The 2021-22 Golden State Warriors in-review: Juan Toscano-Anderson
Juan Toscano-Anderson: C+
In the waning seconds of the Golden State Warriors’ loss to the Memphis Grizzlies in the 2021 play-in tournament, an unlikely lineup closed the game: Steph Curry, Jordan Poole, Andrew Wiggins, Juan Toscano-Anderson, and Draymond Green. After injuries to Kelly Oubre Jr. and James Wiseman unclogged the frontcourt, JTA, a Bay Area product from Castro Valley High School, turned himself into an essential part of the Warriors’ rotation. In a high-stakes April road game against the Boston Celtics, Juan dove over the scorer’s table to chase a loose ball, cut his head open, and had to enter the NBA’s concussion protocols. This moment, which came a few weeks before he signed his first fully-guaranteed contract, was the one that made Juan immortal in my eyes.
At his best, JTA provided relentless hustle, tough perimeter defense and rebounding at the 4, and clever, if somewhat reckless playmaking in dribble-handoffs and the short roll. But the three-point shooting that made Toscano-Anderson into a high-level rotation player all but disappeared this season and his playing time shrunk. That might be a chicken-or-egg situation. Would Juan’s shot have stayed at its above-average percentage from the previous season if he’d gotten consistent playing time? It’s hard to say. The moment that Jonathan Kuminga staked a credible claim to playing time with impressive perimeter defense — and of course, organizational politics — Toscano-Anderson’s future with the Warriors was put in jeopardy.
In mid-November, JTA found himself on the outskirts of the rotation and was called into duty during an ugly road game against the Cleveland Cavaliers. Toscano-Anderson was sloppy, disturbingly so, in his first few minutes but Steve Kerr stuck with him and he gave the Warriors a jolt of much-needed life. Here’s JTA doing a presser that night:
In JTA’s words:
“I think the only difficult part is just having the desire to play. I love this game. This is my life right here. I put so much effort and, you know, emotion into this game, so I just always want to play,” [...] “But at the end of the day, I’m an adult and I’m understanding of what my job and what my role is on this team, and I’m accepting of it. I could sit here and pout about it, but what good is that gonna do?” “It’s all about perspective man,” [...]“I could be anywhere else in the world, I could be on any other team. I could be on a losing team. Shit, I could be back in the G League. But I’m on the best team in the NBA, my hometown team, I get to play with Hall of Famers. Perspective, man.”
Juan was a good soldier about his diminished playing time. But even as his playing time shrunk due to win-chasing and the organizational desire to find minutes for Jonathan Kuminga, he still managed to play in 73 games and start 6 of them. What Juan ended up being to this year’s Warriors team was a locker-room guy, a stalking horse for Jonathan Kuminga, and an occasional jolt to the arm. Whenever Kuminga stopped prioritizing the things the coaching staff asked of him, JTA would make his way back into the rotation. And on nights that the Warriors didn’t have it or needed a severe shakeup, JTA would come in.
My favorite Juan moment came on an otherwise miserable night, March 16, the game where Steph Curry’s leg was injured after Marcus Smart dove into it. The Celtics’ defense had suffocated the Warriors that night — even before Curry’s injury — but in the third quarter, Jordan Poole put the team on his back and shrank a 24-point Boston lead to 10 by the end of the period. JTA came in with the Warriors down 17 points. He’d only played 9 minutes in the previous three games, all of which came in garbage time or insignificant cameos, but he immediately got to work doing what he did best: playing in two-man games with Jordan Poole.
JTA was not a part of the Warriors’ playoff rotation but he did make a few non-garbage time appearances in the Western Conference Finals against the Dallas Mavericks. Unfortunately, his playoff stints will likely be remembered by him embracing the worst parts of the Draymond Green Experience.
If Juan had upped his three-point volume and stayed near the 40.2% mark he shot during the 2020-21 season, he might have staved off Jonathan Kuminga’s claim to playing time. There’s no shame in JTA not being part of the Warriors’ playoff rotation when Draymond Green, Kevon Looney, and Otto Porter Jr. are your best frontcourt players. But there was a path to JTA making himself a lot of money in free agency by trying to make himself into a facsimile of Jae Crowder rather than leaning into the Draymond Green comparisons and allowing his three-point shooting to go from 41% of all of his non-garbage time shots to a mere 29%.
