Trust.
It’s an important part of any relationship, whether between people, corporate partners, or a company and its customers.
Falling into that last category would be the relationship between a sports team and the people who follow, care about, and ultimately fund the team.
I’m sure there were basketball fans around the country who were amused by the Draymond Green negotiation/non-negotiation/re-negotiation/agreement that the Golden State Warriors pulled off yesterday, but I don’t think most Warriors fans would include themselves in that group. Warriors fans are just learning to trust this team, and it’s not easy given the long list of things the team has done to erode, diminish, despoil, and ultimately destroy that trust over the past 40 years.
Need a refresher? Here’s Bill Simmons’ very well-written Grantland piece from 2012, a few days after the Chris Mullin jersey-retirement debacle that turned out to be the beginning of all that’s happened since. Read it, and you will understand that while this fan base has many positive emotions toward its team (love, support, etc.), trust is — and has been — hard to come by.
Stephen R. Covey, the late author of “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” described trust as an “emotional bank account.” He said that every person has one with every other person or entity we interact with, and every time a good thing happens (a nice gesture, a promise kept, assistance in a time of need), it counts as a deposit in that account. When negative things happen between people, or entities, it’s a withdrawal. Covey’s theory was that if you made enough deposits, a withdrawal once in a while wouldn’t hurt the relationship, but that if there was a zero balance, trust would be hard to achieve.
It would take a lot of zeroes to quantify the degree to which the Warriors were “overdrawn” in the emotional bank accounts of their fans.
*
There was no way the Warriors and Draymond Green were not going to get a deal done. While everyone around the country knew that (reporting on the deal used words like “obvious” and “inevitable”), Warriors fans had that little seed of doubt in the back of their minds that allowed them to freak out when Yahoo’s Marc Spears, one of the best NBA experts around, reported that talks had broken off between Green and the Warriors and that Green was headed out to find his market value.
When the neighboring San Francisco Giants allowed Pablo Sandoval to do that, they really didn’t want to keep him. They deny that, for obvious reasons, but if you really want a guy, especially one who runs a little hot emotionally (like Green, for instance), you don’t let him fall in love with some other team. You court him and recruit him, which the Giants never did with Panda, and they got exactly what they wanted. Boston offered him a stupid deal, and the Giants matched it knowing that their account with Sandoval was empty and that he wouldn’t accept their counter. Sandoval took his injury and weight problems to Boston, and after a rare free-agent miss with Casey McGhee, the Giants have plugged in a second-year player at third base, and nobody even misses Sandoval here.
All of that was flying around in the heads of Warriors fans yesterday.
While intellectually we all knew that Green is a perfect fit for what the Warriors do and vice versa, we also know that teams will overpay to bring in successful players, and that Green is an emotional guy who learned to love it here and could learn to love it somewhere else. Spears’ article said that five teams were interested in meeting with Green, including the Pistons, who play about a two-hour drive from Draymond’s hometown of Saginaw.
It wasn’t hard to imagine the next headline being that Green had received an offer, and the Warriors would have to match it. We knew they would, but maybe it would be one of those “poison pill” offers that teams make to really make it hard for the other team to keep their player. What then?
There’s another factor at work here, too. Sports fans have always had their opinions about the direction their teams should take, be it with drafting, trading, or signing free agents. Once the games start, there’s a whole new level of help a fan can provide his/her team: suggesting lineups, game strategy, etc.
And for years, let’s face it, the Warriors needed all the help they could get, in all of those areas. Even recently, when the roster started to look a lot better, the offense under Mark Jackson was YMCA-level, and you didn’t have to be a basketball savant to see it.
But now? Warriors fans, many of whom are also San Francisco Giants fans, have to face the fact that their services are no longer needed. This is a front office, and coaching staff, that are at the top of the game; even the most ardent and serious fan doesn’t know 1/10th of what even the most junior people in that organization do.
This will take some getting used to, not just for fans, but for media as well.
*
To use another Giants analogy, CSN Bay Area posted a question yesterday on its Facebook page regarding the Giants’ use of Brandon Belt in the outfield and asked the fans whether they thought it was a good idea. My first thought was “Really?” They win three World Series championships in five years, and CSNBA thinks there are fans out there smarter than Bruce Bochy? I know we’re all trolling for clicks, and it worked, as dozens of fans were happy to help Bochy out, but the sad truth is that the Giants, and the Warriors, no longer need our help.
While we’ll all miss that role of assistant to the Owner/General Manager/Coach that we’ve held for so long in this part of the country, the positive side is that as bad as things were for 40 years in this basketball wilderness, and as deeply in emotional debt as the Warriors were, we can now enjoy the many deposits they’ve made, and the Green signing was another big one.
Thank goodness we still have the Raiders, and most recently the 49ers, who now seem like they don’t know as much as the guy next to you on BART. And don’t get me started on the A’s.
The only “A’s” Bay Area sports fans should be concerned with are the grades the Warriors are earning with each and every new thing they do, such as locking in Draymond Green for years to come.
