The Warriors' season-in-review: the Warrior's front office
A risky draft gamble, a mess at the backup point guard position, the frustrating value of Kent Bazemore, Kelly Oubre Jr.'s value, and imagining a world without Alen Smailagic
Author’s note: My life has changed quite a bit and my pre-draft plans have been derailed. I do plan on doing some draft content after the draft, which I’ll explain at the bottom of the post. Thanks for reading!
The Warriors’ front office: D
The Golden Warriors Warriors entered the 2020 offseason in a position of power few 15 win teams have ever had. Klay Thompson was assumed to be returning from an ACL injury, the Warriors owned the #2 pick in the draft and the Minnesota Timberwolves’ top three protected 2021 first round pick, a traded player exception worth approximately $17 million, and the allure of championship experience and the sheen of Steph Curry’s legend. The Warriors figured to pursue ring chasing veterans with the taxpayer mid level exception in free agency, draft a valuable long-term piece with the #2 pick, or use a combination of their draft assets to try and swing a deal for a star player.
Hours before the draft, Klay Thompson suffered a significant leg injury that was later revealed to be a torn achilles tendon. The Warriors’ front office had very little time to consider how much Thompson’s injury should affect their draft plans. Apparently it didn’t. The Warriors selected James Wiseman, who figured to slot in (pre-Thompson injury) at the very worst as a 10-15 minute rim running C who could be brought along slowly. In the second round, the Warriors selected Nico Mannion, a point guard who was a high school who then underperformed at the University of Arizona, and Justinian Jessup, a left handed sharp shooter from Boise State University, who spent the year in Australia’s NBL.
In the days after the draft, the Warriors used their $17 million TPE and their own conditional 2021 first round draft pick to trade for Kelly Oubre Jr., despite the $80 million luxury tax penalty his acquisition would trigger. The Warriors then applied for and eventually received a $9.3 million disabled player exception, which could be used to sign a free agent to a one year contract or trade for and absorb into their cap space a player with an expiring contract with a value of less than $9.3 million in a trade. The Warriors did not use that DPE in free agency and instead signed former Boston Celtic guard, Brad Wanamaker, with part of their TPMLE and reunited with Kent Bazmore on a minimum contract.
The decisions that the Warriors’ front office made — save for the selection of James Wiseman and the signing of Brad Wanamaker — are far less interesting and notable than the ones they did not make; the Warriors did not use their disabled player exception at any point in this season; the Warriors willingly went into the season with four centers under the age of 24 on their roster, all of whom were either unproven or had significant injury history; when Marquese Chriss — who came into the season as the Warriors’ most reliable center when factoring in age and injury considerations — broke his leg, the Warriors did not pick up another veteran center; when it became clear that Kelly Oubre Jr. was a poor fit for Steve Kerr’s system, they did not trade him at the deadline and recoup tradeable contracts or valuable draft picks with which to potentially fill Oubre’s salary slot; when Steph Curry partially fractured his tailbone, the Warriors did not look to sign a reliable ball-handler from the G-League or the buyout market; when they did sign someone from the G-League, it was a defensive-first, non-shooting point guard, Gary Payton III; the Warriors also allowed Alen Smailagic to waste a valuable roster spot for the entire season when it was obvious he was not worthy of meaningful minutes.
Let’s go into some of these decisions in further detail.
The drafting of James Wiseman
In the lead-up to the 2020 draft, various Bay Area sportswriters reported that the Warriors were not particularly fond of James Wiseman. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Conor Letourneau said in May of 2020 that the Warriors were higher on USC big man Onyeka Okongwu than they were James wiseman The Athletic’s Marcus Thompson hinted in a predraft podcast for The Athletic that the Warriors might be inclined towards USC’s Onyeka Okongwu if they decided to select a big man; after the draft took place, The Mercury News’ Wes Goldberg wrote that the Warriors’ view of Wiseman was not always so high:
"When Myers scouted Wiseman in November 2019, his impression may have been best described as lukewarm, [...]Wiseman struggled defending Oregon’s pick-and-roll and got into foul trouble [..] The takeaway: He was big and athletic, but raw."
Myers’ pre-draft assessment of Wiseman was pretty fair. If you read my season-in-review post on the Warriors’ bigs, you may have seen the lowlights of James Wiseman’s college game against the University Oregon. I’m going to post it again here because I think it’s an important piece of film to consider when evaluating Wiseman — this was the only meaningful game Wiseman played in his brief college career and he looks painfully raw and frankly, weak, playing against high level competition.
The optimistic view of James Wiseman’s rookie season was that he’d be a plug-and-play big who could crush lobs, get easy transition buckets, and be a fearsome, albeit, inexperienced shot blocker. That optimistic view of Wiseman probably assumed a world in which the Warriors had the necessary floor spacing to create a lob-friendly environment and a willingness on Steve Kerr’s behalf to run pick-and-rolls for James Wiseman. But the moment that Klay Thompson tore his achilles tendon, the Warriors floor spacing was compromised. On top of that, Steve Kerr is notoriously reluctant to run PNR’s and as such, it was unlikely he’d make significant modifications to his preferred offensive system for the sake of a rookie big man.
Selecting James Wiseman was a high risk proposition that has not, at this point, paid off for the Warriors. In his disappointing rookie season, James Wiseman did not contribute to winning basketball. Selecting James Wiseman was a long-term value play, but his long-term value was hurt this season because he was put into situations he was not ready for and played heavy minutes in lineups with poor spacing.
The Warriors’ front office is not responsible for the skill development of James Wiseman, but they are responsible for communicating with and understanding the tendencies and desires of the Warriors’ coaching staff. It is important to make draft selections and free agent acquisitions in accordance with the expectations and values of your coaching staff, lest you end up in a situation where you select a player who will struggle in your organization.
