The Warriors' season-in-review — Steve Kerr and the Warriors' coaching staff
Steve Kerr's various baffling decisions including but not limited to; the James Wiseman dilemma, Kelly Oubre Jr.'s role, the backup point guard position, and Steph Curry's 4th quarter minutes.
Author’s note: This post came much later than I wanted it to be. I’m back in the United States and my schedule is all of a sudden swamped. I’m still hoping I’ll have some draft preview posts, but I’m currently in the process of getting my life together and that’s going to take some time out of my once lax schedule.
Steve Kerr and the Warriors’ coaching staff: C-
In the final 20 or so games of the 2020-2021 season, Steve Kerr coached his ass off. As the Warriors’ bench shrunk due to injury and illness, the Warriors went on a run fueled by smallball lineups and total dedication to the devastating two man game of Steph Curry and Draymond Green. While one may be tempted to see this end of the season run as a redemption of Steve Kerr and the Warriors’ coaching staff, I do not.
Steve Kerr is a very smart man and I have no doubt that he has forgotten more about the game of basketball than I will ever know. That’s what makes his coaching in the first 50 games of the season so frustrating.
Steve Kerr repeatedly made decisions that go against his stated basketball philosophies and preference for high IQ players; Kerr’s use of James Wiseman was detrimental to the prized rookie’s development and trade value; Kerr kept Kelly Oubre Jr. in the starting lineup at the expense of ball movement and spacing only until an injury forced Oubre into the bench role that he was best suited for; Kerr’s inability to put together a consistent rotation led to terrible bench lineups with limited spacing and ball movement; Kerr put Brad Wanamaker on the ball in bench lineups despite knowing that Wanamaker was at his best next to other creators; Kerr was reluctant to play Jordan Poole until Wanamaker’s terrible performance left him no choice but do so; Kerr then handcuffed Poole to Nico Mannion in the interest of having a “true point guard” on the court and in doing so, tanked the Warriors’ bench units defensively and offensively; Kerr’s decision to bring Mannion into the rotation took Damion Lee out of the rotation until Mannion proved himself unplayable; Kerr gave Juan Toscano-Anderson DNP’s for several stretches of the season, despite telling reporters he was one of his “smartest players” and someone he really trusted; Kerr only benched Paschall in favor of Juan Toscano-Anderson after Paschall missed games due to contract tracing, during which JTA made it abundantly clear he was one of the Warriors’ 6 or 7 best players; Kerr only played Toscano-Anderson three minutes in the fourth quarter of the play-in game loss against the Lakers and instead gave nearly 7 minutes to Mychal Mulder; and the Warriors might have avoided the play-in tournament altogether had Kerr been even somewhat more aggressive about getting Steph Curry minutes in the 4th quarter of close games.
Need I go on?
There’s several decisions from that above list that I can make sense of when I put myself in Steve Kerr’s shoes. I suspect, for example, that the minutes and usage of Kelly Oubre Jr. and James Wiseman were influenced by organizational politics. But for whatever reason, he did not push back on the pressures from above and instead acted as if he were a powerless first-year coach and not a three time champion and Hall of Fame bound head coach.
Did Steve Kerr not feel like he had the clout or organizational weight to coach the way as he saw best fit? That’s unlikely. It seems more likely that Kerr played possum and gave certain players and lineups the rope they needed to hang themselves in order to justify his preferred tactical decisions. But in a season where Steph Curry played at an MVP level, willfully wasting games on doomed rotations to prove a point is malpractice.
Steph Curry gave the Warriors his most healthy season in nearly half a decade — as he approaches the back half of his 30’s, there is no guarantee the Warriors will ever get a season like this from Curry again. Steve Kerr coached with a lack of urgency for most of the season until injury and circumstance pushed him into his best lineups. The Warriors missing the playoffs after playing so well at the end of the season (and playing the way they should have for much of the year) is an embarrassment and a waste of one of Steph Curry’s best seasons.
In the interest of thoroughness, let’s discuss some of Kerr’s various decisions from this past season
Steve Kerr and James Wiseman
Before James Wiseman played a single NBA game, Steve Kerr compared him — unprompted — to David Robinson. Excitement about Wiseman was apparently widespread, so much so that the 19-year-old center won the starting center spot despite missing most of training camp. In Wiseman’s first games, he looked like a 19-year-old, but he also showed intoxicating athleticism and a smooth three point shot that he took without hesitation.
When Draymond Green returned to the Warriors after recovering his COVID-19 diagnosis, Wiseman began to shrink. As most rookies do, he struggled on defense, but what was more concerning was that Wiseman mostly abandoned his three point shot and Steph Curry’s godly offensive impact was neutered when he shared the court with the rookie.
