Steve Kerr just thought he was giving a good quote. “It felt like I was descending into the depths of hell,” he joked to his staff as they took to the crimson-coated Toyota Center court for shootaround ahead of the Golden State Warriors’ NBA Cup quarterfinal game in Houston. “I thought I had been better in my life. I didn't think I deserved this fate.” But the internet is endlessly, terrifyingly iterative. Memes metastasize instantaneously. By the first quarter of play Wednesday night, it had become a quote graphic. Kerr’s face, an almost perfect 🙁.
By halftime, the graphic established its intrinsic value: Kerr in hell became shorthand for any brutal visual experience, or any terrible day at the office—the opportunities for recontextualization just about infinite. Fans who watched the Warriors get absolutely suffocated by the Rockets defense all night long in a grotesque 91-90 road loss quickly rerouted the graphic’s messaging. Hell isn’t a place; it’s the Golden State offense in 2024.
A questionable late foul that sent Jalen Green to the line for the game-winning free throws sealed the Warriors’ fate, but it was merely the culmination of a miserable three-and-a-half-minute closing stretch for the Warriors. Golden State held a seven-point lead with 3:38 remaining. And then: errant passes; consecutive 24-second shot clock violations; one of Jonathan Kuminga’s four missed free throws on the night; an uncharacteristic misjudgment from Steph Curry, who clanked an ill-advised 3-point dagger attempt with 11 seconds left and the Warriors up one. Chalk it up to hubris, I suppose. Things have long gone right for the Dubs in Houston, in one of the era’s great (but lopsided) rivalries that’s defined the modern game of basketball.
It's the first time the Warriors have lost to the Rockets since 2020, back during the James Harden and Russell Westbrook experiment. The only current Houston player who was around for those days is Jeff Green, who played for two other teams in the intervening years before returning last season. Houston’s Cup win snapped a 15-game losing streak to Golden State. Longtime Rockets reporter Jonathan Feigen caught Tari Eason in a fit of jubilation after the game: “We are free! We are free! Just letting y’all know, we are free!”
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Free from what, exactly? Perhaps from whatever curse causes a team to miss 27 consecutive 3-pointers in a game. It’s hard to come away from Wednesday night’s game and not sense a change in the winds. It’s a familiar feeling, like we’ve been here before. Ironically, the Warriors now find themselves in a position similar to the one the Rockets were in back in 2018: backsliding into a competitive Western landscape—losers in seven of their past nine games—in search of another star to keep their window open … and wondering whether Jimmy Butler might be the answer.
Six years ago, the Rockets made their interest in Butler known, offering a package that included four future first-round picks to pry him away from Minnesota, where he had burned bridges in ways only he could. Harden, Chris Paul, Jimmy Butler. An honest-to-goodness Big Three to fight fire with fire. There is a SportsCenter clip of Kevin Negandhi relaying the details of the Rockets’ proposed trade package as coanchor Keith Olbermann bangs his head on his desk. (Minnesota, in the end, traded Butler to Philadelphia.) “Everyone is chasing, of course, Steph Curry,” Negandhi said then. “And my advice, after last night: good luck.” Negandhi’s sentiment would read a bit differently today.
Rumors have circled around Butler since the offseason, when he made it clear that he wouldn’t sign an extension with Miami even if it was offered, effectively rendering him a $48.8 million expiring contract. The wheels were greased earlier this week with some rumormongering from ESPN’s Shams Charania, who reported that the Heat are open to trading Butler and that Butler’s agent, Bernie Lee, has a list of preferred destinations: Houston, Golden State, Dallas, and Phoenix—CBA tightroping be damned. (For what it’s worth, Lee blasted Charania on social media for false claims, in a remarkable display of idgaf.) In any case, there is too much noise for the rumors to be baseless. Neither the Mavs nor Suns have any realistic way of acquiring Butler seamlessly, but their inclusion underlines Butler’s win-now motivation. Houston and Golden State are more interesting to consider, for opposing reasons.
