The Sixth Man

by Andre Iguodala

  Nonetheless, the Warriors were direct too. They were flattered that I was so upfront and motivated to come aboard, but they were also surprised. They simply didn’t have the cap space to make my number work. They would certainly see what they could do, but from their point of view, it was going to be hard. I left that meeting feeling that Golden State wasn’t going to happen, which made Dallas the front-runner. My agent, Rob, and Mavericks owner Mark Cuban worked out a number, and by the end of the week, I was beginning to look at places to rent in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. There was just one hitch. The deal was almost as good as done, but they would have to wait for final word about where Dwight Howard would end up, because that would impact the movement of money and players all over the league. If he went to this team, then this team could trade this guy, which meant that team could free up space for this move, etc. All of free agency hinged on him. Dwight was supposed to make his decision by that Friday, which was July 5. So that’s when I would know if Dallas was happening.

  Friday came and went, and Dwight still had not signed anywhere. He announced that he would need the weekend to think about it, and that he’d announce on Monday and we should all just sit tight. This meant that a whole bunch of players would have to wait until Monday, July 8, to find out where were going to end up. Meanwhile, I was just wasting time in LA, bored and antsy, waiting for this whole thing to be resolved. So that weekend I did what I always do when I’m agitated. I went to the gym. My old Philly teammate Evan Turner was in town, so I called him up to see if he wanted to work out while we waited to know what our futures were going to be. He, as always, was down, and by Monday morning, 8:00 a.m., Evan and I were at the gym getting it in.

  We stopped for breakfast after the workout and my phone rang. It was Rob. Dwight’s indecision had had the unexpected effect of giving the Golden State front office extra time to move things around. Rather than acquiring me outright on top of their current contracts, which they could not afford to do without going over the cap, they had been able to work out a sign-and-trade with Denver. The Nuggets had come to accept the fact that I was not coming back, but losing me flat-out in free agency meant they would get nothing in return. Now, with a sign-and-trade, they could re-sign me and trade me immediately to Golden State in exchange for players. For Golden State’s part, this meant that in the trade they would be getting contracts off the books to make room for me. It was a win for me and for the Warriors, and for Denver it was the second-best scenario after signing me outright.

  The same day I spoke to one of the Denver executives in LA. He was upset about how things had shaken out, and he was not hiding it. “You took less money to go with another team?” he said to me. Technically that was true. Golden State had given me four years at $48 million, whereas Denver had offered five years at something like $57 million. But that fifth year in Denver was going to be a partial guarantee, which meant they could cut me or get rid of me at any point. I tried to imagine myself fifteen years into my career playing for a middling team that could just bounce me halfway through the season or whenever they felt like it, and it did not put me in the mood to sign a contract. I tried to explain that it wasn’t about the money. It was about the basketball. I saw the moves they were making, and those moves weren’t inspiring me with confidence. I wanted to play somewhere where I was on board with the team philosophy and where I could see us trending upward. I wanted to go work where I was happy to go work. Wasn’t that my right? Wasn’t that what Curt Flood had sacrificed his career for?

  There was no outright hostility, but I definitely noticed a cooling in my relationship with several members of the Denver front office after the events of that summer. I would, as always, see them at weddings, conferences, and charity events. And the interactions were different. Before, it would have been a hug and a long conversation. Now, it was a head nod and them turning back to their drinks. I wish I could say it surprised me but it didn’t. My entire time in Philly I had been subject to trade rumors. I’d wake up in the morning and hear on the radio on the way to practice that my team was looking to get rid of me. “It’s just business,” I was always told. “It’s nothing personal, you understand.” And I did. But that summer I found myself wondering how it was that when a team wanted to change players, it was just business, but when players wanted to change teams, it was an insult.

  I arrived in the Bay Area about a month or so before training camp so I could play pickup with the guys every day. This was Mark’s vision. Just letting guys hoop and get to know each other in a relaxed environment. Or I should say somewhat relaxed. Harrison Barnes was trying to kill me. He had elbows in my chest, fighting for possessions. He was on only his second year at that point, but I had come in at his position, so he could see the writing on the wall, and he wasn’t going to go down without a fight. But that excited me. It was good to see that guys weren’t just rolling over. They were fighting to be on this team. He’s since become one of my closest friends in the league.

  By the time we got to training camp, I had a good sense of this squad, and it was even better up close than I had thought. The vibe was a unique combination of relaxed and serious. You might call it “professional.” About a week into camp I had a moment that I’ll always remember as my introduction to the team. We were going through a drill, something simple. I don’t remember exactly what it was. And Pete Myers, an assistant coach at the time, just came at me, yelling. “Iguodala! What are you doing? That’s not how you do it! This is what you do!” I was taken aback. I hadn’t had a coach unload on me like that in a long time. I was supposed to be the big get for this off-season, and here was this guy screaming on me like I was a rookie.

