When Bob Myers first became an agent back in the late nineties, he learned quickly that the Warriors didn’t have the most pristine reputation around the league. If Golden State was being whispered as a potential free-agent destination, it was often to leverage another club into sweetening its contract offer. Some of that perception was because of inept negotiations by past front office people; some of it was because, for so long, the Warriors were one of the worst teams in the NBA, so why would anyone want to play for them?
A curious thing happens, though, when you change owners, hire a stable of competent executives, and start winning enough games that you start to look like a potential playoff team every year. All of a sudden, those free agent pitch meetings start to become more of a two-way affair.
So when the summer of 2013 rolled around, the 47-win Warriors got a seat at the big boy table for once. The No. 1 free agent was center Dwight Howard, just 27, one of the best defenders in the NBA, but saddled with a reputation for aloofness and immaturity. With Bogut on the mend, the Warriors saw a chance to not only try to attract a marquee free agent—a big guy who could dominate the paint like few others—but also show the NBA (and, by extension, other free agents) that Oakland was a destination all players should seriously consider. Howard was a long shot, but they had to try.
Eventually, Howard whittled his list of potential suitors down to three clubs . . . and the Warriors made the cut, along with the Los Angeles Lakers (his previous team, who could offer him more years and money than anyone else) and Houston Rockets, constructed by the analytically minded general manager Daryl Morey, and a team on the rise, thanks to high-scoring point guard James Harden, acquired a year earlier from Oklahoma City.
When Howard appeared bound for Houston, Myers went to his backup plan, though it was decidedly less sexy than bringing aboard one of the league’s most physically imposing centers. Plan B was none other than Andre Iguodala, the leader of the 57-win Denver Nuggets that fell to the Warriors in the playoffs. Like Howard, Iguodala was a free agent who could stand to make more money by re-signing with his former team, but his situation was more complicated. Iguodala had a player option for the 2013–14 season that was worth $16.1 million. All he had to do was trigger that option and he was set for another year.
But in March, just a couple of weeks before the playoffs, Iguodala announced he would opt out. The hope, of course, was to land a long-term deal with more money per season. It was a risk, but Iguodala felt the calculus worked in his favor. He didn’t have to decide on the opt-out until the playoffs had concluded, but by that time, the Nuggets had lost both head coach George Karl, who was named Coach of the Year but nonetheless fired for perpetual playoff underperformance, and general manager Masai Ujiri, who was poached by Toronto three weeks after winning the NBA’s Executive of the Year.
From the start of free agency on July 1, Iguodala was up front with the Warriors about wanting to join their roster. That day, he and his agent, Rob Pelinka, met down in Los Angeles at Pelinka’s office with Myers, Joe and Kirk Lacob, and Mark Jackson, who were there to sell him on what they were planning and see if he was on board. But Myers, who’d been in dozens of these pitch meetings as an agent and could assess the tenor of them quickly, realized Iguodala was the one doing the selling. Myers had prepared some DVDs as part of the presentation and was expecting a convivial but spirited discussion—he’d known Pelinka for some 15 years as they competed for clients—but he never played a single disc. “You guys are building something that I want to be a part of,” Iguodala told the group. Everyone—and especially Joe Lacob—came away confident that he possessed the character that would fit with Golden State’s culture.
On the court, Iguodala was a versatile and dependable starter—maybe not a perennial superstar but someone who could shoot from deep, pass well in transition, and had enough NBA experience (nine years) to learn any offensive scheme. For the Nuggets, he averaged nearly 13 points, 5.3 rebounds, and 5.4 assists. The only other players to reach such benchmarks of well-roundedness? LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Russell Westbrook, and Rajon Rondo.
Iguodala was also a solid premier defender against those guard/forward combo players who could slash to the basket as easily as pull up from three. He’d made the All-Defensive second team in 2010–11. He was an All-Star in 2011–12. And he’d been a team leader in Philadelphia for years (taking command of the team in Allen Iverson’s wake) before being traded to Denver before the 2012–13 season. Few players like Iguodala possessed such two-way skills as well as a leader’s mentality.
And yet, no matter what, Iguodala would be leaving money on the table. Denver had a standing contract offer reported to be five years and $60 million, and the Dallas Mavericks, owned by dotcom billionaire Mark Cuban and just two years removed from winning a championship, cobbled together a similarly competitive offer. Sure, Iguodala had professed his admiration right off the bat, but the Warriors still needed to finagle a fair offer.
All Myers had to do was figure a way over the next week to make some impossible math work. The Warriors were in dire financial straits. They had virtually no wiggle room under the salary cap and were less than $3 million away from crossing the luxury tax threshold. The stress was immense. More than a few nights, he came home in a panic, confessing to his wife, Kristen, that he had no idea how this deal was going to happen. “He was sitting out there and we just couldn’t get it done,” Myers later said. “This was one of the hardest things I’ve ever worked on in the NBA. . . . This thing was on life support fifteen times.” Myers called or texted Pelinka constantly to keep him abreast of the smallest development.
