The biggest surprise of the NBA’s shopping season came by self-delivery. The Warriors didn’t walk into a meeting trying to persuade DeMarcus Cousins to please consider joining their team. He showed up on their doorstep.
They simply decided, well, OK, why not?
And that has touched off howling and screeching and cursing throughout the land.
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The Warriors, relentless rascals, did it again. The back-to-back NBA champions, with four All-Stars on the roster, are adding a fifth. Already poised to lap the field, the reaction to them welcoming Cousins has been broad indignation, as if they’ve turned around and started running backward, laughing at the chumps in the distance.
The amount of animosity being slung their way can be weighed by the metric ton. They’re breaking the NBA! They’re ruining the game! They’re taking all the fun out of it! Is there no line they won’t cross?
Where was all this when the Warriors were losing 33 consecutive games in San Antonio? When they were 11-30 over a 10-year stretch against the Suns? How about the 17-season span, 1995-2012, when the Warriors were 12-55 against the Lakers?
Suddenly, the Warriors are living in sporting waters that have been relatively calm since the 1970s, when New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner was wielding his checkbook like a bat, slamming the rest of Major League Baseball. Those Yankees were built to dominate and the rest of the sport had to suffer and deal with it.
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The Warriors, though, are thriving within a salary-cap system designed to prevent it.
There is money involved, and plenty of it, but the Warriors are in this position because they’ve had a measure of luck and they’ve invested in themselves deftly enough to create intangible aces Steinbrenner never had.
After so many seasons in which they got little more than pity or ridicule from the rest of the league, the Warriors have become NBA nirvana. They’re selling an experience. Winning is a by-product.
Cousins decided Monday to accept less than full value to join the Warriors. This came one day after Kevin Durant agreed to a salary discount, for the second consecutive summer, partly to make it more appealing for ownership to afford someone like Cousins. David West, now contemplating retirement, made it clear last summer that if he were to continue playing it would only be as a Warrior. Shaun Livingston didn’t bother to shop the market last summer because, after nine teams in 12 years, he had finally landed upon his happy place.
After wildly outperforming his four-year contract, Stephen Curry became a free agent last summer and offered to take less than the maximum if it would help the team. General manager Bob Myers firmly informed him his salary would have no impact and that he would get the max and like it.
In a league with the likes of such corner-cutting or petty owners as Robert Sarver (Suns), James Dolan (Knicks) and Robert Pera (Grizzlies) and Anne Walton Kroenke (Nuggets), Warriors CEO Joe Lacob and main partner Peter Guber stand out for their insistence on having a first-class operation.
Word gets around. Players talk and they are the best recruiters a franchise can have.
The Warriors spend. They laugh. They play music during practices. They win. If you’d like to one day walk into a locker room and find 300 bottles of designer champagne, at about $1,375 per, to spray from floor to ceiling after winning a championship, the Warriors are your franchise.
They have a coach that listens as well as he speaks, a GM that projects earnestness and chill and an owner that realizes there are no shortcuts to the top.
And they have a core group of players with disparate personalities that are allowed to be themselves, at all times, as long as they remain devoted to the pursuit of winning.
From the toxic soils of the past, the Warriors have become the land of milk and honey and championship rings with diamonds visible from 3,000 miles away.
Don’t hate them for the spoils they have earned.
This is America, where the phrase “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” is the infuriating refrain of the wealthy. Yet the Warriors have done precisely that.
They’re realizing the “American dream.” They are, after all, an example, proof that any franchise with vision, smarts, commitment and a little luck can live as they do.