There’s a misconception of what “tanking” looks like. A lot of people equate it with players and coaches throwing games, but at the core tanking is really about de-prioritizing winning in the near term in order to be better able to succeed later on. The Golden State Warriors, with a flurry of moves at the trade deadline, have sent a clear signal to the league that they will be spending the rest of this season tanking.
While the Warriors have dumped talent and salary in the past, we have not seen such profligate actions along these lines since Joe Lacob purchased the team. The front office has certainly earned our trust that there will be a plan to improve this roster over the offseason, but in the meantime, the tank is in full effect for the remainder of the 2019-2020 NBA season.
Making sense of the trade moves
The Warriors traded six of their fourteen players, Wiley Cauley-Stein, Alec Bruks, Glenn Robinson; and then today’s big move of D’Angelo Russell, Omari Spellman, and Jacob Evans. In return? Andrew Wiggins, and his hugely negative-value contract are now attached to the Warriors.
But back to tanking. This move was not about any of the current players, this trade deadline was all about dropping the team out of the luxury tax line this season, and grabbing as many draft picks as possible. Under those criteria, this was a fairly successful trade season for Golden State. Wiggins comes with a 2021 top-3 protected first-round draft pick and a 2021 second-round draft pick; all the other trades brought them a bevy of second round picks (Utah and Dallas in 2020, Denver in 2021, Toronto 2022, and then oddly, Golden State re-acquired their own 2022 second-round pick).
If this was a renovation project for a house, you could say the the Warriors took it down to the studs - which actually makes sense if you think that the team needed to be rebuilt more than retooled.
Before we get to Wiggins, let’s just consider the roster moves that the Warriors have made and how thoroughly the team has cleared the proverbial deck for a run at another big-name free agent in the upcoming offseason:
This was a pretty bold “pardon our dust” sort of trade deadline for Golden State. They jettisoned Cauley-Stein’s guaranteed deal, as well as Jacob Evans (who was struggling mightily), and Omari Spellman. My guess is that the Warriors are planning on using some combination of those newly acquired draft picks, one of the above players [cough*WIGGINS*cough], as well as their $17 million dollar trade exception to chase someone significant.
The trade exceptions is tricky in that it can only be applied to single-player trades - situations where one player is traded for a draft pick (which the Warriors now have plenty of). On top of if it all, Golden State is now pretty well assured to finish with the worst record in the league and the resultant strongest chance for a top-3 pick in the upcoming draft.
The general framework could look like this:
Wiggins and one or two first-rounders for a malcontent star player - let's say Joel Embiid (since both players make exactly $29.5 million next season).
Then use more picks and the trade exception to land a major player - let's say for example that the Warriors use this to lift Andre Iguodala back out of Miami.
That's a roster that can chase a championship ring. Both of those trades are wild, but Bob Myers and the Warriors have pulled of greater miracles.
Making sense of Wiggins
We have come full circle.
Back in 2014, the last time the Warriors tanked, there was a catchy pithy phrase: “riggin’ for Wiggins". Though his career hasn’t exactly panned out, Wiggins was the number one pick in that draft and it is a lovely symmetry to imagine him stepping into the role of the player that the Warriors drafted that year, Harrison Barnes.
But can he? One of the main reasons why Wiggins is so highly touted was his size. He’s 6' 8" in shoes with a healthy 7' 0" wingspan, and 8" 11" standing reach. But from Anthony Randolph to Brandon Wright, the NBA landscape is littered with the corpses of failed careers of promising young athletes.
The Warriors organization will certainly tell us that they believe in Wiggins, but they’ve also said that they really wanted to see Russell play alongside Curry and Klay Thompson.
Offensively it’s no better, as per Cleaning the Glass, Wiggins consistently rates as a below average player. These are his shooting splits, remember that the most recent years are on the bottom, white percentage is the raw statistic, the highlighted colors are percentile rank (where higher is better) - blue highlights are bad.
So he is (on paper) tremendously bad on defense, and just plain bad on offense.
Or is he?
