The Golden State Warriors won the championship in 2015, came up just short in 2016 and are heavy favorites this year with a 1-0 NBA Finals lead over the Cleveland Cavaliers.
So with the news that Kevin Durant is willing to sacrifice to keep the team together, is this the start of a dynasty? How long can we expect the Warriors' run to last?
On a teleconference previewing the Finals, ESPN NBA analyst Jeff Van Gundy said he sees "nothing preventing them from going to eight to 10 straight Finals." Let's take a look at whether the facts support Van Gundy's forecast.
Obstacle one: Luxury-tax payments
Early Thursday, ESPN's Ramona Shelburne and Chris Haynes reported that Kevin Durant is willing to take less money to allow the team to max out free agent Stephen Curry and retain key reserves Andre Iguodala and Shaun Livingston, removing one potential obstacle to Golden State's continued success.
While Durant taking less money will give Golden State the ability to retain nearly all its current roster, doing so will be costly. Let's make some assumptions: Durant takes the most the Warriors can pay him using non-Bird rights ($31.8 million, which is less than the maximum he could get if the Warriors cleared cap space to sign him), Curry signs a five-year maximum contract (worth an estimated $205 million), Iguodala signs a three-year contract starting at $18 million and Livingston has a two-year contract starting at $9 million. Golden State then uses its taxpayer midlevel exception to re-sign Zaza Pachulia or a replacement center and fills out the rest of the roster with minimum-salary players.
That hypothetical 2017-18 roster stacks up to a $147 million payroll plus an estimated $67 million bill in luxury taxes, for a total of $214 million. (Dan Feldman of NBCSports.com forecasts an even larger $260 million total between salaries and taxes if the Warriors re-sign other current players using Bird rights.)
The Warriors' payroll only grows larger in future offseasons. Rookie wing Patrick McCaw will become a restricted free agent in the summer of 2018 and will likely command a large raise from his current minimum salary ($1.3 million in 2017-18). Klay Thompson's contract expires in the summer of 2019. Thompson's maximum salary will likely be at least $12 million more than the $19 million he'll make in 2018-19.
In 2020, Draymond Green's contract expires after he's scheduled to make a bargain $18.5 million in 2019-20. Green could be eligible for a super-max extension that would more than double his salary starting in 2020-21.
(Thompson might also be super-max eligible. If so, Golden State could only choose one of the two players for such an extension assuming Curry indeed gets a super-max contract, given the collective bargaining agreement allows only two such players per roster. In any case, the Warriors will have the ability to pay both Thompson and Green more than any other team can.)
The good news for Warriors ownership is that because they didn't pay the luxury tax this year, the team won't be subject to more punitive repeater taxes until 2019-20 at the earliest. Still, by that point -- before a possible Green extension would kick in -- they'd be looking at paying their four All-Stars alone a combined $130 million, right around the projected tax line that season. A conservative estimate puts their total salary outlay around $170 million, which would translate into a tax bill in the neighborhood of $330 million.
Because Golden State is scheduled to move to the new Chase Center in San Francisco in 2019, increased revenue could make such an enormous tax bill more palatable. Still, any salary the Warriors add will actually cost them several multiples of that amount -- perhaps as high as more than seven times as much -- when taxes are included.
The specter of the repeater tax eventually convinced the Miami Heat to use the amnesty provision on reserve Mike Miller in July 2013. Though Miller's loss wasn't a huge blow to the Heat, that move reportedly played a role in LeBron James' decision to leave Miami the next summer and return to the Cavaliers, which ended the Heat's run long before they could get to the lofty championship totals Miami's Big Three predicted at a celebration of their signing with the team.
We'll see whether enormous tax bills tear apart Golden State's core or cause the team to opt against adding to it via free agency.
Obstacle two: Age
With the exception of the Heat in 2010, the Warriors have more dynasty potential than other similar collections of elite talent like the Big Three Boston Celtics because their stars are in their prime. Curry is 29, Durant is 28 and Green and Thompson are both 27. Because all except Green are such good shooters, they figure to age better than Dwyane Wade, who turned 29 during the first season of Miami's Big Three.
Still, age is a factor when we start projecting far into the future. For Golden State to reach the 10 consecutive NBA Finals Van Gundy mentioned as their top-side forecast, they'd have to get there when Curry is 36, Durant is 35 and Green and Thompson are both 34.
Of similar or greater concern is the age of the Warriors' role players. While retaining Iguodala and Livingston is important, it's not realistic to expect them to continue playing at their current level over the next few seasons. Iguodala is 33 and Livingston will turn 32 before training camp next fall, putting both squarely on the wrong side of the aging curve.
Here's how my SCHOENE projection system forecasts Golden State's All-Stars, plus Iguodala and Livingston, performing in terms of wins above replacement over the next three years based on the development of similar players and their past ratings by my WARP metric and ESPN's real plus-minus.
Livingston already projects as a below-replacement contributor next season based on his decline this season. Iguodala figures to get close to replacement level by his mid-30s.
While the stars should retain plenty of value, they too are likely to decline as they enter their 30s. So overall, SCHOENE projects this group to be about six wins less valuable each season.
It's important to note that Golden State has plenty of room to drop off and remain elite. After all, these projections suggest the Warriors could win 70 games next season by filling out the roster with replacement-level players, in line with the 69 wins they've averaged over the past three seasons. (Their actual projection will be a bit more conservative because of the diminishing returns to having so many talented players.)
Golden State can expect improvement from the young players on the roster, highlighted by McCaw and recent first-round picks Damian Jones and Kevon Looney. The team has all its first-round picks after this year. As long as veterans remain interested in joining the Warriors in pursuit of a championship -- and ownership is willing to pay them more than the minimum using the taxpayer midlevel exception -- Golden State will be able to replenish its depth.
Those caveats noted, I'd certainly bet against the Warriors reaching the Finals even eight times in a row, which would require five consecutive appearances after this season. In five years, Golden State's four All-Stars will average nearly 33 years of age. Since the ABA-NBA merger, just five teams have made the Finals with such an old core: the 1997 and 1998 Chicago Bulls, who are the Warriors' model for sustained success; the 2011 Mavericks, the oldest top four in minutes per game at 34.4 years old on average; the 2004 L.A. Lakers; and the 1998 Utah Jazz.
I wouldn't be surprised if Golden State remains a leading contender five years from now, but I think the Warriors will be hard-pressed to remain an overwhelming favorite in the West, let alone the entire league. The pull of aging, and the challenge presented by the luxury tax, should bring them back toward the pack by that point.
A more realistic guess might be four additional years, for a total of seven straight trips to the NBA Finals, while younger teams in the West try to create the kind of multistar core the Warriors did before 2015.
The idea of waiting five years is probably a cold comfort for West rivals hoping to break through, but this Golden State run does have an expiration date -- eventually.