As January progressed, Wiseman looked overwhelmed on offense and struggled to execute the complex reads asked of him in Steve Kerr’s motion offense. The shooting struggles of Kelly Oubre Jr., who shot 21.8% from three before Wiseman was benched, certainly didn’t help. The Warriors’ starters struggled to space the floor and the paint was often packed when Wiseman made moves towards the basket.
It seemed inevitable that Kerr would pull the plug on Oubre Jr. as a starter and instead start superior shooters like Damion Lee or Kent Bazemore to open up the court and give Steph Curry and James Wiseman more room to operate. Although Oubre Jr. was acquired as a potential long-term piece, he only had a year left on his contract and it figured that Steve Kerr, a man renowned for his emotional intelligence, would be able to explain this move to Oubre. Certainly the development and trade value of Wiseman would take priority over Kelly Oubre Jr.’s comfort, right?
On January 25th, Steve Kerr inserted Kevon Looney into the starting lineup in place of James Wiseman, and told reporters pregame:
“You guys have heard me all year talk about trying to establish ourselves as a defensive team [...] The last two games have been really disappointing defensively, particularly right out of the gate. First quarter, when we give up 41 to the Knicks I think and 38 to Utah. So, I'm going to go with my veteran center, my veteran group together. That group happens to be our best defensive five.”
Wiseman played four games off of the bench before spraining his wrist against the Detroit Pistons. In Wiseman’s absence, Kelly Oubre Jr. broke out of his shooting slump and the Warriors looked rather good playing smallball. When Wiseman returned, the Warriors reeled off three straight wins for the first time all season before getting blown out by the Lakers and losing in a close game to the Portland Trail Blazers. With one game left before the All-Star Break, the Warriors brought up Jordan Poole and Nico Mannion from the G-League to effectively replace the slumping Brad Wanamaker.
The call-up of Poole and Mannion coincided with Steve Kerr committing to give his younger players more playing time and putting James Wiseman into the starting lineup. But that plan was briefly derailed when Wiseman missed two COVID-19 tests before the All-Star break, which led Kerr to discipline Wiseman in the form of a benching. Things didn’t get much better after he returned — Wiseman played two more games before sitting out a week for contact tracing, during which Steph Curry injured his tailbone.
Wiseman’s last three weeks of his rookie were a rollercoaster. Upon his return from contact tracing, Wiseman got thrown back into the starting line up and was thoroughly outplayed by second-year journeyman, Tony Bradley, and the Warriors then lost three games in row without Steph Curry. Sensing that the Warriors’ season was effectively on the line, Steph Curry returned early from injury and Steve Kerr made a dramatic tactical shift to feature Wiseman in pick and rolls in a win against the Chicago Bulls.
A week later, Curry had missed three more games and the Warriors had lost 6 of their last 7 games. It was around this time that the San Francisco Chronicle’s Connor Letourneau published an article about the Warrior’s pick and roll usage. Here’s a quote from it:
Warriors head coach Steve Kerr has long resisted embracing the NBA’s most popular play, the pick-and-roll, for a simple reason: He believes the best offenses are unpredictable, and worried that a steady drumbeat of high screens would be easy for defenses to dissect.
But after watching Golden State lose seven of eight games as rookie center James Wiseman struggled to find open looks, Kerr was desperate for something — anything — to help his team. Pabail Sidhu, the Warriors’ director of analytics and innovation, showed Kerr numbers reinforcing that Wiseman was at his best in pick-and-rolls with guard Stephen Curry.
In Tuesday night’s 122-121 win over the Bucks at Chase Center, Kerr ran a season-high-tying 71 pick-and-rolls.
The publication of an article so subtly critical of Steve Kerr is noteworthy. For most of his Warriors’ tenure, Kerr has been practically untouchable by reporters in the Bay Area, particularly those at the Chronicle and Mercury News. There’s not really much of an investigative streak among Bay Area sports writers. Ethan Sherwood Strauss was really the last of the local writers with any investigative chops and it seems he’s mostly stopped doing that outside of his book writing. My point here is that somebody in Warriors’ organization likely sought out Letourneau to pitch him this story, one in which Steve Kerr is made to look like something of a moron by a lowly analytics staffer. That is a remarkable development.
In the past Steve Kerr has defended his reluctance to run pick and rolls with Steph Curry by claiming (falsely) that the Warriors wouldn’t be a very good team i ,“we had [Steph] run pick-and-roll every time,” and fretting about Steph Curry not being able to hold up physically if he ran a high volume of pick and rolls. Many figured that this version of the Warriors, one without many capable passers and a collection of athletic and low IQ wings, would run more pick and rolls to reduce the amount of offensive responsibility for said low IQ players and to make use of James Wiseman’s vertical spacing. And yet, that didn’t happen for quite some time and early in the season, when the Warriors did run PNR with Curry and Wiseman, it was apparently unplanned. From Ethan Sherwood Strauss in December of 2020:
The Steph-Wiseman pick-and-roll was not emphasized in the Warriors’ brief training camp work with Wiseman and seems to have sprung up somewhat organically, as the Warriors rummage around for offensive life.
