Golden State Warriors Rumors
Eric Paschal: Dame different! I experienced how that 61 feel before!
“When Steph was injured last year with his hand, we did something different,” Fraser said of the new approach. “The performance staff came up with a scientific way to get him in really good shape, using interval training. Then we applied the basketball drills.” Based on early returns, it was an experiment gone right. “Steph felt like he was in such good shape and so sharp after that method that we decided to do it this summer,” Fraser said. “And then, Brandon Payne was thrown into the mix to add his touch. So, I would say those three parties constitute the macro scale. We’re all focused on using interval training plus what he’s done in the past.”
“He’s a young 32,” Payne said with a chuckle. “He’s jumping really well, moving really well. He’s perpetually in great shape from a cardiovascular standpoint. He’s not showing any signs at all of any sort of aging. He’s moving well, he’s getting stronger. He’s as bouncy and energetic in workouts as he’s ever been.”
Eric Paschall: Dame different! I experienced how that 61 feel before! 😂
DeAndre Ayton responds to Draymond Green's comments
“I need my man somewhere he can play great basketball all the time and win because he’s that type of player.” Suns big man Deandre Ayton was asked about Draymond’s opinion during a guest appearance on “The Woj Pod” with ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski. “We definitely heard that noise. It was promoted everywhere,” the No. 1 overall pick in the 2018 NBA Draft said. “It’s just outside noise. Book is a dude who really maintains focus, and he just wants to win. He’s a competitor at the highest peak there is in this league. “It’s contagious. Seeing how he plays out there every day — it just spreads. Him and I being the head honchos leading, so any noise like that is nonexistent to me.”
Team officials believe that the longer-than-usual rest Curry, Thompson and Draymond Green are getting will help vault the Warriors back to their usual standing among the league’s elite next season. The group’s five consecutive N.B.A. finals appearances from 2015 to 2019 amounted to a grind unseen since the reign of the 1960s Boston Celtics.
Yet these are also strange times for Curry, which made the next-level access at the year’s first golf major even more meaningful. It was an escape from the constant reminders that he and his Warriors are somehow irrelevant in the N.B.A. for now. “Obviously I was happy to see basketball back on TV, but that first week I had major FOMO,” Curry said, using the popular term for the “fear of missing out.” “Once you see Bron and Kawhi and P.G. go at it, and you remember how much fun it is to play in those types of games and that kind of level, you miss it badly,” Curry added, referring to the July 30 showdown between LeBron James’s Los Angeles Lakers and the Los Angeles Clippers’ Kawhi Leonard and Paul George.
“If you say I get to play basketball, sleep and play golf on my off days, that’s not a bad setup,” Stephen Curry said. “From a day-to-day perspective, how you fill your time, I would have no problem adjusting to that. But you can’t take family out of the equation. I don’t think any of us have been away from our families for that long before.”
Noting how President Trump has been critical of N.B.A. players’ kneeling during the national anthem before games to protest racial inequality, Curry said: “My barometer is always, if the current president is upset about something that somebody’s speaking out on, then you’re probably saying the right thing. Whether they’ve knelt, or sacrificed an interview to talk about Breonna Taylor, or whatever’s important, they’re talking about it and they’re backing it up with action.”
The draft lottery, which was recently moved up from Aug. 25 to Aug. 20, will feature representatives from all 14 lottery teams who will appear on virtual displays.
According to a league source, the Warriors have yet to decide on a representative, but they’ve been encouraged by the NBA to send a well-known player.
Draymond Green fined for tampering comments on Devin Booker
The NBA fined Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green $50,000 for violating the league’s anti-tampering rule after his comments about Phoenix Suns guard Devin Booker. Appearing as an analyst on TNT’s Inside the NBA on Friday, Green commented about Booker’s stellar play inside the bubble.
“It’s great to see Book playing well and Phoenix playing well, but get my man out of Phoenix,” Green said. “It’s not good for him. It’s not good for his career. Sorry Chuck (Barkley), but they’ve got to get Book out of Phoenix. I need my man to go somewhere that he can play great basketball all of the time and win because he’s that kind of player.” In a news release, the NBA said, “As announced prior to the start of the 2019-20 season, the NBA has adopted a stricter enforcement approach for conduct relating to tampering, salary cap circumvention, and free agency timing rules, including with respect to the rule prohibiting player-to-player tampering.”
