Exits: The dynamics of power
The Golden State Warriors are a dynasty, right down to its origins.
Dynasty, in its roots, a word that means “to be able to”. The function, initially, to suggest capability — the power to put something, or yourself, in motion. Dynasthai. How beautiful a word to describe the coiling, gathering, bunched intent of action about to unfold. Nothing about success, whether or not the means will meet a good ends, only the feeling of surety that supersedes it.
In the origins of the word, too, comes the best counter to any arguments to the Warriors claim on what it’s come to mean. There is no team more loaded with “the ability to” than Golden State. The ability to perform, to mystify, to make short work of, to pummel, to play with their proverbial food, to execute, to win.
Are the Warriors easy to hate or hard to love? There’s a difference.
I think of the period of grace the team got last season, when they missed the playoffs for the 2nd time in a row. Klay Thompson out, Draymond Green drifting, Steph Curry coming to lead, in fits and starts, a ragtag group a team like Golden State hadn’t seen in so long. Dynasty, then, as something to remind yourself of, that you may still be capable, and able, even if the circumstances don’t permit it.
The parable of the Warriors being a dynasty or not best illustrated in how quickly they made the journey back into root-for-able when it was some patchwork of Curry, Juan Toscano-Anderson, Kelly Oubre Jr., Kent Bazemore, Mychal Mulder, and a still trepidatious Andrew Wiggins taking the floor night after night. A version of the team finally brought low enough to feel sorry for, to invert the collective opinion of them to likeable, because when had Golden State last needed to be “scrappy”? Relatable? And then, in the span of a season (less), its heroes back to full health, a brash and smiling juggernaut reborn, and the team was easy — seemed necessary, a return to natural order — to disparage again.
Is greatness always reviled? In some form, yes.
I still can’t figure out if Green was putting us all on in the Finals when he looked so maddened, game after game, by Boston. Whether he had let the Celtics slip under his skin by choice, more fuel for him to burn through and propel his team by, or if it had happened by force, a gradual grinding down from all the games that came before that series.
When he fell, furious, onto and for the moving target of Grant Williams; or later in Game 2, to tumble with Jaylen Brown and come to sit like two kids playing train at the sideline, Green shoving Brown in the back from his spot as caboose. Both before the half. Game 3, colliding again with Williams, later, shoving Marcus Smart off a loose ball pile-on that got him thrown out and for minute, looked like it got Curry hurt. Benched in Game 4, smacking Jayson Tatum in the face in Game 5 with enough force on a box out that in slow motion replay the skin on Tatum’s already taut cheeks ripples and then, trailing Tatum to the Boston bench because he wouldn’t give the ball up, the earlier hit no doubt still alight in his orbital bone.
To go back to another word’s origins, that clown in one of its earliest meanings, in Roman, is fossor, a grave digger. This is the kind of gravity that Green can take with him around the floor, sizing up his marks as if he is fitting them for the hypothetical, theatric plot in which he plans to gently lay them down. It’s not enough for him to just disarm or disrupt, Green’s expert practice is a complete and total psychic dismantling of his opponents. Digging their competitive grave while he whistles.
Seeing him ruffled, upended here and there at his own trade, was the first time it appeared he’d lost a step. Even his slipped offensive efforts in the Finals — his true shooting percentage of 39% one of the worst in Finals history for a player with significant minutes — felt secondary to this crack in the meticulously maintained and lovingly polished armour of Green’s genial cunning.
But Green, better than most, understands what it is to reenforce the vulnerable parts of your public-facing prowess with an admission of the very same.
“I wear my badge of honour,“ Green said after the Game 2 snarl with Brown, “It’s not that I’m saying they necessarily treat me different. I’ve earned deferential treatment from refs. I enjoy that. I embrace that.”
The Warriors, and Green, may not be slowing, but they are changing. Curry’s tempo will shift, but his team will shift with him. Thompson may take longer in a game to warm so he’s vibrating at the exact frequency where every shot, perfectly alchemized, sinks, but he’ll always heat up. And Green may show more signs of obvious umbrage, but if there’s anyone you want to find more sources of combustion for, it’s him.
