The first time I can recall Charles Barkley hating on the Golden State Warriors was during the 2007 playoffs.
I don’t remember the specific game, but it was during halftime with the Warriors leading over the top-seeded Dallas Mavericks, and Barkley was irate. “Pound those little midgets inside,” he urged the Mavericks.
And when the Warriors pulled off the upset, Barkley, wearing a “We Believe” T-shirt, stated, “The national nightmare continues” (skip to 3:51).
So began the Barkley hate on the Warriors, and it could not have been more apparent this past season, when they claimed the NBA championship despite Barkley stubbornly sticking to his word that “jump-shooting teams” would never win, that “small ball” was a flawed strategy.
In January, he adamantly picked the Mavericks, Grizzlies, and Trail Blazers as the “three best teams in the West” despite the Warriors having the best record and leading in the league in nearly every important statistical category, leaving his TNT cohorts in disbelief:
After Game 4 of the Western Conference Semifinals in which the Warriors routed the Grizzlies 101-84, Barkley still wasn’t impressed, saying something to the effect of the Grizzlies scoring the same amount of points as the Warriors in the second half in a 17-point blowout, which is as asinine an argument as one can make.
Barkley was back in the news this week at a golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, when he contended to the San Francisco Chronicle that the Cavaliers would have beaten the Warriors in the finals with a healthy Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving and that Stephen Curry isn’t the best player in the league, not on the same level as LeBron James or Anthony Davis, despite winning the MVP.
He then went on CSN and complained about the Warriors not facing dominant big men in the playoffs, although they had to battle through Anthony Davis, Marc Gasol, Zach Randolph, Dwight Howard and even Timofey Mozgov en route to the crown. I’m not sure how many other tough big men the Warriors could have faced in the postseason.
Hoops Habit
Regardless, using the “what-if” strategy is a lame excuse. In 30 years, nobody will look back and say, “The Warriors didn’t deserve the 2015 championship because they had an ‘easy’ road to the Finals.” That Barkley has to resort to such hypotheticals is a sign of a man grasping at straws, afraid to admit the truth.
“It’ll always be a big man’s game,” Barkley told the Chronicle. “The Spurs didn’t go out and get a bunch of small guys. I fundamentally believe it’s still a big man’s game.”
Ah, but the Spurs went out and signed LaMarcus Aldridge and David West, who are big, but mostly rely on jump shots and stretching the floor for their points, which sounds a lot like the Warriors.
While the Spurs may prove to be a challenge for the Warriors this season, keep in mind that Gregg Popovich is trying to find a way to trump Steve Kerr and not vice versa, although Barkley and other critics will be quick to dub the Spurs as favorites.
April 9, 2015; Oakland, CA, USA; Portland Trail Blazers forward
LaMarcus Aldridge(12) shoots the basketball against Golden State Warriors forward
Draymond Green(23) during the first quarter at Oracle Arena. The Warriors defeated the Trail Blazers 116-105. Mandatory Credit: Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports
Barkley continues to maintain that his philosophy in 16 years of being an analyst is that a team will always need a dominant big man. While that may have worked for most of his tenure, times have changed, and the game is different.
Yes, size will always remain important in basketball, and someone who is 6’10” will have an advantage over someone who is 6’5″. But with the increased value of spacing, ball movement, and fast pace and the waning use of the old-fashioned half-court, grind-it-out, isolation offense of Barkley’s days, that advantage has diminished in recent years.
I guarantee the Spurs didn’t bring in Aldridge to post him up 30 times a game; rather, they will develop elaborate plays with screens and ball and player movement to create space for his jump-shot, something the Warriors mastered with Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson. The only difference is that Aldridge happens to be 6’11”, and Barkley mistakenly implies that as proof of a center-dominant league.
Barkley needs to evolve from his stubborn, old-school mindset and realize that the Warriors, with their position-less, transcendent style of basketball, are at the forefront of erasing the notion of his “big man’s game.”