For Booker, the winning has been even sweeter, given some of the criticism he’s dealt with over the past few years because of all the losing. Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green said on Friday’s edition of “Inside the NBA” that “it’s not good for [Booker’s] career” to stay in Phoenix. “I feel like that’s important for this organization, for the fans that have stuck by us for this long and still do so,” Booker said when asked about Green’s comments. “Since I’ve been in Phoenix, we haven’t had the win success that we had, but the support’s been there. And this is what we owe to the fans, we owe to the organization. It’s been a long time for us and I think this bubble opportunity was big for us, and we’re taking advantage of it.”
Bleacher Report: Draymond says KD is the best scorer ever and it’s “not even close.” (via @NBAonTNT)
Alykhan Bijani: Draymond Green: “Does James Harden get penalized for the numbers that he’s putting up now? Is everybody just used to it and that’s what you expect, and so now no one gives him the credit that he’s deserving? I think I see a little bit of that.” #Rockets pic.twitter.com/stY1GFI013
Stephen Curry to have his own brand?
I’ve been told by a “sneakerhead” source in China that Golden State Warriors superstar Stephen Curry will soon have his own brand under the umbrella of Under Armour, just like how Michael Jordan has his Jordan Brand at Nike. His new “Curry8 Flow” is supposed to drop sometime in the Fall. I have heard both August and September as possible release time frames, so I don’t have strong intel on that.
Stephen Curry: Trust the process! Welcome to the signature shoe family, @JoelEmbiid ! #embiid1 @UAbasketball
Still, it makes for great entertainment when they do trade barbs. And the scene was set for more entertaining moments when Green joined Barkley, Ernie Johnson and Kenny Smith on Friday’s episode of “Inside the NBA” on TNT. As expected, it didn’t take long for the jokes to ensue. Early in the show, their seemingly contentious relationship was brought up, and the panel addressed it with plenty of humor. “So you started it,” Smith said to Barkley. “I never had any kind of beef. You started the beef.” “And I love the way you punked him,” Smith told Green. “I’ve seen triple-single on my Instagram too many times, man,” Green responded amid plenty of laughter. “Way too many times.”
Steph Curry is not physically in Orlando for the restart to the 2019-20 NBA season. But the Warriors superstar could be making a virtual appearance in the bubble when the Dallas Mavericks take the court in the playoffs. “When they get to the first round, I might be in there and wear my Dallas uniform and make everybody go crazy,” Steph recently told CNBC’s Jabari Young.
NBA Central: Draymond Green wants Devin Booker to leave Phoenix. Ernie: “Are you tampering?” Draymond: “Maybe.” pic.twitter.com/gtWnEyr50n
NBA Central: Stephen Curry will soon have his own brand at Under Armour, per letsgowarriors.com “Stephen Curry will soon have his own brand under the umbrella of Under Armour, just like how Michael Jordan has his Jordan Brand at Nike.” pic.twitter.com/B5thOfCw5y
So let’s dig into just two names on that list: Gordon and Turner. There’s been a little smoke on the Warriors and Gordon front. He’s about to finish his sixth season in Orlando and it’s starting to feel as if that partnership has become stale.
What would it take to get him? The Warriors, in this hypothetical, could offer the Johnson expiring contract and either young talent (like an Eric Paschall or whomever they draft with their upcoming top-five pick) or a future first-rounder. Minnesota’s 2021 first-rounder, owned by the Warriors, is appetizing to other franchises.
Justin Kubatko: The @Indiana Pacers T.J. Warren is just the third player in the NBA’s 3-point era to score at least 115 points with an effective field-goal percentage of 75% or higher over a three-game span. The others? Kevin Durant (2013-14) and Stephen Curry (2015-16). pic.twitter.com/6NURV1SaZO
You could make a case that Mark Jackson is the most polarizing coach in at least modern NBA history. Talk to his supporters, and you’ll get a passionate portrait of a man who remade the Golden State Warriors, taking them from a laughingstock to consecutive playoff berths and a 2013 first-round upset of the Denver Nuggets, successfully laying the foundation upon which a dynasty was built. “Anybody who doesn’t give that man a whole bunch of credit for what he was able to spearhead and get started out there, I think they’re just not in reality. They just don’t know the situation,” Jarrett Jack, who played, and thrived, for the 2012-13 Warriors under Jackson, told CBS Sports. “I was in those huddles. I was in those locker room sessions. The way he talked to us, the amount of confidence he gave us. Go look at the kind of defense the Warriors were playing before Coach Jackson showed up, and look at them now. … Anybody that tries to downplay his role in [what the Warriors have become], that’s not right.”
“If Mark had stayed [as coach], there’s a real chance the Warriors never would’ve won a championship,” a former Golden State official told CBS Sports. “And then we would still be sitting here today saying a jump-shooting team can’t win a title.”
