48minutes.net

By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

By now, you’ve undoubtedly read Marcus Thompson’s blog item regarding the report from Stephen Jackson that Baron Davis wants to be traded back to the Bay less than six months after bolting to go back home.

Aside from the usual eye-rolling that comes with most Baron pronouncements, there’s a very specific and immoveable obstacle to this scenario: BD can’t seriously think that the Warriors (i.e., team president Robert Rowell) — who didn’t want to be on the hook for four fully guaranteed years because of concerns about Davis’ health and motivation — are suddenly going to be willing to pay for FIVE seasons.

Here, then, is a helpful guide to 30 things more likely to happen than Baron Davis coming back to the Bay:

1) Barack Obama arrives at the White House on the afternoon of Jan. 20, spots George Bush ducking out the back door, tosses him the keys and says, “You can keep it. I just got Hank Paulson’s last report, and I’m outta here.”

2) Tracy McGrady and Vince Carter each play 82 games — in the same season.

3) Clay Bennett goes bankrupt and the City of Seattle picks up the Thunder for $42,598 plus court costs in an Oklahoma City repo auction.

4) Warrior fans make it through a broadcast without being reminded that they’re missing (insert number here) points per game.

5) Larry Brown quits the Bobcats out of sheer frustration with Sean May.

(Wait, that one could actually happen.)

6) The L wakes up to the fact that Kevin Garnett has crossed the line from “hard-nosed” to “wantonly overaggressive” and finally takes some punitive action.

7) Allen Iverson takes two weeks off from the Pistons, undergoes 274 laser treatments and comes back without any tattoos.

8 ) Jose Calderon misses a free throw. But only one.

9) Gilbert Arenas announces that he’s quitting the NBA to switch to blogging full-time.

10) Jamal Crawford starts to play lockdown defense.

11) Barry Bonds is named the San Francisco Giants’ new strength and conditioning coach.

12) Kobe Bryant drops 71 on the Suns, then tells a live ABC audience: “Shaq, your ass taste like chicken. At least, that’s what Steve Nash said.”

13) Al Harrington tells Jackson that he’d like to come back to the Warriors, too.

14) Erick Dampier acknowledges that he hasn’t played up to the seven-year, $73 million deal he signed in 2004 and gives Mark Cuban an oversized posterboard check for $30 million in a halftime ceremony at a Mavericks home game.

15) Cuban’s attorneys immediately take half as a retainer.

16) The San Jose Sharks turn yet another glittering regular season into a Stanley Cup title.

17) Stephon Marbury returns to the Knicks at the All-Star break, scores 22.8 points per game the rest of the way and leads New York to the playoffs.

18) Corey Maggette misses 17 games after tearing his lat during a particularly vigorous weight-training session.

19) Eric Gordon takes a rainbow jumper that gets caught among the banners at the TD Banknorth Arena and never comes back to the court.

20) Thanks to a general outcry from critics, “ER” gets renewed.

21) Newspapers in the United States report a 450 percent jump in readership for 2008 over 2007.

22) Dikembe Mutombo stays retired.

23) Dennis Rodman doesn’t.

24) Gregg Popovich promises to dress like Gandalf for the duration of the Spurs’ playoff run.

Will Pop . . .

. . . pick up pipe-smoking as well?

25) Derrick Rose actually breaks Andre Miller’s ankle.

26) Kerri Walsh announces that because it’s too hard to choose a new partner while Misty May-Treanor recovers from her torn Achilles tendon, she’s just going to play solo on the AVP Tour.

And she still wins every tournament.

27) The luxurious manes of Pau and Marc Gasol are revealed to be nothing more than wild wigs when Ron Artest yanks on Pau’s hair during one particularly intense Rockets-Lakers confrontation.

28) Kevin McHale goes 1-62 as a coach. AND STILL KEEPS HIS JOB.

29) No, really: Jamal Crawford starts to play lockdown defense.

30) The Clippers wake up on the morning after the trade deadline and find that not only is Davis still clad in red and blue, but they also still employ Zach Randolph, Chris Kaman and Marcus Camby.

Contact: geofflepper@48minutes.net

By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

It’s looking more and more like the Warriors are going to, once again, end up disintegrating into a cloud of debris.

If, as ESPN’s Chris Broussard says, coach Don Nelson told rookie forward Anthony Randolph to have his agent explore potential trades, then things have come unglued to a point that would probably be unprecedented in franchise history . . . if only this franchise wasn’t the Warriors.

Is Broussard’s report accurate? I don’t know. Can I see Nelson saying something like that to Randolph? Absolutely. Without question. When Nellie gets down on a player — consistently down, not just for a two-week stretch of juggling the rotation or somesuch — it’s pretty much impossible to dig yourself out of that hole.

