This is hard to write.
It’s hard to explain what 40 years of waiting for something means when that thing finally happens. As anyone who has read any of my pieces about the 1975 Warriors team knows, I have followed this team my whole life. I have not been one of the crazy people in the arena for every home game, but I’ve been watching, and listening, and caring about this team.
So I have to try.
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It started in 1976.
The Golden State Warriors, fresh off the NBA championship the previous year, won 59 games, losing two games in a row only once all season. Yet in the Western Conference finals against the Phoenix Suns, they had a 3-2 lead and lost Game 6 in Phoenix and Game 7 at home.
In 1977, the win total dropped to 46, and the Warriors found themselves in a Western Conference semifinal against Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the Lakers. It was a great 7-game series, but L.A. had home-court advantage and won the four games on their floor.
The window for a second championship was closing. The next year, Jamaal Wilkes signed with the Lakers as a free agent. The Warriors cut Charles Johnson, who was signed by the Washington Bullets three weeks later and helped them win a championship in 1978. The Warriors won 43 games, and did not make the playoffs.
It got worse. In 1980, Robert Parish was traded to the Celtics along with a draft pick that Boston used to draft Kevin McHale. The Warriors received picks that they used to draft Rickey Brown and Joe Barry Carroll.
You need to read that paragraph again, and really let it sink in.
Surprised? If you were a Warrior fan, you wouldn’t have been. After all, in a five-week period over the holidays in 1969-’70, the Warriors traded picks that became Tiny Archibald and Pete Maravich for a 33-year-old guard named Adrian Smith and veteran center Zelmo Beaty, who jumped to the ABA and never played for the Warriors.
I’m not going go through every stupid thing the Warriors did over 40 years, you can find that on the internet already. Suffice it to say that trips to the playoffs were rare, and getting out of the first round was a Halley’s Comet-like phenomenon.
From the mid-1980s to the mid-’90s, the “Run TMC” years, they made the playoffs five times in eight years, but never got out of the second round.
Even when the team was good, the Warriors were fatally flawed, usually on the defensive end. An example of this was the 1993-’94 team, which won 50 games. They were 2nd in the league in offense, but 23rd in defense. They were swept out of the playoffs by Phoenix.
Fans thought that was frustrating. They had no idea.
The team was bought in 1994 by Chris Cohan. Anyone who wonders how important ownership is in sports can learn a lot from his example. The fall-off was immediate and drastic.
For 12 years, from that ’94 team through 2005-’06, the Warriors were under .500. In one stretch of five years, they won 97 games. They were consistent in that span of time — they never won more than 21 games or fewer than 19. There was some bad luck in there, though. The Warriors had the number 1 overall pick in 1995, a year where there was no clear number 1 player, but rather than trade out of it, they drafted Joe Smith. I’ll just leave it at that. If you remember him, you know what a disaster that was. If you don’t, that tells you all you need to know.
This is the morass out of which the 2007 “We Believe” Warriors rose, and when they became the first No. 8 seed to ever beat a No. 1 seed in a best-of-seven series (Denver beat Seattle in 1994 when the first round was best-of-five), the fan base was over the moon. They got hammered in the second round by Utah, but there was still optimism. The following year, “Warrior Luck” kicked in, and they missed the playoffs despite winning 48 games — ironically, the same number they won in the 1975 championship season.
After that, the losing returned. Four more sub-.500 years followed, but something good finally happened for this team and their fans. Chris Cohan sold the team. The sun came out! The new owners had money to spend and they wanted to spend it, eyeing a return to San Francisco to a new arena on the waterfront.
They hired a coach with no experience, Mark Jackson, out of the ESPN broadcast booth. They didn’t get everything right with personnel (the ill-fated run they made at DeAndre Jordan is an example), but they started getting the big things right.
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I was fortunate to be at the game that is considered the beginning of what has happened the past six months. March 19, 2012, was the night that Chris Mullin’s No. 17 jersey would be retired by the Warriors. This was to be part of the new ownership reaching out to stars from the past, showing the fan base that they cared about the team’s history. Unfortunately the event came just a few days after the team traded crowd favorite Monta Ellis to Milwaukee for Andrew Bogut, who was injured.
The fans were upset on several levels: Monta was often the only reason to watch the team during his years with the Warriors, and to trade him for what was really an unknown quantity in Bogut made it even worse. It looked like a typical “nothing for something” Warrior trade. Remember also that Steph Curry, while he had shown flashes of the player he was to be, had repeatedly suffered from ankle injuries and had not proven that he could be the point guard full-time.
