Lowe Have we already seen the storybook ending for the Warriors

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THE GOLDEN STATE Warriors finished the 2020-21 season on a 10-3 run to vault them into the play-in tournament. They failed to advance, losing back-to-back heartbreakers to the Los Angeles Lakers and Memphis Grizzlies, but that late-season run rekindled their collective faith after two lost years: When Stephen Curry is right, our style can still work.

Klay Thompson was set to return in 2021-22 after two crushing injuries vaporized consecutive seasons; Thompson tore his ACL in Game 6 of the 2019 NBA Finals, then ruptured his Achilles during a Nov. 18, 2020 workout -- the same day the Warriors selected James Wiseman with the No. 2 pick in the NBA draft, a move that has haunted the team ever since.

The Warriors were right to be optimistic about the way the 2021 season ended, even after their losses in the play-in. They roared back the next season to win the fourth championship of the Stephen Curry/Draymond Green/Thompson era.

You felt the historic importance of that title in real time, the way it cemented Curry's legacy and validated the Warriors' beautiful game, but that championship has grown over two years to seem even more immense and special. They accomplished it against a Western Conference in something of a holding pattern -- a conference that was not anything like what next year's West projects to be, with the Memphis Grizzlies presumably regaining their pace in the pecking order and young teams ready to rise.

That 2021-22 season was a place-holder for the LA Clippers and Denver Nuggets; Kawhi Leonard and Jamal Murray missed the entire season recovering from ACL tears. The Grizzlies, the No. 2 seed that season and Golden State's second-round opponent, were young and not quite ready; their ascendant superstar, Ja Morant, missed the last three games of that Warriors series with a knee injury. The Phoenix Suns, the best team in the conference all season and incumbent Finalists, imploded in the postseason -- unable to find any answer for Luka Doncic.

But those Warriors had an answer for Doncic in the conference finals, and summoned enough of their old brilliance -- combined with some new ingredients, including a career season for Andrew Wiggins -- to upend a Boston Celtics group that appeared primed to stake their claim as the league's next great team. The Warriors won those series. They took them. Other rivals wobbled; the Warriors, like the proud champions they were, held steady.

Having lost in the play-in again on Tuesday to the Sacramento Kings, missing the playoffs for the third time in five seasons, the Warriors are hoping for a repeat of history.

They went 27-12 over their last 39 games, ending the season on a 10-2 blitz. Head coach Steve Kerr held firm until the end that this roster was good enough to go on a long run. There was some internal disagreement about how good this roster really could be this season, sources said, but the Warriors are closer to low-end contention in Curry's twilight than they are to a deep rebuilding stage -- even if there could be a one-year tanking window next season ahead of the Cooper Flagg draft as most of the league aims to win.

Golden State won 46 games. That's objectively pretty good. They finished neck-and-neck with the Milwaukee Bucks and Cleveland Cavaliers in net rating. They did that while dealing with two long Green suspensions and constant toggling with the rotation and starting five. They blew several big leads in puzzling ways. They have no interest in tanking, sources said. They have no realistic means of doing so with Curry on the roster (and healthy) anyway. The plan -- as it has always been -- is to make the most of Curry's remaining seasons.

The Warriors did not exactly push hard to move out of the No. 10 seed late in the regular season. They monitored Curry's minutes, and sat him -- along with Green and Jonathan Kuminga -- in their finale. Perhaps that revealed some shift in focus toward next season and beyond.

The Warriors this summer will be able to trade two future first-round picks and the better slice (picks 1-20) of the protected 2030 first-rounder they owe the Washington Wizards via the Chris Paul/Jordan Poole deal -- plus multiple first-round pick swaps. Depending on their willingness to trade one core young player, Golden State could butt into (some) conversations for win-now veterans that become available. Kuminga would have the most appeal, but the Warriors' brain trust remains very high on his potential, sources said; he is eligible for an extension this summer. (His early-season playing time was a subject of much healthy debate in Golden State -- and across the league, sources said.)

They have a decision to make on Green, whose volatility has worn on several within the organization, sources said. But everyone within the team understands how good Green still is -- one of the league's best defenders, and an orchestrator of the Golden State motion offense who enjoys rare chemistry with Curry. Finding a team willing to trade significant future assets for Green would be tricky; he is owed $77 million over the next three seasons, and the rest of the league has watched the chaos of the last 24 months.

Wiggins has three years and almost $90 million left on his deal, and just completed a mostly disappointing season. His salary would be handy in any major trade, but rivals might view his contract as a net-negative -- and ask the Warriors to attach an asset to compensate, sources said. Golden State is not quite deep enough in trade assets to be able to afford that.

At the February trade deadline, the Warriors tried to engage the Los Angeles Lakers and LeBron James' representatives at Klutch Sports Group on talks about a mega-deal sending LeBron to the Warriors; Rich Paul, the CEO of Klutch, rebuffed Golden State's interest, according to ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski and Ramona Shelburne. The Warriors can always try to revisit that notion. Like 29 other teams, they are monitoring the potential fallout of a Milwaukee Bucks first-round exit.

This is not where they expected to be two years after a rousing NBA title run.