I had an interesting conversation recently with a Nelson confidant about the Warriors’ pick in this year’s draft. This person said that Nelson’s much-hyped interest in Jason Thompson — so well-hyped that it seemed it could only be a smokescreen — was very, very real. In fact, Nelson had to be talked down from Thompson and into Randolph by Chris Mullin and others in the days leading up to the draft.

In retrospect, I can see why Nelson was so much more interested in Thompson, who was taken by the Kings with the No. 12 selection. Thompson doesn’t have the 3-point range that Al Harrington offered, but he has a decent enough mid-range jumper and was ready to go after four years at Rider — meaning that having Thompson on board would have made it that much easier to trade Harrington before the season began.

It also helps to explain why Nelson — again, assuming Broussard’s reporting is correct — can so cavalierly toss aside the No. 14 pick in Randolph.

That being said, it’s one thing for the coach to decide he has no use for a player. But when that coach makes it so patently obvious to all other clubs, how you possibly get decent value? Nelson’s unbridled disdain for Marcus Williams has made it such that the Warriors can’t even sell him off for 50 cents on the dollar.

Given that fact, why shop Randolph now? Why not give him some playing time and showcase him this month before trying to dump him? Why not wait until the summer, let him put up some big numbers in Vegas and build back some stock? It just makes no sense.

I’ve said it before in this space: The best move the Warriors have made in the second Nelson era — the eight-player trade with Indiana — was born of three competing desires all landing on the same deal. There was team president Robert Rowell, looking to regain lost flexibility under the salary cap. There was Nelson, delivering a harsh truth about the games of two former centerpieces of the roster, Troy Murphy and Mike Dunleavy. And there was Mullin, who had been coveting Harrington for years and finally took advantage of the Pacers’ angst to get him — and added the guy who turned out to be the best player in the deal, Stephen Jackson.

Now that Mullin has been marginalized, Pete D’Alessandro whacked and nobody left to rein Nelson in other than Rowell, it’s unclear where this team is going. But it sure seems likely it’s going to be in pieces before its arrival.

Contact: geofflepper@48minutes.net

By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

Warriors center Ronny Turiaf has an easy fix for Golden State’s problems when it comes to securing defensive rebounds:

“Plain and simple, go get the ball,” Turiaf said. “That’s it.”

Except that hasn’t been it, of course. Not by a long shot.

Including last night’s horrific 20-offensive rebound performance for the Indiana Pacers in their 127-210 victory, Golden State has chalked up a defensive rebound rate (DRR) of just 67.0 percent through its first 26 games.

The DRR — a team’s defensive boards divided by the sum of a team’s defensive boards and the opponents’ offensive rebounds — is a rough ratio of how many defensive rebounds a team gets (it doesn’t include team boards, so it’s not as exact as you would want).

At 67.0, Golden State ranks last in the NBA by a wide, wide margin. There’s a chart to illustrate that point below, but here’s some specifics as well: The Kings are 29th in the league at 70.5 percent and the league average is 73.1. The top-ranked Spurs are at 77.8.

Consider: Even if the Warriors closed half the gap between their DRR and the league average . . . they’d still be the league’s worst, at 70.05. So the data begs the question:

How bad are the Warriors, historically speaking?

Well, how about this: They’re the second-worst defensive rebounding team this century.

OK, I realize the 21st century is only in its ninth year, but still, the last time a team posted a DRR lower than 67.0 was in 1999-2000, when the Dallas Mavericks — put together and coached by familiar, white-haired adherent of small ball by the name of Don Nelson — pulled down 66.1 percent of their opportunities.

In an attempt to solve that team’s failings — both on the floor and at the ticket office — Nelson and new Mavericks owner Mark Cuban brought in a 38-year-old Dennis Rodman. Though the Worm helped somewhat — Dallas’ DRR in 12 games with him was about 3.5 points better than in the 70 without — it wasn’t enough to make it worth dealing with his particular brand of crazy.

I’m sure that Rodman would be game to pull down more NBA coin, but let’s assume for the moment that a washed-up, 47-year-old ex-husband to Carmen Electra isn’t the answer for Nelson & Co. this time around.

What can the Warriors do to solve this problem, which keeps biting them at critical junctures (such as the possession Wednesday where Jeff Foster simply bulled over Jamal Crawford, collected his own miss and allowed Stephen Graham to give the Pacers a second-chance layup for a five-point lead)?

“Well, it’s a very complicated thing,” Nelson said last week. “It’s not just one thing. There’s lots of different coverages, there’s lots of different assignments. It takes a while before it’s a natural thing for young players.”

