The Golden State Warriors have been lots of things, but what they are most is the eye-of-the-beholder phenomenon you always knew they were going to be.
In other words, they shall be caricatured both for the good and ill they do, mercilessly, and without respite. And four games into the new season, the dichotomy is already up to speed - which is more than can be said for the Warriors.
On the same night – Monday – that Stephen Curry is seen comforting the nephew of Dallas Maverick player Devin Harris, whose father died in a car accident, the Mavs are in full fume because rookie Jordan Bell lobbed to himself for a meaningless dunk in a lopsided game. That was two nights after Curry got ejected and fined $50K for hurling his mouthpiece in the direction of official Scott Wall. They were 2015 likable and 2018 arrogant all at once.
And that is the only true way of understanding what the Warriors are, and are not. They are neither villains nor human exemplars except by the shifting definition of the person beholding them. They are, like most groups of adults forcibly brought together, a complicated stew of interactions both within the group and to the outside world, but in a nuance-free world they are whatever you want them to be.
They are political. They are corporate. They are sporty. They are kind. They are flinty. They are snarky and sincere and annoying and empathetic – all depending on what you want them to be.
Oh, and they're really good at the jobs they are actually paid to do.
In short, they are famous and successful people not fully in control of how they are perceived. And they play to all of it, knowing that everything they do has prying eyes attached to it. Their privacy is a myth, they have to explain everything they do, and they have to live with the fallout of those explanations.
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Now the basketball – that's the easy part. Once they stop using the cultural demands of the Chinese Communist Party as an explanation for their heavy legs and wandering focus, they will almost surely be the overpowering win machine they have been each of the last three seasons.
But as a societal entity, the Warriors are playing at much bigger stakes. They will be used and abused by the Great Narrative Industry, not to mention the Great Corporate Turbines, and how they handle the relentlessness of the GNI and GCT will determine in part how long they thrive.
While we can see how the business of being the Warriors gets in the way of the art of being the Warriors (the China trip was clearly too close to the start of the regular season for their basketball well-being), the price of being constantly evaluated as a cultural force in a nation with mangled priorities has not yet been measured, and maybe cannot be.
In short, we as a nation are probably bad for the Warriors, but we as a nation spend extraordinary scads of money on the Warriors so they need us while learning incrementally how to revile us and our demands on their sanity.
But at least it pays well.
