The Warriors of Silicon Valley
Last week, the Golden State Warriors finished off the Dallas Mavericks in the Western Conference Finals, advancing to the NBA Finals for the sixth time in eight years. But it wasn’t the first time the Warriors beat the Mavericks in the playoffs, and certainly not the most memorable.
Fifteen years ago—before Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson and Steve Kerr and Draymond Green and Kevin Durant—the Warriors became the first 8-seed to upset a 1-seed in a seven-game series in the NBA playoffs. But even that understates how unlikely it was, because in 2007, the Mavericks were looking like an emerging dynasty. In 2006, they had made the NBA Finals—and gone up 2-0 before a suspicious amount of fouls called against Dwyane Wade in Game 3 swung the series to the Miami Heat—and then the following season they had won 67 games behind Dirk Nowitzki’s historic MVP season.
Only six teams ever have won more games than the 2007 Mavs, and every team that has won 65 or more games in an NBA season made it to at least the Conference Finals. So it seemed like a safe bet that Dallas would be back in the NBA Finals again.
Meanwhile, the Warriors were in the playoffs for the first time in 13 years. They had no huge star, and had spent most of the season languishing at the bottom of their division. In January, they traded for Al Harrington and Stephen Jackson—both valuable role players, but not exactly the kind of superstars that can typically turn a season around. And they didn’t, at least not right away. In early March, the Warriors were just 26-35.
But then things fell into place, and they ended the year by winning 16 of their final 21 games. This was enough to sneak into the playoffs, but it wasn’t like anyone really expected them to do much, even after they upset the Mavericks in Game One, powered by 33 points from Baron Davis. The Mavericks won Game 2 easily, and even though Nowitzki had not played well, it seemed like Dallas was in control.
Until the series moved to California… The Oracle Arena had not hosted a playoff game in 13 years, and the Warriors fans were going to make up for the lost time. Game Three recorded the highest paid attendance in the history of the arena, and the Oakland crowd was loud and intimidating. The Mavericks shot only 38% from the field, nearly ten points below their season average, and the Warriors won both games in Oakland. Dallas won Game Five at home, but again struggled when the series moved back west. In Game Six, the team had its worst performance of all, and Nowitzki in particular was horrible: The MVP was only 2-for-13 from the field, and missed all six of his threes. The mighty Mavericks lost by 25 and were unceremoniously dismissed by a plucky Warriors team, remembered now as the “We Believe” Warriors.
Two things seemed clear after the series: Dirk had choked, and the Oakland crowd had been the decisive X factor. In The New York Times, Lee Jenkins wrote, “The atmosphere at Oracle Arena felt like a college basketball game, with the top-ranked team in town and the student section overflowing.” Over at ESPN, Bill Simmons hailed Oakland as one of only two “throwback cities” in the NBA. What made Warriors’ games so special? Simple: “They play in Oakland and have the most eclectic mix of fans in the league, so their home games have a different feel, almost like an upscale version of Rucker Park.”
Hmm…
Discussions of crowd impact are always necessarily a little vague. They involve a lot of generalizations based on vibes, and can get a little sloppy—one could imagine whole treatises on the racial politics cloaked in a phrase like “an upscale version of Rucker Park.” But in Simmons’ defense, he wrote his piece before Game Six, and predicted more or less exactly what ended up happening, sensing that the crowd would indeed overwhelm the Mavericks. So it would be a mistake to discount the conventional wisdom about the crowd’s impact on that series.
But even if we grant the role played by the crowd in that series, it’s still a question as to what exactly made that crowd so special. Put another way, did Oakland really have “the most eclectic mix of fans in the league”? If so, why? And, if not, why were people so eager to think they did?
For anyone interested in the history of radicalism in America, Oakland is a city of unique importance. Most famously, it was where the Black Panther Party was formed in 1966. But it was also the site of a general strike during the 1946 Strike Wave following the demilitarization after World War II, as well as a major site of the Chicano movement in the late 1960s. In that time, of course, the Bay Area in general was the epicenter of various radical countercultures, but what made Oakland stand out were its racial demographics and working-class aesthetics.