The good news for Golden State was that Richard Jefferson and Andris Biedriņˇs, who together accounted for $20 million, were both in the final years of their contracts. Same for Brandon Rush, who had missed the entire 2012–13 season with a torn knee ligament and was due to make $4 million. Because Lacob had stemmed the Warriors’ habit of dealing away draft picks, they now had a stockpile of them to use as trade assets. The picks could be used to entice a team to take these contracts off the Warriors’ hands, thus clearing enough cap room to sign Iguodala.
The problem was that the clock was ticking on Dallas’s offer. Sacramento had already offered and pulled back a four-year, $52 million deal, to avoid being used as leverage (as the Warriors once had been), and Dallas would not be similarly played. Myers targeted the teams that had enough cap room to take on Golden State’s trio of unwanted contracts—that included the Utah Jazz, Cleveland Cavaliers, Milwaukee Bucks, and Detroit Pistons—but the Warriors had to be prepared to give up a lot. Utah quickly became the most likely trade partner, but they were asking for a king’s ransom in future first- and second-round picks.
Finally, an hour after Iguodala almost put pen to paper with Dallas, Myers informed him and Pelinka that Golden State had a deal in place with Utah. They could hammer out the details the next day, but the Warriors would be 100 percent able to fit Iguodala in under their salary cap. It wouldn’t leave room to do much of anything else in free agency, but the Warriors had their man.
When Tim Connelly, Denver’s new general manager, found out, he wanted in. He agreed to sign Iguodala to a new four-year, $48 million contract and then trade him to the Warriors, thereby receiving what’s known as a Traded Player Exception, which is an amount of money equal to the outgoing salary ($12 million) plus $100,000 that they could use to acquire players via trade over the next 12 months and that money would not count toward the salary cap. As part of the deal with Utah, Denver agreed to receive Randy Foye in a sign-and-trade for three years and $9 million and used the TPE to absorb that. At the end of the day, Denver gained about $9 million in financial wiggle room, whereas they would’ve received nothing had Iguodala left as a free agent. The Warriors not only gained Iguodala and unloaded $24 million of contract bloat but preserved all sorts of trade exceptions by dealing draft picks to Utah and Denver and kept their salary cap obligations reasonable. The Jazz received a smorgasbord of future picks, and those contracts would come off the books in time for the summer of 2014, a serendipitous development given the hype around free agency that year.
If it sounds complicated and somewhat byzantine, that’s because it is. The NBA’s collective bargaining agreement is far from simple to understand and explain. There are people in the employ of every NBA organization whose primary (sometimes only) responsibility is to understand all the complexities that each new CBA exerts on the league and the different ways they can use various tricks and loopholes to their advantage. It’s why every NBA offseason quickly becomes an exercise in not just diplomacy and strategy but minutiae. That’s also why it helps to have a former agent as your general manager, to have someone who understands what’s at stake for all parties at the negotiating table.
The Warriors held a press conference at the team facility a few days later to announce the deal and introduce Iguodala. Myers showed up looking wiped, with sleepless eyes and a week’s worth of facial scruff. The toll this trade had taken on him was clear. When he spoke he still sounded incredulous at the machinations that had resulted in the signing. “There’s an element of this whole day that’s surreal,” Myers said. “To have a guy like this join a team that has been able to keep its core together and then add somebody of his caliber—not only his ability as an athlete, but who he is. I think, as the media and the fans get to know Andre—one of the best people you’ll meet, well-respected throughout the NBA, community guy, man of faith—you don’t find players like this.”
Iguodala said he’d been eyeing the Warriors for years, ever since he was in Philadelphia. He liked the Bay Area’s tech industry and spoke of the postbasketball opportunities it could afford him. He also recalled the 2010 FIBA World Championship and attending chapel services before every game with Curry and Oklahoma City’s Kevin Durant. “Us three were always together,” he said. “Kind of got a chance to see [Curry] work. He got a chance to see me work. Knew how in love he was with the game. We built a pretty good relationship.” At another point, Iguodala said Curry “is like the second coming of Jesus Christ. He’s like the most loved man on Earth right now.”
Now the Warriors had a legitimate starting small forward, not only someone who could mentor a young Harrison Barnes as he continued his development but a versatile veteran who could slide up and down in the lineup as needed. It was Golden State’s first true step along the path to “positionless basketball,” where you have multiple players of varying heights and sizes whose skills overlap with one another. Barnes was sized like a small forward but could shoot threes like a two-guard and was strong enough to defend power forwards. Same for Draymond Green, who possessed the toughness and center of gravity to post up centers on defense. Curry could oscillate between point guard and two-guard—he’d done so ever since his earliest days at Davidson—and Thompson, while not an elite one-on-one defender, was tall enough that he could switch onto small forwards without becoming a liability. It was not unlike a startup trying to build itself from the ground floor and wanting to gather a workforce with varied abilities that could sub in for one another if ever needed.
In hindsight, acquiring Dwight Howard would have scuttled any hope of the Warriors coalescing in such a way, so Iguodala was the perfect fallback option. If acquiring Bogut was the first piece of the rebuild, Iguodala’s arrival was the start of finishing off the penthouse. As Myers said the day his newest star was introduced, “We feel like he’s the missing piece of the puzzle for this team.”