The simple and unsexy solution would have been to avoid this dilemma altogether and trade the #2 pick. We don’t really have confirmed and well sourced reporting on any credible trades that actually were on the table for the #2 pick, so I won’t spend much time on this scenario. We don’t know what was truly available, for the sake of thought, let’s pretend the #2 pick yields you a player no better than present day Harrison Barnes and/or a top 15 pick in this year’s draft.
Let’s consider the players we do know the Warriors could have drafted. LaMelo Ball was an option and Tyrese Haliburton told The Athletic’s Sam Amick recently that he thought the Warriors might draft him as high as the #2 pick. In a trade down scenario, you can reasonably assume the Warriors pick at least one of Haliburton, Deni Advija, Obi Toppin, Oyneka Okongwu, Devin Vassell, and if you want to feel smarmy for picking someone who outperformed their draft slot, let’s add Isaiah Stewart, Tyrese Maxey, and Saddiq Bey to this list.
There’s good options and bad options there. Pick one of the players who outperformed their draft slot like Bey or Maxey, and you probably have a lower ceiling prospect, which might be less appealing in a trade for a megastar. Take someone like Advija or Toppin, who had unspectacular seasons for their teams and your player might only have the aesthetic appeal of being a former top 5 pick, but you might have a more capable veteran at the C or the PG in the form of a veteran free agent or someone who came back in a trade down or TPE acquisition.
You can take LaMelo Ball and imagine how often First Take would talk about Kerr and Ball’s relationship and Kerr’s previous comments about LaVar Ball after every bad LaMelo game. You’re allowed to picture the optimistic timeline too, the one where LaMelo Ball is the Rookie of the Year. Choose any of the above good or bad or scenarios, I don’t care which one you choose. Just try out some of those scenarios in your head to get a sense of the potential upsides and downsides of any choice that you, Bob Myers, are now responsible for. Have fun!
Nobody can say with any certainty how any of these scenarios would have played out. The only things we know are true are the things that have already happened and have been quantified. We don’t have answers, which is why I refer so often to the numbers of lineup stats, which are quantifiable and verifiable. It’s up to us, the viewers of the game, to determine the why of what happens on the court. The past only matters insofar as it already happened and we can’t change it. Instead, try to picture where the Warriors team you’ve built in your head stands on today’s date, July 21, 2021, based entirely on quantifiable information that is highly context dependent.
Do you feel good about your team? Do you like it more than today’s Warriors team with Wiseman or perhaps, a slightly different Warriors team where your offseason acquisitions better compliment Wiseman than the Warriors team that played exactly a month ago. the Memphis Grizzlies?
You don't know what that looks like. We only know how James Wiseman played for the Warriors last year. The Warriors’ front office is responsible for creating the conditions that should best suit their players. In that regard, the Warriors’ decisions after drafting James Wiseman did not really serve James Wiseman (or the Warriors) well. The Warriors entered the season with Steph Curry as their only credible and proven onball playmaker other than Draymond Green, who is simultaneously Magic Johnson and Tony Allen on offense.
The first six minutes of the 2nd quarter are not typically the domain of Steph Curry. As such, the Warriors built a roster where James Wiseman would not have a reliable shot creator and ball handler to play with in these minutes, a little pocket of time that offered Wiseman a chance to compete against lower level NBA players.
Yes, Jordan Poole played well and showed high level passing ability in the end of his rookie season, but if the front office knew that Steve Kerr would not be inclined to play him as a point guard, how would you feel comfortable with Steph Curry and Brad Wanamaker being your only two grown ass men who can play the point guard position?
Roster building around the margins — or say, the Warriors only veteran centers being Marquese Chriss and Kevon Looney — that’s fair game to talk about when discussing the drafting of James Wiseman.
What did the Warriors expect James Wiseman to look like if Steph Curry missed lots of time this past season? Did the Warriors plan at all for how James Wiseman would be developed and what type of players would surround him if the Warriors’ season went under before the All-Star break?
Of course they did. You, Bob Myers, don’t get paid millions of dollars to sit on your ass. Your job is to consider every possibility. The Warriors’ front office thought about every single one of these things. Their decisions and solutions simply didn’t all pan out. And because every decision made in the offseason affected every single one of James Wiseman’s minutes for the Warriors, that’s how I arrive to the conclusion that the Warriors office did a poor job drafting James Wiseman.
Drafting James Wiseman is not yet an irredeemable mistake. But the Warriors’ front office did not make good acquisitions or make fruitful decisions in support of drafting James Wiseman. Now, we await the unknown of next season.
The Brad Wanamaker signing
Brad Wanamaker in his most ideal form would have been a fine fit with the Kevin Durant era Warriors. When healthy, the Warriors had enough offensive firepower to steal minutes for players who couldn’t create so long as they defended capably and could hit open shots on occasion. Alfonso McKinnie, for example, was a mostly acceptable player to play spot minutes with Steph Curry and Kevin Durant and Klay Tompson until he couldn’t hit open shots.
It’s a low bar to clear, but a Wanamaker who hit mostly open threes (and lord knows he’d get lots of them on those Warriors teams) at the rate he did in his Boston Celtics stint would have been a more useful player than Alfonso McKinnie for a previous iteration of the Warriors. Alfonso McKinnie also wasn’t half the defender Wanamaker is.
But on this Warriors’ team? What use did Brad Wanamaker serve in relation to the other players on the Warriors’ roster? Where was the reliable play creator that Wanamaker was used to playing next to? If you had one of those, or if you’d gone into the season believing that Jordan Poole was fucking awesome and would make himself so obviously of backup point minutes to Steve Kerr, Wanamaker might have been a reasonable for signing for the Warriors. But this Warriors’ team didn’t provide the conditions for Brad Wanamaker to be his best self or be of much use to the Warriors. As I’ve mentioned before, Brad Wanamaker was actually fine for the Warriors when he played offball and shared the court with Steph Curry. The thing is, that’s been true for a lot of players.
