Warriors Dynasty Drafting: Moses Moody

Mody Mooses

All articles in this series are at How the Warriors Extended The Dynasty Through The Draft, an in-depth series

In the big picture, our comparisons show that GSW drafted quite well compared to who they could have drafted, and better than any other post-1980s dynasty. However, the nature of the draft is that you’ll get picks that don’t work out. It’s the overall body of work that counts for judging a front office. Criticizing an individual draft is like criticizing a player’s single shot. If it was a good shot, then the result is not as important as the overall shot profile and efficiency.

Despite having just said that, I will now critique the individual draft picks from the point of view of results for the dynasty.

Moses Moody

Who was a better pick in 2021?

It’s way too early to write this. But for completeness, I’ll do my best to write this up.

The Warriors picked Moses Moody at #14. He proceeded to not play much. Thanks, Kerr.

By February, Moody began making 18-ish minute appearances with occasional starts, and the very occasional scoring explosion.

NBA BASKETBALL @DejoseMark

Moses Moody score 30 points Highlights vs Denver Nuggets! #March072022.

Moody was selected for his youth and future promise, and he impressed everyone with the maturity of his attitude and work, but still… part of his appeal was that he might step into an immediate role.

Win Shares was not impressed with Moody’s season. Win Shares is certainly not the best or even maybe a good measure, but I’ve been using it for this whole series of articles and Basketball-Reference makes it easy to find this number for draftees.

Here is a list of players drafted after him that had higher Win Shares.

• Herbert Jones, #35. Defensive wunderkid for the Pelicans.

• Ayo Dosunmu, #38. Ended the season as a starter for the Bulls. What a great find in the draft.

• Bones Hyland, #26. Solid backup point guard for DEN. DEN shipped out Monte Morris partly to make minutes for him.

Okay, now the real action starts because nobody on the planet was going to take these three preceding guys at #14, as wonderful as they are.

• Corey Kispert, #15. Sharpshooter who took a while to settle in, but by the end of the season, he was shooting better for WAS. He was beaten by Moody in the first round of our 2021 Draft Tourney.

• Alperen Şengün, #16. Playing for HOU, a sub-NBA team, he racked up stats and highlight passes and finished along with enough lowlights to keep him on the bench. He’s still promising, but it’s not clear yet that he can contribute to winning at an NBA level. He was caught in a logjam of bigs which doesn’t seem to be clearing up. Anyway, he was beaten by Moody in the Finals of our 2021 Draft Tourney.

• Trey Murphy III, #17. The prototypical 3-and-D player, he had a decent year for NOP and even played pretty well in their no-expectation playoffs-run. His stock rocketed up only at the last minute, so we didn’t even include him in our Draft Tourney.

It is so early in these player’s careers, and while they are all looking promising, none of these plausible #14 picks is standing head and shoulders above Moody in potential, or even in efficient production.

Finally, the following four have a Win Shares lead over Moody, but it is very close and nobody was going to pick any of them at #14.

• Jericho Sims, #58.

• Jeremiah Robinson-Earl, #32.

• Quentin Grimes, #25

• Isaiah Jackson, #22

Bringing us to our guy:

• Moses Moody, #14

So in the end, there are a number of players who had more Win Shares, and I still find many of them as intriguing as Moody or more (Jones, Sengun and Murphy still stand out to me).

But ultimately I would lump Moody in a big group with the rest of them in the “promising but too early to tell” category. I believe Moody is younger than everyone else listed, so perhaps what he gives up on raw production he gets back on being even more “too early to tell”.

How did GSW do against the field?

• Moses Moody ranked for the entire draft class #16 in Win Shares and #25 in Value Over Replacement Player.

Given Moody’s relative lack of playing time, that’s a passable showing in Year 1.

Pick Grade: C+

It’s too early to grade this as a draft pick. But from the Dynasty perspective, it is NOT too early, because the question is not about Moody’s potential. Rather, it’s a cold look at how he specifically helped the Dynasty win titles, which means: what did he contribute to the 2022 Playoffs?

Moody played essentially garbage time in the playoffs, with one important exception. In the DAL series, he played 5, 9, 16, 22, 10 minutes, In Game 2, his minutes came, surprisingly, playing most of the very close 4th quarter. Then in Game 4 he keyed that epic comeback run from 29 down to pull the game to single digits down the stretch and force Luka Doncic and starters to come back into the game, which contributed to Luka’s wearing down in Game 5. Moody played a notable role in that series with solid defense and keeping the offense moving.

So overall Moody played a minor, neutral to positive role in the Playoffs.

As for other rookies, I wrote in the Kuminga piece:

What rookies would have done better in the crucible of the Playoffs? We know for sure that Scottie Barnes did decently. I suspect Evan Mobley would have done well. However both of them were unfortunately gone by pick #7.

We saw Bones Hyland play 17 MPG in (slightly negative +/-) backup minutes in the doomed DEN series; Trey Murphy III shoot respectably in 20 MPG in the NOP-PHX series on low volume; and Herb Jones play big minutes as a starter for NOP as their version of Gary Payton II.

But nobody would trade Kuminga for any of these players. It’s up to your imagination to decide if Franz Wagner (or Chris Duarte or anyone else) would have lit up the Playoffs.

I further note that every single one of those rookies I cited lost their first round series. Playing in an “ahead of schedule” first round on a young team is completely different from playing for Coach Kerr who is optimizing every move to win the Finals, especially needing to prep your veterans to be ready through the playoffs, and giving your rookies a very limited role.

In the end, the Moody pick had a minor positive role in the 2022 title run. And we expect Moody to be playing a more significant role next year, and so he still will have a chance to contribute to the 2022-23 Dynasty Title Defense. For now, I give the grade C+.

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