Never taking this for granted. (AP)

“The Warriors are insufferable. The fans are bandwagon chumps. They are this stacked team and nobody likes how they’ve destroyed parity.”

I don’t care.

I grew up a Warriors fan in the mid 1990s when Run TMC had already disbanded and the team was going to endure a pretty pathetic playoff drought. For over a decade, I didn’t know what good quality basketball was all about. I only saw it occasionally when it was a nationally televised game featuring the good teams with Michael Jordan, Reggie Miller, Shaquille O’Neal and so on.

It was never ever in my belief that the Warriors could reach that level. Why not? The team gave me no reason after head coaching changes every couple of years and poor draft picks over and over again. Nobody wanted to sign with this team and worst of all, the NBA didn’t care about the Warriors either. I remember watching the NBA on NBC games and they would have their tag line video with the voiceover that went like this: “This copyrighted telecast is presented by authority of the National Basketball Association. It may not be reproduced or retransmitted in any form, and the accounts and descriptions of this game may not be disseminated, without express written consent of the NBA.”

And in that video package, they would show their top stars in the background with their dunks, blocks, etc. Never did they feature a Warriors player. It was only the best players from the top eight teams in the league. It wasn’t until years later when the graphic featured a player from every team — I was so happy to see Jason Richardson dunk in that clip.

But that was the NBA for me. It was the elite teams and then the bottom of the ladder Warriors.

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