An introduction
Some throat clearing, a few opinions to keep me accountable, and what this blog will look like.
So here I am, I’ve decided I’m going to try my hand at writing about the Warriors. I’ve wanted to do this for some time. If I could have my way, I’d make a living writing about the Warriors. But there’s obviously plenty of people who feel the same way and they’ve worked harder than me, have bigger platforms, and are probably smarter than me. That’s fine. I’ve earned my low place on the totem pole.
I’ll be completely honest — I don’t have any real credentials to speak of. I played competitive basketball for most of my youth, peaked as a varsity benchwarmer in my junior year, contemplated, decided against playing DIII ball for my liberal art school’s pitiful team, and that’s pretty much it for playing experience. All I’ve got is this platform and a whole lot of opinions. The way I look at it is that if my opinions are interesting and people/readers see value in them, maybe this platform grows and some of you might... want to... pay me for the privilege of reading my opinions.
Because I’m starting from the bottom, I’m only as good as my opinions and analysis are interesting and valuable and I think that the only way for these opinions to be interesting and valuable is to have a track record.
I’ve been posting on RealGM for over a decade and participating on the Lightyears Podcast’s Discord channel for over a half of a year and I’ve made plenty of predictions on both of those platforms that I can’t link to, but I’ll provide a small platter of those summarized predictions/opinions/general theories of basketball for you, dear reader, to judge me by.
The most overvalued prospects in the draft are freak athletes with a shaky feel for the game. Off of the top of my head, Josh Jackson, Wesley Johnson, Ben McLemore, Andrew Wiggins, Jan Vesley, Mario Hezonja, Marvin Bagley, and James Wiseman all fit this archetype. Generally speaking, I put much more faith in the ability of an intelligent player to maximize his body than I do a freak athlete to simply... learn how to play at a high level. I’m open to the argument that lotto teams, by virtue of (often) being poorly run organizations, are a bad place for a freak athlete to learn to play as the motivations/interests of the FO, coaching staff, and ownership may conflict with each other. But I strongly believe that innate feel for the game is not something that can really be taught, at least not to the level needed for a freak athlete with limited feel to become a star. Harrison Barnes is a prime example of that; it took until this year, Barnes’ ninth in the league, for his assist numbers — 3.4 assists per 36 minutes this year — to climb more than .3 percentage points above his career average 2.0 assists per 36 minutes. Barnes has turned into a pretty solid NBA player but the lack of feel he exhibited early in his career put a cap on his ceiling and it’s safe to say that this is pretty much the top end of what he’s capable of doing. To bring that full circle, Barnes is known as a very hard worker and it took him... 9 years to make a significant jump in his feel for the game.
Glenn Robinson III would be more useful than 2015-16 Harrison Barnes to the Warriors. Well, there’s a big egg on my face here because GRIII is... out of the league after getting cut by the Kings. I’m pretty sure I even made a snarky preseason post on RealGM predicting that GRIII would be just as useful to the Kings as Barnes would be this year, so I’ll gladly take the L on this one to prove that I’m not, say, Tim Kawakami, or someone who will spin revisionist tales to justify a bad take of yesteryear. But just for fun, I’ll show you the numbers that had me believing my outlandish preseason take might actually be sensible:
GRIII (2019-20 Warriors stint — 48 games): 12.9 points a game, 4.7 rebounds, 1.8 assists, 1.2 stocks (steals + blocks), 48.1% FG, 40% 3P on 3.5 attempts per game, 85.1% FT, 57.4% TS, -0.6 OBPM, -1.2 DBPM, -1.7 BPM.
HB (2015-16 Warriors stint — 66 games): 11.7 points a game, 4.9 rebounds, 1.8 assists, 0.8 stocks, 46.6% FG, 38.3% 3P on 3.2 attempts per game, 76.1% FT, 55.9% TS, -0.2 OBPM, -1.1 DBPM, -1.3 BPM.
Jordan Poole will have a better NBA career than James Wiseman. This is the hottest take I’ve served up in a while, save for a few mostly kidding takes I’ve served up on the Lightyears Discord — Daniel Gafford > Wiseman, Tony Bradley > Wiseman, Omari Spellman > Wiseman... notice a trend here? — but I feel fairly confident about this one (for posterity’s sake here’s me making that prediction in late March). At the very least, I’m confident that Poole will have a better career for the Warriors than Wiseman will, if only because I’m not sure either of them will be on the Warriors past their rookie contracts (more on that later.) James Wiseman is bad at basketball and has an aggressively negative impact on the Warriors, and particularly Steph Curry’s offensive performance. Not all of that is his fault (more on that later as well), but I simply don’t think Wiseman is going to be better than Poole over the length of either player’s rookie contracts. If Wiseman figures it all out, which I do believe is a big if, I think that’s going to take quite a while, whereas Poole is already figuring things out and really just needs to work on his body and his decisiveness to become a high level sixth man in the league. I’m going to get more into Poole later and I expect to do a numbers summary called Poole Watch that will be a recurring segment here, but here’s some food for thought: Poole is shooting 35.2% from three this year, while the two players he gets compared to most, Jordan Clarkson and Lou Williams, are shooting it at 34.9% (34.3 career for Clarkson) 39.6% (35.1% career for Williams). Jamal Crawford, the godfather of all high volume and high variance bench chukers, never shot it above 38% in his prime to late prime and ended his career as a 34.8% shooter from three. If you think Poole will improve, which I do, and you think his shooting touch is real (50% on floaters in 2019-20, and 52.7% in 2020-21 and 83.2% FT in his brief career), there’s a very clear upward trajectory for him.
Those are just a few thoughts and predictions I’ve made in the last year or so, but I figured they are worth putting down for posterity’s sake as proof of my willingness to make bold claims and to take L’s. If you, like me, have no credentials to speak of, you’re only as good as your predictions, analysis, and your work.
As for the work; I think at this point I’m probably going to just write stray thoughts on this Warriors team. After I get done with this throat clearing, the rest of this post will serve as something of an overview of this Warriors team and thesis on What This Season Means. In the future I might try to write game recaps and post them the night of or morning after, but frankly, I’ve been enjoying this most recent Warriors run so much that I’m planning my entire night around it — I make a nice meal and time it such that dinner is served right when the game starts and I have a nice beer or glass of wine with dinner and the game — so I’m not sure I want to put the kibosh on that ritual just yet. Right now, the Warriors are supremely fun to watch and writing is work and this work is unpaid, for now.
Next up? Some actual numbers and thoughts!