Every team makes mistakes in free agency. It’s hard not to, in fact. Even the Golden State Warriors have made them. The Warriors have to evaluate a player on another team and project how they will fit with the Warriors’ roster, scheme, and culture. Add in a ticking clock and negotiating with agents and outbidding opponents and it’s a wonder any team wins at free agency.
The Warriors have, though. They have been one of the most successful teams at using free agency to improve their roster, from massive stars to players on the margin. None of their four titles over the past decade would have been possible without free agency.
They have also managed to limit their mistakes. Some teams have a long list of terrible free-agent signings; the Warriors have a more nuanced list. It helps that during the summer of 2016 when half the teams in the league overpaid in free agency due to the cap spike, the Warriors were signing Kevin Durant. That worked out fairly well.
The Warriors have made some mistakes in free agency
Yet they have certainly made their share of mistakes over the years. Free agency has picked up in pace over the past quarter-century as teams have begun to meaningfully shape their roster by signing players. This list of the worst free agent signings in the history of the Golden State Warriors will focus on players newly signed in free agency, rather than the Warriors retaining free agents with new contracts. We begin with a signing that was heralded as a death knell to the rest of the league and ended up as anything but.
Worst Warriors free agent signings No. 12: DeMarcus Cousins, 2018
DeMarcus Cousins had a tumultuous start to his career, putting up massive numbers with the Sacramento Kings and New Orleans Pelicans but also displaying a lack of emotional maturity on and off the court. When he tore his Achilles in January of 2018 he had not played a single playoff game in his career.
That following summer his market in free agency was virtually nonexistent. The Pelicans replaced him with Julius Randle and other teams weren’t willing to invest highly in a heavy center coming off of an Achilles injury. Out of nowhere, it came out that Cousins had agreed to sign with the two-time defending champion Golden State Warriors for the taxpayer mid-level exception of just $5.3 million.
Everyone was suddenly ranting about how the Warriors once again had fleeced the league by adding a star free agent to a loaded core. The all-All-Star lineup danced before everyone’s eyes, with Boogie Cousins at center alongside Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, Kevin Durant, and Draymond Green. Who could stop that?
Cousins sat out much of the season recovering from his injury, and when he came back he was…fine. His pondering, bully-ball style was a poor fit for the Warriors, and while they force-fed him plenty of touches they were a more wobbly team with him playing a major rotation role.
Then the playoffs hit, and the Warriors lost Cousins to a torn quadriceps in his second game. The Warriors battled through a tough postseason, losing players to injury left and right, but they still rose above and made the NBA Finals.
Cousins returned right when the Warriors needed him in Game 1 of the Finals but didn’t make the impact the Dubs were counting on. He had one good game in Game 2 but otherwise was inefficient and a negative when on the court.
The Warriors had one major bullet in the chamber to use in defending their title, and they used it on a player who was a poor fit in their system, a poor fit in their culture, and coming off of a devastating leg injury. Cousins was the wrong player to sign before the season, and he was the wrong player to try and save their season in the end.
Worst Warriors free agent signings No. 11: Nick Young, 2017
In a similar vein to DeMarcus Cousins above, the Warriors had very limited assets to use each year to continue supporting their stars and chasing titles. It’s hard to maintain a contender for multiple years, and doing so usually requires hitting on moves on the margin to fill out the bench.
In the summer of 2017, the Warriors were coming off of a dominant playoff run after adding Kevin Durant, winning their second title in three seasons. They stayed over the cap that summer, re-signing Shaun Livingston, Andre Iguodala, and Durant while inking Stephen Curry to a supermax deal.
To cap off their expensive summer, the Warriors used their one exception above the minimum to sign Nick Young. After successfully rehabilitating JaVale McGee the year before, the Warriors called their shot and added a shoot-first, shoot-second scoring guard with plenty of baggage.
Young didn’t have a terrible season, and ultimately his presence on the team didn’t matter; the Warriors went on to sweep the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA Finals that year. Young certainly didn’t move the needle, however, shooting 41.2 percent from the field and averaging 7.3 points per game in a limited role. In the playoffs he played every game but shot just 30.2 percent from the field, averaging 2.6 points. He wasn’t bringing defense or passing or hustle, so the scoring was why he was there, and that was virtually nonexistent.
Thankfully, the Warriors were able to find Quinn Cook, signing him to a two-way contract and eventually elevating him to the full roster and above Young in the playoff rotation. Having Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant gives you plenty of margin for error, but it was clear from the start and by the end that the Young signing was a mistake.
