Without question, the greatest era in the history of the Golden State Warriors has been since Stephen Curry began his run as an All-Star level player. The best player in franchise history has led the team to six Western Conference titles and four championships since he overcame early-career injury issues and began his rise to superstardom.
Curry has hardly done that alone, of course. Klay Thompson and Draymond Green have been his wingmen every meaningful step of the way. Kevin Durant was the co-star with Curry for three memorable seasons. Andre Iguodala was a jack-of-all-trades and a super-sub during the title runs. Andrew Bogut was an All-Defense anchor in the early seasons, while Kevon Looney has been stout more recently. Harrison Barnes and Andrew Wiggins have taken turns as versatile starting forwards.
The Warriors have had a number of contributors
Not every player has been a star, nor even a consistent, high-end contributor. Some players spent a turn as a starter but weren’t at the same quality as the core members of the dynasties. That isn’t necessarily a critique; it’s a hard task to play to the level expected on a perennial contender.
Who have been the worst starters of the Stephen Curry era for the Warriors? Such a prolonged period of contention means a lot of players have stepped into the starting lineup. Starting the clock with the 2012-13 season, let’s look at 16 players who have suited up for anywhere from 16 games to 127 (sorry, Zaza).
We’ll start with some fond role players (hello again, Zaza) and then transition to those players who were simply overmatched in a starting role, and finally, a couple of disastrous draft selections who weren’t up to the task.
Who have been the 16 worst starters for the Warriors in the last 12 seasons?
Worst Starter No. 16 – Damion Lee
When Damion Lee first made his way onto the Golden State Warriors, most assumed it was some soft nepotism at work. Lee is married to Stephen Curry’s sister, Sydel, and after bouncing around the fringes of the league for a couple of years he signed a two-way contract with Golden State in 2018.
Then Lee showed his stuff, demonstrating his value as a shooter by shooting 39.7 percent from deep that first year. It was the following season, in 2019-20, when Lee saw his turn in the starting lineup. His volume that season spiked and his efficiency plummeted.
Lee started 36 games that year, taking 10.4 shots per game and 4.9 3-pointers; he shot just 41.7 percent from the field and 35.6 percent from 3-point range. Designed to be an off-ball shooter and cutter playing with other creators, on the injury-riddled Warriors that season he was pushed into a role too large for him to thrive. He wasn’t bad — his passing flashed, he still stretched the court, and he competed on defense — but he was asked to do too much.
Lee would settle back into the proper role over the next two seasons, coming off the bench for all but six games and helping the Warriors win the title in 2021-22, appearing in 16 games during the postseason run. An overmatched starter, Lee is an excellent role player, as he is now proving with the contending Phoenix Suns.
Worst Starter No. 15 – Zaza Pachulia
Andrew Bogut started 235 games at center for the Golden State Warriors from 2012-13 to 2015-16. When he was moved to make room to sign Kevin Durant, the Warriors signed veteran center Zaza Pachulia to man the middle, and he would do so for 139 games and 127 starts over the next two seasons, not to mention another 15 starters in the playoffs.
Pachulia was a stout body in the middle, playing a conservative defense and protecting the paint. His most infamous foray outside of the paint was when he undercut Kawhi Leonard on a jumpshot, injuring the star (he would miss the rest of their 2017 series) and becoming the basis for a new rule protecting the landing zones of players.
Outside of his paint defense, however, there wasn’t a ton that Pachulia provided over those two seasons. He took just 4.1 field goal attempts per game, did a bit of elbow playmaking as Steve Kerr loves for his bigs to do, and otherwise played only 16.1 minutes per game. He was there to soak up some minutes and not make mistakes, and the veteran Pachulia was able to accomplish that.
When the games truly mattered, Pachulia’s role shrank and he was even moved out of the starting lineup; he rarely ever closed, with the Dubs breaking out their “Mega-Death Lineup” with Draymond Green at center. He would play just one more season in the league after leaving the Warriors.
Worst Starter No. 14 – Juan Toscano-Anderson
The Golden State Warriors added two role players in the lost 2019-20 season that ended up as rotation players and occasional starters by the following year. We already discussed Damion Lee, the sharpshooting brother-in-law to Stephen Curry. The other? Juan Toscano-Anderson, a Mexican-American forward who joined the Santa Cruz Warriors via an open tryout, then made his way to the parent club.
