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Navigating an 82-game regular season without breaking down is the Warriors’ top priority.
With 18-year NBA veteran Al Horford joining the core trio of Steph Curry, Jimmy Butler, and Draymond Green, Golden State is set to become the second-ever NBA team to start four players over 35 years old. Its bench is also littered with veterans such as Gary Payton II and De’Anthony Melton, whose minutes will need managing.
The Warriors have the team they thought they’d have for months. So for months, they knew some of their roster’s defining traits would be “old” and “brittle.”
Those aren’t pejoratives, they’re realities.
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It’s not enough to dissuade them from believing they have the talent – and depth – to contend.
“My headline is this team heading into the season has got a great shot,” general manager Mike Dunleavy said. “That’s where you want to be when Steve Kerr is your coach, Steph Curry is your best player and you have guys like Jimmy Butler and Draymond Green and so on and so forth. We’re excited about this group.”
What the Warriors want to avoid is what transpired last year, when they needed a two-month sprint to avoid the play-in round.
Green, 35, called last season’s playoff push “crazy.” No matter how old a roster is, playing playoff-level games for so long can wear on any team. Whether or not the grueling stretch factored into Curry’s season-ending hamstring strain in the Western Conference Semifinals, the Warriors would rather have him fresher for the postseason.
“I think it definitely caught up to us at the end,” Green said. “But I worry very little about an 82-game season because it gives us an opportunity to now have our team set and go about the season the right way and give ourselves the grace and cushion that you need in order to be successful in the end.”
The Warriors don’t have any significant injury issues heading into Sunday’s preseason opener except for Melton, who is doing on-court individual workouts and will be reevaluated in four weeks. He’s expected to miss at least the first few games of the season. Butler also tweaked his ankle on Thursday, Kerr said, but his injury isn’t considered serious.
The preseason always calls for precaution. But managing minutes is going to be a season-long endeavor.
“That’s always a factor with an older group,” Kerr said. “Especially in today’s game — the pace, the mileage these guys are putting on their bodies with the 3-point spacing. That’s why we have a whole performance team to track that and to help us monitor minutes. Guys are going to be needing to take games off. Older guys tend to get banged up a little bit more.
“So we have to be able to win games without some of our key guys this year. That’s already been something that we discussed as a team. I feel really confident with the young guys that we have, that they can step up and fill shoes when those shoes are empty.”
During the summer, Kerr divvied up a variety of projects to the coaching staff in preparation for the season. In all likelihood, at least one assistant was evaluating strategies and lineup combinations for when Golden State’s stars are inevitably unavailable.
Some aspects of that plan are obvious. Moses Moody is expected to reprise the point-of-attack defender role he excelled in toward the end of last season. The Warriors are optimistic backup center Quinten Post has improved heading into his second season. Jonathan Kuminga will be tasked with picking up slack on nights where Butler or Curry (or both) are unavailable.
The Warriors, on paper, project to be a force in the Western Conference’s second tier. Curry is a top-10 player and Butler isn’t far behind. Their offseason acquisitions made the roster deeper than last year and Horford will provide the most outside shooting from the center position Kerr has ever coached.
Going about the season the right way will occasionally require Kuminga, Moody, and Brandin Podziemski to carry the team to victories.
But true contentions still rests on the old heads.
“That’s what it is,” Moody said. “You know, if the energy is lacking, no matter what they say, it’s a team. In a team, what anybody lacks, the (others) got to step up. Our team, they are not elderly or nothing. They can hold their own. They can do theirs, too.”