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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There’s been a lot of chatter in the wake of Monte Poole’s evisceration of the Warriors’ two leading front-office lights — team president Robert Rowell and coach Don Nelson — about the Warriors cutting Nelson loose before the end of his contract, which has another $12M and two years to run, thanks to an extension agreed upon in October.

I don’t see it, for a variety of reasons:

** The allure of topping Lenny Wilkens’ all-time NBA coaching victories total is too much for Nelson and the marketing-obsessed W’s to pass up.

** Rowell didn’t ascend to his pinnacle of power by kissing off the majority of $12M on a guy who’s smoking cigars and watching for the green flash at the end of another Maui sunset.

** To fire Nelson would be for Rowell to admit making a mistake in choosing him over Chris Mullin. In four years covering this team, I’ve never even heard of that happening, let alone seen it displayed for all the ticket-going public to see.

** If Nelson moves from the bench to a corner office and replaces Mullin as the EVP in charge of basketball operations, what coach in their right mind is going to believe that they’ll be allowed to do their job without interfence from Nelson?

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