Sports Illustrated has announced their pick for 2018’s “Sportsperson for the Year” award. The award dates all the way back to 1954, and its first recipient was Roger Bannister. He earned this award through his accomplishment of the “first sub-four-minute mile” during his track & field career. “Sportsperson of the Year” is now awarded to a person, or team, who displays exemplary efforts or achievements during the past year. This year, Sports Illustrated awarded the Golden State Warriors  the title. The Warriors have maintained the title of NBA Champions for four consecutive years.

You may be asking yourself, ‘I thought the award was “Sportsperson” so why is an entire team selected?’ The award’s selection process is not as simple as one may presume. Sports Illustrated said that one of their major factors for awarding the entire team is how that the Warriors have not only changed the game of basketball but have also merged the worlds of culture and politics.

The magazine stated, “For all the individual brilliance of Steph Curry—a selection whom few would have protested—the Warriors have always been most delightfully viewed through a collective prism. There have been superteams that have forced us to reimagine how the game is played, but none perhaps in a generation, maybe two, are so beautifully choreographed as the Warriors…The rise of the Warriors has coincided with the restoration of the NBA as a leading edge of culture that recalls the league’s prolonged boom, which began with the Magic-Larry years in the 1980s and continued through the Jordan-dominated ’90s. The current boom, too, has coincided with the increasing intersection of sports and the hard questions of politics, race, and identity, among others, that have so divided the country. The Warriors—forcefully but civilly—embraced the unique platform afforded them.”

Throughout this past year, the Golden State Warriors have embodied what it means to be a team in 2018 through their accomplishments both on the court and on the streets.