Brandon Rush, a year removed from such two terrible seasons post-ACL surgery, shot the shit out of the ball on a diet of open threes and defended just enough for the fucking 2015-16 Warriors’ starting lineup to play better with him on the court than they did Harrison Barnes. Quinn Cook, who is little more than a cool dude to hang out with in the Lakers’ locker room, played closing minutes next to Steph Curry in the 2019 Finals and given the roster Steve Kerr had available to him, it was mostly a defensible decision.
The role that Brad Wanamaker was actually suited to play — hit open shots, don’t let the ball stick in your hands, and defend guards — could have been filled by plenty of players. Glenn Robinson III’s statistical production — which was practically identical from 2015-16 Harrison Barnes — with last years’ Warriors suggests he would have benefited from the favorable conditions Steph Curry blesses upon shooters. But he also played only 23 games for the Sacramento Kings this season, who signed him on a minimum deal before they cut him, so maybe there’s a reason he’s not in the NBA. Langston Galloway, who is also not a lead guard but can defends some, shot 39% from three for the Pistons last season, and he signed for a contract in Phoenix for less than Wanamaker made for the Warriors.
If you want a more traditional backup point guard, Raul Neto was a career 38% three point shooter who signed for less than money than Wanamaker. If you want a gunner, the Clippers signed Reggie Jackson for only $100,000 more than the Warriors gave Wanamaker. If you want to spend more money, Austin Rivers, only got $3.3 or so annually from the Knicks and was later available on the buyout market — he won the Denver Nuggets a playoff game en route to the second round. If you crave familiarity, Alec Burks was available and he had enough shot creation juice to become useful to a surprisingly decent New York Knicks team.
The money Brad Wanamaker got could have been split between another minimum wing and a point guard, the Warriors could have signed a lead guard like Rivers with more of their taxpayer MLE, or maybe they could have signed split the money with Wanamaker and someone like Neto or Jackson so that Wanamaker could play alongside another creator. If you really wanna get galaxy brain about it, Brad Wanamaker would have probably fit very well alongside Tyrese Haliburton and made conditions favorable for the pursuit for a veteran center in free agency or in a trade down from the #2 pick.
At the end of the day, Brad Wanamaker is not a great player. Europhoops.net reported recently he’s garnering interest from European teams who are circling the blood in the water — Wanamaker is 31 years old and he’s probably seen his last days as a NBA player. Like James Wiseman, Brad Wanamaker could well have had a much less bad season for the Warriors, but the Warriors front office did not make decisions that provided a suitable environment after signing him.
The signing of Kent Bazemore
In terms of sheer financial value, Kent Bazemore might have been one of the best 5 free agent signings of this past offseason. If you remember Bazemore’s repeated fouls of three point shooters, his YOLO pull-up midrange jumpers, and his late season Oubresque drives to the hoop, that statement might sound mildly offensive. But the numbers bear out that pretty much every Warrior who got rotation minutes played well with Kent Bazemore. When Kelly Oubre Jr. sat out 5 games in April with a wrist injury, Bazemore stepped into the starting lineup and was such a good fit that Steve Kerr finally felt comfortable letting Oubre come off the bench.
On a very favorable diet of shots, Kent Bazemore shot a career high 40.8% from three point land. He was just about equally effective in the starting lineup as he was in unusual and ill fitting bench lineups, despite being an agent of chaos on the court. Spiritually, the closest thing the Warriors have had to Kent Bazemore in the Steve Kerr era was Leandro Barbosa, but the late career Brazillian Blur was less prone to the inexplicable decisions that turned Bazemore into such a divisive figure on Warriors Twitter.
Still, Bazmore outperformed the value of his minimum contract and then some. Kent Bazemore probably shouldn’t start on most teams in the league, but he did so capably for the Warriors. This is of course, due almost entirely to the court warping effects of Steph Curry, but Bazemore was indisputably one of the Warriors best 6 or 7 players. It’s very possible that other players available with the minimum with similar shooting ability — say Torrey Craig, Glenn Robinson III, or Solomon Hill — would have also shot career best percentages from three. But the Warriors’ front office very clearly got good value out of Kent Bazmore.
If you want to nitpick, it’s not like Bazemore’s acquisition was a stroke genius — he was available at a huge discount and you have to figure that Bazemore’s well reported friendship with Steph Curry and Bazemore’s history with the Warriors factored into his willingness to take below market value. Playoff teams and some contenders wanted Bazemore too and some of them offered him more money than the Warriors did. The Warriors were lucky to take advantage of the unique opportunity of getting a discount for Bazemore that they couldn't get with say, Nicolas Batum, Serge Ibaka, Aaron Baynes or any other ring chasing vet the Warriors were expected to make an effort to sign.
If you don’t want Kent Bazemore back on the Warriors, I get that. His anti-vax stances are icky, he should command more than a veteran minimum contract in free agency, and he probably pissed you off countless times this last season. But my evaluation about Bazemore is not about what he offers to next years’ Warriors team. He was a mostly good, albeit deeply frustrating player this last season that the Warriors got at a steep discount. There weren't many players available for a minimum contract that would have been so bizarrely useful across so many different lineup combinations.
Kent Bazemore did well in an unusual Warriors environment. He was a much more natural fit than other notable Warriors’ acquisitions like Kelly Oubre Jr. or Brad Wanamaker. Remember those hypotheticals we did with the Warriors roster earlier where I asked you to consider all the various permutations of a Warriors team that included the #2 pick or its equivalent trade value + all your best and worst free agent targets? Imagine the best or worst team you could build in those scenarios. Kent Bazemore is almost certainly a steal at the veteran minimum on most of those imaginary teams. Short of doing the Marc Jackson and playing Bazemore as your backup point guard, there’s really no way he’d be an actively harmful player at his price point.