San Francisco, Berkeley, and the rest of the Bay Area were known for gay rights, student activism, and various hippie subcultures. But none of those cities were ever more than ~20% Black, while Oakland was 47% Black by the 1980 Census. For various historical reasons, as the population of the Bay Area exploded in the postwar era, most of those coming from Asian countries ended up in San Francisco, and most of the Black Americans coming from the South ended up in Oakland. Hence the rise of the Black Panthers and the Black Power movement in Oakland.
But beyond the political, Oakland has, since World War II, been known as one of the cultural centers of Black life in America, reflected even in its sports teams. The Oakland Athletics dynasty of the mid-1970s was known for Black stars like Reggie Jackson, Vida Blue, and Bill North. The Raiders were adopted as hip hop’s football team (although, admittedly, that really happened in the window when they played in Los Angeles), to the point that Ice Cube made a whole movie about it.
And then there was the Warriors. When the Warriors first moved west, in 1962, they actually moved to San Francisco, playing their home games at the Cow Palace—the same venue where Senator Barry Goldwater would give his famous anti-Civil Rights, “Extremism in Defense of Liberty” speech at the 1964 Republican convention—and calling themselves the San Francisco Warriors. But attendance was lackluster, and in 1971 they changed their name to the “Golden State Warriors.” Part of the idea was that they would represent the entire state of California—that first season, they played six home games in San Diego—but pretty quickly they settled in Oakland.
For a “Black city” like Oakland, the basketball team should have been a source of pride—the NBA, after all, has been ~70% Black for decades. And the Warriors did win a championship back in 1975. But prior to that 2007 team, Golden State had won only three playoff series in 30 years. So the fixation on the crowd seemed to be a way of saying, “This city, which holds a key place in Black American life, is simply starved for a good basketball team, and they will get one even if they have to will it into existence themselves.”
It didn’t hurt that the 2007 Warriors team, despite lacking an obvious superstar, had a distinct identity formed around “Nellie Ball”—the run-and-gun style of fast paced, position-less basketball forged by head coach Don Nelson, then in his second stint with the team. Nelson had led the “Run TMC” team in the early 1990s, but that team never really reached its full potential, in part because Chris Webber refused to play as the small center Nelson’s system asked him to be, and he demanded a trade after his rookie year.
But in 2007, Nelson seemed to find guys whose best use was in that system. Baron Davis, an undersized point guard and native Californian whose time on the Hornets had been plagued by injury and disappointment, thrived under Nellie Ball. Monta Ellis won Most Improved Player. Matt Barnes emerged as the valuable swing man he would be for a decade.
Perhaps the guy who benefited the most from the system was Stephen Jackson. Jackson was just a few years removed from his role in the “Malice at the Palace” brawl, for which he was suspended for 30 games, the most of any participant besides Ron Artest. Then, less than two years later, he was charged with a felony for his role in a fight at a strip club, during which he pulled a gun. The perception was that he was a “thug,” and part of the NBA’s image problem.
Just a few months after the strip club incident, Indianapolis traded him to the Warriors, and he became the kind of player he seemed to be meant to be. His shooting percentage went up, as did his assists. While previously, he was a kind of “tweener”—too big to be a shooting guard, too small to be a forward—that made him perfect for the high tempo style of the Warriors. In the decisive Game Six against Dallas, it was Jackson, not Davis, who dominated, pouring in 33 points for the win.
The emergence of a guy a like Jackson—and, more than that, the assembly of a team good enough to upset the 1-seed Mavericks, out of parts mostly cast off from other teams, made the 2007 Warriors easy to like. And it seemed to provide the team with a spiritual connection to Oakland. Like the city it played in, that team was oft-overlooked and unglamorous, but vibrant, exciting, and fun.
The Warriors, of course, no longer play in Oakland. They moved back to San Francisco following the 2019 Finals, to play in the new, $1.4 billion Chase Center. It is tempting to see this move as a kind betrayal, as a team fleeing their roots for a richer, flashier city. And it is certainly true that the move was largely motivated by a desire to be closer to all the Silicon Valley money, where a new class of tech billionaires can be sold season ticket packages.
