Warriors week-in-review: 1/17 - 1/24
The brief-lived Jonathan Kuminga starter era, new rotations with Gary Payton II and Damion Lee as the first non-bigs off the bench, Steph Curry's shooting slump, and Kevon Looney love and fears.
Who is on the injury report?
Klay Thompson only played in two games this week. Thompson, as will be customary for the foreseeable future, played in only one side of a back-to-back, and was later scratched prior to the Warriors’ Sunday night game against the Utah Jazz with a knee tweak that was described as “nothing too concerning.”
James Wiseman has still not been cleared for full-contact drills or practice. Steve Kerr’s soundbite on the Wiseman situation — and his obvious frustration — is worth watching:
Gary Payton II returned from his bout with back spasms and has only cleared the 20-minute mark once. Payton II has been typically impactful on defense, but it seems clear that his body is still not right. This transition layup where he barely laid the ball over the rim struck me — and apparently nobody else — as rather alarming:
There have been no official updates on Draymond Green’s status, but on a recent episode of his podcast, The Draymond Green Show, he told listeners that he was gaining strength in his back and didn’t sound particularly worried about his injury.
Who did the Warriors play?
The Warriors began their 7-game homestand with games against the Detroit Pistons, Indiana Pacers, Houston Rockets, and Utah Jazz.
How did they do?
The Warriors went 3-1.
How did that happen?
The Warriors’ homestand began with overwhelmingly positive vibes in a 102-86 win against the Pistons. Prior to the game, Steve Kerr announced that Jonathan Kuminga would start at the power forward for the foreseeable future in Draymond Green’s absence — there will be more on this later, I promise! — but the rookies’ minutes were far less than interesting than the tag team shooting theatrics of Steph Curry and Klay Thompson.
For the first time since Thompson returned from injury on January 9, both Steph and Klay had a good shooting night at the same time! The Warriors finished the first quarter with an 11-point lead and jumped out to an 18-point lead by the time that Jonathan Kuminga, who spent much of the second quarter at the 5 after sitting much of the first quarter with foul trouble, subbed out. In the final 3:25 minutes of the quarter, the Warriors went on a run that felt very Warriors and outscored the Pistons 16-6 to close out the half. Klay Thompson had 7 points in two minutes and capped the half with a transition three that sent the crowd at Chase Center into a state of ecstasy and put the Warriors up by 28 points.
The Warriors scored only 17 points in the third quarter and struggled to generate healthy offense, but the Pistons, who are one of the worst scoring teams in the league, weren’t able to generate any momentum in these minutes and so Steph Curry did not play during the fourth quarter and both coaches eventually cleared their benches to give way to a rather boring stint of garbage-time.
Two nights later the Warriors faced a Pacers team missing its six best players — this should have been an easy win — but instead the Warriors let their opponent make a game of it and lost in overtime 121-117 in humiliating fashion due to the heroics of recent Pacers signee, Keifer Sykes. Unlike recent Warriors’ losses, Steph Curry actually shot the ball well and had 39 points on 6/16 shooting from deep. The bigger problem was that the Warriors turned the ball over 21 times and the non-Steph Warriors went 3/26 from three.
In a frustrating and bizarre game, several things stood out:
Jonathan Kuminga opened the game by getting to the free-throw line three times in the first six minutes of the game, but was benched in the third quarter after a few defensive lapses on the weak side and didn’t play again.
Klay Thompson shot the ball 17 times and didn’t make any of his 7 three-point attempts.
Gary Payton II sparked the Warriors during their early fourth-quarter run and then didn’t play in the closing minutes of the game, save for a 7-second stint in overtime.
Kevon Looney had five turnovers, including two costly ones in the fourth quarter. Looney and the Warriors’ high turnover count was due in large part to the depleted Pacers knowing exactly how to defend the Warriors’ pet actions. I cut up film of several instances of the Warriors intentionally putting Steph Curry off of the ball in the second half and/or the Pacers knowing exactly how to defend the Warriors’ motion offense — you can see those here, here, here, and here.