What Kent Bazemore should not be is a starting shooting guard in the NBA. And yet, through circumstance, Steve Kerr determined — correctly — that Bazemore was useful to this Warriors team in that role. That’s not Kent Bazemore’s fault. If you want to piss all over Kent Bazemore for how he performed as the Warriors’ shooting guard, your beef is not with Bazemore, it’s with the Warriors’ organization as a whole.
If Damion Lee had started all year and Kelly Oubre Jr. and Kent Bazemore had come off the bench, would you feel better about Bazemore? My point is that the things that Kent Bazemore did to piss you off were more frustrating than they should have been because you saw more of Kent Bazemore than was befitting of a team led by an immortal iteration of Steph Curry. That version of Steph Curry deserves a well-built, veteran team around him, which means that Kent Bazemore should not be your third most veteran player on the roster.
Kent Bazemore did the best that he could do for a poorly built team and more often than not, he helped the Warriors. The Warriors’ front office did a smart thing in acknowledging the unique circumstances that made Kent Bazemore a viable target and then pursuing him. The Warriors’ front office deserves praise for acquiring Kent Bazemore and any criticism of his acquisition ignores the financial value Bazemore provided and the circumstances that led to him being such a necessary evil for this Warriors’ team.
The acquisition of Kelly Oubre Jr.
I, like many Warriors fans, was thrilled by the Warriors’ acquisition of Kelly Oubre Jr with their $17.2 million TPE. In the wake of Klay Thompson’s achilles tear, Oubre acquisition was a shot of adrenaline for a fan base that was still processing what it would mean to miss out on another year of Klay. The symbolism of the Oubre acquisition and the surprising willingness of Joe Lacob to pay about $80 million for his acquisition when taking into account luxury tax penalties masked some of Oubre’s potential downsides.
The appeal of Kelly Oubre Jr. was easy to understand; he’s a relatively young and hyper athletic wing, he’s a very active defender and rebounds well for his position, and he’d improved his three point shot in every year of his NBA career. To be clear, there were some red flags; the Phoenix Suns lost all but one game in the bubble in Oubre’s absence, advanced and impact stats have never liked him, and he’s had more turnovers than assists in his five previous seasons.
If you’ve been reading my posts, you’re probably something of an obsessive Warriors fan; I don’t need to remind you of Oubre’s brutal shooting slump to start the season, him causing Steph Curry to be visibly frustrated because he didn’t know where to be on the court, or his straight line drives to the hoop and nearly league worst percentage on layups.
Was some of this foreseeable? Maybe. The advanced stats have never painted a picture of Oubre as pretty as his face, but I thought it was sensible to think some of his poor metrics could be attributed to playing for bad teams. It also seemed sensible to think Oubre’s three point percentage could climb to the high 30’s given his linear shooting improvement and the fact that he’d be playing next to Steph Curry. As it turns out, Oubre actually shot near league average, 36.7% after he broke out of his slump in an early February game against the Dallas Mavericks. If you believe that Oubre post-Mavericks game was the real Oubre, then you may be tempted to write off some of his poor impact numbers with Warriors’ because of spacing and rotations and roster fits.
I don’t know how much responsibility the Warriors’ front office bears for what went on in Oubre’s first months of the season unless you want to argue that Bob Myers should have dictated to Steve Kerr that Oubre be benched. Consensus among the prominent sportswriters who report credibly about the Warriors is that politics factored into Steve Kerr sticking with Kelly Oubre Jr. in the starting lineup. When it became obvious that the Warriors starting lineup of Steph Curry, Kelly Oubre Jr., Andrew Wiggins, Draymond Green, and James Wiseman was no longer viable, Steve Kerr decided to bench James Wiseman rather than Kelly Oubre Jr., citing concerns about the Warriors’ defense.
I believe that Kerr’s concerns were sincere. I do not think that Steve Kerr was actively prioritizing Kelly Oubre Jr.’s trade value or comfort level with the Warriors’ organization by benching Wiseman, but this was the end effect of Kerr’s decision. What did that lineup change do for Oubre in relation to the Warriors? For one, it may have kept Oubre, a pending unrestricted free agent, more content with the Warriors’ organization, but that seemed to come undone later in the season when Kerr suggested Oubre would be a bench player for next season’s Warriors if he were to return — in a recent interview with The Athletic’s Shams Charania, Oubre expressed remorse that he’d up until this point in his career he’d not been given a “fair opportunity to show what I can do on a large scale” and generally sounded like someone who was not fond of the idea of returning to the Warriors.
Did keeping Oubre in the starting lineup help his trade value and put the Warriors in a position of power come the trade deadline or this offseason in a sign-and-trade scenario? Not really. The only credible reports I’ve seen are that the Warriors contemplated sending Oubre to Cleveland for Cedi Osman and Javale McGee and that some deal involving the Brooklyn Nets’ Spencer Dinwiddie, who missed most of the season with a partially torn ACL, was discussed but it is not clear which team made or rejected the offer.
Teams like the Spurs, Knicks, and Mavericks are rumored to be interested in Oubre this summer but all of those teams have the cap space or should be able to create enough of it to sign Oubre outright and bypass dealing with the Warriors in a sign-and-trade deal. Beyond that, Kelly Oubre Jr. didn’t play well enough as a Warrior to attract the non-cap room suitors that would offer an interesting package of contracts or draft assets in exchange for Oubre in a sign-and-trade.
Kelly Oubre Jr. is said to want north of $20 million annually on his next contract. I don’t expect the Warriors to give Oubre a deal like that and the type of contract that would benefit the Warriors, say, a 1+1 deal or a cheap multi-year contract, is unlikely to appeal to Oubre. What seems most likely is that the Warriors let Oubre walk or use a second round pick or two to convince a team to create a TPE in an Oubre sign-and-trade. But even that scenario isn’t all that appealing — the Warriors would burn assets for the chance at acquiring another player of the approximate financial value of Kelly Oubre Jr. it’s also not a given that there even exists an NBA team who would willingly hardcap themselves in a sign-and-trade for Kelly Oubre Jr.