This is going to be the part the Warriors want to sell right now: Wiggins can be pretty dominant. Here are his season highs in all major statistical categories over the course of his career; again, the most recent years are the bottom of this table:
Per game this year, Wiggins is putting up a solid stat line: 23.3 points (on a reasonable efficiency of .535 TS%), 5.4 rebounds, 3.8 assists, and 0.9 blocks. That’s not bad. Is it worth a maximum dollar contract? Probably not, but Wiggins is not, as the kids like to say “trash;” there are some redeeming qualities to his game.
According to Cleaning the Glass, Wiggins has recently developed a more facilitator role on offense, assisting on 18.2% of his teammates made shots while on the floor - good enough to land him in the 87% percentile among players at his position.
The hope here - assuming the Warriors hang on to him - is that Wiggins will fill the void at small forward for this team and in so doing will find all the best parts of his game. If his scoring efficiency improved playing in Kerr’s system with Curry and Thompson (likely) and he can emphasize the facilitation rather than scoring aspects of his game, he could fit in here.
Grade the trades
I’m sorry, but I have to back out and give the Warriors’ trade deadline activities a resounding “incomplete” grade. This is not a functional roster, and will certainly go through a major overhaul before the start of next season. Golden State has been doing a lot of shuffling and gaming with their limited assets, but it will take another blockbuster trade or two for these moves to make sense.
In the meantime, the Warriors are in full tank mode, which will be hard on the eyeballs, but should absolutely cement Golden State’s position at the bottom of the standings as they pursue a top draft pick. And freeing the team from the punitive repeater tax may make it easier to rebuild next year.
I must admit I'm unprepared on economics, and I'm a very recently acquired fan, so the whole Dubs story might be unclear to me. But it seems to me that the whole process of these deals, that revolves around the luxury and repeater tax, is a sort of sacrifice that the management asks to the supporters in exchange to five trips to the finals. It seems symbolised by the spheres outside Chase Center, with their mirrors to show to the supporter "look how much you enjoyed these five years, now what can you endure for us in exchange?"
That Zach Lowe Bobby Marks podcast left me feeling a bit better about the trade. Two main takeaways
1). The disconnect between what the fans value Russell and what executives value Russell is pretty big. Russell has limited trade value in the eyes of NBA FOs
2). That 2021 first rounder may NOT have been there had the Warriors waited till the off-season
Man that MT3 article on the Athletic was a piece of beauty. Noticed the 'Warriors Insiders' (worse than Bob Fitzgerald imo) on Twitter spinning this shit as if the Dubs had this perfectly planned all along. mT3 probably writes the fairest article as to what the FO may have or not have been considering when they traded for DLo.
I am a little drunk, but I kinda hate this team right now.
I am also mad I paid for the NBA Team Pass... for this shit? What a complete waste. The team had just started jelling and now the rest of the season is a joke.
I’m looking forward to Steph playing in the Olympics next year more than this team.
Still trying to make sense of it. And I know it is not the popular opinion. But avoiding the repeater tax is huge for us. Save 40 million this year, possibly 60 million next year. And it allows us to go “big game hunting” as several pundits said it.
I HATE Wiggins!!! I cannot stress that enough. But I also don’t believe he could have netted us anything we were truly coveting. So for that I stay indifferent and cannot rate this until after the offseason moves happen. That is when we will all know if this was worth it or not.
But looking at it financially, it made complete sense for the warriors and opened up more possibilities than before. For not I’m grading this a B. (Due to the 2021 protected pick). Time will tell. But this team is going to be hard to watch. Let’s go Smiley!!!
[Anthony Slater]”Per source: Warriors signing Zach Norvell to a 10-day contract to fill another vacancy. He's a lefty scoring guard. Currently averaging 16 points per game in G-League, shooting 40 percent from 3.”
I'm not sure Ky Bowman is a legit NBA player. Puts out great effort on the floor but pretty limited, particularly with his handles, which aren't PG caliber.
Probably, and I mean, he's not going to be an x-factor in the playoffs or anything, but I love his effort, and he'd be good at chewing up minutes during the regular season. Like a poor man's Barbosa.
I'm a bit more apprehensive about the future than I was before the deadline, but I'm actually looking forward to Saturday's game now, just to see the return of Bowman, etc. and of course curiosity about Wiggins. So I guess there's that.
