A Window on the Warriors Dynasty
By: Jason Park
Tags: Nonfiction, Basketball, Books, Sports, Book Review

A Window on the Warriors Dynasty

A review of Ethan Sherwood Strauss’s “The Victory Machine: The Making and Unmaking of the Warriors Dynasty”

Do you miss basketball? In this unprecedented time of school closures and stay-at-home orders, I’m surprised by how much I miss basketball. But if you’re anything like me, I have a drug for you. It won’t cure the sickness, but it will lessen the symptoms. It’s Ethan Sherwood Strauss’s new book, The Victory Machine. Strauss is a beat reporter assigned to the Golden State Warriors for the Athletic, and he’s been covering the Warriors since before they won their first title. In other words, he saw the whole saga up close, and he has a story to share. In his own words:

This is a story of ultimate success. It’s also a story of why ultimate success cannot sustain.

Strauss begins the story in 2010 before Joe Lacob bought the Warriors. It continues through Joe Lacob’s “lightyears ahead” interview, the birth of the Warriors dynasty under Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, 73 wins, Durant’s arrival, a few NBA titles, and Durant’s departure. It’s a story a lot of us know well, but Strauss tells it with the connections and the knowledge he has gained over the years. That turns The Victory Machine into a brand new story: one about professional athletes’, owners, and basketball operations guys, who they are, and what they’ll do to win.

Strauss’s perspective also has a fresh pop of honesty and humor. His writing style is casual in its use of language, a necessary quality in a book about athletes and Ops men with a wide-ranging vocabulary of profanities, and he is not afraid to use the first-person whenever necessary to add personal anecdotes, insights, and true-to-life panache to the narrative. My favorite parts of Strauss’s writing, however, are the unique perceptions he gleans from his time spent with the athletes we love to watch from afar. He sets the stage early on in the book:

Superstars show more loyalty to their brand than to their teams. LeBron James is on his fourth NBA team, having gone from savior to villain to savior again in his home state of Ohio, and then on to Hollywood for a new conquest. Through all of that, he stayed true to his lifetime deal with Nike. It figures. Nike boasts the ability to extend his sphere of influence long after retirement, across time and across the world. An NBA team is impotent by comparison.

Maybe I’m just not as connected to the NBA world as I like to think, but this changed so much of what I thought I knew about player movement when I began to think about basketball players and teams in this way.

Strauss also gives insight into specific players such as Steph Curry, Draymond Green, Klay Thompson, and especially Kevin Durant. Durant is probably the most dominant subject in The Victory Machine, and you will probably think differently about him after his portrayal. (Hint: Durant will not be happy about this book.) It’s also about the relationships between players and personnel. I especially enjoyed his characterization of the D’Angelo Russell deal and its possible effects on Warriors staff:

Of course, nobody quite knew if Lacob and Myers were Russell’s new bosses. If Russell faltered and lost value, Lacob and Myers retained their authority. If the twenty-three-year-old exceeded expectations and turned into a bona fide star of the future? Then Lacob and Myers would lose control and lose authority. They were hoping for this, even banking on their own usurpation. These were highly successful men whose hope was to be subservient to the whims of a twenty-something. In other words, they were at the top of the food chain in Basketball Ops.

But sprinkled into Strauss’s book are understandings that apply to all of us, whether rich and famous or middle-class and unknown. He writes:

When we feel attacked and that fight-or-flight drive kicks in, we tend to remember the experience. I often hear from media members about how awful the fans on Twitter are. I’ll take a glance at their mentions and often see mostly anodyne or positive responses. Those don’t stick, apparently.

Strauss is describing players’ relationships with fans, but he’s also employing a concept that applies to everyone. Whether you’ve seen it on Twitter or not, you’ve experienced the disproportionate effects of insults on your mind and behavior. And sometimes it’s encouraging to know that players, coaches and media members fall into the same mental traps as you do.

The Victory Machine is a helpful salve for the pain of missing basketball games and basketball content. But it’s not just that. The book is a window on the basketball world and a foggy mirror to our own. I highly recommend it to any basketball fan. Enjoy and stay safe.

I received an eARC of The Victory Machine courtesy of Public Affairs and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.