By Justin Taylor
I’ve been a Warriors fan for as long as I can remember, literally. Some of my first clear
memories are of going to games starring Joe Barely Cares and Sleepy
Floyd at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena with my Dad and
brother. I was there when Mitch
Richmond held Michael Jordan to 14 points. Present when Chris Webber threw down behind the
back on Charles Barkley and also an hour and a half before tip off chanting Dallas sucks
before we closed them out game 6 of the 2007 playoffs. I supported Chris Mullin all the way from an alcoholic bust
to hall of famer sitting in the rafters of Oracle Arena.
Two of the best years of my life came watching RUN TMC run Don
Nelson’s offense like a perfectly tuned Ferrari. Then witnessed that beautiful
machine turn into a Honda or a Billy Owens in the blink of Nellie’s eye. I loved screaming MANUTE as our personal
7’7 freak show launched threes with the fans, coach’s and marketing
department’s blessings. I was
cheering on draft day when Nellie swung the trade of Anfernee Hardaway for
Chris Webber to rebuild his Ferrari and then watched in horror as management
allowed him to ghost ride it out of town after one year. Even though it had nine years left on a
10 year lease. All that was left
behind was a Datsun named Tom Gugliotta which magically became a Yugo known as
Donyell Marshall after Nellie had already left on foot. I can’t remember a
franchise choosing a coach over a budding superstar like that since. We bottomed out again only to get the
number one pick in a year when Joe Smith was the consensus number one guy. Anyone who says they advocated Kevin
Garnett is a revisionist historian.
Bay Area royalty
I was there to see hundreds, if not thousands, of UTEP two
steps and killer crossovers and paid dearly for those days via my experiences
with Bimbo Coles, Mookie Blaylock , BJ Armstrong, Mugsy Bogues, and Vonteego
Cummings. I followed the team down
to San Jose yelling SPREEE for THREEE the whole way because the team was
absolutely terrible and there was nothing else to root for. I followed them back to the Arena in
Oakland the following year and even though I may have secretly wanted to
strangle PJ Carlesimo and kick him back to Seton Hall I would never have
advised Latrell Sprewell to act on the notion. That was all part of a magic trick that turned our best player into Chris Mills, John Starks, Terry
Cummings, two more years of PJ plus Adonal Foyle and Todd Fuller instead of
Kobe Bryant and Tracy McGrady.
I Choose to remember this guy instead of the version that choked his coach or
turned down $21 million because he "had to feed his family"
I was beyond pissed when we got screwed in the lottery again
after winning 17 games and paid cash for the right to swap Vince Carter for
Antawn Jamison. After all that
misery and another dismal 20 win season I was actually happy to trade the 7th
pick in a crappy draft for the rights to Larry Hughes and some of the most
spectacular bricks the league has ever seen. That combination led us all the way back to another 17 win
season and yet another screw job in the lottery. Maybe we were better off for it since we probably would have
just ended up with Kwame Brown or Eddy Curry had we landed the number one pick
instead of Jason Richardson at number five. I was over the moon about getting Gilbert Arenas in the
second round but came crashing right back to earth when NBA rules prevented us
from keeping him after two lousy yet promising seasons. Is this bio starting to sound like a
suicide note or is it just me?
Anyways, after all that the only thing I had to look forward to was J-Rich
in the dunk contest, Troy Murphy getting his nose broken repeatedly and booing
Mike Dunleavy as he would hide from the action 30 feet from the hoop.
Being the sentimental guy that I am I have to say that I was
pretty excited to see Chris Mullin come back as general manager in training
then GM of the team if only because he made the fan base feel like we deserved
to be winners again. It was either
that or maybe just because Gary St. Jean was gone for good. All those good feelings went away
pretty quickly when his first moves as executive were overpaying Foyle, Murphy,
Dunleavy, DEREK FISHER and hiring Mike Montgomery to coach them. Personally I kind of liked Eric
Musselman during the RUN GilRichLeavy era (Did that sound forced?) but
apparently having a coach with expectations kind of wore on the players.
Even though he wasn’t the best executive in the league by
any stretch, Mully wasn’t afraid to take risks or admit his mistakes. Those are
qualities that most GM’s don’t possess because they are always on the hot seat. He took one low risk high reward swing
for the fences at the trade deadline that year when he traded Speedy Claxton’s
bad back and Dale Davis’s carcass for a mercurial, overweight, oft injured
malcontent point guard named Baron Davis.
