Even at the highest heights of the Golden State Warriors' dynasty—the halcyon days of 2017 and '18, when the team could do almost no wrong after signing forward Kevin Durant—their fans had to know the party couldn't last forever.
However, it seems unlikely that Warriors fans could have anticipated how odd the comedown would be.
Since Durant's departure after the 2019 season, Golden State has lurched between extremes. It has won a fourth title in 2022 and posted a 15–50 stinker in 2020, when guard Stephen Curry was injured. All the while, the newly moneyed Warriors have been unable to nail the transition to what's next.
That is a fact Curry acknowledged with unusual candor in a Tuesday piece from ESPN's Tim Keown.
"I think the postmortem on some of the two-timeline stuff is not great," Curry told Keown. "We picked [now-Indiana Pacers center] James Wiseman, who's had a rough go. It's not his fault, but we had an opportunity when we were at the bottom of the standings and had the No. 2 pick, and picked Wise. We thought there was going to be a way to bridge that gap, and it didn't work out that way."
The Wiseman pick was meant to put the Warriors on "two timelines"—an informal plan, in Keown's estimation, to "to rebuild on the fly, or rebuild without the pain of rebuilding." The plan has been largely unsuccessful—see Golden State's 18–17 record this season—but Golden State did squeeze the '22 title out of that tumultuous era.
"To hear the way people talk about the 2022 championship is still fascinating to me," Curry said. "Because the 'surprise championship' was a crowning achievement based on that team we had and what we'd been through since the '19 Finals."
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Stephen Curry Shares Honest Assessment of Warriors' Controversial 'Two-Timeline' Plan.