Should Golden State make a trade?

THE current win-loss record of the Golden State Warriors is 6-9, bad enough for 12th place in the Western Conference.

There are 15 teams in the West, so 12 is definitely bad enough, unless you are tanking. The Warriors silently did that in the 2019-20 season and they got the 2nd overall pick which they used to acquire James Wiseman. Wiseman had mostly been injured, been back and forth in the G-League. This is far from the projection for a 7-foot, athletic prospect.

Many pundits, including this corner, thought the Warriors would be a better team with a healthy Wiseman, and that the champions would be ready to repeat. That was a horrendous take made through 20 percent of the season. The big question now is whether we have seen enough games for it to be indicative of how the rest of the season will pan out.

MVP-level Steph not enough

When a team underperforms, the first target is the team’s superstar and leader. Steph Curry has been on a tear. His stats through 14 games: 32.8 points on 53.1 FG percentage, 44.7 3P percentage (this is simply phenomenal even for his standards) with 6.8 rebounds (is this even Steph?) and 6.4 assists.

Curry can’t get any better, and you can see that on the court. In their 15th game against division rival Phoenix Suns, Steph had 50 points, 9 rebounds and 6 assists, and they still lost.

Warriors fans were celebrating how they found the “third splash brother” in Jordan Poole, and now they have two defensive specialists in Andrew Wiggins and Draymond Green. And yet they continue to lose games. What is happening?

Continuity and chemistry

We keep looking at talent and skills, but the truth is, continuity and chemistry are just as valuable in basketball. The Warriors may not have lost much talent by losing Gary Payton 2nd, Nemanja Bjelica and Juan Toscano-Anderson. With Jonathan Kuminga, Moses Moody, and Wiseman, you have younger and athletic players.

But you also lost the continuity and chemistry. That is something you can only develop with time. So it’s ironic that the solution being proposed is to make a trade. However, recent statements that Curry and head coach Steve Kerr had made, the problem may be deeper than simply just growing pains.

Is sending James Wiseman to the G-League, when he’s not injured, a sign that they have given up on him? And if they did, I think it’s too soon.

Wired differently

The Golden State Warriors are an anomaly, and that has been evident since the team made their breakthrough in 2015. This is not your usual basketball team, and they actually changed the game, instead of changing to succeed in the game. The rest of the NBA adjusted to the Warriors, not the other way around.

So why did they get tempted into drafting Wiseman? The hindsight view that they should have drafted LaMelo Ball instead is not helpful at this point. But is it time for the Warriors to admit that they made a mistake, and rectify that mistake by trading Wiseman?

Trading Draymond Green, or Klay Thompson is not even a consideration. They held on with Draymond even after the Jordan Poole incident. That simply means that they still need him.

Should they make a trade? Is there any available star that they can acquire with Wiseman as the primary trade chip? That’s a player being sent to the G-League.

The answer is No. Wiseman’s demotion is simply to reacquaint him to the system without incurring more losses. The Warriors will also not simply admit they blundered — not when you’re the defending champion.

No trades for the Warriors — but I could be wrong.

Double standard

Throughout four seasons from the summer of 2019, this is how many games played by the two precious acquisitions of the Los Angeles teams: Kawhi Leonard, 111 games. Anthony Davis, 150 games.

One player is called “Mr. Glass” and “Porcelain” — the one who actually played more games. The other is deemed as “being smart with load management.”

The media questions the Lakers’ move of acquiring Davis, when the team won a title right when he got on board. The Clippers only reached the Conference Finals in that same period — when Kawhi Leonard was injured.

Any suspect on who murdered logic?

• You’ve no doubt heard of shattering a glass with your voice, but how about singing at a pitch so low only an elephant can hear it? That feat belongs to Tim Storms, who possesses a 10-octave vocal range and holds the Guinness World Record for lowest note produced by a human and widest vocal range.

• In some parts of the world, tarantulas have “pet” frogs, which they protect from predators.

• At the Harvard-Yale annual college football matchup in 2004, Yale students played quite the trick on their opponents by dressing as Harvard pep squad members and handing out crimson and gold placards to the crowd. While told their cards would spell out “Go Harvard” when raised, the actual message read “We Suck.”

• Two of the most common paint colors at Walt Disney World are “Go Away Green” and “Blending Blue.” Their curious monikers attest to the fact that Disney Imagineers created them to make your eyes ignore them.

• The first known dental filling dates to the Neolithic period and was made of beeswax.

• You don’t need a body to play video games — just a mind! Lab-grown human and mouse brain cells inhabiting a petri dish became sentient enough to learn how to play Pong.

• Billy Joel’s song “Only the Good Die Young” was banned by some radio stations for being “anti-Catholic.” Joel hardly minded, however, as the resulting publicity made the tune so popular that he wrote to the president of Seton Hall College in New Jersey (the first entity to forbid it) requesting a ban on his next record as well.

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Thought for the Day: “People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.” — Peter Drucker