Steve Kerr opted not to foul the Pacers at the end of regulation with the Warriors up three points and paid the price for his decision. Steph Curry lost track of Justin Holiday, the Pacers’ inbounder, who then hit the game-tying three in the possession that sent the game to overtime. Kerr later blamed himself for that decision.
Because the Warriors had to go to overtime in this loss, Klay Thompson wasn’t able to play in the final minutes of the game and Steph Curry had to play for 44 minutes.
The Warriors followed up their brutal loss to the Pacers with a horrendous first half of basketball against the Houston Rockets where they fell behind by 15 points at one point. Oh, and remember how Jonathan Kuminga was going to start in Draymond’s place for the time being? That only lasted two games as Kuminga watched Nemanja Bjelica, Gary Payton II, and Damion Lee play before him.
I digress, For much of the first half, a young Rockets team snuffed out the Warriors’ preferred offense actions, as detailed by The Athletic’s Anthony Slater, and the Rockets got easy buckets in the paint with simple dribble penetration that the Warriors failed to defend. The end of the second quarter was particularly brutal — the Warriors went nearly five minutes in between made field goals, and did I mention that Steph Curry went 1/9 from the field in the half?
The Warriors managed to tie things up by the end of the third quarter and late in the quarter, Jordan Poole drew a flagrant foul and had a rare five-point possession after drawing an and-one on the ensuing play after his free throws. In a matter of 8 seconds, the Warriors went from down three points to up two, which gave them a shot in the arm going into the fourth quarter.
Steph Curry’s buzzer-beating shot — somehow only the first one of his career if we’re going to e strict about the definitions of things — gave the Warriors a 105-103 win that felt disturbingly necessary and comforting. This was not a good win by any means, but it was, at least, encouraging to see the Warriors simplify their crunch-time offense in the fourth quarter and put the ball in Steph Curry’s hands and ask him to make plays. Curry played practically the entire fourth quarter (!) and when it mattered most, the Warriors dialed up pick and rolls and Curry-centric actions. The end result: Steph Curry finished the fourth quarter with only five points, but he had four assists and didn’t turn the ball over once.
The Warriors’ simplified crunch-time offense from the Rockets’ game seemed to offer something of a blueprint for how Steph Curry and the rest of the Warriors would attack the Utah Jazz in a 94-92 win two nights later. I clipped up some film of a few examples of the Warriors’ simple and effective offense against the Jazz in the first half, which you can see below:
You’ll notice in these clips that Rudy Gobert is involved in all but one of the above sequences. The Warriors do not fear Rudy Gobert and although he does deter at least a few drives a game in hulking fashion, Gobert’s presence seems to invigorate the Warriors’ offense by encouraging them to simply... attack without overcomplicating things.
Sunday night’s game against the Jazz was not nearly as interesting as it could have been — neither of Klay Thompson and Donovan Mitchell played and Jonathan Kuminga only got 6 minutes of playing time — but nonetheless, it was encouraging to see the Warriors comfortably create efficient offense on a night that Steph Curry went 5/20 from the field and 1/13 from three. If Curry had simply made his shots at even a Westbrookian rate, this game would have been a blowout, but instead, the Warriors and Jazz had to battle it out in an ugly fourth quarter that was an affront to good basketball.
The Warriors scored only 11 points in the fourth quarter and shot 26.3% from the field and missed all 10 of their three-point attempts in the period. Thankfully, the Jazz weren’t that much better as they shot 28.6% from the field and only made two threes. The Jazz did, however, give themselves a chance to send it to overtime after this brutal sequence from Steph Curry:
With one last chance to tie the game or win it, the Jazz got a tough look from three and nearly tipped in an offensive rebound, but the Warriors escaped and finished the week with a 3-1 record, despite playing one of their worst games of the entire season.
What lineups played lots of minutes this week?
It’s time for our weekly ORTG check so you can contextualize the ORTG’s of the various lineup combos listed below: the league average is now 110.0 ORTG, a 0.1 increase from last week. Before we examine last week’s lineups, we’ll take a brief look at the 15 most used 5-man lineups from the entire season, courtesy of Cleaning the Glass:
Curry/Poole/Wiggins/OPJ/Looney: +26.5 net rating (118.4 ORTG) in 39 minutes.