This is all to say, efforts made intentionally or unintentionally to protect Oubre’s value have, in all likelihood, amounted to practically no change in his value. In fact, Oubre’s value at the trade deadline may have been lower than it was last December when the Warriors used a conditional FRP to bring him to the Bay Area.
What then, would have been the downside of attempting to bring Oubre off of the bench earlier in the season? How many scenarios that do not involve catastrophic injury can you imagine in which Oubre’s value at the deadline or as a sign-and-trade target is lower than it is right now? Even in the worst case scenarios where Oubre is an inefficient possessions sponge as a bench scorer, you’re pretty much in the same place as you are right now with Oubre in which a team has to be willing to bet that their organization can turn Kelly Oubre Jr. into a player that actually helps you win games.
The Warriors were a pretty good team when Oubre played well. That statement does not mean that the Warriors’ success was dependent on Kelly Oubre Jr. but rather that high level performances from Oubre and the Warriors’ supporting cast were both infrequent and desperately needed. The Warriors were 11-3 when Oubre scored more than 16 points and Wiggins more than 18 points in the same game and 21-29 when one of or neither of them hit that total. When both of Wiggins and Oubre gave the Warriors something, they were nearly unbeatable.
But more often than not, Kelly Oubre Jr. got in the way of other Warriors’ players. James Wiseman’s minutes with Oubre were a disaster, as were Eric Paschall’s. Andrew Wiggins and Kelly Oubre Jr.’s minutes together occurred most often next to James Wiseman and then later in the season, in feckless bench combinations “led” by Brad Wanamaker. Steph Curry and Kelly Oubre Jr. had a negative net rating in a two man combo, making Oubre one of three players in the Steve Kerr era to play >100 minutes with Steph Curry in a two man combo and have a negative net rating. But again, Curry and Oubre shared lots of time with James wiseman. Context matters.
It was only in Oubre’s final five games of the season that he played significant minutes without one of Brad Wanamaker, James Wiseman or Eric Paschall. In those games, he Oubrecame off of the bench and actually looked good doing so. Oubre’s time off of the bench only lasted five games so our sample size here is maddeningly small. I’ve attached a screenshot of those numbers below — keep in mind these lineups include the Warriors’ humiliation at the hands of the Dallas Mavericks, who led by more than 50 points at one point in the game.
The question the Warriors definitively needed to answer in order to make a sound evaluation on Oubre’s league wide value — can he consistently contribute to a winning team? — remains unanswered. This is not necessarily the fault of the Warriors’ front office. But at the deadline, the Warriors’ front office decided to keep Kelly Oubre Jr. That decision now seems unlikely to lead to additional transactions using Oubre’s salary slot because of the difficulty of preserving said salary slot.
Knowing only the things that are verifiable and quantifiable — how Oubre had performed as a Warrior in the various lineups he’d played with — on the day of the trade deadline, I would have been comfortable trading Kelly Oubre Jr. for Spencer Dinwiddie or the Cavs’ rumored package of Cedi Osman and Javale McGee. What we knew then was that Oubre was a bad fit with James Wiseman, he’d performed poorly with Steph Curry, and there were other players on the roster — namely, Damion Lee and Juan Toscano-Anderson — whose skill sets better fit Steve Kerr’s system and could stand to play more minutes.
What we did not know on the day of the trade deadline was that James Wiseman — who would start after the All-Star break — would tear his meniscus and that Kelly Oubre Jr. would eventually accept a bench role only after his own injury made it clear that Kent Bazemore was a better fit with the Warriors’s starters. The conditions that forced Steve Kerr to play his best lineups and then have Oubre come off the bench were accidental and had not yet occurred on the trade deadline.
We can safely say then, that the Warriors kept Kelly Oubre Jr. at the trade deadline with the expectation that he’d continue to start games. The Warriors chose to keep Kelly Oubre Jr. and willingly subject Steve Kerr to the calculus of putting together a workable rotation with both Wiseman and Oubre starting. That was a choice and not a particularly good one.
If Kelly Oubre Jr. had not injured his wrist a second time, perhaps we would have seen him thrive in a bench role and the Warriors and other organizations would have reason to believe Oubre could be a very useful bench wing on a team with deep playoff aspirations.
But that’s not what the Warriors planned for when they kept Kelly Oubre Jr. at the trade deadline. They planned to keep Oubre, start Wiseman, and as far as know, start Oubre. Knowing what we already knew on the day of the trade deadline, that was an untenable situation, but the Warriors decided they preferred that to the alternative scenarios where they trade Oubre. It’s hard for me not to see that as an organizational mistake.
The Warriors’ front office is not entirely responsible for Steve Kerr’s decisions. Perhaps there were those in the front office who did not ever want to start Oubre, or perhaps the Warriors’ front office understood and were sympathetic to the political implications that informed Oubre’s role. The Warriors’ front office should, at the very least, have a good enough relationship with the coaching staff to be in the loop about, although not necessarily influencing, rotational and tactical decisions.
Knowing Kerr’s plans for Oubre and having access to the data that could tell us what happened in Oubre’s prior minutes, I do not imagine Oubre’s value would have increased post-deadline as a sign-and-trade target. As such, I don’t think keeping Oubre, even if the plan was to let his contract expire, was justifiable. Knowing what we already knew about this Warriors’ team and Oubre’s role in it, I’d have honestly preferred to take a gamble on Osman and McGee, even if the Warriors let them walk in the off-season. I’d gladly have taken Spencer Dinwiddie’s expiring contract, if he was even available, and seen if he was amenable to coming back to the Warriors as a combo guard in bench lineups alongside Jordan Poole and occasionally next to Steph Curry in crunch time. Even if he didn’t want to sign with the Warriors, I’d feel confident that Dinwiddie would hold more value as a sign-and-trade asset than Oubre this summer .
