The Sixth Man

by Andre Iguodala

  Two days later, Kevin Durant was a Golden State Warrior. I was probably the most surprised of all of us.

  * * *

  —

  As the off-season wore on, I had to do more than work out and stay in shape. I needed to take serious medical interventions in order to get ready for another year on the hardwood. I was getting MRIs on my knees and hips, and undergoing a procedure called PRP injections, which in essence is when they take blood out of your body and spin it a trillion times in order to increase the white blood cells that promote healing and recovery. I had learned about the procedure from Kobe Bryant, who made use of it in order to play well into his later years. As a player who had come to the NBA at eighteen, was the star on his team, and had won five championships, Kobe had logged more minutes than pretty much anyone else in the league. So whatever he was doing to keep dragging himself out there year after excruciating year was something I needed to do. I was thirty-two years old at this point, and my body was feeling it. Even with tremendous discipline and incredibly focused eating and exercise habits, there’s only so much you can will yourself to do. This blood-spinning thing was bizarre and a little bit ghoulish, but it was necessary.

  The whole process takes seven days. First you sit there for five minutes giving blood. Sometimes I would get lightheaded, other times not. And then they place the blood in a centrifuge, spinning it around at phenomenal rates of speed while you sit there, looking up at the ceiling and thinking about how it is that your life has led you to a German clinic, where someone in a lab coat is stealing your blood seemingly by the gallon. Then they start injecting the newly white-celled blood in the various sites of your injuries, in my case hips and knees, and then you go on your way. Each visit takes about thirty minutes, and you do it for seven days while your body distributes the new extra-strength blood. You have to exercise every day that week to maximize blood flow, but you can’t do anything too strenuous. So it’s stretches, Pilates, yoga, biking, and light lifting—but no running. After seven days of it, you’re back to full strength. And in my case, I started pushing it at the gym as soon as I could. You can begin to feel slight differences right away, after about two or three days, but it’s about two or three months before it really takes hold. It’s literally like having a new body. If only it would last.

  Preseason prep after two deep postseason runs is very up and down. Some days you hit the gym and you feel like you could do this every day for the rest of your life. The shot is going, the weights are smooth, your body feels like it’s working. Other days it’s as though you have bricks tied to your ankles and the idea of going onto a court with ten other guys banging around for forty-eight minutes over eighty-two games plus the postseason seems like an absolute joke. You don’t even know if you can stand twenty minutes on a practice court by yourself. But the thing is, you do. You just work through it because you know that no matter how bad it feels to go, it will feel much worse to quit. For the last two weeks of the off-season, I was doing two-a-days. Weights and training in the morning, then coming back at night and shooting. And shooting. And shooting and shooting. I like to shoot until I literally can’t shoot anymore. It’s the closest thing I’ll ever come to feeling the way some people describe drugs. I start to lose all sense of my body, of even having a body. I just go until there is nothing left, past fatigue, past boredom, past annoyance. I go past thoughts about the last season, about the world. Soon there is literally nothing left except the ball and the net and my breath.

  * * *

  —

  We knew going into the 2016–17 season that if the Warriors were a sideshow before, with Kevin aboard it was going to be full-blown traveling circus. Ticket prices would explode everywhere we went. Every shoot-around in every town would see dozens more reporters than those for other teams. But oddly, I didn’t feel pressure going into the season. Collectively we did not have a sense of “championship or bust.” It was something beyond that. We knew that winning was what we were supposed to do, and so if we did our work, we would win. If we did not, we would lose. It was that simple. Losing the year before had hurt, but it didn’t linger, at least for me. I wanted to win this year, but I knew that if we did not do our work, then we did not deserve it. And that was all there was to it.

  The season began with San Antonio at home. This was supposed to be a marquee matchup for the NBA, as the Spurs had Kawhi Leonard, a guy who was kind of a quiet superstar. Quiet in the sense that you didn’t hear or see a whole lot about him online—he had no “brand” to speak of—but superstar in the sense that he could flat-out ball and the media was beginning to take notice. He had developed something of a quiet-assassin story around him, and he was known for locking folks up defensively. On the surface, a perfect fit for his team: quiet, fundamental, and deadly. San Antonio was still considered a dynasty of sorts, even though there was starting to be a sense that the window might be closing on their dominance. It was their first year of the post–Tim Duncan era, but they still had Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker, and Gregg Popovich was still the greatest coach in the league. It was good for the press and the league to think of every team as beatable, so opening up against a highly respected San Antonio team made for a great story. If they handled us as we came off a loss in the finals, it would be a great way to show that the West was truly up for grabs.

  That was a tough game, and we were basically thrashed by a San Antonio roster that was much more cohesive and gelled than we were. We lost by nearly 30 points and trailed the whole game, save for a few minutes in the first quarter. For the press it was the ultimate sign that we had been pretenders to the throne and couldn’t hang with the real elite teams of the Western Conference, especially as Cleveland was the other opening-day team and they had beat the Knicks by nearly 40 points. But for us, we were exactly where we were supposed to be. You cannot expect to add a new piece to the existing roster and suddenly have everything flowing. It would take some time for us to understand how it would all work together, and we would learn during the season. Our attitude was basically like, “Tough break. Who’s next?”

