The current NBA regular season holds little interest to us, regardless of what our hometown Golden State Warriors are not doing. Generally, we learned as kids in the 1980s—when 16 of the 23 teams in the league made the playoffs after an 82-game schedule—that the regular season really doesn’t matter much. Now, there are 30 NBA teams, and 20 of them still get a shot at the postseason, so nothing has really changed, has it? Thus, today on NBA Tuesday, we are going to deep dive on a nagging thought in our minds.

Was the 2022 NBA title the Warriors won a “bad thing” for the franchise’s long-term success? We’re going to argue “yes” … with the following bullet-item list as the context and rationale for our conclusions. We know many people may not agree with us, but considering the last four seasons (2023-2026), it’s clear the fourth title in eight years for Golden State gave it a false sense of security in terms of what the potential ceiling was for the team every year since then, which has proven to be pretty laughable.

So, bear with us here as we go through these ideas, one by one:

  • No championship is ever a “bad thing” obviously, so we start with that. When the team lost the 2019 NBA Finals, it went into a deep funk for a variety of reasons, and the entitled, privileged, and spoiled fan base started whining a lot. The 2022 team restored the “faith” of the bandwagon and has kept the money train rolling for another handful of years now, obviously.
  • The reality is, as we have said before, that the 2022 was a lucky one, for multiple reasons, and that’s okay, too, because the Warriors were very unlucky in losing the 2016 and 2019 Finals, as they probably should have won both of those—but did not, due to random and weird circumstances. Thus, in the “luck ledger”? Perhaps the universe owed the 2022 title to them.
  • Yet very little has gone right for Golden State since June 2022: the team has posted a middling-decent winning percentage since then (.541), after winning at a .646 clip during that 2021-2022 campaign. That drop of more than 100 points is significant for a franchise that still considers itself a contender. The reality is the team has not been that in four years now.
  • In factuality, that .646 winning percentage from the championship is a huge anomaly going back to the 2019 Finals, since Warriors “won” at only a .394 clip in the two immediate seasons right after that loss. So, all told, the championship season stands out like a sore thumb in the seven seasons now since that 2019 playoff disappointment. It literally was a fluke, folks.
  • There are reasons for the Golden State downturn since losing those 3029 Finals to the Toronto Raptors: change in personnel, injuries, poor drafting, hanging on to veterans too long, over-investing in mediocre players, etc. We’ve looked at a lot of these issues in the last four years here, and it all stemmed from a relative overconfidence in a few key areas, specifically two.
  • First, the team has made the mistake of not realizing its prize star, Stephen Curry, was aging quite rapidly, due to all those years of wear and tear in the postseason. Never the most durable of players, the extra mileage from going to the NBA Finals for five consecutive springs seemingly wasn’t factored into his aging process. His flashes of brilliance are also a blind spot.
  • Second, the front office believed its own hype in the sense that it found “stars” in the NBA Draft before and just assumed it could do it again and again and again. Curry was a once-in-a-generation gift that fell into the Warriors’ lap, and every piece of their success stemmed outward from there, just like the Chicago Bulls with Michael Jordan: Golden State hubris here.

Thus, by winning that lucky title, the Warriors doomed themselves, really, even if it’s paid off, financially. They did manage to dump the terrible contract of Jordan Poole; they did finally do the wise thing eventually and let the always overrated Klay Thompson walk; they have not done the smart thing and ditched Draymond Green, however. Even the trade-deadline choices this year made the team older and less talented, due to that arrogance in management, fueled by media hyperbole and self stroking.

Some of the blame also falls on Head Coach Steve Kerr, who we genuinely like and respect. But he’s been too loyal to his championship veterans over the years (Thompson, Green), ignoring the math and going with some sort of “gut instinct” that these old guys would somehow regain their youthful forms—which was never going to happen with a diminished Curry on the floor, since he was always the one that made the wheels go ’round so successfully, as we saw in the 2024 Paris Olympics, his last hurrah.

So, that’s our premise: you always take a title when you can get it, but sometimes, it ends up doing you more damage in the long run, and when Curry retires—probably after next season, when the Warriors will once again be mediocre, in all likelihood due to big money owed to three guys in their late 30s—the franchise will slip back into the oblivion it so infamously occupied from 1992-2012. Curry is irreplaceable, and without a valid succession plan for his impending retirement, the Warriors have hung on too long.

It happened to the Bulls; it happened to the San Antonio Spurs; it even has happened to the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers. The Warriors didn’t learn from those past lessons, and they were partially blinded so by that 2022 miracle championship.