Is this surging team currently playing the best basketball it can?

The Dubs’ next five games will tell us everything we need to know.

Well, almost everything.

The Dubs’ upcoming stretch is, in a word, hellacious. Thursday and Friday night, they’ll play a road back-to-back against two of the better day-to-day operators in the NBA, the Knicks and Raptors.

Then, on Sunday, they’ll face arguably the NBA’s best team, the Celtics, in Boston.

The Warriors will return home and have a few days off after that, but the infamous first game after a road trip at Chase Center on Wednesday will be against Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Bucks. And that’s the front end of a back-to-back — the scrappy Bulls come to San Francisco on Thursday.

I’m exhausted just thinking about it. I can only imagine how the Warriors will handle it on the court.

But if this team can amass a winning record over the next week, it’ll speak volumes to the quality of this operation. If that happens, we can buy the Warriors’ current form — they’ve won nine of their last 11 games — as a baseline.

The alternative takes us down a darker alley. I don’t want to go back down there again.

Though, seeing as the Warriors are 3.5 games back of the No. 6 seed — the last guaranteed playoff spot — in the Western Conference, it’s not as if they can afford to do worse than three wins over the next five.

But beating quality playoff teams like the Knicks, the Celtics, and the Bucks is something this team needs to prove it can do.

So far this season, the Warriors are 6-21 against the top six teams in each conference’s playoff standings (as of Thursday). That includes an awful 3-17 mark against the top teams in the West.

The Warriors deserve plaudits for turning their awful season around and becoming a respectable, entertaining product once again.

But if this team is going to do anything more than it did last year — one-and-done in the playoffs — it needs to start beating playoff teams. That’s not a hot take, it’s logic.

The Dubs’ loss to Denver on Sunday hardly inspired confidence that this team can do that. The Nuggets downright punked the Warriors.

Even Tuesday’s Warriors win over the Wizards — an embarrassing operation that will likely be remembered as the worst NBA team since the 10-win 2016 Sixers — failed to inspire confidence.

Sure, Chris Paul came back into the fold for that game and looked good, but the Wizards made the Dubs sweat for more than a few minutes. That’s unacceptable. What’s the opposite of a moral victory?

The performances in the last two games point to a team that appears to have peaked. It took months to find a style of play that worked for the Warriors — they settled on small-ball — but only a few more weeks to find the limits of that style. Predictable stuff.

Of course, the Dubs can keep doing what they’re doing and still make the play-in tournament and maybe even steal a first-round win in the playoffs.

But if that’s the best the Warriors can do, they’re simply treading water. They’ll be right back where they started this season.

Beating the Celtics, Knicks, and/or the Bucks would tell us something different, though.

To do that will require a level of play beyond what the Dubs have put on the court in recent weeks. (Which, again, is good. But the standard around these parts is greatness, and I refuse to let that change.)

To do that, the Warriors will need to find Andrew Wiggins.

I’m not even talking about the best version of him — the 2022 playoff edition. I’m speaking literally: Do they know where he is?

They need him on the court to beat the league’s best. It’d be preferable if he was at his best, but at this point, such a request seems greedy.

Can coach Steve Kerr properly manage Paul’s minutes to limit his time on the court with Steph Curry? I know the Warriors think it’s a good idea to play the two Hall of Famers together — it takes Steph off the ball, after all — but opposing coaches think it’s a good idea, too. Whatever the Dubs can get on offense with that backcourt is promptly given up on the other end. The duo pushes the concept of small-ball beyond the point of usefulness.

And can the Warriors continue to play with the pace and space their new diminutive style affords them? Do they have enough gas in the tank for this road trip, much less enough gas to make it out of April?

Beating some of the best teams in the East won’t answer every question we have about the Dubs — we still need to see them square off with the best in the West, their true peers — but it would be progress on top of the progress this team has already made.

It would provide us all the license to bust out our hyperbole machines and start talking about making a dark horse run at a title.

And that would raise a new question:

What edition of We Believe would this be?

Some are downright livid.

A player who hit .194 last season was not re-signed, and apparently, this is treasonous behavior from Giants director of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi.

Look, Brandon Crawford is a Giants legend. He’s arguably the best shortstop in franchise history. No one else will ever wear No. 35 for San Francisco again — that’s the number for the brilliant fielder who is going to have the plaques and statues outside of Oracle Park.

But Crawford agreed to a deal with the Cardinals on Monday. The Giants signed former Diamondbacks shortstop Nick Ahmed to a minor-league deal on Monday, too.

It has gone over poorly.

I know sports-talk radio callers and social media posters shouldn’t be considered representative of the masses, but it’s hard to ignore them when there are so many.

There’s strength in numbers, after all, and these folks feel strongly that the Giants made a mistake in not re-signing Crawford.

We can all agree this de-facto swap wasn’t great timing by Zaidi. He invited the question: “Why didn’t the Giants just keep Crawford?”

But the answer to that question is simple:

Brandon Crawford could not, under any circumstances, be a backup shortstop for the 2024 San Francisco Giants.

And for the incredible, laudable play he gave the city, region, and team, that’s all Crawford could be for this upcoming edition of the black and orange.

