The Golden State Warriors may lack the championship tradition of a few other NBA teams, but they have certainly had quite a few memorable squads over the past several decades.
One of them was their early 1990s iteration, which featured Chris Mullin, Mitch Richmond and Tim Hardaway, who were nicknamed “Run TMC” after the popular hip hop group “Run-DMC.”
A couple of days ago, the Warriors revealed their “Classic” jerseys for the upcoming season, and they’re a fresh flashback to the era of flattops, Reebok Pumps, NBA Jam and sick crossovers by Hardaway.
Simply put, these jerseys are fire.
#DubNation, let's turn back the clock.@Rakuten || Classic Edition pic.twitter.com/JB0s3VYNmt
— Golden State Warriors (@warriors) August 8, 2022
Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and crew will have fun running and gunning this coming season in these fine threads.
The Warriors Were Tons Of Fun In The Early 1990s
As the decade of the 1990s dawned, the NBA transformed from a fast-paced, team-oriented game into a league that was dominated by slowdown offenses, isolation plays and ultra-physical defenses.
The Warriors were one of just a few teams that tried to prevent the league’s transition from “Showtime” to “slowtime.”
They drafted Mullin in 1985 and Richmond in 1988, and together, they helped the team reach the second round of the playoffs in 1989, where it fell in five games to the Phoenix Suns.
But the following year, Hardaway, then a rookie, added another dimension to the Warriors.
(1991) @HardawaySr was cold like that.
Happy birthday to a legend! 🎂#timhardaway #timhardawaysr #tim #hardaway #sr #hardawaysr #nba #goldenstatewarriors #gsw #goldenstate #warriors #dubnation #basketball #handles #crossover #shot #layup #sport #classic #legend #happybirthday pic.twitter.com/LGljADkQ6P— In The Showcase (@intheshowcase) September 1, 2021
His addition didn’t pay immediate dividends, as they won just 37 games during the 1989-90 season and missed the playoffs, but the following year, they became a force.
Under head coach Don Nelson, who employed a fast-paced, perimeter-oriented offense, the Warriors were second in the NBA in scoring at 116.6 points per game while Hardaway, Richmond and Mullin each averaged over 22 points per game.
They reached the Western Conference semifinals again, only to lose to the bigger and more experienced Los Angeles Lakers.
But the era ended early the next season when Richmond was traded for rookie Billy Owens, a 6-foot-8 forward, as Nelson wanted his team to get bigger.
Although Golden State won 55 games that year, it fell in the first round of the playoffs.
But the “Run TMC” era lived on for a long time, and in many ways, it was a preview and even a prototype for the Curry era and its style of ball that has changed the NBA for the better.
“Run TMC” Was A Harbinger Of Things To Come
By the mid-1990s, with team scoring averages league-wide plunging, “Run TMC” and its style of play was increasingly seen as nothing more than a cute gimmick.
The 1992-93 Phoenix Suns and early 2000s Sacramento Kings came to the brink of winning a championship employing the same run-and-shoot strategy, but no one around the league felt it could fully work.
When the Suns became perennial contenders in the mid-2000s behind Mike D’Antoni’s “Seven Seconds or Less” offense, which itself was basically a knock-off of what the Warriors employed in the early ’90s, the rest of the league started to take notice.
In the ensuing years, other teams slowly started to implement pieces of that system, but it wasn’t until the Warriors won the NBA championship in 2015 that the modern pace-and-space revolution hit critical mass.
That year, they were the only team to average at least 110 points a game.
Just four seasons later, however, 20 teams, or two-thirds of the league, did so.
Give much of the credit to not just the current era of the Warriors, but also to those wacky and entertaining Warriors of 1990 and 1991 who were bucking a growing trend back then.
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