Changes are coming for the Warriors.
The Dubs’ rotations, set at the beginning of the season and relatively unchanged as the team started 3-7, are going to undergo a revamp when the Warriors host the Sacramento Kings Monday night.
“There are just times in the NBA season, where things can go off the rails a little bit, and a great part of being a great team — a solid organization — is understanding how to work through that,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said Sunday. “The coaching staff makes a few adjustments… I’m really confident that we can do that…It should be a good week for us to get back on track.”
Only one of a few rotation adjustments was acknowledged by Kerr on Sunday — Jonathan Kuminga is going to see minutes moving forward.
But I think the changes should and will be more significant than that.
No team in the NBA sees a greater drop-off between starter and bench minutes than the Warriors. The team’s entire second unit needs to be revamped.
It needs to look like the first unit that played Friday in New Orleans.
The Warriors rested four stars and starters for the second game of a two-city, end-of-a-road-trip back-to-back on Friday. So instead of Steph Curry, Draymond Green, Klay Thompson, and Andrew Wiggins, we saw a starting lineup of Jordan Poole, Moses Moody, Anthony Lamb, Jonathan Kuminga, and Kevon Looney.
Why can’t that five-man lineup we saw against the Pelicans be the second unit — the group that starts the second and fourth quarters — starting on Monday night?
That lineup played 14 minutes against a full-strength Pelicans team and posted a net rating of plus 36 points per 100 possessions.
A small sample size? Sure.
But that success didn’t look fluky to me.
Offensively, this lineup spaces the floor for drive-and-kick basketball. Poole has room to create or take his defender one-on-one.
In addition, Moody, Kuminga, and Lamb all have the ability to catch and shoot, slash, or put the ball on the floor for a secondary drive-and-kick action.
And while technically this lineup could work with James Wiseman at center, it’s better with Looney, who is an elite screen-setter and does a great job of moving the ball on the perimeter if it finds him out there. Looney knows the Warriors Way as well as anyone — he might not be the point guard, but he ensures the system holds up when he’s on the floor.
In those 14 minutes together, this lineup scored 1.28 points per possession. The ball moved. Players moved. Actions were incisive. These kids looked like the Warriors.
What’s more important is that this unit played defense, too. The Pelicans averaged 0.92 points per possession against these five on Friday.
This defensive lineup works because it gives the Warriors the option to switch everything in man-to-man or play a mean 2-3 zone with serious length on corner closeouts.
The Warriors have played Ty Jerome — a combo guard — with Kuminga, Moody, and Poole this season, but Lamb is a better fit.
When the Warriors have the ball, Lamb is a strong cutter who is willing to look for his own shot. Jerome is a nice playmaker, but the Warriors don’t need that playmaking next to Poole if the spacing is right. Plus, Jerome is too much of a playmaker — he’d pass up open looks at the basket to try to find an open teammate with a pass.
And defensively, it’s not a competition. Jerome is a good player and puts in a good effort on that end of the floor, but Lamb has length — he has a nearly 7-foot wingspan on a stocky 6-foot-6 frame.
That’s key, because when Kuminga is on the floor, a defense has to switch. The young forward might be an athletic mismatch for nearly every NBA player, but he’s too raw to be a great one-on-one defender right now.
By switching everything on defense, the Warriors can mitigate some of Kuminga’s on-ball issues that would arise with prescribed matchups with playmaking wings. Moving Kuminga around creates mismatches that give the Warriors an advantage.
This lineup is worth further exploration. Hey, it can’t be any worse than the second unit five it’s replacing.
What happens with the other players in that established second unit?
I’d imagine JaMychal Green is dropped from the rotation for the time being. Outside of his rebounding, he hasn’t performed up to expectations to start the year, and is shooting just 23 percent from 3 after his percentage dropped to 26 percent last season with Denver.
He’s a veteran. He can handle it.
Kerr hinted at as much on Sunday.
“You have to have hard conversations… you have to be honest,” Kerr said while trying to be coy about changes. “The thing I learned as a player — I just wanted to know. Players should not be caught off guard by a rotation change.”
Donte DiVincenzo will see run if he, indeed, returns from his hamstring injury on Friday. But I imagine those minutes will come away from Poole — at least for the next few games — for the same reason the Warriors don’t want to pair Poole and Jerome.
And I expect the Warriors to keep playing Wiseman, but to shave his minutes down and to play him alongside Steph Curry at the end of the first and third quarters (with the third-quarter minutes not guaranteed).
Of course, I could be way off. And even if I’m right, all of this can change with one ankle turn or a truly bad shift.
But there was something worth exploring in that New Orleans game, and the Warriors should spend the next few games finding out if that small sample size success can translate with more minutes.
