Warriors owner Joe Lacob rolled his eyes back and unhinged his jaw. The reaction came from a reminder of Brandin Podziemski’s highly successful rookie year this past season for the Warriors.
“Oh my god, he was a revelation to be quite honest,” Lacob said Wednesday in an interview with NBA TV during the Warriors’ summer league win against the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Podziemski was taken No. 19 overall by the Warriors in last year’s NBA draft. The expectation was he would develop in the G League and hopefully earn NBA playing time as the season progressed. He instead slashed expectations and was named First Team All-Rookie.
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A brash, hard-nosed guard who didn’t turn 21 years old until late February and received 17 DNPs at Illinois before being a star in his one season at Santa Clara gained the kind of trust from Steve Kerr that rookies simply never do for the Warriors coach.
“He started a whole bunch of games for us,” Lacob continued. “Steve had trouble getting him off the floor. I mean, he had to have him on the floor – he was so good. He does so many things well. He’s ultra-confident.
“He’s got an NBA body, can get to wherever he wants. He obviously can shoot threes, he can drive, he can pass.”
All that is fine. Lacob said each word with plenty of conviction. Then came the ribbon and bow to top it all off. A quote was given to us all at the quiet time of the offseason.
Golden State Warriors
“I mean, what can’t he do? We are really excited. We think we’ve got a future All-Star, we really do,” Lacob concluded.
Lauri Watch, Day Something.
Lacob wasn’t smiling and spouting about Podziemski simply as leverage in a negotiating tactic between he and Utah Jazz CEO of basketball operations Danny Ainge, who wants your appetizers, a four-course meal and dessert to himself in any trade it appears to acquire star big man Lauri Markkanen.
Kerr couldn’t keep Podziemski off the floor. Podziemski does do a number of things well. The lefty has emphasized being more of a scoring threat and shooter over the summer. Podziemski then shot 40 percent from 3-point range in his three summer league games, averaging nearly seven attempts per game.
His stat line from his last game this summer was 21 points on 8-of-14 shooting and 4 of 8 on threes, 12 rebounds and seven assists. And it’s not hard to imagine those kinds of box scores in the future as his game gets to another level.
Podziemski sees it like that. The Warriors do, too.
There have been rumblings that the Jazz might actually prefer Podziemski as the main trade piece in a Markkanen deal, not Jonathan Kuminga. Podziemski and Kuminga are the two players the Warriors want to keep most from their growing young core, but they’re also their best assets and Ainge is sure to push for at least one of them until the final seconds leading up to Markkanen’s Aug. 6 contract extension deadline.
Kuminga in the past has felt like an off-limits prize of Lacob’s who showed stretches of star potential last season when given a bigger role. Lacob saw All-Star potential when he drafted the 18-year-old in 2021 and still does. There also are reasons to see the Warriors being more apprehensive of a Podziemski trade than finally letting go of Kuminga.
After playing 211 regular-season games and another 26 games in the playoffs, projection still is a main theme in talking about Kuminga. Outside of Steph Curry, Kuminga is the most likely on the Warriors to drop 20 points. It’s also impossible to know if he’ll ever really be an outside shooter, and Kerr questioned what position Kuminga is at his end-of-season press conference.
The Warriors know what they have in Podziemski, and still see ample room for growth and development. They know he’s the player who led the entire team in plus/minus as a rookie. Manu Ginobili is one of his idols, and that style of impact can be mirrored by Podziemski.
Podziemski played 1,968 minutes in the regular season and averaged 26.6 minutes per game. Again, none of that is normal under Kerr.
For the sake of comparison, Kuminga played a total of 1,185 minutes his rookie year and averaged 16.9 minutes that season on a championship team. Even that was more playing time than usual for a Warriors rookie. Nobody came close to Podziemski.
Mychal Mulder and Eric Paschall each averaged more minutes as rookies than Podziemski, but neither played more total. Mulder was 25, Paschall was 23, and the Warriors won 15 games in a season where Curry suited up in five.
The only rookie who flirted with Podziemski’s minutes was James Wiseman when the big man was averaging 21.4 minutes as a 19-year-old before his season ended due to injury. Kerr and the Warriors admittedly regret putting that much on Wiseman so early.
Through three years under Kerr, Kuminga still hasn’t averaged as many minutes per game as Podziemski just did. Kuminga currently is rookie extension eligible, and Podziemski is due a cheap $3.5 million next season.
Adding both players is likely a non-starter for the Warriors in a trade. Picking between one or the other might be the difference in Curry, at 36 years old and only two seasons left on his current contract, getting his best second option since Kevin Durant joined the Brooklyn Nets five years ago. The resolution to the wait should be fascinating to see.