We Believed: Remembering the 2007–08 Warriors

Everyone is well aware that this most recent iteration of the Golden State Warriors has very hilariously transformed NBA fans and many GMs into sputtering Francis Fukuyamas, all a-flutter about the end of (competitive balance) history. It’s actually very funny, in a haha way, because the Warriors were such reliable bullshit for so long. The Old Faithful of absolute shit failure and shame. But then famously, like a gonzo fairytale, of the culmination of a Rocky training montage, this sorrow was briefly lifted during the latter half of the 2006–2007 season, culminating in the 8th seeded Warriors defeating the 67-win Dallas Mavericks, Avery Johnson’s predictable soft bulldozers. This was not your slightly older brother’s Warriors team. This was We Believe. They were a morale defibrillator and brought the Bay Area back to the world of the living. Less fondly remembered, however, was the sequel. The We Believed team of 2007–2008, a team of mostly the same people, but this time twined together by aggravation, skullduggery, and rancid vibes.

The 2007–08 Warriors never really had a chance to be just another pretty good team, because most pretty good teams weren’t emerging from the shadows of such unprecedented triumph. Nelson’s lust for humiliating Mark Cuban, and the palpable pent-up exuberance that emanated from the NBA’s most Sisyphean fanbase was an ancient family recipe for 67-win tyrannicide and this was just not something that could ever be topped. Even the momentum of such an event, had only so much fuel. They simply had too much to live up to, on the court and otherwise. They were a big budget sequel to a cult classic that went straight to video. And that’s the thing and I hope you are sitting down: sequels aren’t usually good! Sometimes they are fun and in dumb ways perhaps more memorable, but there’s a reason people always cite The Godfather Part II as the exception to the rule. Sequels are tacked on, superfluous black sheep. But at least they usually double-down. More explosions. More insane twists. More First Blood. More Charles Bronson shooting an entire neighborhood to death. Even in that one universally agreed upon great sequel, there was more Fredo getting shot in a boat. But this wasn’t the type of sequel these Warriors were. They were a contemplative, sober, meandering, plotless, downtempo sequel, lugubrious, bloated. All the most excessive bits of Terrence Malick with a script by the Duplass Brothers.

They did have some decent weapons: a healthy Baron Davis, a focused, downright statesman-like Stephen Jackson, an ascendant and supremely confident Monta Ellis, and also Nelson, stomping the sidelines like Grendel’s mother, watching as his havoc couldn’t quite seal the deal against the league’s Beowulfs. Don Nelson’s innovations changed the game (point-forwards, pushing the pace, five shooters on the floor at once, unabashed support of domestic beer), but by this stage of his arc, it was less about tweaking philosophy and more about one last score. He practiced something of a Happy Hour obscurantism, almost to the very end. He was folksy and gruff and told it like it was, but also played the sort of mind games that would make the Zen Master himself blush. He was a law unto himself.

The tenor of the season was quickly established by the loss of Jason Richardson, that is to say, the heaving away of Jason Richardson. Richardson, known mostly for his dunking and his lovely smile in the face of unending futility, had finally tasted the appetizer of a winning culture in the Bay. So, of course he was expendable! If this were a film, Jason Richardson would have died off-screen, never to be mentioned again. It was a bad look, and everyone knew it, even considering whatever Kevin Garnett pipe-dreams Chris Mullin was trying to cobble together.

Still, if that was a true punch to the gut, these Warriors would be defined less by tragedy or ineptitude, but by the great sin of being pretty good. Lackluster wins, pedestrian defeats. By rising to the occasion, but only so much. Close your eyes and imagine this team. Which parts of that season resonate today? The 2008 Warriors were covering a song. A raw-throated war anthem, Wagner meets uptempo Springsteen. They just couldn’t hit the notes. Not in the fun, sloppy but life-affirming karaoke way, which is at least exhilarating. In that completely earnest, let’s very solemnly recreate the song exactly as it was, but failing completely to achieve lift-off.

Richardson aside, the Warriors did keep most of their core intact, including the Lord Architect of Chaotic Good, Don Nelson. Nellie at his best was a pioneer. You put him on the Oregon Trail and he’d start biting the snakes. He imagined himself something of a post-structuralist Red Auerbach. But there was something a bit off about him this year. Maybe he was feeling the gravity of expectations, and he had lost his inspiration. Baron and Jackson and Barnes were kindred spirits in a sense, but they weren’t Dirk or Nash or Steph Curry. Not a one of them was a muse. And the vibe of the squad itself felt the same. They had ever so slightly lost that loving feeling, and so had he. They had proven everything that had ever needed to be proven the previous year.