Although he is just 6’6″ tall, his strength and length allowed him to play most of his minutes at the 4, unlocking switch-heavy lineups with Draymond Green and Andrew Wiggins. He was, and is, an active and heady defender who executed the scheme and played with energy.
Offensively Toscano-Anderson was more limited. He was willing to take open shots but didn’t knock them down with consistency, hitting 40.2 percent of his 3-pointers in 2020-21 but no more than 34.8 percent in any of his three other seasons.
Toscano-Anderson started 16 games in 2020-21 and another half-dozen in both the season before and the one after; his lack of shooting made him a difficult fit in the starting lineup, but his energy was loved by his teammates. It wouldn’t be crazy to see the two sides reunite in free agency.
Worst Starter No. 13 – JaVale McGee
When the Warriors signed JaVale McGee prior to the 2016-17 NBA season, it was seen as something of a joke. The bombad Warriors are so arrogant after signing Kevin Durant that they can waste a roster spot on a goofy, unreliable player like McGee.
Then the games started, and it became clear very quickly why the Warriors brought him aboard. His athleticism let him stretch defenses vertically in a way no other member of the Warriors’ core did. A pick-and-roll with Stephen Curry where defenders had to choose between Curry scoring and McGee getting free for a lob was a really difficult action to stop. Add Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson on the perimeter and it’s no wonder the Warriors blitzed opponents that season.
McGee shows up on a list like this because he didn’t really do much else; he was the least disciplined of their centers during that era, an athletic shot-blocker but not a consistent defensive deterrent. Add in his lack of range and lack of playmaking at the elbow and he had to play limited minutes even when starting.
The Warriors’ core seemed to love McGee, and he won two titles with the team, starting 10 playoff games across two seasons. He was perfect for a small-usage role as a rim-runner; thankfully, that’s all they needed from him.
Worst Starter No. 12 – Quinn Cook
Some players are just winners. At least, that’s what it seems like, as they win at every level. Quinn Cook was a standout player in high school, won a national championship with the Duke Blue Devils, and then joined the Golden State Warriors and won another pair of titles.
Cook went undrafted in 2015 and bounced around the G League and a couple of 10-day contracts before he signed a two-way contract with the Warriors in 2017. He didn’t waste any time, either, getting his first start within two months and starting 18 games in total that season, essentially filling in for Stephen Curry in the starting lineup.
He didn’t do a terrible job, either, shooting 41.8 percent across his two seasons in Golden State and helping to glue lineups together with his ball-handling, passing and defensive effort. He wasn’t doing much more than simply filling a lane, but he did that well enough.
Cook essentially spiraled out of the league after his run with the Warriors, playing another 67 games in two years before heading overseas. His fit in the Warriors’ system made him the guy they needed as Curry’s backup, but he wasn’t able to do much more than that.
Except win, of course. No one’s taking those rings away.
Worst Starter No. 11 – Kelly Oubre Jr.
2019-20 was a gap year for the Golden State Warriors, with Kevin Durant leaving, Klay Thompson missing the entire season and Stephen Curry playing just a handful of games. Coming out of that year, the Warriors looked to stock up for a run back to the playoffs.
They fell just short, and a major reason why is Kelly Oubre Jr. On the surface, he seems like the kind of player who probably shouldn’t be on this list. He’s a career 33 percent shooter from deep with some creativity creating with the basketball, long arms perfect for snagging steals, and has averaged at least 15 points per game in five different seasons.
The reason that Oubre lands on this list is that he was a colossally poor fit with the Warriors’ core. Steve Kerr runs a motion offense that is heavy on read-and-react principles, especially adjusting to Curry’s movements to give him space to create magic.
Instead, Oubre was frequently running right into the action, even memorably running right into Curry one time. The Warriors were 11.7 points per 100 possessions worse when Oubre was on the court than when he was off; given that they barely missed the playoffs, that could very well have been the difference between making another run and missing the playoffs entirely.
In fact, the Warriors nearly made the playoffs thanks to a 15-5 finish to the season. That closing stretch coincided with Oubre missing 15 games due to injury and coming off the bench for the other five. Everyone was happy to let him move on after one season.
