Good bye and thank you for all the Swoosh!!

There is a moment from last night that I keep turning over in my mind. Late in the fourth quarter of a play-in loss to the Phoenix Suns, a game the Golden State Warriors could not claw back, Steve Kerr subbed Stephen Curry and Draymond Green out of the game. He pulled them close. A Prime Video microphone caught what he said, and it was not a tactical adjustment or a coaching cue; it was something quieter and more honest than that. “I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” Kerr told them, “but I love you guys to death. Thank you.”

That is a goodbye. It may not be the final goodbye, but it carries the weight of one, and anyone who has loved this version of Golden State basketball felt it.

I want to be honest about something: I was not a devoted NBA watcher before this team redefined what the league could look like. Professional basketball in the late 2000s and early 2010s had drifted somewhere I could not follow easily. The game felt simultaneously chaotic and slow, caught between eras and uncertain of its identity. Then the Warriors happened, and I found myself watching again, not just checking scores but actually watching, leaning forward, caring about what came next.

What made them different was a specific and somewhat unlikely combination. Stephen Curry brought the outside game to a place it had never gone before; he did not just stretch defenses, he broke the geometry of basketball. Defenders had to honor him from distances that had previously been decorative territory, 35 feet from the basket, running off screens, spotting up in transition. He made shooting look like a form of language, something expressive and precise and individual. And he did all of this at a size (6’2″, slight by NBA standards) that would have gotten him quietly discouraged at an earlier point in the league’s history.

But Curry alone would have been remarkable without being transformative. What made the Warriors genuinely new was the combination around him. Draymond Green is the piece that most observers outside the Bay Area underestimated for years; he brought a kind of physical, combative intelligence to the game that belonged to a different era. He is a throwback in the best sense, the sort of player who makes the game hard and uncomfortable for opponents in ways that do not show up in any stat line. He defended every position, he communicated relentlessly, and he made Curry’s magic sustainable because teams could not simply collapse on Curry and ignore the consequences. Draymond made them pay.

And then there was Klay Thompson (for a time, before circumstances and eventually free agency pulled him away); he gave the offense a second creator who could get hot from distance in a way that was almost unfair. When Klay was part of the core alongside Curry, Green, and Kerr, the group described it as an ongoing project of trying to keep things together while still chasing championships, knowing every regular season would be an emotional rollercoaster. (NBC Sports Bay Area) That honesty about the difficulty of sustaining excellence is part of what made them easy to respect.

Steve Kerr is the context for all of it. He is a coach who played for Phil Jackson in Chicago and won championships in San Antonio; he knows what sustained excellence looks like from the inside, and he built a culture in Golden State that felt intentional rather than accidental. He gave players freedom within structure, trusted them to be adults, and was consistently, sometimes surprisingly, willing to say honest things in public about the game, about politics, about things that mattered beyond the box score. He made it easier to root for this team because he made it clear the team was rooting for something larger than itself.

The Warriors won four championships on the foundation of Curry, Green, Thompson, and Kerr; and after Thompson left in the summer of 2024, the remaining core still found ways to compete, even as the rest of the league moved on and declared the dynasty finished. (NBC Sports Bay Area) This past season was turbulent by any honest accounting; injuries, lineup changes, the late arrival of Jimmy Butler III, and a final record of 37-45. But they made the play-in. They won a game against the Clippers in a comeback that felt, for one more night, like the old magic was still there. Curry poured 35 points into that win, and then two nights later, against the Suns, finished with just 17 on 4-of-16 shooting, the tank visibly empty. (Heavy Sports)

That is the honest end to an honest run.

Draymond, true to himself, got ejected late in the fourth quarter after fouling out and then getting into a confrontation with Devin Booker. (Yahoo Sports) Some people will shake their heads at that. I choose to read it differently. He was not going quietly. He has never gone quietly. The roughness and the competitiveness, the refusal to accept that the game was simply over, that is exactly the quality that made him irreplaceable to this team and, frankly, made this team irreplaceable to me. The 1990s NBA I grew up watching had an edge to it, a physical reality, that softened considerably in the decade that followed; Draymond Green carried some of that edge forward into a faster, more positionless game, and it worked beautifully.

After the game, Kerr acknowledged publicly that these jobs have an expiration date and that sometimes it is time for new blood and new ideas; he said he would take a week or two and sit down with ownership to figure out what comes next. (Heavy Sports) Draymond, for his part, was clear that he wants to stay, noting he has a player option for next season and hoping he has done enough to remain part of the franchise. Curry and Green are the only Warriors alongside Paul Arizin and Al Attles to have played every NBA game of their careers with the Golden State franchise. (Heavy Sports) That kind of loyalty is genuinely rare now, and it deserves to be named.

Whether this was truly the last game for this trio, I cannot say with certainty. Kerr may return; these things are rarely as final as they feel in the moment. But the moment felt final, and moments like that carry their own truth regardless of what happens next. These three men changed basketball, made it more joyful and more interesting, more thoughtful and more physically honest at the same time. They made a small-market franchise in the San Francisco Bay Area feel like the center of the basketball world for nearly a decade.

If it is over, it was worth it. All of it. Thank you.