There was another benefit to acquiring Iguodala as a sign-and-trade rather than a straight free agent signing. It let Golden State maintain its salary cap number at a level that allowed it to keep what’s known as a “midlevel exception,” a specially designated pot of $5 million that can be used to sign players without using cap space.
One player they hoped to sign with that money was free agent center Marreese Speights, who’d played his first three seasons in Philadelphia with Iguodala before moving to short stints with Memphis and then Cleveland. Speights had played well in only half a season with the Cavs, who would not agree to a sign-and-trade with the Warriors—as the Nuggets had done with Iguodala—so Myers inked the backup big man to a three-year, $11 million deal that came out of the MLE. And as Speights went west from Cleveland, Jarrett Jack took his spot there, signing with the Cavs for four years and $25 million. (Landry would join the Sacramento Kings for roughly the same amount.)
The Warriors, after a season that stunned even the most optimistic projections, were starting to reassemble in better shape than before. Throughout the process, Myers kept going back to that sit-down in Los Angeles, when Iguodala stunned the room by selling himself to the Warriors’ brass.
“That,” Myers recalled at Iguodala’s press conference, “was a transformative moment for our franchise.”
• • •
Beyond bringing a high-caliber, high-character player like Iguodala into the fold, the Warriors’ offseason was a lot less dramatic than in years past. The team had no picks in the 2013 draft. Curry enjoyed a summer where he was actually upright and mobile for most of it. Lee’s recovery from hip flexor surgery continued without complications. And Bogut, who battled through that irksome left ankle, was signed to a three-year contract extension that, with incentives, could earn him north of $40 million. Lacob had tried for nearly two years to acquire a big guy with Bogut’s size and strength; he wasn’t about to let him go, especially after whiffing on Dwight Howard.
The Warriors also picked up the team option on head coach Mark Jackson’s contract for 2014–15. Jackson’s first season was a rocky one, with nonstop injuries and personnel adjustments. His second was one of the most surprisingly fun Warriors seasons in years. To let him go into the 2013–14 season without picking up his option would’ve looked ridiculous after such progress was made. He would’ve been a lame duck, coaching for his job from night to night. The organization didn’t need to place such pressure on Jackson, who was well liked by players and fans. Plus, he was a stable presence. After all of the turnover during the Cohan era, the Warriors faithful could be assured of at least a familiar face in the head coach’s seat for some time.
Upstairs, the Warriors welcomed a new face. In May, the NBA announced that an ownership group led by Vivek Ranadivé, the founder of Palo Alto software giant Tibco and a Golden State minority owner since Joe Lacob and Peter Guber bought the team, had beat out Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer to buy the Sacramento Kings. The total franchise valuation was pegged at $534 million, which beat out the record $450 million sum Lacob and Guber’s group had put down for the Warriors. Ranadivé had become nationally known in 2009 when the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell wrote at length about the unorthodox strategies he implemented while coaching his 12-year-old daughter’s basketball team in Redwood City, along the northern edges of Silicon Valley. “They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening,” Gladwell wrote. So Ranadivé, who knew close to nothing about basketball, had his team implement the full-court press—a stifling, high-energy defense that often resulted in forced turnovers and easy layups for his own squad—for entire games. The team advanced all the way to the National Junior Basketball championships. Now Ranadivé, who’d been one of the Warriors’ most vocal proponents of the use of emerging technology and once boasted they’d become “the premier basketball team of the 21st century,” was out to spread that gospel 80 miles up I-80 East in Sacramento.
Ranadivé’s replacement was straight out of Lacob central casting: Mark Stevens, a longtime Valley venture capitalist and one of the most well-known figures on Sand Hill Road. That Stevens was selected to scoop up Ranadivé’s stake was hardly surprising. What was far more interesting was ESPN reporting that Stevens had bought in at a team valuation of $800 million, meaning the Warriors had effectively increased their worth by 78 percent over the July 2010 purchase price. And in the wake of the Iguodala signing, the Warriors sold 3,000 season-ticket packages, on their way to hitting an all-time high that fall of 14,500. What had seemed, not three years earlier, like a desperate overpayment to beat out a dotcom alpha-billionaire now looked like one of the savviest business deals of the decade.
Stevens’s arrival was the big front office news of the offseason, but there was another new addition in Oakland—a familiar face to many already there. Sammy Gelfand, the DC whiz kid, was bumped from Santa Cruz north to the mothership and given the title of Basketball Analytics Coordinator. Along with Kirk Lacob, his immediate supervisor, Gelfand was tasked with being the direct liaison between the statheads making recommendations behind the scenes and the coaches who would assess those suggestions. That was what he’d done with the Santa Cruz Warriors, learning the delicate art of espousing the value of analytics without seeming like a pushy know-it-all. That would be critical in dealing with Mark Jackson, who, based on a comment he made in his introductory press conference two years earlier, seemed skeptical about fully embracing and implementing analytics.