The reason Crawford cannot be a backup was proven — somewhat ironically — by the outpouring of disgust and anger that started Monday and rolled into Tuesday.

There’s a lot of deserved love for Crawford. But that loyalty from the fanbase is also creating some blind spots.

Let’s be crystal clear about this: Crawford stunk last year. He couldn’t hit a lick — his bat speed was in the tank — and his defense, once the standout part of his game, took a step back. He was defensively as good as third baseman J.D. Davis in Outs Above Average last year, which is a fancy way of saying he was “fine.”

A player who is fine in the field and brutal at the plate should not be starting at shortstop for any team in baseball.

Sorry, the reality is harsh. Crawford’s decline doesn’t take away from all the great memories he made for the Giants.

But Zaidi and Bob Melvin have to win this season. And they believe that Marco Luciano, the team’s top position player prospect, is ready to take on the shortstop role full-time.

Luciano played 14 games last year and hardly took the game by storm. He posted a .641 OPS in 45 plate appearances, with three extra-base hits. He was unremarkable in the field.

Small sample size? You bet.

But it’s fair to suggest that Luciano, 22, might need some time to establish himself as a big leaguer. The Giants believe in his talent and want to give him every opportunity to do that. If it takes a few months for him to find his footing, so be it — the Giants will make that trade for what they imagine will be a decade of excellence.

You can agree or disagree with the Giants’ assessment of Luciano. I, for one, have my doubts about him at short. The team, however, is steadfast.

What you cannot debate is that having Crawford serving as a backup to a kid — and, again, there was no other role for the veteran on this team — would be terrible for Luciano’s development.

It has nothing to do with Crawford. He’s a pro.

It has everything to do with the fans.

If Crawford were on the roster and Luciano struggled out of the gate this season, do you think Giants fans would have patience?

Of course not. They’d be clamoring like crazy for Crawford, the same way they’re doing now.

Even if all things were equal — if both shortstops stinkl — at least they know No. 35.

There’s no way that energy wouldn’t seep into the clubhouse and front office. No one is on solid ground in those two areas right now — Zaidi and Melvin would only be able to hold off the horde for so long.

Meanwhile, no one will be calling up KNBR asking to play for Nick Ahmed, Tyler Fitzgerald, or Otto Lopez if Luciano has a couple oh-fers in a row and sails a throw to first.

Crawford is a legend, and it will be unsettling to see him wearing a Cardinals jersey — there’s no doubt about that.

But it should also be noted that he will be a potential backup for St. Louis’ young shortstop, Masyn Winn.

If Winn struggles out of the gate, Cardinals fans — who are even more vocal and crazed than Giants fans — won’t be rallying for Crawford to replace him every day. They don’t have a relationship with Crawford, so they’ll see the shortstop for what he is: a player whose days as an everyday player are behind him.

That was never going to be the case with the Giants. Not after a decade of brilliance, not after a career’s worth of memories.

Ready or not, it’s time for the kid now.

And that meant Crawford had to go.

The Dubs came into the game riding high, having won three straight games amid a larger stretch that has returned the team to respectability and the fringe of the Western Conference’s top six.

Golden State was starting to think they could turn this season — on the verge of being condemned only a few weeks ago — into something to remember.

Perhaps the Warriors can do that down the line.

But the Nuggets showed them that there’s a big gap between respectability and serious contention, and the Warriors are nowhere near that second status.

We saw the Nuggets do to the Warriors on Sunday night what we saw the dynastic Warriors do to so many teams for a half-decade: they messed around with them for a while to start the game, allowing the opposition to build up a lead and confidence — then they suffocated them.

The Warriors led by as many as 15 points in the first half. Klay Thompson looked 23 again, scoring 23 in the first two quarters. Andrew Wiggins looked like an impact wing. The ball was moving on offense, the Warriors were rotating on defense, and the San Francisco crowd was justly loving life.

Then the Nuggets decided they had enough of all of that.

Denver went on a 14-0 run to end the first half, tying the contest at the break.

Then, in the second half, they put another 14-0 run on the board.

Nikola Jokić controlled every facet of the game, posting an absurd stat line of 32 points, 16 rebounds, and 16 assists with four steals. Most impressively, I don’t think he jumped once.

And with Jamal Murray scoring an efficient 27 points, the Nuggets’ 1-2 punch took it to the Dubs on offense.

Defensively, the Nuggets smothered the Warriors from the end of the second quarter onwards. Denver was longer than the Warriors at every position, and the Nuggets’ size and physicality overwhelmed Golden State as the game progressed. The Nuggets made it toughest on possessions where the Dubs needed to score the most.

The Warriors’ 15-point lead turned into a Nuggets 15-point lead by the time Golden State coach Steve Kerr pulled his top players off the floor late in the fourth quarter.

Yes, the defending champion Nuggets did what great teams do.

They did what the Clippers did to the Warriors on Feb. 14.

It doesn’t matter if you fall behind early when you’re a great team like Denver or the Clippers. You can afford to feel your opponent out to start a game.

But when the switch is flipped, it stays on.

The Clippers, who have been the West’s best for the last two months, waited until the fourth quarter of that Valentine’s Day game to exert their superiority over the Dubs.

