Nice things aren't supposed to happen to the Warriors. This is how one fan is coming to terms with his favorite team becoming a juggernaut after years of disappointment.
OAKLAND, Calif. -- Oracle Arena doesn't buzz like the cliché loud arena before a postseason game. That familiar roar could be canned from any year in San Antonio or Chicago or any of the other perpetual contenders.
It's different here. Oracle is buzzing in the true sense of the word, in an insectile way, clicking and chattering, the panicked hum of a 20,000-strong colony feeling the weight of expectation settle on its hive. It begins.
The Warriors are favorites. That still feels funny to hear as a long-time fan who started following abysmal, incompetent Warriors teams because of a coin flip. After decades of general nincompoopery and incompetence, the Warriors are the favorites. Not just in the series. For the whole damned thing.
Everyone is aware. The place rumbles. Fire shoots out of the backboard during the National Anthem. The crowd vibrates when each starter is announced. The Warriors are the favorites. They're actually the favorites. This is their postseason to lose.
The buzzing becomes a high-pitched revving about 90 seconds after tip-off. The burden of frontrunner status is flattening everything, distorting it. Here is the poisoned scent of routine dominance. Warriors fans have absolutely no idea what to do with it.
First Quarter
The revving evolves into a sustained growling when Harrison Barnes hits a corner three, and the noise shifts from nerves to incitement. It's a needed shot that breaks up a slow start and sloppy play. The next trip down, Andrew Bogut throws down a perfect alley-oop, a play that had been eluding Bogut and the Warriors for the last month of the season. A minute later, Stephen Curry hits a three to force a Pelicans timeout and the roar becomes something guttural, something ancient from the bowels of the arena.
An M-V-P chant starts. Here is the hypnotizing scent of inevitability, the one we whiffed so often in the regular season. These guys figure it out pretty quickly.
The Warriors are an excellent team, nothing more, to impartial observers. They're machinery, a team filled with players who do one thing well and several other things even better. They have a center who can run the offense and anchor the defense, a power forward who can guard point guards and centers and a backcourt that can drive, shoot threes better than any other and defend any of their peers. It's a magnum opus of a roster.
It's so hard for Warriors fans to see it like that, at least completely. Before the game, whisps of chatter from different parts of the line filing into the arena make up a shared conversation. There's an affected fear, a natural tendency toward the cynical. "The Spurs," someone starts, shaking his head. Behind me, someone else murmurs something that starts with "the Clippers" in an upset tone. Those teams haunt Warriors fans from thousands of miles away.
If you want to understand the uncertainty, note that a former offseason tradition for Warriors fans was dissecting the various permutations that would lead to the Warriors earning the No. 8 seed. Every damned year, there were eight teams that were playoff shoo-ins, and we were plotting on how one could slip through the cracks. If (old team) succumbs to age. If (erratic player) doesn't get along well with (new acquisition). If, if, if. If all that and a few more ifs become reality, maybe the Warriors get that last spot in a league where more than half the teams make the playoffs.
This favorites stuff doesn't come easy. Maybe it shouldn't. Warriors fans are about a decade away from earning that kind of natural arrogance. Even in the best seasons after Run TMC, postseason projecting was essentially filling out a bracket and putting Central Connecticut State University in the Final Four every year. Here was the ceiling of the Warriors for nearly 15 years: Getting that eighth seed and maybe, just maybe, stunning the hell out of a better team.
That happened once. The Warriors were the surprise in 2007, the upstarts, and they ruined Dallas' 67-15 season. And then another one of the better teams stuffed them right back in their place. That was a fun team. That was an incredibly fun team. The team was also a maelstrom of nonsense, filled with players just as likely to throw up a step-back 30-footer as they were to make the smart pass. It was fun, but that permutation of players was never going to outlast the entire Western Conference.
With 3:50 left in the first, Jrue Holiday misses everything on a three-pointer. In the regular season, an airball is met with a handful of jokers chanting "aaaaair-baaaaalll" just loud enough to come across on the telecast. Here, though, the chant arises in unison, spontaneously and magically from the whole. It's an airball chant echoing off the walls of time, a song everyone has been waiting for their whole lives, even if they didn't know it.
This is happening. The Warriors are really happening. The cynicism of the abused fan is gone, in its place collective belief in a team we've come to trust. This really is the best basketball team in the world.
It's 28-13 after the first quarter. This is really happening.
Second Quarter
And then there is doubt. Because of course there is.
The Pelicans start the second quarter with an 8-0 run, and the buzz of the crowd becomes the skronk of an old-timey modem, discordant and choppy. There are nerves, something that Curry describes after the game as "a weird kind of tension." Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is assured.
