Honorary Warrior For Life, JaVale McGee? Plus Mike Brown election results
Honorary Warrior For Life, JaVale McGee? Plus Mike Brown election results
The original Dunkomatic 3000
The master list of Honorary Warriors For Life lists everyone already polled.
Introducing Honorary Warriors For Life
The concept is simple. You get to vote on the question “Is X an Honorary Warrior For Life?”
What does that phrase mean? I once tried to define it, and people found it more fun to bring in their own definitions, so it is now back to being kept vague, like “Most Valuable Player” or “Greatest Of All Time” or “Sandwich” or “Taco”.
You can vote at the Substack poll at the end of this section, or in the comment sections with a #YES or #NO.
The Nominee: JaVale McGee
JaVale McGee joined the Warriors in summer 2016. The Warriors had ejected defensive rock Andrew Bogut to make cap room for the Kevin Durant free agency signing, leaving them without a big man.
I won’t link to the Shaqtin segments on JaVale’s clumsy and chaotic bloopers, but there were plenty of them. JaVale came in as, literally, a joke, and when he left, he became the baseline standard which all later Warriors big men had to meet. Could they play “The JaVale McGee Role” ? Play hard, outrun everyone down the floor, catch lobs for giant dunks, block shots.
JaVale had the biggest catch radius that I’ve seen. The Warriors seemed to delight in throwing higher and higher lobs more and more off-target to see if he could catch them, and JaVale rarely missed.
Because of JaVale’s asthma and Zaza Pachulia’s steadier play, McGee played mainly a backup role. It might amaze you to know McGee played less than 10 MPG. But they were really really loud, entertaining minutes and he never publicly complained about his role.
In 2018, he left the Warriors seeking a bigger payday than the minimum and a bigger role. But he left a lot of great highlights in his wake.
The Poll
Vote in the embedded Substack poll below, or in the comments. Comment votes count as 10 normal poll votes.
*** To have your comment vote count, you must put #YES or #NO somewhere in the body of your comment, exactly once, and add a few words of explanation.
Mike Brown Election Results
The results are in from our previous vote
Weighted Vote: 96.5% Yes.
Poll 89%, Comments 100%.
It was a landslide and the only question was whether Brown would be Unanimous. To be honest, someone voted No early on in the vote, so there wasn’t suspense there either. In any case, a lot of love for Mike Brown, smashing the 75% Honorary Warrior For Life threshold. Congratulations!
Honorary Warrior For Life, Mike Brown? Plus…
super-sub assistant coach Mike Brown
Trogdor (8 ♡):
#Yes, and this is the easiest yes vote of the entire offseason. With the Warriors for 3 of the 4 rings in this dynasty, I think we will find out some day that Brown had a huge influence in helping to shape Kerr from the innovative new coach who took the NBA by storm, to a more polished and refined experienced leader.
Brown almost certainly had opportunities elsewhere before this Kings job came up but he stayed with the Warriors through the good times, the rocky times, and then back into the good times again. He has been a steady voice of experience, and at no time has ever publicly seemed to clash with Kerr despite being the more experienced coach.
I hope the man does well in Sacramento, because he deserves success as both a good coach and an excellent individual. Welcome to being an HWFL, Coach Brown.
Sleepy Freud (6 ♡):
Heck yeah!
Assistant coach for 3 of the 4 title teams (2015 excepted). Occasional Head Coach when Kerr had been ejected or was dealing with his scary back issues. Defensive savant. And maybe most importantly, by all accounts an all-around lovable dude. I remember when he was hired, Kerr said something along the lines of, the most important quality for this job is being someone who everyone enjoys being around, day in, day out, for nine months a year. He was clearly that.
No doubter, imo. #Yes
Freddie (4 ♡):
I will root for Sacramento against the Suns, the Lakers, the Clippers, the Grizzlies, the Nuggets and the Mavs
C'mon Kings!
Asher B. (4 ♡):
I don’t have an informed response. I find it hard enough to evaluate individual player play. Evaluating coaches I find pretty much beyond me. That’s because most of what they do we don’t get to see. If someone could show me Mike Brown introducing a new concept to a player, then working on exercises of it with him for months, and then the player incorporating that in a game with success, then I would of course support his induction into our prestigious hall. This is more a comment about how tricky it is for fans to know what coaches are doing or not doing than it is a comment about Mike Brown in particular. After all, as the article points out, Luke Walton had a tremendous run as a head coach on the bench, but rare is the analyst who thinks that he was doing something special as a coach. Coaching from the bench is just one small part of coaching, and I would love to know more about the rest.
Reminder: To have your comment vote count, you must put #YES or #NO somewhere in the body of your comment, exactly once, and add a few words of explanation.
The poll numbers are looking close to the 75% threshold, so your hashtag could make the difference…
This being the dog days of the NBA summer, I have been ruminating on the word "honorary" while awaiting training camp to begin.....
First, some definitions - HONORARY: conferred or elected in recognition of achievement or service without the usual prerequisites or obligations (Merriam-Webster); given as a reward, without qualifying in a standard way (Cambridge); given for honor only, without the usual requirements, duties, privileges, emoluments, etc. (Collins)
Those above definitions pretty much jive with my understanding of the notion of "honorary" when applied to the context of a "Warrior for Life". It is "honorary" in the same way an "honorary" degree is, not the REAL thing per se, but a reward given to someone who, in some way, embraced Warrior-hood, lived it for a time, was loved by the Warrior community, but who may not, in the larger context, qualify as a REAL Warrior for Life. To put it in another starkly obvious, way - Stephen Curry is a Warrior for Life, Robin Schreiber, the Warrior dancing cam mom, is possibly an *Honorary* Warrior for Life.
Now why am I blathering on about this? Because I feel the above distinction has been lost. Because we are voting on whether JaVale McGee, or GP2, or heck, Šarūnas Marčiulionis, for that matter, should be an HONORARY Warrior. We're not evaluating their qualification to be a Pantheonic Warrior or some such, we're not talking jersey retirements, we're not even talking list of 100 or 500 greatest Warriors or whatever. We're talking about players or outside personalities (cause heck, we voted Damian Lillard in) who, for some reason, had enough of an appeal to qualify for some honorary Warrior-hood, whether it be ties to the community, some legendary fandom-ness, or yes, a player who in their own way was a cult favorite when they were here even if he may not have been an all-star or whatever.
Which is why, when we voted for Andre Iguodala many moons ago, I felt very weird about it. For God's sakes, Iguodala is not an "honorary" Warrior, he is an integral inviolably inseparable part of the lore. He is core. He is a Warrior for life, tout court! In that vein, I hope we never ever go down the route of voting on the "honorary" Warrior-hood of Stephen Curry. Heck, Stephen Curry should get a vote on whether you or me get to be Warrior fans.
So yes, so HWFL was fun, it had something a bit whimsical about it even at the onset, and yes, the criterion was simple - would you cheer for this person except if he played against the Warrior? But now it's turned into something else, I'm not quite sure what it's become, but there is nothing "honorary" about what we are voting on anymore.