By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

Your daily guided tour through the national and local media coverage of the always-entertaining Golden State Warriors.

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San Francisco Chronicle (Bruce Jenkins): Bruce’s numbers about Anthony Randolph’s lack of movement on offense in the Warriors’ last two games are compelling, although they come without context. How many times did every other player stand around? Frankly, you could easily argue that every member of the Warriors stands around too much. This is a team predicated on the one-on-one (or one-on-two or even one-on-three) attacks of Monta Ellis. Stephen Curry is acknowledged by the general manager to be a better scorer with the ball in his hands. Anthony Morrow’s value is trolling the 3-point arc; ditto for C.J. Watson. This is a stagnant team both by design and by coaching, and singling out Randolph to grouse about his following suit is kind of silly.

Plus, it unfortunately masks what I think is a good and powerful point Bruce is almost hitting on – that Randolph does require some sort of go-to move. Where Bruce’s argument fails is with the assumption that such a move has to come with his back to the basket; if Randolph developed enough confidence with the one-step-crossover-and-pullup move that he has shown of late, he could create space with it (by getting his defender going backwards) at any time. Then, if he could consistently drain the open 15-footer that results from such a move, the guy would be damn near unstoppable (until defenses adjusted, at least).

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VIDEO

KCAL (via YouTube): Start here, with Shannon Brown crapping all over Mikki Moore in hi-def. (Or click on the jump for the embedded video.) Honestly, that dunk was so personal and intimate, it felt like we ought to give the two of them the arena, alone, for a few minutes, to work out the ramifications amongst themselves.

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Ball Don’t Lie/Yahoo! Sports (J.E. Skeets): The Dunk Heard ‘Round The Internets.

(BTW, all jokes aside, when you take the Brown dunk and combine it with Kobe Bryant skirting Moore like a pylon on the Lakers’ very next possession on his way to a banked layup and three-point play, it does make you wonder if all Moore can give you defensively is a poor imitation of Mike Dunleavy Jr.’s constant attempts to draw charges. Because if that’s the case, the Brandan Wright injury is going to hurt more than I even expected.)

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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.

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By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

OAKLAND — The Warriors had just finished streaming into their locker room on Jan. 16, still celebrating a 119-114 victory over the Atlanta Hawks — only their second win in nearly two months against an opponent above .500 — when captain Stephen Jackson called for his teammates’ attention.

Jackson could have been the headline of the day, scoring 24 points with seven rebounds, six assists and four steals in his first game back after straining a hamstring, but he wanted to make sure the spotlight shone elsewhere: namely, on Corey Maggette, who came off the bench to match Jackson’s scoring and more than double his work on the boards with a season-high 16 rebounds.

“I was like, ‘All the young guys, even us (veterans), we can learn something from Corey,” Jackson said, recalling his impromptu speech. “This is his 10th year, he’s been starting every year, and for him to come off the bench, have 20-some points and 16 rebounds to help us win, that shows how you have to be a professional and how you put your team first. He did that without talking, without doing anything but going out there and showing with his play. I’ve got to commend him for that.”

Maggette is not wholly unfamiliar with coming off the bench. He’s done so in nearly 40 percent of his 615 career NBA games. But the majority of those instances came in his first two seasons out of Duke; since the fall of 2001, Maggette has started 369 of 469 contests.

In Maggette’s previous work as a reserve, he wound up with numbers similar to those he had put up as a starter. His scoring was up slightly, his shooting down a little. His rebounding had a spike, but his assists dipped by almost 25 percent.

This time around, the change is almost exclusively in one direction: Up.

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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…