PHOENIX — Just as it wasn’t the primary factor in Golden State’s 10-2 start to the season, Steve Kerr’s novel experiment with a 13-man rotation isn’t the main reason for the team’s current losing streak.
But four consecutive losses, including shortcomings to the Nets and Spurs, calls for some self reflection. It’s too early for a full audit, and wholesale changes aren’t imminent, but the first thing to address is the rotation — and the Warriors appear poised to tweak it.
“We’ve got to adapt and adjust,” head coach Steve Kerr said after the Warriors’ 113-105 loss.
“If things aren’t working, which obviously we’re in a bit of a funk, we’ve got to think about the rotation and what we’re going to do with it. I like all these guys. I believe in all of them. But we have to do what’s right to help us win a game.”
Kerr and the Warriors are confident they have at least 12 healthy, NBA-caliber players. Their theory was that by playing all of them, they could ramp up the defensive intensity over the course of 48 minutes and wear teams down. That the professionals in the locker room might not be perfectly content with their roles, but they’d buy in. That nobody would complain while the team won games. That it would prepare them for the inevitable attrition of a season.
It all went according to plan for a month. Then the current slide arrived.
“You want it to work, you want it to prove itself correct,” Steph Curry said of the strategy. “We’re on a four-game losing streak, so you have to make adjustments, whatever that means.”
Nobody within the Warriors ever pretended that playing so many players would be easy. They’ve repeatedly talked about how no one has done it before, and that it likely won’t last a full 82-game season. Now Kerr said he and the coaches will talk in the next couple days about cutting down.
Players jostling in and out of the lineup might struggle to find a rhythm. The coaching staff might not be able to determine, on the fly, whose night it is if they’re only playing in fleeting bursts. The Warriors have a lot of players who are great with certain other teammates, and don’t play as well next to others, which complicates substitution patterns.
On Saturday, Kerr played 13 players in the game’s first 14 minutes. Pat Spencer got off the bench before Moses Moody, Kyle Anderson and Lindy Waters III. Moody and Anderson didn’t play in the second half, finishing with two and seven minutes, respectively.
Kerr was searching the entire night. When he’s cycling through players like that, he’s looking for guys playing with what he calls force, energy, and juice. One way that materializes is communicating on defense, and that was one of Golden State’s issues against Phoenix.
Shuffling through options cascades into players having inconsistent roles, even within a game. Last week against Brooklyn, Moody scored 15 points in the first half, but only played four minutes the rest of the way.
“It’s hard as hell, no two ways around it,” Curry said. “Coach’s job is to make those tough decisions, it’s our job to help him. If you’re not playing, don’t pout, don’t bring the locker room down. It doesn’t help anybody, including yourself. Hopefully we turn the ship around and everybody’s happy again.”
No one has complained about their particular role on the record, and Moody in particular is always mature about his fluctuating role. But given the way his minutes have waned recently, he could be a candidate to get elbowed out even more.
Kerr said he wants to get Brandin Podziemski and Jonathan Kuminga more minutes with Curry and Draymond Green, which would also shuffle things around. Starting Podziemski, like the Warriors did against the Suns, solves one of those problems, but also may require Golden State to play Pat Spencer as a backup point guard.
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That’s adding, not subtracting, the rotation. And it could become even more like a Jenga tower.
“We’ve been really looking carefully at the combinations that we play, game to game,” Kerr said. “And we have a lot of options. That’s not always an easy thing. Sometimes you have too many options and you’re trying to mix and match. Trying to avoid playing certain guys together. Trying to play other guys together. And so it gets harder the more people you’re playing.”
The Warriors may not immediately slice the rotation, though. Kerr might script it out more than it currently is, so players have a better idea when they might be called on, who they’re grouped with and what’s asked of them.
“We are a unique team, it’s a unique situation,” Curry said. “Do we need to shorten it? We probably need to be a little more predictable on a night-to-night basis so guys can get a little bit of a rhythm. Does that shorten it (by) one or two guys? Maybe.”
Earlier in the season, Curry said that to play a 12 or 13-man rotation, everyone in the locker room needs to have “healthy egos.”
That’s not as vital when the team’s racking up wins. But however Kerr decides to turn the dials, healthy egos will be crucial in the coming days.
“We talked about it at the beginning of the year,” Kerr said. “When you’re winning, everything’s great. ‘This is great, we’re playing all these people, everyone’s contributing.’ As soon as you lose, you’re going to have some guys pissed off…Four games ago, we’re on top of the world and everybody’s happy, now we’ve lost four in a row and everybody’s pissed. It’s all part of it.”
