The Twilight of the Golden State Warriors: Basketball Dynasties and the Meaning of Everything
Sure, why not start with the pyramids? Around four thousand five hundred years ago, Khufu, pharaoh of Egypt, second king of the fourth dynasty, dreamed of a grand structure, a titanic monument of limestone and granite to stand for time immemorial. The dream demanded decades of careful craftsmanship, millions of hours hauling tons of limestone across the scorching desert, and tens of thousands of builders, bakers, physicians, and priests. It stood nearly five hundred feet tall, encased in polished limestone that gleamed in the sunlight, giving the colossal tomb an ethereal glow. When it was finished, the dream was filled with treasure to accompany Khufu on his journey to the final world, the dream world that never ends. In its time, the temple must have truly been a spectacle, but such wonder has not left the modern eye, for even today some still wonder whether such a structure could have been built by a civilization of this world.
Today, Khufu’s dream is known as the Great Pyramid at Giza. Go to Cairo today and you’ll see the Pyramids towering over the city, mocking concrete, glass, and steel. Over the past few thousand years, the shimmering stone has eroded away, leaving jagged terraces and gashes. Yet in defiance of the elements, the pyramids stand, silently proclaiming their place in the desert.
During ancient Egyptian history, Khufu lived during the ‘Old Kingdom,’ midway through the first contiguous dynasty in world history. As Egypt unified from a collection of disparate tribes and city-states into one of the first regional powers, rulers developed nomenclature to link themselves to nascent royal lineages, bringing an etymological order to an otherwise brutal succession process. Before Khufu, King Menes unified Egypt and founded Memphis, the capital city of ancient Egypt. But, according to historians, Menes may be a “creation of the record,” a fictitious character later rulers invented to tie themselves to the mythic founding of Memphis. But names were only the beginning.
Pre-modern kings quickly realized the value of legitimizing and justifying their rule through visual and written rhetoric, a symbolic conquest from victory on the battlefield to projections of power across culture. From this trajectory, narratives, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, emerged, grafting meaning through mythology onto the world. But such order, no matter the grandiosity, fades -- it’s destined to. Khufu’s dynasty was eroded away over hundreds of years, and eventually Egypt was defeated by a younger, more powerful rival in the West -- the Roman Empire.
I could spend hours tracing the story of the pyramids to today. But I’m telling you now because the Great Pyramid of Giza was the child of one of the world’s first dynasties. And I’m writing today because one of the world’s latest dynasties just died. I am, of course, talking about the NBA’s Golden State Warriors.
On Tuesday, April 16th, 2024, I watched the Warriors’ stars gasping for breath, hounded by the unrelenting Sacramento Kings. Klay Thompson launched the basketball into empty space ten times, Steph Curry doggedly drove through traffic only to be blocked by younger, more athletic bodies in the paint, Draymond Green did everything in his power to keep his cool and avoid the emotional eruptions that plagued the team the past two years. When the game ended, I almost cried. I couldn’t help myself. I’m not even a Warriors fan, but seeing the once indomitable stars groan under the pressure of a hungry young team pulled me into their pain. Their era was over, and the world would soon move on.
Watching the Warriors’ downfall this postseason, one can’t help but think about the big questions -- what does it mean for greatness to drift? For legacies to end? Does Steph Curry being the greatest shooter of all time even matter with up-and-coming players who can do this?
To answer that, let’s turn the clock back fifteen years. In 2009, San Francisco braced for a rocky year. Still reeling from the Great Recession, San Franciscans knew times ahead wouldn’t be easy -- but the city had been here before. In fact, San Francisco has been in a prolonged boom and bust cycle since the middle of the nineteenth century when James W. Marshall struck gold at Sutter’s Mill in sleepy Coloma, California, spurring thousands of prospectors to seek their fortunes and a few clever entrepreneurs to supply jeans and chocolate to the threadbare, hungry gold-seekers. Unfortunately, not long after the Gold Rush ended, much of San Francisco’s wealth was wiped away by a catastrophic earthquake, but the city rebounded and rebuilt quickly, building some of its most impressive infrastructure in the subsequent decades, including the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges. In the last hundred years, the city’s fortune has ebbed and flowed like the tides flowing through the San Francisco Bay, from postwar deindustrialization in the 1950s to the dot com bubble in the 1990s and then the internet era.