If you want to go even further back, maybe Oubre was the wrong target with the TPE. Maybe in your ideal scenario, the Warriors trade the #2 pick or Minnesota’s top 3 protected 2021 FRP in order to absorb Myles Turner and some compensatory picks. Maybe you preferred a less sexy name that would have cost less to acquire like, say, Bulls’ forward Thaddeus Young, but then perhaps Juan Toscano-Anderson never has an opening for rotation minutes. Every decision affects other decisions — nothing happens in a vacuum.
I do not begrudge the Warriors for acquiring Kelly Oubre Jr. in the first place — as I’ve said, I wanted him on the Warriors too! The Warriors’ front office had more than enough information by the trade deadline to understand how Oubre had been and would continue to be used on this specific Warriors team. I do not understand how all of that information led the Warriors to conclude that they would improve their short term or their long term position by keeping Kelly Oubre Jr. on the roster past the deadline.
I’d love to be wrong about my suspicion that other teams won’t want to sign-and-trade for Kelly Oubre. I’d be surprised and conflicted if the Warriors did end up keeping Oubre. But I suspect that the most likely end game for Kelly Oubre Jr. and the Warriors is that they simply let him walk in free agency. If that seemed like the most likely scenario to the Warriors’ front office on the day of the trade deadline, I would have preferred the Warriors roll the dice on another set of players or assets rather than keep and continue to use Oubre the way he had been used.
The Alen Smailagic situation
When the Warriors burned two second round picks to acquire little known Serbian big man, Alen Smailagic, decision makers across the NBA were variously annoyed and amused by the lengths the Warriors went to in order to acquire Smailagic. Save for a few inventive reads out of dribble hand off sets and elite pump fakes, Smailagic didn’t show much in his rookie season. Without the athleticism or smarts to be a plus defender, Smailagic would need to be an elite three point shooter to stick around in the league, as per Steve Kerr’s assessment of him in December’s training camp
Alen Smailagic did not become an elite shooter this season. Instead, he played 10 mediocre games in the G-League bubble and got 8 minutes of meaningful playing time in a game against the Memphis Grizzlies and got punked repeatedly by real NBA players. Smailagic being overwhelmed at the NBA level was hardly a surprise. What was more shocking was that Smailagic got to waste a valuable roster spot for an entire season on a team that desperately needed healthy and credible NBA caliber veterans.
The Alen Smailagic experiment was not a necessary one but I do sympathize with the motivations that led Kent/Kirk Lacob to become enamored with the unproven Serbian big man. Investing time and draft capital on Smailagic was perhaps not the greatest decision, but at least for last season’s 15 win Warriors it wasn’t wildly indefensible.
But on a roster with a prime Steph Curry, Smailagic was worthless to the Warriors. Beyond that, the Warriors used their #2 draft pick on James Wiseman, a project big man who optimistically projected to be the Warriors’ center of the future. A team with no center more experienced than Kevon Looney and no more physically reliable (pre-leg injury) than Marquese Chriss should not have in any circumstances carried two project centers on the roster, especially one with a ceiling as low as Smailagic’s.
Even in the most hallucinatory best case scenarios for Smailagic’s career, say a more defensively challenged Mehmet Okur style stretch 5, Smailagic would not be ready to play that role for several years, by which point Steph Curry may well have aged out of superstardom. What then, was the point of keeping Smailagic on the roster? He didn’t have any trade value, he wasn’t going to help the Warriors win games, and he was almost certainly not going to be in the NBA in the 2021-2022 season.
There’s two obvious answers to the why of this question, neither of which I find particularly compelling: 1. The Lacob family didn’t want to bow to the most critical faction of the Warriors fan base and 2. The Warriors didn’t want to accrue more luxury tax penalties by cutting Smailagic and signing another player to a guaranteed contract. If Smailagic’s continued presence on the Warriors roster was a symbolic middle finger from the Lacob’s to critical fans, then the Lacobs are wildly egotistical and therefore emotionally unsuited to having any say in personnel decisions for an NBA franchise.
The luxury tax considerations are more sensible, but what’s another few million to your bottom line when you’ve already spent $80 million to have Kelly Oubre Jr. on the roster? Here’s the thing, you have to spend money to make money in the NBA. In the short term, it may hurt your wallet to cut ties with Alen Smailagic and instead sign a veteran NBA player, but the oncourt benefits of having literally just one more competent NBA player on the roster, might have been enough to propel the Warriors out of the play-in tournament or avoid the play-in tournament altogether by having a higher seed.
us recall the Warriors’ roster situation in the final ten games of the season: James Wiseman was out with a torn meniscus, Damion Lee was out indefinitely with COVID-19 symptoms, Kelly Oubre Jr. was out indefinitely with a sprained wrist and minor palm fracture, Steph Curry was carrying a depleted Warriors team with a hairline fracture in his tailbone, and Eric Paschall had been injured and then (rightfully) bumped from the rotation. And then, in the deepest corner of the bench, Alen Smailagic, sat there worthlessly as he was so utterly unplayable that Steve Kerr did not dare give him another minute of meaningful playing time after his bumbling and disastrous stint against the Grizzlies.
Choose an available veteran or reclamation project — I have several on my list I’ll discuss in the next section of this post — and imagine how you’d feel about them being available in the play-in tournament. Does this hypothetical make you feel better than Mychal Mulder’s fourth quarter minutes in the play-in tournament against the Los Angeles Lakers did? Maybe you believe that Steve Kerr’s system is so complicated that it’s not as simple as just plugging in a veteran and expecting them to be useful. If you believe that, you are implicitly conceding that Steve Kerr’s system overvalues familiarity at the expense of raw talent. Is that actually a good thing?