The Nuggets attacked earlier, but the second half Sunday only hammered home the point.

The Warriors’ recent success has come against relative minnows. A win is a win, yes, but to compete for a title, you have to beat the best of the best.

And so far this season, the Warriors are 2-12 against the West’s four best teams (1-3 vs. the Thunder, 1-3 vs. the Clippers, 0-2 to the Timberwolves, 0-4 vs the Nuggets), and 3-17 against the top six teams (1-2 vs. the Pelicans, 1-3 vs. the Suns).

The last time the Warriors beat the Nuggets was Game 5 of the teams’ 2022 first-round playoff series.

The roles have reversed since then.

Now, are the Dubs playing better ball as of late? Absolutely. And that’s made them a surefire playoff team. (Or at least a play-in team.)

But as the Warriors know from one-time first-hand experience, this game has levels.

And the Warriors’ best this season is not good enough for that top level.

Not for the next two seasons, anyway.

ESPN reported Friday night what had been anticipated for the last week-plus: The Warriors’ coach had agreed to a two-year contract extension.

His current contract was set to expire this summer.

The real shocker of it all is how much Kerr will be paid over those two seasons: $35 million.

That’s Derrick White, Bogdan Bogdanovic, or Lauri Markkanen-type money. It’s more per season than Kerr made in 15 years as an NBA sharpshooter.

It will make him the highest-paid coach in NBA history.

And you can’t say he’s not worth it.

Kerr’s performance will always be overanalyzed. Some loud members of the fan base will always believe he has no idea what he’s doing and should be fired.

You should have started ignoring those people long ago. Keep doing it.

Because there are few — if any — other coaches in this league who could have managed the Warriors during their dynastic run, which started when he arrived in the Bay.

(Mark Jackson clearly wasn’t going to do it.)

Fewer coaches could have navigated the post-dynasty world as gracefully, too.

The culture he installed with the Warriors has paid dividends far beyond the cost of this upcoming contract extension.

It paid out in four titles, the greatest run of the modern era, and the establishment of the Warriors — once the league’s laughingstock — as one of the preeminent franchises in professional sports.

Was it all Kerr? Of course not.

It was Steph Curry.

It was Draymond Green and Klay Thompson.

It was Bob Myers and Kevin Durant.

It was Shaun Livingston, Andrew Wiggins, Andrew Bogut, Luke Walton, Mike Brown, and even Jordan Poole, a bit.

It’s hundreds of people I didn’t mention.

But that was the way Kerr designed it all to work.

And he’ll be the first to tell you to credit all of them first.

The process of building up the Warriors was anything but seamless, even though Kerr made it look that way.

The process of keeping the Warriors at the top was even more precarious.

(If I could only tell you just one of the never-to-be-corroborated but hard-to-not-believe stories I’ve heard over the years.)

Oh, and building this team back up again — they went from the worst record in the NBA to, two seasons later, winning another title — was incredible work, too. Kerr never gets enough credit for that.

And navigating the challenges of two timelines and the last two seasons was anything but straightforward.

Kerr has handled it all with smarts and humility. He understands people as well as he understands the game. That’s a hell of a 1-2 for a coach.

I won’t lie, there were parts of this season when my internal monologue echoed the idiots on Twitter. When the Dubs were sub-.500 and floundering, I wondered if Kerr was the right man for the Warriors’ job moving forward. It seemed as if the Dubs had reached a nadir, and it was hard to see things coming together to create a team that could contend for the playoffs, much less a title.

I thought it might be time for everyone to go their separate ways. Nothing great lasts forever — not even the Golden State Warriors.

But Kerr & Co. figured it out.

They seem to always do that. That’s a pretty valuable habit to have in the NBA.

And while I’m not suggesting the red-hot Warriors are a title contender once again, they’re certainly showing as of late they’re a playoff-caliber team. They’re playing at a high level on both ends of the floor and Kerr’s decisions are big reasons why.

He and Jonathan Kuminga found peace after an ugly media blow-up. The 21-year-old forward has been on a tear since.

He benched Klay and had the future Hall of Famer thank him for it.

He pushed back against swing-for-the-fences drafting and helped bring in two impact rookies this past offseason.

And he found a way to manage Draymond amid all of Green’s nonsense this season.

Has Kerr always kept his superstars happy? No.

But he has always kept them committed to the cause. He knows players run the league, but anything but a lackey. It’s probably why he’s stuck around so long so far.

And let’s not forget this man’s bonafides as a coach — he’s lost one Western Conference playoff series ever. One. And that just happened last year. Do you really think he was just a bystander for that kind of consistent excellence?

Even when Kerr couldn’t coach this team because of health issues, the systems he built were strong enough for someone else to lead and do it at a high level. For everyone needing a strongman, just know putting one in charge is a surefire way to have a weak organization.

Ultimately, Kerr doesn’t need credit or admiration. He gets plenty from those who know the game and the incredible, nuanced challenges of his job. (If only it was as simple as X’s and O’s — something that he did so well he revolutionized the game.)

It, of course, helps that Kerr — who was already handsomely paid — is now he’s getting a massive, record-setting pile of admiration from the Warriors.

There’s no salary cap or luxury tax on coaches, after all.

