The Warriors have by all accounts decided to make the most of the years remaining on the contracts of Stephen Curry, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson. Translation: Even with all three into their 30s, they remain focused on the immediate.
Ideally, though, they’ll spend the next four months addressing both the present and the future.
Which means it is likely that general manager Bob Myers and his lieutenants -- holding a top-five pick in the Oct. 16 NBA draft -- will make at least one trade over the next three-plus months.
The Warriors will need to be creative, which they have been. They also must be financially flexible, which they definitely are, according to league sources.
Assessing the needs of the Warriors, we identify five players that qualify as attractive targets worthy of considering through a trade that would have to involve their $17.18 million trade exception (with an Oct. 24 deadline) and/or their first-round pick.
The Warriors will go into the 2020-21 season with positional needs to shore up their depth if they intend to make a run at the title. If Steph Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green are healthy next season, the front office will have to mix and match with what they already have filling out the roster, with the new additions they can bring in on limited money.
At their disposal, the Warriors will only have the taxpayer midlevel exception and minimum contracts to hand out to unrestricted free agents. So what areas do they need to address the roster?
One particular area could be their backup guards. As of now, the only replacements behind Curry on the roster are young, unproven players in Ky Bowman and Jordan Poole. While the Warriors will have a very hard time replacing the role of Shaun Livingston any time soon, it would be beneficial to at least have one veteran to spell Curry.
As for backing up Thompson, the Warriors have a nice piece in Damion Lee, and a young, mostly unknown player in Mychal Mulder. Adding depth to go with Lee to be Thompson's understudy could be essential given the severity of the injury that Klay is recovering from.
Here is a list of unrestricted veteran guards that the Warriors could eye to fill their guard depth.
Editor's note: Twice a week during this sports hiatus, we'll answer questions that Bay Area sports fans long have debated in "Ever Wonder?" This installment: Where did Don Nelson's 'Nellie Ball' offensive strategy come from?
Some of the most successful teams in Warriors history had one big thing in common: “Nellie Ball.”
The offensive fast-paced run-and-gun offense was developed by legendary head coach Don Nelson. He wanted to implement this way of play to speed up the pace of the game, after spending hours wanting to learn anything and everything about the game of basketball.
“It was amazing to listen to him talk basketball,” NBC Sports Bay Area Warriors analyst Garry St. Jean said.
Nelson learned from the best in Red Auerbach, who coached Nelson as a player and who loved this brand of basketball. He would be pestered by Nelson in the forms of questions and quandaries in what would ultimately turn into a “dictionary” of basketball, as Nelson explained in a 2016 article on The Players' Tribune.
When it was Nellie’s time to coach, he noticed he had a lot of smaller, great pieces to work with. That meant he was able to have his best players on the court all at the same time -- all while the squad was in the best shape across the league.
And nobody could figure it out.
But that’s why he ultimately became the NBA’s all-time winningest coach, with 1,335 wins over 31 seasons.
Check out the entire story in the video atop this page.
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