rec’d

Munchausen’s syndrome belongs to two broader categories : psychosomatic disorders and attention-seeking behaviour. So it shares the latter with exhibitionist sports fans and compulsive internet contributors/participants. If it were merely psychosomatic, it could be easily treated, but the with the more complicated cases, the patients will actually show the physical symptoms of their complaints in the exam and sometimes in the lab results as well. Belief can be quite powerful and bend things out of what we expect in a ‘normal’ physical sense — consider the people who walk over red hot embers and don’t suffer burns, just to cite one example of belief altering physiological responses.

Advanced Munchausen’s syndrome demonstrates, in a manner of speaking, the power of negative belief/thought. (if it brings gratification by gaining attention, it brings a positive benefit from the perspective of the patient). GS fans who renew their conviction each year that their team can and will contend for the post season, despite strong evidence indicating a continuation or slight improvement at best from an established norm of mediocrity, and to an extent those fans who understand the team’s plight but want to attend the games and make a show of optimism — they’re demonstrating a belief in positive thinking, that they can shape reality with their thoughts.

We can’t be sure, but this positive belief from fans (or at least their positive consumer spending/behaviour) does seem to have altered things beyond the individual fans. It’s probably boosted the number of home court wins , without which, the team’s record might better reflect its deficiencies. The team in a sense gets doses of legal performance-enhancing drugs when playing for their home partisans. When Riley announced Smart’s firing, he said stuff about the front office’s belief that they had a playoff – calibre team, and that Smart failed to meet expectations. From what was disclosed to the public, Lacob hired Jackson partly due to the reverend’s expressed conviction that the roster built on the same starting five was strong enough to get to the post season. We should give the new stewardship at least two full seasons before assessing them too harshly, but it’s possible they’ve kept the same starting five because they’ve overvalued the players in trade considerations.

There’s a “Warriors curse” to the extent the fans’ support keeps the team financially successful, which is the success that truly matters in the bidness of the n.b.a. Since the merger of the n.b.a + a.b.a., no team in the big league has suffered dissolution (‘contraction’ in sports bidness argot), in other words, no team has really failed. Even the modest success of an early playoff round elimination would represent a huge boost in profits for Lacob and cohorts. Cohan lost the fans’ mandate because he didn’t act and talk like one of the faithful ; Lacob will never fail in that way. It’s very possible that mediocrity will be perpetuated — one championship followed by a conference finals and nothing else close over a span of fifty years is strong testimony.