As great as it is to watch the tremendous trio of Draymond Green, klay Thompson, and Steph Curry try and come together when their backs are against the wall to try and win another championship, there was something so delightful about sitting on my couch in December of 2023 and watching them fall apart, as they did on December 8th, against the OKC Thunder, or as they did a few nights ago on Jan 10 when they lost by 36 to the Pelicans, a team that represents a city associated with music, and not AI.
Art by Olayikanmi Olawale
Thrilling is the word I would use for it. Yes, thrilling, like the fall of a kingdom.
Of course the Warriors represent the kingdom in this case, the evil, evil kingdom, and to continue the analogy, the OKC Thunder and New Orleans Pelicans represent the good guys.
Judah Maccabee type shit. Or, if you prefer, William Wallace.
Wallace being the underdog leader who was so famously portrayed by that (gentle) antisemite Mel Gibson. Remember when antisemitism was cute and cuddly like a Teddy Ruxxxpin doll? I’m getting nostalgic for days like that. Back to the Warriors. They’re losing a lot, and in doing so, it’s exposing a lot of other things.
Number one, their dearly departed GM Bob Myers, maybe not the genius everyone thought he was? I mean, yeah, he gets the credit for drafting Steph Curry and Klay Thompson and Draymond Green, and yeah, they’ve been dominant for about a decade now, winning 4 championships, but 2 of those championships required KD coming to their team for what many describe as the biggest kids move in NBA — maybe sports history.
Had KD not done that, the Warriors would’ve won 2 less championships, and well, by my count that still makes 2. Two fucking championies is nothing to sneeze at, and I’m not even trying to go there, they’ve won 4, but they’ve also sucked ass these last two years, and have pranced around like they still deserve to be the top of the league, when frankly they don’t.
Maybe it’s just because they’re in San Francisco 🏀🥲 this is a city where AI is promoted on billboards unironically, and because of that, at least for me, easy to hate?
Or maybe it’s those blonde twerps I see at gas stations from time to time in their Warriors Championship tee-shirts, they’re always blonde for some reason — sitting in the front seat of their parent’s Teslas.
I never understood why America would root for a team from Tesla tech bro city, but maybe my son will understand? He will have been born to someone who was born in America.
Current ESPN host Bob Myers, who put this team together, won some championships, then split. He’s doing “broadcasting” now, the same thing other NBA champions do when they need to puff their resume between gigs, see Doc Rivers.
Bob Myers will always have “the dynasty” under his belt, no one should ever take that away from him, but he also has the, well, drafting James Wiseman, Jonathan Kuminga, and Moses Moody Two Pathway Timeline thing. Credited to: Bob Myers.
James Wiseman cant get minutes on the Detroit Pistons, and those other two guys, I mean, let’s just say they’re not Tyrese Haliburton.
They tell me Bob Myers had the draft capital to build a consistent winner in Golden State around Steph Curry for years to come, and he miffed it. That should rightfully be looked at as a failure, as much a part of any reading of his legacy as anything else, otherwise what we doing? Oh yeah, we LOVE to pretend all the decisions our heroes make are flawless. That’s why we always have ESPN hire them!
But, is it enough to hate the Warriors as I do purely based on the quiet quit of their former GM? Is there more than meets the eye in this Silicon Valley nightmare? Does Bob Myers, this guy:
2012
on his own validate my goon-like desire to see a kingdom fail?
No, not on his own. But it’s a part of it.
The next piece of that puzzle is Draymond Green. Let’s just leave it there.
Steve Kerr (licking my lips), you’re up now:
I don’t know, I’ve always had a hard time with you, Kerr, I guess, even going back to when you got the Warriors job in 2014, replacing Mark Jackson, who has since been replaced as an ESPN sportscaster by (aforementioned) Doc Rivers.
But anyway, Kerr gets all this credit because he instilled “a system,” as if what he did was some kind of supreme trigono-metric breakthrough. He walked into a team with peak Steph Curry for fucks sake. That’s like a fisherman handing you the pole right when the king salmon is caught, which is essentially what Mark Jackson did for Kerr.
You still have to reel it in, but there’s only so many fools who are going to fuck that up. I’m not saying the Warriors would’ve won with Mark Jackson, they probably did need new blood, but they certainly didn’t win because of some brilliant coach behind the scenes / Nobel prize winning strategy devised by Kerr in the GSW war room, a first time head coach who happened to be at the right place at the right time, by his own admission. Yet the machine, for some reason, still wants to call him Genius.
Steve Kerr played with MJ, studied under Phil, was an assistant under Pop, it all amounted to the perfect little candidate for the perfect little team out of (then Oakland) now San Francisco, the “Golden State” Warriors.
And last but not least, maybe I just hate them because i am a writer from Southern California who doesn’t want AI to steal his identity, and a die hard lakers fan who wants all of the spotlight on my team, and not on yours — who wants a world with more than just strategists, and their pet robots.
It’s been so much good fun this season watching the Warriors lose. The only hard part is Steph Curry. He’s so darn likable and — impossible not to root for.
I know he’s behaving like a true gentleman, taking the losing in stride, golfing and saying all the right things, and of course he would not be a fan of these awful words, but I’m not going to allow my love for the greatness of curry to get in the way of my joy watching the Warriors dynasty crumble.
It’s the closest thing I’ve got to the Lord of the Rings this year, I hope, and damn isn’t it fun to watch a team you hate die?
Oh, and mark my words. They’re trading Draymond and probably going to trade Klay Thompson as well. That’s the real reason Bob Myers left, or at least one of the reasons — someone else had to do the hatchet job. 🪓 🩸
I love you Steph,
HAHAHAHAHAAH
Thanks for reading.
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Till next time. 🏀🥲