What in the world? After James Wiseman missed most of training camp it would have made sense for the Warriors to start him off with consistent PNR’s for the sake of making his transition to the NBA easier. Instead, the Warriors’ coaching staff didn’t even make an effort to teach their prized rookie how to run one of their most effective plays with their franchise player.
In my season-in-review post about James Wiseman I noted that his points-per-possesion (PPP) efficiency as the roll man was mediocre, but make no mistake, this has everything to do with Steve Kerr’s decision to play Wiseman so many of his minutes in lineups with terrible spacing. It was only in April, with less than two months left in the season, that Steve Kerr decided to run PNR’s with Wiseman for Wiseman’s sake and even then, most of his minutes with Curry were still spent handcuffed to Kelly Oubre Jr. How many Warriors fans begged for more Steph/Wiseman PNR’s? How many Warriors fans begged for Wiseman to play more minutes alongside shooters like Damion Lee and Mychal Mulder rather than Kelly Oubre Jr.?
It is alarming that Steve Kerr needed an analytics staffer to show him the numbers on Wiseman in the PNR to finally make the decision to run PNR’s with the Warriors’ prized rookie. It is baffling that Steve Kerr allowed James Wiseman to shoot about twice as many mid-range jumpers as he did three pointers, despite the inefficiency of the mid-range shot. It was damaging to both James Wiseman and the Warriors to have Wiseman post-up about as many times as he got the ball as the roll man in PNR’s, especially when Wiseman was the worst high volume post player in the entire NBA.
James Wiseman’s development was of paramount importance to the Warriors this season, but Steve Kerr failed Wiseman and the Warriors’ organization by putting Wiseman in positions to fail and being inflexible about his coaching principles at Wiseman’s expense.
Steve Kerr, Kelly Oubre Jr., Eric Paschall, and Juan Toscano-Anderson
To hear Joe Lacob tell it, the Warriors weren’t necessarily going to use their $17 million dollar trade expectation until Klay Thompson tore his achilles and the Warriors had a glaring need for a wing. Kelly Oubre Jr. was an obvious candidate for the Warriors to fill the TPE and when the Warriors traded for him, it was expected that he’d get at least 25-30 minutes a game. While Oubre’s mediocre three point percentages and poor playmaking skills made him a less than ideal fit at the starting shooting guard, the alternatives — Damion Lee, Mychal Mulder, and Kent Bazemore — did not have Oubre’s athletic gifts or defensive potential and so Steve Kerr slotted in Oubre as his likely starting shooting guard during training camp.
Kelly Oubre Jr. did not make a three pointer in his first three games with the Warriors and shot 20.7% from deep in the first month of the season. Oubre’s shooting slump was one of the nastier slumps I’d ever seen and his inability to pass or pick up Steve Kerr’s motion offense was clearly cramping the Warriors’ offensive flow. Still, Kerr insisted that benching Oubre hadn’t crossed his mind.
Steve Kerr is a noted people person who is renowned for his high level of emotional intelligence; the Warriors’ “culture” under Kerr has long been a point of organizational pride, dating back to Kerr’s deft touch handling the benching of Andre Iguodala and David Lee in his first season as a coach. As the Warriors’ starting lineup kept digging holes in the first quarter, it became clear that something had to change. I think most people assumed Kelly Oubre Jr. would get benched because he was on a one year contract and didn’t hold a fraction of the organizational importance of Wiseman, but Kerr chose instead to bench Wiseman.
Throughout the season, Warriors writers from The Athletic insinuated in podcasts that Kerr received organizational pressure to start and play Oubre heavy minutes because of the cost of his acquisition. I understand wanting to make good on an investment, but to prioritize that investment over the development and perceived value of your 19-year-old #2 draft pick is foolish. How does it look to outside observers when your prized rookie loses his starting spot to Kevon Looney?
Steve Kerr has long prioritized defense over offense, so I suspect that Kerr earnestly felt his choice to bench Wiseman was consistent with his ideology and ideas about development. Giving Wiseman less pressure to perform may be sensible, I don’t think defensive development would necessarily benefit from additional minutes with bench players. Beyond that, the defensive rating of the Oubre starting lineup with Looney in place was only marginally better than that of the Oubre starting lineup with Wiseman.
Where the starters with Looney were far superior was on offense. We have plenty of data showing that James Wiseman was a very negative impact player this season, but one lineup that absolutely killed teams in a small sample size was Curry/Lee/Wiggins/Green/Wiseman. Moving Kelly Oubre Jr. to the bench and having him sub in for Andrew Wiggins around the six minute mark would have gone a long way towards creating a better balance of floor spacing between the starting lineup and the bench and might have prevented James Wiseman lineups from tanking offensively.
