Light Years: How Warriors Management Built a Juggernaut

With the Warriors currently running roughshod over the NBA landscape like a kaiju attacking the Golden Gate Bridge, it is easy to forget that the Bay Area wasn’t always the epicenter of professional basketball. Oakland was once NBA backwaters, a nowheresville where players’ careers came to quiet, inconsequential ends on the regular (Chris Mills, Terry Cummings, Chris Webber, et al). For most of the 90s and 00s, Golden State was a swamp of mediocre basketball whose tributary was a sea of bad trades and bungled draft picks. But in 2010, a brash Silicon Valley venture capitalist named Joe Lacob purchased the team from recluse owner Chris Cohan and ushered in a new era for the franchise, one that emphasized difficult-to-comprehend concepts such as: “Don’t trade away your best player after his rookie season” (the Chris Webber fiasco); “Don’t give max salaries to non-max guys” (the Antawn Jamison contract); and “Let’s not draft Todd Fuller over Kobe Bryant” (drafting Todd Fuller over Kobe Bryant).

When Lacob entered the fray, the Warriors were still covered in the stench of two decades of garbage basketball, but the new owner hired intelligent NBA insiders to run the franchise’s day-to-day operations, and in the intervening six years, the Warriors have experienced a sudden and transformative leap from league doormat to reigning champs and a 73-win squad. Sure, Lacob might have been feeling himself a tad much when he told the New York Times that the Warriors’ brass is light years ahead of the rest of the NBA — and not mentioning that he inherited a team that employed Stephen Curry was an egregious oversight — but that doesn’t mitigate the fact that he, GM Bob Myers, consultant Jerry West and the rest of the GSW decision-makers have done deft work surrounding Curry with a supporting cast perfectly suited to buoy his transcendent talents.

Before the Warriors tip off their rematch with the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA Finals, let’s take a look back in chronological order how Golden State’s savvy front office built this deep and talented juggernaut of a team:

1) February 23, 2011: Golden State trades Brandan Wright and Dan Gadzuric to New Jersey for Troy Murphy and a second-round draft pick.

In one of the first transactions under new ownership, then-GM Larry Riley acquired former Warrior Murphy along with a lowly-regarded draft pick. The move was less about wanting to reunite long-suffering Warriors fans with the defense-averse Murphy (he never played for the team and was waived) and more about slashing payroll and acquiring assets. That second-round pick — viewed as a throw-in at the time — became the 35th selection in the 2012 draft. Ie. Draymond Green. Ie. The heart and soul of the Warriors. Ie. The kicker of man parts.

2) June 6, 2011: The Warriors hire Mark Jackson straight from the announcing booth.

Jackson, tasked with turning around a perennially sad-sacked franchise despite never having coached at any level, brought to the Bay Area a loud and brash style of basketball. He breathed confidence into his young squad and is credited with instilling in Curry and Thompson the courage to repeatedly fire away from deep. In his first press conference as head coach, Jackson promised a return to the playoffs and, while that might have been hubris-overload (the team flamed out with a record of 23-43), the player-turned-announcer-turned-pastor-turned-coach eventually made good on his promise, helping the Dubs reach back-to-back post-season appearances for the first time in 21 years. That the relationship between management and Jackson soured, leading to some acrimoniousback-and-forth, shouldn’t diminish the work he and his staff did in overcoming decades of Warriors futility to establish a new culture of winning.

3) June 23, 2011: Golden state selects Klay Thompson from Washington State with the 11th pick. 

Prior to the draft, the peerless DraftExpress.com described Thompson as a player that would likely never “be a great finisher at the rim,” and added “concerns lie on the defensive end, where he is noticeably lacking in lateral quickness.” Though not wrong given the evidence at the time, Thompson has been able to shed those projections and turn himself into a two-way monster on the court. A two-time All-Star, and a recent inclusion on the All-NBA third-team, Thompson has been the Warriors most consistent offensive threat in this year’s playoffs. He’s able to launch split-second bombs from deep and has expanded his repertoire by taking the ball to the rack with an improving dribble-drive game. He’s been a defensive stalwart on the wing, able to use his size and sound defensive positioning to effectively guard James Harden, Damian Lillard and Russell Westbrook in consecutive series. Thompson has continued to refine his game each off-season and is signed through 2018-2019 on a non-max deal. (This, in an era where second-tier wings like Nic Batum will likely garner a contract in excess of $20 million per year.)

4) March 13, 2012: The Warriors trade Monta Ellis, Ekpe Udoh and Kwame Brown to the Milwaukee Bucks for Andrew Bogut and Stephen Jackson.

The first sign that this management team was after more than 36-win seasons was when they shipped off fan favorite Monta Ellis for Andrew Bogut, a center with a grisly injury history who had a penchant for high-fiving ghosts. While this trade was met with initial skepticism from fans (as was made loud and clear when Lacob was booed off the face of the planet by Dub Faithful) the move was lauded by NBA insiders who saw the transaction as one that would add a veteran defensive force in the middle, allow Thompson to assume a bigger role as a starter, and perhaps most importantly, turn the reigns of the franchise over to Curry. Remember: Ellis had said before a single practice with the future MVP, that the two were too small to play together. As it turned out, Ellis was right. That’s why he was shipped off to the Milwaukee in the deep of winter.