Warriors marginalizing end of Stephen Curry’s prime is a basketball sin

One of my all-time favorite movies is “Tremors.” Kevin Bacon. Fred Ward. It’s an absolute beauty of a film, and as a world-class procrastinator myself, one line from it has always especially cracked me up.

“We plan ahead. That way, we don’t do anything right now.”

That’s the Golden State Warriors. For going on eight years now, basically since Kevin Durant left in the summer of 2019, they have been planning ahead for a time they believed was right around the corner, but it still has not arrived.

That time would be the post-Stephen Curry era. They started planning for it with the drafting of James Wiseman and Jonathan Kuminga, and even though both those picks turned out disastrous on myriad levels, here they are still planning ahead by doing absolutely nothing right now.

That’s not a line. That’s a fact. The Warriors are literally the only team in the NBA that has yet to add a single player via trade or free agency to its roster this offseason.

The only moves the Warriors, a team that finished eight games below .500 and missed the playoffs last year, have made this summer are re-signing their own guys. Kristaps Porziņģis got $40 million for two years. Al Horford, who’s 40 years old and barely managed to play in half of last season’s games, got $14 million.

On Monday, it was reported that Draymond Green will be returning on a one-year, $27.7 million dealwhich is the same amount he would have made had he opted into his 2026-27 contract rather than opting out to provide the Warriors with the financial flexibility to try to sign LeBron James.

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When that didn’t happen, Green came back for his money. And the Warriors were happy to give it to him — not just because he’s a franchise legend and still quite a valuable player, but because, if we’re being honest, all signs indicate the Warriors are already counting next season as a wash. It’s next summer they’re worried about, when they are slated to have more cap space than any other team in the league with just $50 million currently scheduled on their books.

In other words, more planning ahead. Which is smart. People, businesses, governments and certainly sports teams; everyone has to plan for the future. That’s why we pay Social Security, put money away in a 401(k), and try to eat healthy and exercise. Our older selves will be grateful for the foresight.

The key is to not become so savings-obsessed that you forget to live right now, because right now is what’s real. Curry is what’s real. All this time, the Warriors thought they were smarter than everyone else when, in fact, they just had Curry.

And the fact is, they are willingly, even actively, marginalizing the last prime years of his career when they should be doing everything they can, at least within reason, to maximize them.

Curry deserves one last shot at a championship

Does team owner Joe Lacob have any idea how indebted he is to Curry? When he bought the Warriors in 2010, the team was valued at $450 million. It’s now worth $11 billion. That is almost entirely thanks to Curry, who, by the way, is still a top-10 player in the league even at 38. These aren’t the last Kobe Bryant years in L.A. The Warriors keep thinking they need a home run when all they’ve needed is a few solid singles over the years to keep giving Curry a shot.

Because a shot is all he needs. Nobody thought trading for Andrew Wiggins was going to turn the Warriors into a championship team in 2022, but it did. That was good business. The Warriors smartly turned Durant’s departure into a sign-and-trade for D’Angelo Russell, who they then parlayed into Wiggins.

That’s actual planning. Sitting back waiting for Giannis Antetokounmpo or LeBron James to come to you on a minimum deal isn’t planning. It’s hoping. And that’s what the Warriors have been banking on all this time. The hope that one of these home-run deals that required no real risk would just fall into their laps.

And why not? Everything else has. If you think about it, the Warriors have never had to take a real risk other than dumping Mark Jackson for Steve Kerr in 2014, which was an absolute no-brainer but did take some real stones, to compete for and win multiple championships.

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They were gifted Curry when the Timberwolves passed on him twice in the 2009 draft. Two years later, they drafted Klay Thompson. The year after that, it was Draymond Green. They got Durant in 2016 thanks to a once-in-a-lifetime cap spike that will never happen again.

All of this afforded them the luxury of not having to mortgage future assets to maintain a championship roster. Over the last 13 years, the Warriors have traded four future first-round picks. One for Andre Iguodala in 2013, one to dump Iguodala’s deal and to facilitate the aforementioned Durant sign-and-trade in 2019, one to bring in Chris Paul while also getting off Jordan Poole’s contract in 2023, and one for Jimmy Butler in 2025.

Four traded picks over 13 years. For four championships and six Finals appearances. That’s not reality. The Knicks traded more picks than that for Mikal Bridges alone. That’s reality. You have to spend to win, and not money alone. The Warriors have spent money. Plenty of it. It’s the draft picks they have refused to part with.

It’s no secret that Lacob views himself as the main author of the Warriors dynasty and wants to prove he can write an equally successful sequel in the post-Curry years. That’s not the only reason the Warriors have been paralyzed by their own risk analysis, but it’s surely a part of it.