Juan Toscano-Anderson was a good Warrior and he should eat for free in the Bay Area. Even though he did not contribute to playoff wins this season, he played a huge role in the Warriors’ 15-5 run at the end of the 2020-21 season. Steve Kerr said in interviews that this run helped convince him that the Warriors could still be THE WARRIORS if they stuck to their principles and played the Warriors’ way. In that regard, Juan’s performance in an otherwise lost season still paid dividends this season because he helped the Warriors find themselves again.
Juan Toscano-Anderson’s statistical profile (career bests bolded):
73 games played, 13.6 minutes a game, 4.1 points a game, 2.4 rebounds, 1.7 assists, 0.9 turnovers, 0.7 steals, 0.7 blocks, and 1.6 fouls
48.9% FG, 32.2% 3P, 71% FT, 56.1 TS% (-0.5% league average TS), 54.9% EFG (+1.7 league average EFG).
3.2 FGA, 1.2 3PA, 1.0 FTA.
BBREF: 106 ORTG, 106 DRTG, +3.8 +/- per 100 poss., 0.7 VORP, 1.30 WS/48, 11% USG.
NBA.com: 109.4 ORTG, 105.6 DRTG, -1.4 net rating, 14.7% USG.
-4.9 DIFF in non-garbage time (25th percentile), 49th percentile usage, 36th percentile PSA, 88th percentile AST%, 96th percentile AST:Usg, 1st percentile TOV% among forwards..
-0.90 ORPM, -2.38 DRPM, -3.28 RPM (#336 rank of 557 players).
Juan Toscano-Anderson went from ranking as a mostly positive player in most advanced metrics in the 2020-21 season to grading out as a slight negative. Cleaning the Glass, which only tallies numbers for non-garbage time minutes, provides the most illuminating numbers for JTA. Take, for example, his 32.2% shooting from deep. That’s not great! It’s even worse when you remove garbage time minutes. In meaningful playing time, Juan shot 27.4% from deep. I will concede that uneven playing time likely played a role in this shooting decline. There’s an argument to be made that playing out of position did as well.
Per Cleaning the Glass, Juan played 21% of his minutes at the small forward and 79 % at the power forward. Given the permeability of positions in the NBA, let’s take those positional distinctions with a grain of salt. But it is notable just how much JTA’s numbers change per position. Juan’s 2P% is a below-average 37th percentile at the small forward, where shot 50% on twos, but as a power forward, his 57.6% is good for a 70th percentile rate. He also tallied a 22.2% TOV as a small forward against an 18% TOV as a power forward. Neither is great, but it’s still a notable difference. Juan playing at the 3 didn’t just hurt JTA, it hurt the Warriors, who had a -8.8 net rating. Put Juan at the power forward and the Warriors were +2.9, but what is curious is that offensive rating is stable across at exactly 113.0 for Juan at either forward position — it’s defense the Warriors’ defense that evidently struggled with JTA at the SF, to the tune of a 121.8 DRTG.
Another interesting stat from Cleaning the Glass: JTA went from having a perfectly tolerable foul percentage (how many fouls per team play) of 3.9% in 2020-21 to a 10th percentile 4.9% this past season. You may recall several instances of Juan fouling three-point shooters, committing ticky-tack fouls defending in isolation, or biting on pump fakes. If it felt like that happened more this season, it’s because it did.
Again, I think that uneven playing time played a role in Juan’s occasionally erratic stints. It often felt that JTA’s performances were a flip of the coin whose results you’d know within only a few possessions. That’s not an indictment of Juan, but rather an acknowledgment of the precarious life of an NBA role player,
Juan Toscano-Anderson’s playoff performance:
Cleaning the Glass only counts 10 minutes of non-garbage time in the playoffs. That’s too much of a sample size to draw anything from, so we’re going to skip over this section.
Juan Toscano-Anderson’s shooting profile:
Restricted area: 66.3% on 101 attempts.
Non-restricted area paint: 45.2% on 42 attempts.
Mid-range: 20% on 5 attempts.
Left corner 3: 22.1% on 13 attempts.
Right corner 3: 30% on 10 attempts.
Above the break 3: 34.9% on 63 attempts.
Floaters: 25% on 4 attempts.
Layups and fingers rolls: 54.6% on 119 attempts.