Oh — why two years? Why not sign a long-term deal and take all of Lacob and Gruber’s money?

Well, two years just so happens to line up with Curry’s contract.

This contract was just another smart Kerr move.

This is a team that knows how it needs to play, and it’s ready to run, run, run all the way to the regular season finish line.

Earlier this week, I explained in this space the downsides of the Warriors’ newfound and just commitment to small ball.

Thursday showed the upside.

The Dubs were cohesive, high-energy, and whip-smart for a full 48-minute game. Their 128-110 win over the Lakers Thursday was as entertaining a game as they have played all year, season, and perhaps even the past two seasons.

And while it came against a middling opponent — the Lakers were without LeBron James, who is taking full advantage of the Lakers’ unlimited time off policy — that fact shouldn’t take away anything from Golden State’s performance.

There was nothing simple about the Warriors’ offensive scheme. The Dubs didn’t return from the break and resort to simple high pick-and-roll offense with Steph Curry and Draymond Green. The layers of cuts and screens away from the ball that defined the Warriors’ early dynastic days — the finest version of basketball we, perhaps, have ever seen in the NBA — were still there, in full force, dizzying the Lakers from the opening tip.

Defensively, the Dubs weren’t perfect — at one point, they ran a box-and-one for… Austin Reeves? — but with Green orchestrating the action on that side of the court, Golden State is proving to be a capable defensive team (who knew?) and perhaps even a good one. (Exceptional still feels a long way off, but I think all parties are open to it.)

What these Dubs extolled Thursday, more than anything else, was effort.

And it’s that effort that will define what this season will become.

Pair that effort with understanding on the court, and you have something special to watch.

After Thursday’s game, is it ridiculous to say the Dubs looked like a team that could make some noise in the Western Conference this spring?

Obviously, no.

(It’s my column. I make the rules.)

The issue, of course, is that it’ll take that kind of effort, night in, night out, for the Warriors to turn this season into one of consequence.

It needs the same Green, putting Anthony Davis — or whatever All-Star center the other team has — in a vice grip, just like when the Brow was back in New Orleans.

It will take the immortal and inevitable Curry to be the best player on the floor, no matter the opponent or the circumstance. (My goodness, did Curry play inspired ball on Thursday.)

It’ll take Brandin Podziemski being a rat on the floor. (This is a high compliment.)

Jonathan Kuminga playing a professional, selfless game, well above the rim, of course.

And Andrew Wiggins deciding that yes, he is, in fact one of the finest wings in the league.

Folks, it’s even going to take Lester Quinones. Who had that on their bingo card this season?

Can it be done? Absolutely. When the Warriors play like they did Thursday, there’s a pretty large margin for error, even.

The challenge in doing that will be immediately felt, though.

The Warriors need to repeat their Thursday night effort again on Friday night at Chase Center, when they’ll host the lowly Hornets. Late Sunday afternoon, they’ll host the Nuggets.

Then they get to take the show on the road with games at the Wizards, Knicks, Raptors and Celtics.

Then March 6 and March 7, the Warriors will get the Bucks and Bulls back-to-back at home.

We’ll know so much more about this team two weeks from now. If this is for real — if this push has staying power — we’ll know by that Bulls game.

I can have my doubts about the sustainability of this style. I can worry about this team running out of gas the way it did in 2021 (albeit with lesser talent, but still). I can imagine the effort waning if one thing is knocked offline.

But that’s sportswriter hand-wringing. Don’t let it interrupt the enjoyable show.

Ultimately, the Warriors get to decide what this season will become. They get to write the story.

And you have to like the script they played out on Thursday night.

We did it, folks. We survived the long, cruel months without Major League Baseball. (Thanks for the help, Niners and Caribbean Series.)

But while (fake) games are about to be played, buddy, things are not hunky dory with the Giants.

After another underwhelming offseason, the Giants head into the exhibition schedule carrying questions galore.

But three stand out above the others.

Here’s what I want answered this spring:

Can this team really count on Jung Hoo Lee?

I have no problem with the Lee signing. He seems like a nice player, and it’s not my money.

But being a “nice” player on this roster makes you a bit of a unicorn — it makes you someone this team will rely upon day in and day out this season.

And that all seems like a lot to ask of Lee.

The glove will play in center. That’s worth something. Lee’s bat-to-ball skills should translate just fine. That’s worth something, too.

The question is, what happens to the ball once the bat finds it?

Lee is unlikely to be a big home run hitter — the transition to the big leagues and Oracle Park should zap whatever power he has beyond roughly 10 home runs.

But there’s nothing wrong with being a doubles guy. You can lead by being a doubles guy.

Is Lee going to be a doubles guy?

Some of the projection systems love him. The Bat X — my favorite — thinks Lee will be 14 percent better than the league average this season. They also project him for a 10.6 percent strike-out rate — the highest of all the major projection systems, but still the fifth-lowest mark in the big leagues.

This will work.

But projection systems and sportswriter guesses don’t mean much.

Lee actually has to go out there and do the thing, and his challenge to do that is so much different from some kid being called up from the minors.

Lee must adapt to living and working in a different country and to a much higher level of competition.

Oh, all while there are serious expectations on him, because, again, the Giants need him to be good to make the playoffs this season.

