Oh and Two, and This Is What the Warriors Front Office Bought
They swung for Giannis, Davis and LeBron, missed on all three, and handed Steph Curry the same team back. He's 38. He doesn't have years to spare.
I sat in the car outside my place for a while after the Memphis game ended. Radio off. Just sitting there. Up 12 with 3:47 to go in the home opener, De'Anthony Melton hits a three and Chase Center is shaking, and then they don't make another field goal. Not one. Nine straight misses, a 17 to 0 run the other way, Steph's three gets swatted by Zach Edey, and a rookie named Cameron Boozer hits the jumper that wins it with 20 seconds left. Grizzlies 111, Warriors 108.
So they're oh and two. Wednesday was a 127 to 105 beating in Los Angeles, and Friday was this. I'm not going to walk you through the box scores. You either watched or you heard about it from somebody who looked the way I looked in that car.
And I'll say it before anybody else does. Two games is two games. I know. I've been doing this long enough to know October records don't mean anything on their own.
But these two games aren't really about these two games. They're the bill for a summer, and the summer was a disaster.
Go back to February. Mike Dunleavy stood up and said, "We've got the goods to make deals." I believed him. I think most of us did, because the logic was simple. Stephen Curry is 38. You don't get a lot more years of the greatest shooter who ever lived, so you go get him help while he can still carry the other half of the deal.
The goods bought nothing. They went after Giannis and reportedly put four first round picks on the table, and Milwaukee wasn't interested. They chased Anthony Davis and Washington didn't want to move him. They recruited LeBron so hard that Draymond declined his player option to clear the runway, and LeBron signed with Philadelphia. Then the summer just sort of ended.
No trades. Zero. Not one completed deal all offseason. Al Horford, Melton, Gary Payton II and Charles Bassey all came back. Georges Niang showed up on a minimum after missing all of last season, which I already lost my mind about in August. They let Quinten Post walk to Memphis on an offer sheet because the apron math wouldn't let them match. And when the dust settled the payroll sat $348,000 under the second apron. Call it a cushion if you want. I call it a locked door.
So the front office swung for three stars, missed on all three, and then spent the rest of the money keeping the same team together. I don't know what else to call that except a failure.
Not a bad break. A failure.
And the worst part is Steph held up his end. In September he signed a two year, $116 million extension when he could've pushed for about $20 million more. He took less so they'd have room to build. He did the thing stars never do. And the front office still showed up to the opener with nothing new to hand him.
I keep hearing that they have assets and they're in a good spot. Assets for what, exactly? The whole point of hoarding picks and young guys is that someday you cash them in for the piece that matters. If you couldn't find that piece in the summer Curry turned 38, when does that day come? When he's 40? When he's sitting courtside in a suit?
Look at who's actually out there. Jimmy Butler is still rehabbing a torn ACL and the hopeful target for his return is January or February. Moses Moody is coming back from a torn patellar tendon. Draymond is 36. Horford is 40. Graham Ike started at center in the home opener, and Yaxel Lendeborg, the eleventh pick, started next to him. It's the first time the Warriors have started two rookies in a home opener since anybody started keeping track of starters back in 1970. I want to be excited about that. Lendeborg put up 18, 13 and six in his first game at Chase and the kid looks like a real player.
That's the part that gets me.
Nobody sat in a room and drew up a plan to win around Curry with two rookie starters. That's what happens when everything else falls through. It's a roster built out of whatever was left.
And he's still doing it. That's what makes it sad instead of just annoying. Curry had 24 Friday and he's still the guy everybody in the building is waiting on in the fourth quarter. The defense knows it, too, and that's why those last few minutes looked the way they did. When the shots stopped falling there was nobody else to go to. There hasn't been for a while.
I've watched this man since he was a skinny kid with bad ankles. I've watched him win four rings, change how the whole sport gets played, and drag teams that had no business being in the playoffs into the playoffs anyway. He's earned a front office that treats every one of these last seasons like it's precious. Because it is. There's no version of this where you get them back.
What he's getting instead is a team that tried, sort of, and then shrugged. Swing big, miss, run it back, hope the old guys stay healthy and the young guys grow up fast. It's a prayer with a payroll.
Maybe they turn it around. They've got the Suns on Saturday and there's a lot of season left, and if Butler comes back in the winter looking like himself, maybe this column ages badly and I'll eat it in March. I'd honestly love that.
Right now, though, I'm just sad. Not angry anymore. Sad.
Somewhere out there is a version of these years where Curry had real help, and we're never going to see it. The front office had the summer to build it, and they didn't.
The full 2026-27 schedule and the injury report are up if you want to torture yourself the way I do.
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