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| That’s a lot of silverware |
TODAY we’re going to talk about winning.
Yes, I know. I’m scared, too.
As you can see from the photo above, local clubs which are near and dear to The Lose have been gathering a pretty impressive haul of silverware in recent years. Add a Seattle Seahawks Super Bowl trophy from 2014, and The Lose-loved clubs seem to be awash in spectacular, unprecedented success.
Which feels weird, to be honest, and doesn’t feel all that comfortable. When failure is the default – which it is, in any sort of competition – it can be easy to get used to. There was never any reason to get excited about the Mariners when I was growing up in the Pacific Northwest, because whatever promise they showed early in the season would be undone come August in some 1-8 or 2-10 road trip from hell, usually involving some combination of being swept in Minnesota, squandering a couple of games against the White Sox at Comiskey, melting on the 140° astroturf in Kansas City, and then being swept in Oakland for good measure. Losses mounting, season over, nothing to see here, move along. I grew up in an era where the closest MLB team had 14 straight losing seasons, the closest NHL team had 17 straight losing seasons, and then, of course, I was in and around a university so adept at losing that they coined a verb to describe it. The only way I’d be more qualified to write a blog about losing is if I grew up in Cleveland.
So writing about winning feels strange, but we live in strange times. We live in a time when The Good Guys finished 8-4 and are
But it occurs to The Lose that, as we continue this on-going process of understanding and explicating losing, it’s probably a good idea to define what constitutes success. Success in the moment is obvious, of course – “See that guy over there on the other side? Beat the hell out of him!” – but that’s just one contest. We’re talking about bigger pictures and broader contexts here. What does “winning” actually mean?
This question was put forth by guest columnist Geoff Thevenot to his readership earlier in the year. The question he posed was the following:
Take your favorite team, whatever sport you like. Which of these would you prefer:
a) Over the next ten years, your team is a strong contender every year - they make the playoffs most years, even get to the final round a couple of times, but in none of these ten years do they win the whole thing.
b) Your team is mediocre or worse every year except one, where everything happens to go right and they win a championship.
Now, I know the obvious answer:
c) Win all the games all the time and beat the hell out of everyone.
An answer which, at the moment, can be summed up in three words: “Golden State Warriors.”
I honestly thought that the Warriors would lose Tuesday night in Indianapolis. The Pacers are a good team, the Warriors were playing their 5th game of a 7-game road trip, and weird stuff happens on the road. You lose. It happens.
And the Warriors promptly went on a 22-0 run in the 1st Quarter, dropped 79 on Indiana in the half, had a 31-point lead late in the 3rd Quarter, and left themselves plenty of opportunity to goof off in the final period and still win the game 131:123, running their record to 23-0, which is the best start in the history of American professional sports. They’ve won 27 straight going back to last season, tying them with Miami Heat of 2013 for the second longest winning streak in NBA history, and the seemingly unimaginable all-time record of 33 straight wins, set by the L.A. Lakers of 1971-1972, suddenly looks attainable.
It seems hard to imagine that the Warriors could actually improve upon last season. The Warriors went 67-15 during the regular season, 16-5 in the playoffs, won the NBA title, and posted one of the largest average margins of victory ever in the league. Already, those gaudy numbers slot them as one of the greatest teams in history. Not only are the Warriors outdoing their pace from a year ago (at this point last season, they were 21-2), but they’ve been so dominant – winning by an average of nearly 15 points a game – that some of the most outlandish scenarios imaginable are suddenly within the realm of possibility. The 1995-1996 Chicago Bulls went 72-10, the best record in league history, and the Warriors are threatening to match that, surpass that – and even shatter it. After last night’s win over the Pacers, moving them to 23-0, some projection systems now list the Warriors as having a 1% chance of winning 80 games and a 0.1% chance of going 82-0. The sheer fact they have any chance at all of winning 82 games is astonishing. And as nuts as that sounds, Las Vegas sports books have said that the Mar. 19 game at San Antonio is projecting to be the only time all season the Warriors are listed as underdogs. Seriously, this is just nuts.
