A March Retrospective - Looking Back at the Last 60+ Years of Cal Basketball

Jason Kidd battling LSU in the first round of the 1993 NCAA Tournament.

By Connor Buestad | Connor@Section925.com

Well somehow we got through March 2020. The 31 gutwrenching days are behind us. We are left with the economy nearly in shambles, our government in disarray, our families getting sick, and our sports stripped from our televisions. We needed the joyful madness of college basketball in the worst way this March. The only thing that could truly ease the pain of a virtual lockdown of the world was a collection of buzzer beaters and One Shining Moment. But instead, we were forced to trudge through March Sadness 2020 with nothing but heartache and awful statistics from the CDC of what lies ahead. So, in the name of reflection of what once was and what could have been, why not look back at the last 60+ years of Cal basketball and the Bears’ triumphs in the month of March?

This might take a while, so let’s get some sobering stats out of the way early. Since Pete Newell turned in his whistle in 1960, the California Golden Bears have been to the Big Dance just 14 times. On seven of those trips, Cal came home with a first-round tourney victory and on two of those trips they made a magical run to the Sweet Sixteen. Yes, Cal has made some deep runs in the NIT and even won the whole thing in 1999, but much like the Cheez-It Bowl, we aren’t here to discuss that. We are here to relive Cal’s true glory days.  

Pete Newell Sets the Bar High

Now before we dive into the highs and lows of Cal’s (modern-era) past, we owe it to the Old Blues to at least make mention of World War II Era hoops in Berkeley. When WWII kicked off in 1939, the NCAA had just held their first proper basketball tournament six months prior, pitting the Oregon Ducks against THE Ohio State University Buckeyes. Not surprisingly, the Pac-12 school came out victorious.

During that time, the great Nibs Price was roaming the sidelines for the Bears. Nibs had a lot on his coaching plate to be honest. Not only did he coach Cal basketball for 30 years from 1924 to 1954, but he also coached the Cal football team from 1926 to 1930. Suffice it to say, Nibs was Cal Athletics.  

But in his 30 years guiding the Bears basketball program, only once did he make the NCAA tournament, which resulted in a 52-35 semifinal loss to Oklahoma A&M in 1946. Cleary, we were still multiple decades away from an idea of a three-point line at that point, but we were already in the dunking era of basketball! Yes, a 7-foot white dude named Bob Kurland on Oklahoma A&M “accidently” began dunking in the mid-40’s. Dick Vitale would have lost his shit if he were there to see it. Instead, nobody seemed to care. Fundamentals ruled the day in the 40’s.

At the end of the 1954 season, Nibs finally gave up the reins of the Cal program to a guy named Pete Newell who ended up doing pretty well for himself. Newell had just finished two four-year stints at USF and Michigan State before he took the Cal job. After his first year going 9-16, Newell quickly made the Bears into a perennial winner. He ended his career at Cal going to the tournament four years in a row and in 1959 he won the whole damn thing, beating Oscar Robertson’s Cincinnati Bearcats in the Final Four and Jerry West’s West Virginia Mountaineers in the National Title. Ah, Cal athletics in the 1950’s. Trips to the Rose Bowl and basketball National Championships. What a time.

Pete Newell and his players pose with the 1959 National Championship Trophy after beating Oscar Robinson and then Jerry West.

Lou Campanelli Brings Cal Back to Relevancy

After back-to-back trips to the Natty, Coach Newell had seen enough and moved on. This lead to the Dark Ages of Cal basketball. No seriously, it was dark. Cal was suddenly average/bad for 25 solid years after Pete Newell. First it was Rene Herrerias, then Jim Padgett, then Dick Edwards, then finally Dick Kuchen. No matter who the coach was, the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s were a dry time to be a Cal hoops fan. Bone dry.

But then came Sweet Lou Campanelli through the door, yelling at whatever happened to be in his way. In his first year, he won more games in Berkeley (19) than any coach had since Coach Newell. The next year, he got the Bears to 20 wins with Kevin Johnson at the point and by 1990 he had the Bears back in the NCAA Tournament for the first time in (gulp) 30 years! He rode guys like Keith Smith, Brian Hendrick and Roy Fisher to a 22 win season, culminating with an historic first round victory of Bobby Knight’s Indiana Hoosiers. Two years earlier, Knight had won the National Championship at Indiana and in 1990 he had superstar Calbert Cheaney in his backcourt, but it still wasn’t enough to hold off the sturdy Golden Bears from winning a 65-63 battle.

That 1990 triumph over peak Bobby Knight would prove to be the high-water mark of Coach Campanelli’s career, but controversy and scandal was still on the horizon.

Ah yes, the 1992-1993 Cal Basketball season. With all due respect to Pete Newell’s 1959 National Championship run, this has to be the most memorable year in Cal hoops history. You know the story, but it’s too good not to touch on it one more time. Campanelli brings on a young, fast talking, self-assured assistant coach named Todd Bozeman to help him recruit with the big boys of college basketball. It works exactly as planned, as Bozeman manages to convince Lamond Murray, Jason Kidd, Alfred Grigsby, Monty Buckley and Jerod Haase all to come to UC Berkeley to play basketball, none of which had any clue who Pete Newell was.

We later learn that Bozeman literally took a “by any means necessary” approach to recruiting, but that’s neither here nor there for the interest of this story. The fact is, Cal all of a sudden had some true ballers out of the Harmon Gym floor, thanks in large part to Bozeman.

Of course, Kidd caught fire as a freshman and instantly turned Cal basketball into the hottest ticket in town. Fans flocked to Harmon in record numbers to see the show and were subsequently shocked when Coach Campanelli was fired 17 games into the season. Bozeman, just 29-years-old at the time, moved over one seat on the bench and led the Bears on a six-game winning streak to end the regular season and head into the Big Dance.

There, the Bears came from behind to beat LSU in Round 1 of the tournament, setting up a matchup with the vaunted Duke Blue Devils, two-time defending National Champions featuring Grant Hill and Bobby Hurley. Using a 28-point performance from Lamond Murray, a 14 assist effort from Jason Kidd and 13 points off the bench from Jerod Haase, the Bears shocked the world and sent Coach K packing for home much earlier than he was used to. The Sports Illustrated cover shot from that game can only be described using one word: iconic.

Coach K had no answer for J Kidd.

A Story Too Good to be True?

In the Sweet Sixteen, Bozeman’s magic would eventually run out, losing to Rex Walters and the Kansas Jayhawks. But what could go wrong now? Cal’s recruiting prospects were suddenly brighter than ever, Bozeman was officially the full-time head coach, and Kidd and Murray were coming back for another year. The stars were finally aligning for Cal basketball.

Not so fast, my friends. In classic Cal fashion, the wheels fell off quickly and dramatically.

The 1994 Cal basketball season started with the Bears ranked #6 in the nation. Let that sink in for a second. The Bears finished the regular season going 22-7 heading into a matchup with the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Cal somehow lost by four. Dick Bennett celebrated with his Green Bay underdogs as Bozeman all but ripped off his tie and stormed off the floor in disbelief. It was a sign of upsetting things to come.

With Kidd off to the NBA, the Bears suffered through a losing season in ‘95, even with the addition of high school All-Americans Jelani Gardner and Tremaine Fowlkes. Unfortunately for Bozeman, it was later revealed that he paid Jelani Gardner a pretty penny to choose Cal over the other college basketball blue bloods.

1996 was Bozeman’s last hurrah and it was a fun one, while it lasted. Shareef Abdur-Rahim arrived on the scene and averaged 21 points as a freshman. Ed Gray transferred to Cal from a Junior College in Idaho and put up 16 a game. Randy Duck was raining from three consistently. Tony Gonzalez was throwing his weight around in the paint. Jelani Gardner was still getting PAID. Yes, it was really fun while it lasted. The Bears bowed out early in the tournament that year to Iowa State. Bozeman was canned at the end of the year and the NCAA made Cal vacate their ’96 tournament appearance. So maybe just act like you didn’t read the paragraph you just read. Moving right along.

Ben Braun Leads Cal into Haas Pavilion

Enter Ben Braun. An opportunistic coach who led the Bears through 12 seasons, including the renovation from Harmon Gym into Haas Pavilion. Braun inherited a scary-good team in his first year in Berkeley and he didn’t screw it up. Ed Gray was a senior on a mission, averaging 25 points a game. Sean Marks began showing his NBA potential, as did Michael “Yogi” Stewart. Randy Duck was Randy Duck. Alfred Grigsby and Tony Gonzalez were both upperclassman at this point. The Bears were effing good.

Ed Gray kept Harmon Gym rocking like the old days.

They didn’t earn a ranking until finally hitting the Top 25 in late February, but Braun had his boys playing with a chip on their shoulder. The result was Cal’s second trip to the Sweet 16 in the 90’s, as they outlasted the Princeton offense and beat Villanova as well, to set up a battle with juggernaut North Carolina in the Carrier Dome. UNC would win that game and make it all the way to the national title with names like Vince Carter, Antawn Jamison, Shammond Williams, Serge Zwikker and Ed Cota on their roster. Without diving into the game tape too deeply, it's safe to say Ben Braun had no chance versus Dean Smith on this night. A great run it was, regardless.

A year later, the cupboard was bare for Coach Braun. Almost everyone from the Sweet 16 team was gone. Sean Lampley was just a freshman and Geno Carlisle wasn’t exactly Ed Gray. Cal basketball was back to normalcy again. Bruan would have to wait until Lampley was a senior until the Bears would be back in the Dance.

Now in the newly renovated digs of Haas Pavilion, Braun led the Bears to three straight tournament appearances from ’01 to ’03. In 2002 and 2003, Braun used a clutch core of Joe Shipp, Amit Tamir and Brian Wethers to record first round tourney victories over the Penn Quakers and NC State Wolfpack. It wasn’t Duke or Villanova, but it was something.

Much like Bozeman, but without the scandal, Braun finally woke up to the fact that he had a wealth of basketball talent in his backyard and started to tap into it. This led him to his last tournament appearance as the Cal coach 2006. Leon Powe, Ayinde Ubaka, DeVon Hardin and Theo Robertson were all born and bred in the Bay Area. Braun didn’t let them slip away and brought them to Cal. This decision paid major dividends as the Bears kept their head above water in an ultra-competitive Pac-10. Almost everyone was good in the league at that time and Braun’s Bears were one of the best.

Monty Comes Back to College; Cuonzo Brings More Controversy

Despite Braun’s three trips to the tourney and one trip to the Sweet 16, by 2008 his career in Berkeley had run its course. Mike Montgomery was waiting in the wings and although he was a mess coaching the Warriors, we all knew he could get a Pac-12 school to win from his days on The Farm. Much like Braun, Monty inherited a talented team in his first season in 2009. Jerome Randle and Patrick Christopher were juniors now and ready to run. Jorge Gutierrez was a freshman. All the pieces were there and the Bears went dancing. A year later, they went again with the same core group, this time beating Louisville in the first round. Randle played all 40 minutes that night, and led the game in scoring along with Theo Robertson.

Jerome Randle electrified Cal fans with his ball handling wizardry.

After a year watching the tournament from home, the Bears reloaded with Allen Crabbe and Justin Cobbs to give Montgomery two more well deserved years in the tournament. In 2013 the Bears survived and advanced by beating UNLV in Round 1. Syracuse was too much in Round 2. Montgomery was gone a year later.

Cal’s last appearance in March Madness came to us via Cuonzo Martin, bringing us back full circle to a general theme of hope, controversy and heartache in Berkeley. Martin arrived on campus as a fresh, young, talented coach who had just come off a Sweet 16 run coaching at the University of Tennessee. Much like the Cal coaches before him, Martin inherited a very talented roster that included future NBA guards Tyrone Wallace and Jabari Bird, not to mention Jordan Mathews who would later lead Gonzaga to the National Championship Game. Also true to the Berkeley way, Martin hired a controversial assistant coach to help him acquire the best recruits in the nation in Yanni Hufnagel. Unlike Bozeman, Hufnagel never found himself coaching against Coach K in the Sweet 16, but he did find himself embroiled in a sexual harassment case that threatened the integrity of the athletic program. The more things change…

Hufnagel’s recruiting work brought local blue chip Ivan Rabb in from Bishop O’Dowd as well as Jaylen Brown all the way from Marietta, Georgia. Both of which wound up in the NBA after their time at Cal.

The high point of Rabb and Brown’s collegiate career figured to come in 2016 when they put together a 23-10 season heading into the tournament, then everything unraveled in an instant. The Hufnagel scandal broke the week of their first round game against Hawaii, Tyrone Wallace broke his hand in practice, and Jaylen Brown basically forgot to show up to the game, scoring just 4 points.

The bad taste of that loss to Hawaii still lingers for Cal fans four years later as we watch Jaylen Brown tear up the NBA night after night and Cuonzo Martin count his money in Missouri as a 10th place team in the SEC. The bitter taste wasn’t helped by Wyking Jones who produced back-to-back eight win seasons in Berkeley before mercifully being let go to again pursue his career in show business.

