The arrival of Al Horford and its effect on Curry’s final stage

In Game 1 of the 2022 NBA Finals, Horford made a six triples and scored 26 points in San Franciscowresting immediate control of the series from the Boston Celtics while longing for his first title in his fifteenth season. It was one of the best games of his career. But one of the most devastating soon followed.

“Then we talked about Game 4,” Curry said. “When, in a way, we took it away from them.”

In perhaps the most legendary game of Curry’s NBA career, he recovered from a painful foot injury and scored 43 points in front of an effusive Boston crowd to regain control and turn the series into his fourth title.

In July, three years after that NBA Finals game, Curry received a message from Horford.

Insiders say Horford decided to join the Warriors on his own, without the need for a traditional draft. Green remembers asking general manager Mike Dunleavy later that summer if he needed to call Horford.

“You can call it, but it’s done,” Dunleavy told Green.

However, the conversation with Curry was important for Horford. The text message resulted in a call in mid-July. Curry is not only the face of the franchise, but also the teammate, at 37, who is closest to Horford, 39. I wanted to ask him about the medical staff and maintenance program of two players who began their college careers during the George Bush administration.

“Basically the most veteran conversation you could ever have in your life,” Curry said.

The Horford addition means that four of the most important players of the Warriors are 35 years old or older. Yeah Buddy Hield starts alongside Butler, Green, Curry and Horford in one game this season, will be the oldest starting lineup in NBA history. That fact alone means prioritizing the present over protecting the future. But the much-debated two-timeline approach, although modified and increasingly downplayed, is not dead.

The Warriors still have almost complete control over their future picks and held on tightly to Kuminga this summer, even as the young forward yearned for a fresh start. They could have had a stable veteran like Royce O’Neale and some second-round picks for him, but there’s clearly still a partial long-term focus even though the win-now window is quickly fading.

“That’s one of the beautiful things about having this organization,” Green said. “We’re not sitting here thinking, ‘Hey, give everything away because we don’t give a damn what this looks like in 10 years.'” We do it. And that’s why I think it’s only fair to Mike that he has a future too. It is important to do it the way we have done it. We found a good balance of being able to compete and possibly win now, while maintaining flexibility and resources for the future.

ON THE EVE OF THE DATE deadline in February, Curry and Kerr echoed an opinion first shared publicly by Green. All three delivered a unified message about the need for the board and ownership group to be pragmatic in their approach, stating that it would be unwise to dump all of their future assets for the most realistic upgrade possible.

Green even told Dunleavy and majority owner Joe Lacob the previous summer not to give the green light to the transfer of Lauri Markkanen, considering that the Utah Jazz he asked for all the draft picks and young players.

“I’m a big fan of (Markanen’s) game,” Green said. “But I think if you want to do something that big, you better be sure this is the deal. You don’t usually win those games against Danny Ainge. I look at history.”

The Warriors tried unsuccessfully to find a second offensive partner alongside Curry before last season and lost Klay Thompson who left for the Dallas Mavericks. However, they started with a 12-3 record, briefly thinking they had found the formula thanks to their depth. They then went 3-12 in their next 15 games and plummeted to 25-26 in mid-February.

“We were talking about a 12-3 record last year,” Curry said.

Curry and Green had a memorable conversation in the visiting Jazz locker room the night the Warriors signed Butler. Dunleavy, Butler’s former teammate in Chicago, defended him, believed in his quality, paid him a maximum two-year contract extension and closed a transfer that only cost them a future first-round pick: 2025, thus ensuring that his future team was not limited.

Curry called the approach “aggressive but reasonable.”

It could be argued that the transfer, although a resounding success, came too late and that the record of 23-8 to the finish line He wore down the veteran group enough to knock the Warriors out in the second round. The Warriors privately admit that Curry’s overuse in the series against the Houston Rockets partially caused his hamstring strain.

But the immediate success with Butler, at the contender level, also served as proof of concept for those interested heading into the summer that their new trio could compete if they complemented each other correctly. So they looked for Horford, De’Anthony Melton and Seth Curry, transfers that do not mortgage the future, but rather have the approval of Steph Curry, Kerr and Green. Kerr called it a “commitment to Steph,” believing the front office and front office have returned to a win-now approach enough to compete with dignity in the final chapter of the Curry era.

