Using lineup data from the 2021-22 season to think about lineups and rotations for the 2022-23 Golden State Warriors
Continuity (or lack thereof) from last season's lineups, net ratings for the Warriors' most-used regular season and playoff combos, and trying to approximate the Warriors' rotation and minutes totals.
In the offseason following their 2022 NBA Finals victory, five of the Golden State Warriors from the previous season’s roster moved onto new teams, with one additional player, Andre Iguodala, still undecided on his return at the time of writing. The Warriors added two rookies in the draft, Patrick Baldwin Jr. (#28 overall pick) and Ryan Rollins (#44 draft pick), and signed veterans Donte DiVincenzo (former teams include the Milwaukee Bucks and Sacramento Kings) and JaMcyhal Green (former teams include the Memphis Grizzlies, Los Angeles Clippers, and Denver Nuggets) to veteran-minimum contracts. You can read my articles on the signings of DiVincenzo and Green here and here.
The Warriors’ offseason moves were very obviously influenced by looming luxury tax concerns that made new contracts for valuable playoff performers, Gary Payton II and Otto Porter Jr., too expensive for Joe Lacob’s taste. The contracts that GPII and OPJ signed with their new teams, the Portland Trail Blazers and Toronto Raptors, would have cost the Warriors significantly more than their value on paper, and informed observers pointed out that their replacements, DiVincenzo and Green, were more than $50 million dollars cheaper:
The other consideration that informed the Warriors’ decision to let Payton II and Porter Jr. leave was an organizational desire to open up minutes for Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody, both of whom were in and out of the rotation last season and played sparingly in the playoffs. That same desire extends to third-year center, James Wiseman, who was drafted #2 overall in the 2020 draft and has the fifth-highest salary on the Warriors. Anthony Slater of The Athletic put it this way: “there will be an expectation and a need for the three faces of the Warriors’ youth movement to graduate into the nightly equation.”
The 2021-22 Golden State Warriors were not your typical championship contenders between their exorbitant salary obligations, an unusual mix of aging legends and young players, and a bench consisting mostly of G-League castoffs and reclamation projects. This next season’s team is even more unusual in its construction:
The Warriors got younger this off-season when they added two rookies to the roster. For all intents and purposes, they will also be re-integrating a third rookie in James Wiseman onto the team. Wiseman hasn’t played NBA basketball since April 2021 and prior to tearing his meniscus was one of the most negatively impactful players in the entire NBA.
It’s a real possibility that at least one of their “Foundational Six” is not on the roster next season because of salary concerns. Andrew Wiggins and Jordan Poole are both up for new contracts in the summer of 2023 and if they build on their playoff runs, I see no way their value is less than $30 million on the open market. Draymond Green also has a player option on his contract for the 2023-24 season worth approximately $27 million and if he turns it down, he’ll go into free agency next summer as well.
Moses Moody and Jonathan Kuminga are effectively going to be thrust into rotation minutes out of necessity in the absence of not only GPII and OPJ, but Damion Lee and Juan Toscano-Anderson. There is basically no way that the Warriors will be able to willingly DNP either Moody or Kuminga as they are currently slotted in as the Warriors’ primary backups at the 3 and 4 positions — if you still believe in such distinctions.
The Warriors’ luxury tax considerations made this offseason rather unusual by a championship winner’s standard. In the summer of 2015, for example, the Warriors only had four players enter free agency and they chose to re-sign Leandro Barbosa and Draymond Green to new contracts. Ognen Kuzmic and Justin Holiday were replaced by Kevon Looney (drafted #30 overall in the 2015 draft) and free-agent signing, Ian Clark, and through a series of transactions, the Warriors turned former All-Star, David Lee, into Jason Thompson — although Lee did want to move on from the Warriors after being played out of the rotation, I have long wondered if the 2016 Finals collapse might have been averted if Lee had played after Andrew Bogut’s injury in game 5, rather than Anderson Varejao, who replaced Thompson, but I duress.
In the summer of 2017, following the Warriors’ first championship with Kevin Durant, their only offseason moves of note were the drafting of Pat McCaw and Jordan Bell, and the signing of Nick Young to replace Ian Clark. The offseason of the Warriors’ past that most closely resembles this most recent one is the summer of 2018 when Zaza Pachulia, David West, JaVale McGee, Nick Young, and McCaw moved onto new teams or retired.
That’s a bit of an imperfect comparison, though. By the time the Warriors were in do-or-die moments with the Houston Rockets in the 2018 Western Conference Finals, the only big men that Steve Kerr trusted were Kevon Looney and Jordan Bell, while Young and McCaw averaged the 10th and 15th-most minutes during the playoffs. This is to say, while the Warriors did have to re-make the back end of their roster in the summer of 2018, they didn’t have to find replacements for their top 7 or 8 players.
Let’s return to the 2015 offseason as a point of reference for this most recent offseason because Kevin Durant’s presence in seasons 2016-17 through 2018-19 doesn’t have an analog. The circumstances are different here because Shaun Livingston had signed a multi-year contract with the Warriors the summer before, but how would you have felt if the Warriors had let Livingston go after he played the 7th-most minutes on the team during a successful championship run? Luxury tax considerations effectively forced the Warriors to lose their combined Livingston equivalents in Gary Payton II and Otto Porter Jr.
During the regular season, Steve Kerr will have ample opportunity to figure out how to replace the minutes of GPII and OPJ. The best case scenario for the Warriors would be for Moses Moody and Jonathan Kuminga to pop and for Donte DiVincenzo and JaMychal Green to find the health and consistency that allowed them to start for playoff teams in the past. Don’t discount the possibility of an unexpectedly big role for someone not on the roster, like, say Quinndary Weatherspoon, or perhaps in a more outlandish scenario, a training camp invitee like Traivon Williams, whose passing could work well in Steve Kerr’s offense:
With the start of training camps only weeks away, I thought this would be a good time to take an in-depth look at the Warriors’ rotation from the 2021-22 regular season and playoffs to contextualize the changes that are coming. Let’s dive into some numbers!
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