Ah, Stephen Curry and the Warriors.
I'm old enough that I was born just after their 1975 title, so I never saw Rick Barry or the rest from the 70s. My first exposure to the team was Sleepy Floyd, Chris Mullin, Joe Barry Carroll (aka Joe Barely Cares), and so on. One of my earliest basketball memories is a 4OT game in Oakland where the Warriors beat the Nets.
Look at that box score - http://www.basketball-reference.com/boxscores/198702010GSW.html. Nine 3-pointers taken in the entire game, and that's four quarters plus an extra 20 minutes from the overtimes.
Curry averages 11 attempts a game (and he's on pace to make 400 this season). But before that, a little more.
Run TMC came soon after, and while that was a fun period the Warriors were never championship level as a team. I saw some sad, sad years. I remember Chris Cohan getting booed on his home court when the Warriors hosted the All-Star Game in 2000. I remember a 20-win season feeling like an accomplishment. When they had the "We Believe" team in 2006-07 that made the playoffs on the last day of the regular season, for the first time in a dozen years, I went to a home game then drove up to Portland early the next morning to watch them clinch there. Watching them knock out #1 Dallas was amazing. They ran out of steam against Utah, but eyes were back on the Warriors.
After a better season following that but missing out on the playoffs (8th place Denver had 50 wins and the Warriors had 48), Cohan tore it all up again. Finally, mercifully, he sold the team.
A lot of people thought Larry Ellison was going to get the Warriors, and maybe he was in line to, but it ended up being Joe Lacob and Peter Guber. There was some skepticism, some early foot-in-mouth things and some boasting, but...they somehow got Stephen Curry.
By all rights, he should have been taken by one of the two picks Minnesota had ahead of the Warriors, but they took Rubio and Flynn. IIRC, Curry didn't even really work out for the Warriors before the draft, but Larry Riley took a shot on him. Right away, Monta Ellis said a backcourt with Curry and himself couldn't work. He'd end up right, but probably not for the reasons he may have believed. Ellis was a me-first, team-second player and I doubt he wanted to share much with Curry.
Curry also had bad ankle problems, so bad that when the Warriors had to decide on who to keep of the two, they came so close to sending Curry away. Around that time, I read recently, Curry began to work with someone on better positioning of his body, using his hips more, taking some of the pressure off his ankles. Somehow, it worked.
Along the way, he worked and worked to become the great shooter he is now. He was already good with Davidson, but consider this - he's shooting almost 70% at the rim this season. That's territory you usually only see big men at, and mainly because so many of their baskets from that close are dunks. Curry has become ridiculously good at finishing tough layups because he practices them so much.
Anyway, the Warriors got Andrew Bogut for Ellis, Andre Iguodala ended up joining the team after that playoff series with Denver, they had Thompson, Green, and a good core. But they weren't quite there. Their defense had improved with Mark Jackson as the head coach (and Mike Malone on the staff), but offensively they were still too iso-heavy. That was part of the knock on Jackson. He could motivate, but when it came to actual coaching he came up short. He also could not get along with the front office.
That's why I was excited when they replaced him with Steve Kerr and I read about how prepared Kerr was just for the interview. He learned from Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich. He played with Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, David Robinson, Tim Duncan, and so on. Hell, Kerr was part of that 72-10 Bulls team and won multiple titles as a key role player.
Last year, it all clicked. They moved the ball like a great team should, their defense further improved, and I got to see something I never thought I would - a title. As for Curry? Now he's even better than before. Teams are doing all they can to try to shut him down, disrupt him and more, but because he's so good and so fast at getting shots off that only he can regularly make, and because the players around him are good enough shooters (Thompson especially) that you can't ever forget the rest of them (Curry and/or Green WILL get the ball to the open guy), it's kind of a "pick your poison" thing.
I feel like the basketball gods have smiled on a franchise and fanbase that went through years of dark times with no light at the end of the tunnel, and it's so much fun to watch. To even be talking about them challenging that 72-10 record is a cherry on top, but obviously I'd like a repeat over that. This is a historically good team, without comparing players and eras, and Curry is cementing his status as a top player in the history of the league already.
Yeah, I like my sports.