It’s interesting to look at the Warriors’ individual DRR numbers this season compared to last season, when Golden State still ranked last but had a 70.3 mark that was at least within hailing distance of the rest of the league.

In 2007-08:

In 2008-09:

A few things that stand out: Harrington’s dramatic slide (-5.2) reiterates just how little he cared to toil in a Warriors uniform this season.

That was just one piece of the across-the-board decrease for returning players, such as Wright (-2.7), Azubuike (-2.3) and Jackson (-1.1).

Turiaf attributes some of the team’s problem to a habit of standing around and watching Biedrins (third in the league at 12.0 rpg): “Because Goose gets so many of them, sometimes we’re like, ‘OK, Goose, just go get it.’ We become somewhat complacent; ‘You average 13 a game, so we’ll just box out for you.’”

Yet even Biedrins is down 1.3 percent.

It’s been fun to watch the Phoenix Suns play this season and witness, even as they’re disintegrating because of Steve Nash’s disenchantment with new coach Terry Porter, Matt Barnes having a career year. Much like Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” where you “don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone,” Barnes’ tenacity on the glass has become so much more noticeable now that it’s not here, replaced by the pale imitation that has been Corey Maggette’s work as a “power” forward.

Watson deserves praise for his concentrated effort on rebounding, which has been rewarded with greater numbers, and so to a lesser extent does Belinelli. And, not to beat on a dead horse, while Randolph may have his problems in making the transition from teen-ager to NBA pro, going up and securing loose balls is not one of them.

But Crawford is as bad as he was advertised to be. And Turiaf, the Warriors’ alleged answer to such bangers as Utah’s Paul Millsap (20.4 career DRR) and Dallas’ Brandon Bass (17.4), is at a career-low number, continuing a slide that has not stopped since his rookie year: from 19.0 to 18.3 to 15.4 to 13.6.

There are a number of factors that lead back to different causes. That Golden State’s guards are doing a remarkably poor job at keeping opposing ball-handlers from turning the corner seemingly at will means that Turiaf and Biedrins are constantly pulled out of prime rebounding position to provide last-line-of-defense help around the rim. Nor is it helping that wings are supposed to be heading downcourt, seeking out early offense in Nelson’s system, rather than dealing with the heavy lifting of defensive rebounding.

Turiaf claims it’s all mental, and doesn’t blame even the Warriors’ near obsession with a small-ball setup that the coach keeps saying didn’t work because the opponent’s small squad was just flat-out better.

“It has nothing to do with not being strong enough, being small, blah-blah-blah,” Turiaf said. “It has nothing to do with that. . . . Regardless of what happens, just go get the ball. I’d rather have a turnover — I don’t think coach is going to agree with me on that one — but I’d rather have a turnover with two guys going to get the ball than not getting it. That’s pretty much it.

“Just go get it.”

Hendrix goes, Williams stays
The Warriors couldn’t bring themselves to pay Marcus Williams almost $1 million not to show up for the rest of this season, so they cut rookie forward Richard Hendrix instead to make room for Monta Ellis’ move off the suspended list. The decision saved the team costs the team roughly $600,000 less than losing Williams and makes sense from one perspective: There is no way Don Nelson was going to use either of those two players the rest of the way, so the team simply chose the option that represents less wasted money.

The Lineup Project
I don’t want to give anyone a stroke, so I’ll just point out that the 7:15 in the Medium line encompassed Brandan Wright’s entire evening.

Without Monta. . .
So it’s 7-19, then. I thought I was being pretty good at tamping any optimism when I wrote that the Warriors would be 9-17 by the time Ellis’ suspension ended. Guess I was wrong.

Contact: geofflepper@48minutes.net

By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

OAKLAND — After joining his teammates for the final 15 minutes’ worth of scrimmaging on Thursday, Warriors swingman Kelenna Azubuike is expected to play Friday against the Houston Rockets.

“It’s still a little tender, but it’ll be alright,” Azubuike said of his sprained left ankle, which had sidelined him since Saturday.

Azubuike said the ankle is probably 80 percent of full strength. It troubles him more going side to side than it does going up and down the floor.

“I thought he looked OK, for being out and not being on the floor for a while,” Warriors coach Don Nelson said. “It’s good to see him back out there.”

Azubuike’s return gives Nelson plenty of options in terms of potential starting lineups. The coach has started 10 different players currently on the roster at one time or another, and all of them are now (for the most part, at least) healthy.

One thing you shouldn’t expect to see, however, is the sight of Corey Maggette filling Al Harrington’s role as an undersized center nipping at Yao Ming’s size-18 heels.

