By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

I’m not sure if Anthony Randolph rents or owns his in-season home here in the Bay Area, so I don’t know which piece of advice to give him. It’s either:

a) Call your landlord and find out what you need to do to ensure to get your security deposit back.

or

b) Call a good real-estate agent and get started on staging that sucker, because with this market, it could take months to sell.

Whatever is the case, it appears obvious from general manager Larry Riley’s comments Saturday night that Randolph is on the block and that the Warriors expect to give up the second-year forward in the near future.

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By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

Word comes from this morning’s shootaround (via Jaymee Sire’s Tweet) that the Warriors are keeping forward Anthony Tolliver and making room by cutting loose guard Speedy Claxton.

The move is both expected to some extent — someone prediced correctly almost a week ago that the W’s would keep Tolliver — and yet also surprising, in that Claxton represented one of the Warriors’ largest expiring contracts at $5.2 million.

Honestly, I thought it would be either Chris Hunter or Devean George who got the kiss off to allow the Warriors to retain Tolliver, who had already served out two 10-day contracts and had to be given a deal for the remainder of the year or let go.

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By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

Don Nelson focused his (quite brief) post-game comments after Washington’s 118-109 win Friday night on how the Warriors couldn’t stop Gilbert Arenas, but frankly, as his own team has proven, one player often can’t win by himself, regardless of how good he is individually.

Case in point, obviously: Monta Ellis has quite simply played his ass off since Stephen Jackson left, and the Warriors have nothing left to show for it expect for fourth-place status in the John Wall Sweepstakes.

Did Arenas close out the game, scoring 10 of the Wizards’ 14 points in the final 5:13? Sure he did. But all Washington did in the fourth quarter was nurse home the seven-point lead they had brought into that period. And that lead was built on the back of Caron Butler straight-up abusing the smaller, weaker defenders Nelson kept throwing at him in an orgy of smallball fun.

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By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

Sometimes, an ass-whupping in the NBA is just that, nothing more.

So, given that the Warriors’ butts were well and truly paddled Tuesday by the Washington Wizards and interim coach Ed Tapscott, is there anything to be gleaned from sifting through the wreckage?

Maybe.

There were two major runs that broke the game open for the Wizards. They scored on each of their last eight possessions before halftime, capping a stretch where they got points on 13 of 15 opportunities and widened their lead from five points to 14.

Washington put the game away with a 16-4 run during the latter half of the third quarter that turned a 75-64 advantage into a 91-68 blowout.

There were missed assignments by the Warriors, shockingly easy run-outs for the Wizards and more than enough blame to coat Golden State’s whole roster from top to bottom and not miss a spot.

The biggest two problems were these: an overabundance of second-chance points for Washington (which outrebounded Golden State 54-40) and too many plays on offense that added fuel to the Wizards’ fire — be it by virtue of a long rebound off a missed jumper or a flat-out turnover.

The one-sequence that summed it all up: Newcomer Jamal Crawford drove the lane with 6 minutes left in the third and a chance to cut the deficit down to single digits. He easily shed Antawn Jamison, only to run into Andray Blatche, who caught a lot of Crawford’s body but was credited with a block. Caron Butler scooped up the loose ball to begin a 4-on-1 break that ended with DeShawn Stevenson feeding Butler for a layup (just two of his season-high 35 points).

After the game, Don Nelson laid the biggest share of blame on his youngsters: “I’m pretty disappointed with how my team played, especially the young players. . . . I expect more energy from them and to compete better than what they gave us tonight. Everyone that got in tonight seemed to make some errors. As a coach I want to play the young players, but it is very hard to play them when they play like that tonight.”

He had a point. Anthony Randolph was the best defender at the power forward spot (Washington scored 44 points in the 19:27 he spent at the 4, an average of 108.6 per 48 minutes) but he went 1-for-7 from the floor and coughed up five turnovers.

Brandan Wright, meanwhile,…

By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

My take hasn’t changed from what I wrote several weeks ago on the subject of Stephen Jackson’s extension with the Warriors, which after weeks in the works was finally signed Monday.

In terms of pure production, Jackson deserves to be the highest-paid player on this team (or perhaps second-highest, if Monta Ellis had kept himself healthy). It’s almost an insult that he’s slated to pull down the fifth-highest salary this season behind Ellis, Al Harrington, Andris Biedrins and Corey Maggette.

But by extending Jackson now, the Warriors are tossing aside their previously iron-clad rules of dealing with a player only when the team has used up all of its possible leverage. I’ll be fascinated to hear the explanation for this exception, if any is forthcoming on the matter.

One interesting note: Jackson told me a couple weeks back that he wasn’t asking for the max, but the reported numbers — three years for $28 million — don’t reflect any money left on the table. The most the Warriors are allowed to give Jackson under the Collective Bargaining Agreement is $27.8 million — $8.45 million in 2010-11, $9.26 million in 2011-12 and $10.06 million in 2012-13.

Outside of the reasoning for why the Warriors would break with their own philosophy, here’s the biggest question: How will the signing impact the Warriors in the summer of 2010, when a whole raft of top-notch free agents is scheduled to flood the market?

There is no real hope that a player with the stature of LeBron James will be willing to come to Oakland when the lights of New York are beckoning to him. But having maneuverability in that timeframe — when teams will potentially be looking to offload players in order to make a run at UFAs such as Paul Pierce, Jason Richardson, Josh Howard, Dirk Nowitzki, Tayshaun Prince, Yao Ming, Kobe Bryant, Michael Redd, Amare Stoudemire, Tony Parker, Chris Bosh or Caron Butler — would afford a franchise the opportunity to recast its core, if that was deemed necessary.

With Jackson in the fold, the Warriors are set to spend $51.5 million in 2010-11 for an eight-man core of Jackson, Ellis, Biedrins, Maggette, Kelenna Azubuike, Ronny Turiaf, Brandan Wright and Anthony Randolph.

Based on the trend line of the last few years, my guesstimate of the 2010-11 cap number would be roughly $64 million. (That’s assuming the league’s revenue total continues to ramp up, which is probably on…