was very good during the playoffs. I guess all he needed was someone to say, “You play defense out there, or you’ll get yanked!” cough Nellie cough

Just a more dominant center.

Of course last season was us – floor general + freak injuries + moped

We always have nice youngs who get traded for olds :)

but our top 5 can’t match up to other teams there in lies our problem

Most people would interpret “average starter” as “the 3rd best starter,” not “average player on roster who happens to start.” But you’re right, it can go either way. If you want to be taken more seriously in the future I would suggest clarifying your ideas to eliminate ambiguity. And save the snark for 9th grade English.

If he’s one of your starters, your team is in trouble. Davis isn’t close to being an average player, let alone an average starter. He’s a terrible player. Terrible.

Huh? Sorry, but I don’t follow whatever roundabout insanity you’ve been infected with here. Life or death decision? I’d say that you need to explain yourself better, but I’m strangely not the least bit interested in whatever tangent you seem to be flying on.

Actual evidence involving looking at how rate stats on a per minute basis project suggests that in many cases they project very well or underpredict how players will do. “Prove” is a term that doesn’t really mean much in science, but evaluating hypotheses is well within the realm. Rate statistics are reasonably good predictors. You can continue to doubt it at your own peril; you seem to have no qualms at remaining stubbornly ignorant on the subject.

Per 36 are a great way to compare players, but they’re not as great a way to extrapolate a bench player’s potential production if he were given starter minutes.

Data suggest otherwise for many aspects of a player’s game. While it varies some from player to player, in general, short minute players tend to do better than their projections when suddenly given more playing time (e.g. are forced to play more due to an injury to a starter rather than getting more time simply as a result of beginning to play better). The extrapolations tend to underpredict how well a player will do in scoring and tend to be real, real, real close to how they’d do rebounding.

Of course if the player if foul-happy and cannot stay on the court for 36 minutes, all bets are off, but that’s a limited aspect.

No one though anything of him and they paid.

the truth lies in the middle of outside view and the fan’s view.

That’s a lot of semantics, but all I’m saying is that the Warriors have 11 players, 12 if they sign Watson, who are legitimate regular rotation players. I would assume that is a league high. My examples was to ilustrate that any of those 11 or 12 players would make the regular rotation of any team.

The Warriors will consolidate their players before the start of the season, and not signing Watson will probably be the first step. A 3 for 1, or 4 for 2 trade is likely the next step.

My guess is that fans of other teams look at that and see Belinelli and don’t see a significant difference between him and Redick.

Agreed… honestly, I’d almost rather have Redick, as his utility is more clearly defined. But I don’t think Marco was one of our ten best players last year, and as things stand, he won’t be this year either.

They see Turiaf and wonder how it is that we value so highly a guy who appears too short to play center and doesn’t rebound well or score very much.

Many other fans actually seem to covet Turiaf as a bench piece. I’m not saying that that’s proof that he’s good — it’s quite possible that everyone overrates him. But I actually don’t think Warriors fans’ opinions of Turiaf are all that out of whack with other people’s. When fans from other SBNation sites come around here proposing trades, the guy that gets mentioned more often than any other is Turiaf.

They probably see Wright as a somewhere between project/bust because he hasn’t had that much floor time and is being held to the standard of "lottery pick"

Wouldn’t surprise me, although it’s not like Wright boosterism is limited to GSOM… John Hollinger, for one, has been railing about Nellie’s underutilization of him since 2007. I think there are some other guys out there like Brandan Wright, bigs like Speights or Hickson who could produce solidly with consistent minutes. But I don’t think Brandan Wrights are dime a dozen, either.

Curry has played as many minutes in NBA games as I have.

Absolutely true. On the other hand, going into the draft, Curry was more hyped than anybody except three or four players, one of whom may not play in the US next season. It’s not like Warriors fans imagined Knicks fans’ outrage that we took him — he was a coveted guy. Whether that coveting was wise or not remains to be seen.

Outside of the very, very dedicated, even Randolph looks to the common fan as "huh?"

I’d actually think that the super-casual fan would be pretty impressed by Randolph, just because he’s funny-looking and handles the ball well for a big man… fans on other blogs remarked about him even when he was still playing like crap. The super-casual and the very dedicated would probably both notice Randolph. The medium range fans — the folks who look at points per game without much context — are the ones who wouldn’t think anything of him.

We may be deep, but I do wonder if the perception includes some homerism inflation of players and that if you carefully followed most teams, they could make an argument for being deep in the same manner, though outside of the loyal fan base, much of the depth looks like garbage to the rest of the league.

There’s probably a little bit to this. And we might overrate our bench not just because we’re Warriors fans, but because 1) our starters aren’t that great, 2) injuries meant most of our bench got heavy minutes from time to time last year, and 3) it’s largely a bench of young and likeable guys, the easiest types to root for. We probably overrate some of these guys on average. Marco certainly gets more hype around here than he merits, and we’re all expecting more of Curry than logic might dictate; personally, I probably overestimate Morrow’s potential, just because I like the guy so much.

On the other hand, a lot of these guys did actually produce. Morrow, Azubuike and Watson all shot very well last season, and Wright was one of the more efficient offensive forwards in the league… Ronny shot rarely, but decently. The passing numbers of these five range from decent (Buike, Wright) to good (Morrow, Watson) to laughably good (Ronny)… all five of these guys took good care of the basketball. They all rebounded their position solidly except for Ronny. Only Ronny fouled at an untenable rate, and even he settled that down a little when his minutes went up.

Defense? A mixed bag, for sure. Ronny’s defense was good, poor rebounding notwithstanding, while CJ’s was often horrible; the other three factor somewhere in between. But it’s worth noting that the four best Warriors by plus-minus last season were Ronny (4.1), Morrow (3.1), Azubuike (2.8) and CJ (2.5)… while Wright didn’t fare quite as well, at -0.8, he ranked better than Crawford or Biedrins and even with Monta. Plus-minus numbers have a lot of noise in them, but there isn’t another team in the league whose bench outrated its starters this consistently. We did better when these guys were on the floor.

If you put Monta/Jack/Maggette/Randolph/Biedrins up against CJ/Morrow/Azubuike/Wright/Turiaf ten times, I think the latter team would win at least once or twice… I don’t think I’d say that about any other NBA team. It speaks poorly of our starters, to be sure, but it also speaks well of our bench. It features five or six guys who can play sustained minutes at a decent level. I don’t know of another bench with as many.