But as I try to figure out the various permutations of what I consider to be more ideal rotations, my head starts to spin. Let’s go over some of the things we know about lineup and player combinations from my previous posts:
You want to keep Kelly Oubre Jr. and Eric Paschall away from each other as much as possible.
You want a lot of Damion Lee’s minutes to come alongside Steph Curry and Draymond Green.
You want to keep Kevon Looney and Eric Paschall away from each other as much as possible.
You want to keep James Wiseman away from Kelly Oubre Jr. and Eric Paschall as much as possible.
You want to fit Kent Bazemore into lineups with Kelly Oubre Jr. and/or Eric Paschall whenever possible.
You want to play Steph Curry and Draymond Green together as often if possible if Andrew Wiggins and Kelly Oubre Jr. are going to be on the court at the same time.
You want Eric Paschall to play the majority of his minutes with shooters surrounding him.
Now let’s go over some of the basic tendencies of Steve Kerr’s rotations as well as some of the political and injury considerations that had to be taken into consideration at the beginning of the season:
Steph Curry will play the entire first and third quarters and approximately 6-7 minutes of the 2nd and 4th quarter.
Draymond Green will play approximately 9 minutes or so of the first and third quarters and usually another 7-9 in the 2nd and 4th quarters.
James Wiseman’s development is of paramount importance.
Kelly Oubre Jr. cost $80 million to acquire and your ownership group wants their investment to pan out.
Eric Paschall was on an All-Rookie team last year and is an organizational priority.
Jordan Poole is somebody you do not trust to handle the ball or defend his position.
Brad Wanamaker is at his best when surrounded by other playmakers.
You are willing to punt bench offense for defense.
Marquesse Chriss is out for the season with a broken leg.
Now try and flesh that rotation out in your head with substitutions coming at the 6 minute mark of the 1st and 3rd quarters, the 3 minute mark of the 1st and 3rd quarters, the 9 minute mark of the 2nd quarter and 4th quarters, the 6 minute mark of the 2nd quarter and 4th quarter, and the 3 minute mark of the 2nd and 4th quarter. You’re going to go a little nuts doing this exercise. I’ve tried to do this one in my head a few times and eventually I conclude that Eric Paschall needs to be taken out of the rotation in favor of Juan Toscano-Anderson, James Wiseman will only play in the 2nd and 4th quarters if he earned those minutes, Jordan Poole needs to handle the ball next to Brad Wanamaker if Wanamaker is even in the rotation, and that the best way to keep Kelly Oubre Jr. and Andrew Wiggins’ minutes separate outside of the starting lineup is to significantly reduce Oubre’s minutes.
The best rough rotation I can think of is something like this:
Starters: Curry/Lee/Wiggins/Green/Wiseman
6 minute mark 1st/3rd quarter: Curry/Oubre/Wiggins/Green/Looney
3 minute mark 1st/3rd quarter; Curry/Bazemore/Oubre/Green/Looney
12 minute mark 2nd/4th quarter: Poole/Bazemore/Lee/Oubre/JTA
9 minute mark 2nd/4th quarter: Poole/Lee/Bazemore/Wiggins/JTA
6 minute mark 2nd/4th quarter: Curry/Poole/Lee/Wiggins/Green
3 minute mark 2nd/4th quarter: Curry/Poole/Wiggins/JTA/Green
You can make some modifications here — maybe Oubre comes back at the 3 minute mark of the 2nd quarter when he plays well, maybe Looney does when you need size or Wiseman if he played well in his first stint — but you see how difficult it is to fulfill the previously discussed conditions without having to resort to all out small ball for more than a half of a quarter.
Now try to make your best rotation with Jordan Poole receiving DNP’s in favor of Brad Wanamaker (ugh) and Eric Paschall playing minutes over Juan Toscano-Anderson, as Steve Kerr did. It becomes a mess right away. Here’s the best I was able to come up with:
Starters: Curry/Lee/Wiggins/Green/Wiseman
6 minute mark 1st/3rd quarter: Curry/Oubre/Wiggins/Green/Looney
3 minute mark 1st/3rd quarter; Curry/Bazemore/Oubre/Green/Looney
12 minute mark 2nd/4th quarter: Wanamaker/Lee/Bazemore/Wiggins/Paschall
9 minute mark 2nd/4th quarter: Wanamaker/Lee/Oubre/Wiggins/Paschall
6 minute mark 2nd/4th quarter: Curry/Wanamaker/Oubre/Wiggins/Green
3 minute mark 2nd/4th quarter: Curry/Lee/Bazemore/Wiggins/Green
I hate this. I hate half of the lineups I’ve written on this list. I imagine Steve Kerr did too. I walked you through this exercise to put you in Steve Kerr’s shoes in an attempt to be sympathetic. Again, I keep coming back to three things as I go through this mental exercise: 1. Kerr should have taken Kelly Oubre Jr. out of the starting lineup early on for the sake of James Wiseman and the Warriors’ spacing 2. Brad Wanamaker should have never been put in a position to handle the ball over Jordan Poole. 3. Eric Paschall should have lost minutes to Juan Toscano-Anderson much earlier in the season.
