An organization shouldn’t want to shake things up after winning a championship.
Duh.
It shouldn’t even take a championship — or a winning season, for that matter — for a franchise to identify a solid core and move forward, prioritizing continuity.
It’s the only way to build sustainable success.
Not a one or two-year run. A dynasty.
That’s the goal at the end of the day, right?
Do teams get so focused on the task at hand that they forget — or even intentionally disregard — the future?
That’s a poor way to look at things.
Shortsightedness is a killer to most potential powerhouses.
Sometimes, a lick of success can make them react irrationally, thinking they’re one step away. More often than not, they’re far from it.
It’s rare a team gets close to the ultimate goal without having to go through a nearly unbearable amount of humiliation.
No pressure, no diamonds.
It does reach a point, though, after a certain point, where familiarity prioritization overtakes reactionary advancement as the cause of the inevitable decline.
It’s possible for dynasties to just… fade out.
While a lot of it can usually be attributed to father time — and it’s absolutely one of the causes of the fall of the Golden State Warriors — their franchise player hasn’t lost a step.
Not much of one, really.
Maybe Steph Curry isn’t as agile as he once was.
It’s difficult to recall a time when a 38-year-old was still the same athletically as they were at 28.
He’s still the greatest shooter in the world. That’s something he hasn’t lost.
If Curry’s still, for the most part, the player he’s always been — why haven’t the Warriors found much success since 2022?
They haven’t overreacted since getting eliminated the year after their last championship. Isn’t that the right move?
There’s a fine line between overcorrecting and not correcting at all.
Even the slightest mistake during the adjustment process can ruin a decade of stability.
It hasn’t though, at least not for Golden State.
The two most important players to their incredible decade-long run are still there.
What’s the point of keeping them around if the goal of keeping them around is just to keep them around?
It may be a bit different for Draymond Green — who’s well aware that the Warriors have tried to ship him off in the past.
He was supposed to be the main asset heading to Milwaukee in a deal for Giannis Antetokounmpo last year.
But like it has at nearly every turn, the deal fell out, and Curry remained without much help.
The face of their franchise, in what’s likely to be his final years in the NBA, can’t get the necessary boost from the front office to compete while his body still allows him to.
Stagnation is the result of complacency.
They were on the right track when they made an aggressive move for Jimmy Butler, but the amount of capital it took to bring him in almost cancels out the effectiveness of the aftermath.
Plus, he’s been unable to stay healthy in recent years, similarly to Kristaps Porzingis — who they traded Jonathan Kuminga and team-favorite Buddy Hield for just before last season’s trade deadline.
What good does getting aggressive now do when the years following their last title were defined by inability to execute both on and off the court?
Maybe that’s what they realized at the conclusion of the 2025-26 season — one that saw them missing the playoffs entirely after a defeat in the Play-In Tournament.
They’re the only organization in the NBA who hasn’t made a single external addition this offseason. The only one.
There may not be much of a light at the end of the tunnel, either.
Curry is beginning to grow frustrated with the stagnation.
Took him long enough, but at last, he’s noticing their inactivity.
He’s set to hit free agency after this upcoming season, and unless they make some unexpected noise in the terrifying Western Conference, maybe the best course of action, for both sides, would be to part ways.
It’d be tough seeing Steph Curry outside of a Warriors uniform.
Players who stay with one franchise for their entire career are a dying breed.
It was once assumed Curry would be the one to keep them alive, but if he does end up departing next summer, it’d be tough to place much blame on him.