(2/2) The 2021 Wolves should be better than: - the Knicks (unless they actually get a star player in FA), Cavs
might be better than: - the Hawks, Hornets, Wizards (especially if they trade Beal and reset), Pistons (if they trade Rose, Blake, etc)
In the West, I think they pass they Kings (almost guaranteed), and the Suns. So although their ceiling in the West is still 12th, the Dubs 2021 Wolves pick could slip to 9th. That would translate to a 2022 2nd-rounder of ~40th. Not bad, but not great, considering a trade for Booker could happen next year. Still, with their stars lacking defense, I don't see them breaking into the top 10 in the west, let alone the playoffs.
Whether that's worth taking on Wiggins remains to be seen, but considering Durant was going to leave for nothing, and Iguodala wouldn't have been useful on a tanking team, not that bad of a haul, especially with the lottery odds the way they are.
Replacing Durant with an albatross is worse than just not replacing him though.
While we were close to the soft cap, we still had a little more flexibility. Keeping the max slot affords significantly less.
And if Wiggins can't be "rehabbed", then we're saddled for years with a huge payroll due to the max slot for a possible middle seed team and an aging Curry. This makes our dependence on Lacob's "benevolence" even more precarious.
The point of not letting KD go for nothing was the Ws can use DLo's max salary slot to acquire another max salary player.
That max player being Wiggins is extremely disappointing, and we're basically counting on a miracle that Wiggins' career can be revived by the Warriors, or another team will take on his albatross contract if the Warriors cannot revive his career....
If Durant left for nothing, they would not have been hard capped, which clearly affected a ton of decisions they made. They would have Iguodala, probably for more seasons beyond this one. They would not have had to salary dump players like Burks or GR3, and they might have been able to get better players last summer anyway. They could have kept Spellman assuming they still made that trade. They would not have had to give any picks away for free, hell they could have re-signed Livingston if they really wanted to.
And most importantly, they would not be saddled with Andrew Wiggins, one of the worst contracts in the NBA.
They went through a lot to get this 2021 first round pick. I think in most scenarios, this trade can only be looked at as a massive failure on their part that might really end up affecting Curry/Klay/Draymond's legacies. There are a couple scenarios where this all works out depending on how valuable the 2021 pick is, but I think the odds are clearly against this whole thing ending up as a good deal set of moves for the Warriors.
I agree about Iguodala, but there's also the trade exception generated. Also, if they had kept a better team, they still probably wouldn't have made the playoffs (with Curry's injury - hindsight of course), but had a pick outside the top 5, which in this draft is bad. Worst-case scenario, Wiggins becomes a 6th-man (this is indeed a very bad scenario), but I think the pick will help keep the Warriors contention window going longer. Also, when Wiggins is in his last year, Curry will hopefully have signed a non-max contract, opening up new possibilities. It's a risky trade, though, no doubt about it.
(1/2) If the Wolves were in the East, I'd be mad at Myers: DLo + Towns is at least a low-lottery team in the East (the Bulls are only 3.5 games out of 8th right now), and almost certainly over .500, given the schedule difference. But the real question is: are the Wolves + DLo - RoCo + better depth + top 5 pick this year enough to knock the Warriors 2021 pick into mid-lottery or worse territory (albeit in a deeper and better draft than this year's)?
[if Myers drafts LaMelo this year, I take back pretty much everything good I've said about him]
Yeah, but it's like the saying "everything is single serving size if you set your mind to it"... It's just a negative value asset. Throw enough along with it and it can be moved. Warriors traded a much better player, but got a really nice first round pick back, a 2nd rounder, and they managed to dump Evans undesirable deal along with it.
Same will go for GSW. Wiggins isn't a great asset, but throw a 1st and 2nd in, maybe take back a bad contract and it can happen.
For reference, here's the Forbes article from last year that came up with an objective system that ranked Wiggins as having the worst contract in the league
The big takeaway from that Forbes article is that Wiggins has played at a level basically indistinguishable from replacement-level player for the entirety of his career (now in its 6th season).
