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It doesn't matter if Chris Paul is named a starter

Based on the Warriors' stars' typical availability, he'll be starting a lot of games regardless.

Sep 27

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Good morning. Let’s basketball.

Two Old Men; Francisco Goya; 1819-23

There is still uncertainty about whether Chris Paul will start for the Golden State Warriors or come off the bench for the first time in his career. The Warriors have a very strong starting five — Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, Andrew Wiggins, Draymond Green and Kevon Looney. CP3 has had a Hall of Fame career and, at 38 years old, has some juice left, based on the Suns’ recent successes.

Steve Kerr addressed this in front of the media this week without resolution, claiming that the team has “six starters” and hinting that, quelle surprise, the 38-year-old may back up the most decorated backcourt of this generation.

How you would get CP3 into the starting five is a real difficult question. The cleanest solution is to bench Steph (LOL no way) or Klay; benching Thompson for CP3 would create such a deep well of potential internal animosity that, in my outsider’s opinion, it would undo whatever good is brought by adding CP3 and then some. You could go small in a couple different ways, none of which involved Draymond Green going to the bench. Green needs to be with Curry as much as possible to benefit from their unique chemistry, and if CP3 replaced Green as a starter you’d have that deep well of potential internal animosity I mentioned.

One way to go small: bench Andrew Wiggins and play three-guard lineups out of the box. Wiggins relies the least on Steph’s gravity and Green’s playmaking, and the second unit is going to need some verve without Jordan Poole. But the Warriors’ defense will suffer if you go this route. You could bench Looney and move Green to full-time center, with Wiggins as your four. That too runs the risk of opening up some defensive holes, especially on the glass and against some of the bigger West teams (all of which are fighting with Golden State for seeding).

The easiest solution, of course, is to preserve the existing starting five and bring CP3 off the bench. But it appears that CP3, a prideful man, has not accepted that potentiality, at least based on his public comments. He could be trolling media members who ask about it; he is, after all, one of the smartest players of his generation and has to understand the limits of Kerr’s lineup flexibility. But perhaps he’s being serious.

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Here’s the rub: it really shouldn’t matter all that much, because the Warriors are probably going to have dozens of starting lineups this season, because their stars are going to inevitably miss games. This only matters if it ends up causing high levels of internal distress. Otherwise, CP3 will get plenty of starts.

By my count, the Warriors had 25 different starting lineups last regular season. The primary starting lineup — Curry, Klay, Wiggins, Green and Looney — had 23 games together, only three of which were after the midway point in the season. This of course was in part due to Wiggins’ long personal absence to close the season. But even well before that other Warriors were getting spot starts.

Poole started 43 games last season. That’s right: the Warriors’ designated sixth man started too many games to be eligible for Sixth Man of the Year. (He was absolutely not viable for Sixth Man of the Year anyway.) Donte DiVincenzo (since dispatched to the Knicks, essentially replaced by Gary Payton II) started 36 games, or half of all of his appearances for Golden State. Jonathan Kuminga started 16 games. Each of Anthony Lamb, Moses Moody, Ty Jerome and JaMychal Green received spot starts.

Also note that while Looney was an opening day starter, he was healthy all season long (82 games played) but came off of the bench a dozen times, including in the final weeks of the season as Golden State fought for playoff seeding. Kerr in 2022-23 was not willing to experiment with bringing Curry (obviously), Thompson or Green off of the bench, and Wiggins has never come off of the bench in his 3-1/2 seasons with the Warriors. (Green did famously come off of the bench for three games in the Kings series after being suspending for putting a footprint on Domantas Sabonis’ chest, but that arrangement was more about Looney’s pre-eminence in that series and the need for bench playmaking.)

This is to say that Kerr may be willing to experiment with moving Looney around in the rotation to make room for CP3 (or Kuminga should he pop, for that matter).

But again: except for feelings, this doesn’t matter, because CP3 may very well start 40-50 games. He would also expect to be available less than Poole, who didn’t miss a single game last season and only six games in 2021-22. The Point God, meanwhile, missed 23 games due to injury last season, including the final four of Phoenix’s playoff run.

There’s also the matter of Curry’s availability. Quietly, he’s been missing games on a consistent basis. He’s actually one of the players most at risk of missing the All-NBA cut-off of 65 games: Curry hasn’t played 65 games in a season since 2018-19. (Note: in 2020-21, he played 63 in a 72-game season.) Steph missed 26 games last season, more than CP3. He missed 18 in the Warriors’ most recent championship campaign. He had a 5-year run from 2012-13 through 2016-17 where he played almost every game. That’s not the case anymore. Based on recent averages, there could be two dozen games where CP3 simply starts in place of Curry … assuming CP3 isn’t unavailable in those same games. History and reason indicate that finding a starting point guard when both Curry and CP3 are unavailable could be a bigger challenge than telling Chris Paul he’s not getting Klay Thompson’s starting spot.

I suspect that as camp opens, Kerr, Curry and CP3 will have a good chat, and the trio will find a way to have CP3 publicly take credit for volunteering to come off the bench to start the season (assuming everyone is healthy), and there will be much praise for CP3 and the Warriors for handling it smoothly, and there will be much eye-rolling from skeptics and cynics, and then someone will be out 7-10 days and CP3 will get in there and we’ll analyze it and maybe someone will talk about whether CP3 should actually start by default and blah blah blah. We’ll get to crunch time of these games and Kerr will experiment with closing lineups, which are largely context-dependent in any case, and maybe this will all work and maybe it won’t and maybe we’ll remember that this was a storyline in the offseason and maybe we won’t.