Walking out of Oracle Arena after Game 7, several hours after the throngs of fans had long departed, my mind drifted to what Steve Kerr had once said in the aftermath of losing to Oklahoma in the 1988 Final Four, when his 2-for-13 performance sank Arizona’s bid for its first NCAA championship game appearance.
I will always blame myself for us losing that game.
I didn’t choke or anything. I just had a bad shooting day.
I’m a shooter and my shot was off at the worst possible time.
I’ve bounced back from losses a whole lot bigger than that one.
I thought that no matter what the future held for this Warriors team, there was no better coach in place to help them through this, one of the most improbable and devastating losses in the history of American professional sports. No NBA team had ever blown a 3–1 series lead in the Finals, and the 73-win Warriors, who boasted the first-ever unanimous MVP, were the first.
Because they lost by such a tantalizingly close margin, it was hard not to blame Curry, for whom even a mediocre night on offense would’ve meant a historic championship for the franchise. The MVP was uncharacteristically inefficient, with 17 points on 19 shots. But by Game 7, Curry was nowhere near the player he was in the regular season. The NBA’s leader in steals could barely defend on the perimeter, the lift in his legs sapped by injury. At least the summer would provide a respite. Then he’d get back to training with Brandon Payne after hosting his annual kids’ summer camp. Soon enough, next season would arrive, the hunt for a title beginning anew.
Kerr thought about what he could’ve done differently. As was the case against David Blatt a year earlier, Kerr had faced an adaptive coach in Tyronn Lue, with each man looking to one-up his counterpart at every turn. Each team had a valuable rotation player effectively rendered useless by series’ end—Marreese Speights for Golden State, Channing Frye for Cleveland—but the Warriors couldn’t hold up after losing Andrew Bogut in Game 5. Kerr hoped Anderson Varejao’s passing and Festus Ezeli’s rebounding would make up for the Aussie’s absence. Four days after the Finals, Kerr finally watched the Game 7 tape and was haunted by what he saw. Late in the game, they couldn’t get anywhere into the paint; everything was shot from the outside. The pressure had gotten to the Warriors, who fell back on their worst tendencies as the game hung in the balance. Those lapses of judgment that Kerr couldn’t point out in the midst of a historic regular season had come back to bite them. At least there’d be time to correct such shortcomings in training camp.
What would the Warriors even look like then? They had remarkably little turnover after winning the title, but this offseason would be radically different. Ezeli and Harrison Barnes, having both turned down contract extensions at the start of the season, would be restricted free agents, meaning the Warriors could match any offer. Bench players, like Leandro Barbosa, would be unrestricted free agents. Bogut would be entering the final year of his contract. Same for Curry. They drafted Damian Jones, a 7-foot center from Vanderbilt, and paid the Milwaukee Bucks $2.4 million for their second-round pick at No. 38 and the draft rights to Patrick McCaw, a 6-foot-7 guard from UNLV. Reloading via the draft was fine to a point, but the Warriors needed more.
How they navigated the free agent waters depended on how much space they could finagle under the salary cap. In any other year, Golden State’s wiggle room might’ve been fairly minimal, but in a turn of good fortune, the cap flew up that summer from $70 million to $94.1 million. That was due to the massive influx of TV money that was heading toward the NBA’s coffers. When ESPN and TNT signed a nine-year, $24 billion TV deal in February 2016 to extend their broadcast rights, it represented an enormous increase in basketball-related income (BRI). And according to the collective bargaining agreement, the players get half of all BRI.
With these increases, the NBA raises the salary cap level to make sure the proper amount of BRI is heading to the players’ pool, but what the players’ union needed to decide was whether it wanted the cap increase to be “smoothed out.” In other words, raise the gap gradually over time or in faster, dramatic lump sums? Given the choice, a union wants its members to get paid as soon as possible, so smoothing came off the table. Hence, a 34 percent cap spike from 2015–16 to 2016–17.
That meant everyone suddenly had a surplus of money to spend during the summer of 2016. And because each team had to hit the minimum required salary level—equal to 90 percent of the cap, or $84.7 million—salaries were set to skyrocket as never before.