Enter 2009. In what turned out to be a monumental year for the Bay Area, the Golden State Warriors drafted Stephen Curry, a skinny seventh pick who would go on to be widely regarded as the greatest shooter of all time. A few miles south in Menlo Park, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz began Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm that funded Facebook, Instagram, Lyft, AirBnb, Slack, pumping billions of dollars into San Francisco and the Silicon Valley. Over the next thirteen years, Curry was joined by Klay Thompson and Draymond Green, a trio that bent the basketball world to heel (six trips to the NBA Finals, four championships) while the tech industry launched the Bay Area into stratospheric wealth. From 2009 to 2022 SF Bay area GDP nearly doubled, including one ridiculous year (2016) where the GDP grew eighteen percent, more than any other year in decades. As it so happens, 2016 was also the year Kevin Durant found his way to the Warriors, supercharging a team that had set the NBA record for most wins in a single season (73-9) the previous year. During those golden years, San Francisco emerged as a preeminent global supercity, a basketball powerhouse, and a tech juggernaut. But underneath all this winning and growth, the city (and the basketball world) grew more unequal. In 1995, the city’s average home value was about double the national mean; a quarter century later, it was five times as much. Over the past decade, incomes have risen eighty-seven percent for San Franciscans in the top ten income decile and only thirty-six percent for those in the bottom decile. A recent report by the San Francisco Chronicle listed SF as the third most unequal city in the United States (behind NYC and Chicago). In the NBA-verse, the Warriors’ utter dominance created different inequalities. Before KD joined the Dubs (shortening of Ws), Steph Curry received the Most Valuable Player (MVP) award for the 2015-16 season unanimously, receiving all 131 first-place votes, a feat that has not and will likely never be duplicated. With KD, the Warriors went on to set an NBA record for best postseason win percentage (one loss to LeBron James’s Cleveland Cavaliers) and dominated the league so thoroughly articles like “This Boring NBA Postseason Isn't Your Fault, It's Ours,” started popping up, bemoaning the unequal geographic distribution of basketball talent. San Francisco seemed destined to rise, ever higher. Until it didn’t.
In 2019, Achilles and ACL injuries in the NBA finals (temporarily) halted the Warriors’ dynastic aspirations. The subsequent year, the world was plunged into the throes of COVID-19, sending tech workers fleeing for cheaper rents and causing a precipitous drop in tourism and business travel to San Francisco. As the pandemic recedes, nearly a quarter of offices downtown are said to be vacant, the worst rate in the nation. Drug overdose deaths are surging; car break-ins almost doubled in 2021. In a cosmic parallel to the city’s struggle and frustration, Draymond Green infamously punched teammate Jordan Poole, ruining the Warriors’ 2022/23 season and catalyzing the beginning of the end for this version of the Dubs. Ironically enough, “the Punch” coincided with the rise of the “San Francisco Doom Loop” narrative, a nasty media trend featuring hundreds of articles heralding the fall of a once-great city into chaos and lawlessness (as well as exhortations to move to younger, more dynamic rival cities -- thanks Austin and Nashville). As San Francisco wobbles back to post-pandemic normalcy, one senses that the city is on the precipice of a new era -- mayoral candidates bemoan the city’s over-reliance on the tech industry and proselytize a mixed industry future while a healthy Warriors squad isn’t in the postseason for the first time since 2012.