The Golden State Warriors are not only seemingly unbeatable, but they’re also wildly entertaining. They are a cutting-edge team playing space-age basketball, combining the cerebral, geometric passing game of the Spurs with the pace of the seven-seconds-or-less Phoenix Suns and led by Stephen Curry, a humble and normal-sized guy who is the greatest shooter in the history of the sport, and who is presently radically altering the game by being able to dominate play while standing 30 feet from the basket. They unleash these hell-hath-no-fury runs in games, running up huge numbers of points so quickly that they tend to crush their opposition’s will in one fell swoop. The Warriors also possess the game’s deepest bench with a wide mix of players, so they can play any style of game better than you can – slow, fast, big, small – and do so relentlessly, and they also place a premium on high IQ basketball, meaning they have guys that can figure out whatever you’re trying to do against them in short order, and then go about dismantling it. All that, while having a blast. Dubs games look like dance-offs a lot of the time, what with all the bench guys going nuts and busting a move every time a Splash Bro drains a trey or Draymond Green feeds a lob into the post for a jam.
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| Steph doing Steph things |
I just love the assortment of reactions on this play. Charlotte’s Kemba Walker as much as throws up his hands, seeing the ball with Steph in the corner. “Aw, man!” Meanwhile, Andrew Bogut flips the pass out to a wide-open Steph and just starts trotting the other way before he even shoots. That shot is as good as a layup for Steph Curry. And the Charlotte fans were eating this stuff up, cheering on their native son as much as they were cheering on the Hornets, who pretty much had no chance in this game, as Curry had 40 through three quarters and the final period was essentially garbage time. As has often been the case on the road this season, you couldn’t tell at times which was the home side.
The Warriors have become the greatest show on earth. (They’ve got something of a lovefest going on with the other greatest show on earth, F.C. Barcelona, as you’ve got Curry swapping jerseys with Lionel Messi and Neymar eschewing his floppy footballer hairdo in favor of the “Steph Curry style” look.) At the NBA’s online store, 7 of the 10 biggest selling items on Black Friday, and 6 of the 10 biggest sellers on Cyber Monday, were Warriors garb. On the secondary ticket markets, tickets for Warriors road games are going for 10-15 times more than for any other team. A Warriors game on the road is like the circus coming to town. If the opposition is good, the building is amped up and hyper charged in the hopes of seeing an upset. If the opposition is bad, the game takes on the feel of a Warriors home game, with the fans eagerly awaiting Steph doing some of his Steph things and wowing them. Indeed, thousands of fans are turning up early just to watch Steph & Co. warm up. Good luck getting a ticket for a home game at the Oracle Arena – it will set you back $155 just to watch a horrible team like the Sacramento Kings, much less anyone good. Owner Joe Lacob is also about to turn Golden State into a gold mine, as he’s cleared the next hurdle with the city of San Francisco and is moving forward with plans to build a new 18,500-seat arena near to AT&T Park at an expected cost of $1 billion – all of it privately financed, the outcome of which will send the value of the franchise into the stratosphere. For the Warriors, on and off the court, everything is coming up golden.
And 3½ seasons ago, the Warriors were this.
Seriously, read that article again. I’ve linked to that article by Bill Simmons before. That article, along with this essay by David Foster Wallace, were the genesis for this blog. But read it again and relive the misery. That Simmons piece, written on the heels of one of the lowest points in franchise history, chronicles just how truly, totally, completely, utterly awful the Warriors had been for decades. By the end of that 2012 season, the Warriors were reduced to starting five rookies in an effort to tank and preserve their 1st round draft pick, which they barely managed to do and which wound up being Harrison Barnes. The Ellis-for-Bogut trade sent fans off the deep end: “Why are we trading for a guy who’s hurt and can’t even play? Ellis is our only good player! Curry’s always hurt! Thompson’s meh! This team sucks! BOOO!”
