A handful of days Cleveland Cavaliers fans will always remember are ones Warriors diehards would like to forget.
Golden State fans -- and basketball fans outside of Cleveland in general -- might recall that stretch with slightly more fondness after this weekend.
Michael Jordan said yes to the pitch for “The Last Dance,” ESPN’s 10-part documentary about his final season with the Chicago Bulls that starts airing Sunday, on the day Cleveland threw a championship parade while the Bay Area sulked.
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"The universe has such a funny sense of humor," producer Mike Tollin told ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne. "Because when I woke up, I put on ESPN while I'm getting dressed, and there's LeBron [James] and the Cavaliers parading through the streets of Cleveland with the trophy that they'd just won."
The Warriors’ loss proved to be their gain two weeks later, as Draymond Green said that Kevin Durant wouldn’t have joined 73-9 Golden State if the Warriors had won the title. The 2016 defeat, apparently, also played a small role in the origin of the most-anticipated basketball documentary of all-time.
Nearly two decades after his Bulls tenure ended, Shelburne wrote that Jordan “was ready to tell [his story]. right after another player (James) and another team (the Warriors) got dangerously close to challenging” Jordan’s legacy as the greatest player of all time and the Bulls’ as the NBA’s greatest dynasty.
The Warriors have another indirect tie to the documentary’s production. NBA Entertainment followed Jordan, then-coach Phill Jackson and the Bulls for the 1997-98 season, which Jackson termed “The Last Dance” because just about every Bulls player and coach’s contracts were up after 1998.
Golden State Warriors
The producer who first pitched Adam Silver, the NBA’s current commissioner and then the head of NBA entertainment, on the idea? Andy Thompson, brother of Mychal Thompson and uncle of Warriors superstar Klay Thompson.
"I remember thinking, 'Man, this guy is going to retire,' " Thompson told Shelburne. " 'And we've never really fully documented a year in the life of potentially the greatest athlete in the history of the sport.' "
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Silver and Jordan agreed that the footage couldn’t be used without permission from both the NBA and “His Airness.”
Jordan finally said yes while the Warriors licked their wounds.