Golden State Warriors all-time draft bust starting 5

Point Guard: Nemanja Nedović, 2013

In 2011 the Warriors drafted Klay Thompson. In 2012 they selected Harrison Barnes, Festus Ezeli and Draymond Green. The following season, an ascending Stephen Curry and that young core helped the Warriors leap up into the playoffs and even rip off an upset series win over the Denver Nuggets.

The Warriors owed their first-round pick to the Utah Jazz, but they traded back into the first round at pick No. 26. The player they were targeting was a 6'3" Serbian guard named Nemanja Nedović. The Warriors then pulled off a series of trade-downs, moving from 26 to 29 and then to 30, taking
Nedović and picking up a few extra assets in return.

Nedović never got off the ground for the Warriors. He played in only 24 games as a 22 year old rookie, averaging only six minutes per game and shooting 20.5 percent from the field. He wouldn't play another NBA game after that first season. Players taken at that point in the draft are hit-or-miss, but this was about as big of a miss as you can have.

Where this gets painful is when you consider what player the Warriors could have taken instead. When they originally traded into the 26th pick, there was a player on the board who could have made a much larger impact than Nedovic: a French center named Rudy Gobert. The Utah Jazz took Gobert one pick later and he has gone on to be one of the best defensive players in NBA history. Imagining a front line of Draymond Green and Rudy Gobert isn't a dream; it was literally one pick away from happening.

The Warriors don't have many other busts at the point guard position, making their failure with Nedović all the more painful.