Without any high draft picks in years, the Golden State Warriors have had to dig deep to find young talent.
Sam Vecenie of The Athletic compared the Warriors’ prospects to the rest of the league by looking at every teams’ crop of young players and ranking which teams are in the best situations with players on their first contracts.
Vecenie included all players on their rookie-scale contracts, and made judgement calls for undrafted free agents or players who have bounced around the league without establishing themselves. He wrote that he included most players within their “first couple of years after draft eligibility.”
That excluded players like Damian Lee, Juan Toscano-Anderson and Marquese Chriss.
The Warriors, who have not drafted higher than No. 28 since selecting Harrison Barnes in 2012, did not fare well.
Golden State was No. 28 on Vecenie’s list. It is highlighted by Eric Paschall, a strong second-round pick, but the other four players Vecenie included have yet to show they can be rotation pieces.
The Warriors’ prospect list is made of Paschall, Ky Bowman, Jordan Poole, Alen Smailagic and Mychal Mulder.
Vecenie wrote:
The Warriors moved on from Omari Spellman and Jacob Evans midseason to clear some cap space against the hard cap they activated when signing and trading for D’Angelo Russell. That left a relatively bare-bones group here.
Paschall was strong in his first season and should at least be named second-team All-Rookie. But I wasn’t a fan of either of their other two first-round picks in 2019, and that continued. Poole and Smailagic didn’t show much. Bowman was solid for an undrafted two-way player, but his upside is an energetic backup point guard.
Luckily for the Warriors, the upcoming draft should result in a boost, and perhaps a significant one.
With the worst record in the league, Golden State will draft no lower than No. 5 overall.
The only two teams ranked lower than the Warriors are the Los Angeles Lakers, who traded their young core for Anthony Davis, and the Houston Rockets, who have not had a first-round pick since 2015.
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