Golden State’s Big Three: Mitch Richmond, Chris Mullin, Tim Hardaway, 1991

[Time passes quickly, and it passed a little too swiftly on Golden State’s magical “TMC” trio of Mitch Richmond, Chris Mullin, and Tim Hardaway. This band of NBA brothers lasted just two full seasons (1989-90, 1990-91), after which Richmond was traded to Sacramento in early November 1991. That’s also about when Street & Smith’s 1991-92 Pro Basketball Annual arrived on newsstands, another example of how magazines and their old months-long production schedules could lead to embarrassingly outdated feature articles. That the case with this article, through no fault of his own, from the veteran California-based journalist Dwight Chapin. He was a gentleman’s gentleman and a personal journalistic hero, who passed away this month at age 89. Soon after Richmond was traded, he returned to Oakland to face the Warriors for the first time. It was a special moment that, according to the beloved Bay Area-columnist Art Spander went something like this: This was the moment he feared. This was the…