The 2021-22 Golden State Warriors season-in-review: Damion Lee
Damion Lee's elite finishing isn't enough to prop up his shooting woes, Lee's shot distribution and elite percentages in 21-22 vs. this past season, and his surprising fit alongside Nemanja Bjelica
Damion Lee’s grade: C
In his final meaningful stint of playing time with the Golden State Warriors, Damion Lee made a mess during the second quarter of Game 2 of the Western Conference Finals. In a matter of minutes, Lee got tangled up in a bizarre not-exactly-scuffle with Davis Bertans that “earned” them double technical fouls. A few possessions later, Lee bit on a pump fake and gifted Bertans his first paint field goal of the playoffs. Oh, and he missed two threes and turned the ball over before the Bertans incident. In total, Lee played less than 5 minutes and tallied a -12 in his second-quarter stint. OOf.
Damion Lee was a good Warrior but he was also good for one high-profile meltdown a year. Those incidents — missed free throws and a turnover against the 76ers in March of 2020 and a turnover on a potential game-winning shot against the Wizards in April of 2021 — have unfairly tainted Lee in the eyes of many Warriors fans. Damion Lee received as much public vitriol as I’ve ever seen for a player on a minimum salary contract and his familial relationship with Steph Curry is the obvious explanation for why that vitriol was so vicious.
But for four years, Damion Lee executed the coaching staff’s gameplans with vigor and played with maximum effort whenever he was on the court. Lee was, improbably, the fifth-most tenured Warrior on this past season’s roster (Andre Iguodala obviously had a longer Warrior tenure but had his stint interrupted by his time in Memphis and Miami) and was an early-season staple of the rotation.
In Lee’s first 9 games of the season, he averaged 24.1 minutes a game and was occasionally tasked with finishing games. Lee was a worthy candidate to close games. Through those first 9 games, Lee was averaging nearly 12 points a game on 48/44/87 shooting splits. That type of production from a vet minimum contract player is found money. Look who is out there making the assist to Steph Curry for the dagger three in this October game against the Clippers!
On November 10th, Lee missed the first of two games with a hip contusion. After Lee returned to action, his shooting cratered over the next 6 games and he shot only 2/15 from deep. In late November, Lee missed three games for personal reasons and to attend the birth of one of his children. Lee played another 9 games upon his return before entering the league’s health and safety protocols right before Christmas. So that’s three absences of varying length that disrupted what had been a brilliant start to the season for Lee. From the time of his return from his hip contusion until rough his COVID diagnosis, Damion Lee tallied 40/27/87 shooting splits in a little under 19 minutes. That right there, that’s the type of inconsistency that defines veteran minimum-level contract players.
When Lee returned to action early in the new year, he was still a part of the rotation. But on the night of Klay Thompson’s January 9th return, Lee got his first DNP of the season. It’s fair to wonder if he might have continued to receive DNP’s on the nights that Klay Thompson played if Draymond Green’s absence had not opened up 28-30 minutes that needed to be filled. In an ideal world, Lee was an innings-eater backup who could soak up regular-season minutes prior to Thompson’s return and if necessary, play emergency minutes in the playoffs. But injuries happen in the regular season — Green and Curry’s injuries, for example — and on a roster where your other backup wing options are either 37 or 19 years old, it was inevitable that Damion Lee would play significant regular-season minutes.
In the 2019 and 2021 playoffs and play-in tournaments, Damion Lee’s absence hurt the Warriors. Lee was on a two-way contract in 2019 and probably a better playoff option than Alfonzo McKinnie, Jacob Evans, or Damion Jones, but nobody expected that the Warriors would need a slight improvement on McKinnie to win a championship until they got hit by a brutal spate of catastrophic injuries. In the spring of 2021, Lee was one of the first vaguely notable public figures to get a case of breakthrough COVID after the widespread distribution of vaccines in the United States. The Warriors could have used a player who was just slightly better than Mychal Mulder or Kent Bazemore during the play-in tournaments, but this time, circumstances out of Lee’s control took away his opportunity to prove himself.
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