Lacob was ready to do whatever was necessary to keep the Warriors elite and was determined to turn the hell of losing Game 7 into a positive. “Failure is really important,” Lacob said later that fall. “You need to fail at some point. You need to know what it feels like, how horrible it feels, to fail, to not succeed, to be criticized. And then you’re able to take it next time.” The Finals loss had crushed him . . . for an hour. Then he started thinking about the upcoming draft and (above all) pursuing the great prize they’d talked about for as long as anyone could remember, the most marquee of all the free agents: Kevin Durant.
As Oklahoma City’s enormous (and enormously talented) power forward, who had spent all nine years of his career with the franchise, was hitting the open market, the Warriors believed they had a better-than-average shot at nabbing him. Recruiting Durant had been discussed internally for the better part of two years because Golden State execs figured they would get a seat at the table no matter how the playoff bracket shook out.
The Durant-to-Golden-State narrative bubbled up with fervor midway through the season, so much so that Durant was forced to directly address the speculation when the Thunder came to Oracle Arena in early February. “It’s hard not to enter your mind,” he said from the visitors’ locker room. “There’s a lot of uncertainty to what’s going on because I haven’t really thought that far. I just try to focus on playing basketball. When I lock in, I’m trying to be better every single day, just trying to come in and help my teammates every single day. I think that’s what my thought process is always focused on. And once that time comes, I’ll make that decision.”
A few months later, on-court circumstances couldn’t have worked out better, with both Durant and the Warriors suffering massive playoff heartbreak, but how the economics fell in Golden State’s favor bordered on sheer serendipity. Klay Thompson had signed a max deal in 2014, but Curry’s 2012 contract extension was as team-friendly as possible. Draymond Green’s 2015 contract wasn’t quite the max; he’d taken a haircut worth $11 million. All those accumulated savings—plus the cap’s going up so steeply—amounted to a perfect storm for free agency. (ESPN’s Kevin Pelton dubbed it “a historic fluke.”)
Durant’s joining the Warriors—thereby creating a modern-day super-team—was not just feasible but seemed to make sense. In two years with Kerr at the helm, the Warriors’ offense was a juggernaut, and Durant (standing in for a departed Harrison Barnes) would only magnify their proficiency. The Death Lineup pick-and-roll with Curry and Green? Swap in Durant for Green as the roll man and now you’ve got defenders guessing how to guard the two best pure scorers in the NBA on one play. Curry’s spot-up jumper or Durant’s iso dominance? And what about a Thompson catch-and-shoot, Andre Iguodala corner three, or Green cutting to the hoop? At their best, the Warriors, with four All-Stars under 30 and a Finals MVP, would be unstoppable. It would mean letting go of Festus Ezeli and Harrison Barnes (who knew he was gone from the way his exit interview went) and finding a trade partner willing to take on Andrew Bogut and his $12 million salary, but an ESPN projection concluded that the Warriors (with Durant) would win 76 games. And as Durant sat at home watching Game 7 of the Finals alongside Rich Kleiman, his agent, he was envisioning the same thing.
The Warriors, knowing that potential future championships were at stake, took nothing for granted. Steve Kerr had a video package of clips prepared to show Durant how he might fit into his offense. The team partnered with NextVR—a Southern California virtual reality company that boasts Peter Guber as a board member—to produce a simulation that would show Durant what it was like to be a Warrior, to run out the tunnel and into Oracle Arena, to be in the huddle with everyone as Kerr diagrammed plays, and so forth, all while Drake lyrics in the background subliminally played their part: Cause I got a really big team / And they need some really big rings . . . Are we talkin’ teams? / Oh, you switchin’ sides? / Wanna come with me?
After spending the night before in New York City, the Warriors arrived at Durant’s rented house in the Hamptons eight deep: Joe and Kirk Lacob, Bob Myers, Steve Kerr, and the four All-Stars of the Death Lineup. On Durant’s side, there was Kleiman, longtime friend and confidant Charlie Bell, and Durant’s father, Wayne Pratt.
They talked for the next two hours, and the immediate future of the Golden State Warriors had all the uncertainty of a jump ball free-falling to earth.
• • •
Bob Myers thought the Warriors blew their chance. Sure, they gave the pitch meeting everything they had, but there was just no way Kevin Durant—the Kevin Durant!—would sign with them. It simply couldn’t happen.
