The Sixth Man

by Andre Iguodala

  We started to lose track of our bigger goal of perfecting our game, of peaking at the right time. We just needed to win that night, and the next, and the next. There were games when we didn’t play our best and you could tell early that it was an off night. But instead of just taking the loss and regrouping and adjusting, the starters were staying in, playing forty, forty-one, forty-two minutes a night. We started feeding our own egos, even though we were just barely getting by a couple of games. We often took the floor that year with the expectation that we could smack anybody. It’s not that we shouldn’t have had that confidence, because that’s what all teams need. But we were playing with a switch: the idea that we could turn it on or off whenever we felt like it. What was missing was appropriate fear, appropriate respect for the fact that we could be beaten in any given game.

  And we chased. We chased that record with everything we had because we needed to be not only the best team in the league, but the best team of all time. Everywhere we went, Michael Jordan and the Bulls loomed over us. They had done something once that no team had done before or since in the history of the game. And it made sense that we were excited by the idea that we could match that. I would look around the practice facility and get goose bumps thinking about the fact that this assembly of dudes—Klay, with his easygoing nature and absurdly quick release; Steph, with his incredible earnestness and genuine humility; Draymond, who would bark at anyone, anytime—might have just stumbled themselves onto a team that would go down in basketball history. The allure was too much to resist.

  But the flip side was that in every arena, guys were having the best games of their lives against us. Players who didn’t normally make shots were making them. It was basketball, basketball, basketball. In the pressers, in interviews, every night you were getting booed mercilessly, and every young player on the planet was trying to make his name at your expense. There was just a mental fatigue that set in. I noticed the younger guys struggling with it more, but we were all feeling it. It got to a point where you just needed a break from the Warriors sideshow, but people kept showing up for it. There was no end in sight. By the time we got our seventy-third win, it was the last game of the regular season, and I couldn’t believe that the important basketball was just beginning.

  We ran through Houston in five games and had about the same amount of trouble with Portland. Then came Oklahoma City. People always ask me what the hardest team I’ve ever faced in my life was, and it was that Oklahoma City Thunder team with Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook in the Western Conference finals. I had never seen anyone play like that. Durant was on fire that series. It was the best defense he could muster and it was stifling. And they had a huge lineup with Steven Adams and Serge Ibaka up front. Even their power forward was six foot ten, and all these guys could switch as well as we could. Serge Ibaka was versatile, and Westbrook was just a machine, attacking you relentlessly every single possession. It was like he had a battery pack with extra energy in it. Meanwhile, KD was scoring 50 points every night. We knew that we had to play “A” basketball. “A minus” ball would get us eliminated. And it almost did. We went down three games to one, and it was looking very shaky. I was so focused, the pressure was so great, that in our home no one was having fun. But deep down I felt like if any team could come back from being down 3–1, it would be us.

  In our shoot-around meeting before game 5, Steve told us what we needed to hear. “I know we’re going to get this game tonight at home,” he said. “But that next game, game six in Oklahoma City, an elimination game, is going to be the hardest game we’ve ever played. Period. It will never get harder than that. But I can tell you something else. It’s going to be given to us. I just know it. We’re going to get this game. It will be given to us.”

  I don’t know what he meant by that or how he understood it. But those words echoed in my head all week. And he was right. Game 6 in Oklahoma City is still the hardest game we’ve ever played. But somehow he knew and we knew that it was not going to be over. Klay tends to play big in elimination game 6s, and this was no exception. With 31 points, 11 of 18 from three, he was the reason we won that game. When we came back home for game 7, we just knew. I don’t know how, but we just knew.

  We were matched with Cleveland in the finals for the second time in a row. And they wanted revenge. It was three days later when we tipped off for game 1 and we quickly jumped out to a 2–1 lead. They were better this year, but so were we. And Coach Kerr was doing a great job of recognizing where we had advantages and playing them up. Fatigue was setting in for all of us. That Oklahoma series had taken a great deal out of us. But we knew that we could still rally if we could just keep it together. Then game 4 happened.

  I’ve watched the play a thousand times. I saw it happen on the floor, and I’ve seen it happen in replay after replay. LeBron and Draymond got tangled up on a screen, and LeBron tossed Draymond to the hardwood. The play was still happening, so both players tried to get back into it, Draymond by getting up off his back, and LeBron by stepping over Draymond, who was still on the floor. Draymond got offended that LeBron was stepping over him and flailed his arm, hitting LeBron in the crotch. None of this was called, by the way. The referees let all this slide. Then, moments later, when Dray and Bron got into it over a rebound, a whistle was blown. The two of them jawed back and forth and were assessed with double technicals.

  That night after the game was over, the league office reviewed the footage and determined that Draymond’s swinging his hand was a flagrant foul, and since it was his fourth in the postseason, he would have to miss game 6.

