Curry s injury and retreat made the Warriors unable to evaluate the lineup. Whether to break up the team and trade Antetokounmpo becomes a headache

. Therefore, the Warriors only need to find a basketball environment that Butler or Green thinks is acceptable. Is this possible? Maybe. Butler just had a few brilliant months with the Warriors. He may be worth more now than he was with the Heat. Green’s value is so closely linked to Curry that sending him away can be a more difficult task. There are some teams who would want the best defensive player in the league besides Victor Vinbanyama, and his contract is controllable. But without knowing what kind of offensive role can be played after leaving Curry's system, Green's trading value will vary greatly between teams.

Ironically, the precedent here may be the trade the Bucks made to get Lillard. The Bucks gave all their available draft assets to the Trail Blazers, but that wasn't enough, so they sent Ju Holiday away and reached a consensus that he could be traded again in exchange for more chips later. The Warriors' plan may be some version of this model: they can give up everything valuable, plus Butler or Green, and the latter will be exchanged for more assets that can be sent to the Bucks.

The reason that the deal was built like this was partly because the Bucks didn't want Holiday to know about the negotiations before the deal was finalized. If he was to stay in the team, they couldn’t risk damaging the locker room atmosphere. If the Warriors peddled Butler or Green in order to get Antetokounmpo, they will also face this risk. Can they keep these negotiations as secret as possible, as the Bucks did in 2023? This can be much more difficult. Antetokounmpo is more eye-catching than Lillard, and there will be more teams chasing him. There will be a lot of leaks. The competitors will be happy to shake the Warriors' stability. If the Warriors feel that the trade is unlikely for any reason, it might be enough to get them out of the chase.

If they succeed, is it worth it?

This is the hardest question to answer. The new labor-management agreement puts overwhelming emphasis on the depth of the lineup, so that the Warriors will be at a disadvantage to some extent. Super teams are not popular at the moment. The Lakers were eliminated by the Timberwolves in five games. The Clippers lost to the Nuggets because their role players who are good at defense do not need to be focused on the outside on the offensive end. Alas, the reason the Warriors struggled so much against the Rockets is because they couldn't figure out who should be sent around Curry, Green and Butler, and Rockets' substitute center Steven Adams almost forced them out of the playoffs.

In the best case, the deal gets Antetokounmpo locked the Warriors' salary hard hat on the second luxury tax line. Perhaps in the deal version that includes Butler (higher salary) rather than Green (lower salary), they can keep some powerful role players. Buddy Hilder will have a good shooting ability. Maybe they can re-sign Payton. Keeping Moses Moody would help, but he is one of the young Warriors players the Bucks might really want. But these are players who struggle at certain moments in the playoffs for some reason. They don't have plug-and-play character players like the Thunder or the Timberwolves. They will have to let those role players whose opponents are unprepared, or defensive weaknesses who will be attacked for a long time.

If you believe in the motto "look at the strengths in the regular season and look at the weaknesses in the playoffs", then the Warriors will be easily targeted at the highest level of games. This is not 2016. They won't have four All-Stars. They also won't have Andre Iguodala and Sean Livingston coming out of the bench. As a recruiter of base-paid free agents, the Warriors will be as strong as they were back then, but the recovering Lakers will offer more competitive significance in this regard than any team in the past decade. If the Warriors end up past the No. 1 luxury tax line—and that's almost certain—they will miss the market. Therefore, they must be nearly perfect in the operation of the edge. The Warriors have also chased the stars before, but have never been like this time. They never need to weigh the star's strength and the entire lineup. This creates an irresolvable contradiction between their two core principles. We have discussed Cole's concept of "many people and strong power". He trusts a lot of players and uses multiplayer rotations even later in the playoffs.

But in times of crisis, the management led by Joe Racob always has a high goal. When they were in the trough of the turn of the century, they did not choose players who could easily fit into the team like Teres Halliburton or Franz Wagner. They chose talented players like Wiseman and Kumingga with home run potential. When they lost in the 2016 NBA Finals, they did not renew Harrison Barnes and left Andrew Bogut. They signed Kevin Durant. They did not trade on this year's trading deadline to players like Nikola Vucevic who can only bring some improvement. They traded a star player Butler.

Now they are at a crossroads again, and they are approaching it blindly. Curry's contract is still two years away. So did Butler and Green. And they don't know if this version of the team will survive the harsh test of the four rounds of the playoffs, or even just get close to that. Serious pursuit of Antetokounmpo actually means disbanding their existing teams, and they don't even know if the existing teams need to be disbanded. Losing Curry lost them the opportunity to answer this question. Now they will have to make guesses and expect the best results.