“I do have a lot of faith in advanced statistics; I don’t have total faith in it because you can look at the game and see a guy have thirty points, nine rebounds, and five assists and say, ‘What a great job,’ ” Jackson explained that day. “Me, with my experience, can look at the stat sheet, watch the game, and say, ‘He played horrible,’ and I can break it down to you exactly why. There is a benefit to stats, but stats do lie, contrary to popular belief. I believe, when I look on the floor, a guy can have five rebounds and three blocked shots and you may say he got it done in that first quarter and I say he could’ve had ten rebounds and seven blocked shots, if he’d have given me more passion, more energy, and more effort on the end of the floor. So I will trust the numbers, but I’m going to trust my eyes more so.”
In truth, Jackson hadn’t totally resisted the use of analytics once he came aboard. In his first season on the bench, the Warriors’ defense ranked 28th in three-point percentage allowed. Based in part on SportVU data presented by Kirk Lacob, the Warriors improved to seventh in the league in 2012–13 and to third in 2013–14. “It’s hard to say if we really impacted that, or if the variability of the shots just evened out,” Lacob later told the San Francisco Chronicle. “But we think we were able to help the coaches identify the root of the problem, and they were able to solve it in practice.”
Lacob saw his duty to help thaw the “inherent freeze to analytics” that old-school coaches can project, and having the affable Gelfand on his side would help in that continuing mission. Though Jackson could be demanding, Lacob believed you just had to find the right way to approach him. “If you give [Jackson] a piece of paper and it says this is the best player on the free agent market or this is the third-best player on our team based on his WAR rating, he’s going to be like, No, no, I’d rather rely on what I’ve seen,” Lacob said in a 2012 interview. “But if you’re giving him things like, This guy is shooting better coming from this side, that is advanced statistics. That’s analytics. That he does listen to.”
The people Jackson really listened to, or at least felt most comfortable around, were those on his handpicked coaching staff, a group Jackson picked less for their pedigree than for his own comfort. It was not a group that would threaten his authority as the head coach. Pete Myers, who was once known as the guy who replaced Michael Jordan in the Bulls’ lineup when His Airness left the NBA to play professional baseball, worked 10 years on the Chicago bench after his playing days were over and was entering his third season with Jackson. Same for Darren Erman—a trained lawyer and Louisville native who had only four seasons of NBA coaching experience (with Doc Rivers in Boston) before heading west in 2011—and Jerry DeGregorio, who joined Jackson’s staff in 2011 after eight years as a private trainer and coach.
But when top assistant Mike Malone was poached by the Sacramento Kings to be their head coach—thank Ranadivé for that one—and another assistant, Bob Beyer, was hired by the Charlotte Bobcats, Jackson had to hire two new coaches. One was Lindsey Hunter, who played 17 years in the NBA and won titles with Detroit and the Lakers and was brought aboard just before training camp opened. The other was Brian Scalabrine, who had played for 11 seasons before retiring to do a season of television work for the Celtics. He had no prior professional coaching experience, but he knew Bob Myers (his former agent of 10 years) and Joe Lacob (who was Celtics minority owner in 2008 when Scalabrine won a title in Boston) and could relate to the players of today, in the same way that Jackson prided himself on doing. It was an unorthodox pick but one that Lacob appreciated. After all, Jackson had no coaching experience himself and, so far, that had worked out well enough for Golden State.
Even as Lacob trusted Jackson’s judgment in assembling a staff that would work in harmony, there were constant rumblings that all behind the scenes was not well. There was tension between Jackson and Malone due to the latter’s rising public profile. Malone had been hyped as a possible head coaching candidate the summer before and been credited (along with Erman) by the media for turning around the defense. And the analytics staff had encountered more resistance from Jackson than they anticipated. What good was all this back-end investment in new technology if it was going to be underused on the front end?
Jackson prohibited his assistants from speaking to the media during the season, so there had been no public blowups, but there was a sense of lingering unease as the season drew near.
• • •
After setting the three-point record, Stephen Curry was as anxious as anyone to get back to that level again, but an exhausting playoffs had taken their toll. The good news? No offseason surgery required, so he got right back to work with Brandon Payne and the Accelerate team down near his Charlotte home. One moment, he was doing flat-bodied pull-ups to help with his upper body control. Other times, he was dribbling a ball in his right hand while making behind-the-back passes with his left or maybe doing waves with a heavy rope or getting pummeled with foam mallets as he repeatedly jumped with a ball in his hands and an elastic resistance belt around his waist. The NBA could feel like a world away down in that converted industrial warehouse, but the promise of something more was out there. With every exercise regimen, dead lift, and exaggerated finger roll, Curry was one step closer to affirming his place as one of the NBA’s true superstars.
They just needed to keep the ankles healthy, so the team had Curry work with new performance trainer Keke Lyles to improve his strength training, mix in a little yoga, and essentially rebuild the strength in those ankles so that they didn’t suffer a repeat of the past few years. And because Curry was still on the books for three more years at only $33 million, Myers had financial flexibility to keep building around him. After Iguodala, the team hoped, more stars would follow.
For that to come true, the Warriors would need to put forth another promising season. After winning 47 games and advancing to the conference semifinals, anything less than the playoffs would be unacceptable, but Jackson was also under pressure to succeed given two recent embarrassments he’d heaped on the team.