But the truth is that Oakland is no longer the working class, radical, “eclectic” town it once was. It probably wasn’t really that town even in 2007. Jerry Brown was elected mayor in 1998, and whether he was a cause or just a symbol, Oakland underwent the same patterns of gentrification that the rest of the Bay Area went through. Blacks have gone from 47% of Oakland’s population to only 23% in 2020. And while the city is still racially diverse, it is no longer particularly friendly to its working-class inhabitants, who have seen skyrocketing rents and abusive policing.
Again, some of this is particular to Oakland, but many of the trends the city has seen are apparent in cities around the country—and, really, the world. As capitalism has concentrated more and more wealth in fewer and fewer hands, cities have become completely inhospitable to any type of middle class. Instead, they’ve become amalgams of an international, asset-holding class that owns property in cities without being actual citizens of them in any real sense; an overpoliced underclass made up largely of immigrants and working-class Blacks in redlined communities; and in between, a precarious class of urban professionals and creative workers hoping to leverage themselves into asset-holders before they get priced out completely.
Of course, it’s not that all cities are the same, but it’s hard to develop and maintain the kind of distinct character that used to define a city when the populations are so stratified. What differences do exist are not easy to spot in the crowd at a basketball game, which are now just one of many amenities attracting people to cities, part of the public consumption that makes them worth the insane cost of living that now characterizes urban lifestyles.
But you’re not likely to find an “eclectic” crowd this way, when whatever working class remains in a city is mostly priced out of games. And this is true in every city with an NBA team, including but not limited to Oakland. What the 2007 Warriors had was not anything specific to the city—it was that the team had been so bad for so long that it just hadn’t been able to justify raising ticket prices. Yet. That would come…
There have been some attempts to make this Warriors dynasty seem like the result of cunning strategy on the part of brilliant management and Silicon Valley-adjacent executives. The team’s owner, Joe Lacob has the kind of VC background, as a partner in the famous firm Kleiner Perkins, that specializes in “turnarounds,” and Bob Myers, the team GM, won Executive of the Year multiple times. So it was always an easy hook to credit tech industry-style innovation for the Warriors’ success, to imagine the Warriors as some kind of NBA startup. Whole books were written with that premise.
But this was always more of a branding exercise than a true description of what happened. The Warriors dynasty, like all great dynasties, was built on accidents and lucky breaks, not any kind of Silicon Valley philosophy. In fact, if you look at the front office’s actual decisions, you realize how many missteps they really made. After buying the team in 2010, Lacob issued a guarantee to season-ticket holders that the team would make the playoffs in 2012. Instead, the Warriors finished 23-43, and 13 games out of the postseason. Around the same time, they nearly traded Stephen Curry to the Milwaukee Bucks for Andrew Bogut—it was reportedly the Bucks who said no, worried about Curry’s ankle injuries. They hired Mark Jackson, who had no coaching experience and whose defense-first philosophy did not make much sense on a team built around shooters like Curry and Klay Thompson. Also, apparently nobody liked him…
And then, in 2014, a couple of things went their way. First, the New York Knicks waited too long to extend a formal job offer to Steve Kerr. Kerr had been ready to accept the Knicks’ job from his old buddy Phil Jackson, but when the Warriors were eliminated in the playoffs before they could finalize the deal, he expressed interest in the Golden State job. So instead of ending up with Stan Van Gundy as their coach, the Warriors hired Kerr. Then, David Lee got hurt in the preseason, and Kerr put Draymond Green into the starting lineup. Also, that year Kevin Durant got hurt and the Oklahoma City Thunder, who looked poised to dominate the Western Conference going into the 2014-15 season, missed the playoffs completely. The stars all aligned to turn the Golden State Warriors, who to that point had still not made a Conference Finals since Jimmy Carter was elected President, into a dynasty.
On some level, there was a spiritual connection between the We Believe Warriors of 2007 and the dynasty that emerged eight years later. Both teams played small and fast, and shot a lot of threes. But in another, fundamental way, they were completely different. Instead of a ragtag group of discarded veterans, this Warriors team was all home-grown stars, lead by a family-friendly superstar who gave press conferences with his cute daughter.
