Exits: No reverse or retrospect

Golden State has only ever ridden for the horizon, what happens when the sun sets on these Warriors?

The last time I saw Draymond Green he was leaving the club in Crocs.

I was standing in line outside said club with Holland and Taylor, waiting to get in, watching as pairs of younger, would-be clubgoers edged in around us. When Green came out I’d been watching these more aspirational groups as if in abstract, like I was removed from place even as I stood at the front of the line. Or, the place that was the front of the line but kept becoming second, fourth, sixth in line. Line is a loose description. I watched with no impulse to stake my claim or push into the door of the club the bouncer kept reiterating was at capacity, but kept letting pairs of people slip into.

At some point Holland and Taylor must have had the realization we were, each of us, watching ourselves and the scene at arms-length, because when Green stepped out into the San Francisco night our eyes snapped over to him, then each other, and we laughed and stepped out of line. Gave up the ghost of a “night to remember” or one we “wouldn’t forget”, the two classifications used interchangeably by All-Star Weekend event promoters.

If I was younger, I started to say, realizing the only people who start a sentence that way are people who aren’t. If I was younger we’d be inside already.

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What were the Warriors this year? Stalling, flailing, dejected — at least until All-Star, then came Jimmy Butler and the team’s longest win streak (seven) all season. Probably for Warriors fans this is where the season got started, got interesting, when the team stepped back into its familiar outline.

What I remember best from the Warriors this season was Steph Curry’s aimlessness in those first months of it.

How he roved the same floor he had for 15 seasons but looked like a person encountering what it feels like to walk on sand for the first time. Where was the footing, his face seemed to ask, why was it shifting and why did it feel so hard to keep his feet fixed under him? Crucial for the way he works.

When Curry moves, he lunges. He is endlessly lateral. Watching, trying to pin him, next to impossible. Defenders who manage it get the look of a kid when they’ve just guessed the hand with the prize, and for the arena fan or viewer at home the experience feels like trying to watch all 12 of Eadweard Muybridge’s isolated photos of a running horse at once. A pyramid scheme for persistence of vision, every move predicated on the next and the next, only Curry knows.

It was disorienting, watching that movement stall or go sideways on him. Part of it was the mixed up rotations, Steve Kerr trying to figure out a rhythm for his team and its lodestar and those rhythms upended, swapping, dropping out, changing all throughout a game and from one game to the next.

Part of it was, no secret by now, a miasma of abiding malaise. Lingering still from the deep and final fracturing of the Warriors as they were, past versus present, pre-Draymond Green punching Jordan Poole in the face at practice and the awkward, never fully processed “after”. Sometimes things can be so simple.