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The end is near. But that doesn’t mean it’s already here.
These are, of course, very sensitive days and weeks for the Warriors — every new emergency and loss feel like doomsday and every bounce-back victory feels like the most exhilarating reprieve. And then crisis » doom » reprieve happens again. Then again.
Days removed from a very public argument between Draymond Green and Steve Kerr that rippled throughout the league, the Warriors’ assured Christmas victory over Dallas got them back over .500. Crisis defused. Collapse postponed.
But rest assured, there will be more crises. There will definitely be more losses. We all know we’re traveling through the last light-years of a fading dynasty (merging two famous phrases from franchise lore). There will be a time when the Warriors can’t come back from another spat, big injury, or demoralizing slump.
But this probably isn’t that time. OK, sure, maybe the Stephen Curry Era has seen its last championship parade. That’s not the measure anymore, though. This isn’t the height of the dynasty. This is about just trying to give themselves some realistic chance at it for as long as they can.
To use another famous Warriors phrase: Are the Warriors still capable of meaningful basketball in April and May?
Yes, that’s true as long as Curry can hold it all together (did you see how still and calm he remained while he was sitting right in the middle of the Draymond-Kerr argument?), as long as Jimmy Butler can take over for five- or six-minute segments, as long as Kerr can figure out the right balance on the court and the right tone off of it, and as long as the Warriors’ front office approaches the trade deadline with aggression and savviness.
This isn’t even the closest the Warriors have come to obsolescence in the last year. They were all but done last February, below .500, and briefly falling out of play-in position before Mike Dunleavy swung the massive deal to acquire Butler that changed everything.
I get why so many people around the league are so quick to decide that every new event is proof that the Warriors’ run is over. People say these things because the Curry Warriors have been an enormously important part of the sports conversation for more than a decade — it matters whether they’re good enough to remain worthy of everyone’s attention.
But once they’re not worthy of it, not many people outside of the Bay Area will care. Once it’s over, there won’t be catcalls. There will be silence. For at least a little while longer, the rush to declare that it’s over is an indication that it isn’t yet.
And in that spirit, here are six calm conclusions in the wake of the last few hectic days …
1. Draymond and the Warriors will have to adjust to this later-stage situation, but likely will remain together until the very end — mostly because what else are they going to do?
Right after it happened, I guessed that the Warriors would get through this, like they’ve mostly gotten through every other messy Draymond-Kerr or Draymond-Whoever or Whoever-Whoever Else event over the last many years. And largely because Kerr admitted he was mostly in the wrong in this case, the Warriors seem to have gotten over this one.
At some point, they won’t be able to survive another eruption like this; and that day is getting closer all of the time.
Kerr and Draymond are similar volcanic personalities in the heat of battle. They’ve gone at it famously in the past. They will continue to blow up at each other in random intervals. As Butler suggested on Thursday night, sometimes the raw emotion is galvanizing for everybody.
But I suspect that this argument, like most of the others, wasn’t about personality and emotion as it was simply about basketball problems. Serious problems.
6 days ago
Tuesday, Dec. 16
Friday, Dec. 12
It’s just getting harder and harder for Kerr to balance Draymond’s enormous defensive contribution with Draymond’s declining offensive skill set and opponents that no longer defend him anywhere near the three-point line.
And it’s harder for Draymond, too — he’s trying to make up for it by forcing passes against defenses that know they’re coming. That’s led to Draymond tallying a very low free-throw rate (only taking 1.1 attempts per game, almost half of his 2.0 career average), his career highest turnover rate (5.5 per 100 possessions), and his lowest playing time (27 minutes per game) since early in his career.
That last part is the likeliest solution: Kerr has been cutting down Draymond’s minutes for a few years now, which has the double benefit of freeing up the offense earlier in games and keeping Draymond fresher for the necessary huge defensive efforts at the end against stars like Nikola Jokic, Victor Wembanyama, and Kevin Durant. Which, coincidentally, is exactly what their playoff path might look like.
The Warriors still need Draymond for those moments. They couldn’t trade Draymond for anybody who could give them anything like that kind of defensive lift. He just has to play a little less until those game-turning late-game minutes, unless he gets some of his offensive mojo back.
I think we saw signs that Draymond and Kerr are working through this in a similar way they’ve worked through others — it can look very uncomfortable, but it usually works out.