For the Rockets, merely being mentioned is an encouraging sign of forward progress. Our own Michael Pina outlined before the season why Houston will be listed as a suitor in any and all blockbuster trade possibilities for the foreseeable future: There are few teams in the league with as sizable a stockpile of promising young talent and future first-rounders. Houston is outperforming expectations on the strength of its overwhelming defense, but the Cup quarterfinal put things in perspective. Its offense lacks clarity and organization. A star like Butler could conceivably serve as a solution, but for how long, and at what cost?
The accounting is straightforward for Houston, which, thanks to its calculated offseason spending spree in 2023, has several high-salaried players who price match Butler’s contract in the aggregate. The Rockets have a perfectly fried trade chip in Dillon Brooks’s contract, crafted just for a moment like this. It’s still a tough call. Brooks has been not only one of the team’s most versatile defenders, hanging tough both on the perimeter and when switched onto bigs, but also the team’s best volume 3-point shooter this season. Can one of the worst shooting teams in the league afford to lose one of its precious few release valves from deep? Does it even make sense to cash in for a player more than a decade older than most of the Rockets’ core pieces? Probably not. The Rockets could follow the Thunder’s model of staying patient with the nest egg and banking on internal development. As OKC has shown over the past few years, simply occupying space on the trade market as a looming threat is its own soft power.
“Will I listen to other teams? Of course I will, that’s my job,” Rockets GM Rafael Stone said on SiriusXM on Tuesday, addressing the speculation. “But again, there’s no part of me, there’s no part of our decision-making process that suggests that we’re looking to do anything big now or in the near term. We definitely want this group to be as good as it can be this year, and then we’ll evaluate things at the end of the year. But the hope is very much that this core group can lead us where we want to go, and that from a transactional perspective, we’re largely done.”
The Rockets have time on their side. The Warriors don’t. By the end of their loss in Houston, a sense of exasperation had bubbled up to the surface. Something needs to change. “One of the most important players in the league to watch right now, believe it or not, is Jonathan Kuminga,” ESPN’s Brian Windhorst said Wednesday morning on Get Up, hours before the quarterfinal. “The Warriors have been sniffing around making a star player transaction for almost a year now. Right now, they’re basically making the final analysis on Jonathan Kuminga. Are they going to keep him, or are they going to move him?”
You’d be forgiven for interpreting Kuminga’s minutes on Wednesday night as a sort of audition. Golden State worked him into the pick-and-roll as a handler and screener, giving him various runways to create pressure at the rim off his unimpeachable first step and vertical power. He is a breathtaking athlete and always has been—a rare dimension to the Warriors offense that the team has yet to fully harness since drafting him seventh in 2021. But he’s also always been an awkward fit in an offense that prioritizes a hive mentality over siloed attacks. His defense waxes and wanes, as do his glimmers of playmaking potential—he hasn’t had more than two assists in a game in nearly a month; Pat Spencer, Golden State’s 11th man in Houston on Wednesday, logged two assists in less than three and a half minutes.
Can Kuminga be the star the Warriors need him to be right now? If not, what’s the point in holding on? Acquiring Butler in his age-35 season without any assurances that he would stay beyond this season is enough to make any team queasy, let alone one that would have to part with its wing depth in both Kuminga and Andrew Wiggins to make it happen. It’s unnervingly easy to talk yourself into Butler’s fit on the Warriors: He is a fellow adult in the room; a smart and instinctive off-ball cutter; a player who knows how to parcel out his energy and take over when necessary; a menace that terrorized the Celtics like few ever have, in case everything aligns just right down the road. Curry will turn 37 in March. The Warriors can’t afford to take the risk; they can’t afford not to.
Golden State is at an interesting juncture, one informed by key decisions made and not made—Jordan Poole, Chris Paul, the 2020 and 2021 drafts, the failed courtship of Paul George, and the “mirage” of Lauri Markkanen. The 2022 championship was proof that the embers of a dynasty remain, but for years, the Warriors have been trying to onboard a future incompatible with what remains of its glorious past. After nearly a decade as the league’s gleaming fulcrum, the Warriors have exhausted their leverage—and it’s awfully tough to negotiate from a position of desperation. If Butler isn’t the answer, there will have to be another. Hell isn’t seeing red, nor is it other people. It’s the procession of what-ifs that haunt you into paralysis—the ghosts of what could’ve been obscuring the path forward and out.
