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The Official NBA Season Thread: Season Starts Now
- Thread in 'Sports & Training' Thread starter Started by pmatic,
- Start date
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HOU$TON
formerly convertibleburt
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Harden is still an elite POST defender till this very day.
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Go to the movies.
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Savor this for another day but what are the predictions on the Denver matchup
Vanderbilt gonna be in rotation or nah
They going to continue to start Schroeder
Assuming they target and attack Murray and on the other end, how they gonna scheme Jokic
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Can’t believe the defending champs really put their faith on a stumpy four legged animal. That’s when you know it was a wrap. Down bad 
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I take back what I said last night.
BIG LEEMELONE
I could see why Bob Myers may want to leave. Tough, tough decisions ahead.
BIG LEEMELONE
Are the Warriors stuck with old, expensive and average due to the salary cap?
In the end, it wasn’t some young upstart that knocked the Warriors off their pedestal into an uncertain future. Not Boston as redemption on the final climb up the mountain, not Denver earning its playoff stripes by knocking off the king.
No, the thing that sent Team Light Years into existential despair wasn’t the next space age basketball paradigm … it was a 43-win team playing caveman basketball, one that opened the clinching game with seven straight post-ups and hammered them into submission. What year is this again?
Nonetheless, the Warriors are here, the place that all contenders eventually end up late in their run: old, expensive and trending toward average. The core will be increasingly difficult to keep together in any kind of coherent form going forward. Even relative to other aging contenders of recent yore, these Warriors are somewhat older and massively more expensive.
It’s not just that the Warriors went 44-38 despite relatively good health, it’s that everyone is getting older and no help is around the corner. Of the mainstays of this title run, Steph Curry is 35, Klay Thompson is 33 and coming off two serious injuries, and Draymond Green is also 33. Andre Iguodala, if you remember him, is 39 and played eight games this year.
Wait, it gets worse: Father Time is taking its toll, but the new CBA is here to finish the job. The Warriors spent freely to keep this team together, and especially to augment it once Kevin Durant left. Their willingness to absorb a massive luxury tax bill to turn that money into Andrew Wiggins (eventually) got them an additional crown in 2022.
However, the rules are becoming more draconian just when the Warriors could use a little more flexibility. Golden State will have only minimum contracts available to augment the roster unless it slashes and burns what is currently there.
Green has a player option and could become a free agent, although our Shams Charania and Anthony Slater report that an extension seems more likely. Jordan Poole, coming off a series where he was nigh unplayable, is about to see his salary bump from a great value ($3.9 million) to a potential liability ($28.2 million, presuming his $500,000 incentive for winning Defensive Player of the Year doesn’t kick in). Thompson is set to make $43 million next year despite being, at this point, a pretty average player who was low-key brutal for much of the playoffs.
It becomes increasingly hard for successful teams to pipeline youth, and the Warriors are learning that part, too. They thought they had a workaround with the help of a horrific 2019-20 season that yielded the second pick in the draft, and a one-sided trade for Wiggins that gifted them the seventh pick a year later. Unfortunately, the two players they selected combined to play zero relevant minutes in the second round of the playoffs. RIP Two Tracks, which is a lot harder than it looks, as it turns out; the odds of any draft pick turning into a franchise’s next Curry are vanishingly small.
The question now for Golden State is even if they wanted to keep this rolling, how can they? The cap rules will continue to chip away at them. For instance, guard Donte DiVincenzo is DiVingonzo after making just $4.5 million last season. He will surely opt out of his $4.7 million deal for next season and likely have offers for the full midlevel exception, which the Warriors’ cap position prevents them from matching or even replacing.
In spite of that, one wonders if the Warriors will need to cut further. They have over $205 million in projected salary for next season if Green either opts in or re-signs for a roughly similar amount, which would put them $55 million over the tax line. Combined with the repeater penalty, that would mean a roughly $250 million luxury tax check to the league, which is more than every other team’s payroll, to keep together a 44-win team that is only getting older and can’t make any additions.
It can’t work. The Warriors have to figure out how to get younger and cheaper, and the only plausible way is to shed at least one of their core pieces. There’s a really obvious place to start, at the shooting guard position, where Thompson and Poole will combine to make $71 million next season. Even by the money-out-the-firehose standards of the Warriors, that’s way too much for one position, and they aren’t even getting surplus production from it. Thompson finished the playoffs with a PER of 9.4; it was 9.7 for Poole.
But what’s really possible with those two? Where is the outside demand coming to take on those contracts? Sorry, but nobody is jonesing to pay Thompson $43 million next year. The Warriors are stuck, stuck, stuck.
