The Warriors Are Struggling — But Don’t Blame Chris Paul
Acquiring the veteran point guard was a gamble that has actually paid off for the Warriors — even though the team has struggled elsewhere.
(co-byline: Meghann Morhardt / The Messenger)
Though they still rank among the league’s championship contenders, the Golden State Warriors haven’t exactly gotten off to the fastest start in 2023-24. Golden State is 10-13 on the season, and the team only recently got off a skid where it lost eight times in 10 contests (including a six-game losing streak — the worst such stretch for the dynasty-era Warriors outside of the miserable, Steph Curry-less 2019-20 season).
Since the Warriors are coming off a busy offseason in which they notably traded 24-year-old Jordan Poole, a starter from the 2021-22 championship team, for veteran point guard Chris Paul, we might assume their early season struggles are correlated with those moves. That goes especially because Paul’s fit has been a source of concern for Warriors fans since the day he joined the team (and his most notable moment early this season has involved an ejection, another chapter in his long-running feud with referee Scott Foster).
But while Warriors fans may have shown concern, mainly given Paul’s age, the addition of the veteran proved the Warriors’ commitment to winning now. For the past few seasons, with the addition of Poole, Jonathan Kuminga, Moses Moody and others, it seemed as though Golden State was trying to win in the present while also developing young guys to help in the post-Curry era. Just a season after extending Poole on a four-year, $140 million contract, the Warriors’ willingness to trade him away showed that the focus was still getting Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green their fifth ring rather than worrying about what was to come down the road.
Sure, Poole’s preseason altercation with the veteran Green, which saw Green punch Poole in the face, also played into the trade decision. But as a whole, it showed the Warriors’ desire for a veteran hand to lead the second unit at the point guard position rather than the inexperienced Poole.
And by the numbers, that was a good call: CP3 has literally been the least of the Warriors’ troubles this season.
Paul currently ranks second on the team in on-court net rating, with the Warriors outscoring opponents by 5.8 points per 100 possessions when he’s in the game, and Golden State’s rating with CP3 is 10.4 points per 100 higher than when he sits (which also ranks second-best on the team). Individually, CP3 leads all qualified Warriors in Estimated RAPTOR (a statistic that attempts to quantify each player’s overall performance) and in Wins Above Replacement, ranking among the league’s most valuable point guards in the early going.
(All stats in this story are through Tuesday, Dec. 12.)
So why is the Chris Paul Experiment working in the face of all the doubters? And how can we square that success with the fact that the Warriors as a team are below .500?
Part of CP3’s in-game statistical effect on Golden State comes down to starters versus backups. Paul has just seven starts in 20 games overall, and he’s played 62% of his minutes against lineups with three or fewer of the opponent’s starters, according to PBPstats. He is leading a Warriors second unit that ranks among the best in the league, but it may not be overly surprising that a still-productive Point God can clean up in minutes against bench players.
Even so, winning the minutes without Curry on the court should be a big advantage for Golden State. This season, the Warriors are +6.1 per 100 when Curry isn’t in the game, a huge improvement on both last year (when they were -2.2) and Curry’s entire Warriors career. Since his rookie season of 2009-10, Golden State has a -3.4 net rating without their biggest star on the floor, and before this year, they had only been positive twice when he sat: 2017-18 (thanks, Kevin Durant!) and 2021-22.
In other words, one of the major goals of the CP3-Warriors partnership — improving Golden State’s margins in non-Curry minutes — has been a rousing success.
But in a bizarre twist, the minutes with Curry (and especially Curry but no CP3) have not gone nearly so well.
The Warriors have a -2.9 net rating with Curry on the court — a shockingly low mark for one of the most impactful players in NBA history, a player whose “gravity” is notable for giving teammates more space and making them much better. Throughout Curry’s career, his Warriors teams have been +8.1 per 100 possessions with him on the court, and they haven’t had a negative rating with him in a full season since they went 36-46 in 2010-11, Curry’s second NBA campaign.
We can further break down which lineups are driving Curry’s negative plus/minus by looking at his most common two-man combos:
The only combinations for Curry that break even are with Kuminga, Gary Payton II and Paul. When he is paired with the rest of the Warriors’ starters, the team’s plus/minus numbers have ranged from bad to terrible. And not coincidentally, the Warriors’ starting lineup ranks 22nd in the league in terms of net rating with its members on the court.
But again, Curry’s minutes with Paul are going quite well. When he shares the court with CP3, the Warriors have a +8.8 net rating in a shade over 230 minutes. Among Golden State’s most frequent pairings, only the combo of Paul and Dario Šarić has a better margin.
So much for those concerns about how the two stars would fit together. Perhaps we should have seen this coming, knowing that Curry would mesh well with a true point guard like Paul — given his effectiveness moving around without the ball and hunting space to get his shot. Yet when Curry is on the court with everyone else except Paul, Golden State’s net rating drops to -8.6, an unthinkably bad number for the future first-ballot Hall of Famer. Contrast that with Paul’s plus/minus splits — Golden State is +3.5 with CP3 but no Curry — and the difference is stark.
This isn’t to say Curry is even playing poorly. On the contrary, he is tracking for a near career-best .662 True Shooting % on a customarily high 31.3% usage rate, making 3-pointers at a 42.2% clip while sinking 5.0 of them per contest. The only big difference in Curry’s game with this configuration of the Warriors is a career-low assist rate of 22.6%, the natural byproduct of ceding some passing responsibilities to Paul while on the court together. In terms of shooting and scoring, though, this is one of the most dangerous versions of Curry we’ve ever seen.
But the rest of the Warriors’ starters aren’t holding up their end of the bargain. None of the other four primary members of the starting five — Thompson (-2.0), Looney (-0.4), Andrew Wiggins (-5.9) and Green (-0.8) — has a positive Estimated RAPTOR rating. And it bears mentioning that Green has also missed eight games so far, in part because he was suspended for putting Rudy Gobert in a headlock on Nov. 14, and now indefinitely after hitting Jusuf Nurkić on Tuesday. Add in Kuminga (-0.6), who covers many of the power forward minutes in Green’s absence, and most of Golden State’s top rotation members other than Paul and Curry (and Šarić, who is playing well) are struggling in the early part of the season.
That’s a trend the Warriors will need to reverse very soon if they want to turn their season around. It’s no sure thing that Paul will continue to be available to play at a high level all year long — he’s already missed three games this season, in addition to the 23 he missed last season, and he is 38 years old — even though coach Steve Kerr is pacing CP3 along at a career-low 26.7 minutes per game so far. And on Curry’s end, he can only do so much to cover for his lineup-mates’ inefficient shooting and a defense that ranks among the bottom half of NBA teams this season.
Among all of those problems facing the Warriors, Paul’s dynamic with the team isn’t even on the list — surprisingly, it has actually been one of Golden State’s greatest strengths.
“It’s amazing how Chris has embraced everything here in the first month since he’s been with us,” Kerr said following a 106-95 win over the Houston Rockets at the end of October, in which Paul came off the bench for the first time in his career, snapping a 1,365-game streak in the starting lineup. “When I talked to him this morning about it, he just nodded his head and said ‘let’s got get ‘em,’ like not even a big deal.
“It’s similar to Andre [Iguodala] all those years ago, I guess 2014. When a vet, a great player, all-star, shows that kind of sacrifice it just sets the tone for the whole team. The vibe is great on our team, and Chris is one of the main reasons for that.”
Filed under: NBA