The Golden State Warriors season-in-review: Andrew Wiggins
My mea culpa on Wiggins, his his' early-season All-Star push. his months-long free-throw shooting slump, the quality of shots he took, his emergence as a playoff contributor, and much more
Andrew Wiggins grade: A-
Andrew Wiggins’ regular season:
I want to start this article with a confession. As recently as April, I spent a lot of time on ESPN’s trade machine inventing deals where the Warriors traded Andrew Wiggins in the offseason. My reasoning was simple: I wanted to split Wiggins’ max-salary slot into smaller contracts, clear money for Jordan Poole’s next contract, and create more minutes for Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody.
The solution that appealed most to me was a multi-team deal with the Warriors trading Wiggins and James Wiseman for Kyle Kuzma, Cory Joseph, Kelly Olynyk, and Isaiah Stewart. I didn’t trust Andrew Wiggins to be a playoff performer and I thought Kuzma could give the Warriors some much-needed wing rebounding and second unit-scoring while opening up a starting spot for Jordan Poole. Turning Wiseman into two quality backup centers — one a bruiser (Stewart), and one a playmaking stretch-5 tailor-made for Steve Kerr (Olynyk) — was a cherry on top, I believed.
I bring up my previous desire to trade Wiggins for two reasons: 1. I think it’s good to own up to bad takes and 2. I think it’s important to examine how and why our opinions change.
Andrew Wiggins was voted an All-Star starter after a brilliant first few months of the season, but I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Prior to Wiggins’ positive COVID-19 diagnosis in mid-December, he scored 18.7 points a game on 49/42/71 shooting splits. Wiggins shot 39% from deep the season prior, so it wasn’t out of the question that he’d made another leap, but consider these stats: Wiggins’ career-high three-point shooting percentage prior to his Warriors’ tenure was just 35.6% and his highest free-throw percentage since the start Donald Trump’s presidency was just 71.4%.
If you, like me, don’t trust mediocre free-throw shooters to maintain efficient volume shooting, then it follows logically that Wiggins’ shooting would eventually come down to earth. That is exactly what happened after the NBA announced its All-Star starters on January 28th.
From that date until the end of the regular season, Wiggins shot just 57.7% from the free-throw line and 36.5% from deep but his free-throw shooting slump actually dates back to late December. Wiggins shot just 57.4% from the free-throw line in between his return from COVID and the announcement of his All-Star berth, but that was overlooked as she shot 39.3% from three over those 15 games.
I thought it was mildly embarrassing that Andrew Wiggins’ starting spot in the All-Star Game was partly due to a K-Pop-influenced Twitter voting spree, but he was a worthy All-Star. Wiggins’ All-Star candidacy began in earnest on November 10, the Warriors’ 11th game of the season. On that night, Wiggins faced off against his former team, the Minnesota Timberwolves, and scored 35 points on 14/19 shooting and dunked twice on his former teammate, Karl-Anthony Towns. You can see those dunks below:
Long-time Wiggins observers weren’t surprised by this performance — throughout his time in Minnesota, he was known for playing up to his potential against very specific teams and players, only to recede into the background against lesser opponents. Here’s an excerpt from The Athletic’s Anthony Slater’s post-game recap of that Timberwolves’ game, including quotes from KAT and Steph Curry about Wiggins:
During his Minnesota days, it was known amongst Timberwolves people that Wiggins would get up most for games against the Raptors and Cavaliers. He’s from Toronto and Cleveland is the franchise that drafted and traded him for Kevin Love, at LeBron James’ request. Against both teams, he’d perform like an All-Star.
“He always does that,” Towns said. “Cavaliers trade him, Wolves, you expect him to come out and play well.”
[...]
“That’s up to [Wiggins],” Curry said. “The player he wants to be every single night. He’s on this team for a reason. So whatever he needs to find to get that motivation, we’re going to have his back.”
Curry is normally a bit more diplomatic, but this public desire for a more consistently aggressive Wiggins was direct.
“I’m gonna text Wiggs that picture of him dunking on KAT every game, right before the game,” Curry said. “Let’s see if that helps get the juices flowing. He has 72 text messages from me coming his way.”
In the 17 games between his Minnesota revenge game and his positive COVID-19 diagnosis, Andrew Wiggins scored 19.5 points a game on 50/46/65 shooting splits, including a 32-point night against the Toronto Raptors, 19 points and sturdy defense in a win against the Phoenix Suns, a career-high 8 made threes in a 28-point night against the Orlando Magic, and 27 points in against the Celtics during his last pre-COVID game. Here are some of Wiggins’ best moments from that stretch:
Andrew Wiggins played only five games in between his return from COVID-19 and the return of Klay Thompson on January 9th. Wiggins picked up where he left off and scored over 20 points in four of those five games so it doesn’t seem like COVID-19 had a noticeable impact on his game or his health. What had a far more noticeable impact on Wiggins’ season was not the return of Klay Thompson, but a herniated disc injury to Draymond Green.
In the nearly 30 games that Draymond missed, Andrew Wiggins’ defensive role changed. The Warriors gave up 111.3 points per 100 possessions (this is team-calculated DRTG, by the way!) in that stretch, compared to their 103.2 DRTG in the 38 games prior. For additional context: league-average DRTG in the 2021-22 season was 112.0 and although the Warriors still finished the season with the league’s best defensive rating, their 106.9 DRTG was 3.7 points worse per 100 possessions than what they were on pace for prior to Draymond’s injury.
Andrew Wiggins only missed one of the 29 games that Draymond sat, but in these games, he never took more than five free throws in a single game, he had 13 games without a made free throw and shot 49.2% from the line over this period. What happened to Andrew Wiggins during that period? My best guess: he was dead tired from defensive overwork.
In April, I published an interview that I conducted with an old internet friend of mine, FNQ, who works with machine learning models that track defensive rotations. In our conversation, FNQ repeatedly brought up how much ground Wiggins covered on a per-minute basis for the Warriors. Per FNQ, Wiggins not only led the team in defensive distance covered by a significant amount — no small forward held offensive players to a lower percentage when contesting shots than Andrew Wiggins.