Ironically the last taste Bear fans had of Cal basketball this season was sweet victory over Stanford in an empty arena in Las Vegas earlier this March. As we sit in self-quarantine still licking our wounds from the unprecedented cancellation of March Madness, perhaps we can somehow imagine that Mark Fox would have somehow shocked the world and caught enough lightning in a bottle to send Cal through the Pac-12 tournament field and into the Big Dance for the 15th time since the Pete Newell Era. Likely? Of course not. A blow-out loss to #2 seed UCLA was more likely. But at this point, 40-minutes of live basketball in the month of March would do wonders for the soul. It doesn’t necessarily have to be Jason Kidd beating Duke.  Anything would do, really.  

Senior Kareem South vs. Stanford in 2020.

"Live from the Levi's Cheap Seats" - Sec925 takes in the first Niners playoff game in Santa Clara

Photo by Jim Rowney (Section925)

By Jim Rowney | Section925 Correspondent

It was a long wait.   Coming off a Super Bowl appearance and three consecutive NFC Championship Game appearances, both first time and long time 49er season ticket holders assumed the playoff appearances would continue in the 49ers sparkling new home in Santa Clara.   A rash of injuries, along with infighting between the GM and coach, turned 2014 into a season of mediocrity. A series of retirements by key 49er veterans, some questionable coaching decisions, and even more injuries, made the 49ers an afterthought in the NFL postseason for five forgettable years. 

The large crowds and initial excitement in those early 2014 games at Levi’s became a memory.  Add in new stadium teething problems in the first several years, and Levi’s got the reputation as a giant boondoggle.   Home field advantage? Hardly, when opposing fans made up a healthy percentage of the crowd, with large swaths of empty seats.  One popular sports radio host called it the “worst of the new NFL stadiums, and it’s not even close”. There were even yearnings for Candlestick (where my wife once missed an entire quarter to go to the restroom and buy me a beer).

Was it the stadium, the location, or the poor on-field performance by the home team that caused such emotions?  Probably a combination of all those things. But things have changed. Continued work on the stadium and infrastructure brought viable improvements.   Food vendor variety and quality was improved, stadium employees became more experienced, and cellular access is now excellent. Traffic patterns were diagnosed and changes made.  The VTA figured out how to move people in and out with their excellent light rail system. How many times have people used the word “excellent” in reference to a Bay Area transit agency?

Simultaneously, a new GM and coach seemed to be making all the right moves. Jimmy G arrived, along with a force of nature named George Kittle. A pass rush that made even the unflappable Aaron Rodgers look uncomfortable. Suddenly, long suffering Levi’s season ticket holders are on their way to an NFL Divisional Playoff game at Levi’s Stadium.

Count my family and I among those loyal season ticket holders.   We attended the last game at Candlestick, the first at Levi’s, and Saturday’s playoff game, the first of its kind.  Indeed, we do occupy the cheap seats, high up in section 405, where the field is small, but so is the Personal Seat License price tag, and views are uninterrupted.  We also get a decent breeze from the bay in the hot months, sparing us from the well documented heat of the lower bowl.

Following our usual game-day pattern, we parked at one of several free lots near a VTA light rail station, where an express train whisks us to Levi’s in about 15 minutes.  We have driven and parked at the stadium a few times, but $50 is painful, especially when compared to the $5 round trip VTA ticket. Remember we are in the cheap seats!  

The train was full (stuffed might be a better word) after just a few stops, and the occupants festive.  Viking fans were heartily booed when trying to enter our full car…and yes, they were rejected. The weather…well it reminds of us why we live in the Bay Area, and put up with our traffic and housing issues.  Perhaps a little cool for locals, but downright balmy for visitors from Minnesota. Daytime football, like God intended, on a splendid winter day…a combination even Viking and 49er fans could agree on.

90 minutes before kickoff, the tailgating was in full force.    Walking thru the predominately red and gold parking lot was fun, people were loud and friendly.  However, to be honest, nothing will ever replace the sights and sounds in the Oakland Coliseum parking lot before a Raider game.   The imagination used in various interpretations of what constitutes a “Raider” will be sorely missed. 

Levi’s was never an attractive stadium from the outside, lacking symmetry and classic architecture forms.   But somehow, draped in huge banners, surrounded by the buzzing crowd, it seemed to rise up to the moment.  

My experience with Levi’s 49er fans, at least regular season fans, is mixed.   Notoriously late arriving, there are also a fair number of what I call posers.   Splendidly maxed out in 49er colors, jerseys, and accessories, their main concern during the game is attending to vital social media issues, or trooping up and down the stairs between their seats and the bar, eventually staying there after halftime.  Saturday seemed very different. The huge crowd was in their seats before kickoff, and for the first time that I remember, extremely few (if any) empty seat in our section. Perhaps it was the price of admission, or the importance of the game, but it was great to see.   Viking fans were relatively sparse, but not silent, at least in the first half. We had one in front of us…we liked him because he looked like a Viking, complete with horned hat and long white beard. A good sport also; lacking opportunities for high fiving fellow fans, especially in the second half, he joined us for some friendly hand slapping.

Loud?  Yes. Levi’s was finally rocking.  On the Vikings first possession, the chants of “DE-FENSE!” rang out with intensity.   “Aye-OO’s” were loud and coordinated after every 49er first down. I had the opportunity to attend the Clemson-Alabama National Championship game a year ago at Levi’s, and although the fans were also loud, they were split close to 50-50.  The Alabama half of the stadium was deathly silent most of the game. Not so this Saturday. It’s fair to say the 49ers have finally found, and earned, a home field advantage.

There will be plenty of words written about the game itself, so I won’t review it.  It was, however, an interesting throwback day for the NFL. Both winners, the 49ers and Titans, brought to mind sayings like “Defense wins championships” and “The game is won at the line of scrimmage”.   Old time football! At least for a day, spread offenses and read-option quarterbacks took a back seat. 

Leaving the stadium the crowd was happy, but strangely quiet.  Perhaps exhausted from the outpouring of energy. Most of the talk concerned who the 49ers would likely play, or who they wanted the 49ers to play.  Frankly, I was just happy and satisfied that my season tickets finally paid the dividend I was waiting for, and that we would be back in just 8 days.   The verdict for Levi’s Stadium? Not bad at all, far better than the detractors have claimed. Once inside, it doesn’t matter much what it looks like from the outside. The concourses are wide, facilities numerous, and sight lines are good; even better when you are seeing a football team as good as the 2019-2020 San Francisco 49ers.

Kyle Blanks saw MLB’s opioid issues first hand, now he’s on a mission to help alleviate the problem

By Connor Buestad | Connor@Section925.com

It’s real easy to be intimidated by Kyle Blanks. 

Google him, and you’ll find a 6’6” man built from 265 pounds of seemingly solid muscle. Raised in a small town in New Mexico, Blanks’ hobbies over the last decade included getting new tattoos and punishing baseballs with a huge barrell in Big League ballparks throughout America. By all accounts, from his last name, to his oversized #88 jersey, Blanks comes across as a badass you don’t want to f-ck with. Not unless you are equipped with a 98 mile-per-hour fastball that you could somehow throw by him. 

From 2009 to 2015, Blanks stuck in the Majors as a reliable power threat for the Padres, A’s and Rangers. Riddled by the injury bug, he finished his career with 33 homers, not to mention countless homers on nondescript fields on his path to The Show. He even went deep on Tyler Skaggs once. By the time his time in baseball was over, Blanks was a bona-fide Big Leaguer with the numbers to prove it. 

Refreshingly, especially in 2019, the big ego that often accompanies an athlete of Blanks’ stature is nowhere to be found when you speak at length with the gentle giant. Although he looks back fondly at his long career in baseball with pride, Blanks has successfully transitioned to a new chapter in his life with a new mission. He has no interest in reminding you how good at baseball he once was. Nor does he need to explain how many homers he might have hit if his luck with injuries was better. He’s completely past all that “bullshit.” “It’s simple. I just want to help out as many people as I can,” he explains.

Much different from your typical ballplayer, Blanks is blessed with a level of intellect, curiosity and compassion that is very real when you move past his baseball card and understand him as a person. He’s serious when he says he wants to help others and make a difference; his cause is an alarming issue he sees across baseball and professional sports. Increasingly, players are turning to the use of opioids to fend off the pain of injury and stress during a long season. In the case of Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs, the issue of pain relieving drugs cost him his life this past season. Blanks maintains it’s an issue that runs far deeper than a one-off event in a hotel room on a road trip. “These drugs are more common than you think. More available than you think. It’s just like any other workplace, these players are human with issues they are fighting through like anyone else. We are talking about a small sample of people, but even this small group is definitely affected by our country’s  opioid problem,” explains Blanks. 

The MLB and the players’ association plan to re-evaluate their drug policy in the wake of the autopsy report last week on Tyler Skaggs, the Los Angeles Angels pitcher who had fentanyl, oxycodone and alcohol in his system when he was found dead in Julyhttps://t.co/VZZZgnyCCw

— The New York Times (@nytimes) September 8, 2019

Not only is Blanks passionate about talking on the issue of opioids in pro sports, he is also taking steps in his career after baseball to create solutions for people to deal with pain in safer ways. As Chief Operating Officer of Road Runner CBD in New Mexico, Blanks is helping to create cannabis products that can be used to relieve pain in much safer ways than even the mildest dose of an opioid could. 

Ironically, Blanks was forbidden to use cannabis products for the majority of his career as a pro athlete. While in Major League Baseball, cannabis use was legal, but heavily frowned upon. In the minors, where most players spend a huge chunk of their careers, it was completely illegal and tested for often. Blanks, who was often sidelined with injuries during his time in the minors, was left with alcohol and pills as his options to regulate his pain from injury and overall wear and tear from late-night games and all night bus trips. “I don’t care who you are, we all need something to help us wind down from our day. Some people require more than others. Some people’s days are more taxing than others. What players are using to regulate their injuries and their sleep patterns are often not safe at all,” says Blanks. 

Part of Blanks’ humility and sense of his place in the world comes from his humble upbringing in a small town on the outskirts of Albuquerque called Moriarty, New Mexico. Despite his imposing frame and devastating strength, Blanks’ bat went relatively unnoticed by MLB or D1 scouts in high school, leading him to take his chances at Yavapai College to prove himself at the junior college level. Even with his success at Yavapai, pro scouts were willing to wait for 41 rounds to pass before using the 1,241st pick in the 2004 draft on Blanks. 

When you’re a 42nd rounder in baseball, nobody’s going to hand you anything. The organization has a minimal investment in you and if you can’t hit for two weeks, you might get a handshake and a bus ticket back home to where you came from. Fast. Instead, Blanks faced the long odds in front of him with a zen-like, day-by-day approach and hit himself to the highest level. A Staph infection in 2006 was Blanks’ first big battle on the injured list. Little did he know when he made the San Diego Padres roster, his body would really start to fall apart.

Blanks is now a co-owner of Road Runner CBD, based out of New Mexico (Photo via PressReader.com)

In his rookie year, he suffered a plantar fascia tear in his right foot. The next year he underwent Tommy John surgery on his throwing arm. Two years later, he tore his labrum in his left shoulder, then in 2014 he was getting injections to treat an achilles injuries in both feet. The next year, a cyst removal, not to mention arthroscopic surgery in both of his heels to shave bone and remove tissue. His last season included another achilles operation.   

“It was never ending,” explains Blanks when discussing his laundry list of injuries. “I was in the trainer’s room constantly. Always working with the medical staff, always rehabbing. I don’t want to compare myself to him, but I see where Andrew Luck was coming from. These injuries and this rehab is hard for anyone.” 

Anytime these professional athletes limp off the field, the time is ticking for them to get back on it. Especially for Blanks, a 42nd rounder who had to prove his worth every time he stepped on the field. If you miss a week in baseball, you miss six games. That’s 30 at-bats.  

Blanks defends all of the trainers and medical staffs that he came across in professional baseball. They never crossed the line, never handed out a pill that wasn’t well intentioned. They were always acting in the player’s best interest. But that doesn’t take away from the fact of how powerful these pain pills really are. In many cases, they’re opioids, and they can be dangerous. One pill too many, and you just might not wake up.  

“I’m not out here trying to blame anyone in particular, but I’m trying to let people know that these pills are in the game. They might come with good intentions, but they are still dangerous. There are better ways to treat pain and the leagues should be open to those options,” says Blanks. 

When Blanks talks about his playing days in Major League Baseball, he doesn’t talk much about the home runs he hit, or the hotels he stayed in, or the Hall-of-Fame pitchers he faced. He talks about the pain. The day to day struggle of getting through a 162-game season with a busted up body. The nights drinking and taking pills, trying to find a way to get through the night, knowing that no one wants to hear a millionaire in his 20’s complain about playing baseball for a living.

“There’s not much difference between me and Skaggs when you think about it,” explains Blanks. “I always woke up and drove to the ballpark. Unfortunately Skaggs didn’t that day. This is a bigger issue than people like to admit. Hopefully we can do something about it. I’m motivated to do my part.” 