“At the 5?” Nelson said of Maggette. “He’s got enough trouble playing 4.”

Nelson used Harrington to great effect against the Rockets over the last couple of years, forcing Yao into the uncomfortable role of chasing a 3-point shooter rather than staying home in the lane. Harrington made the plan work defensively by being able to front Yao, with a double team coming any time Houston threw over the top.

At 6-10 and with enough heft not to get pushed over by Yao, Harrington was able to force Houston’s entry passes so high that it gave help defenders adequate time to shut down Yao’s route to the basket or go for a steal. At 6-6, Maggette probably wouldn’t be able to emulate that success, meaning that the Rockets would be able to get the ball to Yao much more quickly, thus negating any help Nelson gave Maggette.

In other words: How does one say “dunk-a-thon” in Mandarin?

“I can’t,” Nelson said of recreating a Harrington-style lineup against Yao. “I can’t do that. I don’t have the personnel. You have to have a unique kind of player who’s quick and can front and make Yao play some guessing games.”

Besides, there were signs that the gambit of fronting Yao was beginning to wear thin, even before Harrington’s departure last month. After averaging 12.3 points and 9.0 rebounds in his first three games against Harrington as a Warrior, Yao exploded in his final meeting against Golden State last season, dropping 36 points and grabbing 19 boards. Yao scored eight consecutive points in the final 2 minutes to secure the win; Harrington, meanwhile, had to ice his forearm after bruising it on Yao’s head.

“The older (Yao) gets, the more mature he gets, the less likely you can do anything with the guy,” Nelson said. “He’s seen everything now, many, many times, over and over.”

This is just one observer’s guess, but unless the Rockets suddenly decide to bench Luis Scola, I think you could very well see Ronny Turiaf start alongside Biedrins, with Biedrins guarding Scola and Turiaf drawing the Yao assignment.

Contact: geofflepper@48minutes.net

By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

After far too many hours spent pouring over spreadsheets for far too little pay, I have the lineup data for all 17 of the Warriors’ 2008-09 games put together, and the results are surprising only in how wide the difference is between the configurations.

As many regular readers already know, I’ve been tracking the success (or lack thereof) of Don Nelson’s various lineups, breaking them down into discrete classes, based on how many big men were on the floor at any given point in time. Big men, for these purposes, include Andris Biedrins, Ronny Turiaf, Brandan Wright, Anthony Randolph, Rob Kurz and Al Harrington.

Originally, I used three groups: large (three big men), medium (two) and small (one). As part of this project, I went back and separated out usage for a fourth category, one that fell between large and medium, consisting of whenever Nelson used his two bulkiest players — Biedrins and Turiaf — along with three wings.

Enough stalling. Here’s the raw data heading into Golden State’s game with the Miami Heat on Monday:

Lineup              GS    OPP   Time
Large                 145    127     67:26
Turiaf-Biedrins     96      87      40:28
Medium              899    949     432:46
Small                 639    690     285:20

Translating those numbers into per-48 minute averages:

Lineup              GS      OPP    +/-
Large                103.2    90.4    +12.8
Turiaf-Biedrins    113.9   103.2   +10.7
Medium             99.7     105.3   -5.6
Small                107.5   116.1   -8.6

Obviously, the numbers support the contention that Nelson’s predilection for small ball — embodied by the continued use of 6-foot-6 Corey Maggette as an undersized power forward — is hurting rather than helping the Warriors. I’ll admit that I would like to have a bigger sample size at the far end of the scale, but to see a 21.4-point swing between the large and small lineups is still eye-popping, regardless of any caveats.

What stokes the frustration of fans is how seldom the large and T-B lineups have been used after Maggette’s return from a strained hamstring. The large lineup was a huge component in the Warriors’ win over Minnesota on Nov. 11 (a 49-33 bump in nearly 20 minutes), that was the last game Magette missed.

In the nine games since then, the two biggest lineups have been used only twice each. But the results would seem to call for more time, not less: the large setup was plus-11 against Philadelphia in a game the 76ers won by eight points, and the Turiaf-Biedrins tandem had similar numbers in Boston — plus-11 in a game the Warriors dropped by eight.

Will we see any change in Nelson’s philosophy going forward? Probably not.

The large lineup requires the presence of at least one of the Warriors’ rookie big men — and those players are subject to the same make-one-mistake-and-you’re-on-the-bench hook that Marco Belinelli got Saturday in New York.

Also, assuming that Monta Ellis does come back healthy, his presence will make the small ball lineup that much more potent. Of course, it would make any lineup, even the bigger ones, significantly better, but the default position of this team and its coach is to go small. Regardless of what any numbers say.

Contact: geofflepper@48minutes.net