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Jordan Bell is frustrated.
Steve Kerr and the Warriors coaching staff is frustrated, too.
And on Monday night, in garbage time of the Warriors’ blowout win over the Lakers at Staples Center, those frustrations manifested themselves in a sideline spat between the second-year player and the head coach, captured by TNT’s cameras.
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Kerr called the heated moment a misunderstanding and said that things have been cleared up after the game. Bell escaped the Staples Center without talking to media.
But whether it was indeed a misunderstanding that escalated or something that had been brewing for weeks, it hints at a bigger issue for the Warriors:
During this incredible five-year run, Golden State has struggled to develop young, reliable talent to back its superstar core players.
And that’s an issue that could undercut this dynasty down the line.
It probably won’t matter that only one recently-drafted player, Kevon Looney, has a regular role for the Warriors this season — after all, they have a five All-Star lineup, as well as Andre Iguodala and Shaun Livingston.
But in the years to come, when the Warriors’ Big Four could push the team’s payroll above $300 million and Iguodala and Livingston will no longer be with the team, the Warriors’ roster will need a significant, consistent impact from young players on cheap contracts.
The Heat dynasty — if you want to call it that — ended in part because LeBron James saw that there was clearly not cost-effective talent around him, Chris Bosh, and Dwyane Wade. You can only sign so many veterans to the minimum and ride your top guys for so long. The Heat burned out in four years.
With that lesson mind, this season was supposed to be a youth movement for the Warriors — they were planning on giving younger players more minutes and more responsibility in an effort to spark energy in the veterans.
Things haven’t worked out as planned.
I understand that it’s hard to develop young talent on a superteam like the Warriors — playing time is always going to be sporadic and the standards are nearly impossibly high for young players — but this miss rate is too significant to ignore.
Right now, Alfonzo McKinnie is the only young player with a regular role who can be expected to make a solid impact for the Warriors in 2020 and beyond. And don’t forget, McKinnie made this team after a training camp tryout — he fell into the Warriors’ lap like manna from heaven.
The Warriors bet on Damian Jones to be an impact player this season, and they gave him plenty of run (17 minutes per game in a starting role) before he tore his left pectoral in December. But even before the injury, there were serious questions to if the 23-year-old third-year big man was progressing enough to show that he could be counted on in the years to come.
Looney has been rock-solid in his defensive big man role for the Warriors, but he’s on a one-year deal and will be an unrestricted free agent at the end of the season — a byproduct of the Warriors not picking up his fourth-year option before the 2017-18 season.
Quinn Cook isn’t seeing regular minutes for a Warriors team that was recently craving for shooting off the bench, so it’s hard to imagine him being an impact player for this team in the years to come, though he does have a modest $1.9 million qualifying offer for next season.
And when the Warriors drafted the supposedly ready-made Jacob Evans with the No. 28 overall pick in June’s NBA Draft, general manager Bob Myers said that Kerr wasn’t “going to have any problems putting him out there” this season. Evans is currently playing in the G-League, as he was struggling to even get garbage-time minutes for the big-league Warriors.
Which brings us to Bell.
The 24-year-old big man out of Oregon is a restricted free agent at the end of the year, but after an impactful rookie season, in which he won over the Oracle Arena crowd with his infectious energy and played solid minutes in the NBA Finals, he was expected to graduate to a larger role in 2018-19.
Instead, he’s struggled to earn regular minutes — Kerr was keen to use Draymond Green at center over him after Jones’ injury (despite the preseason claim that he didn’t want to use Green at center at all this season) — and now a solid chunk of possible playing time is likely to be eaten by DeMarcus Cousins.
Again, there’s frustration on Bell’s side — he’s not playing, and when he does play and seemingly do well, it doesn’t seem to make a difference towards his playing time. And there’s frustration on the coaching staff towards Bell, too — the second-year big man is still freelancing too often on both ends of the court and isn’t providing a consistently high-level of defensive effort. Beyond that, he doesn’t seem to be translating the work the staff is doing with him between games to the games.
So even if Monday’s spat was caused by a benign misunderstanding, as Kerr alleged, it touched a nerve with both parties and blew up.
Don’t think that this is something that will tear the Warriors asunder, though — the team’s veterans talked to Bell immediately after the spat and calmed him down, they’ll handle any fallout.
Beyond that, the coaching staff still sees a ton of potential in Bell. And while they’re not playing him, they still maintain, at least publicly, that he will play a role for this team down the stretch and in the playoffs.
At the same time, it’s becoming harder to see that coming to pass given the current trajectory, especially after Monday.
It’s a situation that has similar notes to what went down with Pat McCaw. Like Bell, McCaw had a sophomore slump after a rookie season that showed so much promise and featured impact NBA Finals minutes.
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Listen to Dieter Kurtenbach & Logan Murdock break it down on the Warriors HQ Podcast…
But this summer, McCaw and his family decided that the Warriors were not the best organization for him moving forward — that he wasn’t going to get the attention or playing time that he “deserved” and needed for his development. The McCaws rejected both the Warriors’ qualifying offer and a fair-value multi-year contract offer.
McCaw is now with the Raptors. He played 18 minutes and scored two points on Saturday.
Bell is a restricted free agent at the end of the season. It’s too early to speculate on what he might want to happen this summer, but it’s fair to say that there’s no guarantee Bell is a Warrior next year, even after he saw what happened to McCaw.
Right now, the Warriors boast a nine-man rotation that keeps Bell, Cook, and Evans on the bench outside of emergency minutes.
So much for the youth movement — Kerr isn’t even trying it.
But with the Warriors establishing their best game over the last few weeks, it’s nigh time for the coaches to follow-through on that youth movement goal and sprinkle in some real minutes for young, controllable (at least when it comes to contracts) talent.
Because while the Warriors like to say that they’ve won behind Strength in Numbers, they need to start developing more numbers soon.