I moved to San Francisco in early 2024, post-tech boom, post-Dubs dynasty, and settled into a cozy neighborhood called Nob Hill. I chose to live there because it’s close to the Financial District, where I work, but as I got to know the neighborhood, I started to see echoes of San Francisco’s past, present, and perhaps future. Thanks to its central position in the city and perch atop California Street, Nob Hill once attracted the wealthiest San Franciscans, the nabobs. Unfortunately, the nabobs lost their mansions and money in that 1906 fire. Naturally, the wealth flowed out of Nob Hill to posh Pacific Heights and Cow Hollow and hotels were erected atop the burned-out buildings. Today, Nob Hill exists as a sort of liminal space between the most affluent neighborhoods (Pacific Heights to the West and Russian Hill to the North) and the poorest (Tenderloin to the South and Chinatown to the East). Depending on who you talk to in the city, my neighborhood is cast as the mildly-dangerous-but-still-acceptable “Tender-Nob” or warmly chided as “Snob Hill.” Walk down Pine Street and you’ll see people sleeping on the street while self-driving cars glide by. Spend some time in San Francisco politics and you’ll hear competing visions for a city at a “crossroads,” awaiting a fresh destiny, a new dynasty…
Dynasties are a strange thing -- once eminently consequential matters of political succession have morphed into sports franchises worth billions competing for trophies and rings and reality television fodder. It would be easy to diminish the importance of dynasties in our enlightened twenty-first century society, but a careful examination reveals a collective obsession. From the media we consume (Duck Dynasty, Game of Thrones, Succession) to the celebrities and business people we venerate (Kennedys, Kardashians, Clintons, Bushes, Obamas, Trumps) we cannot keep our eyes or attention away. Maybe it’s because there’s something deeply human about them, wrapped in family, power, sex, money, maybe meaning itself. Dynasty is Egypt and Rome and America and San Francisco and Basketball -- a single thread, weaving meaning into a world where it often feels absent.
Thus the beauty of basketball, where inside a ninety by fifty-four-foot oasis, everything makes sense. In basketball, we’ve created an objective world, a rational place, bound by the logic of offense and defense, makes and misses, winners and losers. And within that little world, we participate in the coronation of new kings and queens and the dynasties they build in buzzer beaters and blocks. There’s almost something sacred to basketball, the regularity of games and seasons (uninterrupted, even by global pandemics), the orderly procession of bodies into seats, carefully-colored vestments, the erasure of racial, political, socioeconomic boundaries, united in the desire for the superstar to score, the objective truth in the final score and stats. The spectacle of it all.
In the twilight days of France’s dynastic period, before Napoleon conquered the world, he conquered his country’s heart. In a 1997 New Yorker piece about Napoleon’s legacy, Adam Gopnik wrote “In this way, the outward show of the Napoleonic era—the uniforms, the bobbing plumes, the sabres, the ostrich skins and gold-headed canes—was the most lasting thing about it … It seems to fill a deep human need for display, order, glamour that no other system of modern honor has yet quite managed to do.” Perhaps human beings need to be immersed in such a system to make sense of the world. Perhaps the alternative, the notion that none of this means anything and we are spinning toward an endless void, is too terrible to contemplate. Napoleon, like the Egyptian pharaohs before him, understood the importance of the show, the spectacle. And today so do basketball teams. The German philosopher Hegel, upon seeing Napoleon, once wrote “I saw the Emperor – this soul of the world – go out from the city to survey his reign; it is a truly wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrating on one point while seated on a horse, stretches over the world and dominates it.” Today, one might write the same about Steph Curry, the soul of basketball, the soul of David, that small shepherd, rising from the backcourt, concentrating on the hoop thirty-five-feet away, burying a buzzer-beater over seven-foot Goliaths to send eighteen thousand fans into rapturous applause. There is something transcendent about watching NBA superstars, who, at times, transform from abnormally tall human beings to avatars, projections of ourselves. Kevin Durant, opining on his fans’ Twitter DMs said, “[to them, KD is] just an abstraction, a guy on the TV, a figment of their imaginations … they project onto him the pain or hatred or longing that they actually feel about real things in their own lives.”