With Wiggins, Jordan Poole, Jonathan Kuminga, Moses Moody and whether you believe now or later, James Wisman, there is a new iteration of Golden State starting to glow. What they will never do is eclipse the current core. Curry has said as much hinting at next year’s impending extension of Green, that he believes the two of them and Thompson are the trifecta this particular dynasty is built on. Basically, that Green must get paid.
He never said dynasty, no, but when there is no real developmental plan in place to expedite growth for the team’s young athletes into leading roles it’s clear the faith of the front office is in the function and capability of those three as its still perpetually rising suns. And anyway, “dynamic”, meaning motion, progress, or the kind of shifting change we can see starting around the Warriors’ edges, takes its origins from the same root: power. The dynamics of that are still here, flowing through every well-worn step back to the top.
This is a city that went from a population of 459 souls scratching it out on hardly favourable or friendly terrain to a boom in the gold rush that saw the incoming swarms of miners, panners, and people just keen to find a livelihood in the outlying hills leave so many ships abandoned in the Bay that the Port of San Francisco looked like an eerily shredded forest. Boats were repurposed as store houses, hotels, shops, or else rotted and sunk. Eventually, that entire portion of the bay was filled in so the city could expand out over it.
A city that shook and burned so badly that 1/3 of it was reduced to rubble in 1906, built back up quickly, and shook again in 1989, this time televised during the World Series between the A’s and Giants and took apart some of the Bay Bridge, the real and symbolic connection between those two teams. A city that built two of its most iconic, necessary, and easy to consider as always having been there public works projects of the Golden and Bay Bridges during the height of the Great Depression, so impervious to the stock market’s collapse because of the city’s booming financial sector as to string 83,000 tons of steel across 1.7 miles above water, why not?
The 20 year damming of Hetch Hetchy to the city’s current water crisis, the centre of the gay rights movement and the assassination of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, a place that would not have grown at the profound breadth, clip and grandeur that it did without the help of immigrants working in its streets, outlying farmland and earlier mines but leaned hard into exclusion acts, internment camps and redlining all the same. A magnet for counterculture because it proved an affordable, altruistic place to live, housing the Beats, Black Panthers, left-leaning political and labour movements, with a jail island just off its shores. A haven, once, or a haven always for some, unattainable to others, caught in a pattern of give and take as new powers rise, like now, in the tech giants that have come to settle and sap among its slanted streets, with a ruling class of all the people it takes to maintain them pushing the last hierarchy out.
This is a city with 50 hills within its municipal limits, that sits between two fault lines, with handfuls of neighbourhoods built on landfill over water that will eventually be reclaimed by the Pacific, prowling immutable to the west.
The Warriors are not so different than the city they play for, seen best and most recent in the shift from Oakland to Mission Bay, generational fans priced out in favour of an arena that could house wine fridges underneath the court for its richest season ticket holders.
I think of a city like San Francisco and I want to categorize its history by its topography, its dips and swells and the rare times all of it has crumbled to level, only to rise again. The fleeting colour and verve of it still there, if rare, like the red-masked parakeets that flit around Telegraph Hill. But the city’s rise and history has always been one of steady dominion, whether over the natural world or those deemed lesser than, glad-handed off from one dynasty to the next. I think of the times I’ve been there, climbed Russian Hill for the view only to turn back from the top and find the city hidden under a carpet of fog; went to seek sun only to be scoured by wind on Ocean Beach; dozed off after getting in late only to be woken minutes later to fire alarms, sirens, smoke seeping under the door, my hotel burning down in the night. Felt the cold shoulder of the city as I strained to get to its symbolic, picturesque or respite heart.
Dynasty is belonging by no qualification other than blood. The most active ingredient to a body and still, something we can hardly lay any claim over. A passive propulsion. A feat of total remove. Isn’t that what it feels like, watching the Warriors? A team that all others will be held against but moves and works with an impervious disconnect to comparison, that knows itself only within this current lifecycle of dynastic claim, no point in looking beyond because once this is over, it’s done. Once this is over, whenever that is, there will have been and never be anything like it, like them, in the modern makeup of the NBA.
Think you saved the best of these for last. This is phenomenally good.