IT’S NOT GOING TO LAST, of course, this team, this moment, this selfie of pure unselfishness. It’s too perfect, the way these Golden State Warriors, whose crunch-time five is so small it would fit nicely in a Fiat 500, have become the biggest thing in the NBA, with a possible stop at Best Team Ever. He’s not going to last forever, either, this little man and his little ego and his giant bag of pebbled pyrotechnics. It’s too sweet. How can Steph Curry sell the most jerseys and yet barely fill out the one he wears? Nope. It’s all going to go splat. Agents, age, avarice. They’ll mess it up. It will never be this pure and happy again, and he knows it…. “It took me until my fourth year to be on a winning team in this league,” says Curry. “So I know how great it is to win. I know the league is so fluid. One trade, one bad free-agent signing, and it’s over. So there’s no way I’m not gonna have fun. I never fail to savor it.”
For as long as I can remember, the Golden State Warriors were the closest thing the NBA had to a get well card. Teams on a losing streak could expect a date with the Warriors to cure what ailed them, because far more often than not, the result would be a “W.” The Warriors were uniformly and reliably awful- dysfunctionally, consistently, often hilariously bad. They played in an arena that had all the buzz and excitement of a mausoleum…because what did their fans, what few of them showed up, have to look forward to? Golden State was where NBA careers went to die, a team that seemed to owe its continued existence to the fact that the NBA needed patsies to fill out the schedule for the likes of the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics, who couldn’t play each other 82 times a season.
As sports fans, we’re used to the calculating, cynical nature of professional athletes. It’s a tough business (and it IS a business), where careers in most cases end too soon and players know they have a limited shelf life. “Get it while you can” is the only sensible operating philosophy of professional athletes…because if you’re lucky enough to last until your mid-30s, you’ll still be a young man once you hang up your sneakers and get on with life.
Players hold out for better contracts, they bitch and moan about playing time, and in many cases don’t seem as if they’re having much fun. Given the pressures they face and the realities they deal with daily, some of that joylessness is understandable. Still, basketball is and always has been a kid’s game. The professional version is played by large, supremely talented athletes able to do things that most of can only dream of.
Having played the game myself, though not past high school, I have an appreciation and a love for the game…which is why I’m enjoying the run the Golden State Warriors are on now. Say what you will, but the Warriors have managed to make NBA basketball fun again. They can make even the casual observer forget for a couple of hours that professional basketball is a cold, hard business in which decisions are made without consideration of anything but the bottom line. Players are commodities, assets to be depreciated like office equipment. Sentimentality and humanity only make constructing a team capable of winning championships that much more difficult.
IT’S LATE AND the Warriors are exhausted from beating the Raptors 112-109 in Toronto, using every basketball gadget they have: Curry’s sky-show 44 points, forward Draymond (Money) Green’s Chinese-menu game, shooting guard Klay Thompson’s elegant spot-ups.
But now: passport control.
As each player goes through, the grim immigration agent glares at him, glares at his passport, stamps it and waves him on. Except for Curry. The agent glares at Curry, glares at his passport, stamps it and says with a huge smile, “Thanks for making basketball fun again.”
The Warriors are that rare collection of professional athletes who genuinely like one another and enjoy each other’s company. In a hypercompetitive business in which one person’s demise is another’s opportunity to shine, Golden State is a team in the truest sense of the word. Watch them on the court and on the bench and what you’ll see is the rarest of phenomena in professional sports: unbridled, childlike joy and passion. The Warriors play a kid’s game like kids, and they do it genuinely and authentically, which is why I find watching them- even though I’m a Portland Trailblazers fan- so thoroughly enjoyable.
Led by a sublimely, ridiculously gifted point guard who looks as if he’s pushing 13, the Warriors, long renowned for being an NBA doormat, turned things around last year, going 67-15, winning the NBA title…and making it look easy. As happens after such success, the vultures hovered, waiting for the team to spin apart as players took advantage of the inevitable opportunities to grow rich and complacent that would come their way. Fans and the media waited…and waited…and waited. All the Warriors have done this year is to go 69-8 after being Portland 136-111 last night, threatening the Chicago Bulls’ record of 72 wins in a season as they chase their second championship in as many years.
IT’S NOT JUST Curry. It’s 15 guys who fit together like a cryptex and are twice as unsolvable.
It’s the 6’ 7”, 230-pound Green, who’s unafraid to guard anyone or boast anything but is terrified of cats.
It’s Aussie center Andrew Bogut, who could have peed into this team’s Cheerios when he was DNP-Coach’s Decision in the last two victories of the Finals last June. “If I’m not whining about that, then the guys at the end of the bench can’t bitch about minutes,” Bogut says. “Not gonna happen on this team.”
It’s Thompson, the unsplashy Splash Brother, who’s quiet as the tide but whose game is booming. When doubled, Curry dishes, usually to Thompson, who can burn any defender down to ash. Thompson lives to do two things: crush threes and go home to his beloved bulldog, Rocco.
“It’s the most unique set of players I’ve ever seen,” says Warriors board member and former Lakers legend Jerry West. “They all like each other! That never happens. Guys on my teams? No. We were all over the place. But these guys actually, genuinely, like each other. And it shows.”
I’ve never been a Warriors fan because until last year there was never anything special about them. They lost early, often, and ugly, year after year, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Winning the NBA title last year was, in the words of Vice President Joe Biden, “a big @!#$&^% deal” for the team and their long-suffering fan base. More important than their championship, though, was the way they went about winning it. They actually seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely. They managed to make the NBA fun again by making it possible for fans and the media to forget, if only for a short time, that professional basketball is a tough, cutthroat business that gives (and asks for) no quarter.
Go to any NBA arena where Golden State is playing, and you’re likely to see fan decked out in the Warriors’ distinctive colors. Fans come early to watch Steph Curry go through his inviolable pregame routine. Given that the NBA schedule is an invitation to fatigue, ennui, and heavy legs, Golden State has put the lie to the truism that fatigue makes cowards of us all. They play hard, they play to win, and they seldom have a bad night…and when they do, it’s easy to feel sorry for them, even if you’re not a Warriors fan.
In a season where they’ve had to be sublime night in and night out in order to stay ahead of the San Antonio Spurs- another team built along the same lines- the Warriors were undefeated at home until losing to Boston on Friday night. They play before a full house every night, and their fans are legitimately excited…if for no other reason than they finally have something to be excited about. After decades of futility and frustration, it’s nice to see what’s happening in Oracle Arena these days…even if they did dismantle my team last night.
The odds are good that Golden State will repeat their championship run of last year, even with San Antonio close behind. They’ll do it in the same way, with largely the same roster they had last season. And it will be incredibly fun and exciting to watch. Stay tuned….
