The Golden State Warriors Named Sports Illustrated’s 2018 Sportsperson of the Year

Sports Illustrated will have to change their “Sportsperson of the Year” award to “Sportspeople of the Year,” as the title this year has been given to the Golden State Warriors.

Sports Illustrated announced on Monday that the Warriors would be receiving this year’s Sports Illustrated “2018 Sportsperson of the Year” honors. This makes the team the most recent group of athletes and coaches to have impacted the social status of sports, and the communities.

While the award was made to highlight one induvial instead of an entire team, this isn’t the first time a team has been honored as Sportsperson of the Year. According to CBS, the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, the 1999 World Cup-winning U.S. women’s national soccer team and the 2004 Boston Red Sox also received the honor, which has been handed out annually since 1954.

The Golden State Warriors have become a true force to be reckoned with. They’ve won their third NBA Championship in four years, and they set the league’s single-season wins record by going 73-9 during the regular season a few years ago. When SI decided to include the entire team, it said Golden State has “always been the most delightfully viewed through a collective prism.”

“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. At the Dubs’ most golden, their movements and pieces seamlessly blur into each other to the point where it impossible to distinguish the magic of one player from another, even magic so singular as that of Curry or KD.”