Was that an involuntary shiver running through the nervous systems of a few Warriors officials on Monday evening? If James Wiseman meant to do it a little playfully, I give him full credit for using this exact moment to volunteer that fairly famous ex-Warrior Kevin Durant has been giving him plenty of personal advice these days. Even if Wiseman’s revelation was entirely innocent, merely factual, I thought it was pretty amusing and not at all in a bad way.
“I talk with KD every day,” Wiseman said on a media Zoom call after Monday’s practice. “We talk about the system, how he was able to fit into the system here. He just gives me a lot of advice.”
This is not a bad thing at all for the Warriors, though maybe it raises a few eyebrows. This is actually a practical and fitting thing, since Wiseman is the most talented player to try to find a place in the unique world of the Stephen Curry/Draymond Green/Steve Kerr Warriors since Durant did it quite successfully from 2016-17 through 2018-19 before deciding he was ready to try something else.
When Durant did the adjusting with the Warriors, of course, he was in the prime of a Hall of Fame career and mostly blended right in; and he was so good and so well established that Curry, Draymond, Klay Thompson and Kerr didn’t mind doing a little adjusting and blending of their own. But there were some shakier moments in the three-season Durant era, even with all that talent joined together. Sometimes because of all that talent joined together.
Wiseman, who just turned 20 last week, has been going through all of this and more in his rookie season (without, of course, the injured Thompson), which, 50 games into this season, seems on the face of it to be just about as unsettled as it was in Game 1. It’s not easy being the supremely talented newcomer in a system that was built for the originals, and even harder when, like Wiseman, you come in having played only three college games and at a position the Warriors, over the years, have mostly treated as a luxury add-on, not a necessity.
So I think Durant probably has been a solid resource for Wiseman and could continue to be.
The point is, as Kerr often says, the Warriors want to try to win as much as possible while developing Wiseman and a few other younger players. But right now, during their current 1-7 stretch sliding them down the Western Conference standings, they are losing way too much and there seems to be hardly any developing going on. Which is not good, but does not need to be permanent.
Sunday’s loss to Atlanta was one of the more most baffling examples: After a few recent struggles, Wiseman played what appeared to be a strong and attentive nine-minute stint to start the game, but Kerr never put him back in the rest of the first half. Then Wiseman played another solid nine-minute stint to start the third quarter, and again never came back in the rest of the game. Wiseman had 8 points and 5 rebounds on the night and was a plus-3 in his 18 minutes. What was going on there?
“Yeah, I mean, I was very surprised,” Wiseman said with a shrug when asked about not going back in either half after his first stints. “I just knew I was kind of in the air with everything. I guess that was Coach’s game plan, he was trying to figure something out. But yeah, I was kind of confused. I can’t lie.”
Did you think you played well in those segments?
“I mean, the time that I had, I feel like I played really well,” Wiseman said.
When asked about it on Monday, Kerr had a more global view of the situation, which is his right and his job, anyway. Without saying it, Kerr made it clear that Wiseman’s stints were maybe not as impressive as outsiders might think and then used the key word “earning” a couple times to underline a major issue here.
You might think it’s time for the Warriors to move past Wiseman needing to earn minutes and I might think so, too. But Kerr has been through this with other young players, he is talking to the Warriors’ veteran players and watching them on the court and also noting that the Warriors almost always lose ground specifically when Wiseman is playing. Which cuts into the benefits they all get from Curry’s minutes, Green’s minutes, everybody’s minutes.
“I think it’s important not to just automatically assume that minutes equal development,” Kerr said Monday. “I think development also includes observation from the sidelines, earning time, earning minutes. If there are mistakes made in the previous game, let’s work on those mistakes.
“And if we correct those, then we get more playing time. If we don’t correct them, then we get less playing time. So it can’t just be, throw him out there and let him go for 30 minutes because, frankly, he’s not ready for that. And I think it’s just all part of the process. No matter how we look at it, James just needs time. He’s going to need a summer league and a training camp next year. And he’s going to grow, he’s going to get better and better and he’s going to be a great player. But we just can’t force the issue.”