The New Orleans run ends and the Warriors do the things they're expected to do. Klay Thompson drives to the rim, sinks the shot and picks up the foul. Seconds later, he hits a three. The scoreboard shows a graphic that reads "GET LOUD," but it might as well be showing instructions reading "INHALE, EXHALE, REPEAT." It's all involuntary at this point. Everyone's in a fugue state.
If you want to know why Oracle Arena is always so damned loud, why 15,000 people watched Chris Porter shoot 5-for-20 and help the Warriors drop to 17-58, consider the special position of an only child in a two-team market. A's fans who would set AT&T Park on fire if you loaned them a match are the ones high-fiving Giants fans after a Bogut block. Niners and Raiders fans who would push each other off a moving train are suddenly soul mates.
The Bay Area can be high-rises and organic foods, but it can also be vape stores and Trans Ams if you get off the wrong/right freeway exit. Sharing a team brings this whole mess together. It's a carefully curated collection of the region's craziest -- the people banging drums at a sparse O.co Coliseum on a Wednesday night combining with the people who sat through sub-arctic temperatures at Candlestick after the game was already decided. Here they are, rooting for the same team, even if that team is distinctly awful.
This Warriors team isn't awful now, though. They're good. Possibly the best. Probably the best.
But with the shared passion of two fanbases come double the neuroticism. The doubt never quite recedes. Curry rests for most of the second quarter, a luxury Warriors fans still aren't used to, not if you remember the way Baron Davis was ground into a bitter spice 48 active minutes at a time. When Curry rests, the Pelicans go wild. They get closer and closer, and when Quincy Pondexter hits a three with just over four minutes left, the lead is only five.
Curry comes back in the game. The momentum cartoonishly springs back. With a half-minute left in the half, Curry hits a three, and the chants start again. M-V-P. M-V-P. This is a crowd that used to look forward to the Slam Dunk Contest if they wanted to watch the team's best player capture basketball's imagination. There were no "SLAM-DUNK-CHAMP ... SLAM-DUNK-CHAMP" chants back then, even if Jason Richardson was an electric talent and a good Warrior for many years. This a is different. This is a chant for something transcendent, a star taking over in a game decided by stars.
It's 59-41 at the half. This is really happening.
Third Quarter
This is a 12-minute victory lap, with the Warriors holding the Pelicans' skull away with an outstretched arm, bully-style. They don't add to the lead, but they don't let it slip away. It's almost too easy. The buzzing becomes an arrogant chuckle, still loud, but somehow reserved.
In the middle of the third quarter, the Warriors complete something like a signature play. Barnes steps into the passing lane, steals the ball and starts a fast break. The Pelicans get back well, so the ball cycles to someone with a decent shot, to someone with a good shot, to Andre Iguodala alone in the corner. He takes a breath, makes a phone call, sets his feet and buries the three. It was a sequence that showed off defense, passing, marksmanship and depth. It's everything that makes the Warriors good.
Which means we get to dig into what makes a good team. Like, a really good team. A Warriors-good team.
It's an alchemy that Warriors fans haven't witnessed first-hand for decades. We got to see the collections of talent roll in and stomp around, with the team building ticket packages around the Kobes and Iversons of the league, but we never got to see how one of those functional collectives was built, close-up, until now.
The cynical version of how it happened: It took the Timberwolves liking Jonny Flynn and Ricky Rubio more than Stephen Curry. It took the Bucks liking Jimmer Fredette more than Klay Thompson. It took the Kings liking Thomas Robinson more than Harrison Barnes. It took all 30 teams passing on Draymond Green at least once.
The rational version: Yeah, there was luck involved, but the Warriors had a plan. We can see that plan when they switch on defense, long arms in front of faces, no matter who's guarding whom. We can see the plan when they shoot or when they drive. We can see it in the bench, which is probably better than at least half of the starting lineups from the last 15 seasons.
Mostly, we watched the plan develop as players bloomed. Two years ago, Thompson was a poor man's Kyle Korver, hanging out in the corner, waiting for other people to do the work. When he drove to the rim, he looked like was holding tarantulas in both hands instead of a basketball. Then he became a finisher and a fantastic defender, one of the most well-rounded guards in the game. Green spent the 2012-13 season missing three pointers like he got a bonus for each one, but someone kept letting him shoot. Someone saw the value of a Draymond that other teams had to honor beyond the arc.
There's another sad offseason tradition of the Warriors fan: The draft. When you follow a hopeless franchise, the draft is an idyllic fantasy that fixes everything. Until the games start. When you read about your team's first-round pick, you're an actor in a commercial for prescription medicine, wearing pastel and walking on the beach with your significant other, holding hands. Do you have a problem? Take this. Those two walking on the beach took this. Look at them. So danged happy.