Some of Kerr’s early season decisions I can make sense of; I don’t have any issue with Kerr giving Eric Paschall rotation minutes to start the year and I thought his decision to play Paschall at the 5 when Marquese Chriss went down was a good one. But as Kerr tried out one of Andrew Wiggins and Kelly Oubre Jr. in bench lineups with Paschall and eventually, both of them, the effectiveness of those bench lineups tanked.
The second most used non-garbage time lineup for Paschall this season was Wanamaker/Lee/Oubre/Wiggins/Paschall, which had a -16.5 net rating despite defending 7 points above average per DRTG because... they had an 88.6 ORTG. How do you avoid trotting out a lineup that bad? For one, you don’t put Brad Wanamaker in the position of having to create for himself or others. But you can also jigger your rotations to keep Andrew Wiggins and Kelly Oubre Jr. out of each other’s way when they don’t share the court with Steph Curry and Draymond Green by having Wiggins and Oubre sub in for each other, or you could simply not play Eric Paschall.
When James Wiseman sat out games with a sprained wrist, Steve Kerr had no choice but to go small because Kevon Looney sprained his ankle the next day. But rather than start Eric Paschall, Steve Kerr elected to put Juan Toscano-Anderson into the starting lineup in these games. Here’s a screenshot of the 5 man lineups to receive >10 minutes in the period of time that both Wiseman and Looney missed time. Look how many positive lineups there are here! Look how much more smooth everything operates when you remove Wiseman and Looney from the rotation and make it easier to avoid Wiseman/Paschall lineups, Paschall/Oubre lineups, and so forth:
My point is not that the Warriors were necessarily a better team without two centers, but that it was easier for the Warriors to have the spacing they needed when they removed non-shooting players from their rotation. But as we know, trying to figure out a coherent rotation with Kelly Oubre Jr. starting inevitably led to overlap between Wiggins, Oubre, and Paschall at the expense of Juan Toscano-Anderson and the Warriors’ spacing. Kevon Looney and James Wiseman came back to the Warriors’ line up on February 20 in a loss against the New York Knicks in which Draymond Green was unfairly ejected and Juan Toscano-Anderson received a DNP after starting the previous 10 games.
Here’s the thing, I love Juan Toscano-Anderson but I wouldn’t want him to be the Warriors’ backup 5 in bench units. I likke smallball lineups, I am reluctant to expose undersized players to the wear and tear of a season’s worth of rotation minutes at the 5. Juan Toscano-Anderson is a solid NBA player, he’s not ideal small-ball 5 and giving him Eric Pascall’s minutes at the 5 without also removing Brad Wanamaker from bench units probably would have made the Warriors’ bench lineups even more punchless. In effect, Steve Kerr’s reluctance to bench Brad Wanamaker or play Jordan Poole onball left him little choice but to stick with Eric Paschall at the 5 and give JTA DNP’s so long as James Wiseman, Kelly Oubre Jr., and Kevon Looney were in the Warriors’ rotation.
Steve Kerr and the backup point guard position
During the bubble playoffs of 2020, the play of Celtics’ guard Brad Wanamaker caught the eye of Steve Kerr, who said in training camp about Wanamaker, “I really, really liked his game, admired his toughness and the stability that he brought to the game.” Brad Wanamaker fit the bill of a low usage, defense first backup point guard who can play offball and hit open shots next to another ball handler. Most Warriors fans figured that Jordan Poole would be that ball handler; he made massive improvements in his rookie year after getting reps on the ball and was rumored to have made big strides in the offseason.
Instead, Jordan Poole played offball to start the season while Brad Wanamaker was asked to create. Poole did nothing of note in the first games of the season and was soon out of the rotation as Kerr toggled various bench units. Steve Kerr’s rotation changed every few games, but at the beginning of every 2nd and 4th quarter, Wanamaker always was there. At one point in the season, Wanamaker led the entire NBA in 4th quarter minutes, much to the chagrin of Warriors’ fans.
