How to develop young players when aiming for the title? This is the question Steve Kerr has been asking himself for three seasons. With Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green, the Warriors remain very competitive, they largely proved it in 2022, by winning the title.
At the same time, the franchise has welcomed talents like James Wiseman, now in Detroit, Moses Moody or Jonathan Kuminga, who has been at the center of the debate for a few days.
Giving playing time to players who are still very raw means accepting the errors and shortcomings that go with them. However, with its “Big Three” and its ambitions, and unlike the Pistons or the Rockets for example, Golden State does not really have the patience necessary for such a process.
Steve Kerr therefore imagined a solution, modeled on Major League Baseball, in order to find the right balance, for the players as well as for the franchises.
“What should happen in the NBA, given the age at which players arrive, is a system like in MLB”, starts the Warriors coach for KNBR. “A player is drafted, he can sign a bonus, and he goes to the G-League for two years. Baseball players need to hit 1000 times before they are ready for the big league. It’s exactly the same idea. Except that in the NBA, we launch young players with big salaries. I think we have to change the way we think about how the league works. »
Training now accelerated in NCAA
Using the G-League as a laboratory to nurture young talent? This is already the case, and All-Stars like Rudy Gobert, Pascal Siakam or Khris Middleton cut their teeth in the G-League at the start of their careers. But currently, this mainly concerns players drafted later in the first round or during the second, and rarely “top picks”. The proof, when the Warriors send James Wiseman at the start of the season to regain confidence in the antechamber of the NBA, this is seen as a regression for the second choice of the 2020 Draft.
We can also respond to Kerr that for years, especially during the 1980s and 1990s, the NCAA fulfilled this role of training young players. Only then, the best rookies had spent several years in university, and many had even completed their four-year course. This is no longer the case for the headliners now, who only stay one year (“on-and-done”) and a few matches at this level.
More and more often, they are even skipping the university box and heading for parallel paths. The Ignite Team or the Overtime Elite have been set up in recent years to best prepare high school students for the professional world. Nevertheless, this system is obviously imperfect and not everyone then has the technical and physical maturity to win in the NBA in their first season.