I mean, you have no idea how hopeless this team was. When I lived in Seattle in the 1990s, the Sonics were one of the best teams in the NBA. Then I get here, I watch a couple of Warriors games and think, “what the hell is this crap?” The Warriors were so dreadful that the Kings games got more play in the local media, since they were actually a good team, and an exciting one as well. In the newsroom at The Examiner, we’d all be waiting around for the game to finish so the sports guys could close out the edition, and we had a regular crew of peanut gallery dwellers who’d stand there before the TV in the newsroom, watching the game and trying to predict how the Warriors would screw up a winnable game:
Zoran: Here comes the ill-advised three from Derek Fisher.
Terry: No, I think Baron Davis will dribble it off his foot.
Drums: Off-balance shot from J-Rich on the baseline drawing nothing but iron. I’m calling it.
xp: Dunleavy with a no-look pass into the third row.
[Derek Fisher takes an ill-advised three.]
Zoran: I win!
All: sigh …
That was the 2005-2006 team we were watching, which bumbled their way to a 34-48 record and a last place finish in the Pacific Division. The following year came the ‘We Believe’ team, which made a good trade for the first time since, well, forever, and eventually upset the #1 seed Dallas Mavericks in the playoffs. It was a feel-good season, in the end. But ‘We Believe’ was also barely a .500 team and it still had that Dubs’ penchant for wanton self-destruction, which drove everyone even crazier – and that group of barely .500 schlubs turned giant killers was pretty much the best thing the Warriors had to offer over a course of about 25 years. Not only was this team perpetually terrible, but they were stunningly incompetently run and had managed to piss away pretty much every natural advantage – big market, great quality of life, etc. – that the San Francisco Bay Area can provide in terms of being a destination for free agents and such. If you wound up playing for the Warriors, it wasn’t the bottom of the NBA barrel – that was the Clippers – but it was close.
And now, 3½ years later, the Golden State Warriors play the greatest basketball on earth, committing an elegant sort of violence that is beautiful to watch as they go about destroying their opponents. There is usually a moment, in every Warriors win, where Steph Curry makes a shot – be it a long three or a scramble to the hoop or what have you – that is so unbelievable as to literally kill the opponents’ collective will to live. Game over. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen and I have no idea how this happened. Inquiring minds want to know why it is that the Warriors have become so good.
Quite honestly, I’m not sure the Warriors know.
The frustration David Foster Wallace espouses in that essay I linked to stems from wanting to know why it is that a super athlete – in this particular case, Tracy Austin – was so successful, only to discover that she has no real explanation. But this is always the case. Winners either don’t truly know what it is that makes them successful, or don’t want to be unabashedly arrogant and say, up front, “I was just better than everyone else.” Most of the adages and tired clichés don’t really hold up, the worst of which being, “I worked so hard.” Well yeah, you did, but so did everyone else. Trust me, after spending plenty of time around the Washington State campus and seeing players from bad football and basketball teams working out, the idea that they were bad because they didn’t “work hard enough” is bullshit. Those kids busted their asses trying to become better players, and a lot of them ultimately busted their bodies in that pursuit. It didn’t translate into wins on the hardwood or the gridiron.
“No one worked harder than I did.” Seriously? Fuck off. I hate that line.
But the idea that you were unsuccessful because you lost because you “didn’t work hard enough” is in keeping with the Horatio Alger fantasy this country is somewhat obsessed with, this ludicrous notion that hard work and perseverance is somehow enough to be successful in and of itself. It was amusing going to college in the 1980s in sunny Southern California, an era permeated with blind, naïve Reaganesque optimism. I’d get into lots of good arguments with cement-headed business majors who were hopelessly naïve, all of whom had this blind and innate optimism about and insisted that if so-and-so could be successful, they could do simply by putting their mind to it. The classic cliché of those discussions was Bill Gates, the college dropout turned multibillionaire software mogul. If Bill Gates can do it, so can I, by god!
