John Hefti-USA TODAY Sports
After a decade in and around the top, the Warriors are broken in a way that might not be fixable. The core of Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green got old, expensive and hurt, while the aura is long gone, and replacing it are unignorable boos. It is also extremely hard to know how to fix all this.
Sufficiently troubling is the trio’s decline that it is hard to find a realistic infusion of external talent via trade or signing that can get them back into contention. This is due in part to the amount that needs doing, particularly defensively, but also because of how little the team has to work with, given its historically high levels of salary spending and the forgoing of so much of its future assets already. The much-declined Chris Paul was not the cure, and the once-positive residuals of the Andrew Wiggins trade feel like things of the distant past given his career-worst campaign to date. Right now, they are going nowhere, while costing unprecedented amounts of money to do so.
The Warriors, then, have a choice. Let the Steph Curry era wind down naturally, even with injuries, as the LA Lakers chose to do with the late great Kobe Bryant. Or go the other way and get what they can while they still can, as the Portland Trail Blazers did with Damian Lillard. Whichever path they choose will have its merits, in both basketball and business terms; however, both options may come with a new-found priority to cut costs. Players such as Kevon Looney, Dario Saric, Gary Payton II and Donte DiVincenzo are the sort of quality role players on mid-range salaries needed to flank the next competitive Warriors team, but if that next competitive Warriors team is never forthcoming, those players instead become surplus players taxed at repeater rates.
It, therefore, would not be a surprise to see the Warriors go the other way for once, keep the youth, and make cost-cutting moves, rather than continue to try and rustle up a “fourth guy”. The punitive effects of the repeater tax and the new second apron were designed to force this, and it takes very extenuating circumstances for a team to defy those. For the Warriors, those circumstances no longer apply.