But it’s April. The regular season is running out. Wiseman has not caused any mini-controversies, other than his missed COVID test last month, and his development, or lack of it, remains the most obvious issue facing the Warriors this season. At some point, maybe the Warriors need to do some earning here, too.
Don’t Kerr and the rest of the basketball operations staff need to show Wiseman exactly how he can help the team and let him explore this on the court and not spend his minutes wondering if he’ll ever get back on the court?
What are they risking if he plays more and plays poorly the rest of this season? A chance at the eighth seed? Not exactly sacred territory there. I think what Curry, Draymond, Kerr and everybody else will eventually conclude is that the last 20 games can be purposeful if they see constructive moments from Wiseman. And I think they will see that from their rookie. Also, if they don’t see purposefulness out of their rookie now, after all this, then maybe that’s important to know, too.
Detailing everything that has pushed Wiseman’s progress a little offline this season would take up too many words right now and that has been handled elsewhere. It can be tedious, I’m sure, to wait for Wiseman to get up to top speed. As Kerr suggests, it might not happen this season. Or even by the middle of next season. But Wiseman even at 50 percent engine power might be a sight to see.
It’s time to really start seeing it. If the Warriors keep him to limited minutes and still don’t know much about him by mid-May, if they go into this offseason not exactly knowing what to expect from Wiseman into the future, what was the point of this season, anyway?
That was my first thought about Wiseman and the Warriors at this moment in time. Here are four others:
Get him into the second unit
Obviously, Wiseman needs time with Curry and Green. If he’s going to be a major part of the Warriors’ future, he’ll have to figure out how to play with those two (and then with Thompson next season) and they’ll have to figure out how to play with him. That’s a given. But he also partially kills that lineup.
So my suggestion: Wiseman can be the central focus of the second unit, which was sort of the plan a few weeks ago until it stopped being the plan. He can be freer on the second unit, since any shot he takes isn’t taking one away from Curry. He can match up against the opponents’ backup big men. And he can team up in the pick-and-roll specifically with Jordan Poole, which I think would be good for both players.
I think Wiseman needs those minutes with the starting group, but Kerr can limit it to five- or six-minute stints, instead of the long, nine-minute runs he’s been giving Wiseman lately. Then the Warriors can get Wiseman back out there to start the second and fourth quarters with the second unit, alongside Poole, Damion Lee, Kent Bazemore and Kelly Oubre Jr. If the opponent has a big power forward who needs to be guarded, then Juan Toscano-Anderson is a good option, switched in for either Lee or Bazemore.
It’s no major disruption. The Warriors have been fiddling with the second unit all season because it hasn’t really worked all season. So it’s not a bad time to make it Wiseman’s unit.
What Wiseman really needs is a partner, somebody Kerr can put in and figure the next five minutes with Wiseman will be calm and productive. As rookie years ago, Curry always seemed to play steadier when Anthony Tolliver was in the lineup. Who is that guy for Wiseman? Mychal Mulder has been the best Wiseman partner statistically (plus-0.1 per game in 120 minutes together), then Poole, Lee, Bazemore and Toscano-Anderson. But Mulder is out of the rotation now. What remains: the current second-unit group.
This is what they signed up for when they drafted Wiseman
LaMelo Ball is out with a fractured right wrist, but he’s been a far better player than Wiseman so far in their young careers. I’m sure that doesn’t please the Warriors, who selected Wiseman at 2, one slot ahead of where Charlotte selected Ball, but that was always going to be a possibility. The Warriors should’ve expected this — guards almost always are better at earlier ages than centers, and blending in with the Hornets is never going to be as tricky as figuring out your place next to Curry and Green.
Plus, the Warriors didn’t necessarily need another ball-dominant guard, presuming Klay is back next season. If they’re going to get back to competing with the powerhouses, they’ll need somebody to challenge Anthony Davis, Nikola Jokić and Rudy Gobert. And that player is not Kevon Looney.
Maybe it’s not Wiseman, either. But it’s not only up to Wiseman to figure this out. It’s up to the Warriors, too.
