These 2023-24 Warriors are the most expensive team in NBA history. Watching them play this season, you’d never guess it.
These Warriors seem to be heading nowhere, fast: The team is below .500 and showing few signs of that changing anytime soon.
The Warriors look old, disorganized, and, perhaps most damning of all, disinterested.
When “it” goes, it apparently goes fast.
And while the Warriors’ goal was to win another title for Steph Curry this season, one cannot say this decline wasn’t by design.
The Warriors are in this situation because following the 2022 title, the organization doubled down on their veterans.
Yes, there was a “two timelines” plan, but despite Klay Thompson’s game clearly declining and Draymond Green being a bench mainstay during the 2022 NBA Finals, the Warriors refused to move off either player.
That didn’t work out. Yet this past offseason, following the team’s first Western Conference playoff exit in Steve Kerr’s nine-year tenure as head coach, the organization made the same bet on their veterans.
The Dubs are in such a deep hole, the only way out might be to keep digging and praying you somehow come out the other side.
Yes, it’s bleak for Golden State. Tuesday night in Phoenix encapsulated it all: against a shorthanded Suns team, we saw Green be ejected for an indefensible punch of Jusuf Nurkic, Thompson be benched late for crunch time because of indefensible, poor play, and Curry kicked a defenseless chair.
These, I fear, are the true Warriors.
Green will be suspended. That’s undeniable.
And his absence — however long — will actively hurt the Warriors’ chances of winning. Yes, Green might be a lesser version of himself these days, but he can still affect winning in the right circumstances.
Tuesday, Kerr finally broke the glass and made one such circumstance a reality. He went with his best lineup (Green at center) to start the second half against Phoenix.
It took under three minutes for Green to lose his cool, punch the larger Nurkic, and be ejected from the game.
For a team desperately looking for stability, it’s a brutal development.
Sadly, this has become the norm for Green.
In the last 14 months, he has:
• Sucker-punched a teammate in practice, creating an inexorable rift within the team, eventually leading to Poole’s departure.
• Stomped on Domantas Sabonis, which resulted in a suspension from a playoff game.
• Shoved Donovan Mitchell after a rather benign back-and-forth, resulting in an ejection (and loss).
• Put Rudy Gobert in a chokehold (following a Thompson outburst), earning him a five-game suspension.
• Sucker-punched Nurkic. (Though he claims he was “trying to sell a foul.”)
I’m sure there was some basketball from Green in there, too, but it’s hard to remember amid all the fighting.
This is the Warriors’ vocal leader. This is their defensive ace.
Green can still help the Warriors win. Yet he’s hurting the team more than helping it these days.
Add in the mercurial (and that’s being generous) play of Thompson and Andrew Wiggins, the neverending health concerns of Chris Paul, and a long-term injury to Gary Payton II. Kerr and Curry are being asked to build a life raft with duct tape and some broken-down Amazon boxes.
What was once the best lineup in basketball — this team’s bedrock — has been anything but that this year. The Warriors’ traditional starting lineup of Kevon Looney, Green, Wiggins, Thompson, and Curry has torpedoed the team, posting a net rating of minus-8 (113 offensive rating, 121 defensive rating).
Take Curry away from those four, and the Warriors have outscored opponents by 18 points per 100 possessions (62 total minutes this season).
It makes you wonder if the Warriors and Curry would be better off without the veterans.
Every player wants a one-team legacy. We presume it’s out of love for the team or loyalty to the fans. But those are secondary thoughts.
Active players say they want to play their entire careers in one place because it implies a level of competence — from player and team — over a long stretch.
Winning is difficult to achieve. And when it is found, it’s fleeting. The NBA has multiple layers of penalties in place to prevent teams from winning forever.
But even if those don’t work, time never fails to get the job done.
The cruel gifts of age might not apply to basketball immortals like Curry and LeBron James — but for everyone else, the perils are inescapable.
Thompson is 33 — a young man by all other metrics. But he has had two catastrophic leg injuries, and they’re undeniably apparent when he plays. His shots these days are shorter and flatter, his off-ball burst is more of a drip, and he uses up a limited quota of NBA-quality lateral moves before halftime.
Shams Charania has reported that Thompson turned down a two-year deal worth roughly $48 million this past offseason.
That’s the best offer Thompson will ever receive, given his current level of play.
As of now, he’s set to be a free agent at the end of the season.
The Warriors might not have a choice but to let him walk.
A $24 million bench player is a tough enough pill to swallow, even for a legend. Paying massive luxury tax for a player whose play will likely only worsen from here? That’s untenable. Lest the Warriors end up with another Green deal on their hands.
There are still three more years remaining on Green’s contract. Does anyone see that working out?
Green can still (theoretically, at least) affect winning. I’m not sure Thompson can.
When discussing the Warriors, it always comes back to the leading man — Curry.
The Warriors doubled and tripled down on veterans out of deference to the superstar. He wanted this.
This isn’t to pin the lack of success on him. No, he’s the only reason this team isn’t worse.
This is merely to say that the deference to one player — even the most important player in franchise history and the man responsible for the new arena and the NBA-record team evaluation — must end.
No one is enjoying the basketball the Warriors are playing at the moment.
Warriors owner Joe Lacob can’t enjoy the team’s current cost-per-win ratio.
None of this is sustainable.
None of this is changing in the coming weeks.
I don’t believe that Thompson is tradable at the moment. Green most certainly isn’t, either.
Relief will have to come in the offseason. That’s when the Warriors can let Thompson walk in free agency and waive Chris Paul’s non-guaranteed contract.
That’s nearly $75 million off the books.
And if Green can affect winning whenever he returns from suspension, he might have some trade value. The Warriors would likely need to attach a draft pick, or two, for a team to take the remaining three years, and $77 million into cap space via trade, but that might be worth it for the Dubs.
Of course, if the Warriors were to offload the old guard, it would leave Curry surrounded by Wiggins, Looney, Payton, Moses Moody, Jonathan Kuminga, Brandin Podziemski, and Trayce Jackson-Davis.
That’s it. Those are the only remaining players on the Warriors’ books for next year.
Oh, and Kerr is in the final season of his contract, too. Would he stick around?
As positive as that pared-down, younger roster might seem right now, the signs would be clear: The Warriors would be resetting and rebuilding.
Would Curry want to stick around for that?
Is a single-team legacy worth wasting the final years of his basketball best?
Every move the Warriors have made over the last two years has been in the service of winning Curry a fifth ring.
Those efforts have failed to date.
No change is imminent and we still have five months of season to play. But if things keep going this way, the nuclear option must be put on the table this summer:
To best serve Curry, the Warriors might need to set him free.