What losing out on LeBron James means for Stephen Curry and the Warriors

The premise of the Golden State Warriors’ involvement in LeBron James’ free agency was very simple:

• The Warriors employ Stephen Curry, who is one of the greatest players in NBA history and the single biggest reason they have won four NBA championships in the last 12 years.

• Even as the Warriors have faded from their dynastic heights since defeating the Boston Celtics in the 2022 NBA Finals, Curry has repeatedly expressed his interest in continuing to play “meaningful basketball” as he continues to play at an All-NBA level into his late 30s.

• No player on the market better represented a shot at the Warriors playing meaningful basketball next season than James.

• Well, then, let’s try to go get him.

Spoiler alert for those who’ve been trapped under something heavy for the last 72 hours: They didn’t get him. LeBron chose the Philadelphia 76ers, a sentence on par with “The New York Knicks really are the defending NBA champions” for how simultaneously jarring and accurate it is.

James’ decision disappointed suitors in Cleveland, Miami and Minnesota, among other locales. But it might not have hurt anybody more than Golden State, arguably the biggest loser of the whole saga, both for losing out on adding James and for what coming up short in his decision-making calculus represented about the current state of play in the Bay, with the Warriors coming off a 37-45 finish with the NBA’s No. 19 offense and No. 16 defense, unable to advance out of the play-in tournament, and entering next season with two starting wings — superstar Jimmy Butler and stalwart Moses Moody — still on the shelf rehabilitating their respective season-ending leg injuries.

The Warriors didn’t appear to be anywhere close to good enough without LeBron for him to convince himself they’d be championship-caliber with him. It’s a bitter pill, but one that Curry has had to swallow, as he told Marcus Thompson III of The Athletic, who caught up with the two-time Most Valuable Player at teammate Moody’s youth basketball camp in Arkansas:

“The through line,” [Curry] said, “which is hard on anybody in this situation, especially with us keeping this thing together, is knowing that when Jimmy got hurt and Moses got hurt, the whole calculus of everything changes. How do you get through their absence and still stay at a certain level? And then how that goes into this year. It’s the same deal. So, I’m a realist on that.” […]

“And you hope that they both [Butler and Moody] come back healthy,” Curry said, “and we can play at a level that keeps us relevant and competitive and builds a foundation so that we can figure out what it looks like. But that is the situation. We don’t live in any alternative universe.”

It was pleasant to imagine inhabiting that universe. One in which, with Draymond Green opting out to open up more room to maneuver, James decided to run back his 2024 Summer Olympics partnership with Curry. One in which Warriors lead executive Mike Dunleavy Jr. was able to find one or two more complementary pieces to round out the roster, fortifying it enough to be able to survive the 82-game marathon and scratch out enough wins to earn a top-six seed in the West. One in which head coach Steve Kerr was able to keep the core of James, Curry, Green, Kristaps Porziņġis and Al Horford mostly intact, and Butler returned healthy midstream, and this senescent squad could enter springtime with reason to believe it could solve any problem an opponent might present them in the postseason.

That story, though, evidently never gained much traction with LeBron. “The Warriors were also appealing for a time, a source close to James” told ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne — “but only if they acquired a proven star forward like Washington Wizards’ forward Anthony Davis, with whom James had won a title in 2020.” And with multiple reports insisting that Washington never expressed interest in moving Davis before he’d ever played a game for the franchise, that particular pathway was never really viable for the Warriors — if they’d even seriously considered taking it.

Ultimately, when he interrogated his motivations for continuing his career, James settled on his own definition of meaningful basketball: namely, the destination that would provide him the best chance of winning a fifth NBA championship. Reasonable people can disagree over whether the talent that will surround James in Philadelphia nets out to a higher potential ceiling than the collections in Northeast Ohio or Biscayne Bay. There doesn’t seem to be any disagreement, though, about why the Warriors would finish a distant fourth in that race.

Yes, Steph’s as compelling a co-star as any individual player other suitors could offer. Look beyond him, though, and the Warriors roster is heavy on older players with injury concerns, degraded production or both, and light on bankable young talent who can be relied upon to bridge the gap to what comes next. Golden State’s best young players are Brandin Podziemski and Gui Santos, quality contributors who are still well south of an All-NBA selection like Tyrese Maxey, and perhaps 2026 first-round pick Yaxel Lendeborg, a 23-year-old who has yet to play a second of regular-season NBA basketball.

These are the wages of years of missed opportunities. Of the failures of the “two timelines” era, whether to find ways to develop James Wiseman and Jonathan Kuminga into players who could become bona fide long-term contributors, or to just draft different players who might have been better suited to shine in Kerr’s system. (LaMelo Ball and Franz Wagner were the picks immediately after Wiseman and Kuminga, respectively; Tyrese Haliburton and Trey Murphy III went 10 picks later, respectively.)

Of the miserable Green/Jordan Poole incident, which led to the Warriors flipping a 23-year-old 20-point scorer for 58 games of Chris Paul, and paying a protected 2030 first-round pick and a 2027 second to do so. Of the myriad reported pursuits of starry veteran additions over the last half-dozen years — Pascal Siakam and OG Anunoby from the rebooting Raptors, Giannis Antetokounmpo amid his discontent in Milwaukee, Lauri Markkanen as the Jazz rebuilt, Paul George and Kawhi Leonard as the Clippers pivoted, and on, and on — that never actually got across the finish line, for one reason or another. Of the one that did — the Butler deal, which totally transformed the Warriors (and Steph himself) on the court — running aground before it could bear postseason fruit, thanks to a pair of miserable injuries.

Come up empty that many times, and not even the magic of Curry — now 38, now plagued by runner’s knee, now having missed significant time in two of the last four seasons — is enough to “sell a realistic path back toward championship contention.” And without that, all that’s left, as Ann Killion of the San Francisco Chronicle put it, is “another summer of treading water and waiting” — for Butler and Moody to heal, for Dunleavy and Co. to find another swing they deem worth taking, and for a reason to believe not just that the best of the West have passed them by, but that the product the Warriors put on the court will be worthy of fans’ investment and attention.

At this point in the offseason, with the bulk of the free-agent signings and wheeling-and-dealing likely concluded, it’s unclear whether that product will be meaningfully augmented for next season. Especially if the Warriors, who have full control over six of their next seven first-round picks, are reluctant to pony up the kind of draft capital it might take to lock down a deal that might move the needle now at the expense of having the flexibility to build up the roster down the line.

“What [owner Joe] Lacob wants to do — and this might get Warriors fans mad — is he wants to build the next team after Steph Curry,” longtime Warriors reporter Tim Kawakami of the San Francisco Standard said on his podcast, “The TK Show,” during a discussion of whether Lacob might want to sell the team in the years to come. “I don’t know how possible that is. But Lacob has a very keen interest in, ‘I’m going to show, or this organization’s going to show what it can do with Steph Curry and then after Steph Curry.’ I don’t think it’s going to be as good, myself, but that’s what he wants to do.”

In the meantime, Curry told Thompson he’s “hopeful for all the creative ideas of getting the best team possible” — an all-time player keeping his fingers crossed that the front office and ownership to whom he’s entrusted the twilight years of his Halley’s-comet career. But hope isn’t a plan, and it’s damn sure not a superstar forward; and so, for now, all Steph, the Warriors, and the untold millions of fans he’s brought to the franchise over the past decade and a half can do is wait.

“That’s why you don’t envision anything until it happens,” Curry told Thompson. “There’s a lot of moving parts.”

And, unfortunately, not much motion for a team that has been, and continues to be, stuck.