FGA% per total drives: 32.4% from 42.8
Assisted by: Stephen Curry (21), Jordan Poole (16), Draymond Green (11), Chris Chiozza (9), Nemanja Bjelica (6), Andrew Wiggins and Damion Lee (5), Jonathan Kuminga (3), Gary Payton II and Klay Thompson (2), Andre Iguodala and Kevon Looney and Moses Moody and Otto Porter Jr. (1).
FGM% assisted: 73.0%
FGM% unassisted: 27.0%
There are a few things in Juan’s shot profile that should be a red flag for garbage time minutes — Chris Chiozza assisting JTA more often than all but three Warriors is an obvious tell as is Juan taking 13 pull-up threes this past season. Juan also managed to make more unassisted field goals as a percentage of all of his field-goal makes. JTA self-creation was definitely not a staple of meaningful minutes, so we can attribute some of that to garbage time too.
JTA’s shot profile supports the idea that he was more reluctant to shoot on this Warriors’ team than he was the previous season. Take, for example, Juan’s drive stats. In the 2021-21 season, he shot the ball on 42.8% of his drives. This past season, he shot the ball on less than a third of his drives. Juan also went from passing on 46% of his drives to 48.3% this most recent season.
But this season, with a larger sample size of 49 field goal attempts on drives, Juan shot 51%, whereas in the previous season that percentage was 60.6%. When I filter for players to drive more than 75 times and play more than 41 games, Juan ranked 6th in the league in field-goal percentage on drives during that 2020-21 season, just behind his future teammate, LeBron James. Obviously, a small sample size offers some necessary context here. But over a larger one this most recent season, Juan’s field-goal percentage is barely in the top 100 in the league on drives.
Role players are subject to the whims of small sample sizes, changing roles, and inconsistent minutes. Juan Toscano-Anderson’s numbers were far more pedestrian in his third season with the Warriors. This Warriors’ team had players that were obviously more deserving of playing time than JTA and so his minutes shrank accordingly. Under those circumstances, it’s not surprising his efficiency went down, but that’s also not to say that reduced playing time is the culprit for his shooting woes. That might be something of a chicken-or-egg question, one that Juan’s new employers, the Los Angeles Lakers, might give him a shot of answering.
Here’s Juan’s shot chart from Positive Residual:
The lineup stats!
We’ll start with Cleaning the Glass’ non-garbage time lineups.
I’ve highlighted the positive lineups below in green.
The second most-used lineup on this list might look familiar to you — Curry/Poole/Wiggins/JTA/Green closed the doomed play-in game against the Grizzlies after finding traction at the end of the 2020-21 regular season. This was the lineup that felt the most Warriors in that bizarre season and it rocked a +33.8 net rating in its 62 minutes together in this championship season.
The second-most used lineup here, it’s an outlier that is effectively meaningless. You might ask yourself how a lineup with so little spacing kicked so much ass — the reason is that it played literally all of its minutes this season in one game against a tanking Detroit Pistons team. Discount that lineup entirely. The other lineups that rate well have a healthy amount of shooting. JTA alongside Nemanja Bjelica was mostly a good thing, as was JTA surrounded by Steph Curry and other shooters.
15-most used 3 -man combos (positive ones bolded):
Curry/Lee/JTA: +7.7 net rating (116.9 ORTG) in 204 minutes.
Lee/JTA/Kuminga: +15.3 net rating (119.4 ORTG) in 184 minutes.
Poole/Lee/JTA: +2.8 net rating (107.9 ORTG) in 180 minutes.
Poole/Wiggins/JTA: +10.6 net rating (110.1 ORTG) in 171 minutes.
Curry/JTA/Bjelica: +7.2 net rating (108 ORTG) in 171 minutes.
Curry/Wiggins/JTA: +4.1 net rating (114.3 ORTG) in 166 minutes.
Curry/JTA/OPJ: +13.5 net rating (114.1 ORTG) in 164 minutes.
Lee/JTA/Bjelica: +8.9 net rating (113.0 ORTG) in 161 minutes.
Moody/JTA/Kuminga: -2.2 net rating (106.5 ORTG) in 143 minutes.
Curry/GPII/JTA: +16.8 net rating (110.5 ORTG) in 135 minutes.
Poole/JTA/Kuminga: +4.3 net rating (110.5 ORTG) in 134 minutes.
Curry/Poole/JTA: +3.9 net rating (114.7 ORTG) in 133 minutes.
Lee/Moody/JTA: +6.3 net rating (115.8 ORTG) in 124 minutes.
GPII/JTA/Bjelica: +4.6 net rating (105 ORTG) in 122 minutes.
