The Golden State Warriors won the NBA Championship. They were gonna be championship, and now they are championship. Championship. And after a championship, everything players and coaches do is either fun, cute, hilarious, poignant or just plain awesome/dope/lit/rad/sweet/killer/fire. Go with whatever word you like best, we’re all sitting at the same table of friendship and celebration after a team wins a championship.
Championship.
I’ve got four more videos to share, and I figured I’d throw them all into this post so they don’t get lost in the shuffle after tomorrow’s parade. They’re all under a minute long, and two of them are under 10 seconds long, so no attention span-crushing videos here.
Stephen Curry ends pregame warmups with silly corner 3
It’s easier for this dude to hit shots from the left corner than it is for me to enter or exit my garage. If I stop paying attention to what I’m doing at the very end, my car probably gets scraped. Curry stops looking and heads to the locker room, knowing that the cheers will only get louder with every step he takes.
***
LeBron James congratulates Warriors, leaves Game 6
I moved down from the press area with three minutes left, knowing I had a good chance to find an open seat pretty close to the floor since so many Cavs fans started leaving a couple of minutes earlier. There was a row about 20 feet behind the Cavs’ bench with several open seats next to the aisle, and no one minded when I sidled in and started filming stuff.
Here’s the one time the crowd got loud while I was down there — when LeBron James was pulled from the game 10 seconds before the final horn sounded.
***
Final seconds of Game 6, Warriors celebrate
It was incredible to witness this from not all that far away, even though it’s always weird to watch a road team celebrate a title while most of the crowd murmurs and the only cheers come from the few visiting fans who made the trip and the players hopping around on the floor.
No matter, it was still a really cool moment. The way Andre Iguodala went after the ball after Curry heaved it up to the rafters still makes me laugh. If I had a vote for Finals MVP, this last bit of post-clinching aggression might’ve swayed me.
***
Klay Thompson channels his inner Leandro Barbosa
This doesn’t really compare to Barbosa’s “We ARE Championship” rant that I captured several minutes later in the locker room, but it’s still fun. While I was waiting in the back of a ridiculously long line of media people to enter an absurdly tiny visiting locker room to catch the Warriors celebrating, Thompson walked by with Warriors PR employee Brett Winkler, champagne bottle in hand, and at the end of this short video he uttered Barbosa’s famous catchphrase.
I’m not sure what happened at the end of this video — I think the guy in front of me smacked my arm with his giant camera … maybe I was just overwhelmed by the force of Thompson’s words.