Here’s the thing, while Wanamaker was objectively terrible as a Warrior, but his 4th quarter minutes were hardly the end of the world. When Bad Wanamaker did get to close games next to Steph Curry, he was perfectly competent and the Warriors performed quite well. Here’s a screenshot from Cleaning the Glass:
It was in these late 4th quarter stints that Brad Wanamaker got the rare opportunity to play his ideal role as an offball defensive guard. For most of his failed Warriors’ stint, Wanamaker was put in a position to fail because he was asked to create for himself and others, something he is not suited for. Anthony Slater wrote about Wanamaker’s inability to create for himself when the Warriors signed him and Celtics blogs noted his off-ball ability as a big plus, and Steve Kerr admitted to reporters in March that Wanamaker was best next to other playmakers — this was not a surprising outcome.
When it became terminally clear (to Steve Kerr, that is) that Brad Wanamaker could not continue to receive minutes as the backup point guard, the Warriors called up Jordan Poole and Nico Mannion from the G-League bubble. The expectation, as laid out by The Athletic’s Anthony Slater, was that Poole’s G-League stint was a dry run for backup point guard minutes with the big club. Slater was half right — it turned out that the G-League bubble backcourt of Nico Mannion and Jordan Poole would be the lynchpin of a revamped bench unit that would also feature James Wiseman.
This decision was confusing on several levels. A backcourt of Mannion;/Poole was almost certainly BBQ chicken on defense, which is usually a big no-no for Steve Kerr. Slotting players around the three youngest Warriors would also be a challenge; Eric Paschall wouldn’t offer the requisite spacing, while Damion Lee or Mychal Mulder would probably not offer enough wing defense for Kerr’s liking, which made it likely that one of Kelly Oubre Jr. or Andrew Wiggins would have to play in these units.
The calculus of building a workable bench unit around a backcourt of Nico Mannion and Jordan Poole is difficult. It was also not necessary. But because Steve Kerr trusted Nico Mannion and his “true point guard” abilities and was reluctant to put the ball in Jordan Poole’s hands because of the latter’s supposed recklessness, the Mannion/Poole backcourt was the compromise Steve Kerr made when he finally benched Brad Wanamaker.
The Mannion/Poole bench lineups were as bad as you’d imagine. Of these few bench units to tread water, none of them score at a league average rate and net rating of the Mannion/Poole bench units to play >10 minutes that include James Wiseman or Eric Paschall are -55.6, -66.8, -48.9, and -88.2. In the first days of the Mannion/Poole pairing, Damion Lee and Mychal Mulder were completely out of the rotation. When Steph Curry injured his tailbone, Lee was thrust into rotation minutes and when Curry returned to the court, Lee received regular minutes again. For a few more games, so did Mannion.
In early April, Nico Mannion was benched once and for all and Jordan Poole was finally given point guard minutes in bench units. This was an obvious decision. Mannion was entirely out of his element against NBA athletes and provided little value except for his ability to get the ball into the hands of Jordan Poole.
Jordan Poole may benefit from having another playmaker on the court to get him good looks, but that playmaker should not have been Nico Mannion. Steve Kerr’s enthusiasm about Mannion’s true point guard bonafides and concern about Poole’s turnovers turned out to be dead wrong; Mannion was in the 7th percentile for turnovers at his position and Poole the 86th. Because Nico Mannion didn’t have the ability to create for himself, his primary role was to create for others, but it’s a lot harder to create efficient offense for others when defenders know you aren’t a threat to score. This too, was an issue for Brad Wanaker and Shaun Livingston, but at least in the case of Livingston, he provided value as a late shot clock scorer in the midpost.
But even in the golden age of Livingston, Warriors’ bench lineups struggled to score. The much beloved Livingston/Barbosa/Iguodala/Barnes/Speights bench unit of the pre-KD Warriors had a 95 ORTGfor two years straight and while they were solid defensively, they still lost most of their minutes with a -5 net rating. Steve Kerr’s preference for bench units who can hold their own defensively has coincided with the Warriors never seeking out a potent lead guard to run their bench. This is deeply ironic. In its idealized form, Steve Kerr’s offense does not need a true point guard to function. A player who can play on and offball can cede touch to lesser scorers who have playmaking chops and instead lean on backscreens and split cuts and motion principles to find shots.
The emergence of Jordan Poole offers some promise and perhaps, an evolution in Steve Kerr’s coaching. By the end of the season, Kerr was effusive about Poole’s improvements and potential and effectively penciled him in as the Warriors’ sixth man of the future. Poole has the ability to play on and offball, run PNR’s, and hit shooters in the pocket with laser passes thrown from a variety of angles. He is an infinitely more gifted passer than Nico Mannion (and perhaps, much of the league) and as his shooting improves and he grows into his body, he should be able to provide valuable minutes as a lead guard in bench units.
