The Warriors beat the Lakers 123-109 on an opening night with an 11-man rotation
Steph Curry and Andrew Wiggins hit big shots in the fourth quarter, Steve Kerr digs deep into his bench as his veterans get in shape, and the Warriors give over 12 minutes to the Kuminga/Wiseman duo.
After a brief scare in the fourth quarter, the Warriors capped off their celebratory opening night, which included a ring night ceremony, with a mostly stress-free 123-109 victory against the Los Angeles Lakers. This Lakers team is very obviously not a contender. They’re probably not even a play-in team, barring significant changes to their roster. But the Warriors aren’t really at full strength either, despite having most of their roster healthy — Steve Kerr told reporters a few days ago that he was unlikely to play most of his starters 30 minutes a game until their conditioning improved. As such, Kerr said, the team will have to rely on its depth and by proxy, its youth, until they round into form.
Steve Kerr went with an 11-man rotation in tonight’s game, as he told reporters pregame that he might do for the foreseeable future. Andre Iguodala, whose role is more professorial than it is reliable, but pretty much every other non-rookie on the roster played significant rotation minutes. Jonathan Kuminga and James Wiseman shared the court for nearly 15 minutes, including about 5 minutes alongside Steph Curry; JaMychal Green played with pretty much every conceivable frontcourt combination, hit two threes, set rugged screens, and made heady plays; Donte DiVincenzo split time with Jordan Poole and Steph Curry-led units and was on the court in the game’s final competitive stretch as Steph Curry (33 points on 10/22 shooting from the field and 4/13 shooting from deep) and Andrew Wiggins buried the Lakers in a barrage of fourth-quarter threes; Moses Moody played 7 very solid minutes in the first half only to not see the court again in the second half — until Steve Kerr tightens up his rotation in anticipation of and during big games/the playoffs, deserving players like Moody will occasionally get squeezed for minutes.
When it mattered most, Steve Kerr called up on his veterans to bring the Warriors home. That’s likely to be how things are until members of the Warriors’ young core make a credible claim to closing minutes. If the game had gone down to the wire, Jordan Poole was likely to come back in — he was lingering by the scorer’s table for quite some time waiting for a dead ball that came only when Andrew Wiggins had effectively ended the game with just under two minutes left. I’m not sure who Poole would have subbed in for, but it didn’t seem that Klay Thompson was going to join him in the closing minutes. Thompson is, for now, on a minutes restriction of about 20 minutes a game and finished the game with 18 points in 19 minutes, but he had a nice stretch early in the third quarter when he carried the Warriors with his shotmaking.
Because this game devolved into fourth-quarter garbage time, we didn’t get to see a true closing lineup. That was a shame. Blowouts can be fun, but I like competitive games and I like watching Kerr decide how he wants to match up with other teams. At the end of the first half, Kerr closed with the Nickname Lineup who were predictably high-octane on offense and struggled with the Lakers’ physicality on the other end. Would they have closed tonight if the game had legitimately been in danger and Thompson had not been on a minutes restriction? I’d guess no.
Other lineups and players of note before we go into a quarter-by-quarter rotation watch:
The Kuminga/Wiseman played 12:43 minutes together by my calculations and was a -5 in plus/minus in that time. Their best stretch came when JaMychal Green sat in favor of Moses Moody while Jordan Poole started dialing up pick-and-rolls and their worst stretch came when they were matched up against LeBron James at the 5, who made it a point to drag Wiseman into the fray.
JaMychal Green shouldn’t be disparaged because Kuminga and Wiseman performed better with him off of the court tonight. Green was really good tonight and might have closed the game if it came down to it. In 22 minutes, Green hit two threes, grabbed 7 rebounds, and looked completely at home in the Warriors’ system. This post pass was particularly nice:
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