25 Comments

Damn, this hit me where my loyalties lie. I was at one of the games...I...really want Steph to earn that final jewel in his crown, like 3 or 4 more times, please, but I can't. No.

No, I would not give up We Believe. I'm a Warriors fan, then I'm a Steph fan.

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to give up We Believe means giving up Baron Davis' dunk. that can't be undone.

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Looks like another classic Warriors have will be shown tomorrow evening on NBCBASports.

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Mar 19, 2020Liked by Eric Apricot

Steph is the only unanimous mvp in the history of the nba and the way the league is narrative driven theseday, we may never see another one in the next 20yrs..Kwahi has never won league mvp yet nobody uses it against him. Steph's greatness goes beyond a 7 game series..Even when he deserves it, hater will always have things to say. Last finals people were saying Klay would have been the FMVP if we won. However none of those people mentioned the fact that klay had a horrible shooting series against portland in the WCF.. in 2018 steph was the reason we won WCF, was the reason we had a chance to go into overtime in game 1 of the finals vs cleveland. He was the reason game 2 was a blowout because he scored 16 points in the 4th quarter. Hit a clutch shot in his worst shooting performance which was game 3. Led the team in scoring 3 out of the 4 games. Yet they gave it to someone else. Even Andre knows he didnt deserve the FMVP over steph in 2015..We believe was the highlight of some player's careers. Steph is steph. I honeslty believe he will still get to the finals and win a FMVP. Afterall if nobody believed he would achieve all he has, who can bet against him to achieve more.

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Steph really does get massive amounts of resentment, the burnt ends of others' bitterness. So much bile for a man who's brought so much sporting joy to the world.

Screw the haters, especially the ones who pretend to love him.

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Mar 19, 2020Liked by Eric Apricot

I can't imagine giving up something as integral as "we believe" to win a vote that depends on a sportswriter from Cleveland, Jeff Van Gundy(!), and a very (VERY) narrow (minded?) group of sports reporters. How is Finals MVP even a thing? Howard Beck as an arbiter of NBA greatness. Really? We'd be much better off picking a random bar in every NBA city and polling all the people there on the night of the last finals game.

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author

The Finals MVP vote is also among a very very small group of media, something like 11 of them, chosen in unclear fashion.

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Wow -- we MUST be bored to be thinking on these kind of hypotheticals.

But no, wouldn't trade We Believe for a Steph FMVP. He deserved it at least a couple of times. But as other here have said, his legacy is secure. The haters will always find a reason.

We Believe embodies some of the best of what it has meant for me to be a Ws' fan. Loyal to a team that went nowhere for years. A grassroots level fandom that can't be manufactured with all of the marketing techniques they try to use to approximate it. That was REAL fandom and a core part of Warrior lore.

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Mar 19, 2020Liked by Eric Apricot

Definitely not. And I'm not even a lifelong dubs fan. I wasn't here for We Believe, and Steph is the reason I'm a fan. Hell, he's the reason I started watching basketball again in 2012ish, after paying zero attention to sports in general for well over a decade. It's because it doesn't actually matter, except to the haters, and screw them. At this point, you either recognize Steph's greatness, or you're a hater. And the haters are called that because it's what they do. Finals MVP trophies won't change that. Anybody who's currently a Steph hater and claims that a FMVP would change their mind is lying.

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We Believe was a truly magical time if you were in the Bay Area.

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author

I agree with your take that FMVP isn’t a good faith argument. It might be different if Steph had poor Finals, but he has easily been FMVP quality for 4 out of 5.

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Exactly. He didn't get it in 2015 simply because the narrative around Iggy going into the starting lineup and the birth of the Small Ball Death Squad was too juicy. And then in the next two championship runs, he again put up performances that were more than FMVP worthy by any standard, but Kevin mofuckin Durant was also on the team, and there's only one trophy.

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I appreciate the Warriors' stance that they shouldn't use their status to get tested ahead of others. That's the humble, respectful thinking I appreciate about this team.

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Mar 19, 2020Liked by Eric Apricot

This is an easy one. Absolutely not. No one cares about FMVP anyway, if Curry had it there would be something else his detractors set as the standard to exclude him.

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author

Steph has never won ALL-STAR MVP, boom

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Thats just an exhibition game that nobody really took seriously

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OH, the Anti-Stephites, BUT IF HE'S SO GREAT, THE UNANIMOUS ONE, WHY CAN'T HE DOMINATE THE ASG?!? they would say. And they'd be idiots, but they'd do it because, well, they're anti-Steph.

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ASG is just a celebrity game. Who wants to dominate it and get injured in some meaningless game?.The anti steph people hate him because he beat their teams so badly. The same kind of haters who hated kobe during his playing days are the ones getting his tattoos... Everything in nba is narrative driven..the haters say Kd won steph 2 rings but they wont acknowledge that steph won a ring without kd and kd never won anything before playing with steph despite being drafted into a better team.Despite having better players around him in OKC..Steph only had klay.. i personally dont see any reasonable thing draymond contributes on offense and half of the time his passes lead to bone headed turnovers

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Everybody must care about it since it gets talked about so much

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They never talked about it prior to 2015

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Mar 19, 2020Liked by Eric Apricot

The We Believe team is still magical to me and it was an awesome moment for longtime dubs fans. To me, it felt almost as good as winning the finals. That's how beat down my expectations were back then. It was such a ray of light.

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author

To me MAKING the playoffs was such a long shot, I would have been ecstatic with just that. <-- low expectations

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*I* would make that exchange, personally, but I'm a Steph guy who became a Warriors fan because of him. Totally makes sense to me that longtime Ws fans/Bay Area natives would not.

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BTW my personal take is that I would not give up We Believe for the Steph FMVP.

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Never thought I could love these guys more than I do now #DubNation

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