Ethan Sherwood Strauss - The Victory Machine: The Making & Unmaking of the Warriors Dynasty

T HE NBA ARENA IS A FORTRESS UNDER SIEGE . O THER TEAMS show up, seeking to dominate you, trying to kill you. They want a victory, but not just that. They want whats rightfully yours. They seek to be the ones with the wins, the TV ratings, the cash, and yes, even your most skilled warriors. Their scouts are in your building, probing for weaknesses. Their general manager is talking up your star players agent. Those two are friends, and theyre working to ruin a half decade of meticulous planningthe fortress youve built. Overwhelming success is the only bulwark against their schemes. You must win, win big enough to prevent defection. Because after defection comes the deluge: the losses, the firings, the numbing obscurity. The NBA, a very top-down sport, marketed around a select few superstars, is bleak at the bottom.

This just isnt a normal business, though it might be business at its most base level. Its a Darwinian contest where the companys proxies physically do battle. This is not an industry for the faint of heart.

In a July 2017 New York Times article headlined, The Lawyer, the Addict, a lawyer explains the stress inherent to his profession, saying, Being a surgeon is stressful, for instancebut not in the same way. It would be like having another surgeon across the table from you trying to undo your operation. In law, you are financially rewarded for being hostile. The NBA is just like that, but with larger sums of money, celebrity, and worldwide scrutiny.

The game is vicious. Basketball is marketed to the public as joyful, but behind the scenes, its run on hypermasculine cruelty, the kind that has mostly been purged from civilized life.

Heres what I mean, and its not an entirely aggressive example, just a sadistic one. There was an end-of-the-bench player who had a good run of games. Perhaps hed finally broken through and found a job in the league. This would mean financial security and salvation from a dreary career in Europe, which comes with a regimented lifestyle American professional basketball players tend to bemoan (European coaches have a reputation for treating their players like hired help).

His locker neighbor was a veteran, secure in his job. So Bench Guy has a poor game. Then another. And another. In response to the third bad outing, the veteran moves a bunch of his stuff into the Bench Guys locker. I just needed the space, he says with a shrug. Bench Guy flies at the veteran, as teammates rush in to separate the two. I just needed the space, the veteran repeats, this time smirking. The implication is clear: You arent long for this league, so Im taking advantage of your cooling corpse. In this world, the weak get eaten. Again. Darwinian.

Justin Holiday, Bench Guy, went on to carve out a decent role and stick in the league. Andre Iguodala, the veteran, continued to be hard on every younger Warrior under his dominion. Andre knew harshness to be a teacher. It was classic hazing, really: the kind of mentorship that is acceptable in a cruel business. It was Andres bizarre way of showing he cared while also showing that this world is a cold one.

Most teammates arent friends with one another, despite what you might think from all the televised high fives and daps. Sure, theres camaraderie, something ineffable that I cannot parse in these pages. Youd have to play, I believe, to truly understand what its like to share a repeated, collaborative adrenaline rush with someone you share no other kind of bond with. But these guys, usually, cannot be friends, because the conditions dictate otherwise. Winning is generally good for all, but your teammates exploits can easily come at your expense. If the guy next to you succeeds, he gets your touches, your minutes, and ultimately your money. All NBA salaries are public and vary by tens of millions.

Theres another factor at play here, something that comes up when you ask teams and agents about their players: many athletes like to live atop a hierarchy, inside a portable bubble. The bubble can be preferable to deep friendship with NBA peers. Theres a reason players have entourages, beyond how much they enjoy their friends from back home. Its also that your friends revolve around you. Every day, everyone drives where you want to drive, eats where you want to eat. When you go to the club, you get the hottest girl. Thats a given. Sure youll hang out with your teammates on occasion, but egalitarianism just isnt as fun. Also, sometimes these guys, kings in their own right, have other commitments. The portable bubble, on the other hand, is always available and its forever telling you that youre better than those teammates. Your teammates never admit to being worse than you. The bastards.

Resentment runs deep, as does paranoia. Everyone is a threat to be ended. Many of these men clawed their way out of desperate poverty and into cartoonish wealth by dispatching one threat after the next. They are under the gun, but wholly cocksure. Their confidence is earned, validated beyond the wildest dreams of friends back home.

This vibe of swashbuckling insecurity is not confined to the locker room. It infects coaches, general managers, agents, and sneaker executives. Someone is coming for you, but youve beaten all comers thus far. Everyones primed for a fight and everyone thinks hell win that fight.

The egos do battle in palaces replete with intrigue. There are twenty-nine NBA arenas (the Lakers and Clippers share one, at least for now), and each is its own little castle, each controlled by a different king. That would be the team owner, often an impatient billionaire who seeks to run the company as a family business. For the Lakers, this dynamic led to siblings fighting over control in a manner only slightly less brutal than Ottoman-era fratricide. In the NBA, nepotism can cripple a franchise, especially since theres no possibility of a shareholder revolt, or other market corrective. A prodigal son can mismanage a multibillion-dollar entity with no recourse, in perpetuity. This is what happened to the once proud New York Knicks, when patriarch cable tycoon Charles Dolan handed the franchise to his son, bumbling blues aficionado James Dolan. The Knicks have been a laughingstock for nearly two decades since, and nothing can be done. All are powerless to stop a man who projects no leadership.