It is not difficult to imagine a positive scenario in which Smailagic’s roster spot is filled with an NBA veteran. You can sign this veteran at the beginning of the season after Marquese Chriss breaks his leg, you can sign him when Steph Curry hurts his tailbone, you can sign him after the Warriors trade Marquese Chriss and Brad Wanamaker for cap space, you can sign him after Damion Lee gets his positive COVID-19 diagnosis. There’s lots of scenarios here, but it’s hard for me to imagine that any single one of these hypotheticals is more damaging to the Warriors than Alen Smailagic hanging around and providing nothing to the Warriors for an entire season.
Consider this math: in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Tom Haberstroh quoted an anonymous NBA source who said that NBA teams would lose approximately $2 million a game in gate revenue for playoff games. In the most optimistic of these hypotheticals in which platonic ideal of veteran x helps the Warriors survive the play-in tournament or avoid it, Joe Lacob would have made at minimum, two nights of gate revenue from playoff games. Extend a first round series to 7 games and you get three nights of gate revenue. Win a first round series, say against a hobbled Denver Nuggets or uniquely Steph Curry susceptible Utah Jazz team, and now we’re talking at least four nights of gate revenue and perhaps as many six nights of gate revenue if you can extend a second round series to 6 or 7 games.
Yes, this gate revenue would probably be lower than pre-pandemic profits because of California’s more stringent regulations on capacity for indoor events relative to other (conservative) states, but my point stands — ditch Smailagic for a useful NBA player and you might not just recoup the financial loss of itching him, you might also look credible enough in the playoffs for veterans to consider taking a pay cut to join the Warriors in free agency and save yourself some money on genuine talent.
If you want to go a step further, which we will in just a second, imagine you not only cut ties Smailagic, but you use some of or all of your $9.3 disabled player exception to sign or trade for one year of a credible NBA player in addition to making use of the roster spots occupied at the end of the season by Gary Payton II and Jordan Bell. What then, does your roster look like?
The disabled player exception and the Warriors’ empty roster spots
Using all $9.3 million of the Warriors’ DPE might have cost the Warriors up to $50 million in luxury tax penalties. I am more sympathetic to the financial implications of using the DPE than I am that of cutting Alen Smailagic for a veteran minimum player at any point in the season. But let’s take a minute to consider some various possibilities: The Athletic’s Anthony Slater recently reported that the Warriors came very close to signing Nic Batum, who started at the power forward and center positions in the Western Conference Finals for the Los Angeles Clippers, to a veteran minimum contract. Perhaps the Warriors were reluctant to use a fraction of the DPE to give Batum a more competitive offer in anticipation of future opportunities (which did not manifest) for using the DPE. Perhaps Batum would have turned out to be a meh signing who blocks a path for Juan Toscano-Anderson to earn minutes and also compliments Brad Wanamaker just well enough that Jordan Poole never breaks into the rotation.
The hypothetical signing of Batum or another player using a little more than the veteran minimum’s worth of the DPE is one possibility. Another using all of the DPE is a player who signed in that price range is another; JaMychal Green, Chris Boucher, Aaron Baynes, Alec Burks, Justin Holiday, Nerlens Noel, and Bobby Portis all made between $3.7 to $7.3 million annually on the contracts they signed in free agency last summer. If you want to go the trade route, PJ Tucker’s contract fit into the DPE. We don’t know if the Warriors had a package amenable to the Houston Rockets, considering the Bucks had to give up a first round pick and a mildly interesting twitchy and switchy big, DJ Wilson, to acquire Tucker. Acquire Tucker too early in the season and perhaps he blocks the JTA breakout.
Let’s consider some possibilities before and around the trade deadline when you now have a clearer vision of this year’s Warriors team. Daniel Theiss, a credible stretch 5 and excellent screen setter, fit into the DPE on a $5 million expiring contract and the Boston Celtics paid the Chicago Bulls $1.3 million to take his contract and later waived one of the minor assets, Mo Wagner, they acquired for Theiss. The Warriors certainly could have been suitors for Theiss with the minor assets needed to acquire him. Javale McGee, the OG James Wiseman, was acquired for Isiah Hartenstein and two second round picks of so little significance that NBA.com doesn’t even list the details of said picks.
Terence Davis was acquired from the Toronto Raptors for a second round pick, but I understand if previous allegations of domestic abuse that were dismissed make you feel icky about that one. Likewise, Kevin Porter Jr.’s offseason misbehavior and locker room antics were so frustrating to the Cleveland Cavaliers that they gave him away in late January to the Houston Rockets for a second round pick. Maybe you can’t imagine Steve Kerr willingly coaching Porter Jr., but the Houston Rockets, for all their failings and Tilman Fertittaness, had the infrastructure and support system (by which I mostly mean assistant coach John Lucas, a former addict and legendary mentor of troubled NBA players) for Porter Jr. to behave and quickly assert himself as the Rockets’ point guard of the future and a potential star. The Milwaukee Bucks traded Torrey Craig, who is now a key rotation wing for the Phoenix Suns in the NBA finals matchup against his former team, for cash.
If you want to consider free agent veterans or consider the buyout market, Dwayne Dedmon, Ben McLemore, and Austin Rivers stand out as obvious options. Perhaps you don’t want McLemore to play in the play-in tournament or have Dedmon eat into Draymond Green’s minutes at the center, but healthy NBA players are always nice to have as an option instead of literally Alen Smailagic. The most intriguing option here is Rivers. The Athletic’s Marcus Thompson predicted the Warriors would sign him last offseason. They didn’t and it’s clear that signing Brad Wanamaker for a little less than Rivers got was a mistake for this Warriors team. Fine, whatever. But Rivers eventually got brought out by the Oklahoma City Thunder after the New York Knicks unceremoniously dumped him at the trade deadline.
