Catchup: The Maggette Trade

Take a breath, young basketball fan. Pull your eyes away from the glitz and glamour of the freshly underway free agency season; divert your thoughts from idle fantasies of superstars and fresh starts and hypothetical 73-win teams. Far below all the churn, far below where even the sunlight can reach, the Golden State Warriors franchise inches along, as unattractive and irrelevant as ever.

This repellent franchise has, however, made a rather interesting excretion in recent weeks. After a throat-clearing cash-netting second-round pick downgrade, the zombie FO sent Corey Maggette (and said downgraded second-rounder) to the Bucks for Dan Gadzuric and Charlie Bell. Maggette is a very good player coming off of a career year... by several metrics, he was one of the 25 most productive players in basketball last year, and he was certainly the most productive player on the Warriors. Gadzuric and Bell are scrubs, and bad ones. Maggette is a favorite of this blog; conversely, players don't get any more boring than Bell and Gadzuric.

Personally, I don't like this trade.

Catchup: The Front Office

While some enjoy speculating about the insanities of the Golden State braintrust, we Worriers don't: it's depressing, and it's generally based on ephemera and the insinuations of those who profit from insinuating. More to the point, there's no party left worth rooting for. When Larry Riley, a replacement-level cipher of a GM, is your standout front office figure, you know you're in the midst of some dark times.

But this regime is (crossed fingers knocking wood) on its last legs, and we should stand ready for the autopsy. And when you're examining a rotting fish, it's best to start with the head. So let's look at what we know and what we think we know.

The Owner

Tim Kawakami has done a crackerjack job of following this stuation on his blog... an entry from June 21st sums up the state of play pretty well. Basically, Chris Cohan started soliciting bids for the franchise in late April, with the help of auctioneer/sports financier extraordinaire Sal Galatioto. Several groups submitted bids in late May. How many groups? Who were these groups? How much did they bid? Thanks to the usual Cohanic blend of secrecy, coyness and just plain bullshit, we don't quite know. But it's reasonable to assume that 1) Larry Ellison, who cleverly allied himself with the current minority owners, is still the guy to beat, 2) Ellison's in no real rush, 3) a group led by 24 Hour Fitness founder Mark Mastrov is still in the picture, and 4) Cohan isn't likely to get the record $400+ million dollar offer he was hoping for. Awww.

Until a sale finalizes (which could be months), the acting basketball folks are in as pure of a lame-duck position as you can find on the current American pro sports landscape. All of them will almost definitely be fired when a new owner takes charge (and thank the good Lord for that)... in the interim, they're tasked with the job of keeping the team looking all shiny and young and affordable. How're they doing with that task?

REBOOT

Jeez... you take a simple sixty-nine-day blogging sabbatical, and your downtrodden NBA franchise goes all squirrelly on you! Among the Warrior stories that have surfaced while we were off on assignment:

- The team is officially on the market, and while it's too early to name a frontrunner or take down the legions of shrill, blacklit anti-Cohan websites, there is what one would call sunlight on the horizon.

- New uniforms, and better ones, too!

- Kelenna Azubuike exercised his option, keeping him in, uh, white and yellow and royal blue.

- Ex-Dub and Nellie favorite Manute Bol passed away, depriving the league of one of its greatest spectacles and greatest people.

- The Warriors traded one of their best players away for garbage...

- ...and made perhaps the most-reviled pick of the 2010 NBA Draft.

What do we make of all this? Well, friends, that's a good question! And one that will be answered in the days and weeks to come. For we Worriers are BACK, and as long-winded as ever. Stay tuned.

Head-Shaking Record-Breaking

The 2009-10 Warriors were not your garden-variety bad team... they set a number of all-time league and franchise records. As you can imagine, most of them aren't the kind of lists you want your name on. Nevertheless, this season will feature in the history books for some time to come. Here are just a few of the marks we saw broken this year.