But during Draymond Green’s absence, the Warriors’ interior defense suffered as Andrew Wiggins played more minutes at the 4.. That’s not a dig on Wiggins — Green is one of one as a defensive force — but rather an acknowledgment that he’s a perimeter-oriented defender whose instincts aren’t honed towards interior defense. Here are a few examples of Wiggins and the Warriors’ sloppy defense during Green’s absence:
Take note of the Warriors’ frontcourt in that final clip: Otto Porter Jr. and Jonathan Kuminga. Shortly after Draymond Green’s injury, Andre Iguodala had his own injury and only played 7 of the 29 games that Green missed while Otto Porter Jr. missed 9 of those 29 games. As a result, Jonathan Kuminga was forced into a bigger role with mixed results. Is it any surprise that the Warriors’ defense suffered as they gave frontcourt minutes to a raw rookie while their two most experienced and most brilliant defenders sat?
Andrew Wiggins’ free-throw shooting slump and the Warriors’ defensive struggles in that period were a perfect storm of circumstances that I didn’t weigh properly while evaluating Wiggins in the regular season. Part of my regular-season frustration with Wiggins was also influenced by the mid-season play of Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody. During the stretch of games that Draymond missed, Kuminga broke out, and from the beginning of February until the return of Dray, Kuminga averaged 15.1 points a game on 56/36/77 shooting splits. During that 17-game stretch, Kuminga had a game where he capably defended LeBron James, helped close out the Los Angeles Clippers in crunch time and contributed a 14-point and 11-rebound double-double in an impressive win against the Milwaukee Bucks.
During that same stretch, Moses Moody forced his way into the rotation and averaged 8.2 points a game on 48/44/79 shooting splits. Moody also played big minutes in that aforementioned crunch-time victory against the Clippers and hinted at an advanced offensive repertoire in load-management games as he scored 20 points on 12 shots against the San Antonio Spurs and 30 points on 5/12 shooting from deep against the Denver Nuggets.
Andrew Wiggins, on the other hand, averaged 13.9 points on 41/35/39 shooting splits over that same period. The Warriors' record during that stretch was 8-9 — in retrospect, I should have connected the dots between Wiggins’ struggles, increased minutes for the Warriors’ rookies, and the team’s win-loss record during that stretch.
But I didn’t connect those dots. Instead, I got even more hyped imagining a future without Andrew Wiggins’ after Draymond Green’s first game back, one that Wiggins happened to miss. In a 14-point win against the Washington Wizards, the Warriors’ defense looked fine without Wiggins as Steph Curry, Jordan Poole, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, and Kevon Looney played their first minutes together all season. A more sober and less reactionary mind would have remembered that the Warriors did this against a bad Washington Wizards team.
Things fell apart for the Warriors the very next game when Steph Curry got hurt, but in the final games of the season, Andrew Wiggins’ aggression returned and his free-throw shooting bounced back to his career norms. In the Warriors’ emotional victory/loss against the Phoenix Suns, Wiggins shot 8 free throws, but more importantly, he gave a hint of what was to come in the playoffs with tough defense and 8 rebounds. Here are a few moments from that game:
Speaking of rebounds — in the 73 games that Andrew Wiggins played in the 2021-22 season, he only grabbed more than 5 rebounds in 21 of those games. During the non-Draymond stretch, Wiggins only grabbed >5 rebounds in five games. This is to say, nobody had any reason to believe that Andrew Wiggins would become the second coming of Gerald Wallace (7.5 rebounds a game from the small forward position in his ages 22 through 28 seasons) during the playoffs.
Anyone who claims clairvoyance about Andrew Wiggins’ playoff performance is lying to you. There was no precedent for Wiggins changing his game in such dramatic fashion in the playoffs, but I’m glad he did! Andrew Wiggins’ biggest fans believed for quite some time that his star turn was inevitable. But what they missed was how he’d turn into a star. At one point during the spring of 2021, my Twitter feed was filled with disbelief that some crazed Warriors fans preferred Andrew Wiggins to Paul George:
That version of Andrew Wiggins who was promised — a superstar scoring wing — never emerged. During the regular season, Wiggins solidified himself as an elite perimeter defender whose only real flaw was not being able to cover for Draymond Green and Andre Iguodala during the Warriors’ most tumultuous stretch of the season. On offense, Wiggins accepted a tertiary role, one that was easier to swallow late in the season after Jordan Poole’s emergence as Steph Curry Version 0.83.
The regular-season version of Andrew Wiggins was a valuable player, but not necessarily one I would have trusted in the playoffs. In retrospect, I think I was hard on Wiggins for the right reasons — he was obviously capable of becoming a monster rebounder and his playoff emergence proved that! — but I didn’t contextualize his regular-season struggles properly. On n a mostly healthy Warriors team, Andrew Wiggins proved he was one of the best wing defenders in basketball and a capable third option. During the low points of Wiggins’ regular season, I forgot what he’d already shown and got too enamored with unproven rookies, shiny objects that they are.
In 22 playoff games, Andrew Wiggins scored 16.5 points a game on 47/33/65 shooting splits, which was in line with his career shooting splits of 45/35/72. This is to say, the playoff version of Andrew Wiggins was more or less who he’d been for his entire career on offense. What changed is that Wiggins grew in ways that were both unexpected and long desired.
Hopefully, Wiggins’ playoff growth can inform how we evaluate players in the future and serve as a reminder of a few things:
1. There is nothing wrong with holding underperforming players to a higher standard
2. Slumps and periods of bad play don’t happen in a vacuum
and...
3. There is nothing wrong with changing our minds when new information presents itself.
Andrew Wiggins’ statistical profile (career-bests bolded and career-worsts italicized):
73 games played, 31.9 minutes a game, 17.2 points a game, 4.5 rebounds, 2.2 assists, 1.5 turnovers, 1.0 steals, 0.6 blocks, and 2.6 fouls per game.
46.6% FG, 39.3% 3P, 63.4% FT, 56.0 TS% (-0.6% league-average TS), 54.3% EFG (+1.1% league-average EFG).
14.0 FGA, 5.5 3PA, 3.2 FTA
BBREF: 109 ORTG, 109 DRTG, +0.5 +/- on/off per 100 poss., 1.4 VORP, 1.05 WS/48, 23.1% USG.