  Everything is a story. Everything is blown out of proportion. Everything is capitalized for financial gain. This is simply the way the league works. Sometimes you can tell that a decision is going to be made not because of the rules, but because of the story. All season long, Draymond had been the story. Part of it was because of the way he was. But it was also because of the way he was on our team. Most of what he did I saw happening on every floor in every arena around the country from every bench player with an edge. But a story had been created that Draymond Green was out of control and each event served to push that narrative. So by the time that game had ended, you could spend fifteen seconds on Twitter and tell that the league was going to suspend him. Because the decision was never made in response to the event. Basketball is entertainment. It’s live, improvisational storytelling. So decisions will always be made in response to the story. There are going to be those who disagree, but I’ve been around the game a long time. And it’s as plain to me as anything is.

  What else can I say about that series. We watched it slip away, but in a sense it felt as though we never had a grasp on it to begin with. We were playing against something much larger than the Cleveland Cavaliers, even though, to their credit, they played in rare form. We were playing against a growing tide of our own celebrity that we didn’t collectively know how to understand or manage within the game. We were playing against emotional and physical fatigue and an eight-month circus for which we were anything but prepared.

  So by the time LeBron chased me down in the final seconds of game 7 and delivered one of the most awesome defensive plays I’ve ever seen, I already knew that it was over. Kyrie Irving hitting that big three to go up 92–89 a minute later only sealed the deal. We had already made irreversible mistakes. Momentum shifts, tides change. Centers get injured, backs spasm. And games get lost and they never come back again.

  I barely have a memory of walking out of the arena that night. I saw Dave Chappelle, who has always been one of my heroes. I said, “What’s up?” But our conversation was short. We didn’t deserve to win. That’s what I was thinking. We didn’t deserve to win and I just wanted to go home. I wanted to be around my good friends. My wife, my son. Mustafa Shakur, who I had played with in college. My trainer Tyrell. People who knew me from before. I just wanted to be around people I trusted. I just wanted some love and a pizza and to sleep for
three days straight.

  08

  The Seventy-Fourth Win

  There would be no talk of a record next season, no talk of seventy-three wins. It had killed us. Plain and simple. You could point to and debate all the bizarre things that happened in that series: the fouls, the ejections, the suspensions, the Block. And you could debate how differently the season might have gone had any of those things not happened. But the only thing that was completely clear to me and to all of us was that every decision we had made in order to get to seventy-three wins had cost us the title. Was it worth it?

  It would depend on what happened next. If that were to turn out to be our very last shot at the title, I can guarantee that every man on that 2015–16 Warriors team would have spent the rest of their lives thinking about how we had a title and we slowly, painfully, and surely let it slip away. And that all we had gotten out of it was seventy-three wins, a record that would forever have an asterisk. “Yeah, but they didn’t win the title.” This season would not just be about redemption. It would be about all of our futures.

  I had been hearing rumors about our team acquiring Kevin Durant since around the midpoint of the prior season. It’s not uncommon for a player to know a lot more about these pending deals than the press does. Most of us know better than to share what we hear from the staff with members of the media, but the conversations were definitely happening. Often on the Warriors squad, we would find out about deals in the works because an assistant would come to us and ask what we thought. “We’re looking at such and such a player. Do you think he’d fit here? What have you heard about him?” The NBA is like a large company where everyone is a coworker, so the guys on other teams are not just opponents, they’re colleagues. You’ve played with them in summer leagues or against them in conference tournaments in college. You used to crack jokes with them in the cafeteria at basketball camp when you were fifteen. You’ve been together at weddings and parties, off-season barbecues and golf tournaments. And if you don’t exactly know them, you know enough people who know them to make it so that you have a real sense of who they are both on and off the court. But even if you just know a guy because you’ve played his team six or more times over the course of a season, you also observe dynamics, behavior, habits, and attitudes up close. So players have a very good sense of how a guy will fit in on a new team, and if the front office or an assistant GM is smart, they will pull up beside you casually in the training room and float a potential trade by you for your thoughts. It hadn’t reached quite that level yet with Kevin, but we were definitely hearing whispers around the organization that they were going to try to make something happen.

  So Kevin Durant to the Warriors was not a far-fetched idea for any of us when the 2016 season was over, and we knew what that would mean. We would run the league. Period. He was the best pure scorer in the game. An excellent shooter with ball handling, and an all-time great finisher at the rim. He was an offensive juggernaut. And as a seven-footer (yes, I know he’s listed as six-nine, but c’mon) with a seven-four wingspan, he was incredibly hard to defend. We got to see that when he pushed us to seven games about a month before, and it took basically everything we had to get out of that Western Conference final with a win.

  There are only two weeks between the end of the season and free agency, and that year I was basically just trying to get over what had happened in the finals. I was not surprised by the outcome, but I was surprised by how much it hurt. It hurt emotionally, of course, but it hurt physically too. I was tired and aching. My knee and hips were killing me, and I couldn’t seem to get enough sleep, no matter what I did. Those first two weeks were a blur, almost like a hangover. I did my best to show up for my family, for golf, for business meetings. But mostly I felt like I was living through Jell-O. I needed something else to happen.