Curry/Thompson/Wiggins/Kuminga/Looney: -9.9 net rating (104.8 ORTG) in 20 minutes.
Curry/GPII/Lee/Kuminga/Bjelica: +2.1 net rating (133.3 ORTG) in 9 minutes.
Curry/Thompson/Wiggins/Iguodala/JTA: +33.3 net rating (116.7 ORTG) in 6 minutes.
Curry/GPII/Lee/Wiggins/Looney; -37.8 net rating (107.7 ORTG) in 6 minutes.
Curry/GPII/Wiggins/OPJ/Looney: +17.3 net rating (92.3 ORTG) in 6 minutes.
Poole/GPII/Lee/Iguodala/Bjelica: +53 net rating (116.7 ORTG) in 5 minutes.
Curry/Lee/Wiggins/OPJ/Looney: -44.4 net rating (100 ORTG) in 5 minutes.
Curry/GPII/Poole/Iguodala/Bjelica: +50 net rating (110 ORTG) in 4 minutes.
Poole/GPII/Lee/Wiggins/Bjelica: +37.5 net rating (137.5 ORTG) in 4 minutes.
Curry/GPII/Lee/Wiggins/Bjelica: -72.2 net rating (78.8 ORTG) in 4 minutes.
Despite the Warriors playing four games in the last week, there wasn’t all that much consistency in their five-man lineups. That is due in part to the on and off absences of Andre Iguodala, Klay Thompson, and Otto Porter Jr., all of whom typically sit at least one side of back-to-back games, but also due to Steve Kerr’s sudden and yet unexplained benching of Jonathan Kuminga. It’s a shame the Warriors didn’t get another game out of Klay Thomspon this past week — Draymond Green’s absence sucks, but it could be an opportunity for the non-dynasty era Warriors to get reps alongside Klay — but there’s still some notable stuff here.
The Curry/Poole/Wiggins/OPJ/Looney lineup hadn’t played a single minute together prior to the Warriors’ demolition of the Bulls at the United Center. Nearly two weeks after that game, that combo has now played the second-most minutes of any Warriors’ five-man lineup this season. I think it’s reasonable to expect that this lineup should get more run when (if ever) the Warriors are fully healthy.
Something other stuff I noticed:
Lineups with both Steph Curry and Jordan Poole only make two appearances here — the new starters that top that list and Curry/GPII/Wiggins/OPJ/Looney. In the two games that Klay Thompson played this week, the Warriors tried subbing Jordan Poole in directly for Steph Curry in the first quarter and then playing them together only at the beginning of the second and fourth quarters.
The two lineups at the bottom of the list include Andrew Wiggins as the Warriors’ nominal power forward. This is a direct consequence of Steve Kerr’s benching of Jonathan Kuminga and his substitution patterns in the last two games where Damion Lee and Gary Payton II have been the first two non-bigs off of the bench. Kuminga has been subbing in for Wiggins towards the end of the first quarter — in last night’s game Wiggins actually played the whole first quarter — and then playing the final half of the second quarter. We’ll see if these patterns stick, but I do think that Andrew Wiggins can be a useful small-ball 4, provided that there’s enough shooting on the court to give Wiggins the gentle encouragement he needs to drive to the hoop.
Curry/Wiggins/Looney: +10.7 net rating (118.2 ORTG) in 95 minutes.
Wiggins/OPJ/Looney: +21.2 net rating (113.3 ORTG) in 60 minutes.
Curry/Wiggins/OPJ: +19.4 net rating (114.8 ORTG) in 57 minutes.
Poole/Wiggins/Looney: +16.9 net rating (110.3 ORTG) in 56 minutes.
Curry/OPJ/Looney; +19.9 net rating (115.9 ORTG) in 53 minutes.
Poole/Wiggins/OPJ: +26.2 net rating (113.4 ORTG) in 51 minutes.