It all sounds like a lot — enough to make you second-guess immediate success.

The Giants have cited the success of Padres shortstop Ha-Seong Kim as a reason to believe Lee will make an immediate impact in the big leagues.

What is not mentioned in those comparisons is that Kim struggled at the plate his first two seasons, posting a 94 OPS+ before breaking out as a down-ballot MVP candidate last year.

The Giants have Lee locked up for a long time, but they can’t wait three years for the best version of him to arrive in San Francisco.

Does this team have enough pitching?

There’s one big number every big league team needs to worry about this time of year:

It’s 1,400.

Teams pitched between 1453.2 and 1409 innings last season.

No matter how a roster is constructed, your team needs to be able to throw 1,400 innings.

And I don’t see how the Giants can effectively do it. This team is one Logan Webb oblique tweak away from abject disaster.

This isn’t to say I don’t like some of the Giants’ young starters — I do.

And I like the bullpen, too.

However, as things are currently constructed, the Giants lack the arms to get through the first half of the season, when some reinforcements are reportedly ready to rejoin the rotation. (We’ll see.)

As of the start of this week, the Giants’ rotation was:

• Webb (a bulldog, awesome)

• Jordan Hicks (eight career starts, but a hell of a reliever)

• Kyle Harrison (314 innings pitched since high school)

• Tristan Beck (27 years old, average stuff, average control)

• Keaton Winn (Already sidelined with an elbow injury)

Are there more after those five? You bet — so many more.

But no one you would dare trust.

Those are the five best pitchers currently on the roster from which the Giants could make a rotation.

Those are the five pitchers that will need to carry the load for the first 100-something games of the season, until Alex Cobb (hip) and Robbie Ray (Tommy John Surgery) can return, creating — in theory — a wicked 1, 2, 3 with Webb.

Yikes.

Hey, maybe Mason Black is the real deal. Maybe Carson Whisenhunt or Landen Roupp is ready for the big leagues. Daulton Jeffries was once a first-round pick — he might be able to hold down the fort for a couple of starts.

It’s as if the Giants conceded that all pitchers will become injured, so, like your crazy uncle in Arkansas, they’re just stockpiling arms.

Their issue is that they might be a year too early on some of those arms they stockpiled.

And the top arms they stockpiled outside of Webb — Harrison, Winn, Hicks — aren’t worthy of much trust.

Between this and the dependence on Lee to make an immediate impact, it makes me wonder:

Is this team done?

Because they could sure use another reliable starting pitcher and top-end bat.

It’s a shame there are none on the free-agent market anymore.

Wait, what’s that now?

Well then…

And no, it wasn’t during a championship season.

I imagine many of you have blissfully forgotten the Dubs’ 2021 campaign, but it’s evident that Warriors coach Steve Kerr hasn’t.

Amid a season heading off the rails, he has stolen the blueprint of that ’21 season to return the Warriors to respectability.

But ultimately, respectability seems like the extent of what can be achieved.

The 2021 Warriors started their COVID-shortened sprint of a regular season with a 23-27 record. That was an improvement from the year prior, when the Warriors were the worst team in the league, but it was still a major disappointment for a team that had Draymond Green and Steph Curry and had traded for Andrew Wiggins the previous February.

Those Dubs lacked a rhythm, an identity, and any sense of cohesion. James Wiseman, the No. 2 overall pick in the prior year’s draft, wasn’t a fit. Kelly Oubre a late offseason acquisition signed to fill the vacancy left by Klay Thompson, who was missing a second consecutive season to injury, was a disaster. Things were falling apart in the critical stretch of the season — the Warriors lost all but five of 18 games between March and early April (the season ended in mid-May.)

Desperate times called for desperate measures. With roughly a month to play, Kerr made three significant moves.

He shortened his rotation to eight players, ostensibly dumping Oubre (Wiseman was injured) and replacing him with Mychal Mulder and a kid named Jordan Poole.

He inserted Juan Toscano-Anderson into the rotation, as well.

But the most crucial change was making Green the team’s starting center. The Warriors were going to play small-ball down the stretch.

Remind you of anything?

That Warriors team looked good down the home stretch, going 15-5 to end the regular season, including six straight wins at home to end. Curry went thermonuclear, averaging 37 points over his final 22 games.

The Warriors made the play-in tournament, but lost both games.

They ran out of gas.

And that’s my fear with this season’s Warriors, too.

Now, it should be noted that these Dubs are in a much different situation. They’re deeper. They’re more talented.

But they started sprinting on Jan. 27 — the game Kerr made Green the team’s starting center — and they need to make it to mid-April to merely make the postseason. And we saw some sputtering this week.

The Warriors’ loss to the Clippers on Wednesday and near-loss to the Jazz on Thursday showed a team pushing up against its limits. This, like the 2021 team, is a one-trick pony. It’s a hell of a trick, but can it get them to the finish line?

And if it can, will it take them any further?

The good news is that these Warriors have Thompson in the fold. Whether he’s coming off the bench, as he did Thursday, or in the starting lineup, he’s a quality NBA player. (Whatever you want to say about Thompson, that much is true.) Chris Paul should return to the fold after the All-Star break, too. Jonathan Kuminga and Brandin Podziemski look like they’ll be solid — if not stellar — NBA players for the next decade.