AFTER THE 2021 play-in loss, the Warriors made two lottery picks: Moses Moody at No. 14 with their own selection, and Kuminga at No. 7 -- a pick they acquired from the Minnesota Timberwolves (along with Wiggins) in exchange for D'Angelo Russell. (That deal was a masterstroke.) They had originally acquired Russell from the Brooklyn Nets in exchange for Kevin Durant in a somewhat hastily arranged sign-and-trade once Durant expressed his intention to move from Golden State to Brooklyn -- ending one mini-era within the Curry dynasty.

The Moody and Kuminga picks were the last big swings of the vaunted "two timelines" initiative -- Golden State's attempt to defy history and remain great with Curry while at the same time constructing the nucleus that would keep Golden State in contention after Curry, Green, and Thompson were gone. It was less a plan than the result of bad injury luck: Golden State dipping to the bottom of the league in 2020 with Durant gone and Curry and Thompson injured -- and then drafting Wiseman at No. 2.

The Wiseman, Kuminga and Moody trio contributed very little to the 2022 title run. (Moody had some moments in the conference finals against Dallas.) The only young guy who popped was Poole; his career with the Warriors unraveled only months later, when Green cold-cocked him at a practice -- the video of the punch leaking into the media.

The young guys as bystanders in that 2022 championship run almost heightened its significance. Before that title, the Warriors had won three championships over seven seasons. Only one -- the 2015 title, their first of this era -- came before Durant signed with the Warriors thanks to a one-time-only cap spike, creating a borderline invincible Big Four. How would the Curry Warriors be remembered if those three titles were the end of it?

Curry burned all that talk into the ether. The system Kerr built around him showed its staying power. Wiggins' play was a triumph for the front office, having spun Durant into Russell into Wiggins -- and Kuminga -- in a dizzying series of transactions that also involved a salary dump of Warriors legend Andre Iguodala and cost Golden State a protected first-round pick. (That pick is now finally set to convey to the Portland Trail Blazers -- unless Golden State moves into the top four in the lottery.)

In 2021, when the Warriors lost in the play-in but felt such hope for what was to come, the two-timelines plan was in its infancy. Wiseman had played in 39 NBA games. Kuminga and Moody hadn't been drafted yet.

Now, the timelines are merging -- only it might be too late. Kuminga is here. Moody is a solid two-way wing; his main problem is the competition he faces for minutes. Brandin Podziemski (No. 19 in 2023) and Trayce Jackson-Davis (No. 57) -- the first two draft picks of Mike Dunleavy Jr.'s tenure as Golden State's top basketball executive -- are legitimate rotation players. Neither looked out of place as a starter.

The foundational trio, though, is three years older. Green has put his reliability in question. Thompson is an unrestricted free agent; Joe Lacob, the Warriors governor, has discussed on Tim Kawakami's podcast "The TK Show" the possibility of Golden State ducking next season's luxury tax after paying exorbitant tax bills for much of the last half-decade. That will be very hard if not impossible should the Warriors re-sign Thompson at a reasonable number; keep Paul or trade his non-guaranteed $30 million deal for a player or players who help them next season; and fill the roster. (There have been no substantive talks between the team and Thompson's representatives about a new deal for months now, sources said. Both sides surely took note of the four-year, $135 million extension Jrue Holiday -- almost exactly Thompson's age -- signed with the Celtics last week. Thompson will draw some interest in free agency, league sources said.)

THIS WAS ALWAYS the risk baked into the two-timelines construction: the young guys aren't good enough in time to help the old guys contend again, and then aren't good enough to form the core of a 50-plus win contender after the old guys are retired. To call that outcome a "risk" is probably mislabeling it. It was a likelihood -- the most common outcome if a computer simulated this series of team-building events 10,000 times.

Maybe this is just what happens to aging superstars and aging champions who stick together. The team gets old and expensive. Young usurpers pass them by. Opportunities to change that course are rare. For the Warriors, their most realistic opportunity to do so was probably the Wiseman pick. They sniffed out the trade market for that pick, sources said, but found it was not enough to lure a major veteran star. They investigated trading down with other teams in the lower half of the top 10 in deals that would have brought back decent veterans but not game-changers, sources said. None of those deals would have altered where Golden State is now.

They have kicked around other win-now trades since that 2022 title run -- including talks with the Toronto Raptors about OG Anunoby at the 2023 trade deadline -- but never got far on anything meaningful sources said.

Where they are now is not so bad, really: a good team with aging lions and some interesting young players. They discovered some encouraging things this season with potential carryover. Kuminga and Green can play together in small-ball lineups with Green at center -- and even with Wiggins on the wing. When Kuminga went out with an injury in late March, the Warriors inserted Jackson-Davis into his starting spot and shifted Green to power forward -- and found that worked, too.

The storybook ending would be the timelines somehow coalescing, the young guys helping the three foundational stars to one last title together before they ride off into the basketball sunset.

Maybe we already saw the storybook ending in 2022. It made for quite a story -- Thompson recovering from injury devastation, Green lording over the defense, Curry shooting the Celtics out of the Finals and weeping upon victory.

Maybe the story after that is largely anticlimactic: the Warriors fight on as a good team, always searching out chances to jolt themselves back toward the top before it's too late, but never quite finding that one move that changes everything. Curry, Thompson, and Green play together until the end -- never winning another ring, but going out their way, together, in their style, as part of solid teams.

There would be honor in that, if not championship glory.

Honor without excellence isn't good enough for Lacob -- and probably not for Curry, either. Excellence is the standard now.

Expect the Warriors brass to fight like hell against that slow drift to the end.