Back at his in-laws’ house in South Lake Tahoe, Myers’s brain was racked with second thoughts as he paced the floor on the morning of July 4. The meeting hadn’t gone exactly as planned. The virtual reality headset that would give Durant a taste of life as a Warrior? Malfunctioned from the start. Kleiman jumped in to take control: “Why the hell would you guys want Kevin?”
From there, everyone took their turns. Curry talked about facilitating shots and not caring who was getting all the attention. Iguodala, who had also won a gold medal alongside Durant in London in 2012, stressed to him that joining the Warriors would also mean the most fun he’d ever had in his life. As Joe Lacob sat next to Durant’s father, Kerr showed Durant some video plays to illustrate how he’d use him in their offensive schemes. Green told him not to sweat the public’s reaction, that they would defend him through anything. “Just know you not in it by yourself,” he said. “You take some backlash, we taking it with you.” Thompson started riffing how Durant’s presence would create the most open shots Thompson had ever seen before catching himself and steering the pitch back toward how Durant would also benefit, but everyone had a good laugh. Durant’s reps asked about business opportunities in Silicon Valley. Renderings of the new San Francisco arena were shown. It was a cordial back-and-forth that lasted about an hour. The players then talked among themselves for an hour after that. Durant later said it looked as if the players had walked into the room holding hands. That’s how genuine their camaraderie felt.
For the most part, Durant didn’t talk all that much that afternoon. After parting ways with Durant and his reps, Myers headed to the team plane not truly knowing what to think. On a confidence scale of 1 to 10, Myers tells me he was probably a 3: “He’s a very quiet guy. They didn’t show any of their cards.”
The meeting had been on a Friday afternoon, with several teams to follow over the weekend. (Oklahoma City had met with Durant for five hours on June 30 and would get last crack at him on Sunday afternoon.) The Warriors flew back to points west—Joe Lacob to his summer home in Montana, Curry and Iguodala to Chicago, and Myers to Tahoe—but the pitch never truly stopped. Myers made sure the Warriors were following up in every way that might help.
Late that Friday night, Curry sent Durant what Myers called “one of the best text messages I’ve ever seen,” a heartfelt promise that Durant would fit in with them, that they truly wanted him, that no one cared about attention or sacrificing stats, that what mattered was winning a championship. Durant also got calls from Steve Nash (a longtime friend) and Jerry West, who chewed his ear for a half-hour, speaking of regret over his multiple failures in the Finals—Durant had lost once, in 2012 against LeBron James and the Miami Heat—and told him to think about his legacy, of wanting to be regarded as a great all-around player, the implication being that Golden State provided a more fulfilling environment for his diverse skill set.
Internally, West pushed hard for Durant’s recruitment because he was convinced his presence would solve one of the Warriors’ most glaring issues, namely, that their best scorers did not get to the free-throw line enough. From the perimeter, yes, they were lethal, but when you’re deep in the playoffs—perhaps fatigued, physically or mentally or both—West knew you could always rely on driving to the basket, drawing contact, and getting yourself to the charity stripe for a couple of freebies. Curry averaged just 4.6 free throws per game during the season, the second-fewest in NBA history for a 30-points-per-game scorer. In those waning moments of Game 7, West saw the Warriors become completely dependent on the often-fickle deep three. A player like Durant would act as a hedge against Golden State’s temptation to fall back again on such a risky strategy.
Above all, West urged him to block out the noise. “Kevin,” he said, “just follow your heart.” West’s counsel had paid countless dividends in his five years with the Warriors, but his call that day with Durant was everything Lacob had hoped for when he hired him. “You’re recruiting somebody, whether it be in a Silicon Valley tech company or whether it be in basketball,” Lacob would say of enlisting West’s help to persuade Durant, “you’re going to use everything you can at your disposal to do things that would hopefully convince the party to join.” Lacob also enlisted a small, select group of former Warriors to call Durant and vouch for the organization.