The overall quality is markedly better than in ’21.

Remember: The 2021 Warriors were relying on Poole; Mulder, who played 17 NBA games after that season; Kent Bazemore, a starter for that stretch, played 39 more games; and JTA, who, while a positive player for that Dubs team, hasn’t found a serious role since.

So yeah, a little different than two Hall of Famers (albeit in the twilights of their careers) and two promising players 21 and under.

But the formula for success is still the same. While other teams rely on their talent to make the playoffs in the regular season, the Warriors are working for their spot in the postseason.

And they’re working hard. These last few weeks have been a grind.

It’s a shame such effort is novel in this league — it certainly makes for a better product — but there’s a reason most teams coast: They want to have something in the tank for the “real” season.

Even though these Warriors are more talented than the ’21 edition, they have to work as hard as them for roughly the same results.

And they will probably have to exert that effort for longer.

Curry cannot cool down from his latest stint of insane play. Kuminga and Podziemski can’t hit walls. Paul has to seamlessly reintegrate. Thompson might have to be a bench player.

But it’s Green is going to bear the brunt of this effort.

The Warriors are a game over .500 at the break, holding the final spot in the play-in tournament. To make the real playoffs (a top-six seed) and avoid a possible one-and-done scenario, they’ll need to win close to 20 of their 29 games remaining.

It’s a big ask for their big man. I don’t care how much basketball IQ you have — taking on 7-footers is tough when you’re only 6-foot-6.

Green at center was Kerr’s Get Out of Jail Free card during the team’s salad days. Tough game? Put in Draymond at the 5 — the contest was over in a flash.

But there’s a reason it was only used sparingly — every minute at the 5 is a tough minute for the Dubs’ big man. The idea for years was that playing Green at center would be a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency situation.

Kerr has changed his tune on that since Green returned from suspension.

“[But] He’s a little bit older, and we don’t have a good team around him,” Kerr added. “I think the 5 is really the perfect spot for him, where he is in his career, and where the league is and how everyone is playing.”

Maybe it’s passive-aggressive punishment; maybe this is such an emergency. Either way — or both ways — Green playing 30-plus minutes a night at the 5 is the best option for these Warriors to play winning basketball.

The good news is that the Warriors’ season has improved dramatically since Green returned. Of course it has.

The bad news is that it might not be sustainable enough to make this season one to remember.

It should be the last.

No, not the last time for the Bay — the last NBA All-Star Game in any city, town, or municipality worldwide.

This is a tradition that has reached its expiration date. That date might have been a decade ago.

There are three main prongs to an All-Star Weekend, and each of them has proven to be a made-for-TV waste of time.

The Rising Stars game is a nice idea that the league has jammed onto Friday night, before anyone of serious importance arrives in town. I don’t know a soul who has ever claimed to have watched it in an unprofessional context.

Keeping All-Star weekend together for the kids doesn’t make any sense.

So scratch Friday.

Saturday isn’t worth the trouble, either. The only worthwhile event amid all the skills challenges is the 3-point contest, and that has lost its luster because every single NBA game is a 3-point contest.

Hey, NBA — we’re covered on 3s.

Plus, Steph Curry decided to supersede that event with his own sharpshooting contest — Stephen vs. Sabrina was a better show than whatever Damian Lillard won on Saturday. It’s also an event that would have carried just as much interest and intrigue if it was a made-for-TV 30-minute special shot at the Warriors’ former practice facility in Oakland with some kids as the crowd.

And would anyone care if we never did the pass-it-into-some-circles challenge again?

The cardinal event of Saturday night is the dunk contest, which is now a lame parade of props, unoriginal ideas, and G-Leaguers.

The ABA started the dunk contest in 1976, but on Saturday night, the best anyone could do was dunk over Shaq. Two dunkers did that. It was pretty meh the first time it happened.

It’s clear that after a half-century, all the possible dunks have been done. Jaylen Brown’s high-school class project dunks were cringeworthy. The judges were deranged. Just let Mac McClung be a YouTube star — he’d probably make more money than what the Osceola Magic pay him.

The dunk contest peaked in Oakland in 2000. (A dunk contest I caught on NBA TV the other day and watched from start to finish. Kenny Smith was also awful on that broadcast.)

Vince Carter was right then: It’s over.

So scratch Saturday, too.

But what the NBA really needs to scrap the actual All-Star Game.

When was the last time it was worthwhile for anyone involved — players, fans, the league?

It certainly wasn’t this past Sunday.

The All-Star Game has become a farce of a basketball game: guys chucking up shots from half-court and trying stupid dunks, all while not even a sniff of defense can be found.

Our expectations for a glorified pickup game were low, but my goodness.

The All-Star Game has all the integrity of a bunch of sixth graders when the coach is late for practice.

Even commissioner Adam Silver couldn’t hide his disgust at the end of the contest Sunday.

“And to the Eastern Conference All-Stars, you scored the most points… well… congratulations,” Silver said as he unenthusiastically handed the winner’s trophy to Giannis Antetokounmpo.