Defense is definitely the main issue
Just one stat of many that all essentially note the same thing: Wiseman is ranked 84th out of 84 eligible centers in Defensive Real Plus-Minus, at minus-1.88. He has earned it, too. If you track the plays that get Kerr to pull Wiseman quicker than planned, they almost all are tied to Wiseman messing up a rotation or wandering away from his assigned position in a way that dramatically fouls up the Warriors’ defense.
“He’s been pretty good offensively for the most part,” Kerr said. “I think you can see James, he’ll have his moments offensively when you can really see it. Defensively is really the key where there’s just so much to learn, so much ground to cover. Transition defense, in particular, he’s got to improve upon.”
He is actually getting better, though the stats don’t say so
OK, this one is all about perception, because you can circle any random Wiseman game, at any point of the season, and tell me I’m crazy to say he’s getting better. He’s had a lot of clunkers, which Wiseman admits freely. But this is where the Durant conversation might be the most valuable. If Wiseman can just parse out the bad stuff and concentrate on the games that have worked for him and on the aspects of the game that have worked for him, he can grow. It’s fitful, but it’s growth and I think it’s there. Wiseman has to pull back from trying to do everything to just doing the best things.
Durant absolutely subtracted some of his game with the Warriors because that’s how things could keep flowing. It probably wasn’t that easy to do.
“I know what my role is and that’s rebounds, block shots and just run the floor,” Wiseman said. “And just do what got me here. I’m not trying to do too much. I’m not trying to do something out of my game, because I’m still improving, I’m still getting better each day. So I’m really just doing the stuff that I know I’m good at, basically.”
There might not be a faster big man end to end than Wiseman. His hands seem to be getting (a little) better. He hasn’t been beaten down by this season by all observations. Wiseman still clearly is working to get better. He wants to be great. He’ll deal with the bumps. So maybe Kerr wanted to test that out a little. And Wiseman seems tough enough for this. Through 50 games, we don’t know much, but I think we know that. Let’s see more.
Was that an involuntary shiver running through the nervous systems of a few Warriors officials on Monday evening? If James Wiseman meant to do it a little playfully, I give him full credit for using this exact moment to volunteer that fairly famous ex-Warrior Kevin Durant has been giving him plenty of personal advice these days. Even if Wiseman’s revelation was entirely innocent, merely factual, I thought it was pretty amusing and not at all in a bad way.
“I talk with KD every day,” Wiseman said on a media Zoom call after Monday’s practice. “We talk about the system, how he was able to fit into the system here. He just gives me a lot of advice.”
This is not a bad thing at all for the Warriors, though maybe it raises a few eyebrows. This is actually a practical and fitting thing, since Wiseman is the most talented player to try to find a place in the unique world of the Stephen Curry/Draymond Green/Steve Kerr Warriors since Durant did it quite successfully from 2016-17 through 2018-19 before deciding he was ready to try something else.
When Durant did the adjusting with the Warriors, of course, he was in the prime of a Hall of Fame career and mostly blended right in; and he was so good and so well established that Curry, Draymond, Klay Thompson and Kerr didn’t mind doing a little adjusting and blending of their own. But there were some shakier moments in the three-season Durant era, even with all that talent joined together. Sometimes because of all that talent joined together.
Wiseman, who just turned 20 last week, has been going through all of this and more in his rookie season (without, of course, the injured Thompson), which, 50 games into this season, seems on the face of it to be just about as unsettled as it was in Game 1. It’s not easy being the supremely talented newcomer in a system that was built for the originals, and even harder when, like Wiseman, you come in having played only three college games and at a position the Warriors, over the years, have mostly treated as a luxury add-on, not a necessity.
So I think Durant probably has been a solid resource for Wiseman and could continue to be.
The point is, as Kerr often says, the Warriors want to try to win as much as possible while developing Wiseman and a few other younger players. But right now, during their current 1-7 stretch sliding them down the Western Conference standings, they are losing way too much and there seems to be hardly any developing going on. Which is not good, but does not need to be permanent.