Worst Starter No. 10 – Festus Ezeli
The Warriors almost blew it. Heading into the 2012 NBA Draft, the Warriors were armed with three picks in the top-35, including the seventh overall selection. They took North Carolina forward Harrison Barnes at 7, and then were back on the clock with pick No. 30. Draymond Green, a versatile and long-limbed forward out of Michicago State, was still there on the board; the front office loved Green.
Instead of scooping him up, however, they instead drafted Vanderbilt center Festus Ezeli, hoping Green would fall. He did, so history looks back favorably on the Warriors for taking a Hall of Famers in the second round, but the Warriors still chose a center with concrete hands ahead of him and made a scary gamble that could have changed the course of their franchise.
The Warriors started Ezeli a whopping 41 games as a rookie, then after a season lost to a knee injury they gave him another 20 starts over the following two seasons, the first the Dubs’ championship run in 2015 and again during their standout 2016 that ended in heartbreak. In fact, many Warriors fans think it’s the 10-plus minutes he played in Game 7 of the NBA Finals that lost them a game; he was a -9 in a game they lost by four.
Ezeli couldn’t catch a pass to save his life, and it had an impact on his rebounding; he should have dominated the glass with his size and athleticism, but instead, he was simply a decent finisher and big body on defense. He’s one of the players the front office locked onto over the years and just kept waiting to see if he would develop. Unfortunately for Ezeli and the Warriors, he suffered a series of injuries that prevented him from playing another minute in the NBA; Game 7 would be his last game.
Worst Starter No. 9 – Brandon Rush
You would think that starting 25 games for the greatest team in NBA regular season history (going by record) would be enough to propel you off of this list, but the reality is that Brandon Rush wasn’t up to the level of the other players starting that season.
The former first-round pick out of Kansas played for the Warriors, left, and came back just in time for their rise to dominance and won the 2015 title as a bit player. His role increased significantly the following season, and the 30-year-old wing played 72 games and started 25 of them.
Rush shot 49.4 percent on his 3-pointers during those 25 games, and the Warriors outscored opponents by about one point per 100 possessions when he was on the court. On a team en route to setting the regular season wins mark a simple “+1” is a low output, though.
A low-usage role player, Rush was incredibly low-usage on this stacked team. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but he certainly wasn’t doing much to drive their success beside knocking down wide-open shots. Again, that’s fine – it’s not enough to get you off this list, especially since Rush played just one more season and then was out of the league.
Worst Starter No. 8 – Patrick McCaw
10 players in NBA history have won three-straight titles to start their careers. Whitey Skogg did so with the Minneapolis Lakers. Five players did it with the Bill Russell-era Boston Celtics: K.C. Jones, Gene Guarilia, Tom Sanders, John Havlicek and Larry Siegfried. Two players, Scott Williams and Jason Caffey, won with the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s. Devean George started his career with the threepeat Los Angeles Lakers from 1999-2002.
What do all of those players have in common? They played for one team to start their careers. Patrick McCaw made history when he became the first player to win three-straight titles to start his career with two different teams. He started with the Warriors for two championships, then won another against the Warriors with the Toronto Raptors in 2019.
Unfortunately for McCaw, those rings have to last him because he won’t be winning another; he’s already out of the league. There was plenty of hype around McCaw as a versatile two-way wing who was going to glue lineups together, but instead, he just hung around as a role player who never took a step forward.
The Warriors gave him plenty of chances, including 30 starts. He shot 28.8 from deep in those games, with a -88 cumulative on-off and a -3.0 Box Plus-Minus. His defensive playmaking was special and a part of what kept him on the court, but he was ultimately such a poor offensive player that it wasn’t worth it to keep handing him minutes.
Worst Starter No. 7 – Glenn Robinson III
A surprisingly high percentage of the players on this list have come from years when the Golden State Warriors made the NBA Finals. The franchise has truly practiced “Strength in Numbers” over the past decade in maintaining excellence. Some players, however, are making this list from the exact season you would expect: 2019-20, when the Warriors won just 15 games, last in the league.