“When you look at the two-player timeline theory or whatever, I think it’s easy to question it,” Kerr said. But I think you have to take the circumstances into account. Back then, we didn’t make the playoffs two years in a row. So when we recruited all those kids, there was concern that the streak was already over. It made perfect sense to aim for the top with some lottery picks.

To be sure, there are internal grumbles about some of the moves made and not made over the past half-decade, particularly — as AM850 reported during the Kuminga negotiations this summer — Lacob’s reluctance to include Kuminga in a trade for Alex Caruso a couple of seasons ago.

The selection of James Wiseman The second overall pick in the 2020 draft was a monumental mistake. If they had wanted it, they could have opted for a transfer to Anthony Edwards in first place. Franz Wagner and Trey Murphy III were available during the Kuminga and Moses Moody in 2021. But that’s revisionist history for the ever-diplomatic Curry.

“That conversation gets stale quickly,” Curry said of maximizing his window of opportunity. “I understand what everyone is saying and the thinking behind it. But you make decisions with the information in front of you. If the information changes, then your perspective might change. That’s the league in general. I say all this to say: I want to be competitive. It doesn’t mean you’re going to have a perfect situation where you’re the proverbial favorite. But I like where we are.”

THE SUMMIT MOMENT of Curry’s career — that decisive basket in Game 6 in Boston that made him cry on the Garden court as he won his fourth ring — was his new teammate’s deepest professional pain.

Horford said it wouldn’t have slowed down much if the Celtics hadn’t bounced back to win a championship in 2024. If Horford still hadn’t won a title — knowing which franchise and player caused him the biggest disappointment — he doesn’t think he would have been able to join the Warriors this summer.

“I think it would have been too difficult for me as a competitor just because of the way I operate,” Horford said. “So I just don’t think I would have been able to.”

But the dominoes fell for the better of a Warriors core that has been hanging around Horford, but failing to land him, for years. The championship melted the ice. The injury of Jayson Tatum changed Boston’s chances of winning the title. The new salary restrictions, Horford believes, forced him to leave Boston. “This whole CBA thing, the platform thing, basically destroyed the team that they built there,” Horford said.

So he looked elsewhere. He decided not to retire. He watched as a resurrected Warriors team threatened the playoffs without Butler. He realized they needed a capable, expandable veteran center. The team’s general manager agreed.

“Mike has been looking for a player like him his entire career,” Kerr said. “Not just someone who can do pick-and-pop, but a legitimate center, who can make Draymond’s job easier, who can make Steph’s job easier. It’s really hard to find those types of players.”

Dunleavy set two tasks this summer: resolve the Kuminga situation and complement the rest of the roster with veterans who would fit better in the Curry-Kerr-Green system.

The Kuminga contract dispute was long, tortuous, confusing and finally resolved. The rest of the matters, although unresolved in public view, were relatively orderly. “I felt like this had a lot of potential,” Horford said. “So I just had to wait.”

Dunleavy had to call him frequently to assure him of the sequence of the plan, but Horford, according to team sources, was his definitive “1A” target and there were no other free agents nearby. They also had some interest in Luke Kornet, according to sources, but he signed with San Antonio, a contract that was out of his budget.

To land Horford, they offered him a two-year contract worth $11.6 million with a player option for the second season and a 15% transfer fee, which gave them those incentives to close the deal. The second season matches him with the contracts of Curry, Butler and Green, marking a final chapter of contention for the quartet.

At the top of the Warriors organization, there is still one eye planning for the future beyond this era. That will inevitably raise another existential question the next time they have an expensive transfer option at their disposal. But four of the sport’s biggest names of the past two decades – Curry, Butler, Green and Horford – are convinced they have been given a realistic opportunity to play together for two years.

“For me, it’s a privilege to have this opportunity and to be here,” Horford said. “They are very competent. I understand that there are many difficulties with this. There are many challenges. But I am very excited.”