The first clue Myers received that the Warriors might get lucky was on the afternoon of Sunday, July 3, when Durant called him to talk. Myers put him on hold to call Lacob and patch him through. The owner was out in a boat on the lake that borders his Montana home and wasn’t sure the reception would hold up. The only salient portion of that call Myers remembered was when Durant said something to the effect of “So when I come . . .” Myers called Lacob back to verify he wasn’t going insane and had heard the same thing. Neither was completely sure, and hope, at that point, was a dangerous thing. They had already started work on contingency plans. Even as whispers circulated Sunday night that Durant was leaning toward Golden State, Myers decided to just wait for the official call, which would come the next morning.
Finally, a little after 8:00 a.m. Pacific time on July 4, Myers was wandering around outside his in-laws’ house—no more than 50 feet from the exact spot he was back in 2013 when he got the call that secured the Iguodala deal—when his cell phone rang.
It was Rich Kleiman, Durant’s agent. “Do you have a second to talk to Kevin?”
“Sure.” Myers steeled himself for the bad news.
Durant got on the line. “I just want to tell you that you guys are a first-class organization and I appreciate all the things you are and who you guys are but . . .” Myers’ brain raced at that but.
Oh man, here it comes, he thought.
“But I’m coming to the Warriors.”
Myers was overjoyed. He thanked Durant, hung up, and let out a celebratory yell that caused one neighbor to ask if he was okay. All Myers had time to do before the news became public was call Lacob, who was sitting out on his lakeside patio in Montana when his general manager called at 9:20 a.m. local time to tell him that the Warriors had pulled off the biggest free agent signing in years. Lacob already had packed his bags and was ready to jet to the Hamptons if it would help quell Durant’s indecision. His pilot, waiting on standby, could stand down.
“I grew up here,” Myers says. “I just couldn’t fathom a player of his caliber choosing us. We are mostly a homegrown team. Steph was drafted. Klay was drafted. Draymond and Harrison were drafted before we got Kevin. Andre was a free agent acquisition. We’d never been in my mind a place that could attract a player like him and it’s very hard to get anybody in free agency. Disbelief was probably the biggest emotion, to be honest.” Back in 2011, they were elated just to sign a restricted free agent like DeAndre Jordan to an offer sheet. Now the Warriors were an A-list destination, capable of attracting the biggest superstars.
After Myers, Durant called Sam Presti, OKC’s general manager, to tell him the news. It was short, but tears were shed. Around that time, Charlie Bell was texting Draymond Green, who was lying in a hotel room bed in Michigan. “Let’s get it,” the text cryptically read. Klay Thompson was sleeping, checked his phone when he heard the news, and went back to snoozing. But all around the country, fans (and media) were frantically refreshing The Players’ Tribune, the online publication where the announcement was to be posted.
Then it appeared.
The headline read MY NEXT CHAPTER. The story even had original art, with a photographer on-site in the Hamptons. Of the 351-word first-person piece, it was these 13 that changed the course of the modern NBA: “I have decided that I am going to join the Golden State Warriors.” At 8:40 a.m. Pacific time, the Warriors players’ phones blew up with congratulatory texts. Players from around the league started tweeting out reactions. In Hawaii, where the sun still hadn’t risen, Margot Kerr kicked her husband awake when she saw the news.
Myers flew back to the Hamptons the next day to spend time with Durant, to get to know him and his inner circle. His wife, Kristen, asked where he was going now. “This one’s kind of important,” he said, “I think I should go.” There was some element of risk, since players couldn’t sign for three more days, and Myers would realize only later that his return could’ve needlessly complicated matters, but he and Durant got along well and talked over meals about basketball, their respective careers, anything that came to mind.
As they flew back to Oakland to sign the contract and meet the media for the first time, Myers asked Durant if he was messing with him with that tantalizing but. The newest Warrior said he thought he might try something like that but realized he had a tougher phone call to make (to Presti) and thought better of it.
On July 7, Durant met a crowd of several hundred people inside the Warriors’ practice facility and spoke of how blessed he felt to be with a team that possessed such potential. Kerr and Myers joined him on the dais, while Ron Adams, his old defensive coach in Oklahoma City during his first two years there, sat in the front row and beamed. They’d stayed close in the years after Adams left OKC for Chicago and then Oakland. (After Game 7 of the conference finals, Adams pulled Durant aside and told him how proud he was of the player he’d become.) And when Durant first arrived that morning at Warriors headquarters, there was Adams, normally so stoic and composed, waiting to give him a bear hug around the waist.