  We won the next four but got blown out by a young Lakers team, and then went on to win twelve straight. And this was as we were still getting to know how this thing was going to work. It was starting to become clear to me that we had the capacity to put something nearly unbeatable on the floor. Not that we were necessarily there, but that we could be if we were able to get all the parts working together smoothly.

  We swung back through LA on December 7 to face the Clippers, another team the press had tried to make into a West Coast rival. They were talented, but we had beaten them seven times in a row. Nonetheless, it was a nationally televised game, and those are always unpredictable. The phenomenon of teams getting up for our visit like it was game 7 of the finals was even more pronounced when the game was on national television. We were a little sloppy offensively—ten turnovers, which would be unacceptable for some teams, but we were coming to realize it was part of the game with us. We did best when we moved the ball around a lot (we had 32 assists that game), and when we moved the ball around, we turned it over. That was just how it was. If we could keep that number under fifteen or so, then we felt we’d be alright. Mostly I remember that game because that was around the time it started to feel like I had my legs back. We beat them 115–98, and I had twenty-five minutes off the bench. The PRP injections back in September were definitely taking effect, and I felt like I might just make it through this alive after all.

  We followed that up with a late-night trip to Utah to face the Jazz the next day. Salt Lake City has always had a certain effect on me as a player. I always feel—I don’t know how else to say it—blacker when I’m in Utah. Something very uncomfortable is triggered in me when I play in front of that crowd. Not necessarily because they were any worse than any other crowd (though they were passionate). It had more to do with the kinds of thoughts that go through a black man’s head when he’s on a basketball c
ourt. You try not to let the discomfort creep into your game, but I defy anyone to be a black person on a floor in shorts and a tank top being screamed at simultaneously by eighteen thousand white people, who are flipping you off and spitting and foaming at the mouth, and not feel some deep, primordial, almost-cellular sense of threat. It’s just not possible. It would never be possible, but everything felt much more ominous because this was two weeks after Trump had been elected.

  I was not surprised by how incredibly and virulently racist this country is. I grew up in Springfield, after all. But what did worry me was that I began to wonder how much of my safety was based on the fact that even though people were racist, racism was still socially unacceptable. People were racist, but no one wanted to be called racist. They weren’t trying to be out in public about it, which meant that I felt safer in public. But what we had seen over the past year had changed that. There were Nazi rallies and swastikas and people marching in the streets under the Confederate flag. There were murders of black people in churches and on the street, attacks against Muslims. This is the kind of stuff that runs through your head when you are in an arena surrounded by white people who have paid money to express how much they hate you. On the one hand, it’s just a game. But on a much deeper level, it can never be.

  We were up at halftime in that game—big. And then all of a sudden it was close again. It was a phenomenon we were noticing more and more. Games tightening up even though we were clearly outplaying the opponent, especially on the road. We would be clearly smacking a team around, and then they would start getting foul calls that would change the momentum of the game. I’ve been around this sport for decades, and it’s not unclear to me what is happening, but it’s one of those things that you’re not allowed to say anything about, lest you get fined. So you try not to say too much or take it too seriously. You try not to be paranoid. But that night I heard a referee say to a teammate, “Don’t look at me.” There was something about that phrase. It stuck with me, echoed in my mind. But I was trying to stay in a good place mentally. I was trying to just play better and find the best iteration of my role with the team. I was just trying to keep it positive. I knew what could happen to me if I didn’t. Those dark days in Philadelphia were not far enough behind me.

  That road trip went on forever, it seemed. Three different time zones, Los Angeles, Utah, Memphis, Minnesota, New Orleans. It was taking its toll and we were struggling mentally. We were adjusting not only to playing together, but also to collectively facing the heightened pressure of each team circling our night on their calendar. The hardest games are the home games right before a road trip and right after, and our next game was at home against New York, another nationally televised affair. It was here that I was noticing that we were playing down to our competition. Carmelo Anthony and Derrick Rose were both out, and Kristaps Porzingis was a good player, but he struggled that night, shooting only 30 percent from the field. Offensively, we racked up something like 40 assists, and there was some stellar passing. I hit Kevin on the elbow with a sweet behind-the-back pass, and he in turn found Ian Clark, who drained a twenty-four-footer. It was a good moment, because I could see that Kevin was picking up on what we were doing. He was finding passes in motion, keeping defenders off balance, and that bode well for us. But defensively we struggled. We won handily, but I went into the locker room that night feeling like we had sold ourselves short.