Occam's Razor so I'm probably in the wrong here but I wouldn't be surprised if DLo went to.management and quietly insisted to be traded preferably to Minny. There are a couple of tidbits on there on social media to allow said speculation. I do think LIKE I tried to explain to Memphis fans about Iguodala till I was blue in the face THAT DLo probably had a general idea of the Warriors intent and took the guarantee of a max in exchange to play along and up his trade value or even make himself attractive long term.
I think he sensed it that it wasn't necessarily trending that way AND once Minny came out
explicitly with their desire, I think this made a bit of logical sense.l for him to ask out. O get Warriors should have waited and I still contend they could have gotten more but DLo may have also played himself out of more favorable deals as the season went on.
This of course is my speculation and the only way of allowing myself to grieve at the moment.
I came into this writing project extremely low on Wiggins. But after looking into all the stats, I'm cautiously optimistic.
I am pretty darn skeptical, especially about his defense, but as you say, this system and the coaches here have salvaged worst players - albeit none of them on max contracts. Regardless though, I think it was a pretty clear vote of no confidence in the potential DLo+Splash Bros all offense no defense roster construction. If nothing else, Wiggins fills a huge hole at the 3, and provide the sort of dynamic athlete that should thrive off of cuts in the Warriors system
Those all in one defensive metrics are problematic so I tend to take them with a grain of salt. Remember that Klay was known as an offense-first player coming out of college, with the primary knocks on him being bad defense and lack of playmaking.
The Warriors are banking on salvaging Wiggins, but only as far as the offseason when they will decide if they want to ship him off in a trade or stick with him. I think it's fair to say that this is their highest-profile salvage project given the salary and stakes for next season.
If only they had waited for the summer ... I really don't care if Wiggins is a better fit for the team, I don't even want to see him play. But Dlo was our ticket to acquire a better player, someone at an all star level, or at least someone better than Wiggins. We let Burke, GIII, Spellman and the Dlo go ...
The Warriors seem to be trying to surround Steph, Klay, and Draymond with freaky athletic guys that aren't very good at basketball and scrubs. Who knows, it might work. Wiggins at least has the size to be good at defense and it's not like D'Lo was an all defensive team selection either.
Yeah Slater cited the lack of defense (and positional crowding with Steph and Klay) as the main reason that the Warriors were so quick to move on from DLo.
I have the bashing of recently departed players, especially ones that seemed as cool as Russell, but it's hard to argue that the defense issue was going to be a real problem.
"Voices that matter in the locker room soured on Russell as a long-term fit rather quickly. He wasn’t a disruptive personality, just not a beneficial component to a winning defense or a correct fit positionally, considering the two soon-to-return star guards are franchise pillars. Russell didn’t work, but that doesn’t yet mean it didn’t work."
Nothing about Russell's game surprised me though. It's not like he exceeded expectations or underachieved. He played exactly how I expected him to play AND as much as I bash Myers, he's good at evaluating established talent. He must have seen the same exact thing most of us saw and he obtained a trade piece and nothing more.
With Wiggins taking on the HB role, if it works we can go back to playing old-school Splash Brothers basketball. Steph and Klay can play their preferred style in their preferred position without deferring to KD or DLo or Boogie or anybody. I sure hope it works!
Except he wouldn't really be taking the HB role. He'd be taking a rich mans GR3 at a very rich mans contract. The reason HB worked was because in today's league he's more of a natural 4. Wiggins on the other hand is more of a 2/3 like GR3 who probably shoots closer to a 4
Now, before you criticize, I want you all to know that the cover image is probably the finest photoshop work I've ever done (ok, it was MS Paint, but the point stands)
I’ve watched some videos. Wiggins seems much more prone to fast break than Dlo, isn’t that good news for our return to old style?
I must admit I'm unprepared on economics, and I'm a very recently acquired fan, so the whole Dubs story might be unclear to me. But it seems to me that the whole process of these deals, that revolves around the luxury and repeater tax, is a sort of sacrifice that the management asks to the supporters in exchange to five trips to the finals. It seems symbolised by the spheres outside Chase Center, with their mirrors to show to the supporter "look how much you enjoyed these five years, now what can you endure for us in exchange?"