It was sensible on Steve Kerr’s part to want to pair Poole with another playmaker, but that playmaker should not have been Nico Mannion. Bench lineups with Mannion/Poole were fated to be terrible defensively and the only way to make them less bad defensively was to exacerbate their already limited floor spacing. The playmaker who eventually emerged as a good companion to Poole was Juan Toscano-Anderson. In the final month of the season, Toscano-Anderson ramped up his playmaking responsibilities and averaged 3.5 assists a game in a little more than 20 minutes. Plays like these were common:
Ideally, you’d pair Jordan Poole with another Jordan Poole, but short of that, Toscano-Anderson and a veteran guard who can pass, shoot, and defend capably would be an ideal fit to continue the Steve Kerr tradition of not employing a traditional backup point guard. Brad Wanamaker actually fit that outline, but he never got to play that role alongside Poole. Had Kerr actually tried Wanamaker offball after the G-League bubble, it probably wouildn’t have worked; Wanamaker’s shot had abandoned him so thoroughly that defenders would have spent the rest of the season sagging off him and daring him to shoot and further fucking up the Warriors’ spacing.
Jordan Poole’s development was one of the few bright spots of this deeply frustrating Warriors’ season. Like most of the good things that happened this season, it only occurred when Steve Kerr was left with no choice but to do the right thing. It is unambiguously good that Steve Kerr seems to have seen the light regarding Jordan Poole. But Kerr’s distrust of Poole was once so strong that he knowingly played Brad Wanamaker in a role that he (Wanamaker) was incapable of playing. The downstream effects of resisting Poole onball forced Kerr to ride lineups with Eric Paschall at the 5 until Paschall’s body broke down and they forced Kerr to manufacture lineups he hoped could defend around Nico Mannion and Jordan Poole (only for those lineups to neither score or defend). Steve Kerr’s distrust of Jordan Poole probably cost the Warriors 5-6 wins that could have resulted from a more sensible rotation.
Steve Kerr and his media appearances
To even spend more than a sentence or two on notable Steve Kerr quotes from this past season might seem frivolous. But I think it is absolutely worth discussing. In Steve Kerr’s first few years as the Warriors’ head coach, he led something of a charmed life. Championships give credibility and Kerr, who always offered thoughtful quotes for journalists, pretty instantly got the respect of the broader NBA universe. In his first season as a coach, he talked Andre Iguodala into taking a role off of the bench and created the type of environment where David Lee’s injury and subsequent demotion didn’t derail team chemistry or lead to his players challenging him in the media.
That changed in the final year of Kevin Durant’s tenure as a Warrior, one that Kerr would later say this about:
"I enjoyed last season, when we had the worst record in the league, more than I enjoyed that last season when we went to the Finals.”
Kevin Durant heard Kerr’s comments and had something to say.
Durant’s willingness to publicly engage in Twitter beefs with strangers is, uh, unique among NBA players so there may be some temptation to dismiss this incident as nothing more than KD overreacting. But regardless of whether or not Kerr’s reasons for enjoying a season where the Warriors won 15 games have anything to do with Durant (they probably did), I think Steve fucked up by making a comment like that.
The most generous reading of that comment is that Kerr had other things going on in his life that the media was not privy to that made Durant’s final Warriors season particularly hellish. But even in that generous view of Kerr’s comments, he’s still admitted that he enjoyed one of the worst seasons in franchise history more than he did a season with a deep playoff run. Fair or not, perception is reality for a lot of people and I’d expect that most NBA players did not go looking for more information about Kerr’s comments or hear about Kerr’s (unfair) evisceration of NBCS’ Drew Shiller for tweeting Kerr’s words verbatim.
If you’re a Twitter user who likes to scroll and not necessarily read articles, then your read of what Kerr said is probably not great. If you’re an NBA player who actually talks to and has friendships with other NBA players, then you probably know in more detail than the general public does about Kevin Durant’s poorly veiled disdain for Steve Kerr. Just this last week, Durant defended himself on Twitter and seemed to confirm a report about a dinner and conversation he and Kerr had had about his Twitter usage.
In the grand scheme of things, I’m sympathetic to Kerr’s view about the toxicity of social media and what it does to our brains, but I’m a mere (occasionally depressed) internet poster, not a multi millionaire who was paid to coach arguably the greatest NBA team all of a time and lost the confidence of one of the greatest scorers to walk the planet. How bad it got between Kerr and Durant is something only people close to the team will ever know, but Durant’s dislike of Kerr is apparently so strong that he warned James Harden about playing for Kerr. That’s not great.
It’s also not great that Steve Kerr’s other most notable quote from this past season was him admitting that he wasn’t putting a priority on winning basketball games. Let’s take a look at the quote again:
I understand the sentiment Steve Kerr was trying to get across. But I think he misrepresented the mechanics of the argument for playing Steph Curry more minutes and I strongly disagree with the notion that the season was doomed the moment Klay Thompson tore his achilles tendon. Most Warriors fans were not calling for Steve Kerr to turn into Tom Thibodeau and play Steph Curry 40 minutes a game night in and night out. To act as if that was the wish of his distractors was intellectually dishonest.
