The Dub effect
Winning solves everything. Have you heard that cliché before? The Golden State Warriors have mastered the art of winning and are now using it as their primary recruiting tool in free agency.
Everyone likes to win. In professional sports, winning often means great sacrifice — physically and financially.
In the new NBA, monster contracts are handed out to bonafide role players like candy at a parade, or cars at an Oprah Winfrey taping (you get a max contract, you get a max contract, EVERYONE gets a max contract!).
Case in point: The New York Knicks just signed Tim Hardaway Jr. — who wasn’t even a starter for most of the season, and was 46th among all guards in Box Plus-Minus last year — to a four-year, $71 million dollar contract. That kind of money is insane, even for the dysfunctional Knicks. Hardaway.
Overspending isn’t the goal when it comes to free-agency. The real trick with the cap leveling off after the huge leap in 2016 is trying to get valuable players for virtually no money. Easy, right? I should probably become a GM.
As you might imagine, getting decent players for little money is extremely challenging, but the Warriors have turned it into an art form. One method they’ve developed is bringing in “ring-chasers” for the veterans minimum. Take 37 year-old David West, a 2x NBA All-Star in 2008, and 2009: He took less money, and decided to jump on the Spurs bandwagon for the 2015–16 season, and then signed with the Warriors a year later. If you can’t beat em’, join em,’ I guess.
But the Warriors did something bizarre this offseason. They somehow managed to bring in Nick Young (better known as “Swaggy P”), a 3 point catch-and-shoot novelist, David West, and a 6’9’’ stretch-four in Omri Casspi for under $10 million dollars! All three are quality NBA players, and are sure as hell worth more than their contracts suggest.
So how did the Warriors get them to sign short-term, cheap contracts? Did Bob Meyers hold them all at gunpoint until they all signed? Likely no — really what the team did was sell them on the future. The Warriors weren’t pitching these players the contract they were about to sign, but the next one.
The Warriors are one of the most entertaining teams in the NBA, so much so that even non-fans will turn on their TV’s and endure all of Jeff Van Gundy’s bullish grandstanding just to watch a Warriors game. Comparing them to Jordan’s Bulls or the Showtime Lakers is not a stretch anymore — in entertainment quality, that is. Who’s the better team, now that’s a whole different debate for another article.
The Warriors are entertaining, and great, because of their stellar defense mixed with all of the fire power that they have. They can rain threes down on their opponent and put up 20 points in a couple minutes as you switch the channel to see who received the last rose on the Bachelor. The whole is better than the sum of the parts. That’s why you can pair Leandro Barbosa, Mo Speights, Shaun Livingston, or Patrick McCaw with Curry, Thompson, Durant, and Green, and formerly fine players suddenly look like All Stars! Now what would happen if those players were on the Suns or the Magic? They might not be busts, but they certainly don’t excite fans.
That chance for some spotlight is what the Warriors are selling these free-agents. Suddenly a player’s cache goes up — and they’re basically guaranteed a ring. Many former Warriors players have come out and said that there is no better environment in the NBA than the one Bob Myers and the Warriors have created.
Leandro Barbosa, Harrison Barnes, and Mo Speights each decided to move on from the Warriors gravy-train for different reasons over the past couple seasons and found that it was hard sledding without four All-Stars around them. But before you left, you know what they got? Paid.
