With the Warriors currently running roughshod over the NBA landscape like a kaiju attacking the Golden Gate Bridge, it is easy to forget that the Bay Area wasn’t always the epicenter of professional basketball. Oakland was once NBA backwaters, a nowheresville where players’ careers came to quiet, inconsequential ends on the regular (Chris Mills, Terry Cummings, Chris Webber, et al). For most of the 90s and 00s, Golden State was a swamp of mediocre basketball whose tributary was a sea of bad trades and bungled draft picks. But in 2010, a brash Silicon Valley venture capitalist named Joe Lacob purchased the team from recluse owner Chris Cohan and ushered in a new era for the franchise, one that emphasized difficult-to-comprehend concepts such as: “Don’t trade away your best player after his rookie season” (the Chris Webber fiasco); “Don’t give max salaries to non-max guys” (the Antawn Jamison contract); and “Let’s not draft Todd Fuller over Kobe Bryant” (drafting Todd Fuller over Kobe Bryant).
Light Years: How Warriors Management Built a Juggernaut
