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Former Golden State Exec admits to tanking

Jack Strop

Jack Strop

Well-Known Member
Hawks GM says the Warriors tanked the season before drafting Harrison Barnes
Travis Schlenk, a former Warriors exec, told CBS Sports' Bill Reiter that Golden State tanked to land a lottery pick
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https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/hawks-gm-says-the-warriors-tanked-the-season-before-drafting-harrison-barnes/

The Warriors have built one of the NBA's most dominant teams ever, but they had to go through some down years first to reach that point. Every team builds in different ways, but right now the most controversial is tanking. The NBA has taken steps to curb tanking and even changed the lottery.

It turns out that even the Warriors tanked a little bit on their way to the title. CBS Sports' Bill Reiter sat down with current Hawks general manager, and former Golden State assistant GM Travis Schlenk to discuss his philosophy on drafting. During their discussion, Schlenk admitted that Golden State had tanked the season before drafting Harrison Barnes when they shut down an injured Stephen Curry for the remainder of the season and traded Monta Ellis.

"Early in my days in Golden State we were not good. The year we drafted Harrison at seven, our first-round pick was protected 1-7. We made a decision halfway through that year to trade Monta Ellis, who was our best player at the time, for an injured Andrew Bogut who we knew wouldn't play. We made that deal knowing two things.

One, we never had a center in Golden State, when I was there anyway. With eyes on the future if we can get him healthy, get him back, we shut Steph down at the time. We knew we had to fall into those bottom seven spots to get our pick and that was really important to us."
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And oops on the typo in the thread title. [fixed by Jason :)]
 
I remember that team trotting out Charlie Jenkins, Jeremy Tyler and Mikell Gladness night after night - three guys who had no business in the league let alone starting for an NBA team.

Jenkins was my favorite - a shooting guard that had range to maybe the top of the key.

But in the end, look what they got:

They shut down Steph Curry which seemed to cure his re-occurring wrist problem.

They traded their best player which cleared the PG spot for Curry and got them an injured Bogut who ended up being the glue guy on their first championship team.

The tank got rookie Klay Thompson about 15-20 shots per game who turned around and became one of the best pure shooters in the league

And they got Harrison Barnes.

The tank was a disgrace but it set them up for a lot of success in the future.
 
They started dominic McGuire at point guard in a game I went to... I could have written the story then
 
candrew said:
The tank was a disgrace but it set them up for a lot of success in the future.
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It was only a disgrace if you hate brilliant team management. Even I, who defended them at the time, couldn't have imagined things would turn out this well for them.

The really funny thing is, that they really didn't even do a good job tanking, because they almost lost that pick to a coin toss. I remember that game they won against Denver with their water boy playing PG for them. Funny stuff.

Oh yeah, can't forget the part about how tanking creates a losing culture that teams never pull out of. Idealists really hate it when the world doesn't work the way they think it should.
 
The worst thing about it, was that Jazz fans were so obsessed with complaining about GS not playing fair, they were distracted from the terrible, horrible, disastrous decision to chase an 8th seed with a team that had treadmill as their ceiling. Some people here actually thought that crappy team had a chance to beat San Antonio.

That Utah team was so far out of their league it was disgusting.
 
This was pretty clear in the last game of that season, when they all but quit playing in the 4th quarter.
 
So Jazz didn't get Barnes with the 7th pick. Had Utah drafted Barnes, they wouldn't have had the extra pick to trade up for Burke the next year and may have had to settle for Giannis or likely Schroeder (if drafting for desperate need at PG).
 
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Jack Strop said:
So Jazz didn't get Barnes with the 7th pick. Had Utah drafted Barnes, they wouldn't have had the extra pick to trade up for Burke and may have had to settle for Giannis or likely Schroeder (if drafting for desperate need at PG).
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I think we packaged it with our pick to get Trey Burke.
 
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