Every draft prospect has positive attributes in his pre-draft scouting report. They all sound so good, with talk of "motor" and "length" and familiar buzzwords that are grounded enough to rationalize any hype.
I believe that. Every post-draft bit of research always sounded so perfect. Except, wait, there are a bunch of words under the "NEGATIVES" header, too. What was that? Didn't catch it. But, say, look at all those positives in the scouting report! He'll probably fix everything.
Sometimes the players turn out to be solid players, jersey-sellers who do enough to wow the folks buying tickets. Antawn Jamison was one of those. Jason Richardson was another. More often, though, they are role players at best, future ex-basketball players at the worst. There are no saviors. No one is banging lottery envelopes to get Patrick Ewings for the Warriors.
There was no lightning bolt of a draft for the Warriors, just a trickle of sensible uses of opportunity. Curry and then Thompson fall to them. They tank enough for Barnes. They draft Monta Ellis, who turns into Bogut. They draft Brandan Wright, who eventually turns into Green.
Suddenly, basketball makes sense. It's not just a bunch of Left Sharks out there, dancing to their own soundtrack, hitting threes whenever it felt good to chuck one up. There's a choreography, a rhythm.
The Warriors go into the fourth up by 18. This is still happening.
Fourth Quarter
In which everything almost falls apart. The scent of inevitability starts to smell like an insanely angry Mike Dunleavy. The Warriors' past is suddenly everywhere, a death fog surrounding the court.
That's what it feels like from the stands, at least. Curry was seven years old when Tom Gugliotta and his curse arrived, so it's not like the players are battling the history that's tightened everyone in the stands. On the court, things are under control, even if it feels like things are closer to slipping away than they actually are.
Our muted panic flames up when Anthony Davis takes over, reminding everyone that the Warriors don't have a monopoly on talent. The 18-point lead dwindles down to 16. Thirteen. Ten. There's a hack-an-Iggy strategy that's working. The lead is down to eight. Seven. Six. Klay Thompson misses a pair of free throws. The buzz is now a groan, a deep, sustained groan after every whistle.
It's never really that close. Not enough for that level of hand-wringing. Instead we've got a new postseason game of Ifs, counting all the ways we could've reentered the torture zone. If the game were closer for the first three quarters, every lead would have felt much different. If, instead of Davis hitting a fadeaway with 55 seconds left to cut the lead to six, Curry hit a three to extend the lead to six, the arena would have crumbled. Up seven with 24 seconds left -- That's good, right?-- in the stands we were reminding ourselves not to expect even the inevitable.
After all, these are still the Warriors. This is still the team that went 12 seasons without a single playoff berth, then went five more seasons before the next one. This is the team that couldn't back into an All-Star between Latrell Sprewell and David Lee.
And now you're telling me that they're the favorites? The favorites to win everything? This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife.
The doubt of the fourth quarter is an amulet to which we've always clung to ward off the evil spirit of optimism. It's real. In spite of that, the Warriors win, though. Not in the way they would have hoped after the third quarter, but in a way they would have taken before the game started. It might still be happening.
Game 1 went to the Warriors. Just like you might have expected. Just like it was supposed to. It's a dog-bites-man story in the worst way. Of course the Warriors won at home. They lost twice there all season.
To the Warriors fan, though, the game was a microcosm of the entire season. It started out too good to be true, raising expectations far beyond cautious, quiet hope. Then there was serious, inescapable doubt, even if there didn't need to be. There was a humble reminder that if the Warriors stumble, if Sisyphus turns the boulder over and watches it roll down the hill, the Warriors are still set up well for the future. If they lose, the pain will be palpable and brutal, but all won't have to be lost.
But if they win. But ... if they win.
The buzzing isn't unique anymore as fans file out of Oracle. It's the standard, post-victory, good-timey vibrations that come with the home team winning. The Warriors beat a team they were supposed to beat, which is a sentence that Warriors fans can't possibly have gotten used to yet. Even after a third straight playoff appearance.
That thought got a day off to rattle around in some heads, and it'll be ground up and spit back out as raw noise for Game 2. Maybe it's time to stop giving a shit about the past, because you know the team doesn't care. Until it actually happens, though, there will be a buzz that's three parts arrogance, one part unshakeable incredulity. The Warriors probably are this good. The fans just can't decide whether it's time to appreciate it or wait for the universe to correct itself.
The combination of the two sure makes a pretty cacophony, though. And it's only going to get louder and more uncertain.
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