This was supposed to be the year of a king but it ended up being about the band of Warriors who took him out. That’s the thing about the new NBA, where old powers are in decline and new ones are on the come-up.

Change came fast in Adam Silver’s first year as emperor of the NBA. LeBron James, commercially sold as King James, came into 2015 as the league’s undisputed ruler. Within months, Stephen Curry had stolen that title in a flurry of jumpers and slashes to the basket.

But then that was 2015 in the NBA – a season where the power shifts were evident everywhere.

The king of the Lakers finally said he was leaving, the Western Conference began to show it might no longer be the king of the league and a group of new stars came into the league, suggesting that a whole different group of teams might soon be wearing championship crowns.

The return of King James
Early in his time back with the Cavaliers, it seemed as if James might ruin everything. As hard as he worked to reinvent himself as the beloved local son home at last to lead Cleveland to a championship, he struggled to get the Cavs started. Cleveland started the calendar year with six straight losses that dropped their overall record to 19-20. Hardly the revival he imagined.

But then they won 18 of their next 20. James formed a bond with guard Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love to give the Cavaliers an offense as strong as any in the league. They won the Central Division and had the second-best record in the NBA’s Eastern Conference. Then in the playoffs disaster struck. First Love went down, dislocating his shoulder in the first round of the playoffs. Irving went down in the Finals against Golden State. With only one piece of the vaunted ‘Big Three’ left, Cleveland was hopeless against the Warriors. Try as he might, James was unable to single-handedly push the Cavs to the last two wins they needed.

In the end, Cleveland did not win the title that has eluded the city for 50 years. But it was not for lack of trying. Surrounded by almost no one, he nearly pulled the Cavs to a championship on his own. Cleveland shrugged. The city was used to this kind of thing by now. There was, after all, 2016.

The final reign of a king
The finish has been coming for two years. By the time Kobe Bryant hit his mid-30s he could no longer pull the Lakers to greatness the way he once had. Even after recovering from 2013’s Achilles injury, he limped into 2015 as a broken replica of what he once was, with his Lakers in full rebuild. In January, he tore his right rotator cuff in a game against New Orleans and rather than hobble away to the hospital the way most athletes with his injury would, the right-handed Bryant played the rest of the game left-handed before surrendering to surgery the next day.

We may never know another modern player like Kobe – one who so vehemently refuses to accept ‘no’ even as the rest of the world shakes their head in his face. He pushed through the summer to return to a Lakers team that might not win 15 games and then fought through the season’s first weeks with nothing resembling the old Bryant. No matter how you feel about Kobe – and with Kobe there is no middle ground – nothing was sadder than watching a great champion humiliating himself on the court.

With the obvious finally, well, obvious, Bryant announced on 29 November that he will retire at season’s end. Rather than break the news in a press release, he wrote a poem, a love letter of sorts. It was supposed to be a fond note to basketball but it was probably more a song of himself. And yet it was genuine and original and much like everything else in the last two decades of Kobe … a last, lonely pursuit of greatness.

The new kings
In Kings County, New York (also known as Brooklyn), the NBA held what might someday be known as their best draft since the one in 1996 that produced Bryant. In a delicious irony, both of these were held on the home courts of the Nets.

While it is, of course, too soon to predict how great the 2015 draft will eventually become, the promise is there. The No1 pick Karl Anthony-Towns has been an outstanding presence in the middle for Minnesota averaging nearly 16 points and nine rebounds a game. Knicks fans booed when their team picked Latvian center Kristaps Porzingis but he might become the team’s best center since Patrick Ewing. Jahlil Okafor might be the young center Philadelphia has been seeking for years around which to build their team. D’Angelo Russell is starting to show that he can be the Lakers point guard of the next decade.

The shameful beating of the player from a land of kings
Thabo Sefolosha, the 13th pick of the 2006 draft, came to the NBA from a professional team in the Piedmont region, which was once the capital of Italy. For years he was a steady, unheralded presence on very good Oklahoma City teams. Then on 8 April a New York police officer made him famous in a way Sefolosha never wanted.

While leaving a Manhattan nightclub early that morning, Sefolosha, now a member of the Hawks, and teammate Pero Antic stopped on the sidewalk after learning that another NBA player – Chris Copeland – had been stabbed inside. As Sefolosha turned to give money to a homeless man who approached him, he was attacked by a group of officers who wrestled him to the ground. One struck him on the leg with a baton. Another arrested him for obstructing government administration, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. His leg was broken in the scuffle and he missed the rest of the season.

Sefolosha refused a no-plea offer from the New York prosecutor’s office and fought the charges in court. In early October, a jury took less than two hours to acquit him on all three misdemeanor charges. It was yet another seminal moment in a year when police beatings became an almost daily headline.

The coronation of a Warrior king
Looking back, no one should be surprised by what Curry accomplished in 2015. He had been surprising people since his sophomore year of college when he led Davidson to within a game of the Final Four. But the country had long stopped paying attention to the Golden State Warriors. That is until they made everybody take notice.

And yet even after Golden State finished with the NBA’s best record by far at 67-15, few seemed to expect them to emerge from a loaded Western Conference – let alone beat James and the Cavaliers in the championship round. They were too small, too streaky, too devoted to shooting from the outside to win in the playoffs, many people said. Then they kept winning. They won the title. Curry won the MVP. Finally they won over all those who said they couldn’t win.

Then after losing their coach, Steve Kerr, to back surgery, they came together behind Luke Walton and won some more. They won their first 24 games of the season before finally losing to Milwaukee in early December. Then they started a new streak, pushing to 28-1 after beating the Cavaliers one more time on Christmas Day.

By year’s end, King James has become an afterthought. The star of 2015 is a Warrior who could have become a King had Sacramento not passed on him for Tyreke Evans with the fourth pick of the 2009 NBA draft. When Time Magazine’s Sean Gregory recently asked Curry if he thought he was the best player in the world, he said the only thing he could.