Appreciating Warriors' Ascent Requires Memory of Franchise's Dark Days
The Golden State Warriors notched their 60th win of the 2014-15 NBA season before the calendar flipped to April, which is impressive in any context.
It's flat-out mind-blowing when you consider the decades-long parade of horrors that preceded it.
One good way to appreciate that franchise-record 60th win—and all that it means about the Dubs' position atop the NBA hierarchy—is to consider the fact that in the three seasons from 1998-99 until 2000-01, they won 57 games combined.
You could drink in the dozen straight years from 1994 to 2006 in which the Warriors failed to make the playoffs.
You could remember the blown lottery picks: Todd Fuller, Ike Diogu, Patrick O'Bryant and Ekpe Udoh.
Here's a breakdown of notable misses and the players available (hindsight being 20/20 and all):
| 1995 | Joe Smith | Kevin Garnett |
| 1996 | Todd Fuller | Kobe Bryant |
| 1997 | Adonal Foyle | Tracy McGrady |
| 1998 | Vince Carter | Dirk Nowitzki |
| 1999 | Jeff Foster | Andrei Kirilenko |
| 2001 | Jason Richardson | Tony Parker |
| 2002 | Mike Dunleavy | Amar'e Stoudemire |
| 2003 | Mickael Pietrus | David West |
| 2004 | Andris Biedrins | Josh Smith |
| 2005 | Ike Diogu | Andrew Bynum |
| 2006 | Patrick O'Bryant | Rajon Rondo |
| 2007 | Brandon Wright | Joakim Noah |
You could take a spin on a tragi-comic coaching carousel that included P.J. Carlesimo, Brian Winters, Garry St. Jean, Dave Cowens and Mike Montgomery.
Those guys are all good ways to get some perspective on just how remarkable Golden State's revival has been.
But they're not the best way.
Vonteego Cummings is the best way.
He is what used to pass for hope in Golden State.
This isn't a knock on Cummings individually. The No. 26 overall pick in the 1999 NBA draft wound up on the Warriors in exchange for Jeff Foster that year, and he played as hard as any rookie out to prove himself would have under the circumstances.
But he clearly wasn't an impactful NBA talent, as his three-year career quickly proved. Chances are, you've never even heard of him.
Despite that, Cummings (for a brief period in plenty of hopeful, desperate, downtrodden Warriors' fans lives) represented a potential path toward redemption. He was young, he was new in town, and Dubs loyalists didn't yet know he wouldn't pan out.
When a 24-year-old Cummings shot 34.4 percent from the field in his second season, everyone realized he wasn't worth pinning hopes to. Then he was gone, replaced by the next undeserving repository of optimism.
This cycle repeated itself ad nauseam, sometimes with players of Cummings' forgettable ilk, sometimes with more promising (though ultimately more disappointing) names like Gilbert Arenas and Antawn Jamison.
For years, decades, this continued.
There was Larry Hughes, Bobby Sura, Marc Jackson and Danny Fortson.
Chris Porter.
Erick Dampier.
Even Anthony Randolph.
The list goes on forever.
There were reprieves, such as when Baron Davis arrived via trade in 2005 and helped the Warriors get their win totals into the 30s and 40s for a few years, culminating in a first-round upset of the Dallas Mavericks in 2007. After Davis and Don Nelson (in his second tour of duty) helped the Dubs reach that improbable high, things predictably fell apart, and five more postseason-less campaigns ensued.
The constant through all of this was former owner Chris Cohan.
In 2002, the heart of Golden State's darkest period, Mark Fainaru-Wada of the San Francisco Chronicle did a thorough investigative report on Cohan. In addition to lambasting his litigiousness and seemingly poor track record of, you know, treating employees well, Fainaru-Wada also tied Cohan directly to the moment at which the Warriors went off a cliff:
"When Cohan acquired the Warriors in 1994, they were coming off their second 50-win season in three years, they had a waiting list for season tickets, they had sold out 229 consecutive games at the 15,025-seat arena and they were well-regarded throughout the league for their overall management.
"
Cohan sided with Nelson (then in his first tour with Golden State) in a spat between the coach and Rookie of the Year Chris Webber. C-Webb was dealt to the Washington Bullets, and then Nelson resigned anyway.
So began the dark ages.
From 1994-95 through 2009-10, the Warriors won 37.3 percent of their games under Cohan, which was the fourth-lowest success rate in the league during that span, according to Basketball-Reference.com.
Mercifully, Cohan sold the team to Joe Lacob in 2010.
Lacob's track record since buying the team in 2010 hasn't been perfect, but even his mistakes were defensible at the time. Giving David Lee a massive contract in a sign-and-trade and then hiring Mark Jackson don't look great now. But at the time, for a franchise that needed to be relevant more than anything, the moves made a certain sense.
Fans infamously booed Lacob in 2012 after a trade sent Monta Ellis to the Milwaukee Bucks for Andrew Bogut. It was a truly bizarre, surreal response from a fanbase that sat passively through years of awful management only to rise up in shortsighted fury against bold, dedicated leadership.
Twenty years of pain can make a mob fickler than usual, it seems.
A couple of solid seasons under Jackson gave way to what we have now: a model franchise tearing up the competition.
There are no more Vonteego Cummingses, no more symbols of the desperately misplaced hope that defined so many ugly years for the Warriors and their fans.
Now, the hopes are as real as the talent—justified and supported by obvious on-court results. The dreams are bigger too.
Stephen Curry celebrated the team's clinched Pacific Division crown but hinted at bigger goals:
Golden State is dominating the league on both ends, crushing one of the most difficult Western Conferences we've ever seen and still positioning itself to keep this group together for at least another few seasons.
Fans don't need to fool themselves anymore. The days of Vonteego are over, but it's important to remember them, if only to highlight how far the franchise has come.
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