Post-Olympics mailbag

Some more Warriors questions ... and attempts at answers.

The Olympics are over, which means it’s time to shift our attention back to the upcoming NBA season ... hey, we’re only two months away from the next chapter in the Golden State Warriors story. For better or for worse.

Seemed like another good time for a mailbag. Thanks everyone for the questions.

What a great question, Hal! Let’s start with the worries, and then move on to the hopes for the two offseason coaching hires, Terry Stotts and Jerry Stackhouse.

One worry when integrating any new coaches is how well they’ll fit in from a personality and chemistry standpoint. The coaches that Stotts and Stackhouse are replacing — Kenny Atkinson, who left to take a head coaching job with the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Dejan Milojević, who tragically died during the season — were fairly seamless fits on the Warriors bench. They were beloved by the players and respected by the rest of the coaching staff. They could get the message through to the players because of that relationship, and they could challenge Steve Kerr and help bring out his best.

I suspect Stotts and Stackhouse will do well in that regard, but you just don’t know until you know. Other than that, it’s hard to come up with concerns ... really with coaches, most of the time the negatives are more about an absence of positives than anything actively negative that’s being brought to the party. I suppose that if you squint, you could be concerned about a too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen type situation with Stotts and Kerr, who are both known for their highly-successful motion offense schemes.

So let’s start there as we move on to the hopes. The Warriors offense has grown a little bit stale in recent years. It simply doesn’t work when Steph Curry isn’t on the court, and even when Curry is on the court, it often lacks in secondary and tertiary options. With Klay Thompson out of the fold, that issues stands to only be amplified.

That’s where Stotts could really help. Stotts has already spoken about how he thinks he can help tweak the offense, and it’s worth noting that in his final year as the head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, he led the second-best offense in the league, despite having a pretty skeletal roster outside of Damian Lillard. Golden State’s offense was just 10th in garbage-time adjusted offensive rating last year, per Cleaning the Glass, and with Thompson and Chris Paul gone, that number could go down without help. I’m pretty optimistic that Stotts can provide that help.

It’s harder to know what positive traits to expect out of Stackhouse, who has never been an NBA head coach, and has just two years as an NBA assistant. I’ll confess that I don’t watch nearly enough college basketball to have an opinion on Stackhouse’s five-year tenure as head coach of Vanderbilt. But I do think that Stackhouse can have a strong cultural impact and connect with the younger players. There’s a lot of value in having former NBA players on the coaching staff, especially ones young enough that the players on the team will have watched them. And while Kerr himself has plenty of playing experience, it’s probably harder for him — a lifelong role player — to talk young prospects into more selfless roles than it is for someone like Stackhouse, who experienced the highs of stardom as a multi-time All-Star selection.

I think there’s a pretty good chance that there will be a trade, though the options for guards to trade are limited. They can’t trade any of the free agents they signed, and they’ve shown a complete unwillingness to move Brandin Podziemski. They could trade Gary Payton II and even potentially save money, but I feel like they would have already done that if it were something that was in the plans.

It still seems decently likely that Moses Moody will get traded. In a recent article published by The Athletic, Anthony Slater, Shams Charania, and Tony Jones wrote that, “The Warriors have 14 players under contract for next season and feel comfortable entering training camp and the regular season as currently constructed, team sources said, though they are expected to explore smaller-scale deals more actively than is typical in August and September.”

That feels right. I think the time for star trades is long gone, but I think one or two out of the Payton-Moody-Lindy Waters III trio could be playing for a different team when the season begins. Moody is the most likely to me: he seems to be outside of the Warriors plans, and is approaching the end of his rookie deal ... and also probably has a fair amount of trade value.

It’s hard to separate the process from the results, Ed. I think the offseason efforts were quite strong: the Warriors aggressively pursued Paul George and Lauri Markkanen, made an effort to re-sign Klay Thompson, and quickly pivoted to a trio of the best free agents in their price range. They fought like hell for great players, signed good players, and had an intriguing draft, all while making strong moves to solidify the coaching staff.

But it’s hard to tell fans to be happy with the effort of the front office. Fans want results, and justifiably so. And, at best, the Warriors are in “wait and see” mode with the offseason results.

I’ll be honest, I’m pretty bullish on the team going into the season. But we all need to see it before we believe it. I don’t really expect anyone to be impressed by the effort until the process catches up to it.

This is one of the best questions anyone’s ever asked me. I spent a full day thinking about it.

Here’s where I landed: if the NBA adopted the rule right as the season began, I’d give an edge to James Wiseman. Curry still has so many ways to contribute beyond scoring, thanks to his handles, playmaking, and finishing ability at the rim (even with just his left hand), but I think most of those can get stifled by defenses that can back off of him knowing he can’t shoot.

The “he’s only a shooter” claims have always been laughably false, but Curry — like all stars, really — does need his best skill to play in order to set up everything else.

So give Wiseman the first year, but after that? Curry’s such a generational hand-eye coordination savant that I genuinely think he could become a pretty solid left-handed shooter if he had a year to dedicate himself to it. And at that point he’s pretty clearly the better player.