The Ageless Warriors: Stephen Curry and Chris Paul Team Up for One Last Shot at NBA Glory

Stephen Curry is 35 years old. When the 2024 playoffs are played, under normal conditions with him competing, the point guard will turn 36. And he is in his fifteenth season in the NBA. It has been a lot since he was number 7 in the 2009 draft, the fifth guard behind James Harden, Tyreke Evans and the two that the Minnesota Timberwolves decided to choose ahead of him: Ricky Rubio and Jonny Flynn. It has rained, among other things, four championship rings, MVPs (regular season, Finals, All Star Game, Conference Final), nine all stars and some alien records from the line of three that have turned a boy who looked like a flea when he arrived from Davidson, Dell Curry’s son, the best shooter of all time without much possible discussion. Even in these times when everything is discussed.

Curry has seen how, with him as a foundation, the Warriors have built an empire from what was a countercultural and fun franchise, easy to love, but unable to compete. Until the. He has seen how the signing of David Lee (2010) was celebrated as a matter of pride because then, gulps, no one wanted to play for the Warriors. He has experienced the move from Oakland to San Francisco, the rise to become the most valuable franchise in the NBA, behind the Knicks and Lakers (what was never imaginable); and he has seen how the work of an organization that has laid the foundations for what all the others want to do (not just in the NBA) flourished and which is pursued even through collective agreements. So that you don’t earn so much.

There are many factors in this process that has already been in place for a decade: the Warriors returned to the playoffs in 2013 and have only missed it once since then. But the main one, the essential and inevitable one, is Stephen Curry. And since he is going to turn 36, his team knows that time is of the essence and that any opportunity to compete again with the old gang (Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, Steve Kerr on the bench) could be the last . So you have to lift all the stones, read all the fine print and remove all the Romes with all the Santiagos; It’s not going to be. And, if necessary, you have to sign the great enemy, the player who was impossible to imagine wearing the Warriors jersey. But in the NBA, as you know, nothing is impossible. So Chris Paul will play the 2023-24 season with the Warriors.

Paul is 38 years old. He is the third oldest player in the NBA only behind LeBron James (39 in December) and PJ Tucker (born May 5 and Paul on 6). He is one of the best point guards in history: a twelve-time all-star, third in assists history only behind John Stockton and Jason Kidd. But he has not been a champion. Among other things, of course, because he has spent his life in the West and the West of the last decade has almost always been a thing of the Wariors. Paul lost a Finals with the Suns in which his team was winning 2-0 against the Bucks. Will he never have it as close? That’s largely in the hands of, again, Stephen Curry. He was the driving force of some Clippers contenders for the ring for the first time for real with him, Blake Griffin, DeAndre Jordan (the Lob City years) and company. A team that was one of the Warriors’ first true rivals, in full ascendancy. And then they engaged in battles that they always won against the Rockets, whose best version came in 2018… with Chris Paul next to James Harden. That team took Curry and Durant’s Warriors to seven games and could have won the series, and surely later the ring, if it weren’t for a muscle injury… to Chris Paul.

Along the way, Paul mocked Steve Kerr in an image that the NBA world turned into a meme. He kicked Curry and Draymond Green out of a training court in Houston to their ridicule and said in 2020 that he had absolutely no relationship with Green, who in turn spoke like this about Paul: “I don’t like him at all.” Green, of course, is the chaotic factor of some Warriors who would not be what they are without him and who sometimes seem bitterly aware of it. That they treat the power forward, a special player in many ways (unique because of his defensive abilities) as a necessary evil. Sometimes very bad… always very necessary. For rivals, one of the worst to face. But surely, also for everyone, less irritating than Chris Paul, who has left a huge trail of enemies in the locker room that have not been his throughout almost two decades in the NBA (number 4 in the 2005 draft) . Many, of course, in the Warriors’ team. Which is now yours in one of the most incredible turns that an NBA specialized in incredible turns has taken in recent times.