Trade Andrew Wiggins? Sure, he’d have a lot more of a market given his reasonable four-year extension, relative youth (2
and that he plays a position every team is dying to fill. But that would also leave a gaping roster hole on the wing that the Warriors have zero capacity to fill themselves, beyond praying that Jonathan Kuminga – the guy they hid at the end of the bench for the last month – can take over the role.
Kevon Looney and Gary Payton II are on good contracts for at least another year and would have some trade value, but both are probably more valuable in the Warriors’ system than they would be by playing for most other teams. Also, isn’t the whole point to ditch one of the whale contracts and keep the value guys? Besides, cutting an $8 million deal just doesn’t change the Warriors’ big picture that much.
The Warriors will work the phones looking at something to ease the crunch. They can trade their first-round pick on draft night and could trade a future one (they owe their 2024 pick to Memphis), and may need at least one of those just to unload Thompson or Poole and make the payroll quasi-workable.
They could also resort to deeper shenanigans, such as using the stretch provision on Thompson and then re-signing him for the minimum or the taxpayer MLE; such a move could keep the Warriors beneath the second apron, but adding $14 million in dead money in the following two years could hurt their future tax position.
Speaking of which, if there’s any good news here, it’s that the Warriors’ situation looks significantly better a year out. They may need to weather a rough cap storm in 2023-24, but a year later Thompson’s $43 million comes off the books, and Green would be at a lower number than this year’s $27 million. It’s plausible that the Warriors would be below the tax line by then, believe it or not, and could operate handcuffs-free in the trade and free-agent markets.
The fly in that ointment is that Curry will be 37 by the end of the 2024-25 season. It’s his prime that the Warriors are rightly seeking to maximize, so low-key punting on 2023-24 doesn’t seem like a great plan toward that end. The problem is that I’m not sure there’s a better one. Old, expensive and average is a tough place to be in the NBA. But, after a run of four titles in eight years, that’s where next year’s Warriors seem headed. Digging their way out of it would be their greatest feat yet.
In the end, it wasn’t some young upstart that knocked the Warriors off their pedestal into an uncertain future. Not Boston as redemption on the final climb up the mountain, not Denver earning its playoff stripes by knocking off the king.
No, the thing that sent Team Light Years into existential despair wasn’t the next space age basketball paradigm … it was a 43-win team playing caveman basketball, one that opened the clinching game with seven straight post-ups and hammered them into submission. What year is this again?
Nonetheless, the Warriors are here, the place that all contenders eventually end up late in their run: old, expensive and trending toward average. The core will be increasingly difficult to keep together in any kind of coherent form going forward. Even relative to other aging contenders of recent yore, these Warriors are somewhat older and massively more expensive.
It’s not just that the Warriors went 44-38 despite relatively good health, it’s that everyone is getting older and no help is around the corner. Of the mainstays of this title run, Steph Curry is 35, Klay Thompson is 33 and coming off two serious injuries, and Draymond Green is also 33. Andre Iguodala, if you remember him, is 39 and played eight games this year.
Wait, it gets worse: Father Time is taking its toll, but the new CBA is here to finish the job. The Warriors spent freely to keep this team together, and especially to augment it once Kevin Durant left. Their willingness to absorb a massive luxury tax bill to turn that money into Andrew Wiggins (eventually) got them an additional crown in 2022.
However, the rules are becoming more draconian just when the Warriors could use a little more flexibility. Golden State will have only minimum contracts available to augment the roster unless it slashes and burns what is currently there.
Green has a player option and could become a free agent, although our Shams Charania and Anthony Slater report that an extension seems more likely. Jordan Poole, coming off a series where he was nigh unplayable, is about to see his salary bump from a great value ($3.9 million) to a potential liability ($28.2 million, presuming his $500,000 incentive for winning Defensive Player of the Year doesn’t kick in). Thompson is set to make $43 million next year despite being, at this point, a pretty average player who was low-key brutal for much of the playoffs.
It becomes increasingly hard for successful teams to pipeline youth, and the Warriors are learning that part, too. They thought they had a workaround with the help of a horrific 2019-20 season that yielded the second pick in the draft, and a one-sided trade for Wiggins that gifted them the seventh pick a year later. Unfortunately, the two players they selected combined to play zero relevant minutes in the second round of the playoffs. RIP Two Tracks, which is a lot harder than it looks, as it turns out; the odds of any draft pick turning into a franchise’s next Curry are vanishingly small.
