Kurtenbach: If the Warriors prioritize their future over Steph Curry’s prime, they’re ignoring history

There’s an old fable about a frog in a boiling pot of water.

It suggests that if you toss a frog into already hot water, it’ll jump out immediately. But if you instead put the frog in cold water and heat it, it’ll stay in the pot and be boiled.

Well, it turns out that the parable is a myth. Time and time again, it’s been proven that a frog will jump out of the pot when the water becomes too hot.

But you could have fooled me: I watched the Warriors lose to the Celtics on Monday.

The most jarring aspects of the 40-point home loss to the Celtics were how easy it was for Boston and how the Warriors slowly but surely let it happen.

The Dubs were the frog in the pot, with Boston steadily heating up the water as the game progressed. The Warriors never jumped out.

Fitting, no? This problem wasn’t isolated to one bad (albeit highly indicative) game. No, it was the culmination of two bad seasons — two years of Steph Curry’s greatness wasted.

And while the Warriors don’t see themselves as “desperate,” they sure look like a team that cannot maintain the status quo. You can’t sell me on a squad that relies on Gui Santos, Lindy Waters, Gary Payton, and Moses Moody. Sure, there are injuries, but you find me the healthy team in professional basketball.

So yes, it can and will get worse from here.

How do the Warriors fix it?

History tells us that pushing through this mess is the only way out. Make the moves to salvage whatever is left of Curry’s All-NBA years. Give him a few more shots in the tournament and he might just pull a 2022 again.

Meanwhile, the organization is sitting on its hands, hoping everything will magically improve.

Let me throw three other stories your way — fables, if you will. (Only these are real.)

In Philadelphia, the Sixers trusted the “process” starting in 2013. That path included bottoming out the franchise to the point where the 2015-16 team won 10 games all season. It was all about the draft picks. One, Joel Embiid, turned into an MVP.

But in the last decade-plus, the Sixers have not played in the Eastern Conference Finals once. Now, with their latest “Big 3” in tow (but rarely playing) they’re 15-26 and considering tanking the rest of the season to preserve their 2025 first-round draft pick.

Yes, they’re right back where they started. What do they have to show for it?

In Chicago, the Bulls had the superstar of all superstars — Michael Jordan. He retired in 1998, and the Bulls tried bottoming out for a half-decade. That brought about a couple of playoff berths with solid but unspectacular players like Tyson Chandler, Luol Deng, Ben Gordon, and Kirk Hinrich.

It wasn’t bad — they even won a playoff series — but the Bulls didn’t turn into a championship contender (at least in theory) until they improbably converted on a 1.7 percent chance of winning the 2008 NBA Draft lottery and selected Derrick Rose.

Of course, Rose, the 2011 NBA MVP, provided four years of supernova play (the Bulls won 62 games in that MVP season) before injuries took him down.

The Bulls have made the playoffs once in the last eight seasons. Since Jordan retired, Chicago has won five playoff series, with only one conference finals appearance.

All the while, Chicago has averaged 21,218 fans per game at United Center.

The losses keep piling up, but mediocrity seems to pay for the Bulls — the tickets are bought whether they’re good or bad or, even worse, in-between. So, what’s the incentive to try harder?

Then there’s San Antonio, the team that the Warriors tried to model themselves after with their “two-timelines” plan that didn’t quite work out. (The Dubs are still looking for their Kawhi Leonard to pair with the declining “tiny” Tim Duncan.)

The Spurs’ plan is actually quite simple: Land the first overall pick once every decade or so and land a generational center. They did it with David Robinson in 1987, Tim Duncan in 1997, and Victor Wembanyama in 2023.

Easy enough to replicate, right?

The Spurs are unquestionably a well-run organization, but they have to be the luckiest operation in all of sports. For instance, when Wembanyama was on the docket, the Spurs had an equal chance of landing the No. 2 pick, where the Blazers drafted Scoot Henderson. How’s that working out for Portland?

The balls bounced their way at the exact right time. It’s cosmic stuff.

So here we have two big-market teams and the luckiest franchise in the world — three paths through the wilderness that is the NBA without a superstar.

Which one do you think the Warriors will take once Curry — hellbent on being a one-franchise player — retires?

It’s probably not the plan I hear many fans asking for these days: the bottoming out to load up on draft picks for the future, Sixers style. (The Warriors already hold their next five first-round picks.)

And I highly doubt that even one year of bottoming out would bring Spurs-like luck.

No, it seems more likely that the Warriors will head down the same road the Bulls have taken. They cashed in at Curry’s peak, building a massive new arena, much like Jordan in Chicago, and Chase Center’s 30-year mortgages on seats ensure the revenue will keep pouring in, even if the buckets don’t.

And maybe there will be some luck with the ping-pong balls, a la Rose. And maybe they’ll avoid the injury fate of the Bulls and Sixers with their MVPs.

Or, get this: The Warriors could recognize that Curry, who turns 37 in less than two months, is the kind of player that comes around once in a franchise’s history (or three times, if you’re the Spurs) and that “figuring it out” after he’s gone will require the same kind of luck (or more) that it took to land him.

His rise was, in a word, miraculous.

And he took the Warriors franchise — laughingstock of the NBA —  with him to the top.

Getting back to the top would require a similar miracle.

Because there is no future when he is gone, only hope.

And hope, folks, is not a plan.