By that point in time, Steph Curry had just come back early from his hairline fracture in his tailbone, which he’d then sit out additional games for. The Warriors’ front office knew the extent of and severity of Curry’s injury and as far as I know was reported, the Warriors weren’t even connected to nor did they make any serious inquiries about Rivers’ service. Sure, Austin Rivers is annoying because he’s Austin Rivers, but he was also the NBA’s leading scorer in isolation points per possession and he won the Denver Nuggets, the team that actually signed him, a game in the playoffs with his shot making ability. Imagine Rivers playing in place of Nico Mannion in the Warriors’ disastrous stint after Curry sat out a second set of games with his tailbone injury. Hell, imagine Rivers out there instead of Mychal Mulder in the fourth quarter of the play-in tournament. Do you feel better about Mulder’s defense or his ability to hit shots in high-leverage minutes than you do Austin Rivers?
The point guard that the Warriors did sign, Gary Payton II, is an excellent defender, but he’s such a non-shooter and creator that he basically amounted to little more than a souped up Brad Wanamker with some explosive athleticism. In the event that Steph Curry hurt himself again or Jordan Poole was unavailable, the Warriors’ next best option at the point guard would have been Nico Mannion, the third worst NBA player per net rating in non-garbage time minutes. This is fine!
All of these hypotheticals in this post I’ve listed are unknowable. But what we do know is the state of the Warriors’ roster in the final days of the season. The Warriors carried a useless and unplayable project big man on the roster while having all of one healthy center in the final month of the season. Down two wings of varying usefulness, the Warriors’ next man up was Mychal Mulder, a guard in size only whose three point shot seemed to abandon him outside of garbage time. Steph Curry had to be nearly immortal to drag the Warriors back into the playoff race and the Warriors clearly had no contingency plan for his absence or for a world without Jordan Poole, who became an essential and necessary part of the rotation only after Steve Kerr begrudgingly gave him real minutes because the team’s veteran point guard was so bad in and ill suited to his role that he was traded for cap relief.
In that deliriously fun end of season run, Warriors were better without their two most notable offseason acquisitions. The Warriors took a huge risk in picking James Wiseman and then proceeded to build a roster that did not suit him. The player who interfered most violently and most often with Wiseman, Kelly Oubre Jr., is unlikely to return to the Warriors after being acquired at a high price and has probably seen his league wide value fall after his Warriors’ stint.
The Warriors’ decision to acquire Oubre was not necessarily a bad one, but the acquisitions made in support of Oubre and the decision to keep him past the trade deadline — assuming Steve Kerr would have continued to start both Oubre and Wiseman together had they not gotten injured — were unsound. Oubre and Wiseman might not have necessarily been this bad for the Warriors on a better roster or for a coach who was more willing to play his best lineups, but is incumbent on the Warriors’ front office to factor in the tendencies of the Warriors’ coaching staff when making decisions in the short term and long term.
What I find most damning about the Warriors’ front office this past season was their unwillingness to use every available measure to improve the team’s roster. The Warriors’ performance at the end of the season affirmed that which is already known; the Warriors are a very good team when they play to Steph Curry’s strengths. The beauty of a Steph Curry led team is that you can get away with giving heavy minutes to flawed players so long as they play in service to and in harmony with Curry. The backcourt of Steph Curry, Mychal Mulder, and Damion Lee had several combos that killed opposing teams this season — this is due almost entirely to the awesome powers of Curry.
But Curry’s greatness presents paradoxes. One such paradox; Steve Kerr’s offensive system has always struggled to produce efficient offense without Curry. This may be, in part, due to the type of players that the Warriors have employed at the backup point guard position; entering a season with Brad Wanamaker and Jordan Poole as your only non-Curry ball handlers was a foolish decision that defied logic and pretty much all that is known about the tactics and trends of the contemporary NBA. For as much optimism that Poole caused among Warriors fans this year, he and the Warriors would have both benefited from having literally just one other player on the roster who could create shots to play alongside him rather than Steph Curry — was it any surprise that the Warriors lead against the Lakers in the 4th quarter of the play-in game disappeared in less than two minutes seconds with Poole as the only ball handler?
The other paradox of Curry; he inspires such fear in opposing defenses that no sane coach will ever allow Curry a clean look in crunch time and as such it is all but inevitable that other Warriors will be forced to create plays in these high leverage moments. Knowing that, you, Bob Myers, should do everything in your power to make sure the Warriors beat the ever living shit out of teams so thoroughly in regulation that you bypass do-or-die, final shot of the game scenarios whenever possible. Building such a roster is practically impossible but it is still something worth aspiring to.
The Warriors’ front office, however, did not use all the tools at their disposal to build the best roster possible this season and the moves they made that factored in long considerations were mostly failures. To be clear, there were successes this year — picking up Jordan Poole’s third year option even after he looked aggressively mediocre in the first week of the season stands out as a good choice. But how much credit does the Warriors’ front office deserve if the team’s most obvious successes occurred in spite of and in the absence of their most notable and expensive acquisitions? It is that consideration in mind and the Warriors’ unwillingness to improve the roster around the margins that make me so critical of the front office and frankly, the whole of the Warriors’ organization for wasting a season of Steph Curry the likes of which we may never see again.
The next post I’ll do will be after the draft when we know who the Warriors have drafted, or perhaps, traded. I will no longer be doing the deep dive I anticipated doing on guards, wings, and bigs. Frankly, there’s much better writers than me, like, say, Jonathan Wasserman and Sam Vecenie who spend way more time doing draft stuff. Go read them, they’re the best in the business for a reason. But I will still apply the methodology I wanted to use for my pre-draft content to my write-up on the Warriors’ picks. I recall an NBA GM, perhaps Bob Myers, once saying that he liked to watch a prospect’s best and worst game in his pre-draft scouting. Obviously Bob Myers does way more than just that in the build up to the draft, but what I, a lowly restaurant worker who works 5-6 days a week, use the best game/worst game binary to evaluate prospects. It’s an imperfect method, but it’s an interesting one for trying to get a sense of how a player affects the game around him and how much of their statistical impact (or lack thereof) has to do with their own actions and the environments that surround them. See you next time!
OMG! What a piece you wrote. Congratulations. Looking forward to the next one.
Thank you. Well done