  And I loved it. It gave me tremendous respect for the squad. It showed me that everyone on that team was getting held to the same standard, no matter who they were. That’s when it clicked for me that this team had what it took to make something next level. Typically you notice on teams that every player is treated slightly differently based on the size of their contracts, and while that makes a certain kind of sense, I think it subconsciously communicates that the team philosophy isn’t the most important thing. The player’s egos are. Here was something different. Here was an opportunity to build as a basketball player and grow as a student of the game.

  That was just one of the things I would come to love about playing in the Bay Area. The whole experience was new to me, because most players don’t even know that Oracle Arena is in Oakland. When you’re a visiting team, you fly into San Francisco, you stay in San Francisco, and you practice in San Francisco. Then you take a bus across the bridge to Oakland, but by that time you’re so focused on preparing for the game that you don’t really notice that you’re changing cities. You might schedule a tour to Alcatraz or something like that if you have time, but as a visitor you don’t really experience a lot of Oakland. But as a Warrior, it’s entirely different. Oracle becomes your home.

  There are only a few arenas in the country like it. Most cities you play in, the arena is big multiuse building, and it feels like it. In Chicago, the United Center is a huge, cavernous building. The arena is cold because often you’re overlapping with hockey season. Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia and American Airlines Arena in Miami are both enormous. Staples Center in Los Angeles is basically an entertainment center. These places feel like concert halls where you just happen to be playing a game of basketball. But there are a few places around the country that feel like gymnasiums, like buildings built entirely for basketball. Portland, Indiana, Madison Square Garden—these are places where the crowd is loud and right up on you, almost like in a high school or college game. And that energy is electric. Certain arenas just have an aura to them. It’s like the building is somehow able to catch and focus the energy of all twenty thousand people right onto the floor. Oracle is one of those places.

  Even playing there as a visitor, there was always something special about playing at Oracle. No matter how good that year’s team w
as, the building always felt like it was sold out. It could be game sixty-five of a 28-37 season, and the fans would be chanting like it was game 7 of the conference finals. And there was a specific chant that the fans would do: “WAAAAAARRRIOORS . . . WAAAAAAAARRRIOOORRS!” It was a long, hollow, haunting chant, swelling up from the seats, filling up the ceiling, and raining down on you like an echo. It sounded like someone was coming for you in the dead of night. I loved it. It got me fired up. They would even do it during warm-ups. It’s easily the best fan chant in all the NBA. Once you heard that, even as a visitor, you got hyped. You would get chills. You wanted to have a good game just to respect the fans for the energy they were bringing.

  And the fans knew basketball. You often hear about whether fan bases are smart, and there’s something to that. Warriors fans, especially in those Don Nelson and Mark Jackson years, really knew the game. They would react to referee calls the instant they were made. In some arenas the fans don’t know what’s happening until it’s replayed on the jumbotron, but Warriors fans were kind of like New York or Indiana fans that way. They reacted right away. You’d hear them cheering a crossover or a nice crisp pass even while the play was still happening. Sometimes with fans of bigger, flashier teams, it feels like they’re not at the game to watch basketball, but just to be seen. They might as well be at the club. But whenever you played a game in Oakland, those fans were there because they loved the sport and they wanted to see it played at a high level.

  And when I became a player there, that respect for the game was everywhere. Not just in the building, but in the organization, and especially in the coaching. It was like a kind of faith, a very fundamental belief that by truly focusing on the game, on executing it at a high level, on treating each player as an adult and as a professional, then the rest would take care of itself. The organization embodied that and so did Mark Jackson. He was honest but incredibly supportive. Sometimes during the season, I would pass up a shot and Mark would pull me aside and give it to me straight. “C’mon, man,” he’d say. “I can’t have you out there passing up shots. I can’t have you out there not attacking. Do you. You attack, you play defense, so go do you!” That kind of attitude empowered us and gave us confidence. To this day I contend that Steph and Klay would never have turned into the Steph and Klay who set record books on fire if it weren’t for this attitude by Mark Jackson. Encourage you where your game is strong, correct you plainly where you need correcting. He was calling those guys the greatest shooting backcourt of all time before most fans had ever heard their names. And he was giving them a vision of themselves that they could see but no one else could. He was validating their best versions of themselves.

  I remember once in a meeting, he told Steph, “I don’t care how many turnovers you got. People are always talking about turnovers, but I don’t care how many you make. In my opinion, you’re the best point guard in the league. You’re the All-Star. This is your team, so do what you want with it.” It meant something because he said that in front of the whole team. He didn’t pull him to the side and gas him up like some coaches would do. He staked his idea in the ground in front of us. He believed in Stephen Curry and that was what we were going to do as a team. “If a point guard goes at you, Steph,” he said one time, “you have my permission to go back at him. I’ll take the loss.” Most guys would be hating in a situation like this: “Man, look at this dude. Coach gonna keep letting this dude do whatever?” But in my mind that was an amazing feeling to give to your point guard.