NBA.com: 111.2 ORTG, 105.4 DRTG, +5.8 net rating, 22.4% USG.
+0.8 DIFF in non-garbage time (48th percentile), 85th percentile usage, 53rd percentile PSA, 66th percentile AST%, 34th percentile AST:Usg, 67th percentile TOV% among combos.
-0.70 ORPM, +4.34 DRPM, +3.64 RPM (#49 rank of 557 players).
If Andrew Wiggins hadn’t slumped from the free-throw line, it’s likely he’d have turned in his first season with a True Shooting percentage of league average or better. Despite shooting a career-best 39.3% from deep, Wiggins remained just 0.6 points below average per TS%, although his EFG% was slightly above average. I expected that Wiggins would improve his two-point shooting this past season, but he regressed slightly from the 52.9% he shot in the 2020-21 season, to 51.3%, which is still the second-best mark of his career.
Wiggins’ poor free-throw shooting was a blight on an otherwise solid year for him offensively. Wiggins took the second-least amount of shots per game in his career and played his role effectively within the Warriors’ offense. But on a fairly easy diet of shots (more on that later), Wiggins was still only in the 53rd percentile in Cleaning the Glass’ points-per-shot-attempt metric (PSA), which helps explain his offensive impact grading within a stone’s throw of neutral for all three of BPM, RPM, and EPM.
Let’s just ignore RPM for a minute here and go back to BPM and EPM. Per BPM, Wiggins grades out just barely above neutral overall and only 0.1 points better than neutral on defense. You watched Andrew Wiggins this past season and your eyes probably tell you he was a plus defender. For good measure, here are some clips to remind you who he can be on defense:
Shot contest percentages and Wiggins Island clips be damned, the composite impact metrics are meh on Andrew Wiggins’ defense. I’d suspect this has something to do with stocks (combined steals and blocks) and rebounding numbers eerily similar to a pre-injury Klay Thompson, who has never rated as a positive defender per BPM, despite doing excellent work at the point of attack in his athletic prime.
EPM seems like it has the closest read of Wiggins’ defensive impact as he ranks as the 72nd-most impactful defender in basketball and the 35th-best non-big on D. That number feels ok to me when I remember how the Warriors’ defense looked like without Draymond Green and immediately after Steph Curry’s injury.
One last thing of note: Wiggins’ +0.8 net rating differential is the second-worst of his career, but that number is deceptive. Save for the 2020-21 season, Andrew Wiggins’ teams have always performed better with him on the court than off. The catch has been that most of his teams were quite bad. In Wiggins’ best year per net differential, 2015-16, the Timberwolves were +10.6 points per 100 possessions better with Wiggins on the court, but his net rating was merely -1.2. Yikes. This most recent season, Wiggins tallied a career-best +5.6 net rating in his non-garbage time minutes — this was only the fourth time in his career that he even had a positive net rating.
Andrew Wiggins’ shooting profile:
Restricted area: 71.6% on 222 attempts.
Non-restricted area paint: 42.0% on 219 attempts.
Mid-range: 37.2% on 180 attempts.
Left corner 3: 48.3% on 87 attempts.
Right corner 3: 30.8% on 26 attempts.
Above the break 3: 37.5% on 285 attempts.
Floaters: 49.0% on 49 attempts.
Layups and finger rolls: 63.1% on 261 attempts.
FGA% per total drives: 43.1%
Assisted by: Draymond Green (68), Jordan Poole (66), Steph Curry (51), Kevon Looney (38), Otto Porter Jr. (18), Andre Iguodala (14), Klay Thompson (13), Gary Payton II (9), Jonathan Kuminga (6), Damion Lee (5), Nemanja Bjelica (4), Juan Toscano-Anderson and Moses Moody (3), and Chris Chiozza (1).
FGM% assisted: 62.9%
FGM% unassisted: 37.1%
Three-point shots accounted for a greater share of Andrew Wiggins’ shots than they have in any season prior and he became a lethal catch-and-shoot marksman. On a volume quite similar to Jordan Poole and Steph Curry, Wiggins actually outshot both players on catch-and-shoot shots, but let’s provide some additional context: Jordan Poole and Steph Curry took 87 and 181 threes respectively when a defender was within four feet while Wiggins only had 36 such shots. Wiggins shot 33.3% on those shots, by the way, and didn’t register a single “tightly defended” three (a defender less than two feet away). Not all shots are created equal.
In the season prior, Andrew Wiggins actually shot better on pull-up threes than he did catch-and-shoot, albeit on a lower volume. This past season, Wiggins’ pull-up threes went down about six percentage points, but this is now the third season in a row that he has improved his percentage on catch-and-shoot threes. The Mercury News’ Shanya Rubin published a fascinating article this past season on the Warriors’ utilization of shot-tracking programs and how that data had impacted Wiggins’ development in a positive manner. Here’s an excerpt that further contextualizes his three-point shooting numbers:
Jama Mahlalela, one of the Warriors’ newest assistant coaches hired from the analytic-savvy Toronto Raptors, has been tasked with translating that data to Wiggins. The simple ask: Take more threes, even if it feels wrong.
[...]
Wiggins’ simplified scoring objective comes with an index of data that Mahlalela and Warriors coaches that form a “shooting committee” — a group of front office officials and coaches whose names Mahlalela wished not to disclose — utilize.
In addition to effective field goal percentage, coaches use Wiggins’ expected points per possession based on his shooting arc, depth and consistency to determine a three-point shot from just about anywhere beyond the arc is Wiggins’ best option. No tweaks to his shooting motion to be made.
“With Wiggs, we look at NOAH in terms of depth and arc to see if there is consistency,” Mahlalela said. “If you look at those numbers this season, there is a consistent metric. He’s shooting the same way a lot more. I think, when you get successful as a player, they are consistent and confident. Both of them work off each other. And NOAH data, to me, reaffirms that.”
While players might instinctually look for a better shot if a few three-pointers don’t go in, Mahlalela asserts the numbers show three-pointers for Wiggins will always be the right shot. A mentality Wiggins said was easy to adapt with Mahlalela’s reassurance.