One player who got plenty of run that season was Glenn Robinson III, who started all 48 games he played for the franchise after signing in the offseason. With the writing on the wall, the Warriors moved Robinson at the Trade Deadline, and he played out the rest of the year with Philadelphia, traveling to the NBA Bubble with them while the Warriors’ year ended early.
On the one hand, Robinson’s play wasn’t all that bad given the situation he was thrust into. He show the ball well that year, hitting 40 percent of his 3-pointers. On the other hand, the 6’6″ wing joined a teamwide protest against playing defense. He kept his usage relatively low despite plenty of need on the team, passed minimally and didn’t get to the line much; he essentially just got the ball and shot it.
Robinson would have been an ideal 9th-man during the Warriors’ best years, but as their third man that season he was well over his head.
Worst Starter No. 6 – Jordan Bell
Fans of the Golden State Warriors will almost certainly remember Jordan Bell. The 2017 second-rounder out of Oregon was something of a novelty with the Golden State Warriors. He was a defensive playmaker with the strength to play center but the athleticism and agility to execute a switching scheme.
Warriors fans went wild at the prospect of Bell running the court, skying high for alley-oop dunks, then back on defense executing seamless switches with Draymond Green and Andre Iguodala and Kevin Durant. Occasionally that happened, and the ceiling nearly blew off the top of Oracle Arena.
The problem that Bell wasn’t able to consistently bring that defensive impact, often fouling or gambling for a steal or block and coming up empty. On offense he was a fantastic finisher right at the rim, but any further out and he was helpless. In some ways, he was a more athletic, less skilled version of Kevon Looney, whose rebounding prowess and dependability turned him into a regular starter.
Bell never got there, and he was never elite enough on defense to make up for his offensive shortcomings. One-way bigs were replaceable enough in the eyes of the Warriors, and he wasn’t brought back after the 2018-19 season.
Worst Starter No. 5 – Eric Paschall
There were not a lot of highlights from the 2019-20 season. Stephen Curry broke his hand and joined Klay Thompson on the shelf, playing just five games total. Draymond Green loaded through a noncompetitive season. The team had dumped franchise icon Andre Iguodala in order to sign D’Angelo Russell to a max contract, and he was clearly a poor fit for Warriors basketball. It was a difficult time.
One of the lone bright spots was Eric Paschall, one of the Warriors’ second-round picks that year. The rookie power forward out of VIllanova came out of the gates scoring, averaging 14 points per game despite only starting a third of his games. He was fast enough to beat bigs to the cup, and strong enough to bully guards and wings.
The problem for Paschall was that he couldn’t transition to a smaller role when the team’s stars were back. He wasn’t much of a shooter or cutter, and he was a defensive target in the frontcourt. He needed the ball in his hands, and he wasn’t going to get that on a good Warriors team. They moved him after his second season with the team, and he, unfortunately, didn’t stick in Utah either and dropped out of the NBA a year later.
Worst Starter No. 4 – Willie Cauley-Stein
After executing the Kevin Durant – D’Angelo Russell double sign-and-trade in the 2019 offseason, the 19-20 Warriors were hard-capped, which meant they couldn’t spend more than the tax apron (a line a few million over the luxury tax line) for any reason. That’s why they dumped Andre Iguodala on the Memphis Grizzlies.
With only a small amount of money to spend, it was therefore wild that the Warriors, the team that had won three titles treating the center position as highly replaceable, spent what little money it had over the minimum on a center. They dipped into the Mid-Level Exception to sign former Kentucky and Sacramento Kings center Willie Cauley-Stein to a two-year contract.
What Cauley-Stein had going for him was defensive playmaking, and he brought that to the Warriors; he averaged 1.1 steals and 1.2 blocks in 22.9 minutes per game with the Warriors. He played 41 games, starting 37, as the defensive anchor in the middle.
The problem with this anchor was that it didn’t stay down; for every block he got there was another that he missed, making it clear he lacked the defensive discipline to be a long-term option once the stars came back. He was also a nothing on offense, providing decent finishing but with poor hands, no passing or scoring, and even very little offensive rebounding.
The Warriors moved him along to the Dallas Mavericks at the deadline to get something of value for him. He did a few things well, but like many bigs during the Stephen Curry era, he didn’t offer enough on offense to balance out his defensive contributions.
