I understood the special nature of a media pass about a minute after obtaining it, when I walked out of the tunnel into the arena and saw Warriors guard and MVP candidate Stephen Curry practicing jumpers so close to me I could almost touch him. My stomach jumped a little. I stood near the baseline and watched Curry proceed through his routine, making shots all along the edge of the three-point arc. After he left, the other Warrior players, including center Andrew Bogut and guard Klay Thompson, came out and did their pregame rituals. I watched for a while, then I made my way up to the long media table at the top of the arena bowl behind one of the baskets. After the pregame warmups concluded, the teams and coaches trotted onto the court amidst the usual fanfare (“Rip City! Are you ready??”). Tipoff was just after seven thirty.
Though my seat wasn’t courtside, it was good enough to see the action reasonably well. On the table were computer monitors that showed the player rosters with continually updated game statistics, and at the end of every quarter we would get updated printouts from the official scorer, all of which helped us to keep track of what was going on and see which players were having the biggest impacts on the game. All of the media people at the table had laptops or tablets, and many were connected to the Twitter feed from the official Trail Blazer site. I had a tablet and tried following the Twitter posts myself, but I soon realized that I was ignoring the game in front of me to look at text on my screen. This seemed a silly thing for me to do, so I turned my tablet off and focused on the court. Next to me was a blogger from one of Portland’s independent weeklies. He was posting a continuous online feed, and he typed furiously on his laptop for almost the entire game. Afterwards, I told him I admired how hard he worked. He thanked me and said that he’d been doing it for about seven years.
I was glad see Curry on the court, because I had heard that Kerr was going to rest some of his players for some road games in order to keep them fresh for the playoffs. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had done so, but that night we got the full Warriors contingent, including Thompson, who had come back the previous game from an ankle sprain. Unfortunately, that was not the case for the Trail Blazers, who had recently suffered an alarming number of injuries to their starters, including two in their previous game at Memphis. Short-handed as they were, the Blazers played hard in the first half and had the lead at halftime. The hometown crowd appreciated the effort, and at times their volume made my ears ring. The Warriors kept pace, though, especially when Curry found his shooting touch, and they mostly kept the Blazer lead to single digits.
After a halftime show where gold-painted men from Cirque de Soleil did acrobatic routines, the Warriors came out and took charge of the game. As Portland coach Terry Stotts said in his postgame press conference, the Warriors stepped up their pressure on defense and, on offense, put on a clinic on sharing the ball, passing it so often and so quickly that it was often hard for me to see where it was. Curry, with his unbelievable quickness, got himself open at will and ended up with 33 points for the night. With the Warriors defending the basket at our end of the floor in the second half, I also got to see Bogut at work. He always seemed to be in perfect position to contest any shot near the basket (with the exception of an alley-oop to Portland guard CJ McCollum), and the Blazers were sufficiently intimidated to concede the paint to him for much of the night. It was easy to see how important he was to the Warriors on defense, and that if he stayed healthy, they would have a good chance of advancing further in the 2015 playoffs than they had in their previous two trips.
After the game and the press conference, I hung out near the locker rooms and watched the players come out. They looked a little subdued, as one would expect after their evening’s exertions. At that moment, eighty-two games plus playoffs seemed like a very long NBA season.
When I finally left, my car was the very last one left in the garage.
Things to See in Rip City Other Than Basketball, by Chuck Strom
