A scare of team-wide meningitis was only one of many bumps in the road for the Golden State Warriors last season, as retired big man David West told Sam Amick of The Athletic. The Warriors managed to survive a slew of late-season injuries, the monotony of a long and grueling NBA season, plus a potential epidemic en route to an NBA championship, making trivial matters like internal spats only pebbles in comparison to the boulders the team hurdled to crown themselves back-to-back champions.
West had a cryptic message for reporters before calling it a career, leaving a secret for them to unearth — yet his words hold true even after decrypting them — as the Warriors have managed to survive plenty of challenges, just like the rest of NBA teams.
A mid-November spat between Draymond Green and Kevin Durant sent the NBA into a frenzy, as the narrative of “trouble in paradise” flooded media outlets, who saw a clear smear in the basketball heaven that the franchise seem to be.
“Every NBA season deals with that s**t, but what I think people make a mistake about is that because the Warriors are so talented, because everybody knows that there’s this ability to flip the switch and just play better than everybody, that they still don’t deal with those challenges,” West explained, recalling his 2017-18 run with the organization. “And that’s really what the gist of my comment was, like, ‘Man, this s**t was not an easier year — by any stretch. It was not an easy year emotionally. It wasn’t an easy year physically. It just wasn’t an easy year.'
“Yeah… you’ve got the talent to make it all make sense at the end by being able to win, but s**t, you know what? You go through it. You deal with it. And we had a good group last year that had enough sense to keep everything in house, and some of the s**t — again — didn’t get out, which was great, and we were able to deal with it. But the idea that somehow the Warriors don’t have tough environments, or tough things to deal with internally, it was a false narrative that we were getting too much of last year, and I’m like ‘Damn, you know. Y’all are tripping.’”
West wasn't worried when the Warriors' locker room tiff became public, knowing he and his former teammates had survived an even more concerning obstacle earlier this year.
Somehow West's wisdom has been proven true, as the team has successfully managed to make the feud dissipate over the last few weeks.
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