The money, the quintet, the pick and roll

There was, of course, an economic/organizational reason for this: Paul arrived on July 6 from Washington, where he had been parked by the Suns in the Bradley Beal operation. Considered amortized and out of the competitive elite, the express return to it was facilitated by the Warriors’ need to get rid of what they were already clear had been a mistake: Jordan Poole’s extension. The shooting guard, who played a role in the 2022 title, signed a four-year extension in October of that year that could reach $140 million. But his confrontation with Green (of course), who punched him in the preseason and spoiled a group chemistry that until then was sacred, and his poor performance as an accelerator of the second unit turned him into an undesirable salary bill for the Warriors so involved in luxury tax accounts that they couldn’t afford any more trials with Poole. Or maybe they needed to reset the temperature of the team, they knew that some could not continue coexisting and, for the umpteenth time in these years, they understood that Draymond Green, despite everything, had to continue. Chris Paul arrived with a contract worth 30.8 million this season and another 30.8 million next season… but without guarantees until next June 28. Poole left with his big contract, fully guaranteed until 2027.

But the matter was tricky. Because of the past and the pending accounts, because Paul already seemed in clear regression in the last season with the Suns and because his style (the ball in his hands to manipulate rivals through constant pick and roll plays) does not fit properly. naturally in the team that plays the least pick-and-roll in an NBA full of teams that don’t stop playing pick-and-roll. Not to mention that his status as starter (he has been in his 1,2114 regular season games) was facing what may be the best backcourt in history, Stephen Curry-Klay Thompson. And that, with his age and his 1.83 height, he was already becoming a problem in defense, a bad thing for a team in which Curry does what he can and often more than he should and in which Klay ( 33 years old) is no longer the attack dog he was before his tragic (Achilles, knee) ordeal of injuries.

So a large part of the Warriors’ options to compete again, and offer Curry (and Klay, Green…) the possibility of winning the fifth ring, go through Chris Paul. He sounds almost ironic. For that and to fix, of course, a defense that went from the fourth best in 2022 (champions) to the fourteenth in the regular season in 2023 (eliminated in the second round by the Lakers). Steve Kerr has made it clear that it all starts there, and that he is counting on a healthy Gary Payton to reassemble (Green, Looney, Wiggins, Payton) elite-level defensive units. Rudy Gay (another in the top 10 of the oldest) and Cory Joseph are chosen this time to provide depth and depth, Brandin Podziemski is an interesting rookie and fingers are crossed that this will be the year of Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody . A young X factor that has not yet worked in a plan from which James Wiseman and Poole himself have already been ejected.

But Kerr also knows that a good Chris Paul would give the project a new lease of life. And that a sulking version of the veteran point guard would bring a very serious chemistry problem. Some even wanted Paul sent to Portland when Jrue Holiday spent a few days there on a layover, before going to the Celtics. Many fans salivated, but the Warriors did not even consider dealing with the image issues that such a move would bring. Paul, meanwhile, has done what he could. He has trained and gone out to dinner with Green. He has worked with Curry to learn to play with another sun king, the role that of course will no longer be his (it was not in the last Suns, nor in Harden’s Rockets), and he has said what he was more or less expected to say. said: there is no problem if I have to be a substitute for the first time, what it is about here is winning, etc. Green, too: “If you’ve seen Chris compete, he’s an asshole. Of course he could say the same about me, and that’s fine. We are dogs, full-fledged guys, and what we want is to win. “We know we can do something special together.”

Green’s ankle injury, who will not start the season on the track, has made the first decisions easier for Kerr, who will play in the preseason with Curry, Klay, Paul, Wiggins and Looney in the quintet. Klay will defend the power forwards because Wiggins will have to be again, and even more so with a backcourt as small and veteran as the one that Curry and Paul will form, the defender of the rival’s best forward. Paul will have to play more without the ball, when he is in the starting five or with the A unit on the court. But it could be, that does seem very likely to fly the pen, the engine of the team when Curry is resting, and a player who can (partially) change the style of the Warriors and fill those minutes with pick and roll plays that give a new dimension to Kuminga and Moody.

In that, CP3 is one of the best ever. And the Warriors, Kerr just said, have never been good on offense without Curry on the court. Not even when Kevin Durant was there. For the coach, when those minutes have not been criminal it has always been thanks to the defense. Can a 38-year-old Paul whose role is still unclear change that? It is one of the big questions of the new NBA season, one that begins with the Warriors’ enemy in the Bay, stuck in the home of the last? big round by Kerr and the big three. Sometimes, you have to take impossible steps for exceptional things to happen. And in the end, in any case, the real crux of the matter will once again be Stephen Curry, as he has always been. The rest remains to be seen.

2023-10-19 07:46:56
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