Lacob seems to believe he’s just going to find his next franchise player in some future draft when those players hardly exist in the first place. And even when they do, the Warriors have provided no recent evidence that they can identify who they are.

• 2021: The Warriors, basically at the behest of Lacob, took Jonathan Kuminga over Trey Murphy III and Franz Wagner. And then, with a chance at a re-do seven picks later, they take Moses Moody at No. 14 when Murphy III was still on the board, as were Alperen Sengun and Jalen Johnson, both of whom have become All-Stars.
• 2020: The Warriors could draft anyone not named Anthony Edwards. That list includes, among many others, LaMelo Ball, Tyrese Haliburton, Tyrese Maxey, Devin Vassell and Deni Avdija. But Lacob watched a James Wiseman workout and thought he found the next David Robinson.
• 2018: The Warriors, at No. 28, drafted Jacob Evans, whose NBA career lasted less than two full seasons, five picks before Jalen Brunson.

Of course, everyone knows the draft is a crapshoot even when experienced basketball minds and not out-of-their-depth owners are making the calls. Which is to say, it’s not so much that the Warriors whiffed on these draft picks (a lot of other teams did, too), it’s that when it became apparent that they had missed, they waited too long to admit their mistakes.

Warriors could maximize Curry’s present while preparing for the future

The laundry list of trades the Warriors have passed on to cling to their precious “optionality” has been well-chronicled. To be fair, some of them were smart not to do. Lauri Markkanen, with what the Jazz were asking, and Paul George come to mind.

ESPN has reported that they perhaps could’ve gotten Jaylen Brown had they been willing to part with four future picks. Perhaps that would’ve led to LeBron coming, too. That’s a debatable one. It’s at least understandable not wanting to pay Brown max money moving forward, but that would certainly be a team Curry could win with.

This is the type of genuinely risky deal fans believe the organization owes to Curry. I would agree with that, and I would add that Brown, even if you have to overpay him for Curry’s sake, is the type of player the Warriors need to bridge this era to the next.

To me, the one that really hurts is OG Anunoby. The Knicks got him for RJ Barrett and Immanuel Quickley. No first-round picks went to Toronto. The Warriors were strongly connected to Anunoby and could’ve beaten that offer had they been willing to part with a draft pick or two and/or Kuminga when he still had real value.

You put Anunoby, who was very good then and has become one of the best two-way players in the league, next to Curry, and then go out and do the same Butler deal in 2025, and you’re competing for another championship. Instead, the Warriors clung to Kuminga and drafted Brandin Podziemski.

The new Anunoby is Trey Murphy III. The Pelicans reportedly want three first-round picks for him. So far, nobody has jumped, so it’s not just the Warriors. But this is the kind of non-superstar player the Warriors have been way too reluctant to make a move for. Because they don’t want guys who will help Curry right now. They want guys they believe can replace Curry as the future face of the franchise.

Brown didn’t meet that standard. Neither did Kawhi Leonard. They couldn’t get Giannis. Durant didn’t want to come back. LeBron ghosted them. They only moved on Butler because he didn’t cost anything of note. Now they’re probably pipe-dreaming on Nikola Jokic, who could, in theory, decline his player option and become a free agent next summer. Let me save you the suspense. That’s not going to happen, either.

Meanwhile, Curry just keeps getting older. And that’s the shame of it all. Again, these are not the last Kobe years in L.A. or the last Dirk Nowitzki years in Dallas. Even if you don’t think any of these moves on their own will vault the Warriors into honest contention, there’s a middle ground between a championship and a team that is currently projected to win fewer than 40 games.

For all their obsession with optionality, the Warriors are not without options. Here’s a crazy idea: They could trade for good players and try to be a good team and then trade those players again if they want picks back. I assure you that it doesn’t have to be about hoarding every pick and future dollar possible as Curry’s prime dies on the vine, or selling the whole farm.

There’s a middle ground that the Warriors are almost completely ignoring.

And they can only do it because Curry is such a saint. If he were like just about every other superstar and started threatening to leave, the Warriors would have no choice but to act with real aggression. That does not mean they should or would do anything desperate. Even Curry has said that publicly. He believes superstars have an obligation to leave their franchise in good competitive standing rather than demand the type of cupboard cleanings LeBron is known for. That’s commendable.

But the Warriors are really pushing their luck, which, perhaps unbeknownst to them, actually ran out about six years ago. That 2022 championship was an accident. There might not have been one other star in the league besides Curry who could have won that championship with that team.

The Warriors acting like he couldn’t do it again with even a little bit of front-office urgency is an insult to the best player that the franchise will ever see.