Before Steph Curry bruised and partially fractured his tailbone, he’d played 33.8 minutes a game. Curry played 34.8 minutes a game when he came back to set the league on fire while wearing a butt pad to protect his affected area. Ideally, you’d have had Steph Curry play a little less to end the season, but the Warriors and Steve Kerr put themselves in the position of needing an immortal final stretch of games from Curry to even sniff the playoffs because the team bungled nearly 10 winnable games through brain farts, inadequate 4th quarter minutes for Curry, and bad lineup choices.
Prior to Steph Curry’s injury, the Warriors were on the receiving end of 6 different blowouts where Curry didn’t play a single minute in the 4th quarter. In that same period of time, the Warriors won four games in blowouts where Curry did not play a single fourth quarter minute, so in total, we’re looking at about a quarter of the Warriors’ games prior to Curry’s injury where he didn’t need to play in the fourth quarter.
Let’s do some math now. Assuming Steph Curry plays 5:30 minutes a game in any given fourth quarter, let’s multiply that by 10 to get the amount of minutes Curry would have received in a normal game and we’re looking at a little less than 55 minutes, a little more than an entire game of NBA basketball.
Now, let’s do another exercise and chase some wins: if Steph Curry were to come in at the 8 minute mark of the 4th quarter rather than the 5:30 mark of the 4th quarter, he’d play 2:30 more minutes per game. When we divide 55 (the approximate amount of minutes Steph has sat out in blowouts prior to his tailbone injury) by two and a half and see how many games of extra 4th quarter minutes it would have taken for Curry to make up for his 4th quarter absences in blowouts, our answer is 22 games.
I don’t think the Warriors needed two and a half extra minutes of Steph Curry in 22 games this season to have won enough games to avoid the play-in tournament, they might have only needed five or so games of win chasing to be the sixth seed in the western conference. Now let’s imagine that for a second, the Warriors as the sixth seed playing an emaciated Denver Nuggets team who were without their star lead guard, Jamal Murray, and his solid backcourt mate, Will Barton, for the first round of the playoffs. The Warriors already played the Nuggets well before Murray tore his ACL (at the Chase Center, no less). Do you really think that version of the Nuggets could beat Steph Curry and Draymond Green four times in a seven game series? Do you think that solid veteran players might be willing to consider the Warriors in free agency this summer after a solid playoff run from Steph and company?
After the Warriors lost to the Grizzlies in the play-in tournament, Steve Kerr told reporters he considered this past season a success.
I truly hope Steve Kerr does not genuinely believe that this season was a success. Steve Kerr is a smart man and while he knows how to be self-deprecating, I think he also knows that he needs to save face publicly for how this last season went. Even with numerous caveats applied, Steve Kerr did a poor job coaching the Warriors team he was given this season. Did he want this specific Warriors team? Probably not. But Kerr is paid millions of dollars to do a difficult job that most of us could only dream of doing and for much of the season, he seemed to resent being asked to coach this iteration of the Warriors.
No team is perfect, save for maybe those 2016-18 Warriors teams with Kevin Durant, but many coaches have made due with worse rosters and maximized their rosters to the best of their abilities. The 2016-17 Miami Heat, for example, won 30 of their last 41 games of the season with Rodney McGruder starting most of the season at shooting guard and Dion Waiters as their second or third best players. That same season, the first seeded Boston Celtics made it to the Eastern Conference Finals with Avery Bradley as their second highest scorer. In the West, recent examples of overachieving include last year’s Oklahoma City Thunder, led by a rejuvenated Chris Paul, and the 7th seeded 2017-18 San Antonio Spurs, who got only 9 games from Kawhi Leonard and started a frontcourt of the 37-year-old Pau Gasol alongside 32-year-old LaMarcus Aldridge.
Steve Kerr on the other hand, did not maximize this roster or really make any attempt to do so until his hand was forced by injuries. A season in which most of your successes in player development occurred only when all other alternatives had been exhausted cannot reasonably be considered a successful season. A season in which your franchise’s $80 million investment in a pending free agent is a massive failure only until he plays his proper role — one that only occurred after he got injured and other lineups did well — cannot reasonably be considered a successful season. A season in which you receive an MVP caliber season from your aging franchise icon and fail to make the playoffs while utterly failing to develop your team’s prized rookie/trade asset cannot reasonably be considered a successful season.
Steve Kerr’s mostly excellent coaching towards the end of the season makes his inexcusable decisions in the first 50 or so games of the season all the more frustrating. Steve Kerr has shown he knows and is capable of doing better than he did this season and for that reason, I have been so critical of him here.
I’d like to have my front office post up by the end of the week, but my schedule is much different than it was when I started writing about the Warriors, so I can’t guarantee that. But in the meantime, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this!