It was one of the most historic nights in the history of the National Basketball Association.
In Oakland, California, the Golden State Warriors defeated the Memphis Grizzlies to finish the season 73-9, the best regular season record in the history of the NBA. Stephen Curry, en route to his second consecutive MVP award, had 46 points to put the cherry on top of a transcendent season.
Roughly 350 miles south of Oracle Arena, a different game was taking place in what was then the Staples Center. Kobe Bryant was playing in the final game of his illustrious career, all 1,556 regular season and postseason games played in a Los Angeles Lakers jersey. Bryant reached deep and put on an incredible show, dropping 60 points on the Utah Jazz before literally dropping the mic during his postgame address to fans.
While the final night was a wonderful send-off for the superstar who ascended to the realm of "one-name" celebrities, the win that the Lakers pulled off on Kobe's last night was not the norm for the team that season. They finished 17-65 that season, in last place in the Western Conference.
In fact, after making the playoffs in 15 of the first 16 years of Kobe Bryant's career, including five championships and seven trips to the NBA Finals, over the last three seasons of Bryant's career the Lakers won a combined 65 games. The 1999-00 Lakers won more than that in a single season en route to Kobe's first title.
It was a painful end to a long and successful run for the franchise and their driven star. After years of turning draft picks and cap space and young talent into co-stars and veterans and supporting players, the magic ran out. After a huge swing to put Dwight Howard and Steve Nash around Kobe and Pau Gasol failed, the franchise sputtered. When Kobe then tore his Achilles, the course of their franchise changed.
Bryant played just 41 games the next two seasons before suiting up for 66 in his farewell year. The Lakers handed Bryant the max contract he deserved for his years of service, but it was a significant overpay on the production he was able to provide with his injuries and level of play after returning. The Lakers tried and failed to keep a competitive team around Kobe, and the last few years of his career turned into a painful tension of trying to celebrate Bryant while losing massive numbers of games.
Now it appears that the Golden State Warriors are approaching a similar fate.
Steph Curry is about to become the next Kobe Bryant
Without making any statement about who has had a better career, Wardell Stephen Curry is one of the few guards in NBA history with a list of accomplishments in the same stratosphere as Kobe Bryant. A two-time MVP (including the first unanimous winner in 2016), Curry won four championships and made it to six NBA Finals, and he is the greatest shooter in NBA history and tops the list of most career 3-pointers by a California mile.
Curry, now approaching his 37th birthday, is still playing at a high level. If he plays in enough games this season he will likely make his 11th All-NBA team, and he is on track to be an All-Star Starter next month.
The difficulty is that the Golden State Warriors are proving unable to put a contending roster around him. Once upon a time, the Warriors put one of the greatest teams in NBA history around him, and the combination of Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, Andre Iguodala and a rotating cast of role players propelled them to five-straight NBA Finals and three titles. Then, years later, the team put a very different collection of players around Curry, Draymond and Klay and they won another title in 2022.
Yet those days are long gone; Curry is no longer a Top-3 player in the league, and he doesn't have anyone close to a second star to help him carry a team to real contention. Through January 16th the Warriors are wallowing at 20-20, in 11th place in the Western Conference. If the season ended today, Stephen Curry wouldn't even make the Play-In Tournament, let alone the playoff field.
There have been rumors swirling for months that the Golden State front office is pursuing a significant trade to find Curry a co-star. Yet in recent days, it seems clear to the entire organization that no such trade is materializing that will take this group from mediocre to relevant. While Curry is still one of the greatest stars in the game, his team will not be figuring into the title race for yet another season.
Curry seems to have come to grips with that reality. While he is far from giving up on the court -- he is clearly still competing to win every game, as proven in a recent herculean effort to take down the Minnesota Timberwolves and pull the Warriors back to .500 -- he appears to have given up hopes of competing for another title.
After a recent loss to the moribund Toronto Raptors, Curry told reporters that he did not want the Warriors to make a "desperate trade" that would "deplete the future" for the organization. He has clearly seen the writing on the wall.
It's possible that an inability for the Warriors to put a contender around him motivates Curry to ask for a trade, to seek his fifth ring with another franchise. That seems extremely unlikely to happen, however, given Curry's status as the greatest player in franchise history and his connection to that fan base. He looks to be the next in the line of Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan and Dirk Nowitzki, playing an entire Hall of Fame career for one franchise.
What that means, and as Curry has almost certainly now realized, is that the end is not going to be pretty. It's not going to be Curry winning one last title and going out on top. It's not going to be the Tim Duncan career of finding a young superstar to help to bridge the gap. The Warriors had their chance for that with the James Wiseman and Jonathan Kuminga picks, and those did not yield a superstar.
The Lakers loved Kobe Bryant, and it was an amazingly special thing that he stayed with the organization for his entire career. But it meant that watching the end was painful, as the ultimate winner lost so many games during the twilight of his playing career.
Warriors fans need to prepare themselves for the same. They missed the playoffs last season, losing in the Play-In Tournament. They are floundering at the edge of the Play-In race yet again, with young teams like the Houston Rockets and San Antonio Spurs passing them by. Soon the Warriors won't even be able to trick themselves into any postseason contention, and the final years of Curry's career may be as loss-filled as they were for the Lakers.
It's a hard end for such amazing players to endure, but that's how the game of basketball is. You win and you stay on the court. Lose, and it's time to be replaced.