(Photo by Kelvin Kuo / USA Today)

The Oakland Roots bring professional soccer to Oakland

(Photo by Robert Edwards - KLC Fotos)

Hoping to fill the void a new professional soccer team in the East Bay, the Oakland Roots are attempting to win the heart of the Oakland community through a strong branding and marketing campaign that emphasizes its deep ties to the city. The Roots debuted this Saturday evening at Laney College in the newly minted National Independent Soccer Association. Their first opponent was the California United Strikers.

Santa Clara's Steve Nash riffs on the Warriors, KD's departure, and more

Deadspin weighs in on Jay-Z's partnership with Goodell and the NFL

Photo: Ben Hider (AP)

By Billy Haisley (Deadspin.com)

It’s safe to say Jay-Z, to some extent, takes cues from Colin Kaepernick. Jay-Z has expressed his admiration of the former quarterback before, once calling him an “iconic figure.” In the aftermath of Kaepernick’s black-balling from the NFL for his peaceful protest of police killing unarmed black men, Jay-Z rejected the league’s offer to have him perform at the Super Bowl in solidarity. And in a disappointing though unsurprising turn of events, Jay-Z has once again followed Kaepernick’s lead by selling himself and the things he represents to a soulless corporation that will use him to sell things.

Yesterday, the NFL announced that it had bought off Jay-Z’s once-seemingly resolute antagonism toward it by reaching an extensive, and presumably quite lucrative, partnership agreement with Jay-Z’s company, Roc Nation. The partnership’s aim is “to enhance the NFL’s live game experiences and to amplify the league’s social justice efforts.” This will include Roc Nation taking the lead on wrangling entertainers to perform at events like the Super Bowl, hopefully saving the NFL from the storm of controversy it endured ahead of the last Super Bowl, when Jay-Z and several other high-profile musical acts snubbed the NFL out of support for Kaepernick, as well as various audio initiatives linking artists whose brands are in part built around projecting an image of sociopolitical-mindfulness and players, who, according to the New York Times, might put together some playlists or podcasts. The revolution may not be televised, but it apparently will be conveniently streamed to your smart phone for you to listen to on your commute to work.

Minor Tragedy in D Sharp... Ballad of the Thin Man in Oaktown Ends Accidentally Like a Martyr North of the Border... End of Days at Oracle... A Restless Farewell to the Hamptons Five...

KD flying high in MSG (photo by NBA.com)

By Josh Tribe

(Written during the hours leading up to KD's decision)

Time Out of Mind...the hurt gets worse and the heart gets harder...

The worst part of the sudden toppling of Golden State’s empire of jump-shooting joy which I’ve yet to see or hear mentioned anywhere: Not only are we highly unlikely to ever see the Hamptons Five on the court together at the same time – as teammates or opponents – but they weren’t able to be together in the same locker room one last time, to celebrate and commiserate all the life they went through together.  Boogie compared the Finals to a horror movie – Get Out – who’s gonna die next?  It was horripilating to behold.  I’m glad Steph had the team over to his house after Game 6.  It’s devastating to know Durant was not there.  KD and Klay finished the year hospitalized, separated by three thousand miles of rolling waste.  I’ll say this, presuming KD never plays for the Warriors again, and returns the season after next to the bougie Frisco Chase Center in some other colored jersey, he had better receive the most rousing ovation in recent NBA memory.  If those rich social media parasites have the audacity to boo Kevin Durant like the lowlifes of OKC – though I’ll remain forever faithful to Steph, Klay, Dray and whoever else they put out there –  I will never again refer to myself as a Warriors fan.

Already, far as the franchise goes, to hell with them.  I’m a fan of the human beings who play the most artistic, democratic game in sports with skill-sets as eloquent as the John Coltrane Quintet, and always have... and never have I given two shits about the billionaire that owns said assets, nor the franchise brand.  I type in an old blue & orange Thunder jersey, #35, in solidarity with the man, irrespective of his current employer, with a distinct undercurrent of healthy human disrespect for the alleged golden boys of NBA owners, hellbent as they were on abandoning Oakland.     

Desperate to save face, convinced Durant was out the door, the Warriors got greedy, annihilating themselves on the altar of achievement, legacy, the illusion that taking only two of three titles with KD, three of five overall, represents some kind of failure.   

They didn’t need to play KD in Game 5, let alone play him as if he’d never gotten injured in the first place.  No time this century can I remember a player returning from an injury major enough to keep him out significant time, without any kind of minutes’ restriction.  Never seen a player come back to the bench after a such a return, from any type of leg injury, and apply ice, as opposed to keeping said limb warmly loose on an exercise bike.  I think of Steve Nash and Larry Bird nursing their bad backs in modified cobra poses on the floor.  KD coming out of the game, literally icing his Achilles tendon, sitting there with whatever swelling required ice un-elevated; and then returning to rupture it in one fell swoop of fateful hoop.  In my last article, I envisioned KD being allowed by the medical staff to wave a towel from the bench, and possibly getting enough minutes to make a few jumpers in Game 6, were the Warriors to make it that far. 

KD’s last seconds in a Warriors uniform. The looks on Iggy and Lowery’s faces tell you all you need to know. (photo via Getty.com)

We all know what happened.  As it played out, the Dubs needed every one of the eleven points of instant, fluid, gorgeous jump-shooting offense KD provided to extend the series, and make way for one last game at Oracle.  I realize shoulda/woulda/coulda statements uttered in hindsight are especially noxious.   

I don’t see why I should even care /It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.

KD never should have been out there for Game 5, which the Warriors had no business winning.  Game 6 never should have happened.  Klay and Kevin should have entered their “contract” years the healthy 30 year-olds they were just a couple weeks ago.  I know, it’s sports and guys get hurt.  I understand they’ll still sign max deals. Mountains of money do not soothe the spirit and the spirit suffers when the body is unable to do what its soul loves most. Far as the Warriors’ culpability goes, I’ll let Iggy speak for me.  The statements he’s made whilst promoting his basketball memoir shatter beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Golden State Warriors are any better than the other cutthroat subsidiary franchises that make up the larger corporation known as the National Basketball Association.

Whatever else one may say or think, these were the most poignantly poetic playoffs in league history.  Kawhi, universally maligned and misunderstood a year ago – how dare he question the wisdom of the San Antonio Spurs and their allegedly unimpeachable reputation as a “first class” organization.  How dare he listen to his own body over the voices of team doctors?  His season ended two years ago atop Zaza’s felonious foot, only managing to enter nine games the next year, and then punctuating 47 years of Warriors basketball with a muscle-bound exclamation of redemption. 

KD, killed in the press with every misinterpreted statement; accused of being too sensitive, when it was the whole hoops world that took his decision to come to the Bay so fucking personally.  Who’s sensitive?  Kawhi, mocked for his silence.  The illusion that the NBA is set apart in its woke-ness from the rest of the toxic sea of patriarchal machismo the culture at large has been drowning in for so long – dead – the narrative demanded KD prove, once and for all, that he was A MAN, and not a cupcake – I would have played, any of us would have.  It’s ok, he’ll be fine, even if he’s never again the same player who crushed the Clippers and was crashing the Rockets.  He posted after Game 5 that his soul was hurting, but that his spirits were lifted, “like from a shot of tequila,” by the efforts of his teammates, their victory.

What I’ll never understand: the inability of fans to perceive their sports heroes and villains as human beings.  The dehumanization is justified by a bevy of irrelevant facts – their financial wealth, privileged lifestyles, worldwide fame, as if any of it makes them immune from the pains and pangs which plague all human hearts.  The same can be said for certain entertainers who reign the roost in other realms. 

Kevin Durant, since he had the gall to join the Warriors, has been Bob Dylan, decried by his most ardent fans as Judas, the most loathed man in human history, because he chose to pick up an electric guitar.  It couldn’t have gone another way, Durant’s Dostoyevskian saga... Thank you, Jeff Van Gundy, for saying what nobody wanted to hear.  After Mark Jackson spit out some cliché about Durant’s heart, grit, determination, etc., which he (Durant) had allegedly demonstrated by getting himself on the floor for Game 5, Van Gundy demurred, objecting to the statement, accurately noting that its tacit inference was that had Durant not played, opposite conclusions w/r/t his character could have been justifiably drawn.  In his monotone, deadpan, sedated, somewhat slovenly manner, Van Gundy said it all – one last time, JVG grabbed onto Zo Mourning’s mighty leg-limb, held on for as long as he could – but it was soulless still, this clinical bit of truth meekly offered to judge and jury, uttered by a public defender long since stripped of whatever charisma he may have once possessed.  Van Gundy reminded me of the competent, overmatched actor Joshua Jackson playing competent, overmatched defense attorney for one of the (eventually) Exonerated Five from Ana DuVernay’s latest soul-shattering masterpiece of previously untold history, When They See Us, ill-equipped to say it as I would have loved to hear Kendrick Perkins proclaim it – KD had nothing to prove.  He’d proved it all by his fifth or sixth year in Oklahoma.  He’d proved it in absolute terms.  Perhaps not quite LeBron for lack of physicality, perhaps not quite Bird in terms of coldblooded, unshakable confidence, but name me one other small forward in the history of motherfucking basketball better than Kevin Durant.  A player with no demerits.  A seven-footer with Steph Curry’s skill-set.  Who plays the right way.  Classic gym-rat, gym-giraffe is more apt.  Nothing rat-like about majestic KD.  Gym-gazelle.  Kevin Durant, skinny Ganesha of the gym, who overcomes any and all defensive obstacles.  Easy Money Sniper, master craftsman.  Neither Judas nor Jesus.  A man – one of the few worthy of the overused moniker – who has put in his ten thousand hours and more.     

It should of course come as no surprise that an athlete like Durant’s manhood would continually come into question, that his narrative options would be limited to the classic false binary the good old USA assigns the Blackman: superman/subhuman, never just a dude.  It’s why we can never seem to get enough O.J., ultimate archetype that Buffalo Bill surely be.  Shall we overcome, one day?  I doubt it.  Not with bank-maniacs in charge, former-and-once-again-forevermore human chattel filling up the for-profit prisons, migrants and refugees warehoused like war criminals, the first black president presented with a Nobel Peace Prize born of wishful thinking, only to govern like an eloquent autocrat thereafter, who’d treat the residents of Flint no better than his war criminal predecessor treated the residents of the Lower Fifth Ward; not with Assange and Manning locked away forever and Rumsfeld retired contentedly upon Mount Misery and Kyrie Irving being treated like he’s certifiable as Hannibal Lecter for allegedly having asked Brad Stevens how he’d define “government.”  God forbid Kyrie have civics on his mind at seven in the morning with the Orlando Magic coming up.  Imagine had Kyrie asked Stevens what he thought of Juneteenth or the FBI assassination of Fred Hampton!  The intonations of Jackie McMullan and Ramona Shelburne on ESPN as they cited sources which told them Kyrie just “didn’t like living in Boston,” as if Bill Russell had ever lived within those city limits his entire run with the Celtics.  I know Boston ain’t as bad as it used to be – but that a Blackman would dare not enjoy living in the most notoriously racist city north of the Mason Dixon line – Kyrie Irving, who identifies and embraces his ethnic maternal lineage as a member of the Sioux Nation, wasn’t so fond of Beantown and they inflect their astonishment in various shades of thinly veiled dismay.  How dare he!      

Kyrie Irving, mocked and maligned for his eccentric interests and opinions on non-basketball topics, took the majority of the blame for the Celtics disappointing season for his poor leadership, while the head coach received nearly no criticism from the national media. (photo by Kim Klement-USA TODAY)

It reminds of the year Dennis Rodman, still a Piston, infamously claimed Larry Bird was overrated due to his whiteness – and Isiah Thomas, unable to keep a straight face, laughingly claimed to agree with his teammate, refusing to throw Rodman under the bus already buried in wrecked boxcars and then (Isiah), forced to throw a press conference to renounce his non-disavowal of Rodman’s comments, uttered in the throes of competition – it was treated with similar, if not more vehement pushback than Trump’s conferring of goodness onto the Tiki Torch tyrants of Charlottesville.  Rodman and Isiah forced by the league, the media, the public at large, Bostonians in particular, to beg forgiveness for having sinned against the hope of the Great White Hope.  How dare they!  Larry Bird, by the way, didn’t give a flying fuck and looked embarrassed as hell as he appeared along Isiah at the press conference to confirm as much.  Good for Larry, for never having bought into one iota of the bullshit nonsense that swirled around his goofy curly blond locks.    

