Warriors training camp takeout: Competition for new roles is underway originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area
LAIE, Hawaii – The first day of Warriors training camp for the 2024-25 NBA season on the BYU-Hawaii campus wasn’t so much about individual standouts or combinations of players impressing coaches. Steve Kerr’s point of emphasis on Tuesday instead was structure.
The goal is to create a foundation in Hawaii and build from there.
Kerr of course wants the Warriors to play instinctively. Clarity of roles for new additions such as De’Anthony Melton, Kyle Anderson and Buddy Hield, as well as the young core of Brandin Podziemski, Jonathan Kuminga, Trayce Jackson-Davis and Moses Moody, must also be established. That creates more work perhaps than usual during training camp for a coach who has solidly crafted his style of play over the last decade, leading to four championships, but Kerr is up to the task.
Since his arrival in 2014, Kerr has also not been afraid to lean on others to get the best out of his team. The last example is the additions by Terry Stotts and Jerry Stackhouse to his coaching staff. Kerr competed against Stotts for years when he served as the head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, and already finds him to be an invaluable asset to his offense.
“He was a coach who depended on movement and flow,” Kerr said. “He taught his teams in Portland to play with a lot of pace but with a little more structure. That was one of the reasons I brought him here. We believe in the same type of basketball, with the movement and the ball switching sides.
“He’s been around this league a long time. He has great ideas, he’s a great teammate. I’m delighted that Terry is here and he will really help in that regard.”
Here are three takeaways from the first day of training camp, which featured comments from Kerr, Kuminga and Steph Curry.
Who Starts Next to Steph?
The biggest question throughout camp will be who plays alongside Steph Curry in the Warriors’ starting lineup. Curry had the ideal running mate in building a legendary duo between him and Klay Thompson, but Thompson’s marriage between him and the Warriors ended this summer when he became Dallas Maverick. Curry sees options to take an open slot, with each bringing different characteristics.
“We’re defensive minded like Melton,” Curry said. “You have a guy who is a connector and can put the ball on the floor, create like BP, and obviously me and BP started a couple of times last year. You have Buddy who can shoot, who spaces the floor and is a veteran. We have a lot of options.”
Each player brings a different skill set to the floor and a different level of experience. Hield is entering his ninth season, Melton into his seventh and Podziemski into just his second — but the second-year pro has gained the most confidence as a rookie ever under Kerr.
The Warriors head coach shared a desire for two-way players as the Warriors look to create a defensive identity that could lead to who will be Curry’s primary partner.
While the starting shooting guard position is under the biggest spotlight, other openings seem wide open.
Sermon Contest
Kerr’s four core values, which he has carried with him since the beginning of his coaching career, are joy, mindfulness, compassion and competition. The last part is what is too often overlooked. For a team that went from champions to needing seven games to fend off the Sacramento Kings and then lose to them in the play-in tournament, Kerr is done settling.
He said over and over during the offseason that only two spots in the starting lineup were guaranteed: Curry and Draymond Green. Perhaps only one position can be written with permanent ink.
“There’s competition in everybody,” Kerr said. “It’s not as simple as, ‘Who will be number 2?’ It has to be, ‘Who will be the 5 Who is the 4?’ We know Steph is the 1. But what’s the combination?”
Curry is a given. Shooting guard is a guess. It’s still safe to assume that Green will hold down a frontcourt starting spot, unless Kerr thinks he’s the perfect player to lead the second group and still close out games. Andrew Wiggins, who was the only Warrior not to practice due to feeling under the weather, is being pushed to get as close as possible to the All-Star caliber he was in the Warriors’ 2021-22 championship season. . Trayce-Jackson Davis became a starter at the end of last season as a rookie, and Kuminga naturally wants to be an everyday starter as he seeks a massive payday.
“It’s definitely harder,” Kuminga said of training camp. “We got new guys and everybody wants to start and prove it. It’s great. It’s actually great to go at each other every day and that’s just going to give us that mindset to come out there and play hard.”
Let It Fly
The last Warrior on the court by a large margin was Hield. As everyone else piled into buses for a 10-minute drive back to the team hotel, Hield put up shot after shot after shot with personal trainer Trey Slate.
This is what Hield was brought to the Bay to do: Hit shots and put points on the scoreboard, preferably three points.
In the last two seasons, Hield has made 507 3-pointers on 40.7 percent shooting. Thompson in that time made 569 threes at a 40 percent clip. Despite playing 18 fewer games, Thompson also attempted 178 more threes than Hield the past two seasons. Although Hield is not a player-for-player replacement for Thompson, he will be beyond the arc.
And he is not alone.
“I want to be an advanced 3-point shooting team,” Kerr said. “I think that’s important for us. The big change is, Klay is not here. We were fourth in the league last year in 3-point attempts last year, but Klay probably shot eight to 10 of them himself every game. We’re going to have to fill the void, and that’s going to come from multiple people.”
Thompson, in fact, averaged nine 3-pointers per game last season. Kerr mentioned Podziemski, Wiggins, Moody and Melton in his response. Other players will also have to be part of the equation – a group effort of many.