In late April 2012, with the team having just wrapped up another miserable year, Jackson dropped a bombshell on Warriors’ upper management: He was being extorted for hundreds of thousands of dollars by two people, one of them an ex-stripper with whom he’d once had an affair for nearly a year back when he was a TV analyst for the New Jersey Nets. She was in possession of nude photos Jackson had texted her years earlier, as well as recordings of voicemails Jackson had left her during their relationship. After the Warriors coach paid them $5,000, the mistress and her accomplice contacted Jackson’s wife of 22 years (singer and actress Desiree Coleman Jackson) and demanded more money. Jackson then told the team, which alerted the FBI. A sting operation allowed authorities to arrest the two suspects, who were booked in U.S. District Court in Oakland.
The entire debacle was leaked to the press only in late June after the arrests were made and the team was forced to acknowledge both Jackson’s impropriety and its role in apprehending the suspects. “I recognize the extremely poor judgment that I used both in having an affair six years ago—including the embarrassing communication I exhibited during that time—and in attempting to deal with the extortion scheme at first by myself,” Jackson said in a statement. “I apologize for any embarrassment I may have caused my family, friends, and, of course, the Warriors.” It was particularly embarrassing since so much of Jackson’s public image was wrapped up in professing himself as a man of deep faith. He was a pastor, helped run a Southern California church he and his wife founded, and was constantly making references to religion in his dealings with the media and his team.
A year after the stripper extortion plot, Jackson’s faith again became a public issue. In April 2013, when NBA player Jason Collins announced in the pages of Sports Illustrated that he was gay, Jackson’s public comments rankled many in the Warriors organization, including at its highest levels. “As a Christian man, I have beliefs of what’s right and what’s wrong,” he told reporters during the playoff series against Denver. “That being said, I know Jason Collins, I know his family and am certainly praying for them at this time.”
That didn’t sit well with team president Rick Welts, the highest-ranking out-gay team executive in American professional sports. In an interview with a Bay Area public television station a few months later, Welts was asked if Jackson’s comments disappointed him. “Yes,” he said, “and Mark and I have the kind of relationship where we could have a conversation about that. . . . It did disappoint me, but I think since [then] we’ve talked it out and we’re in a good place.”
But between being extorted by a former mistress, making public comments that seemed intolerant at best and homophobic at worst, and relationships with various front office personnel that had frayed, Jackson was entering the 2013–14 season with at least two strikes on his record. He’d had his option picked up, but that was no guarantee for his future. A vigorous start to the new season stood to benefit all parties.
• • •
After a 31-point blowout of the Lakers at Oracle Arena on opening night, the Warriors cruised through the early going of the season. They burst out to an 8-3 record—one win at Oracle coming on an Andre Iguodala buzzer-beater against Oklahoma City—but lost five of their next six, due in part to Iguodala’s straining his left hamstring. He missed the next 12 games; Golden State lost seven. Soon, there was even tension between Iguodala and the team about his return. “We’re in the same chapter,” Iguodala said after missing one mid-December practice. “Not on the same page.” Fans had seen this movie before; it never ended well.
But Iguodala returned a few days later and the team was reinvigorated. The Warriors won 12 of their next 14 and entered the mid-January doldrums on a roll. With 25 wins and 14 losses nearly halfway through the season, the Warriors weren’t playing like a one-year blip. They looked like a seasoned team that was playing for keeps.
Curry, healthy and with more complementary components around him than ever before, was thriving in Jackson’s offense, with 23 points and nine assists a night. Iguodala, despite the injury, started to settle into a groove, scoring more than 10 points a night with five assists and four rebounds. Klay Thompson was averaging 19 points thanks to 41.4 percent shooting on threes. Harrison Barnes, relegated to a bench role except for when Iguodala was injured, was good for 11 points every time out, and the frontcourt duo of David Lee and Andrew Bogut had played in 38 of 39 games so far and was contributing a combined nightly production of 28 points and 20 rebounds. At maximum strength the Warriors were still not an elite team, but they could defeat anyone on any night.
They were even getting better about overcoming the inevitable midseason controversies that always popped up. Before one mid-February game, Jackson was asked about Bogut’s having to sit out with yet another of his freakish injuries, this one a bone bruise and inflammation in his left shoulder. The Warriors center said he suffered it during a late January win against Utah, but Jackson inferred Bogut was being less than forthright about the malady’s origins. “As far as I know, it was not on the court,” Jackson said. “It wasn’t in practice. It wasn’t in a game. I’m not really sure. It may have been sleeping, and I say that in all seriousness, but it’s important for us to make sure we continue to treat him, it’s legitimate, and then let’s be smart with it.”
Bogut was furious when he heard what Jackson had said. “The sleeping comment is absolutely ridiculous. I don’t know where it came from,” he told the media. “It’s definitely not the case I just woke up, slept on my shoulder wrong and have a bone bruise and swelling in my shoulder from sleeping. Very highly unlikely, I believe.” At the same time, David Lee was nursing shoulder and hip issues while Jermaine O’Neal had an inflamed wrist. That meant a few midseason starts for Draymond Green, who started in place of Bogut that night in a 43-point blowout of Philadelphia.