  That Christmas, the NBA, as it always did, set up a rematch of the finals. It was our first time seeing Cleveland since they had beaten us in the final minutes of game 7, and we were trying not to take it too seriously, but the press around the event was absurd. Another nationally televised game meant longer TV time-outs, more press people and suits around the court and the hallways, more celebrities showing up and trying to get back to the locker room. It was pretty silly. Not to mention that Christmas Day games are just hard because you’re away from your family. You feel kind of resentful of the whole charade, like the league is trying to create drama that isn’t really there. We didn’t want to play into the story that this was a “rematch.” We tried instead to treat it as a regular season game, just one more experience along the road of getting ourselves in shape for a postseason run. But nonetheless the drama was hard to avoid. Reporters were asking us stupid questions about the beef between Draymond and LeBron, trying to set up a rivalry between Steph and Kyrie Irving. As the game progressed, we could see that we simply did not have control. It was close for three and a half quarters, and we led most of the way, but down the stretch we let it slip through our fingers in a way that was uncomfortably close to how game 7 had gone. We lost by one point. It didn’t feel like Christmas. Just another workday. The mood in the locker room was somber. We spoke about execution, about being mentally tougher than we were. Teams were roughing us up and getting into our heads. The referees were letting them. But more important, we were letting them.

  Our next stretch was thankfully mostly at home, which we sorely needed. We did well, but I can’t say that we were happy with most of our wins. We were seeing a trend forming. Teams were playing us physically, which we took as part of the game. But we could also see that we were letting close calls affect our mood throughout the game at times.

  I was having a hard time knowing what to believe. I had to remember that we couldn’t just blow every team out by 20 points, even though I could see that we had the team to do it. Steve Kerr had talked to us about this. This, in fact, was one of his most consistent messages: enjoy the moment, don’t beat yourself up too much about mistakes. But I could be really cynical when measuring how well we played. All I could see is what we can improve on, what we did wrong, rather than what we did well. Trying to keep that in perspective was hard.

  We still had another big test lying in wait for us that season. Kevin had not been back to OKC for a game since he’d made his announcement. It felt like a movie, some type of scripted thing where we were the villains. When we walked on the court to a cascade of boos, it was more like a wrestling match than a basketball game. Everything about it felt fake—as though all of us, the fans, the other team were just playing our parts.

  But there were lot of real emotions, and security posted everywhere, which gave the whole thing an ominous undertone. In a pregame presser, I happened to point out that basketball was something I wanted to enjoy doing, and situations like this made it hard. It’s a fine line. I recognize that people emotionally invest in us because of what we do, and I’d had a conversation with a media member off the record before when he pointed out that the rabid, sometimes illogical nature of the fan base was what made our sport great. I could understand that. But on the other hand, here was Kevin Durant, a professional who had decided to go work for another company in his chosen field because he liked the opportunity better, and that meant we needed extra security when we came to town? Like our lives would actually be in danger because a grown man made a job decision in a sport that has no real-world consequences? It boggled the mind. It was Curt Flood all over again. Oklahoma City was the only arena in the nation where they prayed before the national anthem. And still we spent the entire game being told, “Fuck you,” while armed guards made sure no one rushed the court.

  About a month later, we lost a game in Minnesota. I tried to take it in stride, but it’s hard. Losing bothers me. It bothers every athlete, but it bothered me more on this night. March 10, 2017. When you’re playing on a team like Golden State, losing is a lot more frustrating than usual, because it never seems necessary for us. It never seems inevitable. After a game like the one we had that night, I walk to the locker room thinking about every single thing we did on the court that we should have done better. I think about lazy bounces, passes getting picked off for easy buckets on the other end. I think about blown defensive assignments, people forgetting where they were supposed to go on a switch. I think about guys going underneath a screen when they know damn well they were supposed to go over top. I think about the mistakes I
made. I was supposed to switch up on the point guard, but I got caught out of position not once but twice. I can’t let go of these moments. They play over and over in my head like a movie I don’t really like watching but can’t find the remote to turn it off.

  Of course, we played a talented team. Of course, Minnesota is well coached. That’s what you have to say after a game. The press is looking for those words, and if they don’t hear them, exactly in that order, then it becomes a whole thing. The truth is, I feel like we should have won. We all feel that we should have won. But if you say, “We should have won,” then the next day everyone on every media outlet is talking about how you attacked Minnesota. They are shoving your quote in their players’ faces out of context and getting reactions. They are trying to stoke a fight between grown men about their jobs. They are trying to interject themselves in a relationship that they don’t even understand. They don’t understand how you have respect for those guys, how you played alongside them in camps and tournaments when you were fifteen, how they were rookies on your team when you were on your second contract. How you looked out for them, told them about the way the league works. They don’t understand that you know a little bit about the other guy’s background. You’ve heard about where they came from, what they overcame. You may not even like the kid, but you have respect for him because you know how he nearly killed himself to get here so that he wouldn’t have to die some other much uglier and more tragic way. They don’t know any of that. All they know is that here’s these two black guys wearing opposing uniforms. And they’ve heard about “beef” from some hip-hop blog and they think this is how we interact. So they keep trying to make “beef” happen. And no matter what you say in reality, they are going to try to fold it into their fantasy of hyperaggressive black men loud-talking one another. So you have to speak with them slowly. You have to keep your sentences simple, so simple that not even they can fuck it up.