With A Historically Large Payroll, The Golden State Warriors Need To Go Cheap

As seen in our recent breakdown of the history of the NBA’s luxury tax, the Golden State Warriors are willing to spend money on keeping their title window open. Indeed, they have spent more than anyone else, ever – their $170,331,194 tax payment alone last year was larger than the cumulative amount every team combined paid in any prior season except one, let alone the salary costs paid on top.

However, as was also seen in the decision to not match the Portland Trail Blazers’ offer to important combo guard Gary Payton II, even the Warriors have their limits. An offseason of tweaking the fringes of the team has not seen them take any steps to break up the expensive core, and the important yet expensive re-signing of starting center Kevon Looney has seen them push their payroll to $184.4 million already, with another nine-figure tax bill coming up.

Bringing in Donte DiVincenzo on a $4.5 million contract was a move intended to take many of the minutes and much of the responsibility of the departing Payton, as well as Damion Lee, whose status as Stephen Curry’s brother-in-law is seemingly no longer sufficient currency. Lee had been with with the Warriors for almost four years and become a decent player off the bench, but struggled in the playoffs and turns 30 in October, not the ideal age for a team looking to youth to keep open its competitive window. Meanwhile, before his injury-plagued year last season, DiVincenzo at his apex was a skilled and versatile player with some dynamic offensive abilities, which, if he gets back to it, should be a significant talent infusion and good addition off the bench.

However, beyond the drafting and signing of Patrick Baldwin, and the further selection of a couple of second-rounders (Ryan Rollins and Gui Santos), DiVincenzo is also the team’s only addition so far. Nine players from last year’s champion Warriors hit free agency this month, and most have already moved on – Lee has gone to Phoenix, Payton moved to Portland, Otto Porter went to Toronto, Juan Toscano-Anderson went to the Lakers, Nemanja Bjelica returned to the EuroLeague, and Andre Iguodala has gone to a lovely farm upstate.

As a result, there are spots still to fill, and not much money to do it with. Even with all that expenditure last season, owner Joe Lacob is openly bristling about his team’s tax penalty, while advocating for some recognition about how the team’s competitive window was built mostly through their own drafted players. In tandem, then, the Warriors seemingly want to round the roster out cheaply while also keeping things in-house.

With this in mind, enter Quinndary Weatherspoon. Or rather, re-enter.

Weatherspoon is not a Warriors draft pick, but he was with the team last season. He signed initially an Exhibit-10 deal in preseason, and later was called up from their G-League affiliate Santa Cruz on a ten-day contract, before eventually sticking around on a two-way deal. Weatherspoon had spent two years previously with the San Antonio Spurs (who had drafted him 49th overall in 2019) on another two-way deal, and thus is a three-year NBA veteran already; while this does not disqualify him for yet another year of two-way salary (which players can sign up to the end of their fourth year), he will be angling for a full NBA contract.

In his three NBA seasons to date, Weatherspoon has only managed 272 spot minutes over 42 contests, almost none of which have come outside of garbage time. Yet in his time in the G-League and four years at Mississippi State, he has shown himself to be an athletic and feisty point-of-attack defender on opposing ball-handlers, and someone who will get out, run the court and crash the glass like a frontcourt player despite standing 6’3. If that brief resume sounds somewhat like that of Payton, it was meant to, and while Payton is bigger, better and older than Weatherspoon, their similar styles of play (even down to the mediocre outside shooting) tease as to what may be possible for Weatherspoon if entrusted with a similar role.

Further to this, the Warriors could get financial breaks from signing their own second-round picks. In NBA luxury tax calculations, rookies or sophomores who sign minimum salary contracts are counted differently; the minimum salary of a two-year veteran is used in place of their actual salary in tax and apron calculations.

This prevents teams from saving on tax bills by signing cheap youngsters, thereby protecting the employability of veterans. Therefore, while signing a rookie to a one-year minimum deal would cost the team $1,017,781 in salary, the contract would count as $1,836,090 in the calculations for how far over the team was, and the assessed penalties would also be levied against that latter amount.

However, the exception to this rule comes when that young player is signing as a draft pick. Under that circumstance, their contracts are counted as normal – if signing a draft pick to the minimum salary, the $1,017,781 figure is used for both salary and tax. And when paying a $6.5-to-$1 repeater tax rate on every dollar spent, that $818,309 difference essentially becomes a $5.3 million difference.

With this in mind, there is incentive for Golden State to pad out the roster further with their own unsigned picks. And as of right now, the Warriors still hold the right to six of them.

Not all are relevant. For instance, Mladen Sekularac was the 56th pick all the way back in 2002, whose playing career was ended prematurely due to injury and who has been coaching for over a decade. Lior Eliyahu – the #44 pick back in 2006, whose rights were acquired from the Minnesota Timberwolves as the required bookkeeping returning “asset” in the summer 2019 salary dump of Shabazz Napier and Treveon Graham – never really fit the NBA style with his finesse game based on floaters and retired in 2020. He is not joining now either.

Another former Spurs pick, Cady Lalanne (selected 55th overall in 2015 and acquired in the 2021 Marquese Chriss salary dump) is still playing, splitting last season between South Korea and Spain and always being around the double-double range. Yet while he is a good player, a 30-year-old grounded 6’9 rebounding center with limited defensive range does not offer much to the NBA as it is now constructed.

Of the Warriors’ own second-round picks, the team intends to sign Rollins once he is recovered from injury, making either him or Weatherspoon their second two-way contract alongside undrafted rookie Lester Quinones (a similar player to Rollins in some respects, but who has the added job security that comes from being James Wiseman’s former college roommate). Santos meanwhile is not going to join the big league team this offseason, selected as a draft-and-stash in need of experience, though a stint with Santa Cruz may be on the cards.

This then leaves Justinian Jessup, Golden State’s 2020 second-round pick out of Boise State (a pick acquired from the Dallas Mavericks in the trade of former free agency steal Willie Cauley-Stein, and who was just with the team in summer league. A movement shooter, Jessup struggled in that competition as off-ball scorers often do, given that the format is much more conducive to ball-handlers dominating possession in the half court and raw athletes able to capitalise on live-ball turnovers. Nevertheless, he has had a couple of decent seasons in Australia since being drafted, posting just shy of 13/4 in back-t0-back campaigns, and while he needs to continue to level up as a shooting specialist if he is going to make it in the NBA as one (hitting 34.9% across those two seasons down under), he has a chance if he can do that.

Once it became apparent that retaining Payton became prohibitively expensive – and, given the choice between he and Looney, they rightly chose Looney – the Warriors had a checklist of things to achieve with their bench. They needed some dynamicism and playmaking on the wing, some defense in the backcourt, and, just like every team, they could use some additional shooting depth. All of this also needed to come without costing too much. And perhaps it can. DiVincenzo’s good-value addition takes care of a lot of it; Weatherspoon can perhaps do a decent Payton impression on whatever deal he re-signs for. And if Jessup adds a few percentage points to his shot, they could go three for three.