Two days later, LeBron James and the defending champion Miami Heat strolled into Oracle, and the Warriors’ confidence was at a high. With a record of 31–21, Golden State had its best mark after 52 games since the “We Believe” season of 2007–08. Hope abounded with the All-Star break just a game away, but the Heat, at 36–14, were still a notch above. With James flanked by three other future Hall of Famers—Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, and Ray Allen—Miami had knocked off San Antonio in a classic seven-game championship series the season before and was steamrolling through the Eastern Conference en route to its fourth-straight Finals appearance. With an encouraging showing against the Heat, the Warriors could serve notice as a legitimate force in the NBA.
Coming down to the final minute, the Warriors more than held their own. With 7:52 left in the third quarter, Miami led by 21, but Golden State went on a 28–9 run over the remainder of the frame to cut the deficit to two heading into the fourth. And with 15 seconds left to play, it looked as if Curry’s layup and free throw (courtesy of a foul from Mario Chalmers) would decide the game. The Warriors led, 110–108, but Miami had one final shot.
After dribbling into the offensive end, Chalmers passed off to James with nine seconds on the clock. With only Andre Iguodala guarding him and no double-team in sight, James had a decision. Klay Thompson was shadowing Chalmers (an excellent three-point shooter at 39 percent) in the corner and would not leave him unguarded. James could try to force the double-team and then pass off to his young point guard; he decided to take on Iguodala instead. Signed in part for his elite perimeter defense, the Golden State small forward did all he could, keeping a right hand high, but James’s step-back three flew by, just beyond his reach.
With Joe Lacob standing a few feet away in front of his courtside seat, James watched as his shot swished through with one-tenth of a second left for a 111–110 win. The reigning MVP finished with 36 points, 13 boards, and nine assists for Miami. “At the end of the day,” Jackson said, “we witnessed greatness.”
As the first half of the season came to a close and Curry, a first-time All-Star selection, prepared to depart for the festivities in New Orleans, one couldn’t help but notice there was something about playing in Oracle Arena that brought out the absolute best in LeBron James.
• • •
Even before the loss, Joe Lacob didn’t feel Mark Jackson was getting the most out of the Warriors and made his opinion known through a newspaper interview just hours ahead of James’s game-winner. Speaking to the San Jose Mercury News, Lacob affirmed his confidence in Jackson but let it be known the team was not doing as well as he’d expected. The goal coming into the year, he said, was to finish in the top four of the Western Conference; they were a few games off that pace due to some inopportune losses. “The way to look at it bottom line—net-net, as we say—is that we are 31-21 and we have not played as well as we need to play. We’ve been very inconsistent at home,” he vented, even while throwing in a bit of arcane business jargon. “The road’s been fine, but at home we’ve lost a couple games . . . maybe another four games that we just absolutely should’ve won. We didn’t. And I’m not sure why. The team wasn’t ready in those games. I can’t explain it, why we don’t play so consistently at home as we should. We have a great home-court advantage, great fans, great atmosphere. It’s not clear.”
When asked specifically about Jackson and his coaches, Lacob said the team would wait until the season was over to make any final judgments. “I do think our coach has done a good job. We have had some big wins, a lot of wins on the road, and that’s usually a sign of good coaching,” he said. “But some things are a little disturbing. The lack of being up for some of these games at home—that’s a concern to me.” Jackson was officially—and publicly—on notice.
A few weeks later, as the playoffs were coming into focus, another Jackson-made bombshell hit the team. On March 25, assistant coach Brian Scalabrine, still in his first season on staff, was personally demoted by Jackson. The front office, according to reports, urged Jackson to reconsider but gave him the due deference to make the move, even one so late in the season.
All Jackson would publicly say about the matter was that the two men had a “difference in philosophies.” With 11 games left in the season, Scalabrine was exiled to the D-League staff in Santa Cruz.
Not two weeks later, another improbable scandal rocked the coaching staff. Assistant coach Darren Erman—Jackson’s defensive architect and someone who had spent months working with Draymond Green to unlock his untapped potential as a stopper—was terminated for “violation of company policy.” It was later reported that he had secretly taped at least one conversation between members of the coaching staff. Because California requires two-party consent on such things, the Warriors’ hand was forced in firing him, but it was a bad look for the organization and another reminder of what used to occur regularly in the Chris Cohan era. Just days before the playoffs were set to begin, the Warriors were a team, at least off the court, in disarray.
On the court, the Warriors were doing fine. They won five of their last seven games to secure the No. 6 playoff seed and finish with 51 wins, their most in 22 seasons. Health was the reason why: All five starters—Stephen Curry at point guard, Klay Thompson at the two, Andre Iguodala at small forward, David Lee at power forward, and Andrew Bogut at center—each started at least 63 games. Thanks to all that playing time together, Curry (261) and Thompson (223) hit more combined threes than any teammates in NBA history. The Warriors were a top-12 team in both offense and defense while running the sixth-fastest pace in the league.
The only real setback struck with two games left to play, when Bogut, who was already recovering from a groin injury, was diagnosed with a broken rib and ruled out indefinitely. The expectation was that he would at least miss the first round of the playoffs, so Jermaine O’Neal would start for the time being.
