Game Over

OAKLAND —  Thirty minutes after the Golden State Warriors’ season ended with a 14-point loss to the worst franchise in NBA history, the home locker room at Oakland Arena looked like a college dormitory after final exams.

Players said goodbyes while packing clothing and equipment. Wire hangers hung in barren lockers. The Warriors all took their baggage with them as they headed home to North Carolina, to St. Louis, to Alabama and points in between.

The stench of yet another miserable season will take a little bit longer to clear out of Oakland.

Simply put, the Warriors’ 2000-01 season was a worst-case scenario realized. Ending with a 95-81 defeat at the hands of the lame-duck Vancouver Grizzlies on Wednesday night, Golden State was overwhelmed by the challenge of being a competitive professional basketball team.

“I just thank God it’s over. The nightmare is over,” Antawn Jamison said. “We got in this situation where everything was going wrong, and we couldn’t get out of it.”

The Warriors finished at 17-65, the worst season ever recorded by one of the NBA’s three charter franchises still in existence. They were the league’s second-worst team, barely beating Chicago (15-67) after winning just twice in 34 games following the All-Star break--the second-worst post-break record in NBA history.

Though the team’s players and coaches tried to avoid making excuses, it’s clear Golden State’s woes came down to one root cause: injuries. When the season ended, seven Warriors on the team’s opening night roster were unable to play because of everything from degenerative foot bones to back spasms.

The players brought into the Warriors’ locker room to provide toughness (Danny Fortson), scoring (Larry Hughes) and veteran leadership (Chris Mullin and Chris Mills) all spent significant parts of the season in street clothes. For the second straight year, the Warriors led the NBA in man-games lost to injury (421).

“We’ve got seven guys out, and it’s been like that all year long,” general manager Garry St. Jean said. “It makes the [rebuilding] process a lot more difficult, because we don’t even really know what kind of team we have here. We’ve just got to do the best we can under the circumstances.”

The Warriors had slightly higher hopes last fall. In Jamison and Hughes, Golden State thought it had a one-two punch capable of scoring consistently in the competitive Western Conference. St. Jean built his team around the duo, and early on, it appeared to work.

The high point of the Warriors’ season came on Dec. 6, when Jamison outdueled the Lakers’ Kobe Bryant in the best game the Arena had seen in years. Antawn and Kobe went off for 51 points apiece as the Warriors beat the world champions 125-122 in overtime.

But the season began to erode as players spent more and more time on the injured list. Fortson, acquired from Boston in a four-team offseason trade, was phenomenal in the six games he played before a stress fracture in his foot sidelined him for the rest of the year.

Morale slowly subsided. Victories became more scarce. Then there was Mookie Blaylock, who lost his captaincy when he played golf instead of going to practice on Feb. 5 in San Antonio--and wasn’t the least bit remorseful.

“It doesn’t bother me none,” Blaylock said at the time. “I would do it again.”

The season’s most pleasant surprise was the emergence of Marc Jackson, a 1997 draft pick who made the roster during training camp and emerged as the starting center when Erick Dampier needed knee surgery.

With a sweet outside shot and a bulky low-post body, Jackson won consecutive Rookie-of-the-Month awards before injuries curtailed his season. When he and Hughes were lost within days of each other, the hard-core losing began.

Golden State finished the season on a 13-game losing streak, the franchise’s worst skid since 1957. Usually, the Warriors dressed only nine players--sometimes eight, the absolute league minimum--and signed just one player, diminutive guard Charlie Garner, to replace the injured Warriors.

Jamison averaged 24.9 points to finish as the NBA’s ninth-leading scorer, but the losing took a terrible toll on the Warriors’ best player. He grew increasingly depressed over the season’s final two months, and he said that if he’s not convinced the Warriors’ problems will be fixed soon, he’ll ask to leave.

“Take that how you want to,” Jamison said. “I can’t keep losing like this. I can’t do it. We’ve got to get things right here, or there’s not going to be any reason to be here.”

The Warriors will draft no lower than fifth this summer, and they’ve got a good shot at winning the draft lottery. St. Jean said there will be changes on the Warriors’ roster for next season through trades or free agent signings, but he’s not sure what they’ll be.

After all, he still doesn’t know what kind of team he built for the season that just ended. He’s certain the Warriors are better than they looked this season, because nobody has seen the real Warriors.

“I don’t know that we’d do something that’s change for change’s sake,” St. Jean said. “Even with everything that’s happened this year, we’re going to look at what we think we’ve got, and decide what to keep. We’re going to explore it all, but we’re not going to do it until we put this season behind us.”