While Wiggins took more shots than ever from three, he took fewer shots than he ever has at the rim and his share of shots in the paint has now decreased for three seasons in a row. In Wiggins’ final season with the Timberwolves, the 2019-20 season, 55.9% of his shots came in the paint. Two seasons later, that number decreased to 43.2%. In that 2019-20 season, 53.2% of his shots in the restricted area were unassisted as were 70.9% of his non-restricted paint shots. This past season, 57.2% of Wiggins’ shots in the paint were assisted, but he did still create 59.8% of his shots in the non-restricted area paint.
Wiggins taking fewer shots at the rim had its tradeoffs. The good: Wiggins shot a career-high 71.6% in the restricted area and was the frequent recipient of lobs and clever interior passes from Draymond Green. Here’s a compilation of some Draymond Green assisting Wiggins, which includes countless shots at the rim:
The downside of Wiggins taking fewer shots at the rim? Well, for one, lost opportunities. Andrew Wiggins was surrounded by Steph Curry and Jordan Poole for the first two months of the season and then Klay Thompson joined the team — there’s plenty of spacing opening up driving lanes!!! Improbably, Wiggins’ 213 shot attempts on drives was his smallest amount of attempts since his 2014-15 season.
Rationally I know that Andrew Wiggins shooting more threes and getting more assisted buckets on cuts (106 possessions this past season that registered box-score stats compared to 80 in his final full season with the Timberwolves) is a good thing, but when someone as athletic as Wiggins attacks the hoop less with each passing season, it’s hard to not want for more.
Wiggins did, at least, take the fewest mid-range jumpers in his career this past season, not counting the COVID-19 abbreviated 2019-20 season where he only played 54 games.
Here’s Andrew Wiggins’ regular-season shot chart, courtesy of Positive Residual (take note of all the blue in the mid-range and now consider that this past season’s 37.2% on mid-range shots is only 0.7 below his career-best from the mid-range...):
The lineup stats!
We’ll start with Andrew Wiggins’ 15-most used non-garbage time lineups, courtesy of Cleaning the Glass. I’ve highlighted the positive lineups below in green.
There are just four negative combos here in Wiggins’ 15-most used lineups and three of them are starting lineups that Steve Kerr tried out during injuries to Draymond Green or Steph Curry. Those lineups also happen to be among the only ones listed above that consist entirely of players who will be on next season’s roster. Of the 11 positive lineups in this list, only two of them are made up of players from next season’s roster while the other 9 lineups all include at least one of Gary Payton II or Otto Porter Jr., whose departures I am already sick of lamenting.
15-most used three-man combos (positive ones bolded):
Curry/Wiggins/Looney: +10.7 net rating (114.3 ORTG) in 1046 minutes.
Poole/Wiggins/Looney: +8.6 net rating (114.8 ORTG) in 955 minutes.
Poole/Wiggins/Green: +6.8 net rating (109.9 ORTG) in 820 minutes.
Curry/Poole//Wiggins: +15.2 net rating (117.0 ORTG) in 774 minutes.
Curry/Wiggins/Green: +11.1 net rating (111.7 ORTG) in 631 minutes.
Wiggins/Green/Looney: +4.7 net rating (109.4 ORTG) in 553 minutes.
Poole/Wiggins/OPJ: +17.0 net rating (114.3 ORTG) in 437 minutes.
Thompson/Wiggins/Looney: +6.6 net rating (112.5 ORTG) in 412 minutes.
Curry/Wiggins/OPJ: +7.5 net rating (113.1 ORTG) in 385 minutes.
Poole/GPII/Wiggins: +11.1 net rating (111.2 ORTG) in 378 minutes.
Wiggins/OPJ/Looney: +8.7 net rating (113.0 ORTG) in 352 minutes.
Curry/GPII/Wiggins: +13.4 net rating (112.2 ORTG) in 311 minutes.
Poole/Thompson/Wiggins: +7.1 net rating (115.2 ORTG) in 288 minutes.
Poole/Wiggins/Kuminga: -0.5 net rating (109.7 ORTG) in 285 minutes.
Poole/Lee/Wiggins: -2.0 net rating (102.0 ORTG) in 240 minutes.
Andrew Wiggins played the most minutes of any Warrior this past season, but because of his substitution patterns, he mostly shared the court with the front end of the Warriors’ roster. The broad outline of Andrew Wiggins’ substitution pattern was this: Wiggins started the 1st and 3rd quarters and would sub out somewhere between the 6-minute mark and 3-minute mark, or in some cases, play the entire quarter. Wiggins’ exposure to non-Steph Curry minutes in the second unit was less fairly limited as he’d typically sub in somewhere between the 9-minute mark or the 6-minute mark.
Steve Kerr did tweak Curry’s substitution pattern for part of the season and ditched the classic 12-6-12-6 rotation for something more fragmented, but for the most part, Wiggins’ three-man combos reflect that he played most of his minutes alongside the starters or closers. 9 of the 15 combos listed above are ones that will play in the 2022-23 season and all but one of them is positive. I don’t expect Wiggins’ rotations to change all that much next season, so I’ll be curious to see which Warriors become staples of the second and fourth-quarter closing units.
Notable 2-man combos (positive ones bolded):
Poole/Wiggins: +8.9 net rating (113.0 ORTG) in 1562 minutes.
Curry/Wiggins: +8.6 net rating (112.7 ORTG) in 1447 minutes.
Wiggins/Looney: +7.3 net rating (113.1 ORTG) in 1443 minutes.
Wiggins/Green: +6.6 net rating (109.3 ORTG) in 1002 minutes.
Wiggins/OPJ: +8.2 net rating (111.9 ORTG) in 684 minutes.
GPII/Wiggins: +9.6 net rating (109.6 ORTG) in 654 minutes.
Thompson/Wiggins: +4.6 net rating (112.8 ORTG) in 580 minutes.
Lee/Wiggins: -8.7 net rating (97.8 ORTG) in 434 minutes.
Wiggins/Kuminga: -4.0 net rating (103.8 ORTG) in 433 minutes.
Wiggins/Bjelica: -3.6 net rating (100.5 ORTG) in 307 minutes.
Wiggins/JTA: +6.9 net rating (108.5 ORTG) in 296 minutes.
Moody/Wiggins: -10.1 net rating (96.0 ORTG) in 198 minutes.
