The Golden State Warriors offer comfort in chaos
We’re not ready to say “night night” to the core of the Warriors’ dynastic run, which has symbolized more societally than four championship rings.
By Megan Armstrong
Stephen Curry scampered around the court before swishing a corner three while fouled against Memphis in the NBA Playoffs play-in game on April 15. Nobody in NBA history has bucketed more three-point shots than Curry. Still, he looked toward giddy fans sitting courtside with widened eyes, mouth playfully agape, as if to ask, Did I do that? He did — just as he had done over 4,000 times before. And he did it again five days later when sinking a shot that an astounded Kevin Harlan proclaimed “geometrically … should not have happened” during Golden State’s 95-85 Game 1 win over Houston.
“I love the organized chaos; I’m not going to lie,” Jimmy Butler III said after Game 1, according to The Athletic’s Anthony Slater. “Because nobody knows what to expect. Not even myself. Not even Coach. The only person who knows what’s coming out of the organized chaos is the one creating it.”
Butler joined the Warriors from the Miami Heat via a five-team trade in February. The six-time All-Star can’t shut up about how happy he is to be the Robin to Curry’s Batman. “I got my joy back,” Butler said on TNT after the Warriors captured Game 4 to go up 3-1 on Houston in their Western Conference’s first round playoff series.
Due respect to Butler, everybody knows what to expect from these Warriors by now. Golden State has radiated joy, humanity, and steadiness since Steve Kerr became head coach in 2014.
Curry and LeBron James both refuse to relinquish “face of the league” honors, redefining aging in the NBA at 37 and 40, respectively. Though James is arguably the league’s most powerful force individually — athletically, politically, socially — Curry and the Warriors offer something uniquely valuable: Collective familiarity. Or, as they’d say in the Bay, strength in numbers.
And familiar sights are priced at a premium when, increasingly, nothing feels safe.
As the Trump administration destroys decency and democracy, Curry’s brand of cultivated chaos is much preferred. There have been blips of unwanted volatility, such as injuries, punches at practice, or rumors. Franchise legends like Klay Thompson or Andre Iguodala have come and gone. But Curry, Kerr, and Draymond Green have remained. Their united front of the past decade feels almost like a relic, whether because NBA coaches are fired and stars relocate more frequently, or because America is flirting with losing any semblance of stability.
When this Warriors core won its first of four championships in June 2015, Barack Obama was president, and Donald Trump was freshly fired from “The Celebrity Apprentice.” From a bird’s-eye view, the Warriors’ subsequent dynastic run was blissful escapism: the “Splash Brothers” backcourt of Curry and Thompson. The dominance of back-to-back championships with Kevin Durant. A rebuilt roster snagging an unlikely championship in 2022, birthing Curry’s “Night Night” celebration. Even the drama of the Green-Jordan Poole fiasco.
That’s the stuff fans universally want from sports.
But the Warriors haven’t shied from also delivering what people need.
In mid-April, the same night Curry hit his acrobatic three against Memphis, Kerr wore a Harvard T-shirt in support of “academic freedom” after Trump froze $2 billion in federal funding to Harvard because the university refused to comply with his demands. “Way to stand up to the bully,” Kerr said in his postgame presser.
The Warriors always stand up to the bully. They didn’t ask for their turn at glory unfolding simultaneously with the most tumultuous decade of American politics in recent memory, but they answered the call.
Kerr set that tone. Sure, winning five championships as a player uniquely qualified him to take over the Warriors. But what actually matters is that Kerr was molded by his father, Malcolm Kerr, who was assassinated in 1984, and is perhaps even more influential in his activism. May 2022 immediately comes to mind, when he repurposed a press conference to plead for gun control after the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting in which 19 students and two teachers were killed.
“When are we gonna do something?” a distraught Kerr emotionally yelled, pounding the table. “I’m tired of the moments of silences.”
The Warriors have not been silent—the antithesis of “shut up and dribble.” In September 2017, Trump disinvited the Warriors from the White House after their second of four titles because of Curry “hesitating.”
"We would, in normal times, very easily be able to set aside political differences and go visit and have a great time," Kerr said at the time, per ESPN. "That'll be awesome. But these are not ordinary times. Probably the most divisive times in my life, I guess, since Vietnam.”
Instead, the Warriors released a statement saying they’d use their February 2018 trip to D.C. to “celebrate equality, diversity and inclusion — the values that we embrace as an organization.”
The divisiveness deepened. The COVID-19 pandemic ravaged bodies and traumatized society. Elon Musk purchased Twitter and turned it into a machine for bigotry, harassment, and misinformation. So on, so forth. But the Warriors endured.
In April 2019, the franchise was ripped from Oakland and plopped in the epicenter of tech bro oligarchy in San Francisco, but Curry and his wife, Ayesha, founded Eat. Learn. Play. and remain committed to the Oakland community.
NBA players, including the Warriors, were at the forefront of “Black Lives Matter” protests against police brutality in 2020. After the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Green took a strong stance on how Black and white Americans are handled by police.
That May 2022 press conference was far from Kerr’s first stand against gun violence and, sadly, wouldn’t be his last.
And now, Trump’s second term coincides with what Curry deemed these Warriors’ “last ride,” as per ESPN. In August, Curry and Kerr appeared at the Democratic National Convention. Green’s position as an autism activist holds even more weight with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. using his position as secretary of Health and Human Services to spread misinformation about autism. There they are again, doing their part.
“Basketball is just basketball,” Kerr said in “Court of Gold,” the Netflix docuseries about the Kerr-coached USA men’s basketball team winning gold at the 2024 Paris Olympics. “There are so many more important things going on in the world. And yet, when we’re on the court, it is the most important thing. It matters to be your best self. It matters to be part of something special. It matters to put something on the floor that can make people happy.”
Maybe the Warriors’ most generous public service is playing basketball.
A psychological study recently went viral because it comforted people to believe that binge-watching the same television show is a legitimate form of nervous system regulation. The Warriors are the NBA’s comfort show. You can’t predict how the White House will defy all logic — what dehumanizing, demoralizing, frightening news will emerge next — but you can count on a joyful Curry to defy physics.
After all, in the lead-up to what might prove to be the most consequential presidential election in U.S. history, it was Curry who made patriotism feel good again at the 2024 Paris Olympics by exploding for four absurd threes to secure the gold medal against France.
Curry’s mesmerizing shot-making — demonizing opponents with his mouthguard dangling from a childlike grin — will never get old. But just as your favorite comfort show eventually gets canceled, your favorite athlete inevitably gets older. Though Curry hasn’t hinted at retirement, the end of the Warriors as we know them is near.
But not here.
“Somebody asked me this summer, ‘What are you still playing for?’” Curry said on 95.7 The Game in March. That [a fifth championship] is literally the only thing you’re playing for.
Curry, Green, and Kerr could be within six weeks of winning their fifth ring together, but regardless, we win every time they choose to keep trying. To fight for something more.
Megan Armstrong is a freelance journalist, podcast producer and perpetual content consumer. Her work has appeared in Billboard, Boardroom, Esquire, GQ, GRAMMY.com, NYLON, Teen Vogue, The Kansas City Star, The Hollywood Reporter, UPROXX, and elsewhere.
I love Stephen Curry. Not only as a fantastic basketball player, but also as a great person and a great family man.
Another Warriors fan here. Thanks for your detailed & lovely article here on Coffee With The Contrarians.