NBA Team Preview: Golden State Warriors

Dunking With Wolves is counting down NBA Team Previews from the worst to the best. The Golden State Warriors are #7.

Stephen Curry is a superstar. Klay Thompson is not.

While those statements are independently true, somewhere in the middle lies the strange back-and-forth that I continue to have with myself regarding what Golden State’s ceiling might be in 2014-15.

On the one hand, this is a relatively young team that has gone from 23 wins to 47 wins to 51 wins over the past three seasons. The 26-year-old Curry is one of the five or six best players in the NBA and is joined in the back court by one of the top shooting guards in the league in the 24-year-old Thompson. The Warriors boast one of the best defensive wings of the past half-decade in Andre Iguodala and one of the best defensive centers in the league in Andrew Bogut.

On the other hand, Curry and Bogut both have chronic injury issues that somehow didn’t crop up last year, and the team still only won 51 games. Iguodala showed signs of aging last season, and Thompson is on the verge of being handsomely and disgustingly overpaid as a restricted free agent. And don’t forget that they have a rookie head coach in Steve Kerr after firing the coach that led them to a 28-win improvement in a span of two seasons.

Adding Shaun Livingston in the off-season was a savvy move, and along with fellow new addition Leandro Barbosa, the Warriors should have a more balanced bench than they’ve had over the past two seasons. What used to be a distinct disadvantage against teams like the Clippers and Spurs could inch closer to a wash. A bench rotation that includes Draymond Green (who is probably better than David Lee at this stage in their respective careers, but oh well) Marreese Speights, Livingston, and Barbosa is surprisingly solid.

The defense was good last year, and the plus-plus defensive abilities of Iguodala and Bogut alongside the above-average defense from Thompson were enough to hide the obvious shortcomings of Curry and Lee. The loss of Jermaine O’Neal from their bench group will hurt a little, although the return of Festus Ezeli will mitigate the potential impact on the bench production and should be a defensive upgrade on the 36-year-old O’Neal.

Thompson is an intriguing story. He’s highly-regarded across the league, and obviously has some of his largest fans in his own front office — look no further than the refusal of Golden State to trade the sharpshooter for a second top-six player to pair with Curry in Kevin Love. (This will absolutely come back to haunt the Warriors. Pure idiocy on their part if the Wolves were indeed willing to pull the trigger on a Thompson-for-Love swap.)

Obviously, Thompson and Curry are a crazy-good pairing of knock-down shooters in the back court. But Thompson isn’t quite the defender that his reputation insinuates. Sure, he should still improve and could ultimately be an elite defender, but he isn’t quite there yet simply because he’s a 6′-7″ shooting guard.

His offensive game is still limited enough, and because of his limitations he has a tendency to disappear in stretches of games, leaving Curry to drag the offense along largely by himself. Thompson is, by default, one of the best three or four shooting guards in the league, but only because that position has seen a sharp decline over the past decade or so. (Seriously, who else is there? Joe Johnson? Dwyane Wade? Arron Afflalo? After James Harden and Thompson, that’s the conversation, more or less.)

But league-wide position scarcity is not enough to hand a huge contract to Thompson next summer. And that’s a whole different conversation, so I’ll table it — for now.

As it stands, the Warriors will improve again in 2014-15 and win 55 games, if only because Curry and Thompson will continue to improve, and the bench should be better than a year ago. I also expect regression from Portland, so a few of those wins will trickle down the coast to the Bay Area.

The Warriors will be a really, really fun team to watch this season. Just know that they’d be that much more fun (and good) if they’d pulled off the Love trade.

Of course, Warriors fans will certainly remember the summer of 2014 when they’re bogged down under Thompson’s massive contract in a couple years. Sorry, Golden State.