Wiggins/Iguodala: +11.2 net rating (106.1 ORTG) in 194 minutes.
Wiggins/Chiozza: +8.2 net rating (104.7 ORTG) in 86 minutes.
It is in the minutes totals that you can see the extent to which Wiggins mainly played with the other Warriors that turned into staples of Steve Kerr’s playoff rotations. This is in contrast to, say, Jordan Poole, who played over 600 minutes with Jonathan Kuminga, 582 minutes with Damion Lee, and 494 minutes with Nemanja Bjelica — and for good reason! Poole was able to maintain positive net ratings in his minutes with players Kuminga and Lee, but Wiggins, for some reason, could not. I expected that the negative net ratings of some of these two-man combos had something to do with the absence of Steph Curry, but I was shocked to find that Curry’s presence actually made things worse for Wiggins’ minutes alongside any of Damion, Jonathan Kuminga, and Nemanja Bjelica.
In 535 non-garbage time possessions of Lee/Wiggins without Steph Curry, the Warriors had a -4.2 net rating while Curry/Lee/Wiggins had a -18.4 net rating in 312 possessions.
In 488 non-garbage time possessions of Wiggins/Kuminga without Steph Curry, the Warriors had a -0.4 net rating while Curry/Wiggins/Kuminga had a -11.4 net rating in 368 possessions.
In 400 non-garbage time possessions of Wiggins/Bjelica without Steph Curry, the Warriors had a +/-0.0 net rating while Curry/Wiggins/Bjelica had a -15.8 net rating in 205 possessions.
Andrew Wiggins’ net rating alongside Steph Cury is his third-highest of any of the above duos to play over minutes 500 minutes together, so it’s obvious that Curry did not have a negative effect on Wiggins’ minutes or vice versa. I honestly cannot make sense of why the addition of Curry to Wiggins + any of Lee/Kuminga/Bjelica was as bad as it was, but this is a good time to remember that Wiggins was tied with Otto Porter Jr. for the highest net rating on the team in minutes without Steph. Granted, that positive net rating was merely +1.0, but that counts for something.
Andrew Wiggins’ playoff performance:
14.0 points, 6.8 rebounds, and 1.6 assists in 29.9 minutes per game on 53/54/56 shooting splits in 5 games against the Denver Nuggets.
15.0 points, 7.0 rebounds, and 0.8 assists in 33.0 minutes per game on 47/33/65 shooting splits in 6 games against the Memphis Grizzlies.
18.6 points, 7.2 rebounds, and 2.8 assists in 36.7 minutes per game on 46/29/68 shooting splits in 5 games against the Dallas Mavericks.
18.3 points, 8.8 rebounds, and 2.2 assists in 39.2 minutes per game on 44/30/69 shooting splits in 6 games against the Boston Celtics.
Here are the playoff lineups involving Andrew Wiggins that played over 15 possessions together:
All but three of the lineups listed here include Steph Curry. As was the case in the regular season, Andrew Wiggins played most of his minutes, Curry’s health provided, alongside the Warriors’ franchise player. There are five negative lineups here and four of them include Steph Curry. Two of them, Curry/Thompson/Wiggins/Green/Kuminga and Curry/GPII/Thompson/Wiggins/Green, had the misfortune of getting ritualistically bludgeoned in first quarters by the Memphis Grizzlies, while the other two at the bottom have only a small sample size of possessions together.
There are three lineups listed here without Steph Curry and two of them come up positive: Poole/Thompson/Wiggins/Green/Looney started four games together in the first round against the Denver Nuggets while the Poole/Thompson/Wiggins/OPJ/Looney lineup found success deeper into the playoffs.
Below is Andrew Wiggins’ shot chart from the playoffs, courtesy of Positive Residual.
In the shot chart above, there is a fair amount of blue dots along the three-point line. As previously discussed, Wiggins shot more or less his career averages over the course of the Warriors’ championship run. What changed and ultimately defined Wiggins’ breakout in the playoffs was his rebounding and I don’t think that Jordan Poole has gotten enough credit for how his play pushed Wiggins into a new role. In a post-championship episode of Andre Iguodala’s Point Forward podcast, he had Andrew Wiggins on as his guest. Iguodala mentioned that various Warriors used to poke fun at Wiggins’ previous career-high of 11 boards and asked him to explain why it was that he only started rebounding in this playoff run. Wiggins’ answer, although it doesn’t explicitly mention Jordan Poole, is illuminating:
So it was like, the offensive rebounds... I was really just thirsty to score. [...] We have a lot of options on our team. We have a lot of people that come in the game and score the ball and make plays. [...] You gotta figure out different ways to get it, you know what I’m saying? So I was like, “let me try and get my feet wet, go in there and rebound the ball.” Especially when we played small in the Memphis series and I had to rebound. I’m getting the [rebounds] and I’m like, “this ain’t that hard! I can rebound!” From there I just kept with it. It helps us win, it gives us more possessions and I’m like, “I can do this.”
While Wiggins specifically mentions the series against the Grizzlies as a turning point, I’m more inclined to look at the Warriors’ first-round matchup with the Nuggets as the series that kickstarted his transformation into a mid-prime version of Gerald Wallace. With Jordan Poole putting up prime-Steph Curry numbers and Steph Curry coming off of the bench, the Warriors’ offensive pecking order was firmly established in the first round and Andrew Wiggins became the fourth option — in five games, Andrew Wiggins shot the ball just 10.2 times a game and only took 2.6 three nights a night.
In the first two games of the series, Wiggins had 9 and 8 rebounds and took 11 and 9 shots. I took note of Wiggins’ rebounding in my recap of Game 2 and expressed my hope that this would continue as games got more competitive. In Game 3, the Nuggets put a scare in the Warriors, as was likely in their first game on the road, and the game was decided in its final possessions. Steph Curry, Jordan Poole, and Klay Thompson scored 27, 27, and 26 points in Game 3 while Wiggins tied Draymond Green with 6 shot attempts — in the first high-stakes game of the playoffs, Wiggins faded naturally into a background role on offense. The Warriors’ fabled Nickname Lineup got its first taste of crunch time that night and in the most important possession of the night, Wiggins made the two biggest plays to date of his career:
That offensive rebound by Wiggins was his only one in Game 3 and just his fourth of the series. In a losing effort in Game 4, Wiggins grabbed three offensive boards and just barely missed the potential game-winning dunk because he spiked a putback just a little too hard:
The Warriors were a mess in Game 4 — Steph Curry missed four free throws, Draymond Green fouled out, and Jordan Poole played his worst game to date — but that was Wiggins’ best playoff game to date as he finished the game with 20 points on 16 shots and 6 rebounds. Wiggins followed up that game with a muted Game 5 where he only played 23 minutes, less than of which came in the fourth quarter.
