The Warriors think they have time.
Time to “figure this thing out,” as Steph Curry said last week.
Time to make that big trade that will turn the Warriors into a true playoff team..
Time to decide if Jonathan Kuminga is or isn’t the future of this franchise.
Time to tread water at .500, outside of even the play-in tournament, despite a 12-3 start to the season.
And yet time is the one thing the Warriors surely lack.
For the last few years, the Warriors have operated in wait-and-see mode. Blessed by having Curry in his prime (or at least on the early decline) the Dubs have been able to sweat the small stuff of the NBA — luxury tax avoidance, draft-pick management, two-way contracts, founding a women’s team.
While that stuff is all well and good, they never seemed to get around to finding Curry a true No. 2 — the kind of player necessary to compete.
The time to do it is running out.
Curry, the 11th oldest active player in the league, will turn 37 in less than two months, and Draymond Green is 43 days away from his 35th birthday with some seriously tough miles on the odometer. The Warriors will have to decide in six months whether to give Kuminga a long-term deal, and the NBA’s trade deadline—the Warriors’ last opportunity to make a major move this season— is 18 days away.
Eighteen days.
That’s all the time the Warriors have left.
And what do they have to show for all that time wasted?
A .500 record?
A vague sense of Kuminga’s upside — a byproduct of a solid December (in which the Warriors went 4-9 in games he played)?
Let me ask another way: What are these Warriors good at?
I, like the Warriors, will wait.
Suffice it to say that this team isn’t going to “figure it out” in less than three weeks.
Not with Green injured for at least another week, and Kuminga likely two.
Not with Brandin Podziemski still sidelined and Curry playing with a twisted ankle.
And even if everything was going well, what is there to figure out? These Warriors are not good enough to be a playoff team in the Western Conference. (My, how low have we set the bar these days?)
This team is bad and needs to do something to mix things up before that Feb. 6 trade deadline.
And yet, this team’s urgency to make a move—to do anything—seems to be non-existent. Kerr, Curry, and Green are actively fighting such ideas in the press.
Indeedf, the front office and chief decision makers are following the lead of the Warriors players, who spent 48 minutes on Monday – a game on national television — standing around, waiting for something to happen.
No ball movement. No player movement. No dribble penetration. Just a bunch of standing around the 3-point line.
They were like a bunch of sixth-grade boys at the mixer dance — petrified to do anything.
Yes, the Warriors made a trade already this season — acquiring Dennis Schröder for the expiring contract of the injured De’Anthony Melton and some second-round draft picks.
That was a no-risk trade. Sure enough, it has produced no reward so far.
And sure, Joe Lacob and the rest of the Warriors’ front office have talked a big game, but when push has come to shove — when this team has been tasked with making a trade with risk; with doing something that could give this moribund operation a real shot at overtaking the three other teams in California (a massive ask, I know), they’ve balked.
The Warriors have won nine of their last 27 games and lost to the Celtics by 40 on Monday.
Forty!
They’re a team that depends on Curry playing at an All-NBA level every night to win — a team that needs Buddy Hield, Kuminga, or Andrew Wiggins to step up and be a No. 2 on any given night. (Don’t let the multiple options fool you — the Warriors are as likely to go without a No. 2 for a game as they are likely to have one of those players step up.)
Oh, and Curry doesn’t even play both ends of back-to-backs anymore. He also has games where he’s simply off. The result is a team that loses nearly every game he doesn’t play and splits (at best) the games he plays.
I don’t like the math there.
I wonder what the Warriors’ fabled “models” think.
While Lacob and general manager Mike Dunleavy Jr’s favorite line this season is that “trades are hard to make,” the more telling quote was given by Lacob to the Hoops Adjacent podcast this past summer, when he said of trades:
“We run analytical models on all that stuff. We will make the deal that makes us better,” Lacob said. “We have an incredibly complex model these guys run about how good we will be, and it’s not everything what the press writes all the time, or what people say on the internet blogs.”
Yes, he’s blaming some computer (and those damned internet blogs) for why Lauri Markannen — or a half-dozen other available All-Stars — isn’t a Dub. Is that the model that says Kuminga and Podziemski are untouchable in a trade?
If so, get a new model.
And yet I imagine those models — which seem intent on maintaining the Warriors’ “mid” status at all costs — are still running.
If the trade deadline passes and the Warriors haven’t done anything to improve, Lacob and Dunleavy will surely suggest that they can make a move in the summer — which, of course, is when the Dubs will be forced to make a decision on Kuminga, who is a restricted free agent. A market-rate deal for him would surely necessitate moving off other salary, a tacit admittance that the team is all-in on the forward moving forward.
Another lost season will be on deck.
So much for maximizing the competitiveness of Curry’s final years.
The good news is that there is still time to do something, anything to salvage this season — a campaign that could easily be the last All-NBA-worthy campaign for Curry and the final effective season for Green.
And it’s a season in which the Clippers and Lakers are the Nos. 5 and 6 seeds in the Western Conference—surely the Warriors, with proper augmentation, can be better than both of those teams.
And surely that’s this team goal, right?
Yet the Warriors seem too afraid to take bold action—to shake up a roster that desperately needs a shakeup.
So will the Warriors realize that time is not their ally before it’s too late?
I guess we’ll find out soon enough.
Source: Paradise Post