Even though you could feel a culture shift coming, Mullin dispatched
Montgomery back to the college ranks after one underwhelming season and brought
back the guy who kicked off the trip down the rabbit hole 15 years earlier, Don
Nelson.
It was a nervous time that gave me a queasy feeling deep
down but it couldn’t get any worse and at least we had a legitimate NBA
coach. In a way, it kind of felt
like we were getting the band back together. Mullin even brought Mitch Richmond back to assist around the
front office and help the fan base forget that Chris Cohan still owned the
team. Around the next trade
deadline Mullin took his biggest risk yet by swinging a trade for Stephen
Jackson of Malice at the Palace fame along with other hits such as firing a
hand gun outside an Indiana strip club and tattooing praying hands holding a
gun because “he prayed he’d never have to use a gun again.” That trade also netted them Al
Harrington and successfully cleared out all of his previous mistakes not named
Adonal Foyle’s 5 year $41.6 million contract. (Derek Fisher was traded to Utah
for the type of pupu platter you could expect in return for Derek Fisher)
That was an amazing time for Warrior fans across the Bay
Area and a period of validation to me for all the time invested in previous
years. People everywhere remember
the Warriors We Believe team for taking down the one seed Mavericks but the way
we got the opportunity to challenge them often gets overlooked. The team was 26-35 at the time of the
trade and the playoffs were not in the cards even with significant
improvement. The rest is
history. The newly formed squad
went on a tear, a local restaurant owner brought a sign that read “We Believe
Playoff” and we closed out the season on a 16-5 run including nine of their
last ten in the loaded western conference. The stars aligned perfectly but we still needed a win and a halfway
decent Clippers team to lose to a terrible hurricane refugee New
Orleans/Oklahoma City Hornets team on the last day of the season or it was all
for nothing. With that we punched
our ticket to face MVP Dirk Nowitzki and his league leading 67 win Mavericks
squad that we just happened to own over the last two seasons in what equaled a
couple of the most enjoyable weeks of my life.
Everyone knows what happened next. Nellie used his intimate knowledge of a Dallas team he built
and the coach he trained to completely dismantle the best team in their
franchise’s history up until that point.
It took the psyche of that team and it’s star years to recover from
that. Being at game 6 of that
series was no doubt a high point in my life. I was so geeked up my brother and I had to leave work at 3pm
just to be at the gates of the parking lot when it opened. Starting Let’s Go Warriors chants
before the team’s even came out for shoot-around and joining in on the Dallas
Sucks and Nowitzki Sucks chants before they even hit the layup line is something
that only happens in rabid college towns, not corporate hijacked NBA
arenas. We stood as a crowd going
ballistic for the final three quarters of that game and no one will ever be
able to convince me that we as a fan base did not dramatically affect that game
and the series as a whole.
Still gives me chills...
I spent the following series against Utah huddled with my
entire family around a 27” tv in my grandma’s basement in beautiful Hastings,
Nebraska. Who knew when the trip
was planned month’s earlier that we’d be forfeiting a chance to be there to see
our team fight for a chance to play in the Western Conference Finals? We were going absolutely berserk as
Baron Davis posterized Andrei Kirilenko (I swear I could hear Oracle exploding
from 1500 miles away) but a couple of bad breaks left that as the sole highlight
of a series that we could have and probably should have won.
Nellie followed the triumphant return of the Warriors and
the best fans in the league by convincing Mullin to recreate the Mitch Richmond
for Billy Owens trade by sending J-Rich to the Bobcats for a 19 year old
toothpick named Brandan Wright. It
might have been a decent trade if ownership had allowed Mullin to use the $10
million dollar trade exception for another contributor, but they showed that
their favorite part of the swap was dumping J-Rich’s perfectly tolerable
salary. We won 48 games in a fun
afterglow of a year in 2008 to earn the honor of greatest team ever to not make
the playoffs. By the time a free
agent Baron walked to the Clippers because they offered about 25 million more
hot fudge sundaes than us plus an opportunity to focus on producing movies
instead of basketball our return to relevance was over.
