AS THE 3-5 Golden State Warriors transition eras in real time, missteps and all, it has been hard not to imagine what this team would be like without Draymond Green -- and the forms it might have taken had they never discovered his greatness.
The Warriors held both the 30th and 35th picks in the 2012 draft, and had their choice of Green and Festus Ezeli at No. 30. They picked Ezeli. "We decided we had to get a center first," Kirk Lacob, now the team's executive vice president of basketball operations, told me during the 2015 NBA Finals. "I was confident Draymond would still be there at No. 35. He's a four-year player, he's short, he's slow. He was going to slip."
Before that first championship season -- Green's third in the NBA -- Steve Kerr had Green penciled in for 10 to 12 minutes as David Lee's backup. Then Lee suffered a hamstring injury; Green seized the starting role, and has held it over a decade and four championships.
In hindsight, all of that somehow feels inevitable: that Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, and Green were destined to win together -- their skills so perfectly complementary, blurring into a cyclone (the Warriors actually have a play they don't use much anymore called "Cyclone") of cuts and passes and bodies in motion. There is something almost mystical about their connection. It is the type of bond that can develop only over thousands of shared high-stakes moments. It is sports nirvana.
Four months after a glorious, affirming championship, nirvana and mortality collided. The Warriors came to terms with Andrew Wiggins and Jordan Poole on massive extensions; they struck no deal with Green, and did not hold substantive discussions with Thompson, sources said. (Green has a player option for next season. Thompson cannot become a free agent until July 2024; the Warriors have more time to negotiate with him.)
Barring someone taking a drastic pay cut, keeping Curry, Green, Thompson, Wiggins, and Poole beyond this season would result in an unprecedented and probably untenable tax bill. Golden State has options -- all their contracts are tradable -- but the simplest mathematically is parting at some point with Green or Thompson. Green is playing well, though not as well as he did in leading the Defensive Player of the Year race a year ago. Thompson is struggling; keeping him long term would mean committing an enormous sum to three guards in Curry, Poole, and Thompson.
Green punching Poole in practice last month held an almost literary subtext, even if it was subtext projected onto a simple, violent event: an aging star who helped build a dynasty struck a younger player heading the replacement generation.
It sparked rumors: Would the Warriors trade Green? (The Warriors have not engaged in any trade talks centered on Green, and don't plan to as of now, sources said.) It reignited old debates: Was Green ever really a star in his own right, or was he the beneficiary of playing alongside the two greatest shooters ever -- two all-time greats whose penchant for expert off-ball movement enabled Green to thrive as point-forward?