Once they took care of business by re-signing Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry, Andre Iguodala and Shaun Livingston to multi-year contracts this offseason, the Warriors weren’t left with much room to upgrade the rest of their roster. It’s not a huge problem considering their core is now under contract for at least another two seasons — the combination of Durant, Curry, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson alone should be enough for them to make it back to the NBA Finals — but they still had a handful of roster spots to fill before the start of next season.
One of those spots has gone to former Lakers guard Nick Young, who signed a one-year contract with the Warriors for $5.2 million. According to his agent, Mark Bartelstein, Durant, Green and Steve Kerr all met with Young to tell him how much they wanted him in Golden State, which makes sense assuming they get the Young of last season when he averaged 13.2 points per game on 43.0 percent shooting from the field. In the two seasons before that, Young averaged an underwhelming 9.9 points per game on 35.4 shooting from the field.
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The primary reason Durant, Green and Kerr were likely interested in Young is because he’s one of the better 3-point shooters available on the free-agent market. Young averaged 7.0 3-point attempts per game with the Lakers last season and made 40.4 percent of those opportunities. Some of those were pull-up 3-pointers he didn’t make at a very high rate, but Young proved to be at his best when he simply catches and shoots from the perimeter. He made 43.9 percent of his shot attempts in those situations, helping him rank in the 83.3 percentile with 1.14 points per spot-up possession. In total, slightly over a quarter of his offense came from spot-ups last season.
Despite not scoring as many points off spot-ups as other players in the NBA, Young’s efficiency from those plays put him ahead of the likes of Seth Curry, J.R. Smith, Patrick Beverley, Eric Gordon and Wesley Matthews. He’s coming off a season in which he checked out as one of the best pure shooters in the NBA — not only one of the best out of this summer’s free agents — even though his shot selection is still questionable at times.
Putting that weapon alongside Curry, Thompson, Durant and Green will only give each of them more room to operate when he’s on the court because his defender won’t be able to abandon him on the 3-point line similar to how some players approach guarding Iguodala and Livingston.
Young was an efficient scorer in transition and off screens last season as well. He ranked in the 79.1 percentile with 1.26 points per possession in transition and the 62.1 percentile with 0.99 points per possession off screens. Together, they made up an additional 37.6 percent of his offense.
With the amount of attention Curry, Thompson, Durant and Green command in both the open court and half court, it’s no wonder the Warriors scored more points in those categories than any other team last season. Young fits into that picture by giving them another shooter who can run off their split cuts, for example, while also being a legitimate option in transition when one of Curry, Thompson, Durant and Green draw an additional defender.
While signing Young might seem redundant on the surface, the Warriors weren’t actually as dominant from the perimeter last season as they were the season before. They went from making 13.1 3-pointers per game at a 41.6 percent clip in the 2015-16 season to 12.0 3-pointers per game at a 38.3 percent clip in the 2016-17 season. Replacing Harrison Barnes, Brandon Rush, Leandro Barbosa and Marreese Speights with Durant obviously didn’t prevent them from winning another championship, but Young and Omri Casspi will help them regain some of the wing depth they were missing last season when they had to make financial room for Durant.
Young even had a decent season on the defensive end of the floor with the Lakers. Following an Achilles injury in December, Lakers head coach Luke Walton — who likely put in a good word for Young as a former assistant coach of the Warriors — told the media they’d miss Young’s defense because he usually guarded the opposing team’s best perimeter player.
“It’s not just the shooting we’ll miss,” Walton said. “We’ll miss the defense, the energy he brings and the confidence he and his teammates get when he hits big shots.”
It was a side of Young we hadn’t seen consistently throughout his career, and it’s one the Warriors are expecting him to maintain next season. Being able to make 40.0 percent of his 3-point attempts would make him a great addition to the Warriors, regardless of how he performs defensively, and he has the potential to become a valuable bench player for them if he continues to guard players at a high level. He won’t be expected to do it as often as he did for the Lakers — he won’t get the minutes to do so and he might not see much court time against starting units — which should help him make a difference in shorts spurts like we saw with JaVale McGee last season.
If Young only takes 3-pointers and plays defense next season, he’ll fit in well with the Warriors. He doesn’t need to do anything else to make an impact. They already have all the playmakers they need in Curry, Durant and Green, leaving him to focus on his role as a 3-and-D wing off the bench for as little as 10-15 minutes per game. It might not sound like much, but adding anyone who can take some of the pressure off Curry, Thompson, Durant and Green is a small victory for the Warriors.
Expecting anything more from Young would be optimistic. At 32 years old, he isn’t going to change much between now and next season. And now that he’s gone from being a starter on a lottery team back to a bench player on a title contender, it could help him transition into the next phase of his career as an efficient two-way player off the bench. The Warriors are giving him an opportunity to prove he can help them win another championship, and how he performs could set him up well when he becomes a free agent again next summer.
