Is ‘good’ good enough?
Barring bad injury luck, I feel fairly confident that the Golden State Warriors will, at the very worst, repeat some version of the previous season in the upcoming 2024-25 NBA campaign. Perhaps it won’t be a perfect replication, but having Steph Curry, Draymond Green, and some promising veterans and youngsters pretty much guarantees that they’ll be an above-.500 team that at least competes for the Play-In Tournament.
Do they have more in them than that? They certainly think so, and I think it’s a great possibility, even though I sure as heck need to see it before I believe it. And while the excitement of the team clicking, evolving, and leaping back towards the top of the NBA’s totem pole is enough to make me excited about the season to come, a much scarier thought has started to creep in for me.
What if the Warriors are merely good?
There’s been some ludicrous revisionist history lately, with fans trying to paint the Warriors as bad last year. They weren’t! They were good! They finished 10 games above .500 and had a +2.2 garbage time-adjusted net rating.
The problem is that ‘good’ isn’t good enough in the NBA, especially for a team with the lofty expectations of the Warriors, a franchise with a dynasty in such recent memory that the players and fans can still taste it. The team needs better than good. Flaming out as the 10th seed in the first game of the Play-In tournament simply wasn’t enough ... for that matter, neither was the No. 6 seed and a second-round exit the year before.
So what happens if the Warriors are merely ‘good’ again this season? What if the additions of Buddy Hield, De’Anthony Melton, and Kyle Anderson don’t take the team further than the departing veterans could? What if the growth of youngsters Jonathan Kuminga, Moses Moody, Brandin Podziemski, and Trayce Jackson-Davis is mild-mannered enough that the team is still a two-player show dragging its way to mediocre results? Then what?
The Warriors will certainly have a choice to make next offseason if that’s the case. Do they admit that the Curry championship window is fully closed, trade him, and fully reset? Do they repeat this past offseason, trying for a big trade but content to let smaller moves and internal growth make up ground as their two Hall of Famers only get older? Do they mimic last offseason and swing for the fences on a short-term trade to maximize what they have left of Curry?
It’s impossible to determine without knowing what factors lead to that kind of a season ... or if that type of season will even occur at all. But while many franchise would be perfectly content with finishing a combined 16 games over .500 the last two years, we can fairly emphatically say that the Warriors are not one of those teams.
Mediocrity is not an option. Merely good will certainly come with consequences.
