Moving into the 1970s and ’80s you began to see the emergence of the true superstar in the modern sense, players who were celebrity brands in their own right. But still, even the two biggest players of that era, Magic and Bird, were guys lauded for their team approach to the game. This was important for the league to push, because even as late as the mid-’80s games were still being played on tape delay. There simply were not enough people interested to show them live. The league was able to use Magic and Bird to make a narrative that they hoped would earn the trust of audiences that were curious about the sport but not yet committed. Their brand of basketball—humble attitude, well behaved, marketable, and smiling—became the brand that coaches around the league and even in colleges and high schools could point to and say, “See? This is how you win games!”
But by the ’90s something else entirely was under way. A variety of economic and cultural forces had combined to make it possible for players to become more powerful, at least in the eyes of the paying public, than coaches. It began with Jordan, who was so good that not only did he become a brand, but—with the growing influence of rap pushing urban culture, with its love of sneakers, into the mainstream—his clothing and lifestyle brand became, in a sense, bigger than his basketball brand. In his wake, you had players like Allen Iverson, Tracy McGrady, Vince Carter, Shaq, and Kobe, whose sheer athleticism made them human highlight reels, and brought them absurdly priced shoe and marketing contracts that the league simply couldn’t match. By the late ’90s the power had swung back to the players, and a lot of coaches were more like featured extras in a production starring the player. Coaches of that era had to learn not just how to do X’s and O’s but how to manage celebrities on a team.
Steve represented the third phase of this. He had learned by playing on those Bulls teams with Michael Jordan and coached by Phil Jackson what it took to manage superstar talent. But having come up under Lute Olson and having also played with Gregg Popovich, he had a sense of the discipline, of the old-school. He was particularly gifted at managing both things simultaneously, and the end result was a straightforward and trustworthy approach.
“Andre, I just want you to come in and work every day, and have fun,” he would say to me. “You guys love the game. I know you want to have fun, so go do it. I know you are a leader on this team, Steph’s a leader. All I need to do is put you guys in the right position. Find our weaknesses, catch them. If we stay sharp, we can get a six-, seven-year run out of this thing.” This was the type of confidence he had coming in. “You guys are great, I see what we have. We just gotta do a few things to take us over the top.”
I came into camp that year still trying to heal my knee. It seems like every off-season I’m trying to heal a knee, and this one was no different. I wasn’t as in shape as I wanted to be because I had spent the majority of the summer rehabbing, but I was willing to try to grind it out and find my way back into it. You never want to rush your recovery, but circumstances always conspire to force you to do just that. I had spent the summer taking it slowly, and I was excited to push through camp and see where we could get to in our second year together. I had a better feel for each of these guys now. I was aware that I was playing with some all-time great shooters and that I could trust the movement, because if I passed up a good shot, I knew the ball was probably going to come right back. But still, the opportunities for me as an offensive player were lessening. Steve was introducing concepts that were favoring the outside shot even more than we had before, and that simply meant that I was going to have to play with some balance and awareness. Rather than making the offense on my own, I could see that part of what was needed was for me to have a kind of meta-awareness of how everyone else’s game was opening up. Knowing when to open the throttle, when to close it. I felt that as camp went on, I was finding a groove. I shot well, played well, ran the floor well. Steve came to me near the last day of camp.
“You’ve played well, Andre. You’ve earned the starting spot . . .”
I knew right then that there was only one reason he was telling me that. There was going to have to be a “but.”
“But I think it’s best for the team if you come off the bench. If we don’t bring you off the bench, we’re just not going to get as much from our second unit.”
I had never, in my entire NBA career, come off the bench. A million things went through my head. Was he really saying I’d earned it, or was he just trying to soften the blow of telling me that I’d lost a step? Was this the beginning of the end for me? I didn’t want to think so, but every player knows that his days are numbered, and when a starter is turned into a bench player, it’s just one of those moments when you begin to wonder if the end is coming sooner than you think. It may sound as though it’s all ego. I know it’s easy for folks sitting at home to criticize a player for not wanting to come off the bench. But you have to understand the depth of it for NBA players.
From the time you are in your youngest years of the game, seven, eight, nine years old, you are told that you don’t want to come off the bench. To do so makes you a scrub. As you grow, it becomes not only part of your identity but just the way you understand your job. It would be as if you were a journalist, had made a career as a journalist, and then after eleven years someone came to you and said, “We want you to keep writing articles, but we’re going to put someone else’s name on them.” You would take exception and it would be a silly argument for someone to come to you and say, “All that matters is that the article is good in the end.” That isn’t all that matters. There is a certain way you are used to doing things, and it is a lot to totally upend it.
But I had to trust Steve. And I had to trust the organization. He and I saw the game the same way. If he said that the team would do better with me playing with the second unit, then I had to believe him. And most of all, I knew that whatever my personal feelings were about it, there was no conceivable way that starting a big ruckus over this was going to be anything other than terrible for the team.
