Warriors’ Leandro Barbosa celebrates prediction come true: ‘We ARE championship’
OK, so maybe he didn’t know quite as early as our own Marc J. Spears or ESPN.com’s Ethan Sherwood Strauss. but Leandro Barbosa knew before the rest of us: the Golden State Warriors were “gonna be championship.”
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That, I’ll have you know, is not a typo. It is a direct quote, taken warmly and accurately from Barbosa’s postgame comments to CSN Bay Area’s Rosalyn Gold-Onwude after the Warriors beat the Utah Jazz, 106-91, on March 21:
Sure, the “Brazilian Blur” might have Eurostepped past the King’s English there in his excitement about both scoring a season-high 19 points and just how well his team was playing. (At that point, the Dubs had won five straight, with four of the five coming by at least 15 points.)
But his irrepressible effervescence helped turn the slightly misspoken bit of audaciousness into something of a rallying cry for the Warriors, and after they scored a 105-97 win in Game 6 of the 2015 NBA Finals to eliminate the Cleveland Cavaliers and earn Golden State’s first NBA championship in 40 years, Barbosa basked in the glow of his bang-on prognostication:
Barbosa screaming “WE ARE!” is the kind of thing that can send a charge up your spine and make your hair stand on end. An admittedly already-tipsy Barbosa repeating his accidental catchphrase while holding a smiling child is the kind of thing that will warm my heart all afternoon:
It hasn’t gotten loads of national attention — understandable, given the litany of other, starrier focal points on this year’s championship squad — but Barbosa’s return to NBA relevance has been a pretty great story. Just two years ago, the family problems with which he’d been battling as a member of the Boston Celtics were compounded by a more immediate physical concern — a torn left anterior cruciate ligament that ended his season and, soon after, his time in Boston.
After he was let go by the Washington Wizards, Barbosa found himself on the outside of the league looking in, rehabilitating his knee and trying to convince an NBA suitor to take a flyer on a speed-and-quickness-dependent guard on the wrong side of 30 coming off a major leg injury. The Phoenix Suns — the team that had brought him into the NBA in 2003 and with whom he won the 2006-07 Sixth Man of the Year Award — gave him that chance last season, inking him on a 10-day deal before signing him for the remainder of the season when it turned out he still had something to contribute as a second-unit scorer and playmaker who, even at 32 after the ACL injury, can still play with pace.
That speed, quickness, on-court aggressiveness and off-court congeniality led Kerr, who was the Suns’ general manager while Barbosa was there during the “Seven Seconds or Less” salad days, to handpick Barbosa as part of the Warriors’ guard rotation after he took the reins from the ousted Mark Jackson last summer. While Barbosa’s tendency to go 100 miles per hour can sometimes cause accidents, it can also help the Dubs dust the competition, like when he chipped in 13 points on five shots in 17 minutes in the Warriors’ Game 4 win.
As Kerr recently told Tim Kawakami of the Bay Area News Group, though, Barbosa’s value goes far beyond pell-mell drives and hot-scoring streaks:
“The impact he’s made on this team is dramatic,” Kerr said. “It goes beyond just what he does on the floor … Such a big part of this game is chemistry and unity and the energy that comes from the entire group. And that stuff factors in.
“It’s not just black and white trying to quantify numbers; there’s more to it. That’s kind of the beauty of the game.”
And it’s the kind of thing that helps a young and talented but relatively inexperienced group move from “We gonna be championship” to “We are championship.” Kerr saw it all along. Barbosa did, too. And now, so do the rest of us.
Video via Bay Area Sports Guy.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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