Draymond Green gave up $27.7 million in guaranteed money so the Golden State Warriors could chase a superteam that was never real, and now the whole thing is rubble.
Per ESPN’s Shams Charania, Draymond declined his player option on June 29 — days after the Warriors had publicly expected him to pick it up. The opt-out was supposed to free cap space to land Anthony Davis from the Washington Wizards and convince LeBron James to come home to the Bay alongside Steph Curry.
https://x.com/ShamsCharania/status/2071598040880759034
The plan, and I use that word charitably, was a Curry-Draymond-LeBron-AD Big Four. One last championship run. Legacy stuff. The Warriors believed reunion-era goodwill plus Curry’s gravity would be enough to pull this off.
Washington’s asking price for Davis was Jimmy Butler, multiple first-round picks, multiple first-round pick swaps, and multiple second-rounders. The Warriors said no. Of course they said no — that’s a franchise-gutting ransom — but the second they walked away from that price, the entire plan collapsed. Brian Windhorst put it plainly: there’s been “no traction from the Wizards to want to” move Davis. Washington holds the card, and they have every reason to keep it.
Without Davis, LeBron isn’t coming. That’s where the broader LeBron free agency picture stands right now — NBC Sports Bay Area reported the Warriors have a “low level of optimism” he joins without AD. The frontrunners are Cleveland, Miami, and Philadelphia. Golden State isn’t in serious conversations with his camp.
So to recap: Draymond opted out of nearly $28 million, the Warriors couldn’t complete the Davis trade, and LeBron is probably going to play somewhere that isn’t San Francisco.
Now — the complicating part, because I’m not going to pretend this is perfectly clean — Draymond was expected to re-sign with Golden State anyway on a new deal. He’s not walking away from the Warriors. So the $27.7M isn’t simply gone from his career earnings; he’ll get a new contract, just at a lower 2026-27 salary than the option would have paid. The sacrifice is real. The full $27.7M isn’t burned. The two weeks of front-office fantasy were.
The Warriors also signed Kristaps Porzingis to a two-year, $40M deal somewhere in all this chaos, which tells you what Golden State actually has to offer Curry’s next chapter: a 30-year-old big who’s missed roughly a third of his NBA games and a front office that was apparently very confident it could pull off a trade Washington has zero interest in making.
Draymond gave up guaranteed money. Golden State got nothing. Porzingis is in the building. Curry is 38. Good luck with all that.
