The Warriors (finally) trade James Wiseman, welcome back Gary Payton II
The Warriors move on from their worst draft pick in decades in a salary dump.
On Thursday’s trade deadline, the Warriors put a merciful and belated end to their failed James Wiseman experiment. The Warriors’ reunion with Gary Payton II is a delightful cherry on top to the small savings that will give the Warriors a chance at keeping together their Foundational Six.
In his three seasons with the Warriors, James Wiseman proved incapable of playing winning basketball under Steve Kerr. This is not a knock on Steve Kerr, but rather an indictment on Wiseman and those who wanted to draft him with the Warriors’ #2 overall pick in the 2020 draft.
A common refrain from Wiseman defenders was that he’d played only three college basketball games and lacked experience. This objective truth was often framed as a positive thing — surely, with more in-game experience, Wiseman would improve rapidly — rather than a red flag. Wiseman came to the NBA only having played one game against high-level competition since high school, a loss to the University of Oregon, and fared poorly. Here are some video clips:
The James Wiseman you see in those lowlight clips is largely the same one who struggled with the Warriors — missed dunks, bad hands, poor awareness in both ends of the court, an inability to body smaller players, and a propensity for adventurous off-the-dribble moves that took him away from the basket.
After serving a suspension by the NCAA for recruiting violations, Wiseman opted not to complete his lone season with the University of Memphis. Upon being drafted by the Warriors, Wiseman was, in Steve Kerr’s words, sent “into the deep end and let [...] sort of sink or swim.”
Kerr’s unwillingness, or perhaps, inability to provide structure around Wiseman led to a poor rookie season. Left to his own devices, Wiseman shot more than twice as many mid-range jumpers than three-pointers at a clip of 33.3%, he had the worst points-per-possession yield in the NBA of any player to post up at least twice a game, and had the second-lowest PPP of any Warrior as the roll man. All of this added up to an offensive impact only marginally better to late-career Andris Biedrins (-4.0 OBPM for Wiseman’s 20-21 season vs -4.8 in Biedrins’ final season with the Warriors) and the 10th-worst non-garbage time net rating differential in the NBA.
To be clear, Steve Kerr deserved a lot of blame for how Wiseman’s rookie season went. His decision to let Wiseman do whatever he wanted did not help Wiseman’s long-term development or the Warriors’ win/loss record. As a rookie, Wiseman had the worst net rating of any player alongside Steph Curry in >100 minutes during the Steve Kerr era, but to be fair to Wiseman, 84% of those minutes occurred alongside Kelly Oubre Jr. The cramped spacing that resulted from the brutal Curry/Oubre/Wiggins/Green/Wiseman lineup (-13.8 net rating and a 97.4 ORTG) certainly did not put Wiseman in a position to take advantage of his theoretical talents as a vertical spacer.
After missing all of his second season with a meniscus injury rehab marred by repeated setbacks — only Lonzo Ball has had a more arduous return from that injury in recent history — Wiseman finally got the summer league and training camp experiences he did not receive as a rookie. Wiseman walked into a role as the Warriors’ backup center and his pick-and-roll partnership with Jordan Poole was expected to be a key part of the Warriors’ second-unit offense.
Wiseman’s time as a staple of the rotation lasted all of 10 games. The Warriors’ 3-7 start was not owed entirely to Wiseman, but his minutes were consistently destructive regardless of whether he played with the Warriors’ second unit or their veteran championship core. When James Wiseman replaced Kevon Looney alongside the rest of the Warriors’ starting lineup, their net rating went from +25.6 with Looney to -15.8 with Wiseman. After those first 10 games of the season, Wiseman did not play a single minute alongside Steph Curry until February 2 of 2023. Wiseman ended his Warriors’ tenure with a -15.0 net rating alongside Curry in his third season and an on-court net rating of -19.8, which is to say, Wiseman was even more destructive this season trying to fit into the Warriors’ system than he was when he was allowed to explore his game as a rookie.
