One of the oldest franchises in the National Basketball Association is the Golden State Warriors. They started out in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, not Oakland, California. You could say they won the NBA championship before the NBA came into existence. To put that more precisely; they won the championship the very first year (1946) of one of two basketball leagues that would merge three years later to become NBA.
In 1962, they went from being the Philadelphia Warriors to the San Francisco Warriors. They started playing in Oakland which is located just across San Francisco Bay, in 1966. They changed the name to Golden State in 1971 since they were no longer playing in San Francisco. Team officials decided not to call them the Oakland Warriors. The Warriors are just one of two professional American teams in all of the NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL, that do not have either the name of their city or state in their franchise name. (The other is the New England Patriots.)
Most fans don’t think of the Warriors as one of the NBA teams with the most championships, but they are actually tied for 5th place. Besides their inaugural year in the Basketball Association of America, they won again in Philadelphia in the 1955-56 season, and in Oakland during the 1974-75 season. They have six conference titles in the years, 1947, 1948, 1956, 1964, 1967 and 1975. There were two division titles in 1975 and 1976.
As you might imagine, a team that goes back so many years and that has multiple championships, has had some truly standout players. In the first year they won the championship with the help of a prolific scorer by the name of Joe Faulks. Joe really helped the team increase their fan base by getting more people to purchase Warriors tickets.
When they won in the mid 1950′s, they had three future NBA Hall Of Famers, Michael Bryson, Paul Arizin, and Neil Johnston. Then in 1959, they picked up a player from the Harlem Globetrotters who would become one of the greatest players to ever grace the courts. In his third year for the Warriors, he set the single game scoring record that stands to this day. His name was Wilt Chamberlain, and the record was 100 points.
They traded Wilt in 1964 and had a terrible season, but lady luck smiled on them the next year when they drafted another future all-time great, Rick Barry. Barry led them to the NBA finals in his second year, losing four games to two against Wilt Chamberlain’s Philadelphia 76ers. Barry would lead them to the championship in 1975 along with Jamaal Wilkes and Phil Smith.
The team has gone 36 years without another championship, but they’ve had some great players since that time. They include, Purvis Short, Eric “Sleepy” Floyd, Joe Barry Carrol, Chris Mullin, Tim Hardaway, Mitch Richmond, Chris Webber, Latree Spreewell, John Starks, Mookie Blaylock, Jason Richardson, Antawn Jamison, Gilbert Arenas, Baron Davis, Monta Ellis, and many others.
If you’d like a piece of trivia about the Golden State Warriors, one of the team’s current 19 owners is David Letterman’s sidekick, Paul Schaeffer.