Kawhi, KD, Kyrie... a triumvirate of K’s that harken back to the Harlem Renaissance, the Roaring 20s and that entire age of grift and graft, when Europe was doing its best prophetic impersonation of the Nazis all over Asia and Africa.  Lebron’s infamous Decision kicked off an era of the New Negro within the NBA and the chief protagonists of this Harlem Hoops Renaissance looks like they’re headed that way, literarily and literally alike... I have a feeling Booker T. Washington, D.E.B. DuBois and Minister Malcolm would agree, KD and Kyrie should take their talents to Gotham to paint basketball masterpieces in the belly of the beast, Rome before it completely crumbles.  Before KD’s Homeric odyssey went Iliad on him, I’d thought him joining Kyrie was the worst thing he could do.  Now I believe, if there’s any truth to the rumors of their tight heart-connection, I think he should accompany his buddy to whichever NY depot they can agree upon, in order to have his Irving’s back as he heals his heel.          

Do yourself a favor and listen to entirety of Iggy’s interview on The Breakfast Club.  It’s not just that he tells us he had a fracture the Warriors’ brass insisted was merely a “bone bruise” during last season’s playoff run – he retells, as few have, the story behind Allen Iverson’s infamous Practice Rant, and generally conducts himself like the James Baldwin of the NBA players association, calmly, eloquently defending the simple sentiment stated on signs of olden times, I AM A MAN, expressed in modern times as Black Lives Matter.  Iggy contextualizes Iverson’s practice rant – Iverson’s best friend from childhood had just died, as the press knew, and Iverson, distraught, forced to answer redundant questions about demerits accumulated in practice.  The lines always omitted from every clip, “My best friend just DIED, and y’all talkin’ ‘bout practice?!?!”  What Iverson was really saying, “Ain’t I a man?  Don’t y’all see me as human?”  This season, one of Durant’s adopted brothers, a teammate on his high school team, Cliff Dixon, was killed during a birthday celebration.  Nobody gave a fuck.  Nipsey Hussle was also murdered and the media made it seem it was okay, because Westbrook compiled that 20-20-20 triple-double.  Blaze Foley sure was right, it’s a cold, cold world.  Having boatloads in the bank don’t cease the pain of being a man.  But last year, after the death of Greg Popovich’s wife, watch Durant’s reaction.  Last year, one of David West’s best friends, former NBA player Rasual Butler, died.  The fans and media lose their minds every time a player commits the slightest faux-pas on social media – we will never hear the end of KD’s burner accounts, while Cliff Dixon goes forevermore unmentioned.  

But the fanatics are just that.  Media members fan the flames of dehumanization.  What if Kyle Lowery entered Mark Stevens’ place of business, or saw him on the street, and shoved the heel of his hand into the billionaire’s shoulder?  What if Kawhi had reportedly done so to a member of the Spurs’ medical staff?  And he may well have had good reason!  What’d happen?  They’d be arrested for assault.  No matter how innocuous such hypothetical blows may have been, they’d get the book thrown at them.  What happens to Stevens?  He has to miss a few games; issued a fine that for him, is equivalent to less than twenty bucks to folks like you and me.  Imagine Westbrook had laid hands on that Utah fan who famously taunted him?  That fan was banned for life, for words.  Stevens put hands on the Raptors all-star point guard... for absolutely no reason other than some infantile sense of macho fandom infused with Trump era narcissism.  Lowery, who’d later lead the quelling of Canadian jeers aimed at waylaid KD, handled the incident with Selma-like grace.  He’d have been within his rights to have gone full-bore Huey Newton.  Stevens should be made to stand at half-court before tipoff before the first regular season game at the Devil Chase Center, and receive a decleeting bitch-slap delivered by Draymond.  Stevens should thereafter be tarred and feathered, dragged through West Oakland, dipped in cannabinoid oil, rolled into a giant blunt to be smoked by Nick Young, shirtless, in Jack London Square, theretofore renamed Bobby Seal Square... Seriously, by NBA ordinance and California State Law, Stevens is a criminal – if not only for his cowardly shove, but likely apropos application of Puzo’s classic godfatherly phrase: behind every great fortune there is a crime.

Cue Camper Van Beethoven... I bet Stevens wouldn’t shove the songwriter David Lowery, were he to stumble into the crowd at the Warfield or Fillmore. 

America’s ship of state is a shameful shambles from bow to stern, NBA Inc. included – but the stars, superstars, and role-playing rank and file proletariat – have held onto their dignity.  From Lowery, Gasol, et al, hushing the Raptor fans’ ravenous jeers of martyred KD, to Lowery’s restraint in the face of Stevens’ unprovoked aggression, to Steph and Iggy’s accompaniment of #35 off the court in his final appearance in Warriors’ royal and yellow, to Steph’s ineradicable equanimity, to Iggy’s resolute composure and staunch-having-of-his-teammates’-backs, unwavering honesty and eloquence, to KD’s self-effacing confession of soul-pain, to Boogie’s harsh “fuck ‘em, they’re trash,” directed at uncountable idiots all too eager to detract from every success, and revel in every calamity to befall the great KD, to Kawhi and KD’s mutual refusals to be anyone other than themselves, the NBA players, have never looked better.

And, aside from Kerr’s recklessness with Durant’s minutes, enough to once and for all eliminate him from previous considerations of sainthood, I’ve never witnessed a more exquisitely coached Finals.  Nick Nurse, bless his spectacles, with the balls to run a box-and-one, a triangle-and-two.  Kerr going zone, echoes of bellows from my own high school coach, recently gone to the great hardwood beyond, and his (Tom Blackwood’s) unhealthy attachment to the very same two-three matchup zone Arizona coach Lute Olson ran when Steve Kerr was a player there – I’m sure Andre Iguodala learned it much the same way Kerr and I did.  A real father-son, Cat Stevens - Ivan Turgenev vibe pervaded.  There was the moment Klay told his dad he heard no pop (probably lying); Siakam playing for his deceased dad; aforementioned Lute Olson and the fatherly role he undoubtedly played in young Steve Kerr’s life (Kerr’s own father dying his freshman year in at U of A, the ASU fans serenading him with sinister chants of “YOUR DAD’S DEAD” – Tom Blackwood, Lute Olson and my own father all looking on concernedly from on high); VanVleet unable to miss a shot upon the birth of his son, Fred VanVleet Jr.; and of course, the omnipotence of NBA First Father Dell Curry.  Kawhi’s rejection of Coach Pop as a father figure and turning to Uncle Dennis; KD’s lack of an Uncle Dennis, or some analogous cornerman who might have saved him from himself, who might have been able to talk him out of risking all to show the whole goddamn world once and for all, that he’s a man and not some bonne bouche served up at children’s birthday parties.   

It ain’t just me, basketball people tend toward oddly existentially oriented incarnations within the jock archetype.  Before Game 6, those with any hearts and minds whatsoever, still in shock over Durant’s downfall and Bob Myers melodramatic performance – the saddest and strangest NBA presser since Magic announced his retirement – Isiah Thomas was on TV quoting Kant w/r/t age-old questions of means and ends.

It’s taken me a full two weeks to recover, not from the loss, about which I couldn’t give a fart, but from watching two of the game’s most beautiful craftsmen go down with career-altering injuries.  And nobody but their families, teammates and opponents seeming to care.  That’s my take-away.  NBA players are not perceived by the media circus, fanbases, or team owners as actual human personages. No, it’s not as bad as the dehumanization of refugees and migrants, or of those locked forever away in Guantanamo Bay, or the Iranians suffering under sanctions and the horror of knowing they’ve long been scheduled to get bombed to hell.  No, the dehumanization of professional athletes does not compare to what’s been done to Chelsea Manning or Julian Assange, but the same dynamics are at play.  The humanity of Kevin Durant, Kevon Looney, Klay Thompson, Andre Iguodala – despite all eyes on their injured assets and what effects those defects may have on eventual outcomes – went absolutely unseen. 

The ultimate paradox dating back to antebellum days – African Americans placed front and center upon the auction block, sports field, boxing ring, television screen – their humanity doomed to remain unseen.  Ralph Ellison said it all back in 1952.  When Myers got up there with unwetted tears and told the world that Durant was misunderstood, and a good person, it made me think of DuBois’ famous passage from Souls of Black Folk, penned in 116 years earlier:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

There’s always been an unfair two-ness differentiating Durant from his Golden State teammates. Bob Myers couldn’t help himself from ribbing KD about it at last year’s parade, which I admittedly cannot forgive, and which I believe was the formal beginning to the end of whatever good karma the organization surely inherited via the good deeds of Al Attles, Manute Bol, Adonal Foyle, and to be fair, Bob Myers himself.

The ethics of competition is tricky.  At lower levels, winning at all costs is mostly frowned upon.  At the heights of a multibillion dollar industry, it’s expected.  We don’t exactly expect Steve Kerr to treat Kevin Durant as if he were one of our sons on the high school team; but part of the reason we love Kerr is because he and the Warriors have promoted the impression that he does in fact care about his players as people, not pawns in a power struggle to maintain a stranglehold over NBA supremacy.

Like all Warrior faithful born before the 90s, I was satisfied with the Warriors being a playoff team, and an extremely entertaining one at that.  Though their achievements pale in comparison, I have no less love for the Sleepy Floyd, RUN TMC or We Believe teams than I do for the Splash Brothers/ Hamptons Five lineups that’ve brought home so many banners.  The dynasty is dead; and I’m happier for it.  Winning a championship should be an accomplishment laced with unadulterated joyousness, not simply the sense of relief associated with having met expectations.

I hope Steph and Klay and Dray can win another title before they retire.  I hope KD regains as much of his health as humanly possible and is able to win again, wherever he goes – but it doesn’t matter.  The ethos and pathos of Pat Riley and Michael Jordan, for whom losing is misery and winning is mere relief, was never healthy and it’s high time it’s abandoned. 

To the Warriors of the future and athletes the world over, I say: Be on Time; Try Your Best... and fuck the rest. 

Far as KD’s future goes, if I were his Uncle Dennis, the advice he’d get from me: team up with Kyrie, Bed-Stuy, Do or Die.  Selah.

The Slim Reaper (photo via Warriors.com)

San Jose native and Menlo College alum Nate Jackson writes earnestly about life after success in the NFL

Nate Jackson’s life after the NFL is not what you might expect. (Photo by Jack Dempsey)

I have heard the letters C T and E so many fucking times, the question becomes: When I am struggling in the “real world,” is it because I am conditioned for a different reality? Or because I actually have brain damage? Nobody knows, because frustration can read as dementia. It’s the world that drives us mad, not football! It’s the way people communicate: Vague. Non-committal. Via text. Email. Waiting for a response. Fake smiles and faker laughs. Superlatives and exclamation points and the making of plans that never come to fruition. Sorry for the delayed response, things are crazy over here. “Really?” I want to say. “How crazy?” Every conversation is a game of double-dutch and I cant seem to time it up.

Preamble to a Eulogy... It Ain’t Been the Big Easy... Requiem on a Dynasty... One Native Son’s Solemn Prayer to Dub Nation on the Eve of Destruction

(Photo by Nathaniel S. Butler)

By Josh Tribe

“Name me someone that’s not a parasite and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him.”  ~ Bob Dylan, “Visions of Johanna.” 

I’m just a messenger, please don’t murder me.  I come to you on behalf of the oft-mentioned, rarely heard-from-directly basketball gods. 

They want you to know all the narratives that’ve swirled around the Golden State Dynasty have been false.  Accordingly, the Warriors have been both over-and-underrated, universally under appreciated, miscast as villainous deck-stackers, responsible for the ruination of parity and suspense, their achievements perceived as forgone conclusions, their few and far between failures blamed on flaws that don’t exist.  Not that they’re flawless.  It’s just that their alchemic divinations can’t prevail every season.  The addition of Kevin Durant didn’t make them unbeatable, and his impending free agency and the ubiquitous public perception he won’t be back next season haven’t undone them.

Until the Steve Kerr took over for JV coach extraordinaire Mark Jackson, a universal law had unfailingly pervaded all contact sports: Superior size, strength and speed simply cannot be overcome, no matter how skillfully employed, by superior skills, smarts and selflessness.  Joy?  Are you kidding? 

The Raptors players and coach are currently being lauded for their coldblooded stoicism, the lot of them looking like men condemned to death as they left the floor for might well be the last professional basketball game to take place in Alameda County. From the looks of them, you’d have thought they’d at least lost, were the Warriors not so wearily disconsolate.  The Warriors fuel themselves with ebullience and by the fourth quarter they’d run out of gas for the third time in four tries.  A subplot in the lineage of Warriors-related false narratives is undoubtedly burgeoning, one which attaches a causality to the personality-less Raptors and their success.

The basketball gods want you to know they placed Saints Steve and Stephen in the five-one-oh for a reason.  It was an acknowledgement of the Mecca of small-ball Oakland has long since been.  From Sleepy Floyd to Run TMC, Don Nelson and all his quirkiness, culminating in that last hurrah of the We Believe crew of ’07.