“What’s important—what lasts forever—is the game, the game of basketball,” Durant said. “They play it the right way.” As the morning wound down and Durant prepared to change into some sweats and shoot a few jumpers at the far end of the closed-off court, Joe Lacob stood to the side and indulged questions from a small scrum of reporters. I asked him what an advantage it was to have a “closer” like Jerry West to help seal the deal. Lacob bristled at my use of the term. “That’s not really true. He was a part of the process,” he said. “The most important guy was Bob Myers. He’s the guy that led this charge and, in the annals, this will go down as his recruitment, and it should. That’s his job. The players were the greatest asset, and Jerry certainly was an asset that helped.” Ultimately, all that mattered was that Durant was in Oakland. Within two hours of that press conference, with the contract officially signed, the Warriors sold more than 1,000 Durant jerseys through their website.
In the days that followed, criticism of Durant’s defection was constant and fierce. Players both retired (Reggie Miller and Charles Barkley) and not (Paul Pierce) took issue with Durant’s perceived lack of loyalty. The local OKC press was far from kind to Durant, and even commissioner Adam Silver addressed the kerfuffle. “In the case of Kevin Durant, I absolutely respect his decision once he becomes a free agent to make a choice that’s available to him. In this case, he operated 100 percent within the way of the system, and the same with Golden State,” Silver said. “Having said that, I do think in order to maintain those principles that I discussed, creating a league in which every team has the opportunity to compete, I do think we need to re-examine some of the elements of our system.” (Lacob’s terse rejoinder came the next day while attending the Las Vegas Summer League: “Let them talk.”)
With five of the seven richest contracts in NBA history being verbally agreed upon less than a day after free agency started, there was a heightened interest around the NBA’s new economic reality, and it seemed that everyone had a perspective. “Durant’s move to California feels like some sort of reckoning,” wrote the New York Times Magazine. “Silicon Valley has remade or is in the midst of remaking every industry you can name, so why should the N.B.A. be any different?”
A writer for the website SB Nation posited that Durant had, in a way, bolstered LeBron James’s mainstream bona fides: “With Golden State now established as the Ultimate Evil of the sport, or at least its consummate uber-team, it falls on LeBron James—the one man who can stop them—to head into battle next season with yet another goal that goes well beyond a season championship. Unless there’s a massive reversal of opinion concerning the Warriors next season (unlikely), James will find himself tasked with defending basketball from all that this team stands for. Mercenary players, annoying tech money, dirty play, nut punches . . . these are now not only our sworn enemies, but LeBron’s, as well.”
The media’s obsession with dissecting Durant’s image was nothing new. For years, he had been built up as a foil to James—the wilder, more exciting sports icon—whereas Durant (despite his DC roots) was the humble, midwestern alternative.
But as Tommy Craggs wrote in Slate back in 2010, that kind of Durant narrative-building was often disingenuous: “He is as pure a scorer as we’ve seen, and you could drop him in with all the other great self-styled scoring forwards in NBA history—Adrian Dantley, Bernard King, Alex English, even George Gervin—except that at 21 he’s probably already better than those guys. He is certainly more intuitive than just about any of his contemporaries. Carmelo Anthony, for instance, jab-steps and jab-steps and jab-steps on offense, as if cycling through different drafts of his possessions. Durant looks, considers, and attacks. There is nothing humble or understated or gracious about that.”
Unsurprisingly, the most full-throated defense came from new teammate Draymond Green, always eager to express his opinion but exceedingly astute in dissecting the role of the modern athlete. “Nobody complain when somebody leave Apple and go to Google,” Green said. “Aren’t they in competition with each other? Nobody talk junk about the CEO who leaves Apple and goes to Google. As a basketball player, you are the CEO of a business. You are a business. Kevin Durant is a big business. He is the CEO of that business. So him going to play basketball for a different team, the CEO decided to leave where he was at and go somewhere else.
“But there’s so many guys in this league that are so stupid they don’t think like that. They don’t think business-wise. It happens every day in the world. But in basketball, it’s a problem. Aren’t you competitive in your day job if you work for Apple? Don’t you want to outdo Google? What’s the difference on the basketball court? It’s your day job. You want to do what’s better for you.”
