DNHQ After Dark: Emerging wings are giving the Warriors a new identity

Let's talk about defense!

Editor’s note: It’s enjoyable when we get to talk about the other side of the ball, focusing on defensive effort and intensity. Our guy Duncan is here to pay some attention to how Golden State’s defensive abilities were on display against Brooklyn’s formidable offense. Hit em Duncan!

On Sunday, the Warriors failed to win an abjectly winnable game against Toronto. Despite doing 90% of the work to get there, the team could not stand up to defensive pressure from the Raptors’ closet full of young, athletic wings. There have been many moments this year when other teams up the intensity, start playing with energy and using their length, and it looks like the Dubs are completely incapable of dribbling the ball down the court. This was just the latest and costliest example.

This is what a good wing rotation can do against a team as light on ballhandlers as the Warriors. They can make the simplest things in the sport look impossible. Getting the ball out of the backcourt starts to look like an achievement, even if it takes eight seconds and suddenly you have no time to actually get into your offense. It’s a team construction the Warriors are particularly vulnerable to given their age and the lack of guys you trust to dribble – even Steph, while looking like 95% of the player he was when he was the best player in the world in 2022, now struggles to get past the young and spry defenders. Stack a team with them, and most ball-dominant guards will get headaches.

But this is also just a fashionable way to win games in the NBA today. The powerhouse Oklahoma City Thunder are mostly made up of these players, an army of interchangeable 6’4” guys with freakishly long arms who can just take the ball from you. That’s Alex Caruso, Ajay Mitchell, Cason Wallace, Jalen Williams. They’re not particularly big, they’re not all necessarily athletically dominant. They’re just smart and long and athletic enough to make initiating an offense impossible.

Their backline of Chet Holmgren and Isiah Hartenstein are great defenders, of course, but there’s a reason they remain dominant whenever Chet misses time. The interchangeability and the quantity of those players is the secret of their historic defense. It’s almost an unnecessary luxury to have a dominant backline when there’s no seam for a driver to get through to the basket, no pass that isn’t dangerous. Since they have so many of these smaller, long wings, they can play at 100% exertion for small portions of the game, knowing that there’s a fully-rested backup ready to go when they get exhausted.

The fact that OKC doesn’t have a lot of guys who can dribble doesn’t really matter when they’re constantly in the passing lanes, turning you over, ripping the ball from your hands. Not a lot of intensive dribbling needs to happen when you’re stealing the ball in the open court and there are no defenders between you and a dunk.

The Warriors have had candidates for these OKC-type players lately – that’s the dream of what Steve Kerr wants Jonathan Kuminga to be, what Moses Moody could be if he were just a little quicker on his feet, what Gary Payton II was in 2022 before all the injuries. Brandin Podziemski wants to be that player but the lack of athletic tools means that the smarts and peskiness aren’t quite as impactful. The Warriors clearly want to replicate that team construction, that’s what Steve Kerr imagines when he goes to his favorite small lineups, but the personnel has been lacking just enough to make that impossible. So instead we got the sad, slow, small version of the Warriors we’ve gotten used to.

On Monday, the Warriors looked like they took inspiration from Sunday’s implosion, looking exactly like the team that had just crushed them in overtime. The difference was them hitting on a wing tandem that looks like Toronto, or, if you squint, OKC. De’Anthony Melton is still only three weeks into his return and didn’t play on Sunday with the team being careful about his usage. But his impact as the off-guard is tremendous.

Melton is only 6’2” without shoes, fully guard sized (even undersized for the NBA), but his 6’8” wingspan and surprising bounce lets him play more like a wing. Just compare his playstyle to Podziemski, a player he is ostensibly two inches shorter than – they both handle, but often on defense it looks like they play completely different positions. Melton uses those long arms to interrupt passing lanes, tie up defenders, recover and make defensive plays that catch opponents off-guard. Dribbling past Melton looks terrifying, let alone trying to get a shot off while he’s off lurking somewhere.

It all comes together into a player type the Warriors have tried and failed to find since peak Gary Payton II. But we all knew this from those glorious six games last year when he looked like a key starter. It’s incredible that he looks this athletic after the ACL tear, but other than that he was a known quantity that we’ve been waiting for all season.

The true surprise of the season so far, of course, is Will Richard. Richard basically has the same measurements as Melton, with Richard just being slightly taller and slightly stronger but without Melton’s ball-handling ability. It’s a more traditional wing skillset, which is probably why he was out of the rotation briefly as Kerr tried to juice the offense and incorporate Moody and Buddy Hield. But since he’s been back, we’ve seen how those long arms and quick hands allow Richard to similarly dominate opposing guards, forcing turnovers and turning them into quick offense.

It’s not either/or – the combination of Will Richard and De’Anthony Melton seems like way more than the sum of its parts. It’s terrific to have one guy going out there and wrecking the opponent’s offense. With two guys out there like that, teams can’t gameplan around avoiding the one defensive stopper on the floor. Teams generally only have two, maybe three players on the court at one point who are capable of really handling the ball, being able to dribble and initiate offense with any confidence. With Richards and Melton on the court at the same time, you need to either be able to beat one of them or let someone real uncomfortable with initiating try to initiate. It’s a force-multiplier. Suddenly you start to look a little more like the OKC model of championship-level defense.

On a sidenote, you have to give some flowers to the Warriors front office for finding this kid. It looks comical in hindsight given Richard’s great measurables and polished play, but going back through pre-draft reports I can find very few major draft analysts who had Richard even being worthy of a second round draft pick. This wasn’t like Trayce Jackson-Davis where the Warriors making a deal to sign him to a regular NBA contract led him to fall to the end of the second round: it was a pure opportunistic draft pick. The Athletic’s Sam Vecinie had him ranked 78th overall in the class. Biggest credit goes to Nathan Grubel, who had him ranked 40th in the class. And that’s with him being a key part of a team that had just won the National Championship with Florida, not exactly an under-the-radar program. The Warriors have now hit on three consecutive second-rounders as rotational pieces in Trayce, Quinten Post, and Will Richard. That’s a fantastic record of identifying overlooked talent.

Maybe it’s not Alex Caruso and Cason Wallace (yet), but with Richards’s emergence and Melton’s recovery, there’s a very clear defensive identity to this squad that has not existed to this point. Add in the existing off-guards – Moody and Podziemski can be pests themselves, if not to the same degree – and this team is going to be very annoying to dribble near. As the team tries to survive until the trade deadline clarifies who the 2025-26 Warriors are, the Richards/Melton tandem seems like something new the Warriors can actually rely on to win games.