KD reppin’ RUN TMC. (Photo via Golden State Warriors)

Basketball and the Blues: perhaps the only two positive contributions to human culture to arise from the genocidal grounds known as North America, which apparently wasn’t completely forsaken by the rest of them gods, whose spiritual jurisdiction did not include sports and recreation.  What a miserable place of senseless slaughter, the rest of the gods bemoaned from on high, as they viewed the so-called Red Man along with his seemingly infinite herds of buffalo senselessly slaughtered, the West Africans hauled over to be treated even more cruelly, the lynch mobs and police state thugs who took over for plantation owners and overseers after Lincoln, the constant illegal wars waged in and upon every other continent, the insane rates of incarceration of its own citizens, refugees lured by the land of opportunity stripped of their children and warehoused like war criminals, actual war criminals waltzing through the revolving door of wealth and power, a new Atlantis of abysmal misery, the rest of them gods saw it all and told the gods of sport and music to do their best, as they had their work cut out for them.  Let something redeeming come out of there, for Christ’s sake.  The majority of gods, you see, have a soft spot for old Jesus, so childishly concerned with human suffering and full of love for all life’s enemies as he was.  Basketball and the Blues, truth be told, were created by the gods of sport and recreation to cheer up Jesus, who was sulking around heaven all day, preoccupied with the horrors coming out of the Americas century after goddamned century.   

Yes, it certainly is a cannibalistically parasitic society from which sprang the NBA.  The land to its north, despite its lack of mass shootings and propensity for (at least) superficial civility and a politeness rarely witnessed in the Western World, is no less colonial, and only slightly less drenched in blood.  The mere mortal credited with creating basketball was born in Canada.  Remember that, should the Warriors fail to pull off a Game 5 miracle.  Regardless, it appears as though the Bill Russell (Larry O’Who?) (turns out Larry O’Brien was Postmaster General during the Johnson Administration before serving as NBA Commissioner – whatever the fuck, rename the trophy after Russell) Trophy’s Canadian citizenship will be naturalized within the week, if not tonight. 

With silly mortal notions of good and evil, the Basketball World at large has long since taken Golden State’s genius, responsible for its greatness, for granted.  Perhaps success is always misperceived as forgone conclusion.  Even in the absence of KD, due to past dominance, the Warriors remained, insensibly, the favorites going into the Finals.  I’m here to tell you they’ve been underdogs all along.  Even with KD, they’ve been welterweights contending in the heavyweight division.  Sugar Ray Leonard v. Muhammad Ali; Floyd Mayweather v. Mike Tyson; Jake LaMotta v. Sonny Liston.  Take note Max Kellerman (of ESPN’s First Take), you basketball imbecile and alleged boxing expert.  The notion that “adding K-D to a 73-win team made the Warriors unbeatable” was always dead wrong.  Kawhi Leonard avoiding Zaza’s felonious foot; a Rockets team stripped of its inconceivably stupid shortcomings; the overall chaos and incompetence surrounding Lebron’s Cavs.  The Spurs may have prevailed due to their size and sound stratagems.  The Rockets (!), were James Harden willing or able to make one single normal basketball play... forget the debate over analytics v. eye-tests, when your best player stands at half-court with his hands on his knees every time he’s not slated to go one-on-five; when your best player has no interest in cuts to the basket, screening nor receiving screens; when your whole team, due to some asinine plan, eschews midrange jumpers and post-up opportunities wholesale while simultaneously codifying bad body language from management down... When you can count on the Cavs to keep Lebron shackled to the moronic likes of J.R. Smith... The Warriors have been fantastic, and fantastically lucky.  Their collective karma has carried them at least as much as their talent.  It sounds great, two MVPs on the same team.  Let’s see some other team make it work.  Try it with two MVPs not named Steph and KD.  The Warriors have overcome an overt lack of brawn, putting aside what would only be considered a normal amount of egomania, to create a dynasty unlike any in hoops history.  

They’re not perfect, but the Warriors owners (Mark Stevens notwithstanding, and we’ll get to him), management and coaching staff had, relatively speaking, good karmic footing upon which to launch their agenda of transcendent small ball.  It took beautiful arrogance mixed stark realism to pull it off.  We’ll be small and fast and explosive and elite defensively.  We’ll perfect the art of winning without the option of, if all else fails, imposing our physical will or athletic prowess.  We’ll win, in a physical, contact sport, with a sort of sporting flower power.  When Kerr came in he could have shot up the organization with a syringe of realism, instead he envisioned a championship team that embodied the spirt of its best player, who at the time, still looked more like a high schooler than the cornerstone of an NBA title contender.

Let’s quickly review the history of NBA teams that (successfully) banked on somebody under 6’4, weighing under 200 pounds.  Before Steph led the W’s to the Finals in 2015, it’d happened exactly four times: three with Isiah Thomas and his Bad Boy Pistons; once with Allen Iverson and his Sixers, which featured one of the greatest defensive centers of all-time in Dikembe Mutombo, along with a host of blue collar vets, defensive specialists (Toni Kukoc notwithstanding), who under the harsh tutelage of legendary slave driver Larry Brown, managed to make everyone forget that despite his silly athleticism and indefatigable heart and spirit, Iverson weighed about a buck-sixty, undoubtedly less than little-ass coach.  Isiah Thomas changed the game, making way for Mark Price, Kevin Johnson, Tim Hardaway, Iverson, Steve Nash and Steph Curry.  Before Isiah Lord Thomas III, it was believed guards had to be big.  Magic Johnson had become the new prototype.  Isiah led the Pistons to three straight Finals, and was one phantom foul call away from winning them all.        

Isiah vs. the Lakers in the 1988 Finals. He would take home the title in ‘89 and ‘90.

Enter Curry under Kerr.  Ahead of the curve in terms of relying on the three-point shot, the Warriors finessed past teams they had no business beating.  And luckily, when facing off against the Goliath from Akron the first time, Lebron’s two best (and only truly competent) teammates went down with injuries and Steph Curry was able to take his seat alongside Isiah, at what’s still a table for two, reserved for little guys to claim a title as their team’s best player.

The next year, Lebron’s Cavs at full strength, the Warriors blew a 3-1 lead, lost, and signed Durant, as we know.  At which point the basketball world lost its damn mind.  Yes, they added one of the top players in the league, but one who made Golden State a collection of warriors whose strength was not to fight even more so than they already were.  Yes, they possessed unreal offensive fire power.  But so did the Run TMC team, as did the incarnation with Chris Webber, which scored a shit ton, but couldn’t do better than an eight-seed destined to both score and give up an insane amount of points. 

What the Warriors have done over the past half a decade, with KD, without KD, has been to repeatedly trot out a lineup in which none of the rotation players had the capacity to physically overpower their positional counterpart.  Only the changes in officiating, outlawing the manhandling that allowed Isiah’s Bad Boys to prevail, made any of this the least bit feasible. 

Personal disclosure: confessions of an undersized point guard

I’ve got sufficient self-awareness to justify what might otherwise be deemed an inordinate love for one Stephen Curry.  At a much lower level, I nevertheless related intimately to Curry’s essay which appeared online earlier this season.  At 13, unlike Steph, who had hopes of proving himself among the best players his age in the entire country, I was merely trying to establish myself in Orinda, a teeny-tiny, lily-white Bay Area suburb not the least bit known for its basketball pedigree.  But then again, my father wasn’t one of the better three-point shooters in NBA history, but an extremely mild mannered, overtly pacifistic psychiatrist.  I entered Orinda Intermediate School in the eighth grade at four-foot-nine, 82 pounds, armed with, relatively speaking, mad skills and a touch of urban moxie.  I had handles, a deadly push-shot nearly identical to the form Steph once employed – there are only so many ways to shoot a basketball when you weigh less than a hundred pounds – and could finish (a hundred leagues under the rim) with either hand around the basket.  For the O.I.S. 8th grade “A” Team, I was an extremely impoverished man’s Steph Curry. 

Every brunch recess that year, a kid we’ll call Lance and I played one-on-one.  I don’t think I lost even once (though I must have), despite an eleven inch, fifty pound disparity.  Lance was an exceptional athlete, ruthlessly competitive, whose basketball skills weren’t half bad.  He would go on to become a starting tight end and rugby star at UC Davis.  Our basketball battles continued through our early twenties, he at 6’4, 230, me at 5’8, 155.  His skills improved over time, as did my own, and although I can’t recall ever losing to him, I also remember the absolute struggle it was every time.  Had he ever been formally trained as a basketball player, I’d never have stood a chance.  Because, remiss as I am to admit it, in basketball, size matters.  Steph has so stealthily seduced the basketball realm many have forgotten this less than egalitarian truism.  It’s a significant advantage, every time a shot goes up, to be taller and weigh more than your opponent.  Rebounding, setting and fighting through screens, competing for loose balls, etc.  A zillion little things combine to give one team more points in the paint and free throws. Despite the expressive artistry of its athletes, the game does not award extra points for grace.  If it did, the Warriors would win every game by 300 points.

In Game 2, the Warriors’ lone win so far this Finals, the pundits gushed over the Warriors 22 second half field goals, every one of which came via an assist.  Twenty-two assists in one half of basketball.  It is astonishing.  But nobody bothered to point out the shadow of this non-anomaly.  Every basketball teams needs a few unassisted buckets.  An assist on every made shot means zero put-backs, not one instance in which one of your players strips one of theirs and takes it the other way for an uncontested dunk.  All assists means no coast-to-coast layups for Draymond, no threes for Steph off screen and roll.  I, who normally gush with near sexual arousal at the mention of so many assists, shivered upon hearing this statistic cited.  If none of your baskets are unassisted, the other team’s playing amazing defense and committing nearly no unforced errors. 

(photo by Garrett Ellwood)

So what’s gonna happen?  My head says it all ends tonight in Toronto with the entire country erupting in orgasmic basketball bliss, the Splash Brothers’ liquidity reduced to tears.  Durant on his way out, destined to play nary a second, his last shot as a Warrior remaining that pretty midrange shot from the baseline, in which he tore his calf.  My head tells me this is the Warriors’ Waterloo... that attempting to slay Kawhi without KD as akin to invading Russia during wintertime.  Unlike Napoleon, it’s not their fault.  My head tells me that even with KD at full strength for the whole series, it would have been tough.  The Raptors are really fucking good.     

My heart, however, informs me Steph and Klay are due to combine for at least 80, a game in which they both hit 10 threes.  My heart tells me they’ll shock the world, Draymond nodding emphatically as if that outcome was never in doubt.  In my heart, Durant is on the bench for Game 5, disallowed from stepping on the floor by the doctors, but able to lobby his way into some towel waving; but Steph, Klay and Dray slay the purple dinosaurs anyway, making way for KD to pull a Willis Reed in Game 6 in Oakland.  In Game 6, like Reed of yore, Durant’s contribution is largely sentimental.  He hits a few jumpers, blocks a key shot, makes some free throws down the stretch, giving the Warriors just enough to make it to Game 7.  In my heart, Durant puts up 50 in Game 7, three-peat complete. 

It’s my prayer that the Warriors find the humility to see themselves not as two-time defending champions, but as the perpetual Cinderella they’ve always been. 

I’m here as a messenger to tell you the basketball gods are still with the Warriors, but the rest of them gods are pulling for the crew from Canada.  Mark Stevens was their last straw.  The Raptors general manager, fan base, if not their players, deserve the title more than their Golden State counterparts.  Bob Myers’ snarky dig at KD at last year’s victory parade set the tone.  Stevens shoving Kyle Lowery sealed the deal.  For the first time in their historic run, the Warriors don’t have karma on their side.  Let’s face it, every other Finals appearance, it’s been Dan Gilbert, with his plantation mindset looming over it all.

But none of that matters.  Game 3, the Warriors dangling over the threshold of defeat: Steph dives headlong into the passing lane in perfect high school style ball denial.  The Warriors were all over the floor in Games 3 and 4.  And this is what I’ll remember.  Not that everyone idiotically claimed their insane collective skillset made them undefeatable.  I’ll remember KD in the tunnel, hyping up Steph before games, there to greet and congratulate/console his teammates.  Looney battling on with a broken collar bone.  I’ll remember Boogie doing his goddamned best, defying his reputation as a petulant malcontent.  I’ll remember Livingston, who probably should have retired years ago, bringing his old man’s game from the 70s.  I’ll remember Iggy.  All the basketball gods want me to be sure to inform you, that in the basketball hall of fame which exists on high, Andre Iguodala occupies the position Michael Jordan occupies on earth.  Iggy, the ultimate Warrior in every way, with his ancient legs, leading the 2019 playoffs in dunks.  I’ll remember Iggy’s dunks, Iggy’s strips, Iggy playing well past his prime because he “likes Steph,” who he says “is great to be around.”  Iggy, the basketball gods want you to know you’re off the hook.  Go ahead and retire to your long life of golf and philanthropic entrepreneurship.  Steph’s legacy was cemented long ago.  He dines with Isiah at that table for two, where they sing the praises of Joe Dumars and Klay Thompson, Mark Aguirre and Kevin Durant, Dennis Rodman and Draymond Green.     

