The Golden State Warriors dealt with a team-wide meningitis scare in mid-March of last year, which was the root of cryptic comments made by David West after they won the 2018 title.

An outside vendor who handled the Warriors' food on a daily basis contracted a contagious form of the disease and then survived a life-threatening challenge.

The internal fear was great enough that extensive precautionary measures were taken to ensure the meningitis didn’t spread to their team.

The majority of Warriors players and some members of the basketball operations staff took vaccination shots in response to the medical threat. 

“Someone asked me, ‘Was this year easier than last year?’” West said recently. “And I’m like, ‘What do you mean? No NBA season is easy. What the hell kind of question is that?

“People were making this assumption that things were just easy, that things were just rolling along and this was some grand, old fantasy or whatever. And that just wasn’t the case. You know, there are challenges in every single NBA season.”