Playing with Steph Curry means you aren’t going to get a lot of holidays off. This year, the Warriors won’t be part of the league’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day showcase, but they will anchor the league’s inaugural Presidents Day quadruple-header.
The NBA does not traditionally have a Presidents Day extravaganza, mainly because it usually falls the day after the All-Star Game. But since the Super Bowl falls on Valentine’s Day this year, the All-Star Game isn’t until Feb. 21. The NBA is seizing the opportunity to finally get out from the massive shadow of the NFL by delivering an orgy of games, in what feels like a conspiracy to create divorces.
Golden State will host the Indiana Pacers, a matchup that’s not exactly a rivalry, though the teams have some connections. The Warriors sent Chris Mullin to the Pacers for Erick Dampier in 1997, and Mullin was a key part of teams that fell just short of a title. The Pacers returned the favor a decade later, sending Stephen Jackson and Al Harrington to the “We Believe” Warriors team, a move that helped them to a first-round upset and thankfully sent Mike Dunleavy, Jr. out of town.
In 2013, the Pacers and Warriors had a scuffle that counts as a brawl by NBA standards. Roy Hibbert shoved David Lee, both teams went at each other, and Steph Curry attacked Hibbert with a lot of enthusiasm and not a lot of success, like a chihuahua throwing himself at a Great Dane. Klay Thompson got involved, Hibbert got shoved into the stands, and David West and Andris Biedrins acted like disappointed parents breaking up the fracas.
After the game, Hibbert claimed he didn’t know which Warriors guard was fighting him.
“I saw some light-skinned guy. I don’t know if it was Klay Thompson or Steph Curry, I just knew there was a light-skinned guy by me,” Hibbert told reporters. At the time, he probably outweighed Curry by 100 pounds.
More recently, Gary Payton II got Goga Bitadze ejected after dunking on him and staring him down. Both players got technical fouls, but Bitadze already had one, so he got tossed.
The highlight of this clip comes after GPII has been staring down Bitadze and scratching his head for a few seconds and Jordan Poole hustles over to stand behind Payton and scratch his head as well. The Warriors would go on to lose in overtime after 2015 NBA champion Justin Holiday hit a clutch shot to tie the game at the regulation buzzer.
Other than that, the main connections between the Pacers and Warriors come from both teams briefly believing in James Wiseman before his injuries ruined everything, and having great pre-draft workouts with Tyrese Haliburton in 2020, with one team making a better decision about him in the draft lottery.
Presidents Day was originally designated to celebrate the birthday of George Washington, which happens on Feb. 22. Now its a federal holiday designated for the third Monday in February, which means it can’t actually occur on the date Washington was born. It now honors all the presidents, which means William Henry Harrison’s 30 days in office are valued exactly as highly as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 12 years and change, as one day off of work.
In California, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday (Feb. 12) is a separate holiday, and the second February day off is simply known as “the third Monday in February.” Maybe that’s because they want to head off any speeches from Bay Area politicians about how Washington owned slaves, Millard Fillmore was a racist, or Rutherford B. Hayes screwed Samuel Tilden in the 1876 election by agreeing to end Reconstruction, or George H.W. Bush was a tool of the CIA. Those things aren’t incorrect, but this is America. Most of our presidents stunk!
We would like to suggest that California adjust even further and simply designate this holiday as “the Monday after the Super Bowl.” It’s much easier, and we can still imagine George Washington wiping barbecue sauce off his wooden teeth and dragging a hungover Benjamin Franklin out of his wine cellars at Mount Vernon if we want to honor our history.
