A brief timeline of being a Warriors fan.
I was still in grade school. Around me were 20,000 fans shouting and jumping up in joy. It was 2007 and the Warriors had made it to the playoffs, in what felt like forever. Game 6, Oracle Arena, the 8th Seeded ‘We Believe’ Golden State Warriors vs the Dirk Nowitzki's led 67-15 Mavericks.
No one expected the Dubs to get even a game. I mean, they scraped their way to the playoffs and gave us no reason to believe they were a team that could contend with the Mavs. Yet, there they were, on the brink of eliminating a team with the best single-season record, since the turn of the millennium.
They won. A 25 point win in front of the biggest, loudest, and downright best fanbase in the league. Being a Bay Area Native, I was ecstatic and thought, “We’ve finally turned the corner!”. Saying I was wrong would be a gross understatement. After years of irrelevance, somehow we managed to drag ourselves back in. After ‘’We Believe’, it took us six years to get back to the playoffs.
Six long and crappy years. I can’t say that I’ve known how it feels to support a fan base for decades and I can’t say I’m the biggest Warriors fan. But I do believe that watching the Don Nelson-Warriors, nowhere near mediocrity, helped me understand, at least in the most rudimentary sense, the struggle or a fan in an underachieving basketball team. I’ve studied up on literally everything about the Warriors, from Wilt and the 1975 Championship to RUN TMC to the ‘Curry era’ and have no doubt that I will be a DubNation supporter for life.
Being a Warriors fan has been weird, but incredibly rewarding. I mean, the Warriors have sucked, like really, really sucked, but they’ve never been boring, for the most part. Don Nelson’s Warriors were an offensive juggernaut and the offense of Run TMC was better than the 2015 Warriors and they’d absolutely dominate on the offensive end. Hell, it was surprising when we didn’t hit three figures.
Let’s take a walk down time and see how we’ve gone from winning the NBA championship to 40, long years of mediocrity and back to a title.
The 70s: The 70s were awesome. With 8 seasons above .500, it was arguably the best decade in Warriors history. The Warriors recovered from the loss of one of the best players ever, Wilt Chamberlain, and ended up with a great, competitive team, with Hall of Famers like Rick Barry, Nate Thurmond, and Jamaal Wilkes. Overall, the Warriors started out awesomely in the Bay and the move from Philly definitely didn’t affect their level of success.
The 80s: The Warriors regressed in the 80s; they were in between two great eras in Warrior Basketball and struggled to even stay above .500 and make the playoffs. Sure, they did have some great moments: Sleepy Floyd’s 29 in Game 4 against the Lakers in the 1987 Conference Semifinals or the inception of Run TMC in 1989, but we were sub-par for the majority of the decade and definitely not a great success for the Dubs.
The 90s: The 90s started off great. The Warriors had the famous Run TMC years and even if it didn’t yield significant postseason success; it sure as hell was fun to watch. Some attributed Run TMC's popularity to "romanticism of a loyal fan base that hasn't had much to cheer about”, but nonetheless it was a fun time to be a Warriors fan. Even after Don Nelson’s brain stopped functioning and he traded Mitch Richmond to the Kings, all was not lost.
The dissolution of TMC wasn't the end of the world, considering some of the new talent. Chris Webber was one of the most dominant big men in the league and with that team from ’94, they were fringe championship contenders. Then, they screwed it up. They gave up Mullin, Webber, and Hardaway and made Latrell Sprewell, the franchise centerpiece. Yeah, the guy who punched his coach, P.J Carlesimo, and turned down a 27 million dollar contract, by saying that it wasn’t enough to feed his family.
The ‘Latrell Sprewell’ years were pretty terrible and the Warriors ended the decade, at the bottom of the league.
The 2000s: It took the Warriors 13 years to make it back to Playoffs. ‘We Believe’ felt like a reincarnation of Run TMC: A Fast, Offense Based Team run by Don Nelson. It was great, but it was the only playoff appearance of the decade. We had some great players: Jason Richardson, Baron Davis, Chris Webber and a competent coach in Don Nelson, so it was pretty frustrating to watch us come so close to playoffs, yet never make it over the hump, see the ’08 Warriors team. But we did start building for ‘Strength in Numbers’, by making the best Draft Pick in Warriors History: Stephen Curry in the ’09 draft.
The 2010s: I think this is quite self-explanatory.
It’s close in the fourth quarter. The Warriors have trailed the whole way through, but Steph has a look in his eye, reassuring me that the Dubs can pull out with a W. We’re in Staples against Chris Paul and Blake Griffin and after being down about 20 earlier in the game, we’ve brought it down to single digits. Curry has the ball and the shot clock's winding down. He launches it from thirty and you hear a swish. He does this one, two, three more times and all of a sudden, we’re up by 10 as the game comes to an end. Staples is chanting Curry’s name and Doc Rivers looks over in disbelief.
We were incredible, dominant, and resilient.
I guess(hope) this is what means to be a Warriors fan.