SAN FRANCISCO — The trade speaks for itself right now, largely because the Warriors can’t say anything about the surprise deal sending Chris Paul to the Bay Area and Jordan Poole to the Wizards until it becomes official on July 6.
Yes, just the plain fact of flipping a mercurial 24-year-old on a long-term deal for a grumpy, Hall of Fame-bound 38-year-old on a very short-term contract explains a lot about the Warriors’ state of mind and financial parameters in this moment. Add in the drafting of two hardy prospects, Santa Clara guard Brandin Podziemski and Indiana big man Trayce Jackson-Davis, and there is a loud theme that is hard to miss.
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New general manager Mike Dunleavy Jr., Joe Lacob, Kirk Lacob, Steve Kerr and all the others don’t have to say the words: They still love their dynastic core of Stephen Curry, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson, but after the struggles and strains of last season, they knew they had to make some important changes to the rest of their roster. They want to make themselves tougher. Stronger in the face of adversity. More efficient and consistent in playoff situations.
The Warriors don’t have to say the words. But after Friday’s news conference to introduce Podziemski and Jackson-Davis, and days before anybody with the team is allowed to address the Paul acquisition, Kerr explained the general terms of the Warriors’ offseason objective.
“We’re going to be a lot different,” Kerr told me. “The last thing I’m going to do is say anything about a team that just won a championship a year ago and then fought through a difficult season. Made a helluva run at the end of this year. I’ve loved this group that we’ve had the last couple years.
“But the biggest point is that we sensed we needed a shift. Didn’t mean we needed an overhaul, but we needed a shift of some sort. I think everybody in the organization sensed that. And it feels like we’ve made a pretty significant shift without giving up our identity and our sense of who we are as a team. I think, all in all, it’s a very positive shift.”
There is obviously a lot of risk involved. Just eight months ago, the Warriors’ brass was unanimously in favor of giving Poole the four-year, $123 million contract extension that won’t start until next season … when he’s likely to be scoring more than 30 points a game in Washington. Even on Friday, no Warriors person I talked to expressed any regrets about that deal.
But the Warriors needed to change some things up both stylistically and financially to try to catch up with the champion Nuggets and the rest of the Western Conference powers and to give themselves a way out of the dreaded second payroll apron by next offseason. The Poole-for-Paul deal (which includes the Warriors also sending 2022 first-rounder Patrick Baldwin Jr. to the Wizards) subtracts almost $100 million in future salary commitments — which would’ve been multiplied many times over by luxury-tax penalties if that money remained on the books in future seasons — and also gives the Warriors their best secondary perimeter playmaker since Shaun Livingston. Beyond that, if Paul suffers through another injury-blighted season, the Warriors can get out from his non-guaranteed $30 million in 2024-25 or flip that contract for another high-salary player.
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Paul, also, is a notable on-court scowler and scrapper; he’s had his tense moments with the Warriors, just like he’s had with just about everybody. He also rarely turns the ball over, battles on defense and simply is the kind of grown-up the Warriors have been craving this offseason after their experiences with Poole, James Wiseman and several other teenage draftees.
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On Thursday night after the draft, here’s what Dunleavy said when I asked if he was aiming to acquire the kinds of players who’ll make the Warriors tougher next season:
“Yeah, I would say ‘competitiveness’ — there’s a competitiveness,” Dunleavy said. “We drafted a couple of guys with pretty good track records. Obviously, Trayce, four years (of college play); Brandin only really played one year, 21-year-old, but guys that have a sample size of going out and getting stuff done. At the top of it, kind of the competitive/tough factor that was something I think, taking feedback from our team, our coaches this year, we kind of had to get back to.”
Podziemski is a sharp-shooting smaller guard who happened to lead the WCC in rebounding (8.8 per game) last season and said he hopes to average a triple-double very quickly in his NBA career. Jackson-Davis is a bit of an under-sized, non-jump-shooting big man who was a Naismith Defensive Player of the Year finalist and blocked 2.9 shots per game last season. There’s plenty of tape from both of their collegiate careers and none of it suggests that they back down from anything.