And in addition to doing what was in his best interest, Durant also wanted to win, to know what it was like at the top of a mountain he’d never fully scaled. “I’ve been second my whole life,” Durant told Sports Illustrated in 2013. “I was the second-best player in high school. I was the second pick in the draft. I’ve been second in the MVP voting three times. I came in second in the Finals. I’m tired of being second.
“I’m not going to settle for that. I’m done with it.”
• • •
With the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro fast approaching, Kevin Durant wouldn’t be able to stick around the Bay Area very long, but three weeks in Brazil would allow him to play alongside some now-future teammates like Draymond Green and Klay Thompson, who had already made it well-known how he viewed things changing with Durant’s arrival. (“We all want to see each other do well, but I’m not sacrificing shit,” he told Yahoo! Sports, “because my game isn’t changing. I’m still going to try to get buckets, hit shots, come off screens. I want to win and have a fun time every game we play.”)
Thanks to a bit of fortuitous planning from months before, the USA Basketball exhibition tour was stopping at Oracle Arena in late July. It had been just five weeks since the horror of Game 7 and three weeks since Durant was introduced to the Bay Area. The fans congregated on this night to welcome their new star and feel some sense of closure from the wounds of June. A week before the game, team president Rick Welts, in referencing the Game 7 loss, called Durant’s signing “the greatest consolation prize in the history of the NBA.”
At 5:24 p.m., accompanied by assistant coach Ron Adams, Durant took the court at Oracle as a Warrior for the first time, even if he wasn’t wearing blue and gold just yet. Stephen Curry, Andre Iguodala, and Bob Myers sat courtside as spectators, at times lapsing into fits of laughter. Just six seconds in, Durant knocked down the first shot of the game, a three from the left wing off a pass from, of all people, Kyrie Irving. Durant scored 10 in the first quarter, finished with 13, and the United States beat China by 50. After the game, some 2,000 fans crowded around the periphery of the court, simply to catch their first public glimpse of Curry since the title slipped away.
“I’m not going to lie, it felt a little weird for these fans to be cheering me on like that,” Durant said after the game. “Obviously being somewhere for so long and then making a change, but it felt great. I appreciate all of the basketball fans that come and enjoy us playing. But it was cool, man. It was different.”
Seeing Durant in action just two months before Warriors training camp gave the situation a sense of realness, and the idea of how he would integrate into Kerr’s schemes was a basketball strategist’s fever dream. Curry and Durant finished the 2015–16 season ranked first and second in both True Shooting Percentage and Player Efficiency Rating. Over the last four seasons, Curry, Thompson, and Durant ranked first, second, and 12th in threes. Of all players in 2015–16 who had at least 30 post-up possessions, Durant scored the most points per possession (1.23) of anyone. On spot-up shooting, Curry was second in points per possession, Thompson 22nd, and Durant 39th. With Green’s passing from the center position and Iguodala’s versatility, the Death Lineup would be an unstoppable force of basketball excellence with off-ball movement, back cuts, and pick-and-rolls that would leave opposing defensive coaches in cold sweats the night before. They could pass until someone—anyone!—was open, inside or out, iso or in motion. They could endlessly switch on defense and feel confident in the resulting matchup. As Kerr knew, you could play that lineup only maybe 12 to 15 minutes a night because of how taxing it can be (especially for Green at center), but that’s still only a third of these players’ minutes per night in one of the most fearsome five-man lineups ever devised. No wonder the Warriors were giddy to start the season.
A couple of weeks into training camp, the Warriors were honored with the Entrepreneurial Company of the Year (Encore) award from the Stanford Graduate School of Business Alumni Association. Lacob said that night that the award meant as much to him as winning the title a year earlier: “The truth is, we’re not really a basketball team. In this day and age, we’re much more than that. We’re a sports, media, and technology entity.” When the Warriors media guide came out two weeks later, you only had to flip to page five to see a photo of Lacob with the Encore in hand.
