Where The Statues Go

There is a specific kind of sports conversation that only becomes possible when a team is bad.

Not bad in the interesting way, where you argue about the rebuild timeline and whether the young guy is a keeper. Bad in the settled way, where the answer to "when are they good again" is a shrug and a number of years that makes you tired. That is where the Golden State Warriors are, and it is going to be like this for a while.

The upside of that, and it is the only upside, is that it clears the calendar for the arguments that actually matter. So: statues.

Chase Center has been open since 2019 and there is a plaza out front. Four players from the run have earned bronze. The interesting part is not the list. The list is obvious. The interesting part is that two of them are standing in the wrong place.

Curry, and the pose problem

He gets one. That is not the argument. The argument is what he is doing.

Every instinct says the shot. Follow-through, wrist hanging, the whole thing frozen at the moment of release. It is what he is famous for and it would photograph beautifully.

It is also, I think, wrong, and here is why: a statue of a jump shot is a statue of an outcome. Curry's actual contribution to basketball was not that the ball went in. It was everything that happened in the four seconds before the ball went in, the relocating, the running of a defender through three screens until the man was legally dead, the gravity that bent an entire defense toward a guy who did not have the ball.

You cannot cast gravity. But you can cast a man sprinting off a screen with his head turned back toward the passer, which is the single most Curry image there is and which nobody would ever choose because it does not look like a highlight.

Cast the shot anyway. I know. I have argued myself into a corner and I am choosing the crowd-pleaser.

But put it at the arena's front door, where the tourists are, because that is what the shot is for.

Thompson belongs somewhere else entirely

Klay's statue should not be at Chase Center.

Hear this out. The defining Thompson performances happened at Oracle, across the bay, in a building that no longer hosts the team: the 37-point quarter, the 60 in 29 minutes, Game 6 against Oklahoma City. His whole legend is tied to a room in Oakland that the franchise left.

There is something honest about acknowledging that. A Thompson statue in Oakland would be the organization admitting, in bronze, that the first half of the dynasty happened somewhere it does not play anymore, and that the people who filled that building were not imaginary just because the team moved.

It would also be a genuinely lovely thing to do for a fan base that got left behind by a real estate decision.

Pose is easy. Catch and rise, feet square, ball just off the fingertips, elbow high. No dribble anywhere in the sculpture. That is the whole man.

Green is the hard one, and the most important

Draymond Green's statue is the one that will cause the most arguing and it is the one the franchise most needs to get built, because his contribution is the one that is going to evaporate from memory fastest.

Points do not evaporate. Curry's 3-pointers will be on a leaderboard forever and Thompson's 37-point quarter is a number that survives without context. Green's entire career was the stuff that does not make a leaderboard: the switch onto a center, the outlet pass that started a break, the defensive rotation nobody else saw, the willingness to be the most hated man in every visiting building so that four teammates could be liked.

Twenty years from now somebody is going to look up his career scoring average and be confused about why he was a big deal. The statue exists to answer that person.

So do not sculpt him scoring. Sculpt him talking. Mid-yell, arms wide, directing traffic, pointing at something offstage that the viewer cannot see. It is the only statue on this list that would be a little uncomfortable to walk past, which is correct, because that was the point of him.

Kerr, seated

The coach gets one and it should be the smallest of the four.

Not out of disrespect. Out of accuracy. Steve Kerr's job was to manage a room containing several of the most difficult and most brilliant people in the sport and to keep them pointed in one direction for a decade, and the physical manifestation of that job is a man sitting in a chair with his arms folded, watching.

Put him on the bench, seated, life-size, with an empty spot next to him. People will sit in it and take a picture. That is a better monument than anything standing up.

And then the actual question

None of this is urgent, which is exactly why it is worth doing now. Statues get built when a franchise is between eras and has time to be reflective. The Warriors have plenty of both.

The next few years are going to be a grind. There is no obvious path back to the top, no accumulated young talent that suggests otherwise, and no cap flexibility that fixes it quickly. The honest answer to "when are they good again" involves a draft lottery and some luck.

So put up the bronze. Give people a reason to walk past the building and remember what it was like, because for a while that is going to be the best thing available.

Anyway. Klay's goes in Oakland.

I will not be taking questions on that one.