Well, no, actually, you can’t, unless you possess that sort of insight and vision. Bill Gates was an innovator. He foresaw things that others didn’t. He had some innate instincts which others simply didn’t possess. He also created, over time, something of a monopoly in his industry, which the Federal Government didn’t look too fondly upon. A great number of successful people have gotten to that point by, if not full-on breaking the rules, at least pushing the bounds and blurring the lines of what’s acceptable. And that willingness to go to incredible lengths to crush the opposition is important, as it speaks to an inherent hypercompetitive nature. Former New York Attorney General Elliott Spitzer had the best line when talking about the latter in light of some of his investigations into both organized crime and the house of cards that was the American financial system in the early 2000s: “people incorrectly assume that, in a free market economy, companies like competition. They don’t. They hate it. They like winning.” This isn’t to imply that all winners cheat – they don’t. It’s speaks more to mindset, and the idea that in order to be supremely successful, you have to be willing, and be driven, to push yourself to outermost limits. This is why the other pat answer most successful people have when explaining their success, “I wanted it more,” actually has some more merit to it.
The élite fundamentally possess talent and aptitude. They’ve honed and refined that talent over time, of course, and they possess both a competitive drive and also a killer instinct. This is true in sports, business, politics, entertainment, you name it. But of those three things, only one – working hard – isn’t somehow inherent or innate and, thus, mediocre persons can fixate upon it as somehow being the key to success. But it doesn’t matter how much you work at it and put your mind to it, you cannot be the fastest man in the world if you don’t possess the fast-twitch muscle fibres which physically enable you to run that fast in the first place. Without talent, none of the other stuff matters. Indeed, saying that someone has wasted their enormous talent is one of the most damning things you can say about them. In the end, we are better off if we pick our battles and manage our expectations, defining what constitutes “winning” on our own terms.
And talent is easy for even those who have it to ultimately dismiss – after all, they were born with that talent and possess it, it’s what they know and it’s hard for them to conceive that others don’t have the same abilities. But what you’re dealing with here are freaks of nature, people so far outside the norm as to fail to make sense. In that D.F. Wallace essay, he recalls how Tracy Austin was so precocious that a fellow tennis club member was setting up matches for her and wagering on them – when she was 10 years old! Wayne Gretzky scored 378 goals in one season as a 10-year-old, and had scored 1,000 goals by the time he was 13. Tiger Woods was only half-joking when he said recently that he peaked as a golfer at age 11, by which time he had already won 113 golf tournaments. This is not normal. These people are freaks, plain and simple.
Of course, explaining that the élite are freaks, and their success almost certainly impossible to duplicate, to a bunch of Orange County rich kid wannabe entrepreneurs, all of them born with a silver spoon in their mouth and another up their ass, usually fell on deaf ears. They all had galling senses of entitlement, discounting the good fortune of being born into a rich and prosperous family and ignoring the enormous advantages that presented. I may have told a few of them, “why don’t you do us all a favor and make like Bill Gates and drop out of this college.” And I mention good fortune because it ultimately has a lot to do with success, in the end. You have to be good, but you also have to be lucky.
And we poo-poo the idea of luck. We don’t want to accept that something like good fortune – or, even more so, good timing – has such an impact upon success. It’s easy to be skeptical about the role good fortune plays in success, and the mistake that people make is thinking that being good and being lucky are somehow mutually exclusive. They aren’t. Sure, you can be really good at something, but so are a bunch of other people. You need to catch a break, at some point.
