SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA - OCTOBER 14: Golden State Warriors' Klay Thompson (11) shoots during warm-ups before their preseason NBA game at the Chase Center in San Francisco, Calif., on Friday, Oct. 14, 2022. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)
Klay Thompson is warming up. He’s showing signs that he is nearly back to being the impact player the Warriors need him to be.
He’s not there yet. The problem is that the Warriors can’t wait for him much longer.
The Warriors’ loss to the Heat in Miami on Tuesday was a perfect encapsulation of the two Klay Thompsons battling for domination right now.
We saw the struggling, out-of-sync Thompson — the Washed Klay — in Miami.
That player is a step slow on defense. He failed to finish a two-on-one. He badly missed two critical 3-point shots in crunch time.
That’s the Thompson we have seen too often since the start of the season — the Thompson who looks like he didn’t scrimmage all summer, because, well, he didn’t. The Thompson who missed two-and-a-half seasons with catastrophic lower-body injuries.
But while that Thompson was present in Miami on Tuesday, we also saw more of the other Thompson against the Heat.
We saw a few stretches of The Old Klay.
That Thompson is as impactful a two-way player as there is in the league. He’s a dead-eye shooter and lock-down perimeter defender whose game is no-flash, all-substance. That Thompson is one of the best players in the history of the NBA, and while it’s hardly as obvious, he’s been creeping into games more and more as the Warriors’ season progresses.
The Warriors’ goal this season is to repeat as champions. That means playing until mid-June. That’s so far away, you guys.
But Thompson’s understandable progression leaves little doubt that he will be a consistent, impact player by playoff time, if not by the time the calendar flips to 2023.
The issue is that the Warriors could use that player right now, in the first week of November.
At 3-5 on the season, there’s no need for the Warriors to panic. It’s simply too early, and the Warriors haven’t done anything truly disqualifying yet.
But Thompson’s struggles over the first few weeks of the season have highlighted how difficult the Warriors’ “two-timeline” philosophy is to execute — especially for a team with serious expectations on its shoulders.
The Warriors want to believe that development and winning can simultaneously happen. They argue the championship last season proved it can.
The two timelines are about winning now and later. It’s an all-or-nothing premise.
And right now, the Warriors aren’t winning.
It’s important to remember that only one player under the age of 22 was part of the Dubs’ NBA Finals rotation last postseason: Jordan Poole. And after averaging 30 minutes per game in the regular season last campaign, Poole’s postseason play was mercurial in the playoffs. He had great games and games where he was benched.
All that’s forgotten because the Warriors won a title, and Poole landed a (deserved) nine-figure contract extension.
Last postseason, a little more than 15 percent of the total minutes went to Poole and fellow youngsters Moses Moody and Jonathan Kuminga. The latter two saw a nice chunk of garbage time and didn’t play meaningful minutes in the NBA Finals.
This season, with Poole effectively graduated from the young ranks, the Warriors are still giving roughly 15 percent of the total minutes to Moody, Kuminga, and James Wiseman.
The Warriors’ development push only works if the established players create space for that growth. The Dubs need some garbage time for the kids.
Because so long as Thompson remains in ramp-up mode, the Warriors will be playing with tight margins.
Lately, they have been on the wrong side of those margins, losing games with accruing mishaps throughout the contest, like on Tuesday in Miami.
The Warriors’ starting five is still the NBA’s best, but it can reach an even higher level with the full Klay Thompson in tow.
And when that happens, the Warriors will be free to experiment with young players, big lineups, and periods of second-unit play where no defense is played.
The team’s top rotation players — the seven or eight guys Warriors coach Steve Kerr knows he can trust come playoff time — playing at their best takes the pressure off the young players to contribute to winning. It gives young players (and Kerr) a stress-reduced environment to make mistakes necessary for their development.
Wiseman can’t stop anything at the rim and keeps fumbling the ball under the basket? That’s OK. The starters will make up for it. Wiseman can get the run he needs and be a better player in the coming weeks, months, and years. Who knows — he might be worthy of Kerr’s trust come the postseason with enough in-game practice.
Or not. But at least the Warriors will have given him the playing time to find out one way or the other.
Need to find the often-marooned Kuminga some run to see if he’s more a wing or a big? It’s easier to do that when you have a 15-point lead or a perfunctory fourth quarter.
It’s best to have total control of the game if you want to play rookies Patrick Baldwin Jr. or Ryan Rollins, or if you want to find out if Moody can be a two-way hub in the future.
Right now, the Warriors are playing a different kind of two-way player: Ty Jerome — who is on a two-way contract between the Warriors and their G-League affiliate in Santa Cruz — is getting serious run in the Warriors’ backcourt next to Jordan Poole with the second unit. This isn’t a development play, it’s a win-now effort.
Jerome can get the Warriors into their sets, he doesn’t turn the ball over, and he shoots it at a solid clip when he’s open. There’s no development play there — Jerome is playing so the Warriors can tread water.
Kerr feels he has to play Jerome because the players on rookie deals — with the possible exception of Moody — aren’t rotation-worthy right now. Not for a championship contender, at least.
And with them in the mix and some of the established players struggling, the Warriors are lucky if they have five players on the floor in winning form at any given time.
This brings us back to Thompson, though it could be said about Poole or Draymond Green, too.
When Steph Curry is on the floor this season, the Warriors are outscoring opponents by 4 points every 100 possessions.
When he’s off the floor, the Warriors are outscored by 20 points per 100 possessions.
The Warriors need to improve one of those numbers to start racking up wins.
It’s probably easier to do the former, with Thompson finding his game and the Warriors’ starters finding defensive intensity and, eventually, an identity.
The West is deep and challenging, and it’s been nearly 30 years since a team that didn’t have home-court advantage in the first round (a top-four seed) won the title. The Dubs still have time to right the ship, but they cannot dawdle for long. Losses in November count the same as losses in March and April, and no one can expect the full health of top players throughout the campaign.
So the more the Warriors keep losing winnable games because the margins are too tight, thanks to those second-unit minutes when Curry is not on the floor, the more likely it becomes Kerr and his coaching staff will need to scrap those developmental minutes to further their efforts to win games.
Originally published at Dieter Kurtenbach