It wasn’t so long ago at all — playing against many of the same Celtics players who bludgeoned them by 40 points on Monday at Chase Center — that the Warriors seemed like they had figured out some valuable things about themselves and maybe the next chapter of NBA history.
The Warriors won their fourth championship of this era in Boston on June 16, 2022, following Stephen Curry’s lead and getting massive contributions from across the roster. It felt right. It felt natural. And it didn’t feel like the end of the run; it seemed like the middle of something that could go on for at least a few more years and one more title.
Why couldn’t Curry, then 34, maintain his greatness into his mid-30s and beyond? (Update: He’s still doing that with his 37th birthday coming in March.)
Why couldn’t Draymond Green continue to channel his emotions, stay healthy, and play at the highest level? (Mixed results on this one.) Why couldn’t Klay Thompson ease into a new role as an elder statesman and eventually a bench player? (Nope!)
Why couldn’t the Warriors count on playoff-proven 20-something players Andrew Wiggins, Jordan Poole, and Kevon Looney to pick up more of the load from Curry and Draymond? (Absolutely did not happen, for many reasons.)
Why couldn’t 2021 lottery picks Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody bloom into major pieces of the next version of the Warriors? (Three years later, still waiting.)
And why couldn’t the Warriors keep adding crucial, inexpensive veteran pieces on a year-to-year basis the way Otto Porter Jr. and Nemanja Bjelica fit perfectly in 2021-22? (Didn’t happen. The Warriors have run through JaMychal Green, Dario Saric, Cory Joseph, Buddy Hield, and others who haven’t come close to the same level of supplementary production.)
It was all too much to ask. But it was understandable why the Warriors tried to make it so. Why deviate from a successful style unless you have to?
A title from another era
Curry and Draymond are older now and need to be treated with more care. Draymond was suspended for unsportsmanlike acts through much of last season. Poole was punched by Draymond a few months after the ’22 title, suffered through a lousy season, then was traded in July 2023. They’ve never fully replaced what Klay meant to them. Wiggins has had family and health issues and has never returned to his 2022 postseason form. Looney has struggled at times and been moved in and out of the rotation.
The Warriors can’t play like they did three years ago — though they’ve really, really, really tried. And they haven’t added enough of the talent that can succeed playing in other kinds of styles.
The 2022 Finals probably don’t feel that long ago to the Celtics, who won the championship last season and still have many of their top players from the ’22 Finals trip. But for the Warriors, who have gone through suspensions, trades, injuries, play-in crashes, and now sit at 21-21, that last championship celebration was basically from another era.
“Seems like an eternity ago,” Looney said after Monday’s loss. “Had a lot of different iterations of the team since then. Each season brings on a new challenge. That year seems further and further away. But hopefully we can get back to that feeling and getting a championship. We’ve still got to remember those times so we can know what to shoot for.”
It wasn’t completely wrong for the Warriors’ leaders to assume back in ’22 that they were well situated for several more long playoff runs. They had Curry, Klay, and Draymond. That had a championship culture. They had young players. It wasn’t a silly plan. It could’ve worked. But the result, over these last few years, is proof of a more concrete conclusion: It’s difficult to win a championship using any model at any time. And, unless you’ve got Curry and Kevin Durant in their primes, the way the Warriors loaded up from 2016-’17 to 2018-’19, it’s essentially impossible to duplicate the exact way you won the last title with slightly different players and slightly older stars.
There’s the attrition, too: Bob Myers left and Andre Iguodala retired after the 2023 playoff loss to the Lakers; Klay left as a free agent last off-season after he felt like he was being pushed aside. The Warriors missed the playoffs last season after getting blitzed in Sacramento in a play-in game. They look like they’re headed to another play-in berth this season. And Draymond and Kuminga are currently hurt. It’s not the same. Nothing stays the same.
It was worth trying. But everybody inside Warriors HQ understands now that the 2022 title run wasn’t a formula, it was a lightning strike.
“Yeah, we have an entirely different roster pretty much, especially without Draymond out there,” Curry said Monday. “But you look across (at Boston), they have, besides [Kristaps] Porzingis, pretty much their whole rotation still. And they are the defending champs, so they’re coming in with a level of confidence and swagger about them. And it’s the exact opposite of what we have right now. Obviously, great memories but definitely feels like a long time ago.”
Time for a new formula
The ’22 championship was also, in retrospect, the apex of the Warriors’ much-discussed and much-criticized Two Timelines plan, which was launched when they tumbled into the No. 2 pick in the 2020 draft. They used it on big-man project James Wiseman, thinking that they wouldn’t be drafting this high again in a long time and should take a swing on a major talent who could lead the team after Curry’s prime years. Oops on that one. Then they ended up with the Nos. 7 and 14 picks in 2021 and selected two more teenagers — Kuminga and Moody.
None of the three were ideal picks. The Warriors passed on Tyrese Halliburton to take Wiseman, passed on Franz Wagner to take Kuminga, and passed on Alperen Sengun and Trey Murphy to take Moody. The Warriors would be a fairly different team right now if they had any one of those other players.
But drafting is hard. Drafting to fit a specific style of play is even harder. And the Warriors didn’t figure out how to do it in those two crucial draft years. But in some ways, the Warriors made up for those picks by winning the ’22 title, anyway.
So the Two Timelines plan is done, but Kuminga still could be a star. He plays in a very different, less fluid way than the Warriors played in ’22, but the Warriors need that now. They need to be different. They acknowledge that — which is the main reason they traded for Dennis Schroder last month, though it hasn’t helped much so far. They are acknowledging a lot of things now.
Is there a way out of this? Of course there is. Curry is still great enough to be the central part of a winning plan. Draymond is still focused enough to be at the heart of a great defense. But the Warriors can’t continue to play him 30+ minutes a game alongside a non-scoring center — that worked in ’22 and earlier, but it won’t work anymore. They need to either add a shooting center (like Lauri Markkanen) or just commit to playing Kuminga 30 to 35 minutes. They need to loosen up the offensive reins a bit; the quick, read-and-react system that’s perfect for Curry and was fine for Klay is too limiting for other kinds of perimeter scorers.
They need a new formula. They know it. I think some of the more philosophical Warriors comments of the last few days, after the alarm bells of previous weeks, are coming because Curry, Kerr, and others have accepted that there will be more changes from the way they’ve done things for years. It’s probably too late to build a championship contender this season. But next season could and should be a lot more interesting with those constructive changes — and a final goodbye to the 2022 formula.