Why can't the dream go on forever?

Good morning. The Warriors have been ejected from the playoffs. What happens now to the Steph Curry era? Plus: the Celtics survive. Let's basketball.

The Golden State Warriors have had a real weird time since the 2018 NBA Finals, and this season was no exception. They convinced themselves (or pretended to) that Mike Dunleavy Jr. had built interesting depth behind Stephen Curry, but the team was .500 had the season's midway point and seemingly had no path to playoff success. So they flipped a bit of that depth for Jimmy Butler at the deadline, capitalizing on Miami's desperate situation as other teams hesitated to give the Heat anything of value. Outgoing for the Warriors this season in the trades that landed Butler here (including the Dennis Schroder swap in December): Andrew Wiggins, Kyle Anderson, the team's 2025 first and two net future second round picks.

It felt then like a trade with good upside and limited risk. When the Warriors started winning basically every game with Butler and Curry, it felt even better. But in the end, Butler is 35 and Curry is 37. Butler missed essentially two games in the first round and was all out of zip by the time of Golden State's elimination on Wednesday night at the hands of the Wolves. Curry missed the last four games of the series, all losses. This is the reality of building around aging stars.

Which is to say that this is the position the Warriors had to end up in, because the youth movement to add a new young nucleus around Steph did not work. The 2022 championship remains among the most impressive for any player this century, because more than anything it was a final heist for the old crew. Curry's most important co-stars were his co-stars from 2015-19: Draymond Green, Klay Thompson and Andre Iguodala. Wiggins was the found money that year; he was never as good before and hasn't been as good since. And having Wiggins in place was a sort-of masterstroke arbitrage play from Bob Myers to help keep a steady flow of high-salary talent available to use in trades; Wiggins just happened to be the player those Warriors needed. Jordan Poole was the other key contributor to that championship, and some of us will never forget it. And there's no need to rehash why that singular young piece from 2022 is not here to help carry Steph to contention.

Klay's gone, Iguodala is retired and Green is just not the player he was in 2022. (It's easy to forget that Green is 35. While he never relied on pure athleticism to do his job, the physical part still matters, especially given the enormous defensive role he maintains. He's not as quick or mobile as he was in 2022 to say nothing of the 2010s.) James Wiseman was a failed pick. We mentioned Poole. Brandin Podziemski was 9/40 in this series before a 28-point explosion in Game 5. Moses Moody had played 35 minutes all series before Game 5.

Jonathan Kuminga, sigh. Jonathan Kuminga, maybe the most talented player the Warriors drafted in the brief Two Timelines era (though Podz might have the crown) was DNPed in the crucial final game of the regular season under the stated belief that he simply could not play with Butler, DNPed in the first game of the playoffs, pulled into action when Butler went down, returned to DNP status when Butler returned (!), played a disastrous seven minutes in Game 7 for some reason and then became the Warriors' leading scorer in the second round with Curry out. The single weirdest treatment a player has received in the playoffs in memory.

And this was a microcosm of sorts for Steve Kerr's experience coaching the Warriors all year: he didn't really know what he had until Butler showed up, and now we know that he has a flawed team led by two old dudes that don't show great promise of holding up in a brutal Western Conference.