TIDE TURNING ON EVIL EMPIRE OF BASKETBALL
Condemnation of Warriors minority owner exemplifies growing contempt for franchise
It’s not a perfect metaphor, because that would have required Mark Zuckerberg to be the one who leaned over and shoved Kyle Lowry while hollering obscenities at him, but it will have to do.
Instead, it was Mark Stevens, billionaire venture capitalist and Golden State Warriors minority owner, who delivered the offending shove in Game 3 of the NBA Finals, an action that led to his ejection from Oracle Arena and his subsequent banning from the remainder of the series.
And all of a sudden, the storyline that had burbled along in the background of these finals was blown into the open: The Toronto Raptors aren’t just playing against a historically good basketball team, they now find themselves battling the Evil Empire, the team that everyone suddenly loves to hate.
The Warriors are the team of Silicon Valley, a former plucky upstart that rose to prominence right around the same time that the world cottoned onto the fact that tech firms are amassing incredible wealth and trampling over personal privacy and monitoring what you eat and when you sleep.
And now here comes Stevens, in his late 50s, so a little too old to technically be called a tech bro, but still acting remarkably entitled from his five-figure courtside seats. Stevens could have displayed more rich-guy privilege only if he, instead of shoving the Toronto Raptors guard, asked him to bring him a drink. The incident occurred after Lowry ended up in the courtside seats after diving for a loose ball, something that happens a few times in most NBA games. Lowry didn’t touch Stevens, but he leaned over and pushed the Raptor as he was trying to regain his footing.
The condemnation came swiftly, and from all corners, on Thursday.
The Warriors said they were “extremely disappointed” in Stevens’ actions and apologized to Lowry and his team. The NBA players’ association said it expects a zero-tolerance policy for fans touching players, and Stevens’ position as a co-owner “does not alter that view.” The NBA followed that by saying he was banned from all NBA games and Warriors activities for a year, and that he would be fined US$500,000. The league said team representatives must be held to higher standards, and Stevens’ actions were “beyond unacceptable.” LeBron James weighed in to blast Stevens and support Lowry.
Golden State coach Steve Kerr said he would personally apologize to Lowry and the Raptors. Warriors star Steph Curry gave Lowry credit for not losing his temper, and his teammate Draymond Green called the Raptors guard “a true professional.”
Lowry said he appreciated the apologies and that Stevens’ actions were “not a good look for the ownership group they have,” a delicious dig from a guy who knew exactly what he was saying.
But while both teams have bigger things to worry about, including an unsettled NBA championship, the Stevens kerfuffle happened to nicely crystallize the mood that has developed toward the Warriors in recent years. They used to be the team that played in small-market Oakland and were bad far more often than they were good. They had passionate and loud fans, even if their playoff successes amounted to the odd early-round upset. But Curry arrived a decade ago, and a few years after that, venture capitalist Joe Lacob bought the team, along with some other VC types. The Warriors became the team that broke basketball, with Curry leading the way as they won their first NBA title in 2015 and set a record with 73 wins the following season. They were great fun to watch, shooting three-pointers at unprecedented rates and becoming a feel-good story in a league that has traditionally been dominated by big-market glamour franchises.
But after a loss in the 2016 finals, they recruited Kevin Durant, himself a former league MVP, to join them from Oklahoma City, creating a super team that has since won two more titles and caused more than a few fans to wonder if the whole thing wasn’t just a little unfair. And, along the way, the Warriors, with their purposefully vague place name, became less a team of working-class Oakland and more a team of America’s new power centre, the tech wealth of the Bay Area, as personified by firms like Facebook, Google and YouTube that seem to be marching us into a world devoid of quaint notions like actual human contact.
To complete the transition, the team owned by billionaire tech investors will move next season from a blighted part of Oakland to a fancy new building on the San Francisco waterfront.
Local media have developed a whole new genre of story on longtime Warriors fans who have been priced out of tickets in the new digs.
Franchises that win too often, or too easily, often become widely loathed, but the Warriors’ position in the tech mecca nicely complements their new villainy. No one turns from hero to heel as quickly as they have, other than in professional wrestling.
Green put it succinctly after Game 3: “Everybody wants to see us lose.”
He’s not wrong. And that has put the Raptors, weirdly, in a league in which they have ranged from being irrelevant or an object of pity, to being the team that a lot of NBA fans want to see win.
Playing the guys that everyone hates will do that for you.