By the end of the Denver series, Wiggins had compiled a rebounding average of 6.8 a game and had seen tangible proof that his work on the glass contributed to wins. In the Warriors’ second-round series against the Memphis Grizzlies, he grabbed 3, 5, 1, 5, 0, and 6 offensive boards, so I do believe Wiggins when he says that this was the series where he fully embraced his new role. I firmly believe that Wiggins’ attitudinal change could not have happened without Jordan Poole’s offensive fireworks against the Nuggets rearranging the Warriors’ pecking order.
Although Wiggins took more shots per game against the Grizzlies, he also upped his rebounding average in this series, which speaks to his growth. Wiggins actually took more shots per game in each series, but remarkably, he also grabbed more rebounds in each series. In the WCSF, Wiggins took 7 shots off of putbacks or tip-dunks after only taking two such shots in the first round of the playoffs, and in Game 1 of the second round, he corralled helped corral three massive offensive rebounds in crunch time that immediately led to go-ahead buckets. You can see those rebounds below:
Wiggins followed up his 8-rebound night in Game 1 with 16 points, 9 rebounds, and a monster dunk in a close loss. You can see that dunk below:
In Game 3, Wiggins scored 17 points and only pulled down three rebounds, but the Warriors only needed 25 minutes from Wiggins as they routed the Grizzlies in by 30 points. Wiggins had another highlight dunk in this game — a welcome sign of sustained physicality and aggression — but his defensive effort is also worth highlighting. I’ve linked to Wiggins’ second big dunk of the series below as well as a sequence of defense that demonstrates the type of effort and focus that became Wiggins’ new normal:
Game 3 also included several instances of Wiggins making instinctive and well-timed cuts to the hoop to punish the Grizzlies' off-ball defense:
With the Warriors up 3-1 in the series, they went to Memphis for Game 5 and had their biggest clunker of the playoffs. That game got out of hand during the second quarter and Wiggins finished the game with just 19 minutes and a single rebound, so I won’t waste more words on that horrendous game.
Instead, I want to take a moment to appreciate Andrew Wiggins’ performance in Game 6, which has been (rightly) overshadowed by the heroics of Game 6 Klay and Kevon Looney’s rebounding clinic. In 41 minutes, Andrew Wiggins scored 18 points, hit what was then a playoff-high three shots from deep, and grabbed 11 rebounds, 6 of which came on the offensive glass. Wiggins was particularly good in the second half, scoring 15 of his 18 points with 6 rebounds, two blocks, and making all of his three-point shot attempts. You can see a compilation of Wiggins’ best moments from that half below:
By the start of the Western Conference Finals against the Dallas Mavericks, I felt myself getting comfortable with... trusting Andrew Wiggins to play with consistent effort and motor. Look at this sequence from the very first possession of the WCF and pay close attention to Wiggins:
Wiggins chases Luka Doncic off of a pindown screen by the left elbow, quickly scampers under Dwight Powell to cut off Donic’s driving, goes over Powell when the DHO turns a ball screen for Doncic, and immediately follows Powell down the lane to cut off a potential lob as Kevon Looney switches onto Doncic. That’s exactly the type of possession that I wasn’t sure Andrew Wiggins could consistently put together in a playoff series and unexpectedly became commonplace within a matter of just a few weeks. Here are a few more notable Wiggins moments from Game 1:
Wiggins finished Game 1 of the WCF with 19 points and 5 rebounds, but more importantly, his main defensive assignment, Luka Doncic, scored just 20 points on 6/18 shooting and finished the game with 7 turnovers. Holding Doncic, one of the best playoff scorers in NBA history in his brief career, to those numbers was no small feat, but Luka, being Luka, followed that poor performance up with 42 points on 23 shots. The Mavericks also got 31 points from Jalen Brunson and 21 points from Reggie Bullock in Game 2 and led by nearly 20 points at one point in the third quarter, but the Warriors pulled off a third and fourth-quarter comeback behind Jordan Poole that gave them a commanding 2-0 lead going into Dallas for Games 3 and 4.
Still, it’s not like Wiggins played bad defense against Doncic. Sometimes, good offense simply beats good defense. Here are a few examples of the back-and-forth battles between Wiggins and Doncic in Game 2:
The Doncic vs. Wiggins battle reached its apex in Game 3 in Dallas, the closest game of the series through the first three games. Doncic followed his 42-night with 40 points on 23 shots and 11 rebounds, but Wiggins had 27 points, 11 rebounds, and the dunk of the playoffs in the Warriors’ Game 3 victory:
That career-defining highlight dunk was, unfortunately, ruined by the cop-ass behavior of a ref who called the play an offensive foul. That horrendous call was challenged and eventually overturned and felt like the emotional dagger that effectively put an end to the series. Take note of how the ref in question doesn’t move an inch or blow the whistle until the ball has gone through the hoop and Wiggins, in an unusual display of emotion, stares down the Dallas crowd. Fuck the police. To wash the bad taste out of our mouths, here are more Wiggins highlights from Game 3:
The Warriors, as they were wont to do in potential closeout games, put up a stinker in Game 4, but this game was nearly salvaged in a garbage-time comeback by the Warriors’ young players + Damion Lee and Nemanja Bjelcia. What Wiggins did in that game isn’t all that interesting, so let’s move on to Game 5 where he scored 18 points and grabbed 10 rebounds during the Warriors’ Finals-clinching victory. Wiggins defended Doncic capably in Game 5, but by then Luka had pretty much run out of steam, as this possession below demonstrates:
As the Western Conference Finals went on, the Warriors threw more and more looks at Luka, so this assignment did not fall entirely on Wiggins. Here’s an excerpt from an Anthony Slater article that details some of those schematic adjustments throughout the series:
“When you’re playing against a guy like Luka, you just never want to give him a steady diet of anything,” Green said. “You can pick what you think is the absolute best coverage against a guy and you keep doing that. Let’s say it works and it works and it works. If you keep doing it, a guy like that, he’s going to figure it out. You want to try to keep him off balance.”