  That something came with a text from the front office days after the end of the season. “You guys want Kevin Durant?” It was just that simple. Who wouldn’t? We were told that he was hosting teams in the Hamptons on July 30 and that it could be good if we went. This was where the amount of respect that the organization had shown to us paid off. There would be a lot of players who would balk at the idea of going to do something like that. “Why are you trying to get me to do your job?” they might say. And that’s an understandable viewpoint when you are playing for a team that has largely treated you as a commodity or a workhorse for the entirety of your time with them. It felt just like it did in college: you’re only interested in me not because of who I am as a person but because you need something from me now. But this organization felt different. Because Steph was our superstar, and his attitude was always team-first, we all embraced that attitude and the front office reflected it. So when it was time for us to ride for our team, it was no question. We had all played with KD on the USA Basketball national team, so we knew that our best shot was to assemble a squad to go out and convince. Me, Klay Thompson, Steph Curry, and Draymond Green.

  We thought of it as a fun trip too. We’d had a grind of a season and it would be nice to kick it with these guys absent the intense pressure of a championship run and chasing an NBA record. We would get to hang out a bit, have a decent dinner. Our whole attitude for that trip was relaxed and at ease, especially with Klay along. This was a guy who knew how to chill. Overall, we just used the trip to enjoy the moment and each other’s company. This was the attitude we had when we walked into the house Kevin had rented. The air was mild, and you could smell the sea salt in the Atlantic breeze, the sound of the waves gently floating on the summer air. I took a moment to take it all in. It was a moment. Here were five wealthy black men, living in circumstances light-years beyond the wildest dreams of our parents, of our ancestors.

  We met with Kevin for about an hour and a half, and like many good meetings, it was more conversation than pitch. We knew that we had what he wanted, so the plan was just to be honest about what we had. I had an instinct that the word of the day should be simplicity. Honesty. No crazy sizzle reels of him dunking on us or any of that high-tech nonsense. Just keep it real. We told him that we would have fun playing some basketball. That was it. No one on this team had an ego, no one cared who shot the ball and who didn’t. We answered his questions about what the Bay Area was like, the good and the bad. We knew that one thing about Kevin was that when it came to basketball, he didn’t just like to play. He loved to hoop. He loved the game in its purest form, and we felt that this team, the way we had it set up, with the offensive philosophy and the personalities we had on board, was a place where he could come to hoop.

  But I knew the media would kill him if he made this decision. And I knew that if I were in his position, that’s what I’d be worried about. I had a flashback to my days in Philadelphia. I knew what it was like to be hated, to spend every day trying to prove someone else wrong. Steph and Klay had always been loved. And Draymond was only beginning to embrace his NBA-heel thing. “Look,” I said, “we can all do our best to take the heat off of you. But the most important thing is that you have to not give a fuck. Who cares what they say about you? They’re either going to love you or hate you. It’s always gonna be one or the other, no matter what you do. I mean, if you stay where you’re at and you’re not happy, what good is it? So what’s more important? For you to enjoy your life being where you want to be, but with a bunch of strangers not liking your decision? Or to be where you’re not enjoying your life, but with a bunch of strangers approving of you?”

  We were sitting outside in this kind of garden area. There had been a much more official meeting inside during the previous hour with Kerr, Joe Lacob, Bob Myers, and Kevin’s agent, Rich Kleiman—all the suits. Steve had compiled a bunch of clips to show Kevin where he’d fit from an X’s and O’s perspective. Bob Myers had gotten some kind of virtual-reality presentation together that was supposed to not only highlight Kevin’s role as a Warrior but create a sense of the tech advances of the Bay Area. All of it was cool, but as the day wore
on, there was an increasing sense for all of us, front office included, that this was just background noise to him. At a certain point, just the five of us—me, Steph, Klay, Draymond, and Kevin—had stepped outside to talk among ourselves. Kevin had been around this business his whole life and was wise to the game. He knew that every team was going to be coming in with a script and a bunch of canned lines about how they were going to welcome him to the family and he’d finally be home. We’d all been recruited before. What he really wanted, what he really needed, was the real deal from the players. And most importantly, he needed to hear it from Steph, because he knew that Steph had (potentially) the most to lose by him coming. He not only had to see that Steph would say it was all good, but he also had to see that Steph meant it. And that was good news for us, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned about Stephen Curry, it’s that he means what he says.

  The five of us were outside alone and it was midmorning. The humidity was just getting started, despite the cooling breeze coming in from the Atlantic. There wasn’t much more to say. We had all made our pitches. And I had tried to give him the veteran’s perspective I had at this point in my career. But still, we were one of five teams he was receiving that week. Kevin thanked us for coming out, hugs and pounds were exchanged, and we were on our way, all of us piling back in the minibus we had arrived in together because we thought it would give the appearance that we were truly a band of brothers. No one spoke until the van was on the road. The mood in the car was humble, not celebratory. We didn’t feel like we had nailed anything. We had just been ourselves. If it worked out, that would be great. If it didn’t, then that would mean it wasn’t supposed to. But deep down I had some doubts. I remembered the searching look on Kevin’s face as he imagined what he’d have to confront with the media and fans.