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Decade Awards

Franchise of the Decade: Golden State Warriors

Co-owners Joe Lacob and Peter Guber (in T-shirts) built a dynasty.nbae / getty images

In July 2010, Joe Lacob and Peter Guber headed an investment group that bought the Golden State Warriors for $450 million from Chris Cohan.

It was a record price at the time, yet the team’s immediate future seemed as unremarkable as ever. On the court, the Warriors were an afterthought. They had been to the playoffs just once in the previous 15 seasons. Off it, they were just as overlooked, a nondescript organization lacking an identity. 

Quietly, however, the Warriors had already begun an astonishing transformation that would lead to their selection as our Franchise of the Decade. The previous year the team had drafted a slight, sharpshooting guard from Davidson named Stephen Curry. Before the 2010-11 season, the organization debuted a new logo and jersey. The next year it hired longtime NBA executive Rick Welts as team president. That same year it drafted a sweet-shooting guard from Washington State, Klay Thompson.

5

Final round berths in a row, first U.S. pro team to do since 1980-84 Islanders.

Starting in 2014-15, the Warriors embarked on a dynastic run of success. They became the first team since the famed Boston Celtics of Bill Russell to reach five straight NBA Finals. They won the championship three times, and even in a year in which they fell short, still managed to set a regular-season record with 73 wins in 2015-16. They won more games in a five-season stretch than any team in NBA history, then broke their own record the next year. The Splash Brothers, Curry and Thompson, transformed the way the game was played with their three-point bombardments. 

Golden State was having a similar impact in the business space. Under Welts, the Warriors have ranked annually at or near the top of the NBA in revenue, aided by a massive run-up in sponsorship deals including a jersey patch deal with Rakuten valued at $60 million over three years.

Then there is the privately funded, $1.4 billion Chase Center in San Francisco that opened in October. The 11-acre project includes two office towers, 100,000 square feet of retail space, 29 retail outlets and three acres of plazas and open space, and has set a new standard for NBA facilities. It also set a record for contracted revenue that has surpassed $2 billion with its multimillion-dollar courtside seats and massive sponsorship deals, including the naming-rights agreement with Chase.

By decade’s end the Warriors’ estimated value had exploded to more than $3 billion. A golden state, indeed.

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