GSOM Still Angry with Warriors

Golden State of Mind. The gold standard for Warrior blogs. They have created a great community with fantastic ideas, such as community season tickets. The guys who run the site have been loyal Warrior fans for many years, and they clearly care about the team. However, ever since the Dubs traded J-Rich, they have been a tad bitter. Latest example: This random post about how the Warriors are super cheap and don't care about the fans that came out today. The basis for this is the fact that the Warriors apparently have the 25th cheapest roster in the NBA. Even though they are actually over the cap, it's still one of the lowest payrolls out there. For GSOM, this destroys the rationale for the Richardson trade, which was that the Warriors had to cut payroll. A few thoughts on this:

It's pretty much a fact that if the Warriors had wanted to stay under the luxury cap (which most of the NBA does, including the Phoenix Suns, who traded Kurt Thomas for that purpose) and resign Monta Ellis and Andris Biendris next year, that they had to cut payroll. And Richardson was the most easily replaceable of all the large contracts.

GSOM also continues to talk about the fact that Nelson is only going to be around for a few years, and getting and developing young talent doesn't make sense. For them, trading Richardson for Brandon Wright was something that Nelson didn't want to happen. Well, I have a feeling that Nelson might have been told about the Richardson trade before it happened, and would have had to approve of it for it to go through. It was also obvious that during the regular season and playoffs Nelson was not in love with Richardson's game. Nelson needs players who can play defense, rebound, create shots for themselves and others. Richardson could only rebound well, and his lack of ball-handling skills and lack of defense was a negative for Nelson's system.

Finally, this team as currently constructed has just won 8 out of 9, and is playing defense at a level they never reached before. They are loaded with young talent across the board They also have a potential franchise-changing big man in Brandon Wright, which is something they could only dream about last year. And they have the ability to sign and keep all this young talent because of the good cap flexibility they have. Thus, the Warriors having solid cap management is a good thing.

This team is better then last year, deeper and more versatile. The trade of J-Rich allowed the Warriors to discover Keleena Azabuike, and let Monta Ellis do his thing. As good of a player Richardson was, and as hard as he worked for the Warriors, he was a limited player, who had reached the peak of his playing career, and was likely headed for diminished returns. As Tim Kawakami pointed out around the time of the trade, Richardson was good when the Warriors were bad, and not that good when they finally became good. And the fact that GSOM can't get over the trade is a little befuddling to me.