It’s understandable things have reached this nadir. The players — the folks who have actually to do the thing — don’t want to get injured and don’t want to expend any energy on what should be their weekend off.

Why would they try?

We’ve had a bad product for decades now, and no number of format changes — the NBA has tried nearly everything to fix the weekend and the game — has helped. The whole spectacle has only gotten worse.

Since next year’s game in San Francisco is already on the books, the NBA should go through with it and tell the world, “This is it.”

Maybe that will create something worthwhile.

Probably not.

The NBA has created an “exhibition” of worth recently, though — the in-season tournament.

The semi-finals and final of that tournament, played in Las Vegas this past December, are the only three games on the league’s schedule on their respective Thursdays and Saturdays.

If the NBA (foolishly) wants to keep any All-Star weekend events around — be that the 3-point contest, the dunk contest, or even the Rising Stars game — doing them on the Friday night between the final two rounds of the in-season tournament could be the play. (I’m sure the G-Leaguers will be available and the only college football that weekend is Army-Navy.)

They can also move that event from town to town, effectively rewarding cities for building new arenas.

Getting rid of the week-long All-Star break would allow the league to stretch its schedule to possibly remove most back-to-back games. Getting rid of an awful entertainment product might make the NBA’s actual product — the games — better.

Plus, the NFL already took Christmas from the NBA. It’s going to take President’s Day weekend soon enough, anyway.

The NBA might as well have one last hurrah (or dud) in San Francisco, concede the war to the monolith, and start building up something new in mid-December.

At least the in-season tournament weekend would have a worthwhile basketball game.

And that is something the All-Star Game hasn’t provided in a long, long time.

The Niners’ window to win a Super Bowl is still wide open, but it won’t stay open forever. The next defensive coordinator has to be the right guy — something Wilks proved he was not throughout the season.

So who is next?

The Niners are a bit late in the game to hire a DC, having just played a game on Sunday. And just like last offseason, when Shanahan hired Wilks, there are no viable in-house candidates for the gig. (With apologies to Daniel Bullocks and Nick Sorensen.)

One name, however, jumps to the top of the list:

Brandon Staley.

Before you get the pitchforks out, hear me out.

The former Chargers head coach was terrible at that job. No one will debate that.

But he’s not being hired for that job — he’d be hired as a defensive coordinator. And buddy, there’s a big difference.

He is exceptional at that latter gig. His defensive game plans are as innovative, dynamic, and sound as any coach’s. He’s also a disciple of Vic Fangio.

You probably remember that Shanahan wanted Fangio, the former defensive coordinator under Jim Harbaugh, back in 2017. And had the Niners not been playing deep into the playoffs the last two seasons, they might have been able to snag Fangio then, too. He returned to the league with the Dolphins last season and left that job to become the Eagles’ DC this offseason.

But Staley is the next best thing. He might even be better.

When Fangio was in Chicago, he plucked Staley from obscurity — he was the defensive coordinator at NCAA Division III John Carroll University. Then Fangio took Staley with him to Denver. Fangio saw something in this guy, and he was proven right.

Shanahan’s protégé and nemesis, Sean McVay, hired Staley as his defensive coordinator for the 2020 season. His work with the Rams earned him that Chargers head coaching job.

But he ascended too fast. It was a perfect example of the Peter principle — you are promoted to the point of incompetence. After a nice start to his Chargers tenure, things fell apart the last two years. You can blame Chargers’ ownership; you can blame a front office that gave out bad contracts to older players and failed to draft well; you can blame Justin Herbert for failing to take the next step as a quarterback; and you can blame Staley, whose phony faux-quant schtick started to ring untrue after the team blew a 27-0 lead in the 2022 Wild Card round.

The fact is that Staley won’t be a head coach in this league again. He’s whip-smart but lacks the political skills to run an entire team. Plus, he’s a defensive coach, so he won’t receive the benefit of the doubt in interviews — it’s an offense-first league.

However, after going through three coordinators in four years, Shanahan could use some stability in the position.

Shanahan needs someone to be the Steve Spagnuolo — another defensive genius whose disastrous tenure as a head coach ensures he will never be hired for that job again — to his Andy Reid.

While Shanahan’s hands touch everything involved with the 49ers, he does provide exceptional autonomy to his defensive coordinator. The idea is that they run their team, Shanahan runs his, and they come together before a game. That model worked under Robert Saleh and DeMeco Ryans.

It didn’t work under Wilks, because Shanahan continuously had to step in to ensure the program was running. It often wasn’t. (Though other teams had no problem running against these Niners.)

Staley has no defensive ideology that will override what the Niners already do. He’s a pragmatist. Like Bill Belichick (who will not be taking this job, no matter what some idiot on social media says), Staley ran bespoke defensive game plans week-by-week with the Rams and Chargers. He’ll understand the assignment, unlike Wilks. And he can be trusted with being the “head coach” of a defense.

Just don’t let him near the offense.

And while sure, other candidates will be considered — the Niners just did this process a year ago, after all — if Shanahan wants to ensure he has someone who can effectively do the job and won’t require him to do this again anytime soon, Staley is the guy for the gig.

The 49ers defensive coordinator’s exit was set in motion long before Sunday’s loss in Las Vegas, and I’m not even sure winning the game would have saved him.