Justin Kubatko: Duncan Robinson has 250 3PM (and counting) this season. Fastest in NBA history to reach that mark: 48 – Stephen Curry, 2018-19 51 – Curry, 2015-16 51 – James Harden, 2018-19 55 – Harden, 2019-20 65 – Curry, 2016-17 67 – Harden, 2017-18 67 – Paul George, 2018-19 68 – Robinson
While the league’s Disney World venture has gone smoothly thus far, with the league having twice reported that all of the players present have tested negative for COVID-19 while the games go on, sources say the National Basketball Players Association remains concerned about the safety concerns that would come with creating another location for the other eight teams to compete (Charlotte, Chicago, New York, Detroit, Atlanta, Minnesota, Cleveland, Golden State). The NBPA, sources say, has been open to the idea of having in-market bubbles for individual team minicamps. So far, those eight teams have only been able to do 1-on-0 workouts in the facility with up to two coaches at a time.
Needless to say, the two-time NBA Executive of the Year didn’t comment specifically on the 6-foot-9 big man. But he did re-emphasize how important face-to-face interaction with a prospect is for someone in his position. “We don’t even know what pick we have. So there’s that,” Myers said at first. “Secondly, just like when you would hire someone or commit a lot of money to them — which is what we would be doing with a top-five pick — I would just like more information. “We saw some stuff (on film), but we were unable to see anybody in person like we normally would. Hopefully that’s a possibility. I don’t know. Interview somebody in person. Those are things that matter in some respects, and move the needle one way or the other.
“Really, the hardest thing in all of this is finding out who somebody is. That matters. Even though we all loved Steph Curry at Davidson, I’m not sure we all knew how unique of a human being he was … I don’t think anybody knew who he was. “So when we draft somebody, we really gotta try to figure that out. And we haven’t had the chance to do that yet with any guy yet.”
This makes you wonder if the front office will be more inclined to trade the selection, regardless of where it lands. “I value body language, eye contact and those type of things,” Myers said in early June. “Even seeing a guy move within your own gym — you want to see them. Even if it’s 1-on-0. There’s value in that. “And additionally, you’re not just hiring someone — you’re guaranteeing them tens of millions of dollars for some of these top picks. The comfort level diminishes the less exposure and interaction you have. “If it’s all virtual, you do the best you can.”
Other notable backers of the polo look: Boston’s Brad Stevens, Denver’s Michael Malone, Orlando’s Steve Clifford, Houston’s Mike D’Antoni, Charlotte’s James Borrego, Sacramento’s Luke Walton, Golden State’s Steve Kerr, and Washington’s Scott Brooks. (Kerr was so passionate, he requested his name appear on this list in larger font — John Hancock-style.) “I was against [polos], but now that I’m down to my summer weight, I love them,” Brooks said. Most of the above coaches said they would support carrying over the look to the normal NBA environment.
Although his role has been that of a deep bench player for the most part, Toronto Raptors wing Patrick McCaw has been a reigning NBA champion for quite a long stretch now – 1,148 days, to be exact. That’s three years, one month and 25 days straight that McCaw has been a champion, dating back to his stint with the Golden State Warriors and stretching through until now, his time with the Toronto Raptors. McCaw’s championship reign has been so lengthy, in fact, that it’s reaching historical proportions. It’s actually the second-longest consecutive stretch that one player has been a champion in NBA history since the Boston Celtics dynasty of the 1960s.
2w
“This is the part of Andre that’s so impressive,” Warriors general manager Bob Myers told ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski on “The Woj Pod.” “He says to Steve ‘All right, if that’s what you think is best for the team.’ Not only does he say that, he doesn’t then call a reporter off the record and say, ‘This is B.S., this guy has never coached a game in his life and he’s telling me to come off the bench? And I’m an Olympic champion and I’m an All-Star?’ And then goes to practice and mopes, he doesn’t do any of that. He authentically says and believes this is best for the team. “For people to really understand that, I say picture you were the VP in your franchise or organization, you were deserving of the role you had, you had the corner office, and they said, ‘Hey John, look you deserve this office, you deserve this title, but we’re gonna knock you down to kind of an assistant or director, and by the way, it’ll probably be on SportsCenter tonight and just have a good attitude, all right, see you later.’
“In any event, Andre comes off the bench and it’s harder and people interview him after the game and they say, ‘Andre how does it feel to come off the bench?’ And he says, ‘I think this is what’s best for the team.’ And then the reporter turns off his microphone and says, ‘Really, this kinda sucks right, you don’t want to do this?’ And Andre says, ‘No, I will do this.’ ” Iguodala accepted his role without complaint and didn’t do anything to divide the Warriors’ locker room. Not only did Iguodala cede his starting spot to the 22-year-old Barnes, he became the de facto veteran leader for the youthful roster, becoming especially tight with the eventual two-time NBA MVP Curry.