That Zach Lowe Bobby Marks podcast left me feeling a bit better about the trade. Two main takeaways
1). The disconnect between what the fans value Russell and what executives value Russell is pretty big. Russell has limited trade value in the eyes of NBA FOs
2). That 2021 first rounder may NOT have been there had the Warriors waited till the off-season
Man that MT3 article on the Athletic was a piece of beauty. Noticed the 'Warriors Insiders' (worse than Bob Fitzgerald imo) on Twitter spinning this shit as if the Dubs had this perfectly planned all along. mT3 probably writes the fairest article as to what the FO may have or not have been considering when they traded for DLo.
MT2 sorry
I can only reply to the top comments of comment threads. Anyone else encountering that? New to this article, it seems.
Yes
I am a little drunk, but I kinda hate this team right now.
I am also mad I paid for the NBA Team Pass... for this shit? What a complete waste. The team had just started jelling and now the rest of the season is a joke.
I’m looking forward to Steph playing in the Olympics next year more than this team.
Sorry... just had to vent. Sads :(
NBA Team pass - that's nothing. I bought season tickets this year... :-( :-( :-(
Whoa. Yes
None of the other comments have a reply button?
Weird. I'll report it to our benevolent Substack overlords
Thanks for responding Donkeyote (great name). It seems to be happening in the other articles' comments sections too now.
Yep, same
top as in vertical spacing.
I need to know more about Ender’s game cuz I’m wiggin out
This deadline has been a whirlwind...
Still trying to make sense of it. And I know it is not the popular opinion. But avoiding the repeater tax is huge for us. Save 40 million this year, possibly 60 million next year. And it allows us to go “big game hunting” as several pundits said it.
I HATE Wiggins!!! I cannot stress that enough. But I also don’t believe he could have netted us anything we were truly coveting. So for that I stay indifferent and cannot rate this until after the offseason moves happen. That is when we will all know if this was worth it or not.
But looking at it financially, it made complete sense for the warriors and opened up more possibilities than before. For not I’m grading this a B. (Due to the 2021 protected pick). Time will tell. But this team is going to be hard to watch. Let’s go Smiley!!!
I love everything about this comment (maybe not so much the HATE Wiggins but more of a non-fan) though I agree, unleash Smiley and his rainbow three!
[Anthony Slater]”Per source: Warriors signing Zach Norvell to a 10-day contract to fill another vacancy. He's a lefty scoring guard. Currently averaging 16 points per game in G-League, shooting 40 percent from 3.”
Well, one good thing: Ky signs a muli-year deal
I'm not sure Ky Bowman is a legit NBA player. Puts out great effort on the floor but pretty limited, particularly with his handles, which aren't PG caliber.
I'm not nearly as high on Bowman as others, but I'm assuming it's a minimum deal like Damion's and not fully guaranteed anyways.
Probably, and I mean, he's not going to be an x-factor in the playoffs or anything, but I love his effort, and he'd be good at chewing up minutes during the regular season. Like a poor man's Barbosa.
Per MTII:
TOWN BIZ! Juan Toscano @juanonjuan10 is signing a contract for the rest of the year. Oakland’s own makes the NBA!
I kinda figured that would happen. Cool!
Awesome, he'll probably see some action, too
I'm a bit more apprehensive about the future than I was before the deadline, but I'm actually looking forward to Saturday's game now, just to see the return of Bowman, etc. and of course curiosity about Wiggins. So I guess there's that.
(2/2) The 2021 Wolves should be better than: - the Knicks (unless they actually get a star player in FA), Cavs
might be better than: - the Hawks, Hornets, Wizards (especially if they trade Beal and reset), Pistons (if they trade Rose, Blake, etc)
In the West, I think they pass they Kings (almost guaranteed), and the Suns. So although their ceiling in the West is still 12th, the Dubs 2021 Wolves pick could slip to 9th. That would translate to a 2022 2nd-rounder of ~40th. Not bad, but not great, considering a trade for Booker could happen next year. Still, with their stars lacking defense, I don't see them breaking into the top 10 in the west, let alone the playoffs.
Whether that's worth taking on Wiggins remains to be seen, but considering Durant was going to leave for nothing, and Iguodala wouldn't have been useful on a tanking team, not that bad of a haul, especially with the lottery odds the way they are.
