Lineup Lunacies

Want a shorthand way to explain how crazy things have gotten in Oakland? Don't bother looking at the Warriors' record, or rebounding futility, or fouling proclivities, or Monta's ineffectiveness, or the passel of 48-minute nights by individual players. If you want to get a vivid sense of Don Nelson's "Beautiful Mind"-style devolution into basketball madness, just take a gander at the Warriors' list of starting lineups over the last two seasons.

Now, injuries have, to be sure, hampered Nellie's choices. And tweaking lineups is nothing new for the big fella. After taking over for Jim Clemons in Dallas in 1997, Nellie used 35 different lineups in the team's final 66 games... even in '07-'08, an unusually healthy and stable season in Oakland, Nellie used 23 different lineups, one of the league's higher figures that year. He's nothing if not a tinkerer. But there's a difference between tinkering and what we've been seeing for the past sixteen months. The 2008-09 Warriors fielded 47 different quintets to open games, easily breaking the previous NBA record of 42 (recorded in Larry Brown's surreally awful season with the Knicks). Nellie only used one lineup -- Monta/Crawford/Jack/Buike/Beans, if you're curious -- as many as five times, and he used that lineup only five times.

This year, things have gotten even crazier. In their 58 games, the Dubs have already used 34 lineups -- no other team has used more than 25. The Warriors have fielded only one starting lineup more than three times, and eight of the ten starts of that lineup (the grim Curry/Monta/Morrow/Vlad/Mikki quintet) were commissioned by Keith Smart. Which means that -- yes, your math is correct -- Don Nelson has not used a single starting lineup more than three times this season. He's used four different lineups thrice, six different lineups twice, and 24 different lineups only once.

In his 48 games, Nellie has used 34 different starting lineups. In the last 13 games alone, he's used 12 different starting lineups, more than half the teams in the league have used all season. Nellie has used two starting lineups (Monta/Morrow/Buike/Jack/Mikki, Curry/CJ/Cartier/Maggette/Vlad) that share zero players in common. And seventeen different players -- everyone who's played more than 67 minutes this season -- have started at least once under Nellie.

The Warriors' injuries, plus the trade of Stephen Jackson, created unavoidable turmoil... circumstances have necessitated some lineup changes. They have not necessitated this. If Nellie had opened the box and done something crazy like playing the best available player at each position every night, the Warriors would've used a total of only fifteen lineups thus far. There was never a game where Nellie needed to start Coby Karl or Cartier Martin or Devean George or Chris Hunter. There were only two games on Nellie's watch where there was a compelling reason to start either Vlad or Mikki, and there was never a compelling reason to start both.

Starting lineups do not tell the whole story, and smarter use of them wouldn't be any kind of panacea. But you simply can't look at the Warriors's starting fivesomes over the last 140 games and find any semblance of a coaching plan. Simply put, Don Nelson is bored, and has been screwing around to amuse himself. With a new scorer aboard, the madness won't be ending anytime soon.