If you take the 17 different players who played for the Warriors or the current 15 man roster, as a whole and get an average age then we are the youngest team in the NBA.  But I have been wondering what would happen if we try to find out the age of the average player we play?  What I mean is we got lots of young guys on our team, but most of the time their box score reads DNP-CD, while Jackson and Crawford’s reads 40+minutes.  Take a look at the total minutes played this season:

Jackson (despite games missed) has quite a bit of a lead over anybody else, followed by Biedrins and Azibuike (note that they have both played 50 games).  Crawford and Maggette pop out, seeing how many minutes they played in the limited amount of games compared to Watson and Turiaf.

At first I hypothesized that the Warriors average age of player played would be close to 27, looking at the numbers I can probably skip doing a lot of math and conclude that it would be closer to 25 or 26(maybe sometime this week, I’ll take out the old calculator and try to actually compute that number).  I decided to compare that to 3 other young teams: the Grizzlies, Trail Blazers, and the Thunder.  Just glancing at the numbers it is safe to say that the Grizzlies and the Trail Blazers play with younger players than us.  It’s not even close.  As for the Thunder it looks like it would be a close call, too close to make a guess without doing the math.

Just from that, we can drop the claim that we are the youngest team in the NBA.  Does it matter what Kurz, Davidson, and Williams’s age are?  Not when Nellie is trotting out Jackson, Crawford, and Maggette for 35-45 minutes a game.

We all know Nellie enough at this point to know that if we are completely 100% healthy, Nelson would trot a 7 man rotation of Biedrins, Turiaf, Jackson, Maggette, Crawford, Ellis, and Azibuike.  That doesn’t exactly scream out youth.  Look at the game against the Lakers.   Nellie did use a 7 man rotation(not counting 2 minutes and change by Watson and a cameo by Davidson) and that was with Marco(15 minutes) and Randolph(28 minutes)  playing for Azibuike and Biedrins. 

Just because the average age of our roster is the youngest in the league doesn’t mean by any means that we are the youngest team in the league.  Of our primary 7 man rotation that Nelson uses, every player is in their 3rd year of the league.  In that 7 man rotation we see Jackson and Crawford getting the bulk of the minutes.

CONCLUSION: We are not the youngest team in the NBA.