Who is the more annoying Warriors Villain, Chris Paul or James Harden?

Relax, this is just to reminisce.

Honorary Warriors For Life & Warriors Villains For Life

The concept is simple. There are some players who are not in the Warriors organization, but Warriors fans will still root for anyway (as long as no Warriors interests are at stake). So they are not a part of Dub Nation, but they still are welcomed into Dub Nation. This is very often because they are former Warriors players, but not always.

More details are included in our master list of all those voted Honorary Warriors For Life so far. More details are included in our master list of all those voted Honorary Warriors For Life so far. In short, getting >75% support achieves Honorary Warrior For Life; >50% support of voters who know them achieves Honorary Warrior.

For the rare players that are very much the opposite, we have special statuses. For >50% anti-support votes among voters who know then, we award Warriors Villain status, and for the rotten creme de la creme, >75% anti-support votes, we award Warriors Villain For Life status.

James Harden, the current leading Warriors Villain For Life

We recently awarded James Harden with the first WVFL status. We describe the unpleasant details of his case there. The key information is his poll line:

Well 3.6% / Poorly 77.8% / Don’t care either way 15.6% / Don’t know who they are 3%.

Chris Paul

In the Harden comments, people involuntarily reached for another gold standard in Dub Nation loathing: Chris Paul. LGW Nation begged, nay, demanded, a fair chance for CP3 to dethrone Harden for Most Loathed status.

Chris Paul has been a top point guard all his career and he has pushed every team he’s been on to become better, and then driven them crazy with his nagging.

Unlike the Bearded One, Chris Paul has actually beaten Stephen Curry and the Warriors in a series: the colossally weird and dramatic 2014 first round series between the Warriors and Clippers. We discussed this series in detail in my true confession, My Worst Take: Coach Mark Jackson should not be fired.

You can go there for the gory details, but some highlights include CP3 getting away with an uncalled veteran’s foul on Steph’s deciding shot, the bitter taunting after the close Game 7 loss, and the Clippers generally acting like asses while people were trying to be sympathetic to them for playing for an owner too stupid to hide his extreme racism.

From then on, the Warriors were in Maximum Tryhard Mode against the Clippers, no matter what level of burnout they had. Between the Game 7 loss in May 2014 and January 6 2018, the Warriors went 13-1 against LAC, dropping only the traditional Warriors dud in Los Angeles on Christmas Day 2014.

Many of Stephen Curry’s most famous highlights came in that stretch against Chris Paul’s team.

Then Chris Paul moved to join forces with The Beard in Houston (which allowedWarriors fans to efficiently despise multiple villains on one team). There CP3 famously shimmied on Steph (to which Steph responded: “well deserved… if you can shimmy on someone else, you gotta be all right getting shimmied on.”).

CP3 then got used as an injury excuse to dismiss the Warriors’ gutsy 7 game series win in 2018, and then before 2019 Game 6, CP3 tried to play mind games by kicking Steph off the practice court, which Steph whooped about after the stunning upset.

LGW recently surveyed the carnage, musically:

CP3 was traded this year for another Warriors annoyance, Russell Westbrook. (We previously studied Westbrook’s case, and he was definitely a Warriors Villain, but his lack of ever beating the Warriors seems to have taken the edge off of people’s feelings.)

Time and plague seem to have mellowed the interpersonal feelings, as Chris Paul and Stephen Curry bantered recently about Steph dropping him, and Steph quickly deflected the compliment by saying he’s been dropped plenty of times.

And Warriors fans have a lot to be grateful for. It’s been rumored and was mentioned in Ethan Strauss’s book that in 2011, the Warriors almost closed a deal trading both Steph Curry and Klay Thompson for New Orleans’s Chris Paul. CP3 vetoed the deal.

Update: Larry Riley denies this.

95.7 The Game @957thegame

“I can tell you right now, that never happened.” Former #Warriors GM Larry Riley shoots down the Curry/Klay for CP3 trade report

The Results

Anyway, the odds were very good that Chris Paul was going to qualify as a Warriors Villain For Life, and Dub Nation did not disappoint:

Eric Apricot @EricApricot

Poll 35. Dub Nation, imagine you see Chris Paul in a game with no practical implications for the Warriors. (So not against GSW, ignore draft picks, playoff seeding, etc.) Do you want him to do well or poorly?

Well 2.1% / Poorly 79.3% / Don't care either way 16.4% / Don't know who they are 2.1%

CP3 received a 79.3% Poorly and Harden received 77.8% vote. So CP3 was slightly more despised. However, that is way too close to decide on who is the biggest villain, so we had to have an emergency runoff.

The Emergency Runoff

Eric Apricot @EricApricot

Emergency Tiebreaker Poll 35a. Dub Nation, if you see Chris Paul and James Harden competing AGAINST each other in a game with no practical implications for GSW (not vs GSW, ignore draft picks, seeding, etc.). Whom do you want to do better?

Any guesses who the winner is?

• Like Chris Paul better 27.5%

• Like Harden better 16.5%

• I don’t care 23.9%

• Hurts so much to choose 32.1%

So we award Chris Paul with the uncoveted Warriors Villain For Life status, but James Harden comes back from behind to keep his crown as the Dub Nation’s Least Favored Player.

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