Can Golden State Warriors overtake Chicago Bulls' NBA record?

On Thursday night the Golden State Warriors beat the San Antonio Spurs 112-101 to become the second team in NBA history to win 70 games in a season. Our US sportswriter Alex Ferguson asks: Will they get to the Chicago Bulls' 72 game record?

Like almost every game this season, Stephen Curry was the leader for the Golden State Warriors on Thursday night. He dropped three bombs from three-point range, had nine assists and on the other side of the nets, had two steals and five defensive rebounds. Oh, and he had 27 points total, which led the team.

After losing two out of their last three - and one of those to a team who won't trouble the NBA Play-Offs - people were beginning to ask if this team could get over the 70-game hump and beat the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls' vaunted record of 72 wins in a season.

Well, on Thursday night, they had an answer: Yes. They controlled a Spurs team who had all the stars playing - despite coach Greg Popovic's reputation for benching all of his starters before play-off time to ensure freshness - from start to finish, becoming only the second team in NBA history to win 70 games.

The surge for the record has been a cue for everybody to ask the hypothetical question: Who would win if Jordan's Bulls played Curry's Warriors in a NBA Finals battle (you know, forgetting about conditioning, speed, size etc)?

Bulls great Scottie Pippen - who starred alongside Jordan and Dennis Rodman - said that the 1995-96 Bulls would sweep the Warriors in four games. "I don't think we'd take the night off," Pippen told The Dan Patrick Show. "I think that my size and length would bother [Curry] a little bit."

And it's not going unnoticed by the US media that the one tie that binds the 1995-96 Bulls team to the 2015-16 Warriors is one Steve Kerr. In Chicago he was a second-tier player (Jordan, Pippen and Rodman were the first, with Toni Kukoc, Ron Harper, Luc Longley in the second), averaging 7.8 points per game. In Golden State he is a first-tier coach, on the verge of history.

But Kerr himself knows the responsibility is winning his second straight NBA title, which is why he told ESPN that he's thinking about resting his top players now that his team has home-field advantage throughout the play-offs.

"We've been putting it off for as long as we were able to, which was until we got the 1-seed," he said. "Now that we have that, I'm inclined to give some guys some rest if they need it, but I've sort of made a pact with the guys that if they are not banged up and they are not tired and if they want to go for this record or whatever then -- so we got to talk."

I think that the young legs of the Warriors will certainly want to go and beat history. After all, everyone's talking about it and not playing the game would probably cause a bunch of Teslas to be set on fire and iPads to be thrown around in frustration in Silicon Valley.

But after the Boston and Minnesota losses, Golden State can't afford to lose one of their next three game if they want to beat the Bulls record.

Two of the clashes come against the Memphis Grizzlies (the first and third), who themselves have confirmed a play-off place and will certainly have the away disadvantage in the first round. The Grizzlies have won just one game in their last seven, and were obliterated by the Warriors in their two previous games, losing by 50 points in their first game and 16 in the second. Yeah, it hasn't been pretty.

Sandwiched in between that is a clash on the road against the Spurs. Popovich - who incidentally coached Kerr to a NBA title when he played at the Spurs - has already said that he's not going to rest his own stars for that one. "We don't want to sit them two nights in a row going into the playoffs. That doesn't make much sense," he said. "No matter who we're playing tomorrow, we'd sit them; doesn't matter. So the opponent's not the thing. It's about minutes, time, age, all that stuff." He'll be hoping that young star LaMarcus Aldridge's little finger is mended by Sunday night. The NBA world certainly will!

So can the Golden State go 3-0 and seal their place in history? I think yes.