Draymond Green is averaging 27.0 minutes per game this season, down from 29.2 last year. | Source: Matt Slocum/Associated Press
2. You can argue about how effective Kerr’s been this season. You can’t say he’s not coaching hard.
One sign of a looming ending would be Kerr looking and sounding disengaged. Getting into a midgame screaming match with Draymond, then apologizing for it a few days later, is not disengagement. Neither is Kerr fiddling with his lineups through the first months of this season until getting to this new, solid formulation.
Kerr set up all the conjecture about this possibly being his final Warriors season by declining to talk with management last offseason about extending his deal past July. It remains a very live possibility, depending on how everything goes the rest of the way.
But Kerr also left everything up in the air because he knows that if he keeps this thing on track, he’ll want to come back for another season (or two) and Joe Lacob and Dunleavy certainly will pay him to.
3. This has felt like an implosion and yet the Warriors are still in relatively OK shape, sitting in the West’s eighth slot with a decent schedule ahead.
Which old team — the Warriors or Lakers — can remain relevant in the increasingly young Western Conference? I suspect there can only be one. It might be neither, but it seems probable that at least one of these teams, given the superstardom involved, will be doing OK going into the postseason.
The LeBron James/Luka Doncic Lakers have a firm early lead in this race-within-a-race; they’re currently in the fourth slot at 19-10, but they’ve lost their last three and have very shaky peripheral numbers (they’re 25th in defensive rating and have a negative point differential).
The Warriors are 16-15 and we all know about all the winnable games they’ve blown, which almost certainly will come back to haunt them. But they have the third-best defensive rating in the league and a +2.1 point differential, sixth best in the West.
To match their 48-win total of last season, the Warriors would have to go 32-19 from here — a .627 clip. Remember, after Butler dropped into their lineup last season, the Warriors finished 23-8 — a .741 clip. I’m not saying they’re going to win 74% of their games from here on, but something slightly more modest should be possible.
4. If De’Anthony Melton and Al Horford can stay in the lineup, they’ve shown they can solve a lot of things.
These two veterans are who Dunleavy thought they could be when they were acquired last offseason. Well, at least when Melton and Horford are healthy and in rhythm, which, of course, has been almost never this season, until Thursday, when Horford hit some huge shots and Melton was essential.
Kerr needs both of them because they’re rare two-way players on this roster. Horford’s shooting means he can be paired with Draymond and his rim protection can cover for minutes when Draymond is out; Melton is a necessary offensive initiator and also a very useful wing defender.
Dialed out for now: Jonathan Kuminga, Buddy Hield, and Pat Spencer.
5. The Warriors can/will/must make a trade.
Many words have been written on this topic already. Many more will be typed before the Feb. 5 deadline.
Obviously, Kuminga will be discussed in any and all Warriors trade offers. They will also have to decide whether they want to give up one, two, or many more future first-round picks — obviously depending on who they might be getting back.
What kind of player would be most valuable coming back to the Warriors in a trade? A big, tough, two-way wing who can defend and score in multiple ways but also can pass and cut would do wonders for them alternating as a tag team partner for both Butler and Draymond.
The Warriors went 23-8 after acquiring Jimmy Butler last season. | Source: Amber Pietz/The Standard
6. If you have Curry, you have a chance. That should always be the Warriors’ mantra. And I believe it is.
Let’s say the Warriors tick up the rest of the way, get to 46 to 48 wins, earn the sixth or seventh seed, and draw one of the elite teams in the first round.
Would they have a shot to make some noise? It’s possible. We saw it happen just last season when the Warriors got the No. 7 seed by winning in the play-in then took out the No. 2 seed Rockets in the first round, climaxing with Game 7 in Houston.
Would the Warriors really have a chance against the Spurs or Thunder? Obviously, the Warriors would likely be extreme underdogs in either matchup, if both San Antonio and Oklahoma City remain healthy and vrooming along at their current paces.
But also, the Warriors are 2-0 against the Spurs so far this season, with both victories coming in San Antonio.
And the Thunder are 0-3 against the Spurs, one on a neutral court, one in San Antonio, one in OKC.
Would that mean much in late-April? Maybe not. And let’s be clear, it’s possible that the Warriors won’t even make it this far — they could stumble into the No. 9 or 10 seed and get wiped out of the play-in like they did two years ago.
But if you’ve got Curry surrounded by a solid rotation, you probably will be better than that. If you’ve got him at full power, you should be able to scare some powerful teams. You might not win, but you will still be meaningful. It could get loud.
Remember the noise. Because once it gets quiet around the Warriors, it’ll be nearly silent. And nobody will care much about who made the correct predictions for when and where it ended. It’ll just be over. Which hasn’t happened yet.