  It was a good year overall, even though Coach Jackson had what turned out to be a chaotic relationship with the organization. I don’t know all of what happened there, but I know that for many of us, it was an uncomfortable situation. We really liked Coach, and the organization had been good too. So we didn’t know what to think. When it came down to it, we wanted to support Mark because he was the guy who had, on a day-in-and-day-out basis, supported us. So in the media we made it clear. We support our coach.

  As the season wore on, injuries made their mark on our season. Early in the year, I had missed a string of games with a hamstring injury. Andrew Bogut ended up missing the playoffs with a rib injury. This was a problem because our bench that year wasn’t very deep. If you notice, this team has only lost two rounds in the playoffs since I came, and both times Bogut was injured. He played a much more pivotal role than most people gave him credit for.

  Coach had created something really special with the roster he had. He had installed an unprecedented combination of defensive intensity and offensive freedom. But in the end, it was not enough. Bogut’s injury in the playoffs that year meant that we did not have the defensive presence or depth to compete against DeAndre Jordan, Blake Griffin, and the Clippers. And Chris Paul was still arguably the best point guard in the league. Steph still had to get some experience under his belt in order to reach his full potential. We took the Clippers to seven games, and played as well as we could. But we lost by 5 points on the road in game 7 of the first round.

  After the season was over, we had exit meetings. I sat down with Coach Jackson and told him that I was thankful for all he had done and that I really felt we were on the precipice of something big. We got to talking about my off-season plans, and I told him about the treatment I was about to undergo. He was worried. “Don’t play USA Basketball, Andre,” he said. “You’re doing too much. You’ve got to rest and get back healthy. This next season is going to be something entirely different. You watch.”

  I thanked him and went on my way. Hours later I found out from my Twitter feed that he was terminated by the team. That’s how quickly things go in this business. I barely had time to process it because I was undergoing a medical procedure that had me feeling mostly out of it for the next week. It seemed as though I went under with one coach and came to with another. And that’s the thing about professional sports. Everything is on a clock, and there is no time. There’s no time to process, to sit with feelings, to take bigger stock of what’s happening. There’s no time to grieve or transition. Everything is always about who or what is next. Next man up. Coach Jackson had been a mentor and leader to us all season, and two days later it was time to put everything behind us and welcome the next man. I was about to be on my eighth coach in twelve years. So I knew the drill. Just try to be optimistic.

  * * *

  —

  If you put a gun to my head and offered me a million dollars, I still probably couldn’t recall the details of my first meeting with Steve Kerr. He’s just so cool, so plain-Jane. You could sit through an entire dinner where he was at the table and never notice him. But he’s always paying attention, always noticing details. And he knows when to talk and when to listen. Steve and I connected on basketball immediately because we had both learned the game from Lute Olson. We saw the game the same way. He could see things about my game that I was feeling but hadn’t quite found the words for. He recognized that I was still relying too heavily on the isolation, and that I could be an entirely different player in a ball-movement offense.

  One of Steve’s main qualities is that he’s very even-keeled, very self-directed. He is who he is, he is happy with who he is, and he won’t let anything, any pressure, any criticism, any bad looks, any unfair press, change him. When he came to us, we were already the number one team defensively in the league. Mark had made sure of that, and Steve wasn’t the type of coach who would change everything up just to make it fit his image. He recognized where what we had was working, and he was perfectly happy to keep it that way. And he was not a screamer or a yeller. Just like the rest of the organization, he seemed to believe in us as players and as adults. He didn’t have to yell at players to work hard, for example. He recognized that if a player wasn’t working hard, that player knew he wasn’t working hard. Everyone else knew he wasn’t working hard. He would count on that to motivate that person. And if it didn’t, then the player wouldn’t see the floor and it was as simple as that.

 
When you look at the history of the game, his coaching style was, in a sense, the next evolution. In the first thirty years of the sport, coaches were the most powerful forces in the franchise. Because sports in the 1950s and ’60s operated more like the military. Chain of command. John Wooden, the legendary UCLA coach, was maybe the most influential thinker in the philosophy of coaching. He focused on doing little things correctly and with honor and discipline. He stressed that the true job of an athlete was not to win but to rise to every occasion, give your best effort, and make those around you better as you did it. His message carried tremendous weight because his program had tremendous success. He won ten national championships with the UCLA Bruins, a feat no college coach has ever repeated and probably never will. And many of the NBA players who came through that program—Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Gail Goodrich, Bill Walton, and Jamaal Wilkes—ended up in the Hall of Fame. His influence spread throughout the league through coaches and players who had either worked with him or tried to emulate his philosophy. During those years, there were very few max superstar players who could command a following on their own. That would have tilted the balance of power away from the coaches in a way that most people in the game thought was unhealthy. It was assumed that no matter how important a player was, no matter how talented, they were still going to treat the coach with deference.