Kawakami: Warriors aren't breaking up the core, but Jordan Poole ...

LOS ANGELES — The Warriors aren’t going to rebuild, retool, revamp or redefine who they are. You could feel that message pouring out of Stephen Curry, Draymond Green, Klay Thompson and Steve Kerr late Friday night, through the compounding sadness, frustration, loss, anger and exhaustion.

But which other current Warriors players fit the defining aspects of this era? After what the Warriors went through all this season, that might get a very practical and very narrow reinterpretation fairly soon.

They don’t control all of the franchise’s future in the wake of their methodical 122-101 elimination by the Lakers in Game 6, but Curry, Draymond, Klay and Kerr each said their piece so directly and so credibly afterward that I believe them. They’ve spent a lot of seasons giving us reasons to believe them in these moments. I believe them.

The Warriors aren’t rebuilding. This isn’t over. But there will be some changes. There have to be changes beyond the core. With Draymond and the Warriors headed toward talks for an extension, and with Andrew Wiggins, Kevon Looney and probably Gary Payton II counted as the other made men on this roster, and Moses Moody looking solid in this series, that’s a basic foundation of seven players.

But what about Jordan Poole? Or Jonathan Kuminga? Those are the question marks. I think it’s more likely than not that at least one of these two very talented players will be traded in July. And yes, maybe it is a little interesting that after a season spent wondering if this was the “Last Dance” of this aging dynasty, now that the Warriors’ title defense is over, they might actually go on a reverse-youth movement … and keep on dancing to the oldies.

The Warriors have won four championships in this era, including just last season, and might not get No. 5 anytime soon. But if Joe Lacob agrees with these four leaders, and I am guessing he does, the Warriors aren’t going to blow this thing from the top down.

“We’ll figure it out,” Draymond said. “This group was maxed. We got what we could get out of it. But this thing isn’t maxed.”

And if Draymond is staying, will Bob Myers stay, too? That’s another question mark, but it’s entirely up to Myers, whose contract expires in July. My opinion, expressed frequently over the last few months, but underlined now: I don’t think Myers will be the first one to leave Curry while Curry is in his prime, and I’m sure Curry will make sure Myers understands how much he’s appreciated by everybody. Especially by Curry. Myers could still leave for a new opportunity, I just don’t think it’ll be easy to walk away from this.

OK, even if the core remains together, the Warriors weren’t good enough this season, which now has been proven about 10 different ways, from the bad vibes after Draymond punched Poole in training camp to their terrible road record to the flat Game 6 performance last round that forced the Warriors into a draining Game 7 in Sacramento to pull that series out … and led to losing Game 1 at Chase Center to the Lakers just two days later, a loss that set the tone for the overall defeat to come.

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The Warriors weren’t good enough to beat LeBron James and Anthony Davis. They weren’t deep enough to counter Austin Reaves, Dennis Schröder and Lonnie Walker IV. So how will the Warriors be good enough next season, also adding in that they’re likely to lose Donte DiVincenzo to free agency and that the new CBA further restricts their ability to add talent?

They’ll either have to get significantly more cohesion and production out of Poole, Kuminga and maybe Patrick Baldwin Jr. or they’ll have to add cohesive talent from elsewhere. And the simplest way they can add talent would be to trade Poole or Kuminga or both. They both have value and were treasured parts of the since-junked “Two Timelines Plan,” but Poole had his minutes cut because he made only 34.1 percent of his shots in the playoffs and averaged only 10.3 points per game. And after getting a few looks in the Sacramento series, Kuminga was totally out of the rotation in this series.

After Kerr’s postgame news conference, I asked him if he understood why Poole and Kuminga might be disappointed and how he’ll deal with that into the future.

“This is kind of how life works,” Kerr told me. “I don’t mind frustration at all. I want them to be frustrated, and I want them to compete and work and get better for next year. And their time’s coming. You could see it with Moses. Moses had a breakthrough. I felt it in the last few weeks of the season watching him in practice every day. You could see it in the playoffs. He was the first guy to the offensive glass, the first guy to loose balls, rotating early. All the things that we preach, he finally started doing consistently. And that’s why he played in the playoffs. But those things don’t happen overnight. And they’re all hugely key.

“It’s what the coaches see on tape every day. But it’s what the average fan isn’t really going to decipher. But this is what we do. Young players just take time. I have no doubt the way they all work and how much they care, they’re all going to get better and they’re going to grow. But it wasn’t time yet.”

Kerr has given Poole a lot of minutes over the past two seasons, and Poole has at times rewarded him with explosive and creative offensive play. But it was more off-and-on this season, starting with the emotional toll of the Draymond punch and everything that symbolized and roiled up in the locker room. Was Draymond at fault? Surely. But he also strove to win back his teammates and played very well throughout this season. And Poole just never got fully in gear and was at his worst in the playoffs.