Poole/Moody/JTA: -7.0 net rating (104.4 ORTG) in 117 minutes.
As a rule of thumb, we can say that any minutes Steph Curry played with Juan were meaningful ones. Now combinations that include one of the rookies and, say, Damion Lee? I’m inclined to think those are garbage time units or ones that played the majority of their minutes during periods of time where the Warriors’ aging core got a night off or suffered an injury.
You will notice, however, that Draymond Green doesn’t show up in this list. Green’s first appearance comes at the 19th most-used 3-man combo for JTA: Curry/Green/JTA. That trio tallied a +17.2 net rating and 112.1 ORTG in 109 minutes together this past season.
Notable 2 man combos (positive ones bolded):
Curry/JTA: +7.5 net rating (114.1 ORTG) in 492 minutes.
Lee/JTA: +4.8 net rating (112.9 ORTG) in 488 minutes.
Poole/JTA: +1.8 net rating (107.5 ORTG) in 439 minutes.
JTA/Bjelica: +4.8 net rating (105.5 ORTG) in 338 minutes.
JTA/Kuminga: +4.3 net rating (109.8 ORTG) in 332 minutes.
GPII/JTA: +7.7 net rating (109 ORTG) in 304 minutes.
Wiggins/JTA: +6.9 net rating (108.5 ORTG) in 296 minutes.
JTA/OPJ: +5.4 net rating (107.8 ORTG) in 237 minutes.
Moody/JTA: -2.9 net rating (108.5 ORTG) in 227 minutes.
JTA/Looney: -10 net rating (105.3 ORTG) in 213 minutes.
JTA/Green: +4.0 net rating (105.1 ORTG) in 180 minutes.
Chiozza/JTA: -10.8 net rating (91.5 ORTG) in 171 minutes.
Thompson/JTA: +4.2 net rating (115.3 ORTG) in 114 minutes.
Iguodala/JTA: +6.8 net rating (107.8 ORTG) in 95 minutes.
Weatherspoon/JTA: -39 net rating (93.1 ORTG) in 27 minutes.
Only three of the combos listed above have an ORTG above the league average 112.0 — Curry/JTA, Lee/JTA, and Thompson/JTA. That last 2-man combo is one that I wish had gotten more playing time together. Juan Toscano-Anderson would have been well equipped to make the most of Klay Thompson’s floor spacing if they’d had more time to acclimate to each other.
Anything else of note here? I think it makes sense that Juan didn’t spend much time alongside Kevon Looney, but I think he probably would have looked better if he’d spent more time playing next to Draymond Green. There’s not really much of anything to complain about with these lineup combos — the Warriors won a championship barely playing Juan!!! — but they are still interesting numbers to look at.
What’s next for Juan Toscano-Anderson?
Juan Toscano-Anderson received the second guaranteed contract of his career early in free agency with the Los Angeles Lakers. On an unrelated note, Juan is a client of Klutch Sports Group. Somehow, nearly half of the Lakers’ 15-man roster comprises Klutch clients. I wonder why that is???
I digress. I’m having a laugh at the Lakers. I do not mean to disparage Juan’s place in the NBA. He’s earned it. He won a championship and while he didn’t make a significant on-court contribution in this playoff run, he was a key member of the team that went 15-5 the season, a run that helped the Warriors re-orient themselves and gave them a blueprint for what type of players to look for the following offseason. Juan was, by all accounts, a good soldier in the Warriors’ locker room and a beloved community figure.
Given the brick-y makeup of the Lakers’ roster — LeBron James is their best three-point shooter by percentage right now — I don’t think Juan makes all that much sense as a basketball fit for the Lakers. But he has some gravitas, I’d imagine, at least in comparison to the rest of the Lakers’ very young and unproven roster. That Lakers team is unlikely to contend and should be lucky to make the playoffs. But Juan should be one of the Lakers’ smarter players and one of their most proven.
It’s possible that with increased playing time, Juan finds his legs from deep again. Maybe in a system that isn’t movement-based, one where he does not have to always look for Steph Curry or Klay Thompson, or Jordan Poole, Juan will be more willing to fire from deep. For his sake, I hope he becomes a key player for this Lakers team. I will never root for the Lakers, but I’ll be happy to root for Juan from a distance and hope that he plays himself into a bigger contract and gets back onto the path of being a new-age Jae Crowder, rather than a cheap imitation of Draymond Green.