There was a point in time where many great achievements very nearly failed miserably, and a good number of enormously successful were so ridiculously unsuccessful that they very nearly gave it up and decided to do something else. Stories of actors waiting tables and tripling up in studio apartments have become legendary, of course. I’ve had worldwide touring musicians tell me in interviews that the gigs which they remembered most were the ones years prior where 80 people turned up. I once sat in on an interview with some world-renowned architects who recalled that their first gig was designing a bus stop in Austin, Texas: “Let me tell you, that was one beautiful bus stop, by golly. At least it was to us, because it meant we could pay the rent.”
And see, most successful people don’t want to admit that they were fortunate. They will sort of mention it in passing, of course, but that they “worked hard” or “wanted it more” was obviously their key to success. This is precisely why, for the purposes of this blog, successful people are lame. Most of the failure that we chronicle here at In Play Lose is put forth by people who are oh, so close to being great, but not quite. They have “worked hard” and “wanted it really badly” almost as much as the guys wearing the championship rings, but something was lacking, something really small often prevented them from ultimately being successful. We’re talking about minute differences here. The worst player on the Philadelphia 76ers could walk into all but 30 basketball courts in this country, join in a pick-up game and proceed to wipe the floor with the rest of the bushers around him. But put them on one of those 30 courts within the confines of NBA arenas, and they wind up looking like dodo birds.
And the Golden State Warriors, as constructed, are definitely something of an accident. Winning in professional sports begins with the acquisition of talent, of course, and the Warriors were lucky in doing so – “lucky” in the sense that a lot of their competitors didn’t know what they were doing. Consider the 2009 draft, when regular lottery dwellers Minnesota had both the 5th and 6th picks in the draft. The Timberwolves had many needs, like most bad teams do, and they had a particularly pressing need at the point guard position. In their minds, the slickest point guard available was a teenage Spanish phenom named Ricky Rubio, whom they acquired with the 5th pick, but Rubio was under contract at F.C. Barcelona, and the Wolves knew it was going to take some time to buy him out and bring him to Minnesota, so they hedged their bets and drafted another point guard with the 6th pick – Jonny Flynn, who turned out of be a waste of space and who amounted to nothing.
And with the 7th pick in the 2009 draft, the Golden State Warriors selected Steph Curry.
Now, no one, and I mean no one, could foresee that, by the time he was in his 7th season in the league, Steph Curry would morph into the greatest shooter in the history of the sport and a player who would radically alter the game of basketball as we know it. Even so, it’s hard not to see this as an epic gag by the Wolves of historic proportions, one on par with the Trail Blazers picking Sam Bowie instead of Michael Jordan, or the Trail Blazers then opting for Greg Oden instead of Kevin Durant. (What about the four teams who picked before the Wolves in that draft and also passed on Curry, you ask? Well, I think the Clippers are pretty happy with Blake Griffin, the Zombies scored with James Harden but then bungled the trade to the Rockets, Tyreke Evans was pretty good with the Kings but has since moved on to New Orleans, like anyone does as quickly as possible who is stuck with the Kings, and the Grizzlies selected … Hasheem Thabeet. Remember him? Yikes.)
Fortune smiled again on the Warriors in the 2011 draft in the form of complete incompetence from some of their competitors. Some decent players went in the Top 10 that year, but so did the perpetually useless Derrick Williams and Jan Veselý (who?), and so did the wonderfully-named but not particularly successful Bismack Biyombo, taken 7th the Sacramento Kings, who compounded the disaster and showed their usual penchant for idiocy and short-term thinking in a hope to put asses in seats, as they swung a deal with the 10th-picking Milwaukee Bucks to acquire Jimmer Fredette, the Tim Tebow of the Mormon world, a player whose exploits and ensuing cult following at the college level didn’t exactly translate into pro success. (He’s currently playing with the Knicks – the Westchester Knicks of the D-League.) And after all that mess was over and done with during the 2011 draft, the Warriors picked 11th and picked Klay Thompson, the guy who went off for 39 the other night against Indiana, and who has turned out to be better than every one* of the 10 guys picked before him that night.
