What losing out on LeBron James means for Stephen Curry and the Warriors

The premise of the Golden State Warriors’ involvement in LeBron James’ free agency was very simple:

The Warriors employ Stephen Curry, who is one of the greatest players in NBA history and the single biggest reason they have won four NBA championships in the last 12 years.

Even as the Warriors have faded from their dynastic heights since defeating the Boston Celtics in the 2022 NBA Finals, Curry has repeatedly expressed his interest in continuing to play “meaningful basketball” as he continues to play at an All-NBA level into his late 30s.

No player on the market better represented a shot at the Warriors playing meaningful basketball next season than James.

Well, then, let’s try to go get him.

Spoiler alert for those who’ve been trapped under something heavy for the last 72 hours: They didn’t get him. LeBron chose the Philadelphia 76ers , a sentence on par with “The New York Knicks really are the defending NBA champions ” for how simultaneously jarring and accurate it is.

Now what, Warriors? (Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images) IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect / REUTERS

James’ decision disappointed suitors in Cleveland, Miami and Minnesota, among other locales. But it might not have hurt anybody more than Golden State, arguably the biggest loser of the whole saga , both for losing out on adding James and for what coming up short in his decision-making calculus represented about the current state of play in the Bay, with the Warriors coming off a 37-45 finish with the NBA’s No. 19 offense and No. 16 defense , unable to advance out of the play-in tournament, and entering next season with two starting wings — superstar Jimmy Butler and stalwart Moses Moody — still on the shelf rehabilitating their respective season-ending leg injuries .

The Warriors didn’t appear to be anywhere close to good enough without LeBron for him to convince himself they’d be championship-caliber with him. It’s a bitter pill, but one that Curry has had to swallow, as he told Marcus Thompson III of The Athletic , who caught up with the two-time Most Valuable Player at teammate Moody’s youth basketball camp in Arkansas:

“The through line,” [Curry] said, “which is hard on anybody in this situation, especially with us keeping this thing together, is knowing that when Jimmy got hurt and Moses got hurt, the whole calculus of everything changes. How do you get through their absence and still stay at a certain level? And then how that goes into this year. It’s the same deal. So, I’m a realist on that.” [...]

“And you hope that they both [Butler and Moody] come back healthy,” Curry said, “and we can play at a level that keeps us relevant and competitive and builds a foundation so that we can figure out what it looks like. But that is the situation. We don’t live in any alternative universe.”

It was pleasant to imagine inhabiting that universe. One in which, with Draymond Green opting out to open up more room to maneuver, James decided to run back his 2024 Summer Olympics partnership with Curry. One in which Warriors lead executive Mike Dunleavy Jr. was able to find one or two more complementary pieces to round out the roster, fortifying it enough to be able to survive the 82-game marathon and scratch out enough wins to earn a top-six seed in the West. One in which head coach Steve Kerr was able to keep the core of James, Curry, Green, Kristaps Porziņġis and Al Horford mostly intact, and Butler returned healthy midstream, and this senescent squad could enter springtime with reason to believe it could solve any problem an opponent might present them in the postseason.

That story, though, evidently never gained much traction with LeBron. “The Warriors were also appealing for a time, a source close to James” told ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne — “but only if they acquired a proven star forward like Washington Wizards' forward Anthony Davis, with whom James had won a title in 2020.” And with multiple reports insisting that Washington never expressed interest in moving Davis before he’d ever played a game for the franchise, that particular pathway was never really viable for the Warriors — if they’d even seriously considered taking it.

Ultimately, when he interrogated his motivations for continuing his career, James settled on his own definition of meaningful basketball: namely, the destination that would provide him the best chance of winning a fifth NBA championship. Reasonable people can disagree over whether the talent that will surround James in Philadelphia nets out to a higher potential ceiling than the collections in Northeast Ohio or Biscayne Bay. There doesn’t seem to be any disagreement, though, about why the Warriors would finish a distant fourth in that race.

Yes, Steph’s as compelling a co-star as any individual player other suitors could offer. Look beyond him, though, and the Warriors roster is heavy on older players with injury concerns, degraded production or both, and light on bankable young talent who can be relied upon to bridge the gap to what comes next. Golden State’s best young players are Brandin Podziemski and Gui Santos, quality contributors who are still well south of an All-NBA selection like Tyrese Maxey, and perhaps 2026 first-round pick Yaxel Lendeborg, a 23-year-old who has yet to play a second of regular-season NBA basketball.

These are the wages of years of missed opportunities. Of the failures of the “two timelines” era, whether to find ways to develop James Wiseman and Jonathan Kuminga into players who could become bona fide long-term contributors, or to just draft different players who might have been better suited to shine in Kerr’s system. (LaMelo Ball and Franz Wagner were the picks immediately after Wiseman and Kuminga, respectively; Tyrese Haliburton and Trey Murphy III went 10 picks later, respectively.)

Of the miserable Green/Jordan Poole incident , which led to the Warriors flipping a 23-year-old 20-point scorer for 58 games of Chris Paul, and paying a protected 2030 first-r...

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