By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

Things have gotten so ridiculous in the Jamal Crawford-Don Nelson power struggle that it’s prompted a first in the (admittedly short) history of this site: The retraction of an earlier entry.

Back in November, when the Warriors swapped unhappy forward Al Harrington to the Knicks for Crawford, I wrote that it was the best deal Golden State could have made at that time.

My position was that since the Warriors had already cashed in their future salary-cap space by giving a maximum-allowed contract extension to Stephen Jackson, throwing away Harrington’s expiring deal wasn’t a horrible move it would have been for some teams.

[Sidebar on the Jackson deal: It still boggles the mind that the Warriors agreed to that extension some 18 months before a decision needed to be reached. There still has not been any adequate explanation (check that, no explanation AT ALL) by anyone at 1011 Broadway (including, most notably, team president Bobby Rowell, who hashed out the contract details with Jackson) about why Golden State abandoned two years’ worth of tough-as-nails negotiating stances with every member of its roster, then threw a pile of cash in Jackson’s lap.]

And exchanging someone who had no intention of playing here again for a guy in Crawford who can create off the dribble and shoot from distance could only help in the short term.

But after four months of watching the Jamal Crawford Era in Oakland, I can say this with certainty:

The Warriors should have eaten Harrington’s contract rather than pull the trigger on that deal.

Read the rest of this entry…

By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

1508. That, prior to Golden State’s 154-130 thrashing Sunday at the hands of the Phoenix Suns, was how many games it had been since the Warriors allowed that many points.

1508. That’s a number so impressive, it deserves to be written out, like one of those oversized checks you give contest winners:

ONE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED EIGHT & 00/100 GAMES

1508. That’s 18.4 seasons – more than half again as long as the Warriors’ playoff drought had been at its apex.

(Side note: I feel like Jeremy Piven in “Grosse Pointe Blank,” albeit for an even longer timeframe – 18 YEARS, MAN! 18!)

Read the rest of this entry. . .

By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

In 60 games prior to the Warriors’ 110-88 defeat in Chicago on Wednesday, only once did they have a worse ratio of assists to field goals than the 13 assists they had against the Bulls while scoring 36 buckets – a mark of 36.1 percent.

The rock-bottom game? That was the infamous 123-88 blowout in San Antonio on Dec. 6, the 11-assist, 31-FG catastrophe that prompted Don Nelson to institute the European-style ball-movement offense which brought Marco Belinelli and Anthony Morrow to prominence in December.

That was the style that made the Warriors watchable again after an opening month that devolved into little else but Stephen Jackson and Corey Maggette going one-on-one … or two … or three – and having the predictable lack of success.

So why did the Warriors fall into that same mode Wednesday, with the ball stagnating – as pointed out in the comments on the live game entry, Jackson (8-20), Maggette (5-16) and Jamal Crawford (4-15) combined to shoot 17-for-51 – and the offense collapsing faster than the Dow Jones Industrials?

It can’t all be fatigue. Yes, the Warriors were finishing up a back-to-back, but the Bulls also played Tuesday, and unlike Golden State’s laugher in Minny (where nobody played more than 29 minutes, and even then, the minutes weren’t all that taxing for much of the time), Chicago went only seven deep (Anthony Roberson and Aaron Gray each got four minutes of garbage time) in failing to win at Charlotte.

By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

These days, beating the Minnesota Timberwolves – coached in an ever-more-bizarre manner by Kevin McHale in the absence of lone star Al Jefferson – falls somewhere on the degree-of-difficulty scale between “clubbing baby seals to death” and “blasting .300 Win Mag rounds into wolves from a helicopter.”

But just because this was a game the Warriors should have won doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be rewarded for actually, you know, winning it.

Their 42 defensive rebounds were a season-high, a mark made more impressive by the fact that the Timberwolves (with Jefferson at least) are a top-10 team in terms of their offensive rebounding. Minnesota grabbed a combined 37 offensive boards in two earlier meetings with the Warriors this year; last night, that number was 12.

Golden State should get extra credit for that, because even though Minnesota plumped up the Warriors’ DREB opportunities by shooting 35.9 percent, a large chunk of those misses (almost a third — 19 out of 59) came off of 3-pointers, which generate the long bounces that become prime OREB territory.

The Sit-The-Veterans Experiment schedule was thrown off when Ronny Turiaf came up legitimately unable to play due to illness, so Corey Maggette did not get a night of rest and instead came off the bench to make sure the Warriors’ didn’t threaten their season best for turnovers (six in 28 minutes; the rest of the team had combined totals of five in 212).

Read the rest of this entry…

By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

Baron Davis going off for 25 points against his most recent former team is shockingly predictable.

Eric Gordon going off for 27 points against the same squad is just plain shocking.

The Warriors’ 118-105 loss to the Clippers on Monday was, to my recollection, one of the Warriors’ worst performances of the season in terms of simply losing vision and letting guys run free on the perimeter. Rock-bottom in that category for Golden State was the 119-114 loss in Utah on Dec. 5, when Ronnie Brewer and C.J. Miles just kept slipping away from the Warriors’ Club Fed-style defensive presence and scoring uncontested layups.

When Davis hits a step-back 26-footer, or banks in a triple, there isn’t much to be done about that. You shrug your shoulders and move on. But what Gordon did to the Warriors – 27 points, five assists, seven rebounds – can’t be so casually explained away.

Read the rest of this entry…