(*You could make an argument Kyrie Irving is better. You’d be wrong, in my opinion, but at least I’d be willing to listen.)
So as you can see, the Warriors hit the jackpot twice on the talent acquisition front simply because some of their closest competitors – closest in terms of being terrible and desperately needed good players – completely, utterly whiffed in the draft. But this is what bad teams do, just as the Warriors did for much of the previous 30+ years. And the acquisition of good talent isn’t always apparent, at first. No one gave two shits when the New England Patriots used the 199th pick in the 2000 draft on a Michigan QB named Tom Brady. NFL gurus were aghast when the Seahawks threw their 3rd round pick, a QB named Russell Wilson, under center from the get-go and declared him their starter. You hit and you miss, you just don’t know what you’re going to get. If landing a #1 pick in the NBA draft lottery was such a sure thing, then more than five of those players would’ve won NBA titles by now. (This is why the 76ers perpetual floating of the floor is such folly, but we’ll have plenty more to say about those idiots here in the weeks to come. Trust me.) And good talent ultimately isn’t worth a damn without development. You have to put the pieces in place in your organization, through coaching and support staff, in order to give talent the best opportunities to succeed.
Which is easier said than done, of course, and in professional sports, the time-tested and half-assed way to do this is simply to try to copy what other guys are doing. Everyone in the NBA wants to be Spursy. San Antonio’s longstanding success has led to their coaches and execs springing up in open gigs in OKC and Atlanta and Philadelphia. The New England Patriots’ staff are regularly raided when coaching and front office jobs open up in the NFL. Prior to the Pats, raiding the Mike Holmgren-era Packers was en vogue, and lately, the hot place to go is the staff in Seattle. But trying to replicate the success of a Greg Popovich or a Bill Belichick has proven nearly impossible – in part because Greg Popovich and Bill Belichick are always evolving and shifting the way they approach their craft. The Pats have run every sort of offense imaginable over 20 years. The Spurs go big, play fast, play slow, what have you. Billy Beane had moved on from the original Moneyball concepts about the time the rest of the MLB began to catch on. (He had good reason to do so – the discount-rate sorts of players he’d advocated had suddenly gotten very expensive.) You can hire the right-hand man of a true innovator to run your organization, but you’re not necessary hiring the innovation.
And with the Warriors, innovation has come from head coach Steve Kerr. It took some serious chutzpah from Joe Lacob to fire Mark Jackson after three seasons in which he turned the Warriors’ fortunes around and turned them into a playoff team. (Jackson deserves some credit for their success, but not nearly as much as some blowhards would have you believe.) Kerr had no coaching experience and was working in broadcasting, and it sounded like a ridiculous hire at the time, except that Kerr always had a reputation as a player for being a coach on the floor, someone with an enormous basketball IQ – a trait which served him well with the Jordan-era Bulls, where Jordan’s brilliance masked the fact that they were the most intelligent team in the league. Kerr had done his research (and also done quite few Warriors games as a commentator), and what he saw was possible at Golden State was something no one had really even imagined. The Jackson-era offense tended to stagnate too easily, thus negating the great shooting of Curry and Thompson, and was so dependent on isolation and 2-man games that it negated the fact that the Warriors possessed good passers at every position and blunted the talents of both Harrison Barnes and, more importantly, Draymond Green. Green, in particular, is the guy whose talents no one truly appreciated coming out of college – not even the Warriors, who picked him in the 2nd round. His size and skill set don’t make sense – or, at least, they didn’t until Kerr took the job and instilled the Warriors passing game, in which Green often serves almost as a stand-in point guard, able to shoot and drive and pick out open shooters from all sorts of different angles. Suddenly, a 6’7” guy who has no real position in the NBA became one of the most confounding match-up quandaries for opponents.