It wasn’t working. It wasn’t going to work. And instead of pretending that things would get better with time — instead of trying to save face after making a bad hire — Kyle Shanahan made the right decision on Wednesday to fire Wilks.

Shanahan is used to losing coaches, but that’s because they’ve been hired for better jobs by other teams. This is the first high-profile firing of Shanahan’s tenure.

But it had to happen.

The fruit of the Shanahan coaching tree has been so over-picked that the Niners’ head coach had to go outside the building to hire the third defensive coordinator of his tenure.

Wilks had been one-and-done in his prior four jobs. His prior three gigs — Browns defensive coordinator, Mizzou defensive coordinator, Panthers secondary coach — ended with him being effectively fired.

There’s nothing ambiguous about this firing. He’s now one-and-done in his last five gigs.

To be clear, the Super Bowl didn’t help Wilks’ cause. Yes, Patrick Mahomes failed to drive down the field to a touchdown in regulation, but Wilks made some baffling defensive calls late in the fourth quarter and in overtime, opening the door for Mahomes to take advantage.

The Niners had succeeded throughout the game by consistently rushing four and dropping seven into zone, mixing single and two-high coverage. It was basic stuff, but it worked because the Niners’ defensive line was having a huge game.

And then, when the tension was highest, Wilks decided to start running more man-to-man looks.

Mahomes, flummoxed to that point in the game, couldn’t believe his luck. Against a steady, now-predictable diet of super-soft zones on early downs and man-to-man on late downs, he quickly drove the Chiefs into position for a game-tying field goal (forced by the Niners defense, which dropped into zone near the goal line). He moved down the field for the game-winning touchdown in overtime with relative ease.

But that was only the most recent reason Wilks was fired.

The issues started in training camp, when it became clear to Niners players and staff that Wilks wasn’t keen on melding his system — a basic, secondary-first scheme, circa 2005 — with the Niners’ defensive-line-first attack.

Some not-so-subtle nudging came Wilks’ way from Shanahan and general manager John Lynch before the season even started.

But even in late October, Wilks admitted that he was still learning the Niners’ system (which, itself, isn’t terribly complicated.)

By then, Wilks had already been pulled out of the coach’s box and onto the sideline in an effort to increase communication with players. But most of the time, when the defense was off the field, Wilks was off to the side, sitting by himself, looking at his tablet.

Throughout the season, players endorsed Wilks in only light ways.

There were a lot of references to him being a “great guy” or “smart coach.”

Yet you never heard any evidence given to those claims. It certainly wasn’t evidenced on the field. And I would not label Wilks with either description from my admittedly limited (by comparison) interactions with him.

I’ve learned more than I’ll ever be able to remember from on- and off-the-record conversations with football coaches over the years. In most cases, they can’t help themselves from teaching. But that never happened in Wilks’ press conferences or any side conversations I had with him. At his best, he was boring. At his worst, he was terse and condescending. (Shanahan can be both, too, but at least the evidence of his excellence as a coach is apparent on the field.)

You have to wonder if personality was an issue for Wilks when coaching this team.

Regardless, Shanahan made the same kind of “great guy” claims Wednesday during an unscheduled media conference call, announced 10 minutes before its start.

“[It was] a tough decision. It really says nothing about Steve as a man or as a football coach. He’s exactly what we wanted as a man. He is a great football coach. But just where we’re going, where we’re at with our team from a scheme standpoint… I felt pretty strongly that this was a decision that was best for our organization,” Shanahan said.

But would a truly great coach have found himself in such a position?

Wilks knew the deal when he took the job: The Niners had the No. 1 ranked defense in the NFL in 2022, with even more talent coming onto the roster in 2023.

Wilks’ job was to take what was already established — a foundation that landed two different defensive coordinators head coaching jobs — and maintain it. It’d be even better if he could make it better, perhaps with his outside experience.

He failed at his only objective.

Wilks deserves credit for helping cornerbacks Charvarius Ward and Deommodore Lenoir have their best seasons in the secondary. His banging of the table to draft safety Ji’Ayir Brown was an excellent decision, too.

But Wilks inherited a defense with four other Pro Bowl players, and the unit unquestionably regressed. The Niners added Randy Gregory and Chase Young mid-season to improve the pass rush — both players were massive disappointments this season.

So focused on the secondary, Wilks could never marry the pass rush to the pass coverage on the 49ers’ defense. Arguably the NFL’s most talented defensive line struggled to pressure quarterbacks throughout the season — teams could swiftly pick the coverage apart, beating the pass rush to the punch, or add protection to extend plays and beat a secondary that had no scramble-drill plan.

Having inherited the best linebacker duo in the game, Wilks often utilized Fred Warner as a de-facto safety in Tampa 2 coverage — a look that was better suited for the game during the first decade of the century, not the third.

With Warner 30 yards away from the line of scrimmage, is it any surprise the Niners’ run defense slipped to the middle of the pack, and was exploited in the final weeks of the regular season and the two NFC playoff games?

That’s when this decision to fire Wilks was undoubtedly made.

And while Shanahan said he stewed over it for the last few days, there was no sane world where Wilks returned.