Sunday’s loss to Atlanta was one of the more most baffling examples: After a few recent struggles, Wiseman played what appeared to be a strong and attentive nine-minute stint to start the game, but Kerr never put him back in the rest of the first half. Then Wiseman played another solid nine-minute stint to start the third quarter, and again never came back in the rest of the game. Wiseman had 8 points and 5 rebounds on the night and was a plus-3 in his 18 minutes. What was going on there?
“Yeah, I mean, I was very surprised,” Wiseman said with a shrug when asked about not going back in either half after his first stints. “I just knew I was kind of in the air with everything. I guess that was Coach’s game plan, he was trying to figure something out. But yeah, I was kind of confused. I can’t lie.”
Did you think you played well in those segments?
“I mean, the time that I had, I feel like I played really well,” Wiseman said.
When asked about it on Monday, Kerr had a more global view of the situation, which is his right and his job, anyway. Without saying it, Kerr made it clear that Wiseman’s stints were maybe not as impressive as outsiders might think and then used the key word “earning” a couple times to underline a major issue here.
You might think it’s time for the Warriors to move past Wiseman needing to earn minutes and I might think so, too. But Kerr has been through this with other young players, he is talking to the Warriors’ veteran players and watching them on the court and also noting that the Warriors almost always lose ground specifically when Wiseman is playing. Which cuts into the benefits they all get from Curry’s minutes, Green’s minutes, everybody’s minutes.
“I think it’s important not to just automatically assume that minutes equal development,” Kerr said Monday. “I think development also includes observation from the sidelines, earning time, earning minutes. If there are mistakes made in the previous game, let’s work on those mistakes.
“And if we correct those, then we get more playing time. If we don’t correct them, then we get less playing time. So it can’t just be, throw him out there and let him go for 30 minutes because, frankly, he’s not ready for that. And I think it’s just all part of the process. No matter how we look at it, James just needs time. He’s going to need a summer league and a training camp next year. And he’s going to grow, he’s going to get better and better and he’s going to be a great player. But we just can’t force the issue.”
But it’s April. The regular season is running out. Wiseman has not caused any mini-controversies, other than his missed COVID test last month, and his development, or lack of it, remains the most obvious issue facing the Warriors this season. At some point, maybe the Warriors need to do some earning here, too.
Don’t Kerr and the rest of the basketball operations staff need to show Wiseman exactly how he can help the team and let him explore this on the court and not spend his minutes wondering if he’ll ever get back on the court?
What are they risking if he plays more and plays poorly the rest of this season? A chance at the eighth seed? Not exactly sacred territory there. I think what Curry, Draymond, Kerr and everybody else will eventually conclude is that the last 20 games can be purposeful if they see constructive moments from Wiseman. And I think they will see that from their rookie. Also, if they don’t see purposefulness out of their rookie now, after all this, then maybe that’s important to know, too.
Detailing everything that has pushed Wiseman’s progress a little offline this season would take up too many words right now and that has been handled elsewhere. It can be tedious, I’m sure, to wait for Wiseman to get up to top speed. As Kerr suggests, it might not happen this season. Or even by the middle of next season. But Wiseman even at 50 percent engine power might be a sight to see.
It’s time to really start seeing it. If the Warriors keep him to limited minutes and still don’t know much about him by mid-May, if they go into this offseason not exactly knowing what to expect from Wiseman into the future, what was the point of this season, anyway?
That was my first thought about Wiseman and the Warriors at this moment in time. Here are four others:
Get him into the second unit
Obviously, Wiseman needs time with Curry and Green. If he’s going to be a major part of the Warriors’ future, he’ll have to figure out how to play with those two (and then with Thompson next season) and they’ll have to figure out how to play with him. That’s a given. But he also partially kills that lineup.
So my suggestion: Wiseman can be the central focus of the second unit, which was sort of the plan a few weeks ago until it stopped being the plan. He can be freer on the second unit, since any shot he takes isn’t taking one away from Curry. He can match up against the opponents’ backup big men. And he can team up in the pick-and-roll specifically with Jordan Poole, which I think would be good for both players.
