Warriors face season’s crossroads
Looking ahead: Playoffs pale next to bigger plans
Screw the playoffs.
For the Warriors and their fans, making the playoffs this year would be nice, but kind of like a participation trophy. When you have Stephen Curry and Draymond Green on your team, you don’t spray Champagne if you make the playoffs. You grab a juice box and a bag of Fritos.
The Warriors might make the playoffs, but if they don’t, it’s not a tragedy or calamity.
What’s more important than a cameo playoff appearance is for the Warriors to find who they are, and what they are, to put themselves in position to launch the big rocket next season.
That concept is tough to swallow for oldguard Warriors fans, who have posttraumatic flashbacks to the decades of their team wandering in
the wilderness, catching only brief, distant glimpses of the playoffs.
Even the Warriors’ fiveseason run of brilliance didn’t completely wipe out those memories, and they are popping back to the surface with last season’s stinker, and this season’s struggles.
But these Warriors are not those Warriors. This is not that fumbling, bumbling organization throwing together struggling teams. The Warriors are elite, and that means dreaming big, risking big and planning accordingly.
Barring dramatic overall improvement over the rest of the regular season, the Warriors will be a low playoff seed, unlikely to get past the first round. They could fall into the 710 seed range, which would put them in the mini tourney to decide the seventh and eighth seeds for the playoffs. Not much chance of coming out of that postseason scenario with any glory.
What the Warriors need to do, and what they will do, is devote the rest of the season to development and evaluation.
James Wiseman is the Big Project. To be a great team next season, the Warriors will need Wiseman to be a bigdog NBA center, and he’s not there yet. The final 28 regularseason games can be a fantastic crash course for him, but he’s got to play heavy minutes, alongside the best players.
Shortterm, that will cost the Warriors some wins. The brain trust — owner Joe Lacob, general manager Bob Myers and head coach Steve Kerr — have been strategizing over how to handle Wiseman. Start him? Heavy minutes? Bring along slowly?
They now seem agreed on going fulltilt Wiseman. It must pain Kerr at times, being a man programmed over decades to loathe losing, but he knows Wiseman has to learn fast, and Kerr now says Wiseman likely will start the rest of the way.
That’s the ticket! Get the kid schooled up good. The Warriors have a great coaching staff, and a great mentor in Draymond Green, but Wiseman has to get knocked around and bullied in real games.
Wiseman will be here next season. Most of the rest of the players? Unclear. That’s what the Warriors have to learn.
Are they comfortable going into next season with Nico Mannion as their primary backup point guard? Yikes. Here’s your chance, kid, prove you belong.
Jordan Poole, is he a legitimate sixth man on a championshipcaliber team? That’s the Andre Iguodala Chair, a vital role. Poole is a big wild card. His recent play has been the surprise development of the season for the Warriors, but they have to see him sustain it.
Can Damion Lee be a solid eighth or ninth man?
Eric Paschall, does he have a future with this team? He showed he can play smallball center, but he has to show he can play effectively at big and/or small forward.
And it’s not simply a matter of the Warriors watching individuals, seeing how they develop. Kerr and Myers have to see how these players function within The System. Not all good players make good Warriors.
Example: Kelly Oubre Jr. seemed lost in the team’s dynamicflow offense in the early going, but is grasping the basic concepts. It’s a very different way to play ball than most players have played, it takes time to learn, and it’s not for everyone.
For Mannion and Poole, for instance, it’s not just a matter of whether they can shoot and pass, it’s whether they can they do those things the Warriors’ Way, with the constant movement, the extemporaneous creativity.
Even if the Warriors devote their season to research and development, they still could make the playoffs. They have the fourtheasiest schedule the rest of the way, per Tankathon.com, and the easiest in their division.
A firstround playoff series would be a cool education for the kids. Could be embarrassing, too, although you can learn stuff by getting your butt kicked.
But the playoffs, for this team, might be empty calories. Better to concentrate on their final 28 games, when next season’s team will be built.
So (bleep) the playoffs.