Your analysis about the pick is quite interesting.
Noah Vonleh, Frank Kaminsky, Jakob Pöltl, Dennis Smith Jr., Kevin Knox are some of the recent 9th picks. Not especially inspiring.
Replacing Durant with an albatross is worse than just not replacing him though.
While we were close to the soft cap, we still had a little more flexibility. Keeping the max slot affords significantly less.
And if Wiggins can't be "rehabbed", then we're saddled for years with a huge payroll due to the max slot for a possible middle seed team and an aging Curry. This makes our dependence on Lacob's "benevolence" even more precarious.
We wouldn't have been able to sign much last summer. The cap wasn't hard but it was there and we were close to it already.
The point of not letting KD go for nothing was the Ws can use DLo's max salary slot to acquire another max salary player.
That max player being Wiggins is extremely disappointing, and we're basically counting on a miracle that Wiggins' career can be revived by the Warriors, or another team will take on his albatross contract if the Warriors cannot revive his career....
If Durant left for nothing, they would not have been hard capped, which clearly affected a ton of decisions they made. They would have Iguodala, probably for more seasons beyond this one. They would not have had to salary dump players like Burks or GR3, and they might have been able to get better players last summer anyway. They could have kept Spellman assuming they still made that trade. They would not have had to give any picks away for free, hell they could have re-signed Livingston if they really wanted to.
And most importantly, they would not be saddled with Andrew Wiggins, one of the worst contracts in the NBA.
They went through a lot to get this 2021 first round pick. I think in most scenarios, this trade can only be looked at as a massive failure on their part that might really end up affecting Curry/Klay/Draymond's legacies. There are a couple scenarios where this all works out depending on how valuable the 2021 pick is, but I think the odds are clearly against this whole thing ending up as a good deal set of moves for the Warriors.
And to shed Iguodala's salary the Warriors gave Memphis a top 4 protected 2024 pick.
If Wiggins is the ultimate prize after losing KD, the entire thing was a disaster.
I agree about Iguodala, but there's also the trade exception generated. Also, if they had kept a better team, they still probably wouldn't have made the playoffs (with Curry's injury - hindsight of course), but had a pick outside the top 5, which in this draft is bad. Worst-case scenario, Wiggins becomes a 6th-man (this is indeed a very bad scenario), but I think the pick will help keep the Warriors contention window going longer. Also, when Wiggins is in his last year, Curry will hopefully have signed a non-max contract, opening up new possibilities. It's a risky trade, though, no doubt about it.
(1/2) If the Wolves were in the East, I'd be mad at Myers: DLo + Towns is at least a low-lottery team in the East (the Bulls are only 3.5 games out of 8th right now), and almost certainly over .500, given the schedule difference. But the real question is: are the Wolves + DLo - RoCo + better depth + top 5 pick this year enough to knock the Warriors 2021 pick into mid-lottery or worse territory (albeit in a deeper and better draft than this year's)?
[if Myers drafts LaMelo this year, I take back pretty much everything good I've said about him]
Isn't Wiggins's contract widely considered one of the most untradeable contracts in the league?
Yeah, but it's like the saying "everything is single serving size if you set your mind to it"... It's just a negative value asset. Throw enough along with it and it can be moved. Warriors traded a much better player, but got a really nice first round pick back, a 2nd rounder, and they managed to dump Evans undesirable deal along with it.
Same will go for GSW. Wiggins isn't a great asset, but throw a 1st and 2nd in, maybe take back a bad contract and it can happen.
For reference, here's the Forbes article from last year that came up with an objective system that ranked Wiggins as having the worst contract in the league
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brettknight/2019/04/12/nba-overpaid-wiggins-jabari/#6aaeb21876e3
The big takeaway from that Forbes article is that Wiggins has played at a level basically indistinguishable from replacement-level player for the entirety of his career (now in its 6th season).