“I like the fact that both have a lot of college experience,” Kerr said. “I think that’s really helpful. Trayce played 120-something college games. It’s meaningful. It just means you’re ahead when you get here. Means you’re further along than you would be otherwise. The guys the last couple years are doing a good job, they’re putting in the work. But they have to catch up to the level that an older player already is at.
“We feel like we’ve got a really good, competitive group. And there’s going to be spots available. Everybody will have a fair shake to earn playing time.”
Of course, it all has to work on the basketball court, too. The Warriors have a unique playing style with Curry, Klay and Draymond, and they’ve been incredibly successful doing it. This is based on ball and player movement, curls, cuts and screens. Nobody dominates the ball. Everybody moves it to the open guy. Which is not much similar to anything Paul has run in many years, when he’s flourished as a ball-dominant pick-and-roll guy who isn’t often seen cutting and screening away from the ball to open up spaces for others or to set up a catch-and-shoot from distance.
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But the Warriors can make adjustments in game segments. Kerr’s done it before, especially in the Kevin Durant years (when the Warriors dialed up some more isolation sets on Durant’s suggestion) and when Livingston was running the second unit during the Curry rest minutes. Also, as Kerr pointed out Friday, it’s not like they’re wholly averse to pick-and-roll basketball. Next season, they’re going to have an additional extremely capable ballhandler to do it when Curry is out or to be available as an alternative option when Curry is in.
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“If you think about the Lakers series and maybe the last game of the Sacramento series, we pretty much ran high pick-and-roll a hundred times, over and over and over again,” Kerr said. “Steph is obviously lethal with that. But it also limits what you’re capable of in terms of generating offense elsewhere and it puts a lot of stress on Steph’s shoulders.
“We’re obviously going to be more capable of running that style if we want. But also of getting Steph off the ball. One of the most powerful forces we’ve had on this team is Steph’s versatility playing on or off the ball.”
The idea is to give the Warriors another way to challenge the defense. Paul can run his style of offense with the second unit (maybe igniting Jonathan Kuminga’s rim-running game) and then he can possibly close halves alongside Curry and Klay and let them both sprint around screens away from the ball while Paul probes and pressures the defense in his own way.
“One of the things Steph said … I thought his most revealing quote after the Lakers series was that we didn’t have enough variety in the ways that we could score,” Kerr said. “And everything was high pick-and-roll with Steph. That whole series. We just couldn’t create enough. When we’ve been our best, this team has had a lot of good passing, a lot of connectors, a lot of guys who understood how to play with Steph and free him up and use his gravity to slip for layups or create shots on the other side of the floor.
“We have to maintain that type of variety in our game somehow. We lost some of that this year. So hopefully we can regain some of that next year. … When we had to have a bucket, we’ve leaned on the high pick-and-roll, Steph/Draymond. It’s our best play. That’s our 98-mph fastball. But if you throw that down the middle enough, somebody’s hitting it into McCovey Cove. And that’s what happened against the Lakers, we just didn’t have the variety. We didn’t have the changeup, as Steph said.”
As Dunleavy and Kerr are emphasizing, the Warriors still have several roster spots available, which is exciting for them but also a little scary because they’re currently pretty thin on the frontcourt. They’ll be in even worse shape if Draymond doesn’t re-sign in July, but the Warriors have a solid expectation that he’ll be coming back into the fold.
So they’ve just cut a lot of future money with the Poole and Baldwin subtractions. (I’m told that the Warriors are now forecasting something close to $420 million in payroll commitments next season, which is a bit more than was suggested earlier this week, but, of course, things change. Next season it could drop down to $320 million or lower, if they want.) They feel more versatile and tougher with Paul. They have a couple of talented rookies who might earn Kerr’s trust relatively quickly. They’re a little leaner. They’re a lot older. They’re different. And the Warriors, with a new GM and increasing pressure to try to get one more title in the Curry era, were definitely going for different this offseason.
The TK Show: Go to Tim Kawakami’s podcast page on Apple, Spotify and The Athletic app.
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(Photo: Jed Jacobsohn / NBAE via Getty Images)