Worst Starter No. 3 – Marquese Chriss
If you’re noticing a trend going down this list, it’s that we’ve been discussing quite a few bigs recently. You are correct; more so, we’re not going to stop. Each of the six worst starters in the Stephen Curry era are big men, which both highlights the Warriors’ philosophy that bigs were replaceable and suggests that, at some level, perhaps having a good one isn’t a bad idea.
During our favorite season in 2019-20, the Warriors took a flier on former Top-10 pick Marquese Chriss. The theory with Chriss was that he could be a switch-versatile big with defensive playmaking chops but the offensive game to balance it out. He certainly showed flashes of that, averaging a steal and more than a block per game in his 21 starts.
The issue with Chriss was that he didn’t exactly fit into any specific role that the Warriors could use. He lacked the size and primary rim protection ability to be a full-time 5, but at power forward his complete lack of an outside shot was an issue. He generated blocks and steals, yes, but the Warriors were also worse defensively when he stepped on the court.
Unlike most of the players from that lost season, Chriss came back the next season as an option in the center rotation, and the team seemed genuinely excited about his transition to playing center full-time. Then two games in he broke his leg and missed the rest of the season, and he didn’t find a way to stick in the league after that.
Worst Starter No. 2 – Damian Jones
Perhaps reacting to the failures of Festus Ezili and Anderson Varejao in the Warriors’ NBA Finals loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers, the team used their first-round pick to draft Vanderbilt center Damian Jones in the 2016 NBA Draft.
Jones then played just 49 total games in three seasons with the team, resigned to mop-up duty his first two years before getting some more run in 2018-19, starting 22 games for the Warriors as they retooled the rotation around their core. They didn’t go well.
Jones, to his credit, finished well that season, shooting 71.6 percent from the field as an incredibly low-usage finisher. That’s about all that he did, however. The offense was 3.2 points per 100 possessions worse with Jones on the court, per Cleaning the Glass, and the defense gave up 3.9 points more per 100 possessions. He had some solid defensive potential (potential he has flashed at times in the years since) but it didn’t come through with the Warriors.
Interestingly enough, although Jones had one of the worst on/off impacts of any starter during that era, the Warriors were so good that he actually had a positive point differential in his 22 starts. Even so, it was clear the Warriors couldn’t rely on Jones in important moments (eight total playoff minutes that season) and they moved on from him that offseason.
Worst Starter No. 1 – James Wiseman
When you first read the headline of this piece, perhaps you pictured another player; one of the doomed spot starters from the 2019-20 season, or the much-maligned D’Angelo Russell (who was bad relative to his contract and the cost to acquire him, but halfway decent when viewed objectively). In reality, however, the worst Warriors starter from the Stephen Curry era has to be James Wiseman.
We’ll set aside for the moment the waste of resources drafting Wiseman second overall; can you imagine a Warriors team with LaMelo Ball, or even Onyeka Okongwu or Obi Toppin? What if they had traded down, as many were encouraging them to do, and taken Tyrese Haliburton? A Knicks deal for Mitchell Robinson and No. 8 was actually discussed!
Sorry, let’s get back to the topic at hand. Setting aside the cost to acquire him, Wiseman’s play on the court was spectacularly bad. When he took the court the Warriors’ offense and defense got markedly worse; Cleaning the Glass estimates his on/off impact to be in the first percentile leaguewide. That’s as low as it gets!
Despite playing on teams with winning records and positive point differentials, in his 27 starts the Warriors were outscored by 159 points, or 5.9 points per game. He had twice as many turnovers as assists in those 27 games and somehow shot under 50 percent from the field as a center playing with the likes of Stephen Curry, Andrew Wiggins and the other shooters on the team. Despite boasting phenomenal size, he couldn’t (still can’t) figure out how to play NBA defense, skying for some blocks but otherwise standing out of position and moving entirely without basketball instincts.
Perhaps there is still a chance that James Wiseman puts it all together and finds a way to marry his physical potential with his actual ability. It became clear to the Warriors, however, that there was no hope of him helping them win during the remainder of Curry’s prime. His performance made him the unquestioned Worst Starter of the Stephen Curry era.