The Golden State Warriors have the league’s highest payroll at a whopping $175 million. Three players are on max contracts, and a fourth, Draymond Green, isn’t far away from the max. Standing $40 million above the tax line, give or take, they stand to owe the league $135 million in luxury-tax payments. Their tax payment will equal or exceed the payroll of at least 20 teams.
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So it was quite ironic to watch the Warriors’ win over Utah on Saturday night, a key face-off that could end up being a preview of the conference finals, and see Golden State win the game largely on the strength of players who make the lowest salaries possible. With no Green and no Klay Thompson — that’s $62 million on the sideline — the Warriors nonetheless scored 123 points against a good defense. Steph Curry provided the fireworks, yes, but the Warriors’ cheap guys were the winning margin.
All of them were acquired either late in recent drafts, in the offseason or just straight off the scrap heap. Put simply, the Warriors created something from nothing this offseason; the idea of using a top-two pick to augment the aging Splash Brothers core has been replaced by the reality of using a bunch of well-chosen minimum guys to massively raise this team’s floor.
In contrast to some other teams that had minimum contract signings that haven’t panned out (hello, Lakers!), the back end of Golden State’s roster has been one of this season’s most pleasant surprises, and it’s lifted what was a middling team a year ago to the top of the conference.
It’s the story in the NBA this season, at least so far: Golden State missed the playoffs last season, brought back the same core players … and is trucking the league. The difference is that a bad back end of the roster has become a massive strength.
Here’s a news flash, for instance: Curry is having his worst statistical season since 2012-13 when he wasn’t yet an All-Star and we were all fretting over his ankles. A PER of 23.7 and 61.1 true shooting percentage is awesome for mere mortals; for Steph, it’s a far cry from the 26.3 and 65.5 marks of a year ago.
Yet the Warriors have been orders of magnitude better. No big splash transaction caused this: 2020 second overall pick James Wiseman hasn’t seen the floor yet, 2021 lotto picks Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody have hardly played and Thompson is still out. They made no trades and didn’t even use their midlevel exception. Instead, they just won every small decision … and suddenly are flooding the court with good, inexpensive players.
Yes, Green has looked much sprier than a year ago, and Andrew Wiggins suddenly figured out how to shoot (43.4 percent from 3). But after Curry, Green and Wiggins, the next eight Warriors in minutes this season all make peanuts, and each has made large contributions to the team’s runaway success:
- Otto Porter started for Green on Saturday and scored 20 points. Perhaps more importantly, he handed out eight assists, never missing a beat as the pinch-Draymond and adding a significantly improved shooting threat. Porter only played 42 games over the past two seasons as injuries threatened to swallow his career, but he’s only 28 and he’s a 40.0 percent career 3-point shooter with an elite basketball IQ. The Warriors got him on a minimum deal. Pay dirt.
- Gary Payton II also started the win at Utah, finishing with 12 points and two steals. The Mitten wormed his way into the first five after being added as the 15th roster player just before the season started. What a pickup. He’d been bouncing around the fringes of the NBA for five years and, at 29, figured to top out as a 10-day guy. A point guard his whole career, Golden State reimagined him as an off-ball terror, screening and rim running to take advantage of his athleticism and minimize his iffy shooting. He’s shooting 63.5 percent from the floor with a heavy diet of dunks and layups, and his 21.0 PER is second on the team behind Curry.
- Kevon Looney is a Warriors old-timer, but the last pick of the 2015 first round is still on a cheap deal that pays him $5.2 million this year. Overcoming the injuries that held him back the last two seasons, he’s started all 35 of the Warriors’ games, giving them a solid fifth starter in the middle who can defend bigs and still play their heady screening and passing game at the offensive end. Dealing from the high post, he had six assists in the win over Utah.
- Jordan Poole scored 10 points off the bench against Utah in his first game as a reserve; the sixth man role is likely more natural for him than playing next to Curry. The 28th pick in the 2019 draft, he soaks up a mere $2.1 million on the Warriors’ cap but is averaging 17.6 points per game; his quick first step and ability to play pick-and-roll help give this team an offensive versatility it has otherwise lacked.
- Plucked from the wreckage of the Warriors’ 2019-20 disaster, Juan Toscano-Anderson was a grinding hustler plugging away for the Warriors’ G League team until they promoted him last season and realized his grinding hustle translated. Toscano-Anderson is tough enough to play as a small-ball big but has the mobility to switch out onto the perimeter. He picked Mike Conley’s dribble in the open court in Saturday’s win. He’s on the second year of a minimum deal that pays him $1.7 million.
- Nemanja Bjelica is another minimum guy with a great feel for passing and playing the Warriors’ game of screen-and-pass pinball; Golden State has done a great job identifying players who fit its system. Bjelica also has a deep shooting range and made 39.1 percent of his 3s this year (38.7 percent career), giving the Warriors a “stretch five” option it previously lacked.
- Damion Lee is another 2019-20 survivor. He missed Saturday’s win but has provided a solid backup two all season — a good defender with enough off-ball gravity as a shooter to make defenders cover him. His minimum deal pays him $1.9 million.
