20. That fall, Webber decided that he didn't want to play center anymore, exercised his one-year option and demanded a trade. The Warriors quickly dealt Owens to Miami for center Rony Seikaly to make him happy. Webber still wasn't happy — he wanted the trade. New Warriors owner Chris Cohan backed Nelson and sent Webber to Washington for Tom Gugliotta and three first-round picks (1996, 1998 and 2000). All three of those picks eventually landed in the lottery, and yet the Warriors ended up with Todd Fuller (no. 11), Keon Clark (no. 13) and Chris Mihm (no. 7; sent to Washington).
21. We can't just casually skip over this Webber thing. He had just won Rookie of the Year and unleashed a free-flowing, up-and-down, uber-athletic, cerebral offensive game that had absolutely nothing in common with anything that had ever happened in the NBA before. If 1994 Me wrote my annual "Who Has the Highest Trade Value" column that summer, Shaq would have gone first, Robinson and Hakeem would have gone second and third, and Webber would have gone fourth … yes, ahead of Karl Malone, Scottie Pippen, Shawn Kemp, Grant Hill and everyone else. When someone that talented blows through your city and disappears just as fast, you don't just salvage that, and you certainly don't recover from it. The Warriors were never, ever the same.22. With Webber gone, the Warriors became Latrell Sprewell's team. The good news: Spree was coming off a First-Team All-NBA nod the previous year. The bad news: He was Latrell Sprewell.
23. Within four months, Nelson resigned as coach and GM, just a couple of weeks before Golden State flipped Gugliotta to Minnesota for the perennially disappointing Donyell Marshall. The Warriors won 26 games and the no. 1 overall pick, taking Maryland star Joe Smith ahead of the next four selections … Antonio McDyess, Jerry Stackhouse, Rasheed Wallace and Kevin Garnett. Defensible at the time. I swear.
24. Over the course of the 1995-96 season, the Warriors turned four former no. 1 picks (Hardaway, Gatling, Alexander and Carlos Rogers) into some guaranteed mediocrity (Kevin Willis, Bimbo Coles and BJ Armstrong), winning 36 games behind up-and-coming coach Rick Adelman. Of course, that knocked them out of the top six of a loaded lottery (Allen Iverson, Marcus Camby, Shareef Abdur-Rahim, Stephon Marbury, Ray Allen, Antoine Walker). They took Todd Fuller 11th. Four of the next six picks: Kobe Bryant, Peja Stojakovic, Steve Nash, Jermaine O'Neal.
25. You know what's sad? We're not even close to being done yet.
26. In November of '96, the Warriors traded Seikaly and Clifford Rozier (yet another Warriors first-round pick who didn't make it) to Orlando for Felton Spencer, Jon Koncak and Donald Royal. If you remember, they acquired Seikaly for Billy Owens, who was acquired for Mitch Richmond … who, by the way, averaged 24 points a game in Sacramento and made five straight All-Star teams from 1993 to 1997.
27. Coming off another lottery season (30 wins), the '97 Warriors fired Adelman, hired college coach P.J. Carlesimo and spent the eighth pick of the draft on Colgate center Adonal Foyle. The next pick? Tracy McGrady. I love the mind-set that it's too risky to take a high schooler, but it's not risky at all to take someone from Colgate. Ladies and gentlemen, the Golden State Warriors!
28. That concluded a 20-year run with the following lowlights: five playoff appearances; 13 playoff victories total; three no. 1 overall picks and two other picks in the top three; eight players traded who ended up starting for a championship team or making a first- or second-team All-NBA (McHale, Parish, Webber, Hardaway, Richmond, Williams, Wilkes, King … and that doesn't include Payton), three future Hall of Fame coaches who passed through on their way to a better place (Popovich, Karl, Adelman), two valuable bench guys buried in Golden State who thrived elsewhere (Mario Elie and John Starks), an All-Rehab Starting Five (King, Richardson, Mullin, Washburn, Lucas) and a Hall of Fame Absolutely-Coulda-Drafted-Him Starting Five (Bird, Garnett, Kobe, T-Mac and Payton, with McHale coming off the bench).