The Warriors’ base defense this series has been man-on-man with Wiggins guarding Dončić. In the regular season, they switched a ton against the Mavericks, which allowed Dončić to target Curry and Poole to great success. The staff recognized this in the lead-up to the series and made sure to instruct Curry and Poole to hedge out and recover, while allowing Kevon Looney to switch.
“We don’t want to just fall into switches,” Green said. “That’s what they want. So I think our coaching staff did an incredible job, as they always do. I told y’all before, I have never gone into a playoff game feeling like I wasn’t prepared or another team was better prepared than us. Our coaching staff continues to do an amazing job, and, equally as important, guys are following the game plan.”
Doncic’s two worst shooting performances came in Games 1 and 5 of the Western Conference Finals, but the power of Luka is such that he still averaged 32 points, 9.2 rebounds, and 6.0 assists a game, albeit on 41/34/77 shooting splits. This past summer, Mavericks owner, Mark Cuban, praised Wiggins’ defensive work against Doncic and claimed (incorrectly, in my opinion), that it was Wiggins who won this series for the Warriors:
Valid or not, Cuban’s opinion is notable for the fact that Andrew Wiggins, one of the most notoriously underperforming #1 overall picks of all time, was receiving well-deserved and near-universal praise for his play in the playoffs. The day after the Warriors closed out the Mavericks, noted charlatan and TV personality, Stephen A. Smith proclaimed — correctly! — that the Warriors would need Wiggins to play well in order to win the Finals. In just a matter of weeks, Andrew Wiggins went from receiving derision for his All-Star berth and mid-season shooting slump to being properly assessed as a key and consistent playoff performer for the Warriors.
Andrew Wiggins became a Forever Warrior during the NBA Finals, at least in my eyes. In 6 games, Wiggins played a team-high 39.2 minutes a game and upped his scoring to 18.3 points a game, he tallied 1.5 steals and 1.5 blocks a game, and most importantly, he grabbed 8.8 rebounds a game. Wiggins’ statistical output would have been incomprehensible to me as recently as mid-April. Hell, even during the peak of Wigginsmania during late November and early December, I would have felt more comfortable putting money on Jonathan Kuminga as the Finals MVP than I would taking the over on Wiggins’ rebound average of 6 a night.
Wiggins’ rebounding and his legendary Game 5 overshadowed the fact that he actually shot rather poorly during the Finals. In six games, Wiggins only cleared the 45% threshold from the field twice, first in the Warriors’ Game 1 loss and then again in Game 5, a game where he scored 26 huge points despite missing all 6 of his three-point attempts. Your lying eyes won’t believe this, but Andrew Wiggins actually shot worse from three in the Finals than Harrison Barnes did in the 2016 Finals.
What distinguished Wiggins from Barnes, a player whose role and impact he was expected to approximate, was that when his threes didn’t go down, he found ways to contribute. In 7 games, Harrison Barnes managed only 9 combined steals and blocks, which is what Wiggins had in Games 1 and 3 alone. Wiggins tallied 19 stocks in the 2022 Finals and his 16 and 13 rebounds in Games 4 and 5 were just two rebounds short of Barnes’ rebound total for the entire 2016 Finals.
In the Warriors’ frustrating Game 1 loss, the play of Andrew Wiggins was a bright spot. The Celtics opened the game with their center, Robert Williams, roaming off-ball on Wiggins. This did not go well for the Celtics as Wiggins set effective high screens for Steph Curry and attacked the hoop with vigor against his matchup. You can see a few examples of that below:
But during the Celtics’ historic run of fourth-quarter three-point shooting, Wiggins had a few sequences of less-than-ideal defense that led to threes:
In the Warriors’ blowout victory in Game 2, Wiggins only scored 11 points, but he grabbed three offensive rebounds and played focused defense. Here are a few clips below:
My personal favorite Wiggins moment from that game was not one that ended in a box-score statistic, but rather a brief tiff with Celtics forward and irritant, Grant Williams:
That’s a display of emotion that I didn’t expect from Wiggins and one that felt welcome, considering the stakes.
Andrew Wiggins finished Game 3 with a team-worst -16 in 40 minutes. Despite 18 points, 7 rebounds, 2 assists, 2 steals, and 2 blocks, his defense Wiggins made some costly mistakes throughout the night, none more devastating than this transition turnover in the fourth quarter that negated a rugged defensive rebound:
Wiggins also had his share of defensive misadventures in Game 3:
By the standard Wiggins set for himself in the playoffs, this was a bad game with teachable moments. The cameras captured Andre Iguodala coaching Wiggins up mid-game for a moment that, in retrospect, feels symbolically potent:
In the all-important Game 4, Andrew Wiggins supplemented Steph Curry’s 42 points and 10 rebounds with 17 points and 16 rebounds, including this hugely consequential putback in the non-Draymond Green minutes of the fourth quarter where the Warriors took a lead:
Here is a more complete highlight video of Wiggins’ Game 4 performance:
Andrew Wiggins’ Game 5 performance will likely be remembered for two things: he “carried” Steph Curry all game and then scored 10 points in the fourth quarter to Steph Curry’s four points, and he punctuated the Warriors’ win with a ferocious driving dunk. But something else happened that night, something Wiggins had never done before in his career — he had double-digit rebounds in two straight games.
In his career-defining Game 5, Wiggins scored 26 points to Jayson Tatum’s 27, and played typically excellent defense throughout the night:
Wiggins also made 10 of his 14 shots in the paint, which helped offset an 0/6 night from three:
In the fourth quarter that Wiggins became immortal:
It’s the above play, however, and not Wiggins’ big dunk (I’ve linked to that play here) that is my favorite of his night because it demonstrates his knowledge of and commitment to executing the Warriors’ motion offense, which of course, is made possible by Steph Curry’s gravity.