The team’s deconstruction continued with the panic signing
of Corey Maggette (A guy who was a ball stopper the minute he came out of the
womb.) because Elton Brand and his surgically repaired knee wanted no part of
this team. Monta Ellis celebrated
his newly signed $66 million contract by wrapping his moped around a tree,
mangling his ankle and getting suspended without pay for it while he recovered
for something like 70 games of the season. Between Mullin advocating the resigning of Davis, protesting
the signing of Maggette, sticking up for Ellis after he destroyed his
ankle as well as our season and Nelson’s back room back stabbing that was the
end of his short return as the king in Golden State. The only enjoyable thing worth watching since was Monta’s
highlights and growth and, and, yeah, Monta growing up…that’s it.
I was booing Cohan in 2000 and was starting chants begging
him to sell the team from 2009 until my wish finally came true in late
2010. I was there to witness Joe Lacob
getting booed in 2012 for the sins of his predecessors, the trade of Ellis, the
toothless stripped down team on the floor and the awkward pause that begged for
an ass kicking. That wasn’t me
though. I’ve got thick skin and an
eye on the future. He sent Nellie
out to pasture, brought in a management team that finally knows more about
basketball than me or even the average fan and showed the balls necessary to be
something more than mediocre. As
for me, I think it’s obvious at this point I’m not going anywhere. My lifetime of torture has driven my
Dad to care more about the Lakers of all teams and my brother to indifference
but I’m here watching every word and move of our new owner and regime. Gary St. Jean telling me how great
things are on the pre and post game is a tough pill to swallow but I’m granting
them the opportunity to SHOW me. I
have been through more than enough to just laugh it off when they TELL me we
are a playoff team. I’d only be
lying to myself and anyone who reads my life story if I pretended I wasn’t
going to be right there going crazy next time we are a contender whether it’s
next season or 30 years from now.
Amen, Justin. And don't forget the coda of the true warrior believer, "Wait til Next Year" In the meantime, i am watching the games and rooting for us to win and cheering when we lose. How is that possible? I spend too much time checking the standings and hoping for W's by The Kings, Pistons, Cavaliers, Raptors and Nets. I didn't think it was possible but games like the one last Friday night give me hope that those other teams don't care whether they end up 6, 7, 8 or 9 in the lottery but it matters so much to us. Go Warriors!
ReplyDeleteI feel your pain and enjoyed the incredible highs of trading for the rights to C-Webb and beating the Mavs. It's great to reminisce about the blue and gold of the past. I forgot about Vonteego Cummings and how Bimbo Coles was an absolute disaster. So no mention of Tim Legler, Big Vic, Keith Jennings, or Paul Pressey? I do the same thing that don does by cheering for the W's but desire the loss. All I want from this team is a competitive game with the final outcome of a Warriors' loss. I check out the standings on a daily basis and pay close attention to the wins and losses of the teams with worse win records. Go Warriors and earn that 7th spot!
ReplyDeleteAhhhh...how could I forget about Fat Vic, the microwave Chris Gatling and Mr. Jennings...lol...Pressey and Legler didn't provide enough highlights or disasters so they didn't make the cut...Sorry to drive everyone down such a long and painful road but I wanted to give some of my Warrior history before i continued with other columns...thanks for reading...Bill Simmons gave a more detailed account our ridiculous history in a longer and even more painful column here...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7714701/how-annoy-fan-base-60-easy-steps
This is it!!! This is exactly how I feel. I've followed the Warriors since I was a toddler. I think I was 11 years old when my greatest hope was that Larry Hughes would develop into Allen Iverson and I threw a foam brick at the screen every time that lumbering idiot ox Eric Dampier stepped on the court and acted every bit like a bad parody of Shaquille O'Neil, except he actually got called for fouls and his big stony hands couldn't hold onto the ball long enough to even move it toward the basket.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the trip down memory lane. While I don't share in your optimism, I've gritted it out this long and I'll certainly keep my fingers crossed year after year. And if the Memphis Grizzlies move to San Jose? Well, I won't turn down the chance to root for 2 teams :D
Like I said at some point in one of the columns, I just think the pieces we need to add now are a lot easier to find and acquire since we have a center now. I'm probably stupid for being as upbeat as I am for the future.
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