Golden State Warriors

The Golden State Warriors are the franchise that broke basketball and rebuilt it in their own image. What Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, and Steve Kerr accomplished between 2015 and 2022 - four championships, six Finals appearances, a 73-9 regular season, and a fundamental reimagining of offensive basketball - ranks among the most transformative runs in the history of professional sports. The Warriors did not merely win; they changed the geometry of the game itself, proving that a team built around three-point shooting, ball movement, and defensive versatility could dominate a league that had been ruled by post-up big men and isolation scorers for decades. The Splash Brothers era turned the three-point line from a supplementary weapon into the primary means of attack, and every team in the NBA has been trying to copy the formula ever since.

The franchise's history stretches back to 1946, when the Philadelphia Warriors won the first-ever Basketball Association of America championship. The team moved to San Francisco in 1962, bringing Wilt Chamberlain and his hundred-point game with it, and eventually adopted the Golden State moniker to represent the entire Bay Area. Rick Barry's 1975 championship - a shocking sweep of the Washington Bullets - was the franchise's lone title during a long stretch that included far more losing than winning. The Warriors spent much of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s as one of the NBA's most irrelevant franchises, the Run TMC era and the We Believe upset of the top-seeded Mavericks in 2007 serving as brief, brilliant exceptions to decades of futility.

The Curry revolution changed everything. Drafted seventh overall in 2009, Curry was considered too small, too injury-prone, and too reliant on his outside shot to become a franchise player. He became the greatest shooter in basketball history instead, a player whose range and accuracy have no historical precedent. Chase Center, the gleaming waterfront arena in San Francisco's Mission Bay that replaced the beloved Oracle Arena in Oakland, is the physical embodiment of the franchise's transformation - from a lovable underdog playing in a concrete relic to a global basketball empire operating out of a billion-dollar palace. The dynasty's competitive window may be closing, but the Warriors' impact on how the game is played will endure for generations.