It was the culmination of a year of accolades and achievements that few sports teams ever experience. Besides Curry’s winning the MVP unanimously and Kerr’s earning Coach of the Year honors, the Warriors were named Best Analytics Organization at the Sloan conference in March; Kent Lacob and Sammy Gelfand were there to accept the award. (As Sports Illustrated wrote, “The team seemed to be mentioned in every panel and presentation, generating awe as easily as they generate points.”) The Warriors were the most popular team on the NBA’s League Pass subscription service and Curry’s jersey was the top seller in 48 states—all except, you guessed it, Ohio and Oklahoma. In March, when Fortune released its list of the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders,” Curry and Kerr were co-listed at No. 15, the only sports-centric people to be honored (other than Alabama football coach Nick Saban) and one spot behind Bono.
In May 2016, Sports Business Journal reported that the Warriors were valued, according to a limited partnership sale, at $1.6 billion, meaning Lacob and Guber had, in less than six years, increased the team’s value by some 256 percent over the original purchase price. And Chase Center, the team’s privately financed 18,000-seat arena in San Francisco, appeared on track to break ground in early 2017 and open in the fall of 2019. That same month, the publication also named the Warriors its Sports Team of the Year for the second time in three years, based on their on-court success but also for business reasons. Season-ticket renewals were at 99 percent, local TV ratings were the highest of any market, their social media presence had more than doubled in one year’s time, and revenue from new corporate partnerships was up 20 percent. It was no surprise when Lacob was named Sports Executive of the Year.
The Warriors had become, in many ways, a model for all other professional sports franchises. Using a spirit preached by Lacob and championed by Peter Guber, the Warriors were successful, profitable, beloved, and sustainable. They’d gotten there by making smart decisions and never being afraid to innovate. As Guber himself said during a conference at Stanford in March 2016, “We live in a constant state of ‘beta.’ ” So long as that attitude prevails first and foremost, the Golden State Warriors figure to hold their place as one of the elite organizations not just in sports but (as evinced by the Encore Award) in all the business world.
As the 2016–17 season drew near, Bob Myers was asked about the long-term sustainability of Golden State’s success. Could they truly become, say, a new-age San Antonio Spurs, always reloading and seemingly immune to whatever new trends may arise? “I think we’re going in the right direction but you have to be careful because things swing really fast in sports,” he said. “An injury, a decision—people are viewing things as going swell now, but it can change, so you got to stay humble and keep doing what you do and hope that people recognize you for it. It’s professional sports. You think you got it all figured out, and then whatever it is, fate, misfortune remind you that we’re all susceptible to a downturn.
“We want to enjoy this and see how far we can take it.”
• • •
It’s 11:00 a.m. on a drizzly morning in Oakland. Here the Warriors have come, to the conclusion of an endless offseason. It’s October 25, the day the Warriors will embark on a year that promises rewards bigger than anything they’ve imagined. To that end, everyone is keeping up a semblance of normalcy, adhering to their tried-and-true routines after game-day shootaround. In the far corner, Draymond Green practices midrange jumpers with new assistant coach Mike Brown, far from the madding crowd of reporters, TV crews, and staffers who’ve assembled to cover this spectacle. With Luke Walton having left to become head coach of the Lakers, Brown is one of several new faces around, but he’s not the one everyone has come to see.
That would be Kevin Durant, who’s shooting long threes with another new assistant, the recently retired NBA guard Willie Green, who feeds him a fresh ball after each attempt. On another rim to their right, Shaun Livingston shoots corner threes as Sammy Gelfand, the Warriors’ analytics whiz kid, grabs loose balls with an eager smile. Closer to the media scrum, Stephen Curry cycles through his customary three-point drills around the arc as assistant coaches Bruce Fraser (the de facto “Curry Whisperer”) and Nick U’Ren (who helped legitimize the Death Lineup in the 2015 Finals) keep track of makes and misses. Ron Adams works on defense with Andre Iguodala, who gets second-unit mates Kevon Looney, Patrick McCaw, and Ian Clark to follow him to another rim like a band of ducklings lagging behind. As always, Klay Thompson fine-tunes his catch-and-shoot technique with assistant coach Chris DeMarco.