The Warriors now unleash, at crunch time (if crunch time ever happens, which isn’t often), the single-most devastating lineup in the league: Curry, Thompson, Barnes, Green, Iguodala. That lineup is currently averaging 170 points per 48 minutes played. In one of their only close calls this season, that lineup simply crushed the Clippers in the 4th Quarter, and may have crushed the Clippers’ psyches in the process. They seem to enjoy doing that, particularly to teams perceived as rivals for the title. The Warriors took great pleasure in mauling the Grizzlies both at home and in Memphis, and made sure to further humiliate the Houston Rockets, who have failed to launch this season. I’ve read quite a few articles theorizing about what sort of scheme Greg Popovich will cook up to slow down the Warriors when they meet later this year. It’s a strange question, one that infers somewhat that the Warriors are somehow standing still. If I’m the Warriors, I’d look at the Spurs old, slow lineup and hit them with the lineup I mentioned above right from the opening tip, just as that lineup started the last three games of the NBA Finals. I would come right out against one of the slowest-paced teams in the league and try to run them into the ground, and also expose whatever defensive ploys they have in mind right from the get-go. The sooner you expose what they’re trying to do, the sooner you can adjust. In the end, I can’t see how the Spurs, who are a terrific team, can beat this team 4 times out of 7. Unless injuries hit – always a legit possibility, of course, and one to be mindful of – I don’t see how anyone can.
And this just doesn’t happen. It’s preposterous. It’s absurd. It also tends to be fleeting. There is a reason why so few teams are able to repeat. Generally, winning championships and shattering performance records requires an awful lot to go right, and the law of averages starts to catch up with you in terms of injuries and such. With success also comes increased payrolls, as you invariably have to reward those who got you the title. In the NFL, the Seahawks deep and dominating side from two seasons ago has splintered in short order, simply because there wasn’t any viable way for the club to keep everyone under the constraints of the NFL salary cap. The small-market Royals already lost Ben Zobrist, will likely lose Johnny Cueto, and now have to figure out how to pay everyone else. (Though I suspect both the Seahawks and Royals consider these to be inherently nice problems to have.) As for the Warriors, Draymond Green has a new, $87 million contract after last year, and come summertime, the club will have to figure out if/how to re-sign swingman Harrison Barnes and rapidly improving center Festus Ezeli. A player’s value goes up simply through being a part of a championship team, regardless of what their actual contribution was. As such, they tend to be wildly overpaid as free agents. In the case of both the guys I just mentioned, they are restricted free agents and the Warriors have the right to match any offers, but the Warriors already had to dump the big salary of David Lee in the off-season so as to avoid going over a payroll threshold which would’ve incurred huge luxury tax penalties, and if some team foolishly offers Harrison Barnes a $100 million contract, who knows what the Warriors will do?
And everyone is competing, trying to get better, looking for that edge. The margins are so slim that sustaining success of the sort the Warriors are now experiencing is impossible. You just can’t win every year. I’ll be perfectly happy winning every other year – and speaking of which, 2016 is almost here, which means we should start preparing for another San Francisco Giants pennant race and parade. And something really amusing happens when you do what the Giants have done, which is capture World Series in 2010, 2012, and 2014: you become the enemy. I love going onto fan sites now and reading “the Giants are the worst,” and “their fans are so obnoxious” and all that stuff. During the 56 years in which the San Francisco Giants failed to win a World Series, no one outside of the Bay Area as much as gave a shit about them. Then they win three in five and jealousy starts to settle in, envy and bitterness arises.
And it’s awesome. It’s totally awesome. Hey, I loved the Jordan era Chicago Bulls right up until they played the Sonics in the 1996 NBA Finals, at which point they became evil incarnate. A lot of people seem to think that Patriots fans are particularly annoying in the NFL, but I just see the most obnoxious among them as being newcomers and recent converts who don’t remember the days of the early 1990s when the 2-14 Pats were duking it out with the 2-14 Seahawks to see which team would be bad enough to get the first pick in the NFL draft. The Patriots are their fans have become “smug,” just as the Yankees are “smug” and the Spurs are “smug.” It’s all good-natured nonsense entirely based upon jealousy and not based in reality.