Ugh. WNBA can't start soon enough
Occam's Razor so I'm probably in the wrong here but I wouldn't be surprised if DLo went to.management and quietly insisted to be traded preferably to Minny. There are a couple of tidbits on there on social media to allow said speculation. I do think LIKE I tried to explain to Memphis fans about Iguodala till I was blue in the face THAT DLo probably had a general idea of the Warriors intent and took the guarantee of a max in exchange to play along and up his trade value or even make himself attractive long term.
I think he sensed it that it wasn't necessarily trending that way AND once Minny came out
explicitly with their desire, I think this made a bit of logical sense.l for him to ask out. O get Warriors should have waited and I still contend they could have gotten more but DLo may have also played himself out of more favorable deals as the season went on.
This of course is my speculation and the only way of allowing myself to grieve at the moment.
Maybe they can revive Wiggins's career like they did with McGee and Chriss. I dunno. I'm being blindly optimistic. But who knows?
I came into this writing project extremely low on Wiggins. But after looking into all the stats, I'm cautiously optimistic.
I am pretty darn skeptical, especially about his defense, but as you say, this system and the coaches here have salvaged worst players - albeit none of them on max contracts. Regardless though, I think it was a pretty clear vote of no confidence in the potential DLo+Splash Bros all offense no defense roster construction. If nothing else, Wiggins fills a huge hole at the 3, and provide the sort of dynamic athlete that should thrive off of cuts in the Warriors system
Have they salvaged worse defensive players, though? He's literally the worst defender in BBR's database.
well I don't know.
Those all in one defensive metrics are problematic so I tend to take them with a grain of salt. Remember that Klay was known as an offense-first player coming out of college, with the primary knocks on him being bad defense and lack of playmaking.
The Warriors are banking on salvaging Wiggins, but only as far as the offseason when they will decide if they want to ship him off in a trade or stick with him. I think it's fair to say that this is their highest-profile salvage project given the salary and stakes for next season.
If only they had waited for the summer ... I really don't care if Wiggins is a better fit for the team, I don't even want to see him play. But Dlo was our ticket to acquire a better player, someone at an all star level, or at least someone better than Wiggins. We let Burke, GIII, Spellman and the Dlo go ...
I can't be more angry ...
Carajo!! :/
If they waited until summer, they'd still be facing the repeater tax
I'm elated at Evans. Cool on Burks and DLo. Ok on Spellman and absolutely bummed on WCS and GR3
The Warriors seem to be trying to surround Steph, Klay, and Draymond with freaky athletic guys that aren't very good at basketball and scrubs. Who knows, it might work. Wiggins at least has the size to be good at defense and it's not like D'Lo was an all defensive team selection either.
Yeah Slater cited the lack of defense (and positional crowding with Steph and Klay) as the main reason that the Warriors were so quick to move on from DLo.
I have the bashing of recently departed players, especially ones that seemed as cool as Russell, but it's hard to argue that the defense issue was going to be a real problem.
"Voices that matter in the locker room soured on Russell as a long-term fit rather quickly. He wasn’t a disruptive personality, just not a beneficial component to a winning defense or a correct fit positionally, considering the two soon-to-return star guards are franchise pillars. Russell didn’t work, but that doesn’t yet mean it didn’t work."
https://theathletic.com/1588888/2020/02/06/the-warriors-suddenly-face-a-vital-challenge-can-they-awaken-andrew-wiggins/?source=twittered
Nothing about Russell's game surprised me though. It's not like he exceeded expectations or underachieved. He played exactly how I expected him to play AND as much as I bash Myers, he's good at evaluating established talent. He must have seen the same exact thing most of us saw and he obtained a trade piece and nothing more.
With Wiggins taking on the HB role, if it works we can go back to playing old-school Splash Brothers basketball. Steph and Klay can play their preferred style in their preferred position without deferring to KD or DLo or Boogie or anybody. I sure hope it works!
Except he wouldn't really be taking the HB role. He'd be taking a rich mans GR3 at a very rich mans contract. The reason HB worked was because in today's league he's more of a natural 4. Wiggins on the other hand is more of a 2/3 like GR3 who probably shoots closer to a 4
Now, before you criticize, I want you all to know that the cover image is probably the finest photoshop work I've ever done (ok, it was MS Paint, but the point stands)
I'm an artist and I had to look to see what had been done. Good job! :)