Bogut was so frustrated by yet another freak, ill-timed injury that all he could do was joke about his upcoming offseason workout regimen. “I’m going to dedicate the summer to learning how to play while avoiding contact at all costs, I guess, moving out of the way, not taking charges, and not trying to block shots,” he said. “There are some players in the league who are very good strategically at avoiding contact, so I guess I need to watch them and bring that into my game.”
Bogut would be missed, but the Aussie’s absence was no death knell for the Warriors, who had more depth than in recent years and were confident they could survive long enough to witness his return.
But that reality would require advancing past the potent Los Angeles Clippers.
• • •
Most first-round matchups in the NBA playoffs are fairly pedestrian. Occasionally you get a No. 4 vs. No. 5 matchup that’s intensely competitive. Once every few years, a lower seed (No. 7 or even No. 8) will push a top-seeded contender to the brink, maybe even shove him out with a monumental upset. But nothing memorable usually sprouts from these middle-of-the-road No. 3 vs. No. 6 pairings. Sure, the Warriors and Clippers finished No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, in the Pacific Division, separated by six games in the standings, but they were evenly matched. Golden State had Curry and Thompson; the Clippers had All-Stars Blake Griffin (drafted No. 1 ahead of Curry) and Chris Paul, the most lethal true point guard in the league since Magic Johnson. Most assumed this one would go seven games, and the basketball gods did not disappoint.
Where the deities did outdo themselves, however, was concerning a titanic bit of news that surfaced after Game 3. By that point, the Clippers were up 2–1 and the series had already shifted back to Oracle. After stealing a close win in Game 1 in Los Angeles and getting blown out by 40 in Game 2, the Warriors returned home only to see a frantic fourth-quarter comeback fall short and lose a heartbreaker, 98–96, despite two Curry threes in the final minute. The Warriors wouldn’t have been even that close if they hadn’t dug themselves out of an 18-point third quarter hole, but that was when Jackson subbed out Jermaine O’Neal and David Lee and had Draymond Green slide up to center and Harrison Barnes play power forward. That “small-ball” lineup, where the undersized Green matched up with the opposing big, immediately sparked a 10–0 run and helped fuel that frantic fourth-quarter rally that fell just short.
The series thus far was playing out true to expectations, and Game 4 seemed as if it would be merely a continuation of recent events.
That was when TMZ (and, soon after, Deadspin) leaked audio recordings of Clippers owner Donald Sterling uttering a litany of racist statements about African-Americans (including Magic Johnson) to his girlfriend. Sterling had long cultivated a reputation as one of the league’s most repugnant owners and this news went viral within hours. By the time Game 4 was ready to tip, the Sterling controversy had enveloped the NBA landscape, and Oracle Arena had become ground zero. When the Clippers came out for pregame shootaround, they took off their jackets to reveal their warm-up jerseys worn inside out, so the word “Clippers” would not appear across their chests. Now this first round matchup had been infused with something that transcended sports and became a cultural event that the world was watching.
The sideshow clearly affected the Clippers. Before the game, head coach Doc Rivers had used some variation of “I don’t know” or “no idea” more than a dozen times in taking questions from reporters. The players themselves looked sluggish, as if their mental energy had been drained by all the off-court extracurriculars. The Warriors jumped out to a 15-point lead after one quarter and never looked back. Curry finished with 33 points, including five threes in the opening quarter to start the afternoon off, while Iguodala had 22 points and nine assists. Green, making just his second-ever playoff start, replaced O’Neal in the lineup as David Lee slid up to center, a small adjustment to give the team extra energy. (On the ESPN telecast, Jeff Van Gundy repeatedly called it the “speed lineup.”) Green’s defense on Griffin, who was held to just 21 points after back-to-back games of 30-plus, was a particular revelation, and Golden State won easily, 118–97, to tie the series. “I didn’t do my job tonight,” Rivers said after the game, “and I take that personally.”
But the Clippers, recharged by coming home, comfortably won Game 5, 113–103. After falling behind by 10 after one quarter, the Warriors never led again. Jackson even implemented yet again his “small-ball lineup”—Curry, Thompson, Green, Barnes, and Iguodala—for the first six minutes of the fourth quarter to try to use athleticism and defense to cut into the deficit, but it was for naught.
With its season on the line, Golden State returned to Oracle for Game 6 and eked out the narrowest of victories, 100–99, as a sellout crowd sporting more than 3,000 mini-megaphones (thanks to a promotional giveaway) blasted the court with a wave of ear-melting cheers all night long. Green, starting for the third time in a row, played the most well-rounded game of his young career, chipping in 14 points, 14 rebounds, four assists, and five steals, the first glimpse on a national stage of his promising development. Curry, with 24 points and nine assists, sealed the win by purposely bricking his final free throw with four-tenths of a second on the clock.
Oracle Arena had never cheered so loudly for a missed Warriors shot.
