After their win Thursday night in Boston, the Golden State Warriors have won seven titles when counting their time in Philadelphia, including the league's first crown in 1947.
Yet they were lifting this Larry O'Brien Trophy for the first time.
That's because last month the NBA unveiled a redesigned championship trophy, evolving the design that was first introduced in 1977. As part of the league's 75th anniversary celebration, the NBA reshaped and renamed some of its most important awards, including the iconic championship trophy.
The O'Brien update is the result of a collaboration between the NBA, Tiffany & Co. -- which has produced the trophy for decades -- and a Los Angeles designer named Victor Solomon who was tasked with not only redesigning one of the most iconic trophies in sports but also bringing a new look to an entire suite of trophies handed out by the NBA each season.
Before the Warriors got their hands on the trophy, ESPN was given a behind-the-scenes look at Tiffany & Co.'s headquarters in Cumberland, Rhode Island, to witness an expert team of makers craft each individual piece from scratch and assemble them into a trophy that not only brings Solomon's designs to life for the first time, but also honors every past NBA champion.
MOST NBA FANS first got a glimpse of Solomon's work at this year's All-Star Game in Cleveland, when the league unveiled new trophies for the 3-point contest, slam dunk contest and All-Star Game MVP, which had previously been named after the late Kobe Bryant. Solomon's designs were a radical departure from what the league had handed out at past All-Star Weekends, but for the Larry O'Brien Trophy, he knew he had to stick close to what had worked before.
"The silhouette of the Larry O'Brien is too iconic to ever disrupt," Solomon told ESPN at his Los Angeles studio. Solomon had dreamed about redesigning NBA trophies for years. Five years ago, those dreams began to become a reality.
"This angel of a woman called Mary O'Laughlin from the NBA reached out to me about a potential collaboration, and at our first meeting I pitched the idea of redesigning the trophies," Solomon said.
When the G League was looking to redesign its trophies for its annual awards showcase, Solomon connected with Christopher Arena, the NBA's head of on-court and brand partnerships, who had been working from his end to give the league's awards a makeover.
"I kept beating the drum as my relationship with the league grew," Solomon said.
Both Solomon and the league didn't want to change the iconic O'Brien Trophy into something unrecognizable. The designer knew he was working with a treasured design beloved by fans and players alike -- former Dallas Mavericks guard Jason Terry famously got the trophy tattooed on his bicep before helping the Mavs win the title in 2011.
Still, he saw a few innovations that could enhance the trophy without disrespecting its rich history.
"One of the main tenants that we went into the project with was trying to take the history of everything that came before us and spin it forward," Solomon said.
THE UPDATED VERSION of the Larry O'Brien Trophy is still based on the key image capturing the precise moment of a basketball about to fall into a basket. But its differences are immediately recognizable -- in part because it is backwards when compared to the previous trophy.
"The trophy sort of leaned to the left, but we wanted to lean it to the right looking forward and following in line with our new Finals logo, which has a cursive script that everyone reveres back from the '80s and '90s," Arena said.
"Overall, the silhouette of the form it pitched literally forward to symbolize the new era," he added. "The ornament ball on top is rotated so that the crossing seams can be seen in profile."
Both the ball and the net are more lifelike now. The seams on the ball are more pronounced, and so is the net engraving on the column which now features a more literal net pattern.
Tiffany has crafted the sterling silver and 24-karat gold vermeil trophy since it debuted 45 years ago this month and expects to do so well into the future.
Once the designs and architecture are finalized, the construction and assembly of the O'Brien takes about a day. It consists of seven pieces: two base pieces, the net, the basketball, a neck piece, a reflector plate and a locator plate. The makers in the Rhode Island facility build each piece according to Solomon's designs before assembling them together to form the final product.
Different artisans take the lead on the different construction phases, and by the time they are done spinning, annealing, bending, soldering, filing, polishing, washing and assembling, the final product resembling a ball falling into a golden hoop stands 24.5 inches in height and weighs 16 pounds.
The biggest single change to the new version trophy is below its iconic basketball and net. The design team changed the base of the trophy from a square shape to a pair of cylindrical feet, and those new feet now include an incredible NBA history lesson.
Want to know who won the NBA title in 1977? Just review the golden data table on the trophy.
"We wanted to take the history of everything that had come before to inform moving forward," Solomon said. "There was an obvious opportunity there to canonize all the previous winners of the championship trophy on this base, where all of the names will be etched into this new circular base."
Like the NHL's Stanley Cup -- which includes engravings of not just every team that has won the title, but every player as well -- the new Larry O'Brien Trophy includes room for expansion.
"On the top of the first cylinder we've etched all previous NBA championship teams and on top of the second, we've left enough negative space to present the next 25 years of winners, designed to take us to the 100th anniversary," Solomon said.
"We think we have room for another 25 seasons," Arena added. "So when we get to 100 years, we'll flip the discs out and we'll get started again."
BEFORE THE INTRODUCTION of the previous version of the Larry O'Brien Trophy -- the trophy didn't actually get that name until 1984 -- the league had a single championship cup that was passed from team to team every year, just like the Stanley Cup (the vintage Walter A. Brown Trophy is now on display at the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts). When the Portland Trail Blazers were handed the trophy in 1977, they got to keep it, and a new one was created the next year for the Washington Bullets, and every subsequent champion.
However, that tradition will be disrupted -- briefly -- this year.
After commissioner Adam Silver hands the trophy to the winning team at the end of this year's Finals, the trophy will travel back to Rhode Island. There, Tiffany & Co.'s makers will etch the name of the new NBA champions into the base before returning the trophy to them. That organization will keep that trophy forever, and the 2023 champs will get their own new O'Brien, with its own unique updated circular base.
Arena said this makeover is one small element within the league's larger push to build a more robust, more cohesive ensemble of trophies that aims to elevate the significance of some of pro basketball's biggest honors.
"The idea was if you could bookend the first 75 and look forward to the next 75, what sort of things would you do to celebrate that and to reframe or reform everything that we do?" he said.
The NBA is in the midst of a major awards overhaul, reshaping and renaming some of its most important trophies after some of its most legendary players. It's a massive project that fans are just starting to get a taste of this season.
Not only has the league introduced the new NBA All-Star Game Kobe Bryant MVP Trophy and the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Social Justice Champion award, but last month Jayson Tatum took home the first Larry Bird Eastern Conference Finals MVP Trophy and Stephen Curry won the first Magic Johnson Western Conference Finals MVP Trophy. The league also renamed its Eastern and Western Conference championship trophies for Bob Cousy and Oscar Robertson, respectively.
The league's major regular-season individual trophies have yet to be redesigned, so Solomon might have more work ahead of him. Some of them -- like Defensive Player of the Year and Sixth Man of the Year -- don't have names attached to them. The Rookie of the Year and MVP trophies are named after historical NBA figures -- former Philadelphia Warriors coach Eddie Gottlieb and Maurice Podoloff, the league's first president. Meanwhile, more recent big names such as the late NBA commissioner, David Stern, and the legendary Michael Jordan don't have trophies named after them, but that could change in the coming years.
Going forward, when an NBA player wins a meaningful award, the goal is to use that moment to honor another legend who helped the league reach its massive stature.
"When you think about the journey of a player or a team throughout an entire season," Arena said, "there's hard work that goes in, from the day they picked up a basketball until the day they achieve that goal. And we just wanted these trophies to really represent that hard work and that effort and that blood, sweat and tears that goes into every single dribble and shot and practice and workout to get to that level."
Over the past 75 years, it's the players who have driven the league, and according to Arena, the NBA wanted the awards to respect that: "We wanted these to feel elevated."