Dieter Kurtenbach: The Warriors might have the right pieces to be respectable next year. The NBA won't let that happen

Monday night in Washington was supposed to be a feel-good evening for a Warriors team that really needed one.

A nice win. Steve Kerr’s 600th win, in fact.

De’Anthony Melton looked great. (Nothing new there.) Kristaps Porzingis put on a show (now that’s new). The duo combined for 57 points and offered a tantalizing glimpse of what could be.

Those two, with Steph Curry, Jimmy Butler, and Draymond Green this time next year?

Tantalizing stuff.

But because it’s the Warriors in 2026, even the good stuff comes with a catch.

The outline of a roster worthy of respect in the 2026-27 season is there. It’s not just the big names.

You’ve got Malevy Leons and his impossibly long arms looking like a genuinely nice end-of-bench option for the Dubs. You’ve got Gary Payton II, suddenly resembling the exact player the Portland Trail Blazers thought they were signing to a lucrative deal after the 2022 title. You have LJ Cryer, who is, simply, a nice player.

And then there’s the now-undeniable positives of Gui Santos. The guy has already been re-signed because he figured out the greatest cheat code in Golden State’s system: if you never stop moving on offense, great things happen.

Put all that together with the keystone pieces and a nice late-lottery draft pick, and there’s enough there to be a serious, competitive basketball team next season. Strength in Numbers version, what, five-point-oh?

That is, of course, under the extremely laughable caveat that health cooperates with their aging veteran stars.

But that’s for the cosmic realm.

The bigger issue is with the spreadsheets.

The Dubs might just have something worthy of keeping together.

But how on earth do they keep this together?

When the NBA’s new collective bargaining agreement went into place, the salary rules weren’t just a tweak to the system. They were overt shots fired directly at teams exactly like the Warriors. It was a swift cane right to the knees of the NBA’s upper-class.

The new system arrived armed with hard caps and onerous penalties if you even drifted into the ballpark of those tax aprons. Yet it kept the exact same fully-guaranteed, cap-percentage contracts that have made mid-tier and high-level NBA players the richest athletes in American professional sports. Again, the goal was simple: stop the “superteams.”

In doing so, the league engineered an ecosystem in which the only viable path to sustainable success requires a core of young players — a few of whom may be on their first max contracts — supported by a massive coterie of draft picks.

The Warriors are not in that camp. Not even close. And now these rules aren’t just taking down Golden State; they’re actively keeping them down.

You can make a coherent argument that the Warriors could be worth a watch and maybe a spring fling if they could keep Melton, Porzingis and Green on the same roster.

But to someone like me — and to everyone I’ve talked to about this over the last few weeks, with the intensity ratcheting up in recent days — such a feat seems impossible.

Technically, it isn’t. But you should not envy Warriors general manager Mike Dunleavy right now.

He’s probably going to have to choose between two of the three, and even that will require some serious maneuvering.

And when it comes to respectability, just two of the three will make the Warriors a tougher sell for next season.

As it stands today, the only way for the Warriors to realistically keep Melton is to offer him the full non-taxpayer mid-level exception for next season, estimated at $15.13 million. Doing so, however, requires that the Warriors duck under the first luxury-tax apron.

Factor in Brandin Podziemski’s $5.6 million team option (certain to be picked up) and a first-round draft pick (roughly $5 million in year one), and the Warriors will be sitting with exactly eight players on their roster and less than $20 million to fill every single remaining spot.

Perhaps Porzingis will take a steep, truly massive discount. But you can’t use a mid-level exception on him, because then you cannot use it on Melton.

Even if Green were to decline his $27 million player option for next season and sign an exceptionally team-friendly deal, Golden State would need to ink him to a figure under $10 million per season just to make the math of keeping him, Porzingis, and Melton work.

Even then, it would be incredibly tight and would likely require the outlay of another contract — likely dumping Moses Moody’s $12.5 million deal.

Simone Biles has to shudder at this amount of gymnastics.

Again, it all seems outside the realm of possibility. It doesn’t seem particularly fair, either.

But in the modern NBA, that’s exactly the point.

The new CBA has fully incentivized tanking and has slaughtered the league’s cash cow, the Dubs.

The league is so run by spreadsheets that it makes baseball look downright whimsical.

But hey, at least the broke team owners are happy now that everyone is miserable with them.

Yes, if the frequent losses didn’t dampen your spirits, Warriors fans, the one game in a while that let you wonder “what if?” should have gotten the job done.