These Warriors, once powered by energy of Miltonian proportions, never managed to again create that signature Nelson symphonic maelstrom. Yes, the first half of the season had a bit of magic, low-level We Belong Now magic, especially the quick win-streak following Stephen Jackson’s return from suspension that briefly had them looking like dark horse spoilers again, but this was followed by cruise control and then a slow, damning tumble.

But really, they did alright. More than alright. 48 wins in the Western Conference is an objectively demanding accomplishment. Generally, they held their own. They got straight smashed by the Big 3 Celtics once, but got them back later with a delightful Baron Davis game-winner. The Paul/West/Chandler Hornets diced them up and announced themselves as the new upstart in the West to be feared. The Pistons gingerly strangled the life out of them them twice with typical plodding midrange brutalism. Mike Dunleavy’s Pacers stole a revenge game. Derek Fisher pulled some cut-rate Sith Lord flopping bullshit in the closing seconds of a close one with the Lakers. Fluke losses and blowouts all tilted the abacus the same direction. They were good, but the exchange rate for good in the West is not great.

The team was top heavy and then of course exhausted. There was Baron, Stephen Jackson, and Monta and then there was everyone else. And Monta was only part of the trifecta of usefulness because he was on some epic shit, especially in February. He was making everything, adroitly spinning around gormless defenders and dropping buckets with such panache you’d be forgiven for thinking Monta might really “have all the things there are to have.” Nelson, who unfairly but also accurately called Monta a “little selfish bastard” really didn’t have a lot of options. Players who could play would play. The collegial never-say-die spirit of the previous year had totally vanished.

The only thing Don Nelson ever really enjoyed about Al Harrington was sending him to the grinder, that is to say, forcing him to sacrifice his body to Yao Ming, which occasionally actually worked pretty well. Andris Biedrins had not yet completely gone off the rails but the limits of his upside were plain to see. Even one of Nellie’s signature scrapheap bad boys, Matt Barnes regressed hard. His journeyman pluck and barely shackled hostility had earned him a place on a team that very much embraced a bit of hothead-ism. His aggressive cross-court outlet pass was a thing of janky, singular beauty. But he fell out of the rotation following his mother’s death and never got back in. No Country For Old Men got it right: you can’t stop what’s coming, and if you’re famous and on TV every few days, it’s even worse, because the world gets to watch you flail in real time.

And the bench! Nelson’s doghouse was a mansion. Troy Hudson, or T-Hud as he is known to scholars, was mostly moonlighting as a basketball player to finance his rap career. He played 93 minutes that year, which is fifteen minutes more than album copies sold. Mickael Pietrus, who had all the physical tools to one day be (sarcastically?) dubbed a “LeBron stopper”, was forever on the periphery of Nelson’s good graces. Pietrus was a garrulous adonis whose signature move was stepping out of bounds and being surprised about it. Then there was rookie weirdo Marco Belinelli and his affected off-balance threes, unnatural contortions that occasionally sent him spiraling out of bounds, which again, is where Pietrus usually was. Austin Croshere, who looks like a guy who would definitely shush you in a movie theater, or perhaps murder you in a movie theater, might have been their most consistent bench player for a stretch, and that’s pretty gross. Nellie would certainly have murdered Patrick O’Bryant with his bare hands if he could have gotten away with it. Nelson played the lumbering Kosta Perovic sporadically probably just to make his loathing of O’Bryant absolutely clear. Nelson of course had no use for Brandan Wright and his knobby, tentative limbs. Really the only bench player who acquitted himself well was Kelenna Azubuike, who was both even-keeled and jacked as hell. Also CJ Watson, the Quiet Storm, a D-League call-up who parlayed his time with Nelson into a decent NBA career, but who may be best known as a guy Floyd Mayweather once threatened to kill. Badge of honor, that.

And who could forget the strange return of Chris Webber! Nelson said with a straight face and perhaps even sincerely, “I’m afraid if we don’t get him here [that] our team is not strong enough to be a playoff team.” In retrospect, and yes, also at the time, it seemed an experiment that had some popular support from nostalgic fans, but was nonetheless doomed.

Webber’s presence ultimately amounted to nothing much at all. A midseason red herring of Hans Rosenfeldt proportions. Most people with eyes didn’t imagine the rapidly aging Webber made any sort of sense in the anarcho-run-and-gun shitscape milieu of Nellieball. But Nelson’s ultimate endgame was by signing Webber was probably more about atonement than moving up to say the 6th seed in the Western Conference. Nelson had, of course, publicly owned up to, how do you say in English, not handling the situation with the younger version of Webber optimally the first time around. Getting him back on the Warriors as they were finally, finally getting their shit together would be the sort of grand gesture worthy of a rom-com. The first time these two were co-workers back in days Newt Gingrich was important, big things were expected, practically ordained. Instead the brief shining moment was poisoned. Where Don Nelson goes, the whiff of Byzantine court intrigue is as redolent as cigar smoke or Bud Light. Warriors fans watched in slow-motion horror as their well-deserved fairy tale ending morphed instead into scorched and lifeless soil. Warriors ground was plowed over and sowed with salt like an East Bay Carthage.

