How the Warriors shook up their player development department

SACRAMENTO — The G League season ended in late March. That freed up Seth Cooper, then the Santa Cruz head coach, to shift his focus to the main Warriors team. Steve Kerr has always welcomed his G League staff around whenever the schedule allows. Extra bodies, extra help.

Mike Dunleavy Jr. approached Cooper during the playoffs. Dunleavy was still second-in-command behind Bob Myers, but his influence had already grown substantially and his bigger picture views mirrored that of his soon-to-be front office.

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Dunleavy, Nick U’Ren and Kent Lacob had put in place a player development program over the previous few seasons, making specific coaching hires and essentially creating a new leg of the organization meant to better cultivate all the high-value draft picks they were welcoming.

This, they felt, was the needed next evolution of it. Dunleavy approached Cooper. The structure was eventually decided. Cooper would be the co-leader, representing the coaching perspective. David Fatoki, the Santa Cruz general manager, would be the other co-leader, representing the front office. They’re installing it this summer. Cooper and Fatoki were courtside for both summer league games in Sacramento, the new faces of a player development program the organization is considering a connected but separate entity from the front office and coaching staffs.

“It just feels like we’re kind of taking what we built the last couple years and trying to make it better,” Steve Kerr said.

The Warriors made some purposeful hires the same summer (2021) they drafted Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody. They brought Dejan Milojević over from Serbia to work with James Wiseman and Kevon Looney. They hired Kenny Atkinson as their lead assistant. They grabbed Jama Mahlalela from Toronto. All three had player development backgrounds. Mahlalela was tasked with organizing the evolving program.

But he jumped to the front of the bench before this previous season, leading to more involvement in creating rotations, scouting and strategizing on a game-by-game basis. That generated some time management conflict, pulling Mahlalela in several directions. He left for a job on the front of the Raptors bench this summer — leaving a vacancy on the front of Kerr’s bench that is still to be determined — but the player development shift was already decided on before the departure.

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“There were a lot of times where we would be having a meeting up on the ninth floor (discussing the night’s strategy),” Kerr said. “The young guys would be gathering at the bottom floor and we’d have to make decisions. ‘All right. Who’s going to stay? Who’s going to go down there?’ I think we now have a more clear delineation of the roles.”

This is Cooper’s fifth season with the Warriors. He spent his first two on Kerr’s staff as a player development assistant. He spent the previous two as the head coach in Santa Cruz working directly with Fatoki. Both Cooper and Fatoki raved about their working relationship together and the front office has liked the recent G League results, growing players like Lester Quiñones, who is lighting up summer league this week.

So they’re promoting both Cooper and Fatoki as a tandem. Cooper is no longer the G League head coach. They’re in the process of hiring someone in his place. They’re still ironing out the specifics, but Cooper will be on road trips and behind the bench for most Warriors games but not involved in the night-to-night strategy.

Cooper still intends to attend most game strategy meetings. It’ll help him relay the needed points of emphasis to the younger players. But his job is an on-the-ground long-term approach. He will run the practices and drills and scrimmages and pregame workouts for the younger group of Warriors. They plan to bring the Santa Cruz team up to San Francisco more often to get the fringe rotation players live reps.

“Seth has been so good in Santa Cruz and has learned so much in terms of how to teach these younger guys because they sometimes get five days of practice a week down there,” Kerr said. “With the younger guys, the focus is much different than coaching Steph and Draymond and Klay.”

Kerr emphasized Cooper’s drill work a few times as something he might even implement during the rare times that the veterans are also involved in a heavy workload practice. He likes some of what he has seen.

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“The hardest thing to coach is decision making,” Kerr said. “You know, we call it point-five basketball. Everyone knows that phrase. But it really is a decision making sport and you’re you’re constantly tasked with making a quick decision. Dribble, pass, shoot or defensively rotate, box out. All these things have to be done quickly. And if you’re a half-count late, the possession is destroyed at either end. That’s the focus — drill work that can really accentuate players ability to make decisions quickly.”

Cooper was also a bit untraditional in the way he deployed his Santa Cruz staff last season. He purposefully didn’t assign particular assistant coaches to particular players, as is custom. They’d either work in larger groups or rotate on a regular basis. The tentative plan is to implement that this upcoming season with the Warriors.

“As long as we’re meeting and we’re all preaching the same things and we all know the big rocks that we want to move,” Cooper said. “Because, you know, I might look at something specific on spacing and, you know, a different coach might see something on his pick-and-roll reads. And I think for the players to hear as many really good ideas from different people as possible, that’s kind of the goal.”