After the win, Jackson spoke as if in both present and past tense, like he harbored an inkling this could be his last game at home as Warriors head coach. “I’m proud of my guys. It’s been an incredible, incredible ride,” he said. “And now, against a 3-seed with two of the top 10 players in the world, and a future Hall of Fame coach, we are going to Game 7, in spite of all the sideline music.” He cited his team’s toughness and willingness to step up in the face of adversity. “Mo Speights? Ready. Hilton Armstrong? Ready. Jordan Crawford? Ready. Draymond Green, a gamer. David [Lee] responded. I’m proud of these guys, and it wasn’t our best night.” It was like a longtime coworker sending out a sappy good-bye email on their last day in the office and feeling compelled to thank everyone who came to mind.
Jackson added, with more defiance than confidence, “I look forward to Game 7.”
• • •
The Warriors hadn’t won a Game 7 on the road since 1948—not since Joe Fulks was dominating the old BAA and wowing East Coast crowds with his newfangled “jump shot”—and history would again stand in their way this time around. The loss of Bogut eventually became a burden too big to bear, as Los Angeles shot 55 percent from the field. Despite 33 points from Curry and 24 from Green, the Warriors couldn’t keep up with the fast-paced Clippers, who scored 39 in the fourth and prevailed, 126–121, to end the Warriors’ season. Golden State actually led by one with 2:22 to go, but Los Angeles kept scoring at the rim as needed. Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan combined for eight points over the next 90 seconds to seal the win.
Jackson was resolute after the game, seemingly ready for any decision Lacob might make concerning his employment. “I’m totally confident and have total faith that, no matter what, I’m going to be fine,” he said. “That’s even if I’m a full-time pastor.”
Lacob had a lot to consider. On one hand, the Warriors had just had their best two seasons in more than 20 years and were playing their best and most vibrant basketball since the Run-TMC days. The players clearly loved Jackson’s style and temperament. He was a man of deep faith and that resonated with quite a few Warriors, especially Curry and Iguodala. After the close Game 1 win over the Clippers, and amid rumors swirling that Jackson’s firing was a fait accompli, Iguodala said the team was playing “to save our coach.” Before Game 2, most of the team attended services at Jackson’s church.
But there had been so many difficult moments, in both the past (such as the extorting mistress and comments about Jason Collins coming out) and the present. Executive board member Jerry West wasn’t a welcome figure at team practices. Jackson had almost no functioning relationship with Kirk Lacob, didn’t want him talking to his assistants, and prohibited analytics head Sammy Gelfand from corraling rebounds for players at practice. Erman, before he was fired, was certain Jackson was badmouthing him behind his back, and Scalabrine, according to a report, hadn’t spoken to Jackson for weeks at one point. Jackson had lost virtually all interest in reviewing game film or diagraming plays in the huddle. “[Jackson] did a great job, and I’ll always compliment him in many respects,” Joe Lacob said that fall to a room of venture capitalists, “but you can’t have 200 people in the organization not like you.”
On May 6, Jackson was fired. All of Jackson’s assistants—the few he still had, anyway—were canned as well. “We all make the decision to change the CEO too late, right?” Lacob later explained. All along, he saw this as a business decision and nothing personal, even as his own son was among those shunned by Jackson. “No matter how many times you’ve done it, we’re always in the situation. We’re always waiting longer than we should wait. And I’m very cognizant of that after all those years [as a venture capitalist]. And in sports, it’s no different than a business. You really kind of have to get ahead of it.”
Jackson was, as Sports Illustrated deemed him, “the right man at the right time . . . though he was the wrong man for the long run.” Appearing the next day on Dan Patrick’s nationally syndicated radio show, Jackson implied he was canned for not acquiescing to Lacob’s demand that he overhaul the coaching staff and implicitly criticized the organization for interfering with his authority. As Patrick likened anti-Jackson whispers coming from inside the Warriors to “propaganda,” Jackson emphasized that he didn’t “try to get out of my lane and be running reckless all around the building.”
Lacob later admitted that the long-running tumult surrounding Jackson and his staff was a breaking point between the two men: “Carte blanche. Take my wallet. Do whatever it is to get the best assistants there are in the world. Period. End of story.” But Jackson wouldn’t budge. “His answer . . . was, ‘Well, I have the best staff.’ No, you don’t.”
Jackson wished whoever inherited his team well, even while lobbing one last grenade into his successor’s chair. “That’s a championship-caliber team,” Jackson told Dan Patrick. “That’s a team that’s prepared and ready. Somebody will inherit some incredible players and some incredible individuals. It will be entertaining to see what their next step is, because 51 [wins] is not enough.”
Warriors fans were stunned by the news. What sense did it make to fire the most successful coach since the first coming of Don Nelson? Lacob didn’t get much benefit of the doubt for his decision in the local media. Despite all the public acknowledgment that Jackson had screwed up numerous times and was far from a perfect leader, the move was seen as reactionary and ego-driven. They thought letting a personality conflict dictate personnel matters could set the organization back years.
One particularly damning rebuke appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, in which longtime columnist Bruce Jenkins let Lacob have it with both barrels. Speaking of the Warriors’ recent years of success, Jenkins contended that “to reject all that, because of a man’s personality, speaks of a very risky gamble. And I don’t buy this notion that, with a new coach, these same Warriors reach the NBA Finals next year.