The Golden State Warriors are in purgatory and they seem to be okay with that. There are certainly worse places for an NBA franchise to be. The Warriors aren’t talented enough to truly challenge the top teams in the Western Conference for supremacy, yet they aren’t bad enough to be a basement dweller either trying to tank for better draft positioning.
They have been relegated to the Play-In every season since they won their last title, and barring some shocking trade or acquisition, they will almost certainly be destined for the Play-In next year.
Warriors may be content to slowly walk off towards the sunset
It’s not a bad thing, but it’s not exactly a great thing either. They still have their star in Stephen Curry and they know as long as he’s healthy, they’re going to be able to reliably sell out Chase Center whenever the team is in town. They still have head coach Steve Kerr and will likely still have Draymond Green, meaning that nostalgia element from the championship years is still intact.
They’ve still got Jimmy Butler and Al Horford who are proven veterans who know how to win, although Butler will probably miss most, if not all, of the first half of next season recovering from his torn ACL.
On paper it’s not all that bad of a situation until one remembers that the Warriors talked themselves into the exact same thing last offseason, and went on to have an injury-riddled season in which they finished at 37-45 and snuck into the Play-In as the 10th-place team.
All their veterans are just a year older and more injury-prone. Their young players like Brandin Podziemski and Moses Moody are still waiting to fully breakout and prove themselves as legitimate NBA starters. There’s still a lot of uncertainty for the franchise at this point, but perhaps everyone is okay with that.
Kerr seems to be perfectly content with presiding over two more years of steady decline while laying a groundwork for the future, whatever that looks like. Curry has talked about “meaningful basketball” in the past, but he may be content to just have some fun regular season showdowns for the rest of his career, or maybe even a first-round playoff series against the Oklahoma City Thunder or San Antonio Spurs in which he gives them a scare or at least has one more vintage performance.
There are a lot of NBA franchises that are much worse off and have far less to cheer about or remember fondly. This purgatory isn't much fun at all for fans that still want the Warriors to desperately chase a title year after year, but for those who accept that the championship ambitions are now on the back burner, these next few years can simply be about accepting Curry’s greatness while he’s still playing, and also hoping to see some progression from the younger players.
It may be a tough adjustment but no dynasty lasts forever and even though Neil Young said, "It’s better to burn out than to fade away," these Warriors have done enough in the last decade-plus that they’re earned a nice, slow walk towards the sunset if that’s what they want.
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