Hovering over the Warriors’ dynastic death bed from my perch overseas, my role is that of a unitarian hoops priest.  I’m prepared, however solemnly, to perform the last rites for this, the most poetical dynasty in NBA history.  Built on faith that goes beyond execution, the Warriors have reminded us that joy is as good a fuel as ambition, revenge or vindication.  Win or lose, in my heart a big brass band plays a Big Easy Second-line sendoff to this beautiful basketball experiment.  The big brass band waits to play “Nearer My God To Thee.”  The three seasons featuring Curry paired with KD have been a joy to behold.  Their biggest stumbling block a mutual tendency towards being overly deferential to the other. 

Win or lose, I think KD comes back on a short-term deal for one more go around.  But when it’s over, whether it’s tonight or years down the line, I’ll remember the parasitical media getting it wrong and how the Warriors nearly let themselves get undone by it, all the while maturing as men and teammates in precisely the cliché manner in which sports are supposed to imbue its participants. 

Dear Golden State Warriors, thank you for your dignity. Last message from the basketball gods wanted me to impart on their behalf: WE STILL BELIEVE. Stance. Selah. From Berkeley and Saigon, Let’s go Warriors!

The final regular season run inside the Oakland Coliseum stirs up 47 years of emotions

Draymond skies under the signature Coliseum ceiling. (Photo by Noah Graham)

By Connor Buestad | Connor@Section925.com

Sunday, April 7th against the L.A. Clippers marked the last time I will likely ever set foot inside the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena for a Warriors game. The 47 years the Dubs have spent on the hallowed ground of 7000 Coliseum Way along the 880 have come and (almost) gone. As the Grateful Dead sang so many times in Oakland, “wo, oh, what I want to know, where does the time go?”

By now, the walk from the Coliseum BART station across the “scenic” pedestrian bridge is always a sentimental one for me, even if it’s a Tuesday night A’s game versus the Royals. There’s just too much history on that bridge. The fog rolling out in the distance over San Francisco, the scrappy scalpers, the underrated musicians, the one dollar waters, two dollar canned domestic beers and the 10 dollar fake T-shirts get me semi-emotional every time.

This particular evening was already sure to add an even higher degree of sentimental value. Even more than you could imagine there would be on the last regular season game in the the history of Warriors basketball in Oakland. But what I wasn’t expecting was the death of my childhood friend Brian Hammons just days earlier. “Hambones,” as they called him, spent his whole life living and rooting for the Warriors from various locations in the East Bay. His fandom never once wavered, even in the LEAN years of the early 2000’s, when the idea of a .500 team playing at the Arena in Oakland was almost laughable. The type of guy that wouldn’t rush you to leave a game early, but instead citing the small pleasures of small beer lines, lenient ushers, and the unpretentious fan base all around us.

Maybe it was just the nostalgia talking, but Sunday’s game felt in many ways like it did back in the 2000’s. The beer lines were still manageable, the ushers weren’t tripping if you needed a different view, and the season ticket holders were all there. The seats were still blue, the ceiling somehow still made me feel like I was in Rome, and the jerseys still featured a Thunder lighting bolt on the backside of the shorts. At least for one more night, everything was the same as it was back in 2001.

I remember the 2000-2001 season like an addict who got sober 18 years earlier. 2001 was rock bottom, no doubt about it. Coached by Dave Cowens, the Warriors went 17-65 that year. That season, it had been six years since the Dubs had made the playoffs. It would also be another five year wait until they would make it again. It was the middle of an NBA nosedive of unprecedented proportions. The Warriors sucked. There was no other way to describe it. You could sit virtually wherever you wanted, so long as you were willing to pull back a curtain and step over a row of seats to get into the lower bowl. The rotation of starters was absurd. An aging Mookie Blaylock, Marc Jackson, Larry Hughes and a frosted tipped Bobby Sura in the backcourt, coupled with Adonal Foyle and Erick Dampier down low. Antawn Jamison was their franchise player at that point. Off the bench that year you had studs like Bill Curley, Vinny Del Degro, Corie Blount and Vonteego Cummings. Hell, you even had 37-year-old Chris Mullin, playing in his final NBA season.

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The love is mutual. (Photo by Noah Graham)

The winter of 2001 was extremely dark, but the following season, after drafting Gilbert Arenas and Troy Murphy, the Warriors were able to claw themselves back over the 20-win mark for the first time in three years. It gave them the modest amount of “momentum” they needed to push toward the 2007 “We Believe” team led by Don Nelson, Baron Davis and company.  

Yet however terrible the brand of basketball was in 2001, the Bay Area fan was always easily convinced to heed to call of the Warriors marketing campaigns and come out to the Arena to have a “Great Time Out,” with the late great Thunder mascot grinding to make as many people happy as humanly possible.

The 2001 fan was in attendance on Sunday. They didn’t sell their tickets to an online ticket brokerage or a guy on the peninsula with a red Tesla. Uncle Bob from Hayward who owned the tix wouldn’t have allowed that. Hell, he still doesn’t know how to scan his tickets on his phone properly yet. But no, Bob won’t be in San Francisco next year. He’d love to be, but it just doesn’t work like that anymore around here.

The loudest roars from the Oakland faithful on Sunday night came for their adopted son, Stephen Curry, and understandably so. They roared when he ripped off his jacket at the end of warm ups to reveal his “We Believe” era whites that he wore as a rookie in Oakland a decade ago. They roared when he knifed through the L.A. defense to find easy layups that shouldn't have been there in the first place. They roared when he launched one of his signature rainbow contested threes and splashed it. “CURRY HIT IT FROM THE BART STATION!!!” announced Bob Fitzgerald for the 1000th time in his life. By Q4, The Baby Faced Assassin had nothing to do but throw a towel over his shoulders and laugh.

After the final buzzer sounded and the ceremonial confetti dropped, the die-hards from the second deck were invited down to share a moment with the second coming of Al Attles, a skinny white dude with a bad back named Steve Kerr. Trained by legends Gregg Popovich and Phil Jackson, Kerr scrapped the sarcasm of Pop and sided with the thoughtful zen of Phil as he addressed the emotional Warrior fans that were left standing with 47 years of Oakland basketball memories Run(TMC)ing through their heads.

Just like any great party you go to, once it really gets going, once you think it will never end, you look up and it’s over. For the past 47 years, the Oakland Coliseum has hosted great company in East Oakland. Everyone has now started to show up for the three-peat going away party. There’s no telling how wild it will get over the next couple months. All we know is that it will be over soon, whether we want to believe it or not.

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Killa Klay soaking it all in. (Photo by Noah Graham)

Can Nico "Red Mamba" Mannion bring Pac-12 basketball out of its funk? We'll find out next winter

By Connor Buestad | Connor@Section925.com

It has been well documented that the Pac-12 conference has stumbled on some hard times on both the hardwood and the gridiron over the last few years. Proud to be known as the Conference of Champions, the Pac has recently been relegated to the “First Four” play-in game on the Tuesday night before the tournament and early December bowl games in half-empty stadiums. However, you can’t keep a great conference down for long, and we know it is only a matter of time before the likes of Arizona basketball and USC football will get their ducks in order and start winning on a national level once again. One intriguing athlete that hopes to expedite that process is Nico Mannion, also known as the Red Mamba. If you haven’t heard of him, now you have, thanks to a brilliant piece of writing by SI’s Chris Ballard below. If that’s not enough, hear from the player himself in the mini-doc below as well. I can hardly wait until Gus Johnson gets a hold of this young gunner when he catches fire in March somewhere.

Meet Nico Mannion: A 15-year-old (sorta-maybe) basketball prodigy (by @SI_ChrisBallard) https://t.co/tnDHya6pkd pic.twitter.com/6bzbhLOL6m

— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) February 9, 2017

A Georgia grad lends his insight on Mark Fox, California's new basketball coach

Fox had a 286-176 record in 14 seasons as coach at Nevada and Georgia. He made the NCAA Tournament five times but never advanced to the Sweet 16. Fox was fired at Georgia last year after failing to reach the tournament in each of his final three seasons with the Bulldogs. (AP) (photo by Sean Rayford)

By Peter Horn | @PeterCHorn

There’s a play that sticks out in my mind as an encapsulation of Georgia basketball under Mark Fox. One of the nameless games between two teams clawing for .500 on the SEC Network’s Tuesday evening slot, the commentators marveling at the pick and roll screens drawn up by Fox during a timeout as our Serbian power forward dribbles the ball off his knee into the fourth row of the stands. We’d go on to lose that game. Or win, it doesn’t really matter.

And that’s kind of how it always went. There were bright spots and promising years—an NCAA tournament appearance in years two and six, one legit NBA player in Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and a couple others who thought they were and are now bouncing around the Lithuanian D-League—but mediocrity was the mean to which we would always revert.[1] Over the years, his furious scribbling on dry-erase boards to a clearly outmatched team down 14 points with 1:26 to go took on a Sisyphean feel. At some point that boulder was Fox’s to own.

The problem was recruiting, which largely stemmed from his inability to establish in-roads with AAU programs, notably the Atlanta teams an hour away that power the national blue bloods.[2] But that’s a bit like blaming your lawyer for not paying off the judge. The intersection of AAU recruiting, apparel companies and snake oil opportunists that leach off top recruits is a sordid business that’s likely even worse than reported, and for all of Fox’s shortcomings, he ran a clean program and seemed to genuinely care about the development of his players on and off the court. Hell, if we were paying our players, it’s time to call the collections agency.

It may not be fair, but it’s hard not to judge Fox vs. his successor, Tom Crean (who allegedly is a different person than Tom Arnold).[3] Despite a rocky first year at the helm, UGA has the #9 class in the country in Crean’s first full recruiting cycle, including the nation’s top shooting guard and #2 overall player, Anthony Edwards, along with three other four stars. For comparison, Fox signed one five-star and five four-stars in nine years, and Crean’s class isn’t done. This from a guy whose main criticism was Indiana in-state recruiting.

In years past, a .551 overall record and a couple tournament berths may have been enough for a school as football-centric as UGA. But during Fox’s tenure, we saw a number of SEC programs make significant strides—seven SEC teams made the NCAA tournament in Fox’s last year— while the Georgia program treaded water. When it’s just Kentucky in the tournament, it’s one thing. When it’s half your conference, it’s another.

And thus begins the Mark Fox era at Cal. If history is any indication, the Golden Bears are getting a skilled tactician, widely regarded as one of the better X’s and O’s coaches in the game,[4] a coach who will be a tireless ambassador for the entire Cal athletic department and may just show up to a football game covered in body paint and spiked shoulder pads. A fiery leader not afraid to lose his jacket and take the occasional technical foul, and if he can figure out how to tap into the AAU recruiting pipeline with his ethics still intact, potentially one of the better all-around college basketball coaches in the game.

—

[1] Had UGA basketball won one more SEC game under Fox, its conference record would’ve been literally mediocre at 0.5000 (78-78).

[2] …who all seem to wear blue: UNC, Duke, Kansas, Kentucky.

[3] Allegedly.

[4] Just ask John Calipari, whose effusive praise of Fox and public calls for him to keep his job at Georgia felt a bit like a boxer lobbying to keep his bloody sparring partner in the ring.

—

Peter is a Georgia grad and casual-at-best Georgia basketball fan who’s lived in the Bay Area for the last six years. 

(Deadspin) Kevin Durant And Quinn Cook Mourn Shooting Death Of Close Friend

Kevin Durant and Quinn Cook mourn death of close friend during Warriors' win over Indiana: https://t.co/7NhTFC33k4 pic.twitter.com/S4yCmkMF27

— Deadspin (@Deadspin) March 23, 2019

Take a look at the 2019 Oakland A's promotional giveaway calendar

Grab this bad boy on April 20th versus the Blue Jays.

By Connor Buestad | Connor@Section925.com

After another early playoff exit in 2018, the Oakland A’s were back in uniform for the first time on Monday in Arizona, looking to spit out the last of the bad tastes left over from Yankee Stadium. The 2019 A’s have a whole lot to look forward to, as they bring back their young core group that won almost 100 games a year ago. Budding stars Matt Chapman and Matt Olson both are freshly minted Gold Glovers, Ramon Laureano is a human highlight reel in center, Khris Davis is coming off a league leading 48 homers and Blake Treinen is an All-Star stopper coming out of the pen. Gone is fellow All-Star Jed Lowrie, but he has been replaced by the talented Jurickson Profar at second base, coming over from Texas. If the A’s can put together some reliable starting pitching, an AL West title is certainly not out of the question, regardless of how well the Astros are playing.

With the growing excitement surrounding the upcoming season, it makes sense to take a look at the promotional giveaway calendar on offer at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. With the Warriors leaving the Town in June and the Raiders being sued by the city, the A’s are likely to have the friendly confines of the Coliseum all to themselves.

The unofficial list below should give you an extra nudge to get out to the Coliseum in the year ahead. Highlights include three bobblehead days (Matt Chapman, Matt Olson and Bert Campaneris), seven fireworks nights, 1989 World Series Reunion Night vs. the Giants, Fanny Pack Day and Khris Davis Bat Day.