• We started tracking this story four months ago, and it has indeed come to pass... the '09-'10 Golden State Warriors were the worst-rebounding team in NBA history. Their opponents grabbed 792 more rebounds than they did, an average of 9.66 a game... that disparity just edged the 789-board deficit racked up by the previous record-holder (Nellie's '89-'90 Warriors). The current team played at a slightly slower pace, to boot, so on a percentage basis, the gap is bigger. The '89-'90 Dubs grabbed 44.66% of all possible rebounds. The current crop grabbed only 44.42% of all possible rebounds. Just to reiterate: this team was worse at a core basketball skill than any NBA team has ever been.

• The Warriors fielded more starting lineups than any NBA team ever had, and not by a little, either. Larry Brown claimed this record four years ago -- in his nightmarish season with the Knicks, he used 42 different starting lineups. Nellie and Keith Smart used 49 different starting lineups this season. In fact, in his 72 games on the bench ("at the helm" would be overstating his level of engagement), Nellie used all 49 iterations of those lineups. Nellie did not use a single starting lineup more than three times.

• Monta Ellis recorded the highest Usage Rate by a Warrior in the 33 seasons for which that metric has been calculated, edging Purvis Short's '84-'85 showing.

• Monta's reward for all that gunnin'? A net plus-minus of -11.73, the worst net plus-minus by an NBA starter (50%+ of team's minutes) on record.

• On the bright side, Stephen Curry broke the NBA record for most three-pointers made by a rookie. Who says we've got problems?!?!?!?

2009-10: A Season Punted

The Warriors' thrilling win in Portland last night capped off a 7-5 finish to the season, easily the year's most successful stretch. It was a fun closing run, with big moments and big performances from a number of guys -- in each of the Warriors' final six wins, a different player led the team in scoring. The players remained enthusiastic and chipper throughout the dying months of the season, something many bad teams, and many Warrior teams, have not done. It's hard to remember a group of players as likeable as the current crop, and you may well be feeling pretty good about them right now.

As the glow of those final games fade, however, you'll again be confronted with the cold realities of the team's ineptitude. In a season that was supposed to represent a bounceback from the moped miseries of the yesteryear, the Warriors regressed by three games. Their 26-56 record was tied for the fourth-worst in the league, was the Warriors' worst record since 2001-02, and was the tenth-worst record in the 64-year history of the franchise. (Actually, tied for tenth-worst: the Dubs also went 26-56 in '94-95,the year Chris Webber, Don Nelson and Jim Fitzgerald cruelly morphed into Donyell Marshall, Bob Lanier and Chris Cohan. Let's hope this year doesn't leave scars as lasting.)

This wasn't simply a bad year. This was a horrible year, a disaster, an unmitigated embarrassment. The Warriors got a hard-working and largely healthy year from Monta Ellis, a fabulous, career-best season from Corey Maggette, and an eye-opening rookie turn from Stephen Curry. They still couldn't reach the "heights" of the '08-'09 squad. Why not?

The franchise's various mouthpieces have already made it clear what they want the narrative to be: injuries, with a splash of ref bias. Poor team health was, indeed, a huge issue, and maybe we can chalk that up to pure bad luck (though that's probably a generous assumption). But even if you account for injuries, the Warriors still underperformed. As we've discussed in the past, injuries, even crippling ones, don't have to nuke a team as quickly and thoroughly as they nuked the '09-'10 Warriors. You could blame a 36-46 season on injuries. When you're 26-56, you've still got a lot of 'splainin' to do. As for ref bias -- the Fitz talking point that if Monta had gotten the star calls he deserved, if the league hadn't cheated the Dubs out of a win in Denver in January, the season might've gone a little differently -- it's an excuse that's too pathetic to even merit a debunking. Let's not be children, here.

Was lack of talent an issue? To be sure... the Warriors' talent level is not particularly high. But it's not particularly low, either, and given the energy and hard work displayed by the majority of the roster, it's hard to figure how you only eke out 26 wins in a season. The Pacers have an overrated star and a crap supporting cast around him, and they still managed 32 wins. The Pacers resolutely refused to tank, but then the Warriors didn't tank, either... the Warriors had more wins in their final twelve games than they'd had in their previous thirty games, and they even cost themselves a draft spot or two with a 5-3 record in April. If they weren't talentless, and they didn't tank, how'd they end up on the short list of the worst teams in Warrior history?