NBA commissioner on fans' hatred of Warriors - 'I get it'
To the victor goes the spoils, and oftentimes the disdain and jealousy too.
Yet, the reigning back-to-back NBA champion Golden State Warriors seem to be the target of much more than the typical sports ire.
The league’s most recent dynasties haven’t faced nearly the amount of scrutiny as the Warriors have.
Between 1980 and 1988, the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers, respectively spearheaded by NBA legends Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, won eight of the possible nine championships. Yet nobody derided those teams for their loaded rosters and monopoly on the NBA Finals. If anything, it reinvigorated an NBA fan base that was dying.
Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls won six out of eight championships (and honestly probably would’ve won eight out of eight had it not been for Jordan’s baseball sabbatical) in one of the most revered eras in NBA history.
More recently, dominant teams like the San Antonio Spurs (five championships since 1999) and the Lakers (five championships since 2000) made themselves fixtures in the NBA Finals and never received a fraction of the criticism the Warriors do.
Despite all of that, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver gets it. He admitted as much in an interview Wednesday on ESPN’s “Golic and Wingo” show.
Silver acknowledged that it wasn’t so much the dominant nature of the Warriors that rubbed fans the wrong way, though that is certainly a part of it, but rather the way that Golden State became so dominant.
“I get it in terms of Kevin Durant going [to the Warriors in 2016 as a free agent]. It was a bit of an aberration in our system; we had a spike in our cap, it enabled them to have additional cap room. The Warriors will tell you they would have figured out a way to get it done anyway,” Silver said.
Silver raises a good point. The Warriors didn’t do anything illegal; they were just extremely fortuitous. They drafted the majority of their stars. They were able to lock in Stephen Curry on a below-market contract due to concerns over his ankles. Then the NBA’s great cap spike of 2016, stemming from the extremely rich broadcast deals the league inked with ESPN and Turner Sports, gave the team prerequisite cap space to sign a generational scoring talent like Durant.
Now the vitriol aimed at Durant, for leaving a talented Oklahoma City Thunder team to join a 73-win Warriors team that just beat OKC, is a little more understandable. Whether or not he took the “easy way out” is a little subjective, but it’s virtually inarguable that he left a good team to join a significantly better team.
Silver, for his part, insists that fans should embrace the elite.
“I’ve said repeatedly, let’s also celebrate excellence. Ownership, the job Bob Myers has done as a GM, Steve Kerr, of course, one of the great coaches in our league. Steph Curry, drafted; Klay Thompson, drafted; Draymond Green drafted 35th by Golden State Warriors,” he said.
Again, for what it’s worth, Myers got extremely lucky, and with all due respect to Kerr, a wet paper bag could coach the Warriors to 60 wins.
Silver also seems averse to meddling in team affairs just for the sake of parity. “[The NBA doesn’t] want to go about breaking up teams just to break them up, just to force some sort of parity that is kind of unnatural,” he said.
Of note, Silver’s predecessor, David Stern, came under fire when he vetoed a trade that would’ve sent Chris Paul to join forces with Kobe Bryant back in 2011.
Silver did add that the league could potentially look at altering player movement, a decision that would likely go over like a lead balloon with the National Basketball Players Association.
The issue of parity is always a tricky one in sports. The NFL’s New England Patriots, for example, are a model of consistency and are generally loathed outside of the greater New England area. But even the Patriots have shown cracks in their armor, whether it’s losing Super Bowls to Nick Foles and Eli Manning or struggling against the Miami Dolphins and Baltimore Ravens.
The Warriors haven’t lost a playoff series since adding Durant. Is that good or bad for the NBA? The early returns certainly seem to lean toward the latter. But for now, while Silver commiserates with disgruntled NBA fans, he doesn’t seem all that worried about it.
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