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This is a better time to be the Houston Rockets and San Antonio Spurs — two fast and flexible teams filled with young stars who have their whole championship-chasing futures ahead of them — than to be the Warriors or Lakers, who are either on borrowed days or have mostly expired in plain view.
It’s an even better time to be the Oklahoma City Thunder, who just finished celebrating their first title with all of their key players not only set to return next season, but due to get better.
And it’s still a very good time, it seems, to be the Denver Nuggets, who dipped after winning the 2023 championship but just renewed themselves on Monday, the first day of free-agent negotiations, with a good trade and very wise addition.
That’s a lot of good-time teams in the Western Conference, for sure, who currently feature Kevin Durant, Victor Wembanyama, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and Nikola Jokic. The future is very bright. The path — other than having to collide into each other through future postseasons — is all sketched out for these four ambitious franchises.
And, as further displayed by Monday’s activities, NBA Physics is inescapable: When some teams go up, others must go down or at least stay worryingly in neutral, and that definitely includes Stephen Curry and Jimmy Butler’s Warriors and LeBron James and Luka Doncic’s Lakers.
The Rockets, of course, lost a home Game 7 to the Warriors in May but then changed the whole dynamic by trading for Durant without giving up any of their young core. And on Monday, Houston agreed to deals with Dorian Finney-Smith (exiting from the Lakers) and Clint Capela to fill microscopic holes in its rotation. Meanwhile, the Spurs agreed to terms with Luke Kornet for more depth behind Wembanyama. And the Nuggets tossed Michael Porter Jr.’s massive contract to the Brooklyn Nets and got very talented Cam Johnson in return, then agreed to a deal with Bruce Brown, a key part of that ’23 title team and somebody who would’ve fit tremendously well with the Warriors.
The Warriors and Lakers’ big moves on Monday? Hmm, pretty quiet, and, well, maybe check back later.
For the Warriors, the most important — and probably frustrating — inertia right now involves the Jonathan Kuminga situation, which, like his career so far, has always been both potentially electrifying and potentially a dud. Right now, the Kuminga market feels like it’s verging toward dud-ville.
The Warriors are capped out and have few middle-sized contracts to pile up to make a big trade possible (like they did with Butler), so the Warriors’ best chance to make even a moderate-sized move this offseason is to send off Kuminga in sign-and-trade. But to do that, both the Warriors and Kumina need a team that wants him enough to offer a good contract and something good in a trade.
While surprising things can develop deeper into the free-agent cycle, the most valuable free-agent deals almost always land very quickly. The mad free-agent rush for Kuminga just hasn’t happened. And if Kuminga isn’t garnering enough interest now, it’s probably best for both himself and the Warriors to sign a short-term deal and play it out at least until CBA trade limitations ease up in six months.
Could this be a blessing in disguise for the Warriors? Get Kuminga back for his fifth season and maybe that’s exactly when he and Steve Kerr get everything figured out and unleash Kuminga as a high-flying star-in-the-making? Maybe. I think the odds are against that, though, especially if Kuminga and Kerr feel and act disappointed to deal with each other one more time. And Kuminga’s trade value might plunge even more.
But again, this was just one day. Many other things can and certainly will happen in this period. The Warriors need a center, and might add Al Horford, though, at 39, he’d hardly reset anybody’s timeline. The Lakers, guess what, also need a center, and maybe they’ll get Deandre Ayton, if that means much.
None of that, though, is all that important when Houston, San Antonio, Denver, and OKC — especially OKC — are sitting there in the West and getting better in the West.
Yes, the Warriors and Lakers already made their huge moves last winter by acquiring Butler and Doncic, respectively, and it’s unfair to expect these aging teams to get younger and stronger in a blink. But there’s also a gravitational pull to this kind of stuff — once you’re perceived to be a bit stuck in place, it’s hard to push yourself into the most exciting transactions.
And let’s be clear: It’d be worse for the long and short term if Mike Dunleavy and Joe Lacob risked it all by throwing their valuable future first-round picks (as I keep saying, they’re valuable for a reason) or tied up too much money in risky propositions.
Also, the Warriors have been down and nearly written off several other times, starting five or six years ago; in that time, they’ve won the fourth championship of this era, lived through the rise and fall of the Sacramento Kings, and outplayed and outlasted the Memphis Grizzlies, among others. Dunleavy also picked up Butler in the middle of one of their worst periods last season, which revved up the entire franchise.
It’s still possible. This was just one day. It might all work out just fine. Dunleavy has done a lot of solid stuff in the secondary days of free agency over the last few years.
But it’s sobering that the main event of Monday was a fond goodbye: The Warriors had to let stalwart Kevon Looney go to the New Orleans Pelicans when there was no way they could logically come close to the two-year, $16-million deal he was offered. I also don’t know if there was any logic to what the Pelicans were doing, but hey, that’s on them, and good for Looney to get the nice payday.
It would be a very Warriors thing for Looney to follow Andre Iguodala’s path back to this franchise in a few years. It would feel right. But that also would be a bit of spinning in place as the best teams gallop forward. Until the Kuminga situation is resolved, the Warriors are not moving ahead and they might be sliding backward. Monday was a day of feeling that, worrying about that, and wondering if the top teams are moving so far ahead that they really can’t be caught.