Fandom 250: The case for Golden State Warriors fans

The Golden State Warriors have the best fans in the NBA, nay, the world. Here’s why they should be No. 1 on the FanSided Fandom 250.

To be the best fandom, according to a formula I just now made up that does not reflect the views of my employer or the Fandom 250 powers that be, you need to score well in three distinct departments: Numbers, passion and loyalty.

Numbers, as you might guess, refers to the sheer quantity and vastness of your fandom. Counterintuitively, it’s not necessarily easy to quantify, but may be marked by ticket sales, consecutive sellouts, viewers, social media follows, a general feeling of inescapability.

Passion is itself part reputation and part actual displays of fandom. Passion is record-setting-loud cheering, fighting the good fight on Twitter (LMAO STEPH BETTER), making reckless statements, traveling far and wide and sometimes paying exorbitant prices for two-plus hours of something magical.

Loyalty and its cousin longevity refer to how long and through what kind of hell fans have cheered. Points won’t necessarily be deducted if your beloved is new to the scene (ahem, Thunder fans), but they’ll certainly be gained from years during which the most entertaining thing trotted out on the court was a man in blue spandex and fake muscles (also Thunder fans).

In all departments, the Golden State Warriors fandom is stacked.

Numbers

We’ll start with the numbers because that is, of course, the most contentious of the Warriors fandom’s qualifications. The Warriors have an absurd number of fans around Oakland, the Bay Area, the country and the world. But they also have an offensive number of fans who became fans circa 2015, the year Golden State won their first modern championship, kicked off the subsequent season with 24 straight wins and placed a vise-grip on the public consciousness of professional basketball.

You could, in all fairness, call these bandwagon fans. The ethics of bandwagoning aside, the fact of the matter is a formidable fanbase received a massive boost in the numbers department, adding both Bay Area sports generalists and new fans across the country to their already impressive, sell-out consistent numbers. In 2015, the waitlist for Warriors season tickets was 12,500 fans long.

All those fans also make up one of the most culturally, racially and economically diverse fanbases in sports, even if Oracle doesn’t always reflect it anymore. Some of the fans are born-and-raised, multi-generation locals, many are transplants or first-gen immigrants. They’re working class and artists and activists and small business owners and finance folk and, yes, techies. The Mercury News reported in 2015 that while the Warriors don’t track race or demographic data of season-ticket holders, the organization estimates, based on surveys, that only 56 percent of Warriors fans are white, which is almost exactly representative of the Bay Area itself, according to the 2010 census. For the most part, the Warriors organization has cultivated this diversity with affinity nights and community involvement, and it’s a rather simple logic that states when you appeal to multiple demographics, you’ll attract more fans in total. The Warriors are proof of that.

Passion

Lee Jenkins once described Oracle, during the 2015 playoff run that saw New Orleans Pelicans coach Monty Williams question the legality of the fans’ noise, as “a diverse cauldron of chaos.” The Warriors, of course, were good at this time.

Still, even before the play was worth hollering for, Warriors fans were passionate. As Ezekiel Kweku put it, the time between 1975 and 2010 — when Joe Lacob and co. bought the Warriors — “was characterized by a diehard, rabid fanbase and futile basketball.”

I have a not-particularly-novel theory that the worst teams produce the craziest fans and even before their numbers extrapolated wildly with Curry-crazy and small-ball-smitten fans around the country, the Warriors faithful were nuts.

After all, you don’t get to be one of the most intimidating arenas in basketball by being muted with your fandom. According to anecdotes from various players, media and fans, Oracle was the loudest arena in the NBA throughout the late ‘00s and early ‘10s. Despite being perennially out of the playoffs at this time, the Warriors were in the top 10 for attendance. When they did make the playoffs in 2013, ESPN’s decibel meter showed they were louder than a jet plane.

Passion, unsurprisingly, also thrives in good times. When the Warriors announced they would move to San Francisco, there was concern that the general progression of pricing and Bay Area gentrification would dilute the fandom’s enthusiasm. That San Francisco fans would get bored, or not know what they’re watching, or lose the passion that made Oracle so special. 

After the Warriors won their first championship in 40 years and a year later signed Kevin Durant, and since their dominance and future championships have become a foregone conclusion (even if that’s not at all how sports work), the question has become whether any Warriors fans have that energy anymore. Have they lost the passion that made them so notorious, as the loudest, most loyal, most obsessive fanbase in basketball?

So far, the answer is no. At Oracle, on Twitter, in sports bars worldwide, Warriors fans are no less vocal, no less nuts. They’re still easily worked into a frenzy by what Harrison Barnes once called dagger plays, i.e., the threes, crazy shots and four-point plays that make the crowd lose it, even more so now when they come from young players like Jordan Bell and Patrick McCaw or loving reclamation projects like JaVale McGee and Nick Young.

Loyalty

I’m fully aware emphasizing the dedication of Warriors fans through 35 years of institutional torture as a counterpoint to the bandwagon, new money, tech bro face of the fandom is kind of obnoxious.

But still: Quietly and not so quietly, lifelong Golden State fans — heck, even Golden State fans who fell for the team circa We Believe — will tell you it’s an honor just to be nominated. It’s shocking and amazing people are talking about Warriors at all. Yes, fans are acquitting themselves to success quite enthusiastically, but amidst everything else, they’re still a fandom only five years into actually having something for which to root.

And yet that never stopped them from rooting before. The aforementioned passion and numbers are proof that the fans were notable long before the team was. Warriors president Rick Welts, who worked closely with former Commissioner David Stern as a league executive, told the Mercury News, “The fan support for the Warriors [was] legendary. The thinking was, if they could ever get in the right ownership hands, the sky was the limit.”

(Of course, they did and it is.)

The makeup of Oracle is changing and it’s only going to change more with the move to San Francisco. But the legions of loyal Warriors fans that filled the arena aren’t just going to disappear. Those that choose to not make the move, or find the tradeoff between regular season attendance and resale value too hard to pass up, will still be fans, wherever they watch the game. To suggest otherwise is an insult to the institution of fandom.

There is a fourth factor, too, that’s worth considering and that’s reputation — or fan brand. It doesn’t necessarily reflect the strength of the fanbase, but still, when you call something the best, it’s nice to feel good about whatever it is said group of people connotes. Unfortunately, it is here that I must admit Warriors fans draw poor marks. The Warriors fan brand is rather negligently mired in the one-two punch of bandwagon fans and anything having to do with inherently embarrassing and possibly evil tech bros.

Next: Fandom 250: The ultimate fandom ranking

Perhaps it’s only fitting that Warriors fans, like the team they root for, are in the midst of a bit of an identity crisis. The team is no longer an underdog, but the heel-turn hasn’t exactly been a natural fit. Fans have not quite dislodged the through-the-mud, chip-on-the-shoulder, we’ve-waited-for-this-let-me-gloat mentality, and yet they also know that most everything about the modern-day Warriors is shiny, new and terribly uncool.

But whoever they are, the Golden State Warriors are the best — and their fans are too.