I’m a lifelong East Bay sports fan.
For professional teams, that means I’ve always rooted for all the Oakland clubs, the A’s, Raiders and Warriors. For many of us who grew up in the East Bay, cheering for a San Francisco team is not an option. Despite the proximity, surely New York Jets, Chicago White Sox, and Anaheim Ducks fans will understand.
There are, though, other reasons we hate San Francisco.
My whole adult life, I’ve been bracing myself for the A’s to leave Oakland. Always my favorite team, they’ve been plagued by poor attendance and an ownership group that hasn’t invested in payroll.
Without getting into the messy details, the A’s offered the Giants the South Bay, now known as Silicon Valley, when they were considering leaving California in the early ‘90s. The Giants built a brand-new park by the Bay instead.
When the A’s later asked for the territory back in their own search, the Giants refused to give it back.
Now the Raiders are leaving for Las Vegas, which is dumb but I honestly have a hard time getting too worked up about it. But the Warriors are moving — for no reason other than money — to San Francisco, leaving the best fan base in the NBA, a fan base that supported them through many lean years before the titles came, high and dry.
Thursday night’s Game 6 was the end of the NBA season, with the Toronto Raptors eliminating the crippled champions on their home floor, but it was also the last game at Oracle Arena, and my last game as a Warriors fan.
It is not my charge to cover the Warriors, except insofar as they impact the Wizards or, occasionally, the broader culture. Given my personal rooting interests, I have largely gone out of my way to avoid writing about them. Aside from a single profile of Steph Curry, a story about the Positive Coaching Alliance that threaded through Steve Kerr, and a couple of book reviews, I left the dynasty well enough alone.
But that dynasty is over, now, regardless of what happens with Kevin Durant or even Klay Thompson this summer.
In my own, personal hierarchy of East Bay sports teams, the Warriors have never been at the top. I’m an A’s fan first, then Cal football and basketball, vestiges of my youth spent at Memorial Stadium and Haas Pavilion. Everything else — the Warriors, the Raiders (mostly because of my dad), even the Sharks (mostly because of my best friend) — came below that, in that order.
The brilliant “We Believe” team of 2007 reignited my dormant fandom, and after cheering Steph Curry through his March Madness runs at Davidson, it’s been a joy to watch him eviscerate expectations and critics alike on his way to becoming one of the very best players in the sport. It doesn’t hurt that the Warriors are also the only one of my teams to win a title since I was six years old, three decades ago.
Despite fierce competition in the category, there is no sports argument on the internet as dumb as calling these Warriors a super team, simply for adding Durant. They drafted and crafted Curry, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson, and were in a position to offer a maximum contract to either a fourth homegrown player whose inconsistency was maddening in Harrison Barnes, or let him walk and plug Durant in, at the same position and cost. Anyone who tells you they would have made the reverse decision is either a fool or a lair.
Still, the Durant years have not been as fun. The team is unquestionably better with him on it — there is no reasonable debate to be had there. But they aren’t as free-flowing in their creative madness that made them so compelling to begin with.
Beyond that, with Durant in tow, there was a clear understanding that every year was championship or bust. When the bar is set at nothing short of perfection, there can never be the purest joy in all of sports, which is exceeding expectation. Titles are not cause for celebration as much as relief.
The combination of another Durant-fueled title run and the creeping dread of the team leaving left me somewhat unenthused about this year’s playoffs. I just wanted to make sure they knocked out the Rockets, because the Rockets have actually ruined basketball, reducing the free-flowing, long-range trigger happiness of the Warriors to a mortar-and-pestled-to-dust math equation, perfecting the art of both crying to and working the referees for every point while also sucking the soul out of one of the more dynamic guards of his era. They are miserable to watch play and deserve no happiness. Sam Jackson expressed my feelings about them best.
But it wasn’t until Durant got hurt — in that series against the Rockets, of course, when everyone pronounced the Warriors dead — that I really cared again. It was glorious watching them toss the Rockets in the trash, then celebrate the 35th anniversary of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” by removing the Trail Blazers’ still-beating heart (uh, spoiler alert, I guess) while setting them aflame.
It was a repudiation of the entire, stupid, super team narrative, a reason to believe they never needed Durant in the first place. If they could win a title without him, this one last time before leaving, it might not make the echo of 3-1 jokes go away forever, but at least it would validate the “Splash Brothers” dynasty to even the most ignorant haters.
But after two home losses, things looked bleak. When fans poured for the exits Friday night in the closing minutes of the Game 4 loss, they were rightly excoriated for doing so. There was every reason to believe that would be the last game at Oracle Arena.
If you were there, and that didn’t mean something special to you, if it wasn’t worth seeing the final seconds tick away to the buzzer, to cheer the team that quenched a biblicalesque 40-year drought with a glorious, wondrous flourish, then you had no business being in the building that night. Those fans were already on their way across the Bay.
When Durant went down again in a heap in Game 5, the Toronto faithful cheering and waving him goodbye before realizing that they’d been caught on camera cheering and waving him goodbye, I just wanted the team to win that one more game, to get the series back to Oracle for one final run.
Of course, once back, I didn’t want them to lose the final game of the dynasty in Oakland. It’s the kind of end-of-life bargaining endemic to human nature, I suppose, grasping for one more game, one more day, one more shot, one more breath, one more anything.
I had long since stopped trying to make time go backward, but found myself wishing I could at least enjoy the final moments. Curry got an open look, down a point, at a wing three, but couldn’t hit.
The confusion of the final seconds, the officials huddling at the monitors, allowed the fair-weather fans to pour out once more to the Coliseum parking lot, leaving only those willing to watch the other team celebrate on their home floor to soak in the final moments in Oakland.
The Warriors’ move to San Francisco hurts so much more because of how unnecessarily cruel it is. Imagine if you were an Orioles fan (condolences for the near future if you are) and, instead of Major League Baseball relocating the Expos to Washington, the Angelos family just decided it would be more lucrative to move their team there instead.
Now, imagine the suffering you’re going through with the on-field product that went on for decades before the team was any good, but then it suddenly was the very best and most exciting team in baseball, winning titles. It was then, at that moment, selling out every game, that the owners decided to pick up and move. Oh, and also that the Ravens decided to ship out to Atlantic City on a whim at the same time.
This final season has been like a movie where the team needs to band together, against all odds, to win in order to save the franchise. Except, instead of everybody cheering for them to pull it off, the entire North American subcontinent is rooting against them, and even if they did find a way to win, we’d still lose the team.
I don’t expect any sympathy from other sports fans when it comes to what happened on the court Thursday night. Titles are titles, injuries are injuries, and what could have been doesn’t matter. Some voodoo doctor jabbing dolls of every Warrior with a first name starting with “K” doesn’t diminish the Raptors’ victory. The universe is cold and unflinching and cares not for sentimental narratives.
A friend of mine once had a quote pinned to some social media profile that read, “nothing would end if it didn’t end badly.” There was never really any good way for the Warriors to end this era in Oakland, not with the full Silicon Valley Borg infiltration of the franchise, which had reduced this last run to just championship attempt Four of Five, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Five One Zero.
When the old Warriors — a step slower, diminished, banged up in their own right — seemed like they might pull off one last title for Oakland anyway, it felt like a perfect parting gift, a sonnet to their first love.
Alas.
Nobody knows what comes next, except for two things: The Warriors are no longer unbeatable, and they no longer belong to Oakland.