Worst Warriors free agent signings No. 10: Brad Wanamaker, 2020
The Golden State Warriors sat out the NBA Bubble in 2020, in the midst of an injury-plagued season that saw them land at the bottom of the standings. They were certainly tuning in, however, and were apparently impressed by the play of the Boston Celtics’ backup point guard, Brad Wanamaker.
That following offseason the Warriors were arming themselves for another run, and they signed Wanamaker to back up Stephen Curry. The theory of adding the veteran journeyman guard was that they would get a good defender who could shoot and move the ball. Nothing special, but something reliable.
That’s not the player that they got. Wanamaker was downright awful in the Warriors uniform, shooting just 21.3 percent from 3-point range in 39 games. For a Warriors team that was floating around .500 most of the season, they were -12 when Wanamaker was on the court.
It was so bad that the Warriors had to dump Wanamaker’s contract at the Trade Deadline after just a half-season with the team. If they had signed a more reliable point guard in the offseason, it’s very possible that they were a couple of games higher in the standings and would have avoided the Play-In Tournament altogether that year.
Worst Warriors free agent signings No. 9: Al Thornton
The 2010-11 Golden State Warriors tried and failed to make the playoffs. Stephen Curry as a sophomore was already starting to break the limits of 3-point shooting, Monta Ellis was chucking like a superstar and David Lee was in his prime. The problem was that their defense, theoretically anchored by Andris Biedrins, was one of the worst in the league, and they got just about nothing from their bench.
With a third of the season to go, the Warriors decided to make a move, signing Al Thornton off of the buyout market. The 6’8″ forward was supposedly going to come in and be the lift the bench needed, and his size and length were going to bolster the defense. The move was talked about as a move to help them in the present and add a player they could re-sign that summer as a core piece.
Instead, Thornton’s stint with the Warriors was an abject disaster. He scored just six points per game in 22 showings with the Warriors, not even attempting a single 3-pointer and barely moving the needle on defense. The Warriors sputtered to a 9-13 showing in his games, and his performance was so bad that he never played another NBA minute again. His career ended with the Dubs.
Worst Warriors free agent signings No. 8: Kwame Brown, 2011
Kwame Brown is the poster child for how the NBA was ill-prepared for the wave of high schoolers entering through the draft. Michael Jordan and the Washington Wizards became enamored with Brown’s size and athleticism and took him first overall in the 2001 NBA Draft, then failed to give him the support he needed to develop as a player and a person.
Even so, Brown was a hard worker and still had those excellent physical tools, so he managed to hang around the league. He played four seasons in Washington and 2.5 in Los Angeles before he began bouncing around, playing in Memphis, Detroit, and Charlotte over the next four years.
So we came to the offseason of 2011, and the Warriors were in the market for a big man. In a financial context where the salary cap was much lower than it is today, the Warriors invested $6.75 million in a one-year deal for Brown, perhaps thinking they could finally be the ones to translate his physical gifts into something more.
They never truly got that chance. Brown was up-and-down in the first nine games of the season and then suffered a chest injury that knocked him out for the rest of the year. He would not return, playing just 22 games for Philadelphia the following year before his career ended.
Worst Warriors free agent signings No. 7: Anderson Varajao, 2016
The Golden State Warriors made a handful of small blunders in the midst of their 73-win season, ones that didn’t matter during the regular season but came to roost in the playoffs. One of those was signing Anderson Varejao on the buyout market after the Cleveland Cavaliers dumped his salary at the Trade Deadline.
Varejao was a longtime Cavalier big man who was beloved by fans and well-known for his floppy hairstyle, but by 2016 he had suffered multiple significant injuries and lost most of his athleticism. Nonetheless, injuries to many of the Warriors’ bigs led them to sign him mid-season and give him a small rotation role.
That rotation role continued into the playoffs, a time when the Warriors should have slid Varejao to the end of the bench. Instead, Kumba-ya-Kerr rotated between Varejao and Festus Ezili, not committing enough to the Death Lineup and not excising the generally lackluster Varejao from the rotation.
The big man played in six of the seven NBA Finals games, scoring a grand total of seven points and shooting 0-for-4 from the line. Conspiracy theories about Varejao being a sleeper agent for the Cavs are ridiculous, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t partially to blame for the Warriors’ collapse in the Finals.
After that poor match and terrible end to the season, did the Warriors wash their hands and walk away? They sure didn’t! Instead, they doubled down and brought Varejao back the following season, when he averaged just 1.3 points per game in 14 appearances.