- After all that and I haven’t mentioned Andre Iguodala! He’s also on a minimum deal but has played just 371 minutes, 11th on the team. Nonetheless, he showed up for a crucial cameo in the Utah win, with 12 points, eight rebounds and seven assists. He turns 38 this month and sometimes never so much looks at the rim but still defends and passes at a high level.
Add it up, and that’s eight players who make a combined $17.6 million — about what a decent, no-frills starter costs in today’s market — and all eight of them have been important factors in the team’s success.
As a result, a Warriors team that got heaps of bad minutes from its secondary players in 2020-21 now never gets bad minutes, ever, from anybody. (I hear you smart alecks in the audience adding “until Wiseman returns.”). And again, look at how these eight players were acquired:
- Two very late first-round picks
- Three players plucked from the G League scrap heap
- Three players on veteran minimum deals
The Warriors have done such a good job winning on the little stuff that it’s obscured what could end up being a historic fail of taking Wiseman over LaMelo Ball. You could have gotten good odds on “they’ll completely screw up the pick but win the title anyway” in the summer of 2020, but that reality seems increasingly possible.
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Depth and minimum players indeed have their limits: The deeper we get into the postseason, the more the Warriors will have to rely on their top-line talent rather than their superior bench. But in Golden State’s case, they’ve been so good that they can probably scale up. Also, a lot of these minutes will be replaced by somebody named Klay Thompson.
Even so, there’s a lot to like here for May and June; Porter, Poole and Payton could be “Tier 4” or “Tier 5” guys, as Seth Partnow might say. In particular, Porter’s shooting and size make him playoff gold. Looking deeper, Poole’s one-on-one game should adapt well, Iguodala has proven he can deliver in the postseason and Payton can still be effective in his small-big chameleon role. Sure, Bjelica will probably get played off the court defensively and Toscano-Anderson offensively, but the Warriors don’t need to go 12 deep in the playoffs.
As a result, the Warriors could go down as one of basketball’s great ironies: the most expensive team in history, winning big because their cheap players were so good.
CAP GEEKERY: Two-way churn
Now that several of the league’s teams are done playing roster-exemption roulette, they can get down to some other typical January business: shuffling two-ways. I’ve already written about this week’s guarantee deadline and the inevitable trade talks that will get underway leading into the Feb. 10 trade deadline.
The other January intrigue, however, typically involves teams’ two-way spots, By this point, halfway through the season, teams usually know which of their two-ways they’d like to keep around all season and which ones are worth swapping out for a look at a different player. Dallas, Indiana, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Golden State and the Lakers, for instance, have all waived two-ways in the last three weeks.
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Additionally, teams are starting to plan with two-way “keepers,” plotting how to sign them for next season. Already we’ve seen Houston (Garrison Mathews) and Memphis (Killian Tillie) jump in to lock up two-way players for next season’s roster, with both teams shelling out $2 million per season. It helped that each had exception money left over; more typically two-way “promotions” happen for the league minimum.
Among other teams one might expect to pursue signing two-ways to roster contracts are Oklahoma City (Aaron Wiggins), Miami (Caleb Martin), Atlanta (Skylar Mays) and the LA Clippers (Amir Coffey). However, tax and roster issues could impede them. Memphis, for instance, had to waive Sam Merrill to make room for Tillie, while Houston had to bid adieu to Danuel House. A team like Miami would likely want to wait till the waning days to sign Martin because it’s so close to the luxury tax. Signing him earlier would push the Heat over, barring trades.
The other element here is that teams have gotten a long look at some of the league’s fringe talent thanks to all the emergency 10-day contracts (more than 100) during this wave of COVID-19 outbreaks.
Nearly all these players are two-way eligible, and several are likely to be near the top of teams’ target lists once the party ends on 10-day roster deals. Memphis already jumped in and signed Tyrell Terry into its two-way, while Golden State jumped in to grab Quinndary Weatherspoon in the wake of his 14-minute emergency stint in the Warriors’ Christmas win over Phoenix.
Expect a lot more of this in the coming days and weeks, especially as the league’s COVID-19 wave crests and the flood of emergency 10-days slow to a trickle.
ROOKIE OF THE WEEK: Davion Mitchell, PG, Sacramento
(Note: This section won’t necessarily profile the best rookie of the week. Just the one I’ve been watching.)
Translating college performance to NBA is inherently imperfect, and usually, rookies surprise us one way or the other — they’re better at one skill or worse at another, with sometimes huge implications for their overall effectiveness.
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Yet sometimes things play out almost exactly as we expected, and the player ends up being what we thought he was. This season’s Dennis Green Award winner might be Davion Mitchell, the ninth pick in the draft. He’s been neither a runaway success nor an abject bust; basically, he’s been about you expect from the ninth pick, and in ways that were completely expected.
Let’s start with the good stuff: This dude is an absolute hellhound on defense. When he subs in for the more, um, laissez-faire approach of De’Aaron Fox, the change feels palpable. Check out this sequence against Portland’s CJ McCollum for instance, where he fights through a screen and forces McCollum into a difficult contested runner.