The fans booed owner Joe Lacob viciously as he tried to present the jersey to Mullin. Rick Barry, the franchise’s greatest player, thought he could reason with the mob, and he made it worse. I walked around the arena during that “ceremony,” hearing not just the boos but the individual voices of frustration and hate, and I remember thinking, “These guys are really in trouble.”
The trade, though, had a lot of logic behind it, even at the time. While Bogut had already developed a noticeable injury history, he was a rare thing, a massive man who could defend the rim and pass the ball, and those don’t grow on trees. Curry wasn’t Curry yet, but it was clear that he and Ellis couldn’t play at the same time because they were just too short, and Klay Thompson, a natural 2-guard, was being shoehorned into minutes at the 3 spot. Ellis, meanwhile, was and has remained an enigma, a player of enormous skill who had not played in college and wasn’t really interested in developing futher than he had. The Bucks tired of him quickly, and I think that the Mavericks would agree that his limitations have become, in a way, their limitations in Dallas. This was a really good trade, but the fans were so used to the Warriors making mistakes that they jumped to the conclusion that this was just another gaffe.
The personnel department, first under Larry Riley and then Bob Myers, had quietly started to assemble the team you see today. They didn’t have any high draft picks, though. They were getting into that rut in the NBA where they were making the playoffs, but didn’t have a realistic chance to win the whole thing, so they weren’t in the draft lottery. They did have a No. 7 pick in 2012 that they used to take Harrison Barnes, but he and Curry (No. 7 in 2009) are the only single-digit draft picks on the team.
To me, all of this was nice, but the firing of Mark Jackson was the event that set this championship season in motion. The courage that it takes to fire a coach after a 50-win season is not common, but watching last year’s team was an exercise in frustration. You could just see how much better the Dubs could be, but their offensive scheme was extremely limited, and it almost always fell to Curry to bail the team out as the shot clock expired. Jackson also had one of the weakest group of assistant coaches in the league, something Kerr flipped on its head by assembling one of the best. You can’t win without talent, but if you don’t think it matters what your management and coaching staff do with that talent on a daily basis, you’re not paying attention.
It also matters that the head coach sets the right tone and creates a culture in which all voices are heard — even the voice of the 28-year-old video coordinator who comes up with an idea, trailing 2-1 in the Finals. It matters that a coach takes pressure off his players twice in a playoff run. It matters that a coach takes care of the adjustments so that his guys can simply go out and play. Steve Kerr enabled his team to overcome 2-1 deficits against two separate opponents, capturing Games 4 through 6 with the decisiveness befitting a 67-win regular season which set new precedents in the realm of analytics.
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For those of us in the San Francisco Bay Area who have seen the difference between great postseason coaches — Bruce Bochy and Bill Walsh — and others (Dusty Baker and Mark Jackson, to name a few), Steve Kerr has displayed so much wisdom in such a short period of time. Had the Warriors not owned the foresight needed to fire a coach after a 51-win season and (even more important) find the right replacement, we wouldn’t be celebrating this championship.
Consider this, as an important side note: The 2013 Denver Nuggets, with Andre Iguodala as a leading player, fell to the younger, less-polished Warriors and Jackson in the first round of the playoffs. Denver promptly fired George Karl after that 57-win regular season, a move which preceded the Jackson ouster in Oakland by one year. The move might have made sense for the Nuggets, but the essential part of the puzzle was to find the right successor. The Warriors got Kerr after they dismissed Jackson. The Nuggets got Brian Shaw after showing Karl the door. Iguodala, meanwhile, came to Golden State and maxed out under Kerr’s guidance.
The Warriors put so many pieces together in perfect balance, at just the right time. Everything that was wrong in 1980; in the interminable Chris Cohan era; and many places in between had finally given way to complete organizational competence, from the owner down to the 28-year-old video coordinator the head coach took seriously.
As a result, the team I fell in love with in 1975 — and then suffered with for the next four decades — has come full circle: back to a championship, a Larry O’Brien Trophy, and an upcoming victory parade.
What we have here is a basketball team that has gone from being one of the worst-run in professional sports to one of the best-run in professional sports in four years. This championship is a shared effort among a great front office, a great coaching staff, a transcendent player, and his talented and unselfish teammates. I don’t think you could find a fan base that was more deserving of this experience, walking through a barren desert for 40 years before finding a well of pure, cool water.
Well, except maybe Cleveland.
