Building around Steph Curry, Jimmy Butler, Draymond Warriors' offseason priority originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area
SAN FRANCISCO – Draymond Green sat on the Warriors’ bench during their season-ending loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves in Game 5 of the Western Conference semifinals Wednesday night and began talking with assistant coach Jerry Stackhouse.
Their conversation was both a look back and a look forward.
“I’m like, man, if this group had training camp together, some of the mistakes that we make, we just wouldn’t make,” Green shared Thursday at his exit interview at Chase Center. “Especially on the defensive end. We just wouldn’t make those mistakes if we had a training camp.”
By now, everybody knows the guarantee Green made during NBA All-Star weekend in San Francisco. Never shy to make a headline, Green said he was going to ride Steph Curry and Jimmy Butler to a championship. The Warriors were one game above .500 and tied for ninth in the West. A contender, they were not.
Not then, at least.
But Green, soon after Butler became a Warrior, knew this team had a chance if they could remain healthy. He always liked the Warriors’ chances even more for the 2025-26 season.
The Warriors now will have a full offseason to reassess and build around Curry, Butler and Green. Butler will have a full training camp to get an even better grasp on concepts and how he can best be used next to Curry. The hard part has already been completed.
“I think the biggest change that needed to be made was we needed someone like Jimmy Butler, and we made that change,” Green said. “I think the hardest part is done.
“It’s harder to get guys like that through trades, through free agency. It just doesn’t come up often. I think that part is done. It puts us in a much better situation going into this offseason than last year, where we were kind of looking for that.”
When the Warriors had Curry, Butler and Green on the floor together, they were as good as it gets. Their net rating together was even better in the playoffs than in the regular season, but the trio only spent seven of the Warriors’ 12 playoff games together. Butler, in one of those games, left with an injury in the first quarter, and Curry’s season ended in the second quarter of Game 1 in the conference semifinals.
The Warriors went 23-7 with Curry and Butler in the lineup and willed their way to beating the No. 2-seeded Houston Rockets over a taxing first-round series that took seven games. They aren’t ones to make excuses. They also firmly believe they could have beaten the Timberwolves at full strength and had a real chance at contending for a fifth title, and a first for Butler, during this decade-plus dynasty.
“I think just you look at the sample size the last two months, and even the Houston series when we had our mind focused on a goal, we had enough to accomplish it and get to a point where we were playing pretty high-level basketball,” Curry said. “Does that mean we can win a championship? We hope so.
“That’s really all you want, is a fighter’s chance. You look at the league right now, I know there’s a lot of youth taking over, but we were one of the last eight teams that realistically had a shot, and if you can run that back, make some tweaks that can help our overall roster – obviously you’ve got to get through an 82-game season, like I said, and you want to be in a position where you’re not chasing, but I feel like we had enough that we showed we could be that team. That’s all you really want.”
Father Time isn’t being forgotten inside the walls of Chase Center. Curry is 37. Butler will enter next season at 36, and Green is 35. No team has won a championship with players as old as the main core and Big Three to lean on.
All three of their contracts are lined up through the 2026-27 season. Steve Kerr is on the same timeline, too.
Age, at least to Butler, remains nothing more than a number.
“I don’t think this age thing is anything the way that everybody is taking care of their bodies, doing right,” Butler said. “I think the potential is there. With the full season we’ve got coming up ahead, I think we’ll be able to find out.”
The ages of those three also put a heavier urgency on the Warriors’ front office to build around them. Curry says the Butler move gives Golden State more “clarity” this summer as to how the rest of the roster can be constructed. He acknowledged the Warriors need to get bigger across the board, and that their shooting struggles became paramount, especially when he was sidelined.
Playoff basketball is about 16-win players who can impact winning at the highest stakes. The Warriors needed more 82-game players as well.
Curry played 70 games in the regular season in back-to-back years for the first time since doing so in five straight years, which were his ages 24 through 28 seasons. Green became a full-time center once Butler arrived and his body can only take so much after withstanding a pounding from players who tower over him for so long. Butler was held to 55 regular-season games because of multiple suspensions from the Miami Heat, but he has an injury history and plenty of wear and tear of his own.
Playing such high-stakes basketball months before the playoffs even begin takes its toll. Having to do so as a team that has spent so many years going through the postseason with three players closer to 40 than 30 is diving into the shallow end of shark-infested waters.
That’s where general manager Mike Dunleavy makes his money. Since stepping into impossible shoes to fill, Dunleavy hasn’t been afraid to shake things up. As a former player himself and son of someone who was both a coach and general manager, he understands the importance of having a pulse on the Warriors as a whole. He isn’t just crunching the numbers, he’s having the side conversations that keep a group together and make the wheels turn.
“I have the utmost confidence that Mike will do the right things, and the job that he’s been doing of just keeping this thing together and moving it forward and helping it grow, collectively as an organization but also the work he does with individuals and the conversations that he’s walking around having with individuals, he understands it.” Green said. “He gets it, which puts us in a really good spot.”
Standing on a battlefield and eyeing younger, longer and athletic teams will be another uphill climb the Warriors must overcome. They have their Big Three. They took a swing and feel like they could have been rounding the bases if everything fell in their favor.
It didn’t, and now it’s back to the drawing board of an optimistic offseason that’s bound to create more questions on how to support the three names that make everything go: Steph, Draymond and Jimmy. They’re the appetizers, dinner and dessert. Everybody else is fixings, either fitting for a toast or spitting out the sour taste of disappointment.
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