Our own lives…
Basketball has been with me for a long time. At the ragged edge of childhood memory, I saw one of Kobe Bryant’s final games on a chilly New Year’s Eve at TD Garden. At the time, I didn’t care about the game or the players; watching the Boston Celtics meant a couple hours with my dad and grandfather, the only time we ever spent together, just the three of us. From elementary to high school, as far as I was concerned, watching professional sports was a waste of time. Why so many people cared so much about people they would never know running up and down a court to shoot a rubber ball was beyond comprehension. As a skinny, mediocre cross country runner, athletics felt more trivial than transcendent and I took up video games and YouTube and books instead.
Midway through college, I accidentally discovered pickup basketball. Initially, it was excruciating and embarrassing. Soon, it was a revelation. After one intense three v three, a few fellow hoopers invited me to watch the NBA playoffs in their dorm room. I didn’t have anything better to do, so I came along. I remember watching Giannis Antetokounmpo, a 6’ 11” titan nicknamed “the Greek Freak,” power through bodies en route to the basket, an unstoppable force of skill and athleticism. Unfortunately, that year Giannis was bested by my dad and grandfather’s Boston Celtics, who went on to lose to, surprise, surprise, the Golden State Warriors, whose Steph Curry summoned a 50 point supernova to put the Celtics away. My family and (new) New England friends were devastated and I began to feel a tug toward these teams that gave me a reason to call Grandpa Joe to talk about Jayson Tatum’s streaky shooting, fodder for small talk around the office (Did-you-see-Jamal-Murray-hit-that-buzzer-beater-over-AD-last-night?), and a pride and connection to the city I lived in. Sometimes, when life feels heavy, I’ll shoot free throws until my arms get sore. Flip open my phone to check a score or two on the bus. Glance at a game for a few minutes at a bar.
Other than for a select few thousand unusually athletic human beings and those who cover and support them, sports are not the main focus of life. They probably aren’t even the secondary or tertiary focus. But they matter. A lot. In a world drifting from the deep meanings we used to hold to, sports are an arena where significance is unassailed. To some, this might feel a little sad, maybe childish. When there are so many other things that are so much more important to care about, why should any energy go to basketball? Instead of checking scores and stats, perhaps I should be volunteering, protesting, gardening, practically anything else. Fair enough.
But there’s something else there too. Sports answer a deep human need, a desire for things to make sense, to witness greatness, to see the best of what human beings can be. In a piece about basketball that inspired this one, Sam Anderson, a NYT magazine writer wrote, “We are ravenous for meaning. We want to know that what we do matters, because lord knows there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.” Sports and dynasties don’t need to matter in an objective sense, they can’t. The Warriors winning an abnormal number of championships in the past few years doesn’t really matter. Shooting a rubber basketball into a metal hoop doesn’t mean anything. But it also means everything. Because that’s what it means to be a human being -- we create games, dynasties, meaning, from nothing. Rather than accept the world as a range of sensory inputs, we think, we dream, we love. We write stories to contextualize our family, society, world, universe, and create games and art and architecture to embody the Truths in the stories we tell. It’s our destiny and we love doing it. We can’t stop watching it. Watch some basketball this summer. You’ll see thousands of people watching ten guys run around a court, desperately longing to see their team make a shot or prevent the other team from doing so, a beautiful, profound display of the human spirit that strives and weeps and rages and gets knocked down but rises, through the pain to reach higher, higher than the basketball rim, higher than the Golden Gate Bridge, higher and higher, toward the stars or wherever we think the pyramids came from.
Beautifully written!
Principle 83: “Sports are a universal unifier which should be appreciated accordingly”
no tears for me on the end of the warriors ‘dynasty’, happy the lakers and bron bron put an end to them