Kurtenbach: One bad Jimmy Butler step has thrown everything into question for the Warriors

It happened on a play you’ve seen a thousand times. A low-post entry. A jump step. A plant.

It was standard operating procedure for a Warriors third-quarter possession on Monday night in January against the Heat; the kind of mundane basketball action that usually fades from memory before the next commercial break.

But then Jimmy Butler didn’t get up.

And that’s the tell. Butler—a bonafide NBA warlord — does not stay down unless something is seriously wrong.

He is granite wrapped in Nike. He doesn’t show weakness as a matter of principle. So when you see a true hardman writhing on the hardwood, clutching his right knee and yelling in agony loud enough to be heard in the upper bowl, you know the script just flipped.

Look, I’m not a doctor. And I don’t have a badge to swipe into Rick Celebrini’s database, either. But I do cover the San Francisco 49ers, spending my autumns watching ligaments snap in Santa Clara. I have an unintentional PhD in the body language of season-ending injuries.

And if that injury is what I think it is — what the silence in the arena suggested it is; what Butler’s screams suggested it was — it doesn’t just ruin a Monday night for the Dubs. No, it throws everything into question for the Golden State Warriors.

The timing is cruel. The Warriors were finally, finally figuring it out. With Butler pulling them along, they were in the midst of their best run of play this season, looking less like a nostalgia act and more like a legitimate threat. There was a long way to go to cement that reputation, but at least there was something to work with in San Francisco.

And then it all went away in less than a second.

On the front end of a home back-to-back, the floor for this Dubs team appeared to drop out.

So, where do they go from here?

There is the chance that Butler’s injury wasn’t as bad as it seemed. That’s far and away the best-case scenario — the one that every Warrior fan should be hoping for until official imaging comes through.

But whether this is the big-time injury or merely a weeks-long sigh of relief, the Warriors’ Jonathan Kuminga situation has now escalated from a lingering headache to a full-blown migraine. That Kuminga trade the Warriors can’t make? It either needs to be executed by tomorrow morning — though how they land an impact player for Kuminga with zero leverage and less of a market is beyond me — or Kuminga needs to be pulled out of the doghouse to play serious minutes in lieu of Butler.

The luxury of providing Kuminga some teaching lessons — or, more specifically, Steve Kerr’s preference to not deal with Kuminga at all — left when Butler exited the court without putting weight on his right leg Monday.

Regardless of Kuminga’s situation, the rest of this season now requires Stephen Curry and Draymond Green to play nearly every game if the Dubs want to push for anything of worth this spring. Their load management plans? Burn it. If the Warriors want to salvage this campaign, the thinned-out old guard has to carry a load that would break men ten years younger.

“We have to do it by committee,” Curry said after Monday’s game.

And that’s just the immediate panic. The long-term picture is where the nausea really sets in.

We have to talk about the money, and we have to talk about the timeline. If the worst-case scenario has, indeed, come to pass, you are looking at Butler returning from a catastrophic knee injury for his age-37 season. He’s on the books for $56.8 million for the 2026-27 campaign — that’s one of the biggest contracts in the NBA for a player whose game relies on physicality, but has been potentially stripped of his greatest asset.

Can the Warriors bank on that uncertainty going into the final year of Curry and (possibly) Green’s contracts?

Can Curry and Green bank on that?

Does Kerr even sign up for it? Remember: He doesn’t have a contract for next season.

Perhaps the situation is so dire, so devoid of pivot points, that there is really nothing the Warriors can do but trudge onwards. They might have to just give whatever is left the old college try.

Next year? They’ll deal with it whenever this season is done.

And, oh, yeah, the Warriors won on Monday, so the post-game vibe wasn’t disappointment. But it was realization.

The future of a Hall-of-Fame-caliber player, and perhaps the entire trajectory of the Warriors franchise, is left hanging in the balance.

And all it took was one bad step.