Worst Warriors free agent signings No. 6: Willie Cauley-Stein, 2019
The Golden State Warriors took a major swing in the 2019 offseason, turning Kevin Durant’s departure into a double sign-and-trade to bring back D’Angelo Russell (more on that move later). That hard-capped them, which means there was a hard limit they could not spend over under any circumstance.
They lost a ton of depth that offseason and had very little financial flexibility to replace it. That’s why it was incredibly strange when the largest contract they signed that summer (other than Russell) was former Sacramento Kings center Willie Cauley-Stein.
The center out of Kentucky was an elite athlete, with plenty of “run and jump” upside as a rim protector and lob finisher. Yet the Warriors know what makes things work in their system. Cauley-Stein was seemingly signed to provide Russell with a pick-and-roll partner, but spending what little extra money they had on a center? Yet again, the Warriors made the same mistake.
Throughout their dynasty, the Warriors have continued to invest resources in centers they didn’t need, that didn’t fit their system, and who have contributed much less than ball-handlers or wings would have.
As the Warriors stumbled to a last-place finish, Cauley-Stein was perhaps not the problem but he certainly wasn’t the solution. He averaged 7.9 points and 6.2 rebounds in 41 games for the Warriors before they traded him to the Dallas Mavericks for a second-round pick.
Worst Warriors free agent signings No. 5: DeAndre Jordan, 2011
This is the most bizarre selection on this list because DeAndre Jordan was never technically a member of the Golden State Warriors. Yet in the spirit of the experiment, the Warriors signed Jordan to a contract and, if not saved from themselves, likely would have prevented a dynasty in the process.
In the summer of 2011, DeAndre Jordan was a restricted free agent, coming off of a “breakout” third season where he averaged 7.1 points, 7.2 rebounds, and 1.8 blocks per game. He looked like a rising defensive star with some upside as an offensive force inside, and a Warriors team looking to build a young core around Stephen Curry signed him to a four-year, $43 million offer sheet. For reference, the cap in 2011-12 was $58.04 million; this season it is $123.66 million.
So think of the contract as something more like a four-year, $90 million deal. One could certainly argue that Jordan was worth that contract, given his growth as a defender and athletic finisher over the coming seasons; the LA Clippers re-signed him and he became one of the faces of the “Lob City” era in Los Angeles.
What if the Clippers hadn’t matched? Well, then the Warriors likely wouldn’t have had the financial flexibility to sign Andrew Iguodala in free agency. They almost certainly wouldn’t have traded for Andrew Bogut. There is a great chance that Steve Kerr would have chosen the New York Knicks job when the Warriors didn’t have the personnel to best fit his system. No Iggy, no Bogut, no Kerr, and you almost certainly don’t have four titles.
Worst Warriors free agent signings No. 4: D.J. Mbenga, 2007
The very worst moves a team can make in free agency are signing long-term deals with players who then drop off and aren’t worth that contract. Not only are they overpaid, but more importantly they are under contract for multiple seasons, hamstringing a team from moving on.
Thankfully, the Golden State Warriors have not made that mistake very often. Their missteps have tended to be on single-year contracts, signing players who end up not helping them to any great extent. Such players have shown up a lot on this list. Perhaps the very worst (best?) example of this mistake was center D.J. Mbenga.
In terms of opportunity cost to the Warriors, it cost them almost nothing to sign Mbenga. They picked him up off the scrap heap for an end-of-rotation role. His signing did not harm the Warriors long-term in any way. He is on this list simply because he may have been purely the “worst” free agent signed by the Warriors, at least in recent memory.
Mbenga was available because the Dallas Mavericks waived him, and the Warriors scooped him up for big depth. He played just 130 minutes across 16 games before the Warriors gave up and cut him. In those minutes he shot 9-for-23 from the field (39.1 percent) for 19 total points. That’s a center who only shot around the rim missing over 60 percent of his shots.
Mbenga shot just two free throws, had only four assists, and had 32 fouls to his 19 points. The Warriors that season had a 111.8 offensive rating, good for fourth in the league. When Mbenga played, they had an offensive rating of just 98. He was inexpensive and easily waived, but purely on account of what he brought the Warriors, he was possibly the worst free agent they ever signed.
Worst Warriors free agent signings No. 3: D’Angelo Russell, 2019
In the summer of 2019, Kevin Durant decided to leave the Golden State Warriors to join Kyrie Irving on the Brooklyn Nets. Bob Myers and the Golden State Warriors’ front office suddenly had an idea; what if they could turn Durant’s leaving into a sign-and-trade, receiving back an All-Star point guard in the process?