This obviously won’t apply to the veterans. Steph Curry will still work directly with Bruce Fraser. Klay Thompson will still work directly with Chris DeMarco. Successful routines won’t be upended. The Warriors remain pretty much a two-tiered roster. The veterans do what makes them comfortable. The youth will be put through the evolving player development program.

It’s fair to question how much success the Warriors have had in that department in recent seasons. They gave up on the Wiseman project at the last trade deadline and flipped Jordan Poole, Patrick Baldwin Jr. and Ryan Rollins — three recent draft picks, one a high-profile developmental win — for the aging Chris Paul this summer. Kuminga and Moody haven’t busted out yet.

Those personnel decisions would signal a de-emphasizing of the future and rapid prioritization of the Curry past and present. But the difference in contention or not next season may actually be the quiet growth of that youth.

Moody and Kuminga are stepping into the all-important third season, needing to take some tangible leap to fortify a bench that isn’t proven beyond Chris Paul and Gary Payton II. Brandin Podziemski and Trayce Jackson-Davis are the new-arriving rookies, neither expected to be relied upon immediately but both are considered more polished prospects and better equipped for Kerr’s system than the Warriors’ recent draft picks. The pressure remains on Cooper and Fatoki’s department to advance the youth.

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“From the outside looking in, people view player development and they want immediate results,” Kerr said. “But to expect immediate results with this team doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. When you draft 19-year-olds and you say, ‘Hey, this is going to take some time.’ It’s easy to say, but then reality hits and everybody’s saying, ‘Well, why aren’t you developing those guys?’ Well, I would argue that we are developing. We just happen to have a championship team that has a lot of vets playing in front of these guys. So a lot of the development is just happening behind the scenes. And we feel good about that development. But it just takes time.”

Wiseman didn’t work out. They took him second overall, he missed more than half of his time with the Warriors because of a tricky knee injury and looked too far away upon return. They pulled the parachute quickly. It’s a mismanaged draft miss that’ll sting for a long time.

The jury is still out on Moody and Kuminga. Moody fell out of the rotation most of last season but impressed the coaches behind the scenes down the stretch and actually muscled his way into the top seven by the middle of the Lakers series. There is belief he is ready for a regular role (though the same thing was being said a summer before). So it’s wait and see.

Kuminga has actually compiled a more encouraging regular season résumé. There have been long stretches where he has looked like a true two-way impact wing in the making. They’ve had him defend some of the league’s best players in isolation and he puts more pressure on the rim than anybody on the roster. But Andrew Wiggins and Payton returned for the playoffs and Kerr stapled Kuminga to the bench, later saying that he needed to rebound better to impact winning at the power forward spot.

It’ll be on Kuminga to sharpen certain aspects of his game this summer and on Kerr to find the right lineups and an increased level of trust in a young wing bursting with talent. But you don’t find anyone in the organization who doesn’t believe Kuminga’s long-term ceiling is still quite high.

“The last thing people remember was him not playing much against Sacramento and the Lakers,” Kerr said. “So we do have to deal with the narrative, first of all. But we’re much more concerned with the actual development, the welfare of the players and how they’re how they’re doing, how they’re handling things. I think both Moses and JK have really come a long way in two years.

“So it’s just trying to reconcile modern expectations with the amount of media attention and daily scrutiny of every player’s production with what’s actually realistic, in terms of how much playing time guys are going to get on a team like ours. I think that’s pretty difficult, frankly, difficult on our players mainly. They’re seeing their peers play a lot more. Then our fans, understandably, they want to see young guys play so they can get the picture of the team clearly. It’s all kind of part of it.”

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There are also the various motives and agendas and opinions flowing within and around the organization, clouding the conversation further. Forget just the agents and family and friends and players and coaches within the locker room. How about the scouts and front office members who pushed for certain picks or members of an opinionated ownership group that are heavily invested in a certain player succeeding?

That’s where Fatoki’s involvement becomes necessary. This is his eighth year in the organization. He started in basketball operations in Santa Cruz. Did some various on court coaching duties down there. Then he shifted to college and pro scouting for the Warriors under Kirk Lacob. Then the last two seasons he has been the general manager for Santa Cruz. The Athletic did a long profile on him last December, which you can read here.

He will still maintain that GM title while organizing and overseeing the player development from a front office perspective, running the bigger picture meetings as an extension of Dunleavy and Kirk Lacob.

“That was the biggest thing, making sure we have the key stakeholders in one place, having someone from both sides manage this in a more full-time role,” Fatoki said. “Myself rolling up to Mike and rolling up to Kirk, the front office’s