The Golden State Warriors are reeling, on the verge of dropping out of the play-in tournament spots. The sharks are circling, picking apart their struggling season from every angle. Emphatic takes about both their short-term and long-term future are being dished out left, right, and center, by pundits.
In the immediate, much of the criticism coming their way is fair game for a franchise that has undoubtedly started losing some of the winning luster of their dynastic years. One unfortunate year of injury and rebuilding seemed like an acceptable hiatus after their epic, draining five-year run. Two begins to look like a more worrying pattern.
But take a big picture look and there are plenty of reasons for the Warriors to be optimistic over their long-term future. Here are five of them.
Stephen Curry is still an all-time great
The number one takeaway for the Warriors from this season is that Stephen Curry is still slap, bang in the middle of this prime. That much is self-evident from a season that would place him right in the thick of the MVP race if the Warriors record were closer to what they hoped it would be going into the season. On one level this is the cause of some of the hand-wringing. He’s 33, he wants to win now, and the roster around him isn’t ready to help him do that.
All true. But it’s also true that he looks like he can be really good for several more years yet, and indeed could very well still be an All-Star level player for the duration of the long-term contract extension the Warriors hope to sign him to this offseason. The oft-used comparison is Steve Nash, who was still balling at an All-Star level in his age 37-38 season. That’s potentially five more years of Curry leading this team at an elite level, or somewhere close to it. And while Curry wants more than anything else to win, he is deeply rooted in the Warriors franchise and is not about to jump ship. So while the clock is ticking, it’s ticking a little slower than some of the more hyperbolic takes might indicate.
Klay Thompson will still be able to shoot
No one can really know what Klay Thompson will look like when he returns to the court after two devastating injuries hopefully early next season. But the one thing that almost certainly won’t have changed is that he will still be able to shoot the basketball at an all-time level. Throughout this disappointing season, the Warriors’ offense has been plagued by a lack of spacing and a lack of shooting. Even if Thompson is slow back, he will help solve both of those issues instantly.
The bigger question will be around how he moves defensively, and whether he’s better off guarding wings than speedy guards. But even if he is slow off the mark, by this time next year, when the Warriors hope to be back in the playoffs as a real threat, Thompson is a huge piece of the puzzle. The last time Curry, Thompson, and Draymond Green were healthy they went to the NBA Finals and arguably would have won if Thompson hadn’t been injured twice, first missing a pivotal Game 3, before the dreadful injury in the midst of a classic Game 6 performance.
One final note on Thompson - given his work ethic, his clear love for the game that he’s missed so much, and the relatively positive recent comeback by Kevin Durant from the devastating achilles injury he suffered the game before Thompson’s first injury, is the basketball punditry world really so sure that he can’t get close to what he was before? Because if he is, writing the Warriors off now is a bold take indeed.
This is the worst James Wiseman will be
James Wiseman’s bumpy rookie year is a favorite topic of concern for commentators. It’s fair to say that the Warriors’ attempts to win while developing young players has left them not winning enough, while simultaneously not seeing the results from developing their young players enough. Wiseman’s role has gone back and forth repeatedly, and his confidence has waned. At this early point of his career he’s struggling more than he was when he was fresh in.
But the Warriors didn’t draft Wiseman thinking he was going to dominate from day one. The whole point of drafting Wiseman was to bring in and develop a player with a tantalizing package of size, skill, and athleticism to fill their long-term gap at the center position.
There should have been no illusions about how long this process would take. Prior to this season Wiseman had played precisely 3 games in the NCAA, and only one half against a genuine decent level team with any NBA talent on it in Oregon. The implication of this was he was never going to be ready to dominate in the NBA, no matter how many encouraging summer workout videos were posted on social media in his long hiatus from a competitive basketball setting.
The path of player development does not run smoothly either. That is doubly true in a pandemic where there was no summer league and no training camp. Wiseman is going through his struggles now, but that does not mean this moment is forever. Indeed it is much more likely to be a very necessary part of his development. What matters is how he works through it, the work he does off the court in the summer, and ultimately how he bounces back.
If rookie seasons determined everything, Tyreke Evans would be a two-time MVP, not Stephen Curry. And if you want to look at a more current example, just look at Jordan Poole who looked anything but an NBA-level talent in what was a dreadful rookie season yet is now looking every part the bench scorer and secondary playmaker the Warriors hoped for.
The key thing to recognise with Wiseman is that he has yet to have a proper developmental offseason within an NBA franchise. Whatever version of Wiseman emerges next season will be a lot better than the current iteration.
Wiseman’s experience is an extreme outlier
The other angle on Wiseman’s struggles is the fear that this season is an example of what happens when a team tries to play rookies alongside seasoned veterans trying to win. But this fear may well be overblown. There are few prospects who will come in having trodden Wiseman’s path. In the NBA it is still not permitted to jump straight from high school into the draft. This is essentially what Wiseman did, with a global pandemic in between.
The reason this matters is that the Warriors may well end up with two top-ten lottery picks in the 2021 draft, at least if they play their cards sensibly over the next month or so and get a little bit of luck. There will be prospects who are raw, but all of them will have played either a full season of NCAA basketball or, in the case of likely top-5 selections Jalen Green and Jonathan Kuminga, in the G-league bubble against genuine NBA-level talent.
So while trying to thread this needle of remaining competitive and developing youth is tricky, the Wiseman situation is an extreme outlier. Any of the top-5 prospects will be able to contribute something from day one, and there will be more NBA-ready prospects later on in the lottery. And if the Warriors get really lucky they may get a chance to draft Gonzaga’s Jalen Suggs, who looks like he could be a real impact rookie.
The Warriors have the assets to improve
The final piece of the puzzle here is that the Warriors are not in any way stuck. They have a generational superstar, something franchises go years, sometimes decades, trying to find. They have two proven complementary stars. And while this season has shown they need more than they have on the roster currently, they also have two prime assets in Wiseman and the Minnesota pick they can move if a superstar trade presents itself this summer. Indeed, if the Warriors do pull the plug on the playoff chase over the next few weeks, they could end up with a third prime asset.
To have a championship-caliber core, and an asset base they can use to either develop a contending supporting cast and then lead the next charge as their current stars age, or cash in early for another star, is a very rare thing indeed. Most dynasties fall into obscurity and take years to rebound. The Warriors are not in that position.
This doesn’t mean their timeline alignment problem goes away, and the Warriors will need to get a little lucky in the NBA draft lottery. And yes, the Warriors have some decisions to make this offseason, not least on whether to cash in their chips in a big trade, or stay the course in developing a new generation of top-end talent.
But at least they are in a position to make those decisions. Ultimately, if they get those decisions right, the Golden State Warriors are in a much better position to contend than most other teams over the next half-decade.
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April 06, 2021 at 07:30PM
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5 Reasons For Optimism On The Golden State Warriors’ Long-Term Future - Forbes
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