Well, OK, the Dodgers are scum. But that’s just fact and should be accepted as such.
And the Warriors will start to be vilified as well. If they go 75-7 and obliterate the field come playoff time, they’ll become every club’s mortal enemy next season, and everyone in 29 other places will be so mad whenever Curry makes another 35-footer and so giddy if/when their home club can topple the champs for a night. Warrior fans who suffered 40 years of indignity and embarrassment, yet still kept turning up all that time, will come to be regarded as spoiled and arrogant and whatnot. Awesome. All of it. Bring it on.
And all of this talking about winning is making me feel, well, almost dirty. I know not to trust this feeling, I know that it’s not real – and then the Warriors go out and win another game. Maybe they’ll lose tomorrow night in Boston. Yeah, they probably will, especially since I’ve been writing about them and now I’ve jinxed them. How does that line from Bull Durham go? “Never fuck with a winning streak.” Sorry guys. My bad.
No, come to think they probably won’t lose. I have no idea when they’ll ever lose.
And in terms of Geoff’s original question about what constitutes success, I’d like to say that I’d like to see a team that’s always pretty good, even if they never win anything, since on a nightly basis I would be entertained – except that I’m fascinated with failure, of course, so losing isn’t the worst thing imaginable. (Although I’ll freely admit that watching most every game of the 2-9 homestand by Seattle Mariners last summer which essentially ended their season was too much for even me to take.) Not all of my favorite sides are necessarily colossal failures. The Vancouver Canucks have been generally good for most of the past 15 years, and while they’ve failed in the playoffs, they won division title after division title and, night after night, you had a pretty good chance of seeing some spectacular play if you tuned in for one of their games. Likewise, the Sonics teams I had season tickets for in the early 1990s were easily the most exciting teams to watch in the league. They never won a title, and suffered an incredible indignity by choking in the first round of the 1994 playoffs, but again, they were spectacular entertainment.
Having said that, well, some of the most fun I’ve had in a life of sports fandom have come when long-suffering sides that I support rise up and reach the pinnacle. Even watching “the richest game in football” from afar, on television, the excitement of the 45,000 Norwich F.C. fans at Wembley was palpable, tangible. You could almost feel it through the screen. Norwich scored twice in the first 15 minutes, and for the next 75, the game was essentially a party for everyone dressed in yellow and green. And why shouldn’t it be? Apart from a League Cup in the mid 1980s, Norwich City has never won anything in 100+ years as a club. That sort of joy and jubilation is hard to beat. We were out and about in the Mission on the night the Warriors won the NBA title last summer, and the senses of joy and relief where everywhere among the people in the many people in the streets – after 40 years, the Warriors had finally done something right. Surprisingly, among the three Giants championships I’ve seen since I’ve lived here, the celebration after the first – which broke the 56-year skid – was actually the most subdued, as jubilation was mixed with a profound sense of relief. Finally, the club which had had so many great players over the years – Mays and McCovey, Marichal and Cepeda, Clark and Bonds, etc. – had attained that ultimate prize. And heaven only knows what will happen if the Mariners ever win a World Series, or the Canucks win a Stanley Cup, or the Oranje win a World Cup, but it would definitely be fun to find out.
That feeling of finally reaching that pinnacle is pretty hard to beat. It almost makes years of frustration seem as if they were worthwhile. So I’m not sure how you define success, really. But since the Warriors don’t seem particularly inclined to ever lose again, in this particular instance, success is being defined for me, and quite nicely at that.
OK, enough of this winning bullshit. Fortunately, the Vancouver Canucks are god awful so far this season, having amassed more losses so far than any other team in the NHL. (But they’re the right kind of losses, so it’s not all bad.) And hey, the 76ers lost again, dropping them to 1-22 on the season. Now that’s more like it …