In Steve Kerr, they were led by a young, media-savvy coach. They’d even changed their team colors, to a brighter scheme of gold and blue. And instead of stories about the unique experience of an Oakland crowd, you started to see coverage that emphasized the team’s connection to Silicon Valley. Altogether, this was a much more corporate-friendly Warriors team than the 2007 version.
None of this is a criticism, of course. The Warriors dynasty has been so much fun, especially in its early days. That 2015-16 season, in particular, was a joy to watch. That was the year they really embraced the Death Lineup—their small starting five, with Draymond Green at center, that enabled them to stretch the court and get open threes. They’d stumbled into that lineup almost by accident—putting Andre Iguodala into the starting lineup during the 2015 NBA Finals, seemingly in a desperate bid to find someone, anyone who could guard LeBron James. But that was the lineup that really took the Warriors to another level. Curry/Thompson increased their three-point attempts by 27% that year, and the team seemed literally unbeatable: They started the year 24-0, en route to a record-setting 73 regular season wins, and Curry becoming the first ever unanimous MVP.
And then, in true Silicon Valley fashion, they started buying up the competition. Kevin Durant, who nearly led the Thunder past the Warriors in the 2016 Western Conference Finals, signed with the Warriors that offseason. That gave Golden State the previous two MVP winners—a concentration of talent that was unprecedented in NBA history.
Just as Amazon quickly morphed from “We sell books online!” to “Kneel before us, retail industry, and beg for mercy or we will abandon you for space,” the Warriors morphed from a plucky upstart to an unrelenting behemoth. It was a little depressing to watch them: A team that previously seemed to win because of its distinct identity now won because it just had a monopoly on all the talent. The offense got more conventional—playing through Durant and utilizing Thompson/Curry as just overqualified secondary options—but even more dominant. In 2017, they marched through the Western Conference without losing a single playoff game.
Perhaps the most depressing thing about the Durant Warriors was what it said about success in the NBA. What Durant had done in Golden State was not all that different from what LeBron James had done in Miami and Cleveland, or the Celtics had done with the Big 3 in 2008—superteams were nothing new in the NBA. But those teams were at least built from scratch. Durant seemed to be saying that there was no hope in competing with Goliath, so you might as well join him. And the Warriors seemed to be saying that their team identity was secondary to simply acquiring talent. Innovation is less important than monopoly power… I guess the tech philosophy really is important to the Warriors’ success after all.
The Warriors dynasty seemed to end when Durant tore his Achilles in the 2019 NBA Finals. Golden State lost to Toronto without him, then Durant left for Brooklyn, Klay Thompson and Steph Curry got hurt, and the Warriors spent their first season in the new Chase Center finishing with the fewest wins in franchise history (to be fair, the season was shortened by Covid-19). They recovered slightly in 2021, but still missed the playoffs.
But then this season, they’ve started to look like vintage Warriors. Curry had another great year and found himself named on some MVP ballots. Klay Thompson is finally back, and while his play has been inconsistent, he’s shown flashes of his old self. They even have a Death Lineup 2.0, featuring Jordan Poole and Andrew Wiggins. The rejuvenation has been exciting to watch, and it feels like a more fitting capstone to the last eight Warriors’ seasons.
If you’re looking for reasons to be bitter, of course, it’s easy to point out that the team no longer plays in the Oracle Arena, and is no longer playing in front of the distinct Oakland crowds that defined them for so long. But it feels pointless to be nostalgic for an Oakland that no longer exists. It’s certainly appealing to imagine pro sports teams taking on the character of their city’s working class, but it’s too far from the truth to really take seriously. At it’s worst, it’s a kind of stolen valor on the part of franchises that cater to their wealthiest season ticketholders.
A year after leaving Oakland, the Warriors debuted a line of “Oakland Forever” uniforms as a tribute to the We Believe team. After spending decades branding themselves as the team from “Golden State,” only alluding to the actual city they played in by its vague nickname “The Town,” the Warriors finally busted out a limited-edition uniform with the word “Oakland” on it—AFTER the team no longer actually played in Oakland. It was so cynical, disingenuous, and depressingly successful in its attempt to seem cool that it was the perfect representation of what the Warriors have become: Silicon Valley’s team.