On the heels of an 18-point loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers on Monday, Stephen Curry called the Golden State Warriors a "very average" team -- and by the numbers he's correct. The Warriors will begin 2025 as average as it gets with a 16-16 record.
But right now, even that feels like a stretch. Golden State's "average" record is being propped up by a 12-3 start that is looking more like a mirage every day. Over the last five weeks, the Warriors have gone 4-13 with the league's third-worst offense.
Meanwhile, the defense that performed like a top-five unit to start the season is giving up almost eight more points per 100 possessions during this stretch. All of this is good enough, or bad enough, however you choose to look at it, for the Western Conference's last play-in spot, one up in the loss column over what would currently be a lottery-bound Suns team.
A Jimmy Butler trade appears to be off the table. We know by now the Warriors don't want anything to do with Brandon Ingram. Knowing their early blueprint of (fading) defense and increasingly complicated depth needed an addition, Dennis Schroder was supposed to be the efficient and individually capable second scorer that Curry desperately needs.
He hasn't been. That could change, of course, as Schroder was having a career season in Brooklyn before a seven-game sample with the Warriors during which he has failed to shoot better than 37% or score more than 12 points in any single outing. Even at his previous levels, however, Schroder probably isn't anywhere near impactful enough to lift a team that frankly doesn't appear to be anywhere near good enough to play with the big boys come spring.
That's not to say they can't be better than this. Curry is coming off a pretty disastrous shooting month by his standards (40/36 splits and just 21.5 PPG). Chances are, that'll improve. But there's also a real chance that Curry, at 36, doesn't have what it takes anymore to single-handedly lift what is an otherwise creatively challenged offense.
He doesn't create the same kind of separation anymore. Perhaps that's his age, or his knee tendinitis. It's probably a mixture of both. Either way, he can't consistently shed double- and triple-teams anymore, and more and more one-on-one defenders are even bottling him up. When he does manage to get a step, he's not finishing in the paint with nearly the sort of cleverness that we've seen from him in the past. It's not to say he was ever explosive, but he had some sneaky spring in his finishing steps that gave him consistent clearance to flip up whatever H-O-R-S-E shot he decided was appropriate.
Curry still creates plenty of panic off the ball, but he also spends a lot of time running around to create supposed advantages for his teammates, who, in turn, simply aren't good enough to consistently take advantage of those opportunities.
When the support-staff 3s are going in, it masks a lot of this issue. But that's not a reliable crutch on a roster that, frankly, is pretty thin on truly talented shooters. The Warriors are made up more of potential shooters. It's night to night whether that potential materializes. When it doesn't, it gets pretty ugly.
During the 12-3 start, the Warriors were the fourth-best 3-point shooting team in the league. Since then, they rank 23rd. Buddy Hield (44% to 33%), Draymond Green (45 to 30), Moses Moody (41 to 30) and Lindy Waters (38 to 28) have all fallen by at least 10% over the last five weeks.
Now, even with his own struggles over this stretch, Curry is still able to keep the Warriors, on paper, more than respectable on offense, where they register a 118 rating (which would rank fourth best league wide) when he's on the court.
That said, those numbers feel deceiving when you watch the juiceless Warriors of late. Defenses are a lot more hip to Golden State's randomness these days. You can only create so many split-action shots, and switching off ball can literally keep the ball completely out of Curry's hands for possessions at a time. It's uphill even with Curry on the court, despite with the numbers say.
But when he goes off the court? Forget about it. Golden State's offense drops to a cover-your-eyes 99.5 rating. You have to go back a decade, to the Process 76ers, to find an offense with a sub-100 rating. Sure, ratings measure a full season across all lineups, but you get the point. Curry is once again doing all he can to make an otherwise bad team palatable.
But these new-age Warriors fans, who have, for the most part, only known championship basketball, don't do palatable. They won't see Curry's last good years lost to mediocrity without taking to any platform that will have them, on pretty much a nightly basis, to light up Steve Kerr for his small and inconsistent lineups and the front office for its ongoing two-timeline experiment.
Kerr isn't a developmental coach, and that lack of trust has probably cost these young guys the consistent time they need if they were ever going to have a chance of turning into the player the front office projected, at least during this window. Still, Kerr is not the problem. The roster simply isn't good enough.
As for upgrading that roster, you can understand the front office's hesitance -- or, to this point, outright refusal -- to mortgage the future (however unpromising that future will likely end up being without Curry anyway) for a short-term trade when the team isn't close to contention anyway.
Honestly, who takes this team to a legit championship level? Butler -- at the cost of Andrew Wiggins and Kuminga, mind you -- is the best hope for that on paper, but even he's a stretch. And again, Butler's not even available, according to Pat Riley.
The truth is, if the Warriors were to make the sort of trade that would seemingly be available to them (reports indicate that could've possibly added Cam Johnson to the Schroder trade had they included Kuminga, but what would that have really netted them?), they would likely be doing so to just be a little better than they are right now without actually crossing the contention threshold.
It still might be the advisable play. Even if they have to give up a future pick or two, what cost is that? The 20th pick or somewhere thereabout? Hell, they've had three lottery picks in the last five years and haven't found the guy. Their books will be clearing up enough to go after the next franchise player in free agency.
But it's not that simple. There was probably a time when Brandin Podziemski was attractive enough to pair with picks and salary to bring back a significant player, but his value has fallen off a cliff as he's looked closer to a G-League player than the first-team All-Rookie player he was a season ago. Moses Moody doesn't move the needle. It's going to have to be Kuminga. And that's a hard trigger to pull.
Even if Kuminga isn't the next franchise player, which he almost certainly isn't, he's a damn good player and can be a really good third or fourth piece on a damn good team. The problem is the Warriors, at this moment, likely need him to be a legit second piece (an All-Star or very close to it) to be a serious threat. He's not that good. Plain and simple. And right now, neither are the Warriors.
