When is the appropriate time to worry, to panic, to wonder if everything is unraveling before the season even starts for the Golden State Warriors?

Right about now.

Normally, panicking over preseason storylines is a fool’s errand. The NBA season is an 82-game slog, training camp is largely theater and veteran teams rarely care about October.

The Warriors, however, don’t have the luxury of normal.

Golden State spent the summer selling the idea that running back a 37-win team wasn’t organizational delusion, but shrewd patience. The pitch went like this: Stephen Curry’s knee is sound; Draymond Green and Steve Kerr have fresh contracts and aligned spirits; rookie Yaxel Lendeborg will patch the interior depth; and Brandin Podziemski is primed for a contract-negotiation-fueled leap. Sure, Jimmy Butler and Moses Moody are shelved for months, but Kristaps Porziņģis was supposed to bridge the chasm.

Porziņģis — the 7-foot-3 unicorn whose rim protection and floor-spacing unlock Kerr’s playbook — was a foundational justification for continuity.

The argument was that Warriors weren’t bad last season — things just didn’t work out.

But in running it back, the Dubs insisted that 2026-27 would be different.

Except opening night is less than two weeks away, and nobody has seen Porziņģis.

That seems like things “not working out.”

Nobody will say why, either, though it takes very little imagination to connect the silence to his ongoing bout with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS). Al Horford, who won a ring alongside Porziņģis in Boston and is his closest friend on the team, hasn’t heard from him. Kerr has managed to reach him with text messages.

Asked Thursday if there was any understanding of Porziņģis’ issues or a timetable for his return, Kerr delivered the same answer twice:

“No.”

You have to appreciate the brevity, even if the subtext is terrifying.

“We just don’t have much information,” Horford told reporters Thursday. “So I think for us, it’s just hoping that he gets right, gets better. And for us, it’s just continuing to move forward. The preseason’s here, the games are coming, and the challenges are in front of us. And with our sport, with any sport, the next guy has to step up, and we’ll have to do a little more. And that’s kind of where we’re at.”

That’s diplomatic speak from a pro’s pro.

I think the real conversations have a lot more curse words in them.

Now, the Warriors are notoriously protective of player privacy when injuries don’t show up neatly on a scan. Sprain a wrist or tear an ACL, and they will hand out an animated graphic and a four-stage recovery timeline. Bring an unpredictable autonomic nervous system ailment (or whatever was happening with Andrew Wiggins a few years back) into the building, and Chase Center turns into Fort Knox.

Fair play to the organization for shielding the player amid bizarre circumstances. It’s a genuine human tragedy for Porziņģis, a 31-year-old whose immense gifts have been hijacked by a chronic condition where standing upright can send his heart rate skyrocketing. His career, his stability, and tens of millions of dollars (at least) have been left in the balance. This is no small thing. We barely know Porziņģis, but you have to feel for the guy.

Along those same lines, fair play to anyone (namely, me) who points out that the Warriors staked their competitiveness on a player whose body might not cooperate on Tuesday, next week, or next month.

Golden State signed Porziņģis to a new contract this past offseason. They banked on stability — that this issue was sorted.

If that stability was an illusion, where does that leave the Dubs?

Butler and Moody aren’t walking through that door anytime soon. The strategy was for Porziņģis to be a big reason why the Warriors stayed afloat to start the season. That way, Butler and Moody could return to a playoff hunt rather than a lottery vigil.

But for the Warriors to be saying things like “the train doesn’t stop moving” on Thursday in relation to their should-be starting center leaves Golden State fighting a two-front war of attrition.

Survive until the return of Butler and Moody, but now also survive the absence of Porziņģis at the start. And one must presume that he won’t be here at the start. (We can all hope that’s proven wrong.)

Forgive me for wondering if it’s asking too much what this team has.

Golden State faces a brutal early-season reality: five sets of back-to-backs in the first 10 weeks. Curry is 38. Horford is 40. Green’s odometer has hard miles on it. We know how they’ll be managed.

And that’s to say nothing of the other issues that, of course, will arrive once things really jump off. But again, this is a team that won 37 games last year and whose big offseason additions are a rookie (albeit an older one) and Brandon Williams, who was a 13-point-per-game scorer last season but is a pedal-to-the-metal point guard who represents an improvement over Pat Spencer, but is unquestionably being overhyped a bit with his run this preseason.

The Warriors have plenty going for them heading into this season. I really believe that.

But this is a team that needs everything going for them if they want to be anything respectable in the Western Conference.

And so long as Porziņģis is, mysteriously, cryptically, silently, tragically out of commission, that simply won’t be the case.