29. Somehow, things would only get worse. From that point forward, no Warrior would make an All-Star team.6
30. In August of 1997, the Warriors traded their most popular player ever (Mullin) to Indiana for Erick Dampier and Duane Ferrell. Four months later, their best player (Sprewell) was suspended for the rest of the season for choking Carlesimo during practice … not once, but twice.
31. Read those last two sentences again.
32. With another season imploding and Smith possibly heading toward free agency, the Warriors sent him to Philly for Clarence Weatherspoon and Jimmy Jackson. That's right, they somehow turned the first overall picks in 1993 and 1995 into Donyell Marshall, Weatherspoon and Jackson. Even Billy King couldn't do that. (Thinking.) You're right, Billy King could probably do that.
33. Still reeling from a 19-win season highlighted by an agonizingly boring lawsuit — the Players Association suing to get Sprewell paid during his suspension, and somehow winning, even though, again, HE CHOKED HIS COACH — Warriors fans finally caught a break when electric rookie Vince Carter fell to them at no. 5. Naturally, this lasted about 15 minutes: They ended up flipping Carter's rights to Toronto for Antawn Jamison's rights, even throwing in some cash to make it happen. The silver lining, if there was one: They never had a chance to have their hearts won and eventually broken by Vince Carter.
34. After the '99 lockout ended, the Warriors traded Sprewell to the Knicks for two expensive veterans (Chris Mills and John Starks), then signed Jason Caffey for $35 million, obliterating Golden State's cap for the next few years like it was the climactic scene of a Michael Bay movie.
35. A rejuvenated Sprewell ended up leading the Knicks to the 1999 Finals, where they lost to Gregg Popovich's Spurs. Also happening that season: Hardaway led the no. 1 seed in the East (and made second-team All-NBA); Mullin started for the no. 2 seed in the East; a rejuvenated C-Webb led Adelman's wildly exciting Kings team to the playoffs (and made second-team All-NBA); Nelson rebuilt the Mavericks around Nash and Dirk Nowitzki; and Carter won the Rookie of the Year award. Other than that, the Warriors fans weren't bitter at all.
36. The lockout team finished 21-29, just good enough to knock them out of the top nine of the '99 draft (narrowly missing Rip Hamilton, Andre Miller and Shawn Marion). Their big moves that summer: They signed Dampier to a seven-year, $48 million extension, then turned Bimbo Coles and the 10th pick (Jason Terry) into Mookie Blaylock, Vonteego Cummings and a 2001 no. 1 pick. Could any other team make a trade that involved Bimbo, Mookie AND Vonteego?
37. At this point, Warriors fans were rooting for another lockout. Their team won 19 games the following year and somehow didn't have a no. 1 pick because they gave their own pick up six years earlier in the C-Webb trade (turned out to be no. 5 overall: Mike Miller), then traded the rights to Washington's no. 1 pick (turned out to be seventh overall: Chris Mihm) with Starks for former lottery pick Larry Hughes and old friend Billy Owens. Don't worry, they made some other lousy moves that summer: re-signing Foyle for $18 million; trading Caffey for Bobby Sura; and trading Marshall and Billy Curley for Danny Fortson and Adam Keefe.
38. If you're scoring at home: Chris Webber > Tom Gugliotta > Donyell Marshall > Danny Fortson.
39. The 2001 Warriors had more players (22) than wins (17). The league's second-worst record earned them the fifth pick (Jason Richardson); they also drafted Troy Murphy (with the pick from the Blaylock/Terry trade) and stole Gilbert Arenas in the second round. Naturally, they celebrated that draft haul by egregiously overpaying Jamison (six years, $85 million).
40. Next year's team won 21 games … which somehow made them the most successful Warriors edition of the last five years. Their win totals following the catastrophic C-Webb trade: 26, 36, 30, 19, 21, 19, 17, 21. And that still doesn't capture how much it killed the franchise to lose Chris Webber.
3/26/2012 2:49 PM