That player was D’Angelo Russell, who made the All-Star Game in 2019 as an injury replacement but was out of the Nets’ plans as they planned to sign Kyrie Irving. All the parties agreed, and the Warriors did some intense cap gymnastics to make it work, including dumping Andre Iguodala on the Memphis Grizzlies at the cost of a first-round pick.
All of that work, including hard-capping themselves, meant they fielded a much weaker team than the one that went to the NBA Finals the year before. With Klay Thompson out for the season, when Stephen Curry went down with a hand injury the team crumbled and ended up at the bottom of the standings.
From the beginning, paying D’Angelo Russell a max contract looked like a mistake. He was not a top-24 player when he made the All-Star Game, and he was a bad fit for the Warriors’ system. They tried to make it work, signing Willie Cauley-Stein to give him a “pick-and-roll partner” but it didn’t help much. Russell shot a mediocre 43 percent from the field and averaged 3.1 turnovers per game as the burden fell on him to try and make the offense go. He did fine, but given how poor of a defender he was, fine was not good enough.
Could Russell have looked better playing alongside a healthy Curry and Klay? Probably; everyone but Kelly Oubre Jr. does. But the reality was that the Warriors gave a max contract to a player who didn’t deserve it, wasn’t a great fit for their system, and would have prevented them from winning in the playoffs.
The Warriors got lucky; the Minnesota Timberwolves were enamored with Russell and traded Andrew Wiggins and a first-round pick for him, a pick that became Jonathan Kuminga. The Warriors “won” the overall transaction. Yet if the Wolves hadn’t been willing to make the trade, the Warriors would have been stuck with an overpaid ill-fitting guard, and there is very little chance they would have won the 2022 title.
Worst Warriors free agent signings No. 2: Calbert Cheaney, 2003
The Golden State Warriors missed the NBA playoffs for twelve straight seasons from 1994 to 2007, and towards the end of that span, they were desperate to put together a team that could win enough games to make it in. To that end, they worked to acquire a number of players in 2003 that had proven track records in the playoffs.
One such player was Calbert Cheaney, a veteran wing who started alongside John Stockton and Karl Malone for the Utah Jazz the year before. The 10-year veteran had started his career off as a potent offensive scorer with the Washington Bullets but had moved into a much smaller role the past few years. Even so, the Warriors handed him a multi-year contract.
Things didn’t go the way that the Warriors had hoped. Cheaney continued his decline, completely abandoning the 3-point shot and shooting only 48.9 percent from 2-point range. Lineups with Cheaney were a net negative, and his “playoff experience” did little to help the team win; they went 37-45 as they continued their playoff drought.
Things compounded that following offseason when Cheaney exercised his contract option to stay with the Warriors. That year the wing’s minutes went down precipitously, as did his efficiency (42.6 percent from the field) and scoring (4.5 points per game). He stuck around for a third season, averaging just 2.2 points on yet worse efficiency before he washed out of the league entirely. The Warriors didn’t make the playoffs in any of his three seasons with the team.
Worst Warriors free agent signings No. 1: Derek Fisher, 2004
We just discussed how the Warriors were desperate to make the playoffs in the early 2000s, and one year after adding four players with postseason experience (and missing the playoffs) they went the extra mile, handing out a lucrative six-year, $37 million contract to Los Angeles Lakers point guard Derek Fisher.
Fisher played a key rotation role on three straight championship teams in Los Angeles, but the year before was pushed to the bench when the Lakers added Gary Payton. That was likely the impetus for Fisher seeking greener pastures, and he thought he found them — or at least a larger role — with the Warriors.
He certainly got the larger role, averaging 10.2 field goal attempts per game with the Warriors. He also shot a shaky 39.3 percent from the field, averaging just 11.9 points on those 10.2 shots. The following year was more of the same, with 10.8 shots per game yielding a slightly higher 13.3 points per game. After two seasons, the Warriors washed their hands and traded him to the Utah Jazz; after one season he would find his way back to the Lakers and eventually win another two titles with Kobe Bryant and the Lakers.
So there you have it: the 12 worst free agent signings in Golden State Warriors history. They don’t have any true disaster deals, or at least not because of signing new players; they have plenty of miscues around re-signing their own guys. From Derek Fisher and D’Angelo Russell to DeMarcus Cousins and Nick Young, the Warriors have their own fair share of free agent missteps in the rearview mirror.