This is the postpractice setup that works for the Warriors, and they are loath to futz with it too much, especially this early in the season. The familiarity helps quell the uncertainty that a new slate of games can bring. As they didn’t end the previous season under the best of circumstances, they’ll take any comfort they can get right now. But there are new faces who must learn how things are done here. Gone are Andrew Bogut and Harrison Barnes (to Dallas), Leandro Barbosa (back in Phoenix), Marreese Speights (south to the LA Clippers), Brandon Rush (north to Minnesota), and Festus Ezeli (landed in Portland). Their replacements—David West, Zaza Pachulia, and JaVale McGee—mingle here and there as they acclimate to their new digs.
Eventually they disperse, slouching toward the workout room, trails of sweat forming along their backs, to reappear a few hours later at Oracle Arena. As the Cleveland Cavaliers are receiving their championship rings 2,500 miles to the east, the Warriors steel their focus. One by one, they trickle out onto the court to begin some light pregame shooting. They all know full well that the only goal for this season is a championship, an honor both achieved and squandered in the past 16 months. Now they’ve reloaded and critics say their very existence has ruined competitive balance, harmed the very fabric of what makes basketball fun. They will be the most covered, most scrutinized basketball team in the history of the sport—another fact of life they cannot control.
What they can dictate is how they play every game, run the fast break, switch seamlessly onto opposing defenders, and so forth. Soon, these actions will feel instinctual, but that will come after an adjustment period. It won’t be perfect from the outset, but Golden State is good enough for now. No team has come close to averaging 116 points per game in 25 years, yet that seems entirely possible for these Warriors.
Aside from otherworldly talent, the team has some tech initiatives that could play a role. Their practice court is now outfitted with technology from two different startups that promise to analyze their play as never before. An Alabama-based company called Noahlytics uses a sensor positioned 13 feet above the rim to analyze every shot a player takes around the arc at 30 frames a second and map it on a monitor installed a few feet away on a wall. Five years earlier, SportVU was deemed revolutionary because the motion tracking could log a player’s movements on the court. Noahlytics can actually map the angle of any shot and the exact plane of where the ball crosses down and through the rim and out below. The Warriors were one of four teams to try out that piece of tech near the end of the 2015–16 season, but they were the first NBA team to install the SmartCourt system from an Israeli startup named PlaySight. SmartCourt allowed the Warriors to record practice, stream it live online to people off-site, and store tagged plays in the cloud for either immediate or later review. Myers liked it so much that the system was also installed at their D-League facility in Santa Cruz.
But while technology helps and the Warriors will take every advantage they can, it means nothing if they don’t win. The Finals taught them that in the most painful way imaginable. More than 400 threes from one player? A record 73 wins? The first unanimous MVP? And now, signing Kevin Durant? Doesn’t mean a thing without the ring. Michael Jordan himself told Joe Lacob as much when they dined over the summer. As His Airness decreed, “Seventy-three don’t mean shit.”
As the minutes ticked down to tipoff with the San Antonio Spurs, Oracle was awash in antsy anticipation. The 190th consecutive sellout crowd filed into the arena not really knowing what to expect. The players methodically worked on their jumpers, baby hooks, and layups, as Dave East’s remix of Fat Joe and Remy Ma’s “All the Way Up” blared overhead. The chorus came around—I’m all the way up / All the way up / Nothing can stop me / I’m all the way up—and sounded prophetic.
Regardless, the Warriors sat atop the National Basketball Association with 29 teams eager to knock them down. Five years ago from this moment, Golden State could boast no homegrown All-Stars, Olympic gold medals, recent playoff appearances, or all-time records. They had come very far in a short period of time and there was more to do, but the season—one they hoped would affirm their place in basketball history—had arrived.
As Zaza Pachulia and Pau Gasol prepared for the jump ball from referee Dan Crawford, who had worked Game 7 of the Finals, Joe Lacob stood a few feet away, nervously bouncing on the balls of his feet in front of his usual courtside seat. Peter Guber was three seats to his left, also standing with anticipation. Stephen Curry stood in the backcourt, gnawing on his mouthpiece and retying the strings on his shorts, while Kevin Durant pointed to the sky and walked across the Warriors logo to his new usual spot, prompting another rush of cheers from the crowd.
When everyone was ready, Crawford tossed the ball high in the air.
A new season had begun.