Prior to Game 6 of the Finals, Andre Iguodala went around to various Warriors players to check the temperature of the locker room. After talking to Andrew Wiggins, Iguodala felt confident that the Warriors, and Wiggins specifically, had the requisite amount of focus to guarantee a Game 6 victory. Here’s Andre in his own words on his Point Forward podcast:
Game 6 we have to win [...] You’re checking the temperature of your teammates — on the flight, I’m checking [their] temperature, we get in, [we’re] stretching, we’re doing a light lift because we get their two days early — I’m checking the temperature. [...] And I’m thinking to myself, “are we gonna have one of those games where we have a letdown?” cause we’re up 3-2 and I know, I’m like, “fellas we gotta end this tonight,” cause in all actuality, we should have won Game, I’m thinking we should have got it done in five. So I’m saying, “we gotta get this thing done,” and I just remember at the start of practice I’m talking to Wiggins and I’m like, “how you feeling?” and he's like, “I’m good,” and I was like, “Wiggs, we gotta win it all tomorrow, we can’t waste a game, we gotta take care of business,” and he was like, “We GOTTA win tomorrow,” and you know Wiggs — he don’t really talk, at all or [...] have an expression like that and when he said that, I knew we were good.
In Game 6, Wiggins stuffed the box score and was on the court for the most consequential moments of the game. In 43 minutes, Wiggins scored 18 points on just 7/18 shooting (he did go 4/9 from three though!) but he grabbed 6 rebounds, dished out 5 assists, and had 4 steals and 3 blocks. Wiggins was also on the court for the Warriors’ 21-0 run between the first and second quarters and contributed four points and a block to that run. Here are Wiggins’ defensive highlights from Game 6:
In the fourth quarter, Wiggins scored 6 points for the Warriors, second only to Steph Curry’s 10 points, and hit a huge three with a little under six minutes left to push the Warriors’ single digit-lead to 11 points:
That three came less than a minute after Wiggins had blocked a Jayson Tatum drive, which you can see below:
With the Warriors up by 12 with nearly a minute left, the game was effectively over. At this point, Steve Kerr subbed Wiggins out to bring Andre Iguodala in for a moment that probably caused at least a few tears throughout the Bay Area:
During the Warriors’ post-game celebration, Wiggins gave fans something to discuss during the long offseason as he predicted that he and Jordan Poole would both soon be very rich men:
What is next for Andrew Wiggins?
Andrew Wiggins is now in the final year of a max-salary contract that was once (correctly) deemed one of the worst in the NBA. Fortunes change quickly in the NBA and over the course of a solid regular season and excellent playoff run, Wiggins has proven that he is a valuable NBA player. In the playoffs, Wiggins found that he had another level of play in him when he realized that he could rebound at a high level. In Wiggins’ appearance on Andre Iguodala’s Point Forward podcast, Wiggins reminisced about his low-rebounding days and said, “I’m never gonna average four rebounds again [...] I look back like, ‘How?’[...] I wasn’t really even thinking straight.”
If Wiggins is true to his word and averages, say, 6-7 rebounds in the final season of his contract, he’ll probably play himself into another contract in the approximate range of his current $35 million salary, assuming his defense and shooting stay on par with what he did in the 2021-22 season. One of Wiggins’ peers at the small forward position, Mikal Bridges, signed a 4-year/$90 million contract extension back in October of 2021 that now seems cheap, even with Bridges getting sacrificed at the altar of Luka Doncic in the Western Conference Semifinals.
Wiggins, on the other hand, is coming off of a playoff run where he outplayed Bridges, played excellent defense on star wings like Luka Doncic and Jayson Tatum, became a rebounding machine, and proved he’s a big game player. Is there any way that Wiggins’ market value is below $30 million dollars next summer if he’s merely the same guy he was in the regular season but with a nose for rebounds?
It’s possible that Wiggins reverts back into a pumpkin during the regular season, but with the motivation of looming contract negotiations, I think he has plenty of motivation to hit another level this next season. How much more ceiling does Andrew Wiggins have left in him? Wiggins will be 28 years old at the start of the playoffs next season and should be at approximately the peak of his powers. I have my concerns — ones that are informed by free-throw percentage — about the consistency of Andrew Wiggins’ shot, especially after shooting 33% from deep in the playoffs. But if a motivated Wiggins builds on the things he learned in the playoffs and dedicates himself to cutting into open shots, he can offset shooting inconsistencies.
Wiggins’ value on the open market next season may be determined by how much opposing team’s GM’s believe his offensive game is a product of Steph Curry. Earlier in this article, I wrote about Wiggins subsisting on a diet of exceptionally easy three-point looks — if I can find that info, no doubt front offices around the NBA have taken note of that as well.
The Golden State Warriors are soon going to be in a world of hell because of luxury tax payments that could balloon north of $400 million if the organization doesn’t find a way to shed salary. The reporters most plugged into the Warriors’ front office and coaching staff, Anthony Slater and Marcus Thomspon of The Athletic, think it’s a real possibility that one or of Andrew Wiggins, Jordan Poole, Klay Thompson, or Draymond Green is not on the Warriors roster in the 2023-24 season.
The specter of contract negotiations will loom over the Warriors next season, but hopefully, that, coupled with a champion’s confidence, will push Wiggins to another level. Joe Lacob has stated that the Warriors winning another championship would probably make it easier to suck it up and figure out how to keep the Warriors’ “Foundational Six” intact, so I hope that Wiggins and his teammates can transcend this bizarre situation and do what’s best for the team this next season.
By all accounts, Andrew Wiggins has loved his time in the Bay Area. Over the course of this past season, Wiggins has praised the organization, his coaches, and his teammates at length and it’s hard to imagine that he’ll find a better basketball situation outside of the Bay Area. If a bag is what Wiggins wants, the Warriors will be in a tough position. If Wiggins values his happiness and comfort and is satisfied to take a pay cut after making over $170 million in his career, the Warriors could keep their core intact. Wiggins can go a long way towards making that a reality. Hopefully, the dual motivation of glory and future financial earnings push Andrew Wiggins to prove that his Finals performance was no fluke, but rather, a new standard to hold him to.