Finally, there's good news for Warriors fans: They're not racists. In fact, they're too tolerant.
A column by Bob Kravitz in the Indianapolis Star posed the question to Pacers general manager Larry Bird about the six white players on the team. This, of course, created quite the skull-throbbing jaw-fest across the nation about a whether this was an accurate portrayal, b whether it spoke poorly of Bird or the Pacers' fan base and c whether it was bad business or bad journalism. If any of those topics interest you, have at it. We're just here to point out that two of those six melanin-deficient Pacers used to toil here - Mike Dunleavy and Troy Murphy - and to the best of our knowledge, nobody ever said the Warriors were too white. They said the Warriors were too not good, but never too white.
In fairness, the last Warriors team to have six white players was the 1991 team and wow, do we feel dirty counting them up at all, but there have been teams with five most recently 2005, with Murphy, Dunleavy, Andris Biedrins, Zarko Cabarkapa and the transcendent Nikoloz Tskitishvili. Again the black-white makeup never seemed to matter here. The 34-48 record did, though, and to our credit nobody here ever said it was because their racial balance wasn't sufficiently balanced. There was no black-white argument at all. We all agreed the record was due to having not enough good players and plenty of bad ownership.
Now I grant you that the difference between five white players and six escapes us. In fact, the whole debate seems to miss the point because the standings seem to sort out all deficiencies in a team's makeup. Bad teams are bad because they're bad, and owners or general managers with a racial issue aren't in the NBA.
Why Warriors fans keep turning up to watch what they watch is another debate entirely, but at least their consciences are clear when they do show up. They may not notice black or white, but they do know bad. They know it too damn well, if you really want to know the truth.