Mitchell hasn’t replicated the insane steal rate he had at Baylor (just 1.3 per 100 possessions this year), but he remains active on the weak side. Watch here, for instance, as even though he’s guarding a dangerous corner shooter (former Virginia Wahoo legend Kyle Guy), he’s hugging the lane to be in a position to help; Jimmy Butler never sees him coming.
Overall, the Kings give up 107.1 points per 100 possessions with Mitchell on the floor and 115.9 with Fox, and that doesn’t feel like an accident.
Alas, it’s an offensive league, and Mitchell struggles to be an impactful offensive player right now. The Kings score 109.5 points per 100 with Fox on the floor and a mere 104.0 with Mitchell, and that, too, does not feel like an accident. With a PER of 10.9 on 48.0 percent true shooting, this is the biggest hurdle between Mitchell and being a long-term starter versus an Avery Bradley-type specialist.
Mitchell projected as a good but not great shooter and has struggled to even check that box (31.5 percent from 3), and he has been an infrequent guest in the painted area.
There are hints of promise, however, as he can be explosive off the dribble and canny navigating behind screens, such as when he leaves Terrence Ross chasing ghosts here:
However, he still needs to get to the cup more often and refine his package around the rim once there. He’s a bit dependent on two-foot takeoffs and needs to add more Euro steps and craft to his finishes, especially at just 6 foot 2. Watch here, for instance, as he easily blows by Omer Yurtseven but can’t elude the challenge from Haywood Highsmith, even with a head of steam.
In concert with this, Mitchell rarely draws fouls — he has just 30 free-throw attempts all season — and needs to learn some of the free-throw grifting tricks of the league’s better guards. Mitchell also is fond of step-back jumpers, but if he can improve the elements above he could get downhill a lot more frequently with his quickness.
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Overall, it’s been a mixed bag for Mitchell, and in 20-20 hindsight, of course, I’m going to say the Kings should have taken Alperen Sengun. But the reality is that Sengun and the 24-year-old Chris Duarte are the only players taken in the next 15 picks who have played any better than Mitchell, and it hasn’t been a huge difference. Besides, rookie point guards who aren’t named Chris Paul or Magic Johnson typically spend their first season taking their lumps. Mitchell is something, but I’d venture to say we’re not going to know what the Kings have here until the middle of next year.
PROSPECT OF THE WEEK: Dereon Seabron, 6-7, soph., F, N.C. State
(Note: This section won’t necessarily profile the best prospect of the week. Just the one I’ve been watching.)
Dereon Seabron was already rattling around the edges of the draft conversation in recent weeks after a solid start to his sophomore season, but after a dominating effort against Florida State on Saturday, scouts are sure to double back for second and third looks. Seabron scored 32 points on 12-of-14 shooting, throwing in seven assists, seven rebounds and two steals for good measure, as he repeatedly slashed his way to the rim for right-hand layups. The Wolfpack still lost, partly because of a ridiculous play at the end where his coach called timeout while Seabron was steaming toward the cup for a potential tying basket, but Seabron’s play raised eyebrows all over.
He’s likely to be one of the most divisive players in this year’s draft because of his clear strengths and equally clear weaknesses. Let’s start with the positives: Seabron is 6 foot 7 and has a point guard’s handle. He’s a good passer, but his real skill is being able to slash to the rim with long strides and then finish in the trees. He shows good feel for the game at both ends with solid steal rates and some good reads on drive and kicks.
I’m always a sucker for big wings who can dribble, particularly ones who can get to the rim on their own steam in the half court, as Seabron did several times on Saturday. The way the league is going, guys like this almost always end up playing if they can shoot even a little bit.
Um … about that. Seabron has made only nine 3-pointers in his two seasons at N.C. State. While he hasn’t particularly needed the 3-point weapon as a collegian, he very much will at the NBA level. A 66.4 percent career free-throw mark doesn’t offer huge encouragement that he can become more threatening from the perimeter at the pro level.
Two other weaknesses stand out. First of all, he’s not exactly a high wire athlete. He hasn’t blocked a shot all season, and his paint finishes are more below-the-rim crafty bank shots. He’s good slashing to the rim and has a nice handle, but you wouldn’t call him explosive. Finally, he’s an older prospect: Although a sophomore, he’ll be 22 on draft night.
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Add it all up, and there’s a lot for scouts to unpack in the coming weeks. The combination of size and handle alone is going to push him into the first-round conversation and possibly well into it if teams feel the shot is fixable. On the other hand, a B-minus athlete who can’t shoot and is already 22 isn’t exactly a sexy résumé. He seems very much like an eye-of-the-beholder type, and his stock could be all over from team to team. Some may compare him to a similar prospect, Toronto’s Dalano Banton, who was picked 46th in 2021.
Overall, there’s going to be some spirited draft-room debates about Seabron. The only thing that seems certain after Saturday is that everybody will make sure they get a good, long look at him in the second half of the season.
Related reading
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Brown: Klay Thompson finds a gem on comeback trail
Slater: Klay Thompson’s return is near
(Photo of Davion Mitchell and Gary Payton II: Randall Benton / Associated Press)