—

March 28 vs. Angels: “Win for Hero-Town Rally Towel.” After starting the season in Japan on March 20th, the A’s return to Oakland to kick off the season with day baseball in Oakland. They’ll be handing out Hero-Town Rally Towels. Hopefully these rally towels will be green collar.

March 29 vs. Angels: Bob Melvin Manager of the Year pin. This is also the first Green Friday of the year where the A’s wear their Kelly Green alternates. Green Fridays > Orange Fridays. There I said it.

April 16 vs. Astros: First “Free Parking Tuesday” of the year. There won’t be free parking at the new stadium. Cherish this.

April 20th vs. Blue Jays: Matt Chapman Gold Glove Bobblehead. Very well deserved.

May 8th vs. Reds: Saint Mary’s College Night. There are a lot of other college nights not listed here, but God is a Gael. Also, come boo Yasiel Puig in a Reds uniform. Guaranteed fun.

May 10th vs. Indians: Fireworks Night #1. Your first chance to get out on the beautiful Coliseum grass.

May 12th vs. Indians: Mother’s Day Breast Cancer Awareness Day. Go watch Krush Davis launch baseballs with a pink bat.

May 25th vs. Mariners: Rally Candle Night. Should be interesting.

June 1st vs. Astros: Fanny Pack Day. Fanny Packs are the new black.

June 14th vs. Mariners: Fireworks Night #2.

June 16th vs. Mariners: Fathers Day Khris Davis Bat Day. Will help you hit 48 bombs in your adult softball league.

June 20th vs. Rays: Oakland Larks cap. Good looking, OG hat.

June 22 vs. Rays: Matt Olson Gold Glove Bobblehead. Still under construction, but expect the glove to be dipped in gold.

July 3rd vs. Twins: Fireworks Night #3.

July 4th vs. Twins: Tote Bag Day. Save 10 cents on grocery bags!

July 14th vs. White Sox: T-shirt day. Presented by Cache Creek Casino, so expect high quality.

July 27th vs. Rangers: Fireworks Night #4.

July 28th vs. Rangers: Root Beer Float Day. Find Dallas Braden and Shooty Babitt to get you a generous scoop.

August 4th vs. Cardinals: T-shirt Day #2. Also presented by Cache Creek.

August 17th vs. Astros: Fireworks Night #5.

August 18th vs. Astros: Beerfest. Fresh beer in the Treehouse.

August 24th vs. Giants: 1989 World Series Champions Team Reunion. A rough night for Giants fans.

September 7th vs. Tigers: Fireworks Night #6.

September 8th vs. Tigers: Bert Campaneris Bobblehead Day. Campy!

September 21 vs. Rangers: Fireworks Night #7.

September 22nd vs. Rangers: Fan Appreciation Day. Celebrating 51 years in Oaktown, hopefully pushing for a pennant in late September…

(For the full, official calendar, click here)

The sweet sound of ⚾️ is back!#HellaSpring pic.twitter.com/3B3RvNp1aQ

— Oakland Athletics 🌳🐘⚾️ (@Athletics) February 11, 2019

Tim Kawakami and Ethan Strauss piss off KD, which makes sense

By Connor Buestad | Connor@Section925.com

Tim Kawakami has Section925 blocked on Twitter, out of laughable sports blogging pettiness, so I haven’t been allowed to keep up on his hot takes in the sports world as of late. His co-worker at The Athletic, Ethan Strauss is also hard for me to find behind the site’s paywall. Regardless, the two writers are clearly talented and successful in their own right, with the pedigree and player access to prove it. That being said, there’s no arguing that both of these reporters have a habit of getting under the skin of the athletes and coaches that they cover. In fact, they seem to take pride in this. They portray themselves as bad-ass journalists that don’t back down when they are fed bullshit in a press conference. They would tell you how they stand up for what’s right and report on the truth. They refuse to be in the business of Public Relations for the teams they cover. Straight shooters that their readers can trust, they’ll tell you.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that if you go out of your way to stir up some shit with a player or coach, your subject might eventually get a little fed up. I remember when Kawakami covered Jim Harbaugh’s successful 49ers teams, there was always tension between him and the team. Sure, Harbaugh could be a jerk in interviews, but Kawakami continued to pester Jim and the front office, even when it was clear they were in no mood to talk. Kawakami was essentially asking for it, always looking to ruffle feathers. Always asking one more question than was appropriate.

For this reason, it comes as no surprise that Durant snapped at his recent press conference. Yes, Kristaps Porzingis had been traded out of New York to clear up cap space, and yes KD is embarking on free agency. But Durant still has the right to be upset that Strauss decided to publish a piece declaring that Durant already has his foot out the door to NYC. It’s really not that complicated. Durant has never said he wants to leave the Warriors, but the media covering his team are writing about how he’s going to be gone. So that pisses him off, especially when you consider his production in a Warriors uniform, two Finals MVP’s, etc.

This three minute press conference has been analyzed and debated to death by the national media, but to me, it couldn’t be more simple if you watch the whole thing play out. Kawakami kicks off the questioning with something he knows Durant doesn’t want to discuss. What is Durant supposed to say in that situation? “Yes, yes I think New York sounds fun, I’ll probably go play there next year. Thanks.” Of course he’s not in the mood to hear that question and of course we know he can’t really answer it with anything other than “I’m here to win games for Golden State and that’s what I’m focused on. Thanks.” That’s what Durant could have, and probably should have said, but instead he was more honest with how he felt. How he felt betrayed by the media when all he’s been doing is producing for the Warriors and keeping his mouth shut. Durant wasn’t asking for a fight, but Kawakami and his buddy Ethan brought him one anyway. Naturally, he got defensive and to be honest, it’s hard for me to blame him. Kawakami and Strauss set out to get Durant to crack and that’s exactly what they got. Nobody involved should act surprised.

—

(Below: listen to Strauss joke about Durant and the press conference and also hear KD add more context to the story.)

“I just want [beat writers] to be truthful. ... It was good to get that off my chest.”@KDTrey5 on the comments he made to the media pic.twitter.com/KmHc1v4wTn

— Get Up (@GetUpESPN) February 11, 2019

Apparently You Shouldn't Bet Against Jared Goff, Despite What Deadspin Says

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Brewed in Marin, Jared Goff showed Joe Montana-like qualities in the NFC title game inside a hostile Louisiana Superdome. (image via Getty)

By Connor Buestad | Connor@Section925.com

Back in 2013, Jared Goff arrived on the campus of UC Berkeley as a token skinny blonde kid from Marin Catholic High School, hoping to win the starting quarterback job for the Golden Bears. For various reasons, I had my doubts about how he would fare as a true freshman in the Pac-12. To be honest, I thought Zach Kline, the hyped gunslinger from San Ramon Valley, deserved to beat him out for the job headed into the fall. His high school field didn’t even have lights, I reasoned. How could he take over at the helm of a major college football team that quickly and easily? Shouldn’t Kline, with a year under his belt in college, not to mention a stronger arm, get the first crack at the job?

Ultimately, Sonny Dykes selected Goff to run the show for the Bears, effectively handing him his slick Air Raid Offense playbook and getting out of the way. In year one, despite some flashes of brilliance in the pocket, Goff struggled mightily as Cal sputtered to a 1-11 record, with their lone win coming at home versus Portland State, a team that can’t exactly call itself Division 1.

Despite the adversity, Goff bounced back with big passing seasons as a sophomore and junior, thriving in Dykes’ open air offense. Blessed with a strong receiving corps around him, Goff began to attract the attention of NFL scouts with his ability to put a ball on a dime, while never getting truly rattled, even on the road at the likes of the University of Texas.

Yet for as much success as Goff had on the collegiate level, he never quite solidified himself as a truly big-time quarterback. Alarmingly, over his three years with the Bears, Goff never once beat a top-25 team. Yes, you could argue that his defense was the problem, but Goff also shrunk in big moments himself. Perhaps his biggest test came as a junior on the road at no. 5 Utah, with College Gameday present in Salt Lake City. The 23rd ranked Bears gave themselves a chance to win that night, but ultimately could not overcome Goff throwing FIVE interceptions.

But, true to form, Goff would let his low points roll off his back and by year’s end, the junior was throwing six touchdowns in a bowl game victory over Air Force. NFL scouts were loving every minute of it, apparently.

When draft day hit in Chicago in the spring of 2016, one of the main storylines was how weak of a draft class it was for QB’s. Beside Goff and Carson Wentz, it was slim pickings. The LA Rams and head coach Jeff Fisher needed a franchise QB, so they went with Goff at number one overall, leaving Wentz for the Philadelphia Eagles at #2. Almost immediately, Goff became a rookie bust. Meanwhile, Wentz hit the ground running, leading the Eagles offense and winning games immediately and winning over the Philly faithful.

Deadspin foreshadowed Goff’s rookie campaign beautifully by ripping him a new one for his unabashed, over-the-top marketing efforts on draft night. The first overall pick was bashed for his social media ads on his personal channels with the article titled “Man, Jared Goff Loves Brands,” which basically made fun of him for squeezing every last dollar out of a night he was already making millions on.

Man, Jared Goff loves brands: https://t.co/OXeN18ewyc pic.twitter.com/hxsBOHLSKT

— Deadspin (@Deadspin) April 29, 2016

By June of 2016, Goff was back in the news with Deadspin’s prestigious site for going back on his word with LA Dodger Yasiel Puig. A life-long Giants fan, Goff has been known to hunt souvenir baseballs in the stands at Pac Bell Park in a cream colored SF jersey. As a teenager, he even went as far as to tweet out his desire for Puig to get drilled in the ribs. That’s why it was a bit lame to see Goff immediately buddy up with Puig in a Dodgers jersey on the field at Chavez Ravine. Naturally, Deadspin gave the rookie hell for it with the headline, “Jared Goff Buddies Up With Yasiel Puig, Betrays the Sanctity of His Takes.” Honestly, it was pretty well deserved when you considered the sanctity of the Giants-Dodgers/NorCal-SoCal rivalry. Poor form indeed.

Jared Goff buddies up with Yasiel Puig, betrays the sanctity of his takes: https://t.co/wvOkByJBrQ

— Deadspin (@Deadspin) June 7, 2016

When the preseason of Goff’s first pro season got underway, he looked, well, really bad. Thus, drawing the headline, “Jared Goff Looks Kinda Butt” by Deadspin. Under the guidance of Fisher, Goff looked lost leading the Rams offense, quickly spurring on whispers of “is Goff a bust?” from guys like Colin Cowherd and the like. Of course, it was way too soon for this type of chatter, but then again, it could very well have been true. He did look pretty butt out there.

To add to the “bust” whispers, Goff didn’t even suit up in his first game as an LA Ram. Coach Fisher seemed too worried to let him be the second string QB against his hometown 49ers on Opening Night. So instead, the first overall pick in the draft would be asked to watch cautiously from the sideline and take notes form Case Keenum. The headline “The Rams Might Be In A New City, But They Still Suck” was run by Deadspin, outlining the apparent dysfunction of the new-look Rams franchise.

The Rams might be in a new city, but they still suck: https://t.co/WDB5SPZtVP pic.twitter.com/KBGQClkqoY

— Deadspin (@Deadspin) September 13, 2016

By the time Goff finally got a chance to suit up for Fisher’s archaic offense, the only Deadspin headline Goff could produce was one of a casual mocking. “Jeff Fisher Pleased With Jared Goff’s Ability to Perform Basic Funcitons,” it read. Still pretty depressing all things considered.

2017, however, was an entirely different story for Goff and the LA Rams. Fisher was sent packing and in came 31-year-old Sean McVay to the rescue. The offensive wonderboy didn’t waste any time in his first season as an NFL head coach, winning the NFC West with an 11-5 record. In one short year, Goff went from an NFL cautionary tale, to a Pro Bowl and a playoff appearance. It all happened so fast that the media, especially Deadspin, didn’t know what to make of it. Was this real life? Would McVay’s secret sauce be sniffed out? Could Goff continue to slice up NFL defenses at this alarming rate? Most were still skeptical.

By year two of the McVay era, there was no denying that the Rams were on to something. And by the middle of this season, after turning in one of the most electric games in Monday Night Football history, Deadspin in particular began to wonder, “Was That the Future of Football?” And if you thought about it for a second, it absolutely was. Jared Goff vs. Patrick Mahomes trading touchdowns to the tune of 54-51 in LA. Yes, the future football was upon us.

Was that the future of football? https://t.co/9nCD8Pxols pic.twitter.com/NPFHf6zL6h

— Deadspin (@Deadspin) November 20, 2018

Yet even as Goff was solidifying himself as young star quarterback in year three of his prosperous NFL career, the naysayers still had reason to believe the skinny blonde kid from Marin would eventually fall back to earth and fulfill “bust” label that seemed to fit him well enough. A few bad games and the narrative could be unearthed once again. And that is exactly what happened. “It Only Took Four Bears to Make Jared Goff Look Like a Chump.”