Coming off the bench was entirely different from starting and it would take me all year to get used to it. When you start, you can kind of let the game come to you. Every game is different. Every player, every team, every contest has its own rhythm to it. As a starter, you can let that rhythm reveal itself to you in the first two minutes. You can take it in and figure out the plan. But coming off the bench feels like you’re being thrown into an already moving wave. You’re having to impose your will on whatever’s happening. You’ve got to force things off the bench. That’s not really my style. I didn’t really know how to do that, and as the season started, the whole thing was even more confounding.
But Steve did have another vision for me. Every time he sent me in, he would say the same thing to me: “Andre, find the flow.” And for some reason, I knew exactly what it meant. It meant get that ball moving, get it popping. Get motion and rhythm to our game, especially if we were down when it was time for substitutions. I had been thinking of it all wrong. My job wasn’t to come in and create offense. It was to come in and find where the offense lay. It was always there. I was to find it for our team, to uncover it and deliver it. And almost always it could be found through the movement of the ball.
People in my life, friends, family members, didn’t understand. I would argue with my business manager Rudy all the time. He thought I was suffering from a lack of confidence. My close friend and basketball trainer Tyrell, who’d been working with me since I came into the league, said his friends were texting him things like, “You said Dre was nice. He fell off. He’s over.” And I could see where they were coming from. In my two previous roles, I had tried to just focus on doing my job, but the circumstances of the roster meant that I was still the face of the team, with my image on posters and programs. And this meant I would have ads and opportunities and clout. In this new role, however, I might spend twenty-four minutes on the floor and come away with 4 points and 3 assists.
It’s one thing to agree with something and quite another thing to go out and live it game by game. I would have a good game, and know that I’d had a good game. I would feel focused and clean, showing up in the right spots, making the right plays, and we would win. But still, it would just feel weird that I’d had only one shot. It would get frustrating. To complicate matters, we were definitely winning. By the time we got to Christmas Day that year, we were 22-3. No one wants to be the guy who’s complaining when everyone is winning. And we’d been having fun doing it. I would be on the sidelines cheering and jumping up and down with support for my team, but inside I was struggling. And it wasn’t even about shooting all the time. There were some nights when I would feel like, “Man, just let me get the ball, draw a double-team, and pass.”
Helping find the rhythm for my team worked. But finding my personal offensive rhythm within that never did. Sometimes I’d be open to shoot, but I would know that we’d had too many one-pass-and-shoot possessions in a row and that it was time to get the ball popping. So I would pass up the shot. After a while it was hard for me to attend to both my own rhythm and the team rhythm. They were frequently at odds. Sometimes I would come into the locker room at halftime and be pissed. I was literally out there on the floor killing my value. I could see it happening, possession by possession. What if this wasn’t my last contract? What if I had come to Golden State only to descend into being a mediocre player? I knew those thoughts weren’t going to help me, but it was human nature. This game takes a lot out of you. And the idea that you might not be getting everything you can out of it is troubling. It can make a person unravel. It always goes back to that question. How much would you take to give up a hip? When you give as much as you do to this game, when you know it may make it impossible for you to walk without pain again, you want to make sure you are getting everything you possibly can in return. Championships are good for you, but maximizing financial security may, in the long run, be even more important.
But even when I had my doubts, it was clear that there was absolutely no point in sabotaging the locker room with complaining. I could see what Steve was trying to accomplish, and the vision made perfect sense to me because he and I had learned the game the same way. We finished 67-15, one of the best records in franchise history, but I still ended the regular season feeling entirely out of sorts offensively. I had never gotten into my groove, and I was aware that offensively I was capable of so much more. Still there were moments toward the end of that season when I began to understand something greater about it. I would be working with the second unit, trying to see the game and transmit it to them as we ran. And I would start realizing that the more judicious I was about picking my offensive spots, the better everything went for me and for the team. I began to finally understand the meaning of the old cliché “Less is more.”
I saw that in my playing, but I also saw that in my teammates’. By the time I’d gotten there, Stephen Curry was in the middle of a complete resurgence. Many people forget that his first few years in the league were marked by injury. People felt like he was never going to get it together well enough to play long-term. But he quietly underwent a complete transformation of how he used his body and played his game. It was an act of complete discipline and willpower, and freakish talent. It was the quintessential Steph Curry move.
There aren’t that many people like him in this sport or anywhere else I’ve seen. Steph is truly as all-around a good guy as everyone makes him out to be. He comes from a very good family, as we’ve all seen on TV. His dad, Dell Curry, played in the league for many years and seems to have done a pretty tremendous job raising his son. There is not a mean bone in Steph’s body. Of course he’s insanely competitive, but he’s also very genuine and very humble. But maybe the thing I noticed most about him after playing with him for a couple of years is that he is ridiculously athletically gifted. He excels at literally everything. Playing golf with him is boring because he hits the ball far and straight every single time. Then he can putt long and straight and put you out of the game by the first hole. It doesn’t matter what the sport is, he dominates at it. You’ll be playing darts and he’ll hit triple twenties. We had a Ping-Pong tournament for the team as a way to break up the grind of a long season, and of course he ended up in the final match for that. Then another time the coaching staff took us to the baseball stadium, where we were allowed to play a game for fun. Steph was the pitcher, and of course he was firing strikes right down the line until it became time to hit, and then there he was, winning at that too. He hit two home runs that day in a major league stadium and he’s not even a baseball player. Maybe Allen Iverson was the only other person I played with who was as all-around gifted as Steph Curry.