The Warriors are a practical organization. They base their decisions on what works on the court. What wins games. What wins series. What fits with Curry. They needed Poole and Kuminga (and before that, James Wiseman, who was traded in February) to step into roles this season. In the Lakers series, the multiple void was obvious. Kerr could’ve done more to get Kuminga fully to speed long before the Lakers series, but he logically points to Moody’s rapid development at the end of the season. It’s the way Kerr coaches, and it’s the way young players actually earn respect and playing time for the Warriors. It’s lasting. Nobody gets minutes for free.

I asked Kerr: Are you disappointed you couldn’t get the young guys more involved in this series and this season?

“No. No,” Kerr said. “These guys are so young. I always say you look at Moses, Moses would be a junior at Arkansas. JK would be a junior in college. You think Steph Curry and Draymond in their junior years at Davidson and Michigan State could’ve helped an NBA team win a championship? Of course not. That’s not how it works.

“Development in the NBA for kids who come in with so little experience does not happen in two years. It just doesn’t. It’s so rare for any really young player to make a dramatic impact in the NBA playoffs. I think JK, Moses and Jordan have all really developed and put in the work. And their time is coming. But it takes longer than just a couple of seasons to think we can just throw them out there and expect them to win a series like this. It just doesn’t work that way.”

With Jordan Poole set to make $27.5 million next season and the Warriors facing a salary crunch, a trade could be on the table. (Harry How / Getty Images)

Is it unfair that Poole, Kuminga and Moody (and Wiseman) have been held to championship standards from the moment they arrived? Maybe in the context of the rest of the NBA. But the Warriors of this era are not everybody else. They’ve won so much because they have different, harder, higher standards.

There will be major salary questions, too, of course, with this roster heading over the $400 million mark in total commitments next season, which is a line that Lacob has said he will not cross, and that was before this elimination. Poole is due to make $27.5 million next season, the first of the four-year, $123 million contract he signed last October, just weeks after the punch. If Draymond signs for anything near $30 million, some money will have to be subtracted. And Poole will have some value around the league. Maybe not as much as he had when he signed the deal, but part of the reason the Warriors paid that price was that they knew Poole would have trade value.

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I think the Warriors will see what the market is for Poole. They could use a tougher backup guard. They could use somebody who can score tough points. They were missing a “change-up,” as Curry described it, against the Lakers’ two-layer defense, guarding the perimeter and then having Davis sitting in the lane. The Warriors need a scrambler. Maybe they can trade Poole for a scrambler who doesn’t make as much money, which would check two boxes.

I don’t think they’re going to be very interested in trading Kuminga, who might want to be told he’ll have a larger role next season. Kerr isn’t big on playing-time promises, but I think the Warriors can discuss a sixth- or seventh-man role for Kuminga next season over Anthony Lamb. I think they’ll need to keep Kuminga around because the Warriors need more talent, not less. (Unless they can package Poole and Kuminga together for a borderline star like, say, Toronto’s OG Anunoby.)

But the Warriors can afford to think about moving Poole and Kuminga because the core will remain and because so far Poole and Kuminga haven’t really fit with the core. And though the mainstays are all getting older, and though they weren’t enough to beat LeBron and Davis, Curry, Klay and Draymond were good enough to pull this season out of the dumpster, get into the playoffs and knock off the Kings. They’re still the Warriors’ essential players.

This is not the time to break it up.

“No matter how different it looks, I think we all understand each other, what we bring to the table,” Curry said of himself, Draymond and Klay. “The trust that we’re just going to compete until the wheels fall off. That is something that should not be taken for granted in this league. We’ve proven that we can do it. Even in this series, this year, things were looking bleak at one point in the regular season and we find ourselves in the second round trying to just scratch and claw your way out of it.

“We’re going to fight and we’re going to compete and we believe in each other. That goes up and down the roster, and hopefully there’s belief in us that we’re able to lead that. I feel like that’s a two-way street, and that’s the stage we’re at in our careers, to keep doubling down on it.”

Then I asked Curry a long question about the Warriors’ young players — what does he think of their development, is he disappointed that Poole and Kuminga weren’t factors in this series, and what does he think comes next?

“There’s a lot in there,” Curry said with a shrug. “I think everybody’s going to get better, everybody’s going to take the next step … I don’t know what the opportunity’s going to be. I don’t know what the roster will look like. I don’t know as we’re sitting here right now what opening night’s going to look like in terms of who’s going to be asked to do what. …

“It’s hard to say specifics right now about what it’ll look like because this league is crazy, things can change really quickly.”

Things change quickly in this league, but the Warriors aren’t going to change too much this offseason, even after their first loss in the Western Conference playoffs since Kerr was hired. They have to get better. They have to keep the best parts of who they are. And they’ll probably trade one or two players who can be at their best elsewhere.

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(Photo: Noah Graham / NBAE via Getty Images)