Ranking all of Steph’s teammates: #86 — Marcus Derrickson

On June 25, 2009, the Golden State Warriors drafted Steph Curry. Ten years and 16 days later, the Oklahoma City Thunder traded Russell Westbrook to the Houston Rockets. With that move, Curry moved to second in the NBA for longest tenure with his current team. The only player he sits behind is Udonis Haslem, though that feels like a technicality. At this point, Haslem is essentially an assistant coach for the Miami Heat, having appeared in just 43 games and played fewer than 300 minutes over the last four seasons combined.

During his time in the Bay Area, Curry has had 106 teammates who have appeared in at least one game. Some played in exactly one game, while others played in hundreds. Some never actually played in a game that Curry was active for, while others formed historically great partnerships with him.

And I’m ranking all 106, one a day, over the course of three months.

Players are ranked — and stats are shown — based only on their time as Curry’s teammate. How good/bad they were in other organizations doesn’t matter. How good/bad they were on pre-2009-10 Warriors teams doesn’t matter.

To see all of the rankings thus far, you can click on the “Ranking Steph’s teammates” tag at the top of the article.

#86 — Marcus Derrickson

Photo by Noah Graham/NBAE via Getty Images

Games: 11 (87th out of 106)
Points per game: 4.2 (T-72nd out of 106)
Rebounds per game: 1.2 (T-88th out of 106)
Assists per game: 0.2 (T-97th out of 106)

I mean the following as no disrespect: Marcus Derrickson played for the 2018-19 Warriors, which was a really, really, really good team. In 2019-20 he played in Summer League for the Sacramento Kings, a bad team, and when they didn’t want to keep him around, he signed an Exhibit 10 contract with the Atlanta Hawks, a really, really bad team. And then they cut him from their G League team.

It’s not a great sign when you’re cut from the G League affiliate of one of the league’s worst teams.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Derrickson just needed to get out of Golden State and find a place that had more available minutes. That may eventually prove true, but it certainly didn’t happen this year, as Derrickson failed to log a single minute with an NBA club.

His 11-game tenure with Steph Curry and the Warriors was odd. After being a part of the Warriors 2018 Summer League team, Derrickson earned a two-way contract. After the success the Warriors had had the year before — when Quinn Cook was on such a deal — fans were fairly optimistic. Here was a rookie with the Draymond Green style of body that made you think he could guard just about any position.

He had a nice three-point stroke in college, so it was easy to think he had, essentially, Eric Paschall written all over him. Minus the fact that Eric Paschall was still in college at the time. Ignore that detail.

If you squint, you can still see that player inside him. Derrickson shot 50% from beyond the arc in his limited NBA run, making half of his 20 triples. In a much larger sample, he shot 41.9% from deep with the Santa Cruz Warriors. That’s a great number.

But his positionless frame ended being less the type of strength that has defined Draymond’s career, and more the type of weakness that allowed scouts to overlook Draymond and have him fall to the second round. All those fears were realized in Derrickson’s game.

He was too small to effectively guard power forwards and centers, but too slow to guard wings. He didn’t rebound the ball well, constantly getting bullied on the block, but didn’t do enough offensively to be a perimeter player.

As a result, he struggled mightily on defense, though, in his uhh . . . defense . . . most rookies do. But he struggled mightily on offense as well.

He’ll surely try again to catch on with an NBA team in 2020-21, and hopefully he does. With a little development, maybe he’ll turn into a nice NBA player. But he was raw as Steph Curry’s teammate, and ends up #86 on the list.