Overall my connection to those Golden State teams is as strong as to any team I’ve even been on. You often hear players say that they get along with all their teammates, but in this case it was really true. Each person was so unique, and the overall vibe was so good, that we just kind of got to enjoy being around each other. You had Klay Thompson, who really puts the “free” in free spirit. Laid-back doesn’t even begin to describe him. He’s just really about never causing any problems, always going along, always hanging out with the team. He’s one of the easiest guys in the world to be around. His dad, Mychal Thompson, played for the Lakers alongside Magic, Kareem, and James Worthy, and you can tell that Klay came from that good home, that well-taken-care-of background. His dad is from the Bahamas, which is a very laid-back place, and you can see that trickle down to Klay. He like to chill, crack jokes, hang out with the fellas.
But like every professional athlete, he has another side to him. I watched from the sidelines the game in which he scored 37 points in a quarter against Sacramento. Even though it was a statistical anomaly and an all-time record, it was in a certain way exactly what you would expect from Klay. He is like Steph in the sense that he has the gene, the ability to become so caught up in a game that he’s entirely unable to remember what happened twenty seconds ago. In a shooter this can be a tremendously helpful quality. Klay can go 0 for 7 from distance in the first two quarters of a game and literally have no idea that he’s 0 for 7. His brain just doesn’t track it. Steph is the same way. For these guys, there are no missed shots—all these guys see is the next one. That is a very unusual skill. Most players, myself included, simply aren’t like that. If I miss three three-point shots in a row, I’m probably not shooting from distance for the rest of the game—that’s just the way I am. I’m not trying to end a game 0 percent from three. But Klay is different. He simply does not care. He’ll just keep shooting until it turns around. And it always turns around. That’s how they can go from shooting 0 percent to ending the game hitting ten or twelve straight. It’s just something, some incredibly focused, almost mercenary quality inside them.
A lot of times people will say that a player is “unconscious” when he or she is going off in a game. And from what I’ve seen with Klay, that’s an accurate description. He gets a laser focus, and it seems like everything else disappears. Being the kind of player I am, that sometimes surprises me. My whole thing is to see the game, know the situation. As soon as I touch the ball, I’m immediately trained to look around me, know where everyone is, who’s cutting where, how much time is on the clock, how many fouls each player has, how many we have collectively. That’s probably why I would know that I was 0 for 3. But Klay, when he gets that laser focus, sees nothing but the hole. Sometimes he’ll just launch a shot from ten feet beyond the arc early in a possession when we’re down by like 2 points, and I’m yelling as soon as he gets the ball, “Klay! You’re at half court, man!” It’s like it truly never occurred to him. He just sees a shot he can make.
Once, we were doing a team-building exercise. The idea was to understand the connection between feelings of success and the way we sat in our bodies, versus how we held our bodies when we were talking about “failure.” So everyone had to answer the question of what were their fav
orite moments in the game, what were the moments they felt the highest, and we were to notice what was happening in our bodies as we talked about it. When Klay’s turn came, we all assumed he was going to say that his highest moment was the day he scored 37 points in a quarter against Sacramento. I mean, that was an NBA record! But he didn’t. Instead he said, “My best moment was one night I caught a pass and I was like fifty feet from the basket and I was about to shoot it. And all of a sudden, I hear Andre being like, ‘What the fuck, Klay? You’re fifty feet out.’ And I thought about it for a second and shot it anyway. It went in, and I was like, ‘Yeah, Andre, fuck you.’” We all had a good laugh at that. I was like, “Wow, really, dog? That was your best moment?” But that’s just the way it is with him. He believes he is the best shooter in the world, like he’s never going to miss. And he’s not entirely wrong about that. I understand that attitude to an extent. He and Steph both went to small schools, they were both overlooked in a sense, and they have something to prove. And they have both turned out to be all-time great shooters. That’s no coincidence.
As much as our team is animated by that love of the game, maybe the other biggest factor is that sense of being an underdog, of being overlooked and having to prove to the world that we belong here. We all have a little bit of that, but Draymond Green is the heart and soul of that idea on our team. All of us on the team came, of course, from different backgrounds—this is the case with all players. Some guys like Steph and Klay come from good homes, two parents, professional-athlete parents, and the game is with them from birth. You have other guys who come from basically nothing, but everyone around them recognizes that they can be the savior if they can just make it out of there. So everyone sacrifices for them, protects them, travels with them, sends them off to prep schools, spends all their money to make it work for them. But you have those kids like Draymond who were underdogs the entire time. Never the upper-middle-class kid with the basketball family, never the golden child or hood savior everyone rallied around to lift up. He had to put it all together on his own. That’s why he has that bravado about himself. Because he wasn’t supposed to be here at all.
The Sixth Man Page 17