Curry/Poole/Wiggins: +14.7 net rating (114.7 ORTG) in 49 minutes.
Poole/OPJ/Looney: +26.1 net rating (114.6 ORTG) in 47 minutes.
Curry/Poole/OPJ: +30.4 net rating (113.3 ORTG) in 45 minutes.
Curry/Poole/Looney: +23.8 net rating (121.3 ORTG) in 41 minutes.
Curry/Thompson/Wiggins: +14.6 net rating (118.7 ORTG) in 35 minutes.
Wiggins/Thompson/Looney: +10.1 (116.9 ORTG) in 34 minutes.
GPII/Lee/Bjelica: +3.8 net rating (116.9 ORTG) in 30 minutes.
Wiggins/Kuminga/Looney: -14.8 net rating (109.8 ORTG) in 29 minutes.
Poole/GPII/Bjelica: +8.5 net rating (100 ORTG) in 29 minutes.
Curry/Thompson/Looney: +11.1 net rating (121 ORTG) in 29 minutes.
Variations of the starting lineup of Curry/Poole/Wiggins/OPJ/Looney fared very well this past week. That’s no surprise. The prominence of the GPII/Lee/Bjelica combo is interesting because, as I mentioned earlier, Steve Kerr turned to those three players as his first subs off of the bench after demoting Jonathan Kuminga. That combo has held its own, despite not doing so well on defense, but it’s worth noting that a fair amount of their minutes are coming in non-Steph Curry lineups at the end of the first and third quarters.
Here are the Warriors’ two-man combos that played at least 35 minutes together this past week:
Curry/Wiggins: +4.5 net rating (112.9 ORTG) in 114 minutes.
Wiggins/Looney: +11.8 net rating (114.6 ORTG) in 110 minutes.
Curry/Looney: +9.6 net rating (117.6 ORTG) in 96 minutes.
Poole/Wiggins: +14 net rating (109.6 ORTG) in 70 minutes.
Wiggins/OPJ: +21.1 net rating (113.1 ORTG) in 66 minutes.
Curry/Poole: 14.8 net rating (108.5 ORTG) in 65 minutes.
Curry/OPJ: +19.9 net rating (110.2 ORTG) in 63 minutes.
Poole/OPJ: +22.1 net rating (105.8 ORTG) in 61 minutes.
OPJ/Looney: +21.2 net rating (113.3 ORTG) in 60 minutes.
Poole/Looney: +16.9 net rating (110.3 ORTG) in 56 minutes.
GPII/Bjelica: +0.0 net rating (104.4 ORTG) in 46 minutes.
Poole/Bjelica: -6.4 net rating (91.3 ORTG) in 44 minutes.
Curry/Lee: -11.1 net rating (100 ORTG) in 44 minutes.
Curry/GPII: -26.6 net rating (96.7 ORTG) in 44 minutes.
Curry/Kuminga: -4.5 net rating (109.6 ORTG) in 43 minutes.
Lee/Bjelica: -10.2 net rating (103.6 ORTG) in 42 minutes.
Thompson/Wiggins: +16.1 net rating (117.2 ORTG) in 41 minutes.
GPII/Lee: -4.8 net rating (114.5 ORTG) in 39 minutes.
Poole/Lee: +16.7 net rating (96.2 ORTG) in 36 minutes.
Curry/Thompson: +14.6 net rating (118.7 ORTG) in 34 minutes.
Behold the amount of negative net rating combos here! Poole/Bjelica, or say, Lee/Bjelica coming up negative isn’t terribly surprising given the amount of minutes those combos got without Steph Curry last week, but it is shocking to see Curry/GPII so brutally in the red. Still, it is encouraging to see the only high-minutes Klay Thompson combos come up overwhelmingly positive here with exceptional ORTG’s.
KLAY WATCH BABY!!!
Given the Warriors’ history under Joe Lacob’s ownership of obfuscating and concealing the extent of injuries, I do not necessarily buy that Klay Thompson’s recent knee tweak does not merit concern. I hope I’m wrong about this though, and I’ll gladly eat my words if it turns out to be a mere single-game absence.
