Thursday night at the Chase Center was a cold slap of reality right in the face:
Despite a great arena and continued improvement all around, the Golden State Warriors have officially moved into the worst place in basketball.
The Celtics came in and dismantled the Dubs. Even with a little trash-time hustle, the Steph-less Warriors were exactly what they are now: a slow team headed for the finish line.
This is not hell.
NBA hell comes with ping-pong lottery balls and a shiny new 19-year-old savior to sell fans.
No, this is too bad. The Warriors are stuck in basketball purgatory. They’re not bad enough to work – they’ve already managed 29 wins. But with Steph Curry’s runner’s knee keeping him in street clothes for at least the next four games, any dream of pushing the No. 6 in the West has been cooked.
They roam the middle seas, completely off campus.
They are trapped in the PIT.
The Play-In Tournament is a neat gimmick cooked up by the league office to give mediocre teams a reason to pretend it’s April Fools. But for Golden State? It’s just a cell.
And in that cell, everything has no meaning.
It’s a disaster, but watching this Dubs version is enough to make you wish you were watching a real, shameless, bottom-feeding tank job. At least those groups have order. All loss is a quiet quiet place in the front office.
You can sell hope if you smell. You can dream that you are on your way to college and tell yourself that help is on the way.
The Warriors are literally doing this in 2020. There was a purpose then. Positivity, I mean. (Don’t look at what they actually did with that number 2 pick.)
That’s not the case for the Warriors.
The franchise spin machine will step up and tell you that the next few weeks are a “critical testing period” for 2026-27 and beyond.
Purely, it’s business talk designed to buy time when the office has no answers.
Let’s be brutally honest here: What exactly are we testing other than No. 30 down? He is the sun in the solar system of the Warriors.
Without him, you don’t scout a collegiate basketball team; you just put a stopwatch on a sinking lifeboat.
And what should we take away from a game like Thursday? Deep into the rubble of a game when Boston led by 34, it actually looked like De’Anthony Melton and Kristaps Porzingis were the guys _you_ need to keep around to put a team on the floor next year – goalies.
Melton is a defensive bulldog who knocks down timely shots. Porzingis provides that floor-spacing, rim-protecting flexibility that fits well in the modern NBA — and, conceptually, he’s a perfect match for Curry.
Both are free agents. Based on what we saw on Thursday, the Warriors would be foolish to allow any moves.
There’s just one big problem: The Warriors have absolutely zero flexibility to keep both Melton and Porzingis in market deals.
In order to keep that duo, the front office has to pull off some seismic, earth-shattering moves to create the necessary space. We’re talking financial gymnastics the likes of which we haven’t seen in the Mike Dunleavy Jr. era.
So, in the words of Will Smith – back to reality: The Warriors are checking out the ridiculous NBA CBA roster that they can’t live with. They are preparing for the Play-In Tournament which they tried to avoid but failed. And they are waiting for their injured star to come back to save the season that has already slipped through their fingers.
Hope is the only money that matters in professional sports. Without Curry returning, staying healthy, and coming together with this (and fully healthy) roster in a way that puts the league on notice just before the postseason (I’m holding my breath), where is the hope for a bright future in San Francisco right now?
The Dubs are just there. They play without strings, trapped in the inescapable space of the NBA’s middle class – too good and too proud to go out, almost good enough to make winning meaningful. They have become unplayable characters in someone else’s video game – there to provide effective opposition to teams trying to achieve something this year. (Good or bad.)
It’s a painful way to live – a slow trickle of disappointment.
Like I said, this isn’t roundball hell. Hell has a purpose. This is a very bad ending.