Au contraire. Wiggins already told Kerr he loved playing for Thibodeau, disrupting a narrative that has partly smeared his otherwise sterling reputation. “We had just traded for Andrew Wiggins and he was really helpful,’’ Kerr told The Post in a phone interview Saturday from his home in San Diego. “I had a long conversation with [Thibodeau] about Andrew. He gave me some good advice on ways to connect with Andrew, how much he enjoyed coaching him and why. We’ve gotten to know each other over the years. [Thibodeau has] been very helpful to us.”
“He showed some X’s and O’s and went over some actions they ran for [Wiggins],” Kerr recalled. “Some of the things they were trying to do. The thing with Tom is he’s a workaholic, loves the X’s and O’s, loves breaking down film and takes great joy in it. Our staff values his opinion.’’ “What is apparent is he and Andrew had a great relationship and Andrew said that as well. I know Andrew told me he really enjoyed playing for him and appreciated his commitment. When a coach knows his stuff and gets along with his players, he’s got a great chance to succeed. I think Tom’s got a great shot.’
“No doubt Tom knows his stuff. He works his ass off. He’s had success in this league and a lot of respect from his peers. And he knows what he’s doing. He could be a great hire. But there’s always a lot of things that go into it. They got to put those pieces together. It’s never easy. You got to build the roster and continuity.” Kerr said he does not look forward to facing a Thibodeau-coached Knicks team in 2020-21. “You know he’s done all the homework and will know all your plays,’’ Kerr said. “Every coach has an assistant in charge of the main scouting report for different teams. A lot of times you call a play and the head coach asks the assistant what’s coming and the assistant will yell it out. Tom yells it out himself. He does everything. He doesn’t leave any stone unturned.”
Warriors not thinking trade
With a guaranteed top-five NBA draft pick, plenty of intrigue revolves around what general manager Bob Myers and the Warriors front office plan to do with such a valuable asset. Although plenty of potential trade ideas have been thrown out there, Myers told ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski that Golden State isn’t having any active trade discussions at the moment. “To be truthful, we’re not discussing trades with teams right now,” Myers said on “The Woj Pod.” “I don’t even know if we’re allowed, but we’re not. I perceive September for you to be busy reporting on whatever nuggets you have as far as potential trades. “At this point, it’s almost not worth hypothesizing internally, we still just need to operate as who’s the best fit for us. Every team is always looking at their economics, will they change, maybe, but right now we’re not worried about that kind of information because we just don’t have it.”
As Warriors general manager Bob Myers explained on ESPN’s “The Woj Pod,” that was both intentional and deserved. “Look, the guy came to our team, was MVP of the Finals twice, two championships, three Finals,” Myers told Adrian Wojnarowski, “what do you want? I mean, what do you want to happen? What do you expect out of a human being? What is the problem with that? But, people would find it and seek it. “Everybody is so fast to look at what’s wrong with a team, and I was just so focused on — and still am — on what was right with all those things, even in losing. Even in the effort you make to win or lose, there are great experiences there. And so for me — and it may have come from I liked the guy, for all of him. “A lot of people that comment on him would say he shouldn’t have left or he shouldn’t have done this — everybody’s telling him how to live his life. The way I think about Kevin is … just because you don’t understand doesn’t mean he’s confused.”
Mark Jackson — a native of the Big Apple — was drafted by the New York Knicks with the No. 18 overall pick in the 1987 NBA Draft. The former Warriors coach played six full seasons (plus part of the 2000-01 campaign) with the organization, and represented the Knicks in the 1989 NBA All-Star Game. Although he was rumored to be a candidate to become the franchise’s next coach, Tom Thibodeau got the job. “He will establish a culture of hard work (and) discipline. Great hire for the Knicks,” Jackson said on ESPN’s show “First Take” Thursday morning. “I wish them nothing but the very best.”
Stephen A. Smith then asked the current NBA TV analyst for his thoughts about potentially getting another NBA head-coaching job in the future. “Coaching the Golden State Warriors for three years — had the time of my life,” Jackson said. “Relationships that will last a lifetime. (We) turned things around and had tremendous success. I look forward to the next opportunity of me being a head coach in this league once again. “I really am excited about the opportunity of having the chance to lead another franchise — either turn things around or keep (things) on the same track and give us a chance to win it all.
