Hollinger: Are the Warriors stuck with old, expensive and average due to the

In the end, it wasn’t some young upstart that knocked the Warriors off their pedestal into an uncertain future. Not Boston as redemption on the final climb up the mountain, not Denver earning its playoff stripes by knocking off the king.

No, the thing that sent Team Light Years into existential despair wasn’t the next space age basketball paradigm … it was a 43-win team playing caveman basketball, one that opened the clinching game with seven straight post-ups and hammered them into submission. What year is this again?

Nonetheless, the Warriors are here, the place that all contenders eventually end up late in their run: old, expensive and trending toward average. The core will be increasingly difficult to keep together in any kind of coherent form going forward. Even relative to other aging contenders of recent yore, these Warriors are somewhat older and massively more expensive.

It’s not just that the Warriors went 44-38 despite relatively good health, it’s that everyone is getting older and no help is around the corner. Of the mainstays of this title run, Steph Curry is 35, Klay Thompson is 33 and coming off two serious injuries, and Draymond Green is also 33. Andre Iguodala, if you remember him, is 39 and played eight games this year.

Wait, it gets worse: Father Time is taking its toll, but the new CBA is here to finish the job. The Warriors spent freely to keep this team together, and especially to augment it once Kevin Durant left. Their willingness to absorb a massive luxury tax bill to turn that money into Andrew Wiggins (eventually) got them an additional crown in 2022.

However, the rules are becoming more draconian just when the Warriors could use a little more flexibility. Golden State will have only minimum contracts available to augment the roster unless it slashes and burns what is currently there.

Green has a player option and could become a free agent, although our Shams Charania and Anthony Slater report that an extension seems more likely. Jordan Poole, coming off a series where he was nigh unplayable, is about to see his salary bump from a great value ($3.9 million) to a potential liability ($28.2 million, presuming his $500,000 incentive for winning Defensive Player of the Year doesn’t kick in). Thompson is set to make $43 million next year despite being, at this point, a pretty average player who was low-key brutal for much of the playoffs.

It becomes increasingly hard for successful teams to pipeline youth, and the Warriors are learning that part, too. They thought they had a workaround with the help of a horrific 2019-20 season that yielded the second pick in the draft, and a one-sided trade for Wiggins that gifted them the seventh pick a year later. Unfortunately, the two players they selected combined to play zero relevant minutes in the second round of the playoffs. RIP Two Tracks, which is a lot harder than it looks, as it turns out; the odds of any draft pick turning into a franchise’s next…