But Lacob won’t accept that what the Warriors have achieved is a product of anything but a master plan. “The great, great venture capitalists who built company after company, that’s not an accident,” he said. “And none of this is an accident, either.”

After the pickup game, Lacob pulled on a sweatshirt and went to breakfast at a cafeteria on the ground floor. He goes there so often that one of the smoothies on the menu, involving orange juice, vanilla yogurt, bananas and strawberries, has been named for him. He pointed this out, then ordered one. When I asked him about the previous night’s game, he could hardly contain himself. He boasted that the Warriors are playing in a far more sophisticated fashion than the rest of the league. “We’ve crushed them on the basketball court, and we’re going to for years because of the way we’ve built this team,” he said. But what really set the franchise apart, he said, was the way it operated as a business. “We’re light-years ahead of probably every other team in structure, in planning, in how we’re going to go about things,” he said. “We’re going to be a handful for the rest of the N.B.A. to deal with for a long time.”

When Lacob and his group of investors bought the Warriors in 2010, the $450 million they paid was deemed wildly excessive by nearly everyone. Larry Ellison, one of the 10 richest people in the world, was the losing bidder. It was more than anyone had ever spent on an N.B.A. franchise at the time. And this wasn’t the Lakers or the Celtics or even the Knicks. This was the Warriors, a team that plays in Oakland and had last won a championship in 1975. In 2010, Lacob promised another within five years. And last June, the Warriors won the finals, defeating LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers in six games.

In the months since, they’ve attained the status of a cultural phenomenon. More than any team since the “Showtime” Lakers of Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, they’ve become famous not just for winning but also for how they win. You don’t need to know the nuances of the sport to appreciate Curry’s uncanny accuracy, or the fact that he routinely launches shots from longer distances than anyone ever has. You just need Internet access and a willingness to suspend disbelief. Curry has moved beyond “SportsCenter” to mainstream pop culture; even his 3-year-old, Riley, has developed a following. When Curry went on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” to be interviewed, a reaction shot of her in the audience elicited the biggest cheer of the night.

What’s happening with the Warriors as a business isn’t something Kimmel is likely to mention, but it’s equally impressive. The $450 million that Lacob’s group paid to Chris Cohan, the former owner, seemed so laughably expensive because of the woeful state of the Warriors franchise. This wasn’t just a bad team, but a team that seemed permanently stuck in a state of irrelevance. “The little engine that couldn’t” is how the investor Nick Swinmurn, the founder of Zappos and a lifelong fan of the Warriors, describes it. During Cohan’s 16-year ownership, the Warriors had reached the N.B.A. playoffs only once. Sixteen of the league’s 30 teams advance every season. “So on an odds basis,” Lacob notes, “you’re supposed to make it half the time. Something was very wrong.”

Such ineptitude had eroded interest. There were only 7,000 season-ticket holders. The arena where the team played, in a vast parking lot beside a highway, was outdated. Its corridors were narrow, its catering facilities rudimentary. It didn’t have rooms that could be leased for corporate meetings. While the league’s newest facilities have been built with palatial home clubhouses the size of health clubs, the Warriors’ was austere and cramped. One look at it during a road trip was said to discourage players around the league from considering the team when they became free agents.