The question now for Golden State is even if they wanted to keep this rolling, how can they? The cap rules will continue to chip away at them. For instance, guard Donte DiVincenzo is DiVingonzo after making just $4.5 million last season. He will surely opt out of his $4.7 million deal for next season and likely have offers for the full midlevel exception, which the Warriors’ cap position prevents them from matching or even replacing.
In spite of that, one wonders if the Warriors will need to cut further. They have over $205 million in projected salary for next season if Green either opts in or re-signs for a roughly similar amount, which would put them $55 million over the tax line. Combined with the repeater penalty, that would mean a roughly $250 million luxury tax check to the league, which is more than every other team’s payroll, to keep together a 44-win team that is only getting older and can’t make any additions.
It can’t work. The Warriors have to figure out how to get younger and cheaper, and the only plausible way is to shed at least one of their core pieces. There’s a really obvious place to start, at the shooting guard position, where Thompson and Poole will combine to make $71 million next season. Even by the money-out-the-firehose standards of the Warriors, that’s way too much for one position, and they aren’t even getting surplus production from it. Thompson finished the playoffs with a PER of 9.4; it was 9.7 for Poole.
But what’s really possible with those two? Where is the outside demand coming to take on those contracts? Sorry, but nobody is jonesing to pay Thompson $43 million next year. The Warriors are stuck, stuck, stuck.
Trade Andrew Wiggins? Sure, he’d have a lot more of a market given his reasonable four-year extension, relative youth (2
and that he plays a position every team is dying to fill. But that would also leave a gaping roster hole on the wing that the Warriors have zero capacity to fill themselves, beyond praying that Jonathan Kuminga – the guy they hid at the end of the bench for the last month – can take over the role.Kevon Looney and Gary Payton II are on good contracts for at least another year and would have some trade value, but both are probably more valuable in the Warriors’ system than they would be by playing for most other teams. Also, isn’t the whole point to ditch one of the whale contracts and keep the value guys? Besides, cutting an $8 million deal just doesn’t change the Warriors’ big picture that much.
The Warriors will work the phones looking at something to ease the crunch. They can trade their first-round pick on draft night and could trade a future one (they owe their 2024 pick to Memphis), and may need at least one of those just to unload Thompson or Poole and make the payroll quasi-workable.
They could also resort to deeper shenanigans, such as using the stretch provision on Thompson and then re-signing him for the minimum or the taxpayer MLE; such a move could keep the Warriors beneath the second apron, but adding $14 million in dead money in the following two years could hurt their future tax position.
Speaking of which, if there’s any good news here, it’s that the Warriors’ situation looks significantly better a year out. They may need to weather a rough cap storm in 2023-24, but a year later Thompson’s $43 million comes off the books, and Green would be at a lower number than this year’s $27 million. It’s plausible that the Warriors would be below the tax line by then, believe it or not, and could operate handcuffs-free in the trade and free-agent markets.
The fly in that ointment is that Curry will be 37 by the end of the 2024-25 season. It’s his prime that the Warriors are rightly seeking to maximize, so low-key punting on 2023-24 doesn’t seem like a great plan toward that end. The problem is that I’m not sure there’s a better one. Old, expensive and average is a tough place to be in the NBA. But, after a run of four titles in eight years, that’s where next year’s Warriors seem headed. Digging their way out of it would be their greatest feat yet.
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In fairness, Curry still got his typical production. The 4 finger guy though is a wash.
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What's funny is it seems like players don't realize this
. Their eyes light up when they see him in the post and then it's like they're surprised when they can't get a good shot off
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Evil only wins if good men do nothing. Jokic is a good man. He'll put the Lakers to rest.
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AD has really been prime Bill Russell in these playoffs. He has to be considered for BITW if he can do the same against Jokic
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Correct that for you. Warriors lost with a washed team.Don’t care
Warriors lost with a stacked team
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Contain Murray and this will be the most confident I'd be in our ability to win a series the entire playoffs.
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Tried to keep up but my bad if this already appeared here
lawdog1
Supporter
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This might be true but it’s not saying a whole lot because of how few genuinely good post scorers there are in today’s NBA.
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Legend
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Also wondering who they start on Porter
The matchups in this one will make for some good podcasts
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Do you smell what's cooking? Dubs got smoked.Good morning Los Angeles
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If the trend continues, either Porter or KCP will lay a turd a la Bane/Klay. Lakers gotta punish those Jeff Green lineups. Minny/PHX didn't really bother to exploit Jokic’s defense but we know the Lakers are drawn to the paint
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Curious about that as well. The Nuggets are a pretty big team height wise.
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Or Gordon will be ghost
Jeff Green and Gordon could be WORN after the series win or lose lol
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Looking like Bruce right there. She got that Olympian body structure.
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