The 2021-22 Golden State Warriors in-review: the coaching staff
A revamped coaching staff, Gary Payton II and Otto Porter Jr. as avatars of an evolving NBA, coaching rookies on a contending team, and Steve Kerr's Midas Touch in the playoffs
The Warriors’ coaching staff grade: A
In his 7th year coaching the Golden State Warriors, Steve Kerr and his staff turned in a masterpiece performance, arguably one of the more impressive coaching jobs of the last decade. I was hard on Steve Kerr in my season-in-review of 2020-21 but I’ll gladly concede that a significant amount of his poorer decisions seemed to reek of front-office meddling. Even with that caveat attached, Kerr still demonstrated ideological inflexibility about his backup point guard position and admittedly struggled to know, what, exactly to do with rookie center, James Wiseman, who Kerr said the Warriors tossed “into the deep end and let [...] sort of sink or swim.” Steve Kerr made up for those blunders and then some this past season by taking a roster of aging legends, injury-prone role players, G-League castoffs, and recent lottery picks and turning them into a championship team.
Before this Warriors team played a single game together, Draymond Green very publicly raised doubts about the construction of the roster and their ability to contend:
Green’s doubts were reasonable, but the coaching staff met the challenge over and over again, even as the Warriors did not play a single game the entire season with their full roster healthy. Consider, again, that Klay Thompson played his first game back from consecutive catastrophic lower-leg injuries in nearly 1000 days on January 9, the very same day that a slipped disc in Draymond Green’s back caused him to feel pain in his calf. That injury would keep him out for over two months and during Green’s second game back from injury, Boston Celtics’ guard, Marcus Smart, dove into the leg of Steph Curry while chasing for a loose ball, and the Warriors were forced to play the rest of the regular season without the star around which all their supporting players orbit.
Things got weirder in the playoffs — Jordan Poole started in a healthy Steph Curry's place for the first four games of the first round against the Denver Nuggets. Steph Curry was not only ok with this choice — he encouraged it, which is a testament to both Curry and the culture selfless that Steve Kerr has built. During that first round of the playoffs, the media — myself included — went into a premature frenzy about the new “Death Lineup” of Steph Curry, Jordan Poole, Klay Thompson, Andrew Wiggins, and Draymond Green, and after that lineup started the final game of the first round, the Warriors would end up using six different starting lineups throughout the playoffs en route to their championship victory against the Boston Celtics. Remember also, that the Warriors lost one of their starters in the Western Conference Semifinals, Gary Payton II, to a broken elbow, re-built their rotation around his absence, and managed to re-integrate him back into key minutes during the NBA Finals. Impressive stuff.
Steve Kerr pushed all the right buttons, over and over again, and did so not only in the highest-leverage moments of the season but in seemingly meaningless regular-season games. I’ll gladly admit that I can get hysterical about substitution patterns and offensive schemes. But this season is a vindication of Steve Kerr and the long game that he preaches and practices — a long game that might be maddening when you watch G-League level players sniff out the Warriors’ pet action split post sets in the doldrums of the late-January regular-season games, but one that is immensely satisfying when the Warriors’ role players know how to execute the team’s offensive sets deep in the playoffs after not having played meaningful minutes in weeks.
Let’s get into some of the coaching staff’s decisions and victories in more detail.
Revamping the Warriors’ coaching staff
After failing to advance out of the play-in tournament in the 2020-21 season, the Warriors hired three assistant coaches to address some of their weaknesses from that season. Jama Mahlalela, a former assistant coach for the Toronto Raptors and head coach for their G-League, was hired to revamp the Warriors’ player development system; Kenny Atkinson, former head coach of an overachieving Brooklyn Nets team that reached the playoffs with a roster young roster of projects and rejects, was brought in to provide insight on the “different level we can get to as a staff, in terms of what to do with the analytics, how to potentially use them,” Kerr said last summer; Dejan Milojević, who coached adolescent versions of Nikola Jokic and Ivica Zubac, was very obviously brought in as a big-man coach whose efforts would focus on primarily on the development of James Wiseman.
The Warriors’ coaching staff, which had mostly been the same over the previous seasons, was in need of a shakeup and Steve Kerr told The Athletic’s Anthony Slater that he was concerned they might have developed a penchant for “groupthink.” During that bizarre and frustrating 2020-21 season, the Warriors’ coaching staff seemed to be at a loss for how to integrate James Wiseman and Kelly Oubre Jr. into their rotation. Again, it seems clear in retrospect that political considerations might have forced them into starting roles that they were not suited for — recall, for example, Kerr saying in January of 2021 this about his starting lineup of Curry/Wiggins/Oubre/Green/Wiseman: “If I had to win a game tomorrow, I wouldn't start that group.”
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