Exits: A golden standard

Writer Alan Chazaro on growing up in the Bay Area, a golden dynasty's bad days, and Steph Curry.

Stephen Wardell Curry gives it up to Kevon Looney, who immediately tosses it back to Steph, except, Steph is now two steps in the opposite direction of where he once stood, and suddenly, his defender, a slinky De’Aaron Fox, is trapped in front of Looney, who has suddenly set a screen, but rather than a screen — which seems flimsy, permeable — Loon is more like an immovable wall, and while Fox can only scramble, launching himself sideways and extending vertically towards Golden One Center’s rafters, Curry has already launched the ball above everyone’s skulls with an elegant confidence, transforming the faraway net into a familiar nylon music. Three points.

It’s only three minutes into Game 7 of the first round of the 2023 NBA Playoffs, with the entirety of Sacramento, California, willing themselves against elimination versus a white-jerseyed Golden State Warriors, the defending champs.

And Steph hasn’t even started to cook yet. 

There’s another play, near the end of the 2nd Quarter, where Steph coolly brings the ball past half court. Dray positions himself in front of Curry, forcing Keegan Murray to switch over for Terence Davis. Steph darts right, away from the action. He approaches the three-point ring and dribbles between his legs while continuing to push up the court. Between the legs again, up the court. Between the legs once more. Jabs forward. Hops backward. Lifts. Releases. Murray is outstretched, with too much ground to cover. Three points.

Watching it in real-time has made most of us desensitized to how matrix-bendingly improbable each of his shots are. It’s automatic, in the way muscle memory kicks in when a normal human being might be driving a car, or riding a bike. Steph does that, on repeat — except in front of the planet, with many hoping for his demise. And still, three more points.

When I was a boy growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area — the second son of Mexican immigrants — I didn’t know much about California, or the United States. I just kind of floated through my days, with a mix of Spanish and English at home and school, with neighbors who only spoke Chinese in our apartment building. There wasn’t much footing for me back then, so I constantly pivoted in the way young children with non-native parents do when they don’t know where exactly the basket is — socially, culturally, academically — freezing up instead. But one thing I had was basketball. On blacktops. On TV. On a Super Nintendo console. Sometimes it made me feel good. Other times, it was a confusing mess to my kiddy brain.

One of my earliest NBA memories is actually something that has nothing to do with basketball. It involved Latrell Sprewell, one of the only star players on the local Warriors team at the time, choking then-head coach, P.J. Carlesimo, in practice. For weeks, images of Carlesimo’s red, wrangled neck — presumably from Sprewell’s hands tightening around his windpipe — was shown on the nightly news, with commentary about how disastrous the season in East Oakland had become. They’re themes I would soon get used to — the Warriors losing, and the dangers of the Bay Area. But I never veered away, despite more attractive cities with more attractive superstars making headlines throughout my entire adolescence.

From the time I was in elementary school to the time I was getting ready to transfer out of community college, I had seen my beloved Dubs in exactly zero playoff appearances. None. The first finally came in 2007, with the immortal We Believe unit. It felt electric. But it fizzled out just one season later. Two years after that, in 2009, the franchise would draft a scrawny, injury prone kid out of Davidson — a tiny liberal arts school in the suburbs of North Carolina. And then, in 2013, the unthinkable: a playoff series win under Steph Curry’s emergent wings, against the higher-seeded Denver Nuggets, and the glimmer of a team that might actually prosper beyond one post-season cameo. At that point, I’d seen two playoff series wins in twenty-two years. And Steph still wasn’t an All-Star. It couldn’t get worse.

There’s this thing about Warriors fans where everyone on the internet assumes we only know winning. That as soon as the first piece of golden hardware arrived in Golden State, we all suddenly stopped following some other team, or some other player, to cheer overnight for a roster we knew nothing about or had no prior commitment to or investment in. There’s a blind assumption that, because four championship banners have been hung in the past decade, we have no knowledge as a collective fanbase about struggle, no awareness of the grind. My fellow NBA lover, when I tell you that thousands of us in Dub Nation know more about losing than we do about winning, and more about Lottery Picks than Larry O’Brien, it’ll maybe put into context why the past ten seasons have been fucking orgasmic. Say what you will about Kevin Durant, about Finals MVPs, about injuries, about payroll, about anything and everything else you can conjure up in recent seasons. I’ve heard it all. Whatever your hypothetical is, I’ll respond with this: What I have experienced in the past handful of years as a lifelong fan of my region’s only basketball team since childhood is something I hope every fan base can feel at some point in its existence. Because it hasn’t always been celebratory parades around here; and that’s what makes it so gorgeous to hold, if only for a few glorious years. We went from no one ever noticing us in the room — literally, people ignoring me in a Joe Smith Warriors kit — to being the ones everyone loves to hate — and complaining to me about how we ruined the league. 

In a weird way, this dynasty wasn’t just for the Bay Area’s thirstiest hoop heads. It was for every franchise that has ever been overlooked. The Phoenixes, the Minnesotas, hell, even the Clippers of the world. We grew up watching teams that desperately cycled through coaches, pinned hopes on flawed rookies, and signed washed-up vets like John Starks and Mugsy Bogues in their final years — for two consecutive decades. It may not seem like that today from the outside looking in, but I promise you, Warriors fans were in the trenches longer than most fan bases have been. And it all changed the moment Steph Curry injected us with aspiration after all we’d ever known was abandon.

Before that night ended in California’s capital, Steph signed the history books, yet again, by becoming the first player to ever tally 50 points in a Game 7. Though some will doubt his greatness, as always, those of us who have seen every centimeter of growth, every half-court bullseye, every injury and recovery and misstep and assist will know, deeply, what Steph and Company have meant to our city, to our homes, to our friends, to our families. If this is the end — or nearing the end — of that run, I thank them, humbly.

So when the confetti settles on another dynasty — somewhere far away and distant from what we’ve ever seen — in this hyper-evolving era of basketball, just trust that I’ll still be right here, next to the wide-open Pacific Ocean, where I’ve always been, knowing that the absolute best and the absolute worst days of being a Warriors fan are behind me.