Boy, the Warriors sure could have made our lives easier by not getting trucked by the Kings last Tuesday night.
Had the Warriors not been trucked by the Kings, they’d be playing the Pelicans in New Orleans tonight, and the Pels would be without Zion, and the Warriors would likely win and move on to an intriguing best-of-7 vs. the Oklahoma City Thunder and we’d all get our popcorn and talk hoops and watch hoops for the next two weeks.
But . . . the Warriors got trucked in Sacramento.
Splattered. Crunched. Whomped.
And now we have to scoop up the road kill. Which ain’t pretty.
And now we’re on-air addressing just a few wee questions along the way, like:
- Should the Warriors make an effort to bring back Klay Thompson?
- Should the Warriors let Klay Thompson walk, like Ronnie Lott to the Raiders, and use the money for other purposes?
- Can the Warriors slither out of Andrew Wiggins’ contract, which has three years and $84 million burdensome dollars paid to a mysterious player?
- Should the Warriors even process the concept of full explosion, and move Draymond Green?
- Can the Warriors somehow move Chris Paul for an asset?
- Can the Warriors expect Jonathan Kuminga to emerge into the necessary and missing No. 2 threat behind Steph Curry in time to re-invent the squad next fall?
- Is Mike Dunleavy, Jr. the man to make these gigantic and difficult decisions, and which should he prioritize?
- And finally . . . drumroll please . . . is this all re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic, or — shout it out loud now! — “GIVEN ALL THESE BURNING ISSUES, CAN THE WARRIORS WIN ONE MORE CHAMPIONSHIP IN THE STEPH CURRY ERA?”
That, sports fans, is the name of that tune.
The unfortunate answer I keep coming back to is: No.
No, the Warriors cannot win another championship in the Steph Curry Era, barring a dramatic personnel move by Dunleavy that reinvigorates and recharges and remakes the Warriors.
For starters, look outside the Warriors’ living room window. There’s a giant bus parked on the lawn with the words ‘WESTERN CONFERENCE’ painted on the side. The bus ain’t going anywhere. And, to carry this analogy to a crude ending, it’s likely disposing of its waste on the Warriors lawn, a la Cousin Eddie from “Christmas Vacation”, to fulfill this week’s generationally-dated pop culture reference quota.
And then there’s the size issue. As in, the Dubs don’t have it.
And there’s that No. 2 scorer issue. As in, the Dubs don’t have it.
And then there’s what we’ll call the “Keon Ellis Factor”, as in the Dubs not having those 24-year-old long athletic defenders, like Sacramento’s Elllis, who sprung out of the I-80 bushes to clothesline the Warriors when they least expected it.
This doesn’t mean I’m not intrigued by how Dunleavy tries to solve the puzzle. I’m highly intrigued. I want to be wrong. I want a 2022-like run from Steph and the crew, where they shock the NBA with one more miracle journey to mid-June.
It’s going to take something creative and bold. It’s going to take finding a way to trade Wiggins and/or Paul and land a premier free agent —an aging but effective Demar Derozan, anyone?
To the burning issue of Klay: if being creative and bold means Klay plays elsewhere next year, we’ll have to prepare ourselves for it — as I just saying to my poster of Willie McCovey in a Padres uniform. These things happen, kids.
About the only guys who come out of this looking good are a) the guys who light the beam in our state capital; and b) Bob Myers, who exited, stage left, with the artful timing of Laurence Olivier doing ‘Hamlet’.
It’s Mike Dunleavy’s problem now, and Joe Lacob just texted him at 1:05 am, and 1:06 am and 1:07 am and . . .
Boy, it would have been nice to not get trucked in Sacramento.
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