While Steve Kerr and his coaching staff did Wiseman and the Warriors a disservice in his rookie season, I see little they did wrong in their handling of him this season, save for the brief-lived second-unit frontcourt of Jonathan Kuminga/JaMychal Green/James Wiseman. After a few disastrous games of second-unit meltdowns early in the season, Kerr shifted Wiseman’s minutes to coincide with Steph Curry in the hopes that Steph’s floor-raising would help Wiseman. It didn’t and Kerr moved on to chase wins, which is his right to do so as a coach. Here are some numbers I pulled up back in November about Wiseman’s first 10 games of the season:
There are five players who have played >100 possessions with James Wiseman together: Jordan Poole, JaMychal Green, Moses Moody, Steph Curry, and Jonathan Kuminga. All of them, save for Steph Curry, see their percentage of shots between 0-3 feet shrink when they share the court with Wiseman while Kuminga is the only one whose finishing improves with Wiseman on the court, and that’s because he’s made the only two attempts from 0-3 feet he’s taken during those minutes.
Here is the differential in FG% from 0-3 feet without and without Wiseman for those five players (positive ones bolded):
Poole: -13.6% worse with Wiseman on the court.
J. Green: -19.2% worse with Wiseman on the court.
Moody: -33.4% worse with Wiseman on the court.
Curry: -20.0% worse with Wiseman on the court.
Kuminga: +42.9% better with Wiseman on the court:
Turnovers also skyrocket with Wiseman on the court.
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Among those five players to have more than 100 possessions alongside Wiseman, JaMychal Green is the only one who has a lower TOV% when he shares the court with Wiseman. When Wiseman is on the court, Steph Curry’s TOV% nearly doubles, Poole’s jumps up 2.4%, Kuminga’s increases by 5.8%, but Moses Moody’s TOV% increase is staggering: he goes from a 12.4% TOV without Wiseman — this is still higher than I’d like it to be, but is only 47th percentile — to 24.3% TOV with Wiseman. Take note also of Draymond Green’s TOV%: he goes from 14.7% TOV without Wiseman, which would be the third-best rate of his career, to what would be a career-worst 26.7% TOV with Wiseman on the court.
To try and ignore Wiseman’s destructive qualities and pin blame on the Warriors’ coaching staff and surrounding players requires an Olympic level of mental gymnastics. Are we supposed to believe that a Warriors’ coaching staff that used to frequently post up Shaun Livingston for ISO’s doesn’t believe in post-ups? That Steve Kerr, the same coach who implored Mareese Speights in the offseason of 2015 to ditch the long 2’s for 3’s, doesn’t want his bigs shooting from deep? That Steph Curry and Draymond Green, who made lob threats out of Gary Payton II and Jonathan Kuminga last year and Andre Iguodala and JaVale McGee and Jordan Bell in years past, are bad at throwing lobs to Wiseman? That Steve Kerr, who rode a rookie-season Jordan Bell and third-year Kevon Looney as his only centers in the deciding games of the 2018 Western Conference Finals against the Houston Rockets, doesn’t play young players? That Steve Kerr, who ran pick-and-rolls with JaVale McGee, Jordan Bell, Willy Cauley-Stein, Marquese Chriss, and Festus Ezeli, doesn’t want his bigs to roll hard to the hoop? That the Warriors’ system, which Marquese grasped in one training camp despite never previously playing the center position, is too hard to comprehend for bigs?
With this deadline deal, Warriors fans will no longer have to inhale industrial levels of cope to justify Wisemasn’s place on the team. Wiseman’s subtraction is an addition and I trust Steve Kerr figured out how to use Gary Payton II on an even smaller version of this Warriors’ team.
I’ll have more words on the Warriors’ trade deadline in the coming days, but for now, I will sleep better knowing the Warriors made the right move and put an end to the James Wiseman era, a player who combined the body language of Anthony Randolph with the softness of Brandan Wright, the low post usage of Ike Diogu, the tunnel vision of Corey Maggette, the rim protection of Troy Murphy, and the hands of Adonal Foyle.
A quick author’s note:
It’s been a while since I’ve published an article on the Warriors. To my handful of subscribers, I owe you all an explanation. I’ve been something of a road Warrior in the last two years and I haven’t been in one place for more than three months since March of 2021. That reality has had its beautiful moments, but it’s also worn me out. I’m back in New York right now and I’ve decided it’s time to put my roots down for a little bit. On a day-to-day basis, that means taking on a consistent part-time job. What I’ve done for the last few years is pick up objectively aimless part-time work that allowed me to fit writing about basketball into my schedule while also freelancing event production gigs. But frankly, my previous part-time work experiences paid badly and were quite lonely. For various reasons, I need to be making real money right now and also making more social connections, so for the time being, I’m only going to be writing about the Warriors when my schedule allows me to. Right now, paid work and putting my roots down are taking priority. That could change at some point, but for now, that’s my reality.