I think Wiseman needs those minutes with the starting group, but Kerr can limit it to five- or six-minute stints, instead of the long, nine-minute runs he’s been giving Wiseman lately. Then the Warriors can get Wiseman back out there to start the second and fourth quarters with the second unit, alongside Poole, Damion Lee, Kent Bazemore and Kelly Oubre Jr. If the opponent has a big power forward who needs to be guarded, then Juan Toscano-Anderson is a good option, switched in for either Lee or Bazemore.
It’s no major disruption. The Warriors have been fiddling with the second unit all season because it hasn’t really worked all season. So it’s not a bad time to make it Wiseman’s unit.
What Wiseman really needs is a partner, somebody Kerr can put in and figure the next five minutes with Wiseman will be calm and productive. As rookie years ago, Curry always seemed to play steadier when Anthony Tolliver was in the lineup. Who is that guy for Wiseman? Mychal Mulder has been the best Wiseman partner statistically (plus-0.1 per game in 120 minutes together), then Poole, Lee, Bazemore and Toscano-Anderson. But Mulder is out of the rotation now. What remains: the current second-unit group.
This is what they signed up for when they drafted Wiseman
LaMelo Ball is out with a fractured right wrist, but he’s been a far better player than Wiseman so far in their young careers. I’m sure that doesn’t please the Warriors, who selected Wiseman at 2, one slot ahead of where Charlotte selected Ball, but that was always going to be a possibility. The Warriors should’ve expected this — guards almost always are better at earlier ages than centers, and blending in with the Hornets is never going to be as tricky as figuring out your place next to Curry and Green.
Plus, the Warriors didn’t necessarily need another ball-dominant guard, presuming Klay is back next season. If they’re going to get back to competing with the powerhouses, they’ll need somebody to challenge Anthony Davis, Nikola Jokić and Rudy Gobert. And that player is not Kevon Looney.
Maybe it’s not Wiseman, either. But it’s not only up to Wiseman to figure this out. It’s up to the Warriors, too.
Defense is definitely the main issue
Just one stat of many that all essentially note the same thing: Wiseman is ranked 84th out of 84 eligible centers in Defensive Real Plus-Minus, at minus-1.88. He has earned it, too. If you track the plays that get Kerr to pull Wiseman quicker than planned, they almost all are tied to Wiseman messing up a rotation or wandering away from his assigned position in a way that dramatically fouls up the Warriors’ defense.
“He’s been pretty good offensively for the most part,” Kerr said. “I think you can see James, he’ll have his moments offensively when you can really see it. Defensively is really the key where there’s just so much to learn, so much ground to cover. Transition defense, in particular, he’s got to improve upon.”
He is actually getting better, though the stats don’t say so
OK, this one is all about perception, because you can circle any random Wiseman game, at any point of the season, and tell me I’m crazy to say he’s getting better. He’s had a lot of clunkers, which Wiseman admits freely. But this is where the Durant conversation might be the most valuable. If Wiseman can just parse out the bad stuff and concentrate on the games that have worked for him and on the aspects of the game that have worked for him, he can grow. It’s fitful, but it’s growth and I think it’s there. Wiseman has to pull back from trying to do everything to just doing the best things.
Durant absolutely subtracted some of his game with the Warriors because that’s how things could keep flowing. It probably wasn’t that easy to do.
“I know what my role is and that’s rebounds, block shots and just run the floor,” Wiseman said. “And just do what got me here. I’m not trying to do too much. I’m not trying to do something out of my game, because I’m still improving, I’m still getting better each day. So I’m really just doing the stuff that I know I’m good at, basically.”
There might not be a faster big man end to end than Wiseman. His hands seem to be getting (a little) better. He hasn’t been beaten down by this season by all observations. Wiseman still clearly is working to get better. He wants to be great. He’ll deal with the bumps. So maybe Kerr wanted to test that out a little. And Wiseman seems tough enough for this. Through 50 games, we don’t know much, but I think we know that. Let’s see more.
