The Warriors Spent All Summer Chasing a Star and Signed Georges Niang
One year, $3.9 million, and a 33-year-old who didn't play a single game last season. That was the whole offseason.
My phone buzzed while I was standing in front of the open fridge at ten at night, which is exactly where I've received every piece of Warriors news that mattered for about three years now. Georges Niang. One year, $3.9 million. Last spot on the roster. I read it twice, closed the fridge, and didn't take anything out.
So that's the summer.
They went looking for Giannis. They went looking for Anthony Davis, partly because getting Davis was supposed to be the thing that got LeBron in the door, and LeBron went to Philadelphia instead. Big swings, all of them, and every one of them came back empty. Then August gets late, the roster still has holes in it, and the front office does what it always does now, which is find a guy who shoots well and hope the math covers for everything else.
I want to be clear that I don't hate the player. Niang can genuinely shoot. He's at 39.9 percent from three for his career, which is real, and he's been doing it for a decade across Indiana, Utah, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Atlanta. He's 6-foot-6 and built like a guy who bumps you off your spot instead of jumping over you. Put him in a corner next to Curry and the geometry works. It always works on paper. That's the whole problem with paper.
The number nobody at the podium is going to lead with is this one. He didn't play a single game last season. Not one. A left foot injury took the whole year, he got moved to Memphis in the Jaren Jackson Jr. trade while he was still hurt, Memphis waived him, and then he sat in free agency until the Warriors called. He's 33 now. Coming back from a foot injury at 33, as a guy whose entire job is standing in the right place and getting a clean release off, is not nothing.
And we're doing this because Jimmy Butler's knee and Moses Moody's knee are both question marks going into October. That's the actual reason. It's not that somebody looked at this roster and decided the missing piece was a stretch four in his eleventh year. It's that two of the wings who were supposed to be here aren't going to be here for a while, and you can't open a season with nine healthy bodies and a prayer.
Curry is 38. Draymond is 36. Horford is 40 years old and is still, somehow, part of the plan. The one genuinely new thing on this roster is Yaxel Lendeborg, the eleventh pick, and now Niang is going to be standing in front of him in the rotation the first time the offense goes cold in November, because that's how Steve Kerr's Warriors have handled young players for as long as I can remember. I'd love to be wrong. I've said that before and I've been right about it every time, which is not a thing I enjoy being.
They finished 37-45 last year. I watched most of it. There were nights where the ball still moved the way it used to and I forgot for a quarter and a half, and there were nights I turned it off in the third and told my brother the next day I'd watched the whole thing.
The Niang deal also does something quieter that's worth sitting with. It pushes the payroll up against the second apron, which means the flexibility is basically gone. Fifteen players. That's the team. Whatever this roster is on October 21 in Los Angeles is what they're stuck with unless somebody gets hurt badly enough to force a move, and I don't want to spend the fall hoping for that.
There's a small piece of this I actually like, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Niang played for Santa Cruz back in 2017-18, when he was a second round pick nobody wanted, and he clawed his way from that to a nine year NBA career. That's a real story. He's been inside this organization before, on the worst end of it, riding buses. If you're going to hand somebody the fifteenth roster spot, hand it to a guy who's already proven he'll take the assignment seriously.
But loyalty to the badge is not the same as being fooled, and I refuse to do the thing where we all talk ourselves into a minimum guy as if he changes anything. He doesn't. He's a corner shooter on a team that needed a second star and never got one. If he gives them 60 games at 38 percent from deep and doesn't get hunted into oblivion on defense, that's a fine outcome for $3.9 million and everybody involved should be pleased.
What I keep coming back to is how quiet all of it felt. Four titles. The best shooter who ever lived, still functional, still ours, running out of Octobers. And the summer that was supposed to buy him one more real chance ended with a fridge door and a shooting specialist coming off a lost year.
Ask me in March if I was too hard on this. I might be. Ask me tonight and I'm just tired.
More coverage: Warriors section · Bay Area NBA · Bay Area Sports Blog home