Alas, Klay Thompson only played two games this past week because of the aforementioned knee tweak. In those games, we got to see the good and bad of Klay Thompson in nearly-identical settings against terrible NBA competition. In the Warriors’ win against the Pistons, Klay had 17 points in the first half and had an invigorating scoring burst to close out the second quarter where he poured in 7 points in nearly two minutes. Against a young and inexperienced Pistons team, Klay looked comfortable making plays for himself and others with the ball in his hands. Here are a few clips:
We also got to see Klay in the post a bit against the Pistons, which is something I’ve long believed could be beneficial to the Warriors’ crunch-time offense.
Take a moment and watch how the above post up is set up by Klay Thompson setting a pindown for Steph Curry after inbounding the ball. The attention that Curry draws is enough to give Klay a clean lane to cut into unimpeded. The Warriors have been running this play a far amount for Klay, particularly with Andrew Wiggins in Klay’s place, and it’s been a nice and easy way to get clean looks near the hoop.
Now for the bad: I’ve linked to all of Klay’s seven missed threes against the Pacers here. Note how rushed and short many of these looks are.
Through four games this season, Klay Thompson is averaging 14.7 points, 2.8 rebounds, 2 assists, 0.7 steals, 0.3 blocks, and 1.8 turnovers a game on 37/30/100 splits in 21.3 minutes a game.
Here’s a visual representation of Klay’s shot chart this season, courtesy of Positive Residual:
Assorted notes
I’m going to use bullet points here to put together some stray thoughts:
Steph Curry’s shooting slump has now lasted nearly two months and he’s shooting a pedestrian (by his standards) 37.6% from three. As has been the case all season, his percentage on open threes is hurting him. Through 43 games — over half of the season at this point! — Steph is shooting 32.6% on open threes, which comprise of 6.1 of his three-point attempts a game. When asked about his shooting struggles by Anthony Slater, Steph Curry struck the right tone and didn’t attempt to excuse his struggles:
Since the Warriors’ Christmas day win against the Phoenix Suns, the Warriors are now shooting 32.1% from three as a team. Curry is shooting 30.7% in that period from deep. Ugh.
Speaking of the Christmas day game — that was the day that All-Star voting began and the day that the Warriors’ PR and adjacent state media went on a push to talk up Andrew Wiggins as an All-Star. Since that date, Wiggins has come back to earth some and is averaging 17.1 points a game on 46/38/58 shooting splits. That’s putrid production at the free-throw line. Prior to Christmas, Andrew Wiggins was putting up 3.8 shots a game in the restricted area, but since his return from COVID-19/the start of the insufferable Wiggins propaganda, he’s only taking 2.7 shots a game in the restricted area. I’d like to see that number climb.
Kevon Looney has probably been the Warriors’ most consistent player in the midst of the teams’ winter malaise. Prior to Sunday’s game against the Jazz, Looney had grabbed double-digit rebounds in five consecutive games, a career-high streak. Since Draymond Green started missing games, Looney has been better than ever averaging 7.3 points, 10 rebounds, 2 assists, and 1.6 stocks on 62/0/100 splits. He has, however, played 24.2 minutes a game since Draymond was shelved indefinitely. For reasons that make no sense to me, the Warriors are apparently happy so thrilled with Looney’s recent play and durability that they feel no need to add reinforcements at the center position, despite Green’s injury and the likely possibility that James Wiseman won’t earn rotation minutes this year. The flawed logic behind that thinking is laid out by Anthony Slater in this article, which reads like an attempt at a victory lap by the Warriors’ organization, who are willingly trotting out a 25-year old who has had multiple surgeries on his hips and abdomen and has a degenerative nerve issue, for extended minutes. Seems bad!
What does this next week have in store for the Warriors?
The Warriors finish off their 7-game homestand with nationally televeised games against the Dallas Mavericks, Minnesota Timberwolves, and Brooklyn Nets.
My prediction for this week
They will lose all three games.