It only took four Bears to make Jared Goff look like a chump: https://t.co/kyUfMBJrOH pic.twitter.com/3FrtIcvrnS

— Deadspin (@Deadspin) December 10, 2018

Yes, technically that would be correct, Deadspin. Then again, the Bears defense isn’t all that chumpish (Khalil Mack, heard of him). But wait, the struggles continued, prompting the concerned Deadspin headline, “Jared Goff Is Really Struggling” to pop up as a headline. The article read as follows:

The Jared Goff who seemed like an obvious MVP candidate three weeks ago is nowhere to be seen. In his last three games, Goff has only one touchdown against seven interceptions; compare that to 26 and six over the first 11 weeks of the season. The Rams were perhaps the best team in the NFL through 11 weeks, winning the game of the season and only dropping a thriller to the Saints, in which Goff played heroically. Since winning that Monday Night Football classic, Los Angeles has gone 1-2, struggling to dispatch the Lions two weeks ago, getting crunched by the Bears last week, and convincingly losing to the Nick Foles-led Eagles this week, their first home loss of the season.

That’s why going into the NFC Championship game in New Orleans, I made the conscious (more importantly sober) decision to bet against Goff. He was getting just three points on the road in front of a literally deafening New Orleans Saints crowd. On the other side of the ball was the ultra-experienced Drew Brees, a 40-year old competitive junkie who basically never loses at home inside the dome. A man with a Super Bowl to his name and over a dozen playoff appearances as a starting QB. The Saints had the savvy Sean Payton leading them, while the Rams countered with 32-year-old McVay, a guy who still hasn’t finished two seasons as a head coach in the NFL. Goff had never one a truly big game in his life. Would he start now? Well… yes.

Say what you will about the “worst call in NFL history,” Goff made plays for his team to put them in position to win the game. With Montana’s #16 displayed proudly across his chest, Goff weathered a treacherous storm in the first quarter when the Rams fell down 13-0 to start the game. He could have easily folded at that point, as most other unproven quarterbacks that young would have been swallowed up by the noise in the dome. All his excuses were built in and ready to go. He could head into the post-game pressor and talk positively about how young the Rams were as a team from top to bottom and how much room they had to grow in the seasons to come. The narrative would have made sense. But somehow, Goff was able to push the noise of the fans and the headlines aside and pull out an improbable, albeit controversial victory in the face of sure defeat.

Rams head to Super Bowl while Saints are left to be haunted by terrible missed penalty: https://t.co/2ukiuYD6HZ pic.twitter.com/PIfTNwPWQ4

— Deadspin (@Deadspin) January 21, 2019

Now onto Atlanta Goff goes for Super Bowl 53, to square off against one of his childhood heroes in Tom Brady, another Bay Area native in his own right. If you want to bet against Goff in the Super Bowl, by all means go ahead. After all, the Vegas odds will be in your favor. Just don’t expect Deadspin to use the word “bust” and “Goff” in the same sentence anytime in the future. They’re way too smart for that.

Chris Ballard goes deep in an insightful Warriors Sports Illustrated profile

There's no franchise in sports quite like the Golden State Warriors. From big accomplishments (a third title) to countless little things (about coach Steve Kerr’s beers…), the Sportsperson of the Year award recipients took care of business in a sometimes-trying 2018, with an indelible ethos that has made them a joy to watch and a dynasty that endures.

Hoopaholic Diaries, Episode 2: It’s the Management, Idiot

Things have turned tumultuous in the Warriors’ final season in The Town.

By Amos Manary

Whew… It just sucks.  They’ve done it to themselves, the self-inflicted sabotage that seems to undo most every NBA dynasty.  The pettiness that plagues the country at large has infected basketball’s alleged empire of egoless joy.  Alas, all empires, be they benevolent or malevolent, die of suicide.  They’ll probably still win it all, this year, and possibly even maintain their supremacy, in spite of the apparent inevitability that not only did the KD-Warriors honeymoon conclude (right after the first championship), but that the whole marriage is doomed.

KD never said, “Till death do us part.”

Everything that could possibly be said already has been said.  So much so that every case has been melodramatically overcooked and served up like a hockey-puck hamburger.  It’s a bit like a slightly ambiguous, but nevertheless ominous, medical diagnosis – the Warriors, at minimum, have a heart condition.   It’s as if the team just found out it’s HIV-positive.  Manageable, perhaps, but a new, starker reality.  And now the fanbase has been left to choose sides, because one of their feuding All-Stars must be to blame.

Everybody’s points are valid, but incomplete.  Maybe Durant is a bit diva-ish; that Draymond can take things way too far is nothing new.  People are so quick to forget!  It’s a goddamned team game – and ain’t about Draymond or Kevin, it’s the whole shebang.  Steph being out certainly precipitated it, but even if his saintly, savior-esque personage hadn’t been absent, it all woulda blown up eventually, as all festering malignancies do, when ignored or mismanaged.  The Warriors had their chance to see the relationship counselor – come June it’ll be time for the divorce lawyer, which’ll be of no use, since there never was any marriage.  

The problem is systematically general, so if you gotta blame someone, blame general manager Bob Meyers – if the Warriors’ glorious tower joy crumbles unceremoniously – or even half as unceremoniously as the shit-show that’ll be looked back on as the first purloin in the veneer, blame those at the top, who unquestionably saw the fires first, and failed in whatever attempts they might have made to put it out… Talking heads claiming special knowledge have said it’s much worse than has so far come out – what Draymond said, behind closed doors, to KD.  I lack the imagination to conjure the connotative destructiveness Draymond’s capable of unleashing…

First things first.  As for the micro-drama at the end of the now infamous Clippers game.  Of course things would fall apart against the Clippers, whose Sterling demons cannot be vanquished by Jerry West’s dignity, nor Steve Ballmer’s madman enthusiasms.  Draymond made a bad play; should have dropped off the rock with Durant and filled a lane.  Minor demerits to both guys.  To say Draymond overreacted would be valid but for its oxymoronic quality.  Which is why KD shoulda held his tongue, at least a bit – that Draymond went bonkers can at least mostly be chalked up to his general unpredictability, which by the way, reeks of MK Ultra mind control.  Perhaps Draymond’s handlers have just been having a bit of fun.

I have no idea what kinda tension’s been building between the two, and normally try to steer clear of gossip, in general, and especially when it comes to anything I actually care about… Alas, my beloved Golden State Warriors… whom I be-love so not for their coincidental geographical positioning in the region of my rearing, but for that aforementioned goddamn joy, which was evident so recently (when Klay broke Steph’s record for 3’s in a game just a few weeks ago).

I hate to say I saw it coming.  And it had nothing to do with KD going to the Knicks or clairvoyant visions of a titanic Draymond meltdown.  It was fucking Bob Meyers up there on stage at last summer’s victory parade.  For the second straight year I watched the shit live-streamed from Oakland to Saigon.  Highly inconvenient, time difference and all.  I say shit because, compared to the year before, the parade was just awful.  The shitty energy shone through the cyber sea-cables.  The drunkenness was embellished.  Even Steph looked shady.  But Bob Meyers with that snarky remark about Durant not being quite as important as the guys who’d been there from the start.  Why not throw Kerr under the bus too while you’re at it?  Get Mark Jackson up there for fuck’s sake!  He’s the coach who midwifed the birth of the Splash Brothers.  Oh it rankled me something fitful.  “And there ended the Warriors’ cohesion,” said Bob Fitzgerald in immediate reaction.  Meyers then jokes, only half sarcastically, saying that yes, that [his bonehead comment from five seconds earlier] would probably be the “first fissure.”  And here’s why it was and is:

The Warriors lost to LeBron when his next two best teammates made it through the Finals halfway healthy.  Led by Draymond, they woo KD aboard.  Half the world calls KD a pussy bitch.  The Warriors alone seem to have his back.  And none more ferociously than Draymond.  Maybe Durant has been lording his impending free agency over his teammates’ heads, I dunno.  Maybe he’s not exactly the guy who made that MVP speech.  I think he is.  I think he’s probably one of the five or six sanest players in the league, along with Klay, Steph, DeRozan, Kevin Love, there’s a few NBA all-stars who, for whatever reason appear to my ignorant eyes as super obviously normal-ass people.  Draymond ain’t one of ‘em.  And I love him.  Because, for no other reason, you need sociopaths like Michael Jordan or Draymond Green if you’re gonna win it all…

It remains to be seen if Bob can keep Kevin satisfied with life in the Bay Area past the summer of 2019.

But Meyers’(albeit) tongue and cheek joshing of Durant at the victory parade illuminated the reality that the organization wasn’t immune to the hypocritical, hyper-criticism of Kevin Durant, based solely on his choice to join the Warriors, who had of course – and this can’t be overemphasized – all but begged him to join them.  

Durant, as has been well-overpublicized, was slow to get over, past, and through the waves of resentment that ricocheted his way upon departing Oklahoma, and which, as his multi-podcast interviewer Bill Simmons recently noted, Durant seemed to have expected to pass in the wake of, if not one, but certainly two titles, back-to-back Finals MVP – if he could enter LeBron’s echelon, in championships… if he could provoke pundits to openly wonder, was/is LeBron unquestionably still the best player on the planet… if he could do all that, then, like the LBJ to Miami Decision deriders, his naysayers would slink back to the oblivion from whence they came… Nobody mentioned the decision once LeBron started winning titles with Bosh and Wade.  But back-to-back titles didn’t stop anonymous idiots and NBA legends alike (Walt Clyde Frazier, for one, who’ll surely change his tune on KD should he opt to become a Knickerbocker) from insisting an asterisks to forever suffix Durant* … in the Akashic annals of basketball, Kevin Durant relegated to a widow’s peak corner in the least prestigious nook of the Basketball Hall of Fame attic – and what Bob Meyers’ dumb-ass mouth-fart revealed for Durant, methinks, was that the Warriors themselves were in on it too, the petty-ass ball-busting, because that’s what Meyers’ comments conveyed – we might love you KD, we might depend on you, but we have our own asterisks for you.  I bet that for Durant that fucking hypothetical asterisks feels as real as a goddamn Star of David on a Jew’s chest, circa the end days of the Weimar Republic. 

The Splash Brothers incubating under JV coach Mark Jackson; JaVale, Bogut, Harrison Barnes beating LeBron and Delly (minus injured Kyrie and K. Love) for the first title since Al Attles – all very cute and quaint.  But it’s now and there’s only now.  They have two of the three best players in basketball.  Klay and Draymond are both top 20 players.  Boogie too.  But I’d scrap everybody if it meant holding onto Steph, KD and Steve Kerr.  Lose Bob Meyers immediately.  I realize now, expunging the last of this vomit that I’ve misspelled his name each and every time.  So be it.  Steve, you shoulda been on this earlier.  I’m sure you did your best.

If Draymond is butt-hurt that KD might do what he did before, leave his current team for greener pastures, if he expected KD to treat his initial signage with the Warriors like some kinda wedding vow, then he’s only guilty of that all too human tendency toward attachment, irrational and idiotic as it is, we humans don’t like change when it don’t benefit us.  Whatever the beef, I’m not surprised Warriors’ management was unable to quell its hideous inertia – because Draymond is the heart and soul of the team… he’s the extrapolation, extension, personification of the whole handcrafted fairy tale, the very emblem of the allegedly more organic acquisition of the players who won 73 games without Durant.  Second round pick fat kid, likely MK Ultra mind control victim, Draymond Green, with the charisma to woo KD spewing a different flavor of the same venom KD’s unlikely to ever understand –

The public suspension (humiliation) of Draymond is the best evidence of management’s guilty conscience.  Pinning it all on the emblem won’t solve shit.  Maybe they can resign Boogie and emerge none the worse for wear.  I don’t think so.

Why not leave, if you’re KD?  Because every other situation would be worse.  The solution?  Go to Charlotte and play with Kemba and for MJ?  Hmm.  The whole team needs an Ayahuasca (or San Pedro) ceremony led by legit shamans (not just a bit of sage and clever witticisms from Phil Jackson) – a team shroom trip at minimum – the Warriors are in need of psychedelic healing… Bob Meyers, if you’re still worth a damn, you’ll call Bill Walton immediately.  Bill Walton could fix this… if his son wasn’t coaching the Lakers.  Too late.  Don’t think he’s available.

The Warriors were miscast as villains.  Till they started turning on each other.  The first public sign I saw was the team president’s innocuous – (so says conventional idiocy) - ribbing of Durant (which if he reacts to, conventional idiocy renders him hypersensitive, i.e. a pussy bitch, i.e., not a man). 

Kevin Durant and Draymond Green are both beautiful basketball players.  I’ll root for them both till they hang it up.  But, and this was the initial point lost on everyone but Durant and his family, Kevin Durant is a MAN… and he might well decide the best team for him is no longer the Warriors, Draymond or no Draymond and if Draymond can’t handle that reality… then he’s as certifiable as the President, of the United States, and perhaps just as culpable as his top supervisor at his job.  

So this is what David West was referring to…

Selah. 

Full Video: You be the judge of Kevin Durant and Draymond Green's now infamous argument in LA

With 2019 on the horizon, will the A's finally nail down a new ballpark site?