The rapprochement between Nelson and Webber, who were now fifteen years later reimagined as peers in parallel late careers just sputtered and then finally stopped. Webber made a few jumpshots, struggled to run the floor thanks to a bum knee, and in the process, managed to completely disrupt the momentum the Warriors had clawed for following that disastrous opening run of games. This was the 18th Brumaire of Don Nelson and Chris Webber. First tragedy, then farce. Subplots that peter out. Ill-advised fan service. Performative hatchet burying, demons fumbling to be exorcised, two knights of infinite resignation playing out a sideline chamber drama to abrogate past sins. Webber retired in March. He averaged 3.9 points, 3.6 rebounds, and 2 assists in 9 games.

Still, the Warriors had control of the 8th seed for much of the season. But time and time again, when it mattered, they came up short. They were locked in a race for survival with their funhouse mirror counterparts, the Iverson/Carmelo Nuggets, another team loaded with outsized characters and misplaced potential. The difference between these two middling fuck-up teams was firepower and a bench. The Nuggets had both, the Warriors didn’t.

The games behind the curtain were equally dispiriting. Though this would extend into the offseason and really explode the following year, this was the real origin of the (super boring) power struggle between Chris Mullin and team president Robert Rowell. Obviously no Warriors fans were rooting for an unctuous little slug-man like Rowell to prevail, but of course that’s what happened. That’s what happens in life. Mullin, who of course made his fair share of novice GM mistakes, nonetheless was a beloved figure who also got the Warriors back into the fucking playoffs after more than a decade, and the slow stream of insider gossip regarding their behind-the-scenes thumb-war from Tim Kawakami and other gossipy beat writers was dispiriting. Especially so, given Golden State’s meandering, pretty much fine season. “It’s never an easy decision to make a change,” Rowell said of the (as in his) decision to let Mullin go, proving beyond all doubt his familiarity with doublespeak and its cousin, disreputable cousin, shitheadspeak. “He’s a class individual who will always be remembered for his accomplishments with the Warriors organization.” But also, fuck him, Rowell might as well have continued.

The nadir of the season, the moment that echoed into off-season eternity, happened during one of these possible last stand moments. With the season “mathematically” on the line Baron Davis was benched for the entire second half of the penultimate game of the season. He partied too hard the night previous, or perhaps said something rude about Bud Light. Nelson, very intimate with power and control, put his foot down in a futile gesture, a paean to personal responsibility. Watching the team’s best player not even allowed to go down swinging was the culmination of a season’s worth of gradually amassing psychic pain. The end wasn’t going to end well. For anyone.

The truth is, teams like this are not easy to love. What’s to love? Obviously there’s nothing to despise, these are just dudes you stare at as they go about their workday and the idea that you have to love or have a personal connection with a team you probably mostly like due to geography is flawed at the outset, but leaving all that aside, what did this team teach us exactly? What’s the throughline here? Here today, gone tomorrow? Life is cyclical? One moment you’re on top and the next you’re…in the crowded middle? Sentimentality is is poison? Nothing lasts forever? We all die alone? The virtue of being a footnote?

It’s too easy to love something special and this team just wasn’t that. The main thing people remember about them is their failure, spiritually and in seeding wise. They missed the playoffs and with the 14th pick drafted Anthony Randolph, Slovenia’s favorite adopted son. He was almost immediately declared the Chosen One because that’s how bad shit was. Barnes and Pietrus bounced to become journeymen elsewhere. Biedrins was very soon about to lose his mind. Baron and Elton Brand miscommunicated and ended up on separate coasts. Stephen Jackson went all Grima Wormtongue on Robert Rowell. Monta fell off his scooter and was punished draconically by the insecure regime. He would never be the player he was that February again. None of them were, really.

We Believe had been powered by brimstone and Oedipal fury, propelled by the fiery dispositions of Baron Davis, Stephen Jackson, and Matt Barnes, this team was guided along by the liver-spotted hand of righteous inertia. This was relatable, because this is life. This is the sophomore slump. This is realizing the clever things you should have said when you ran into the person on the stairwell. This is noticing the beginnings of a bald spot. This is when the job interview goes very well until it doesn’t. Not quite a team worth remembering with fondness, but not quite a team you should forget either. And because of their general blandness and also the chaos and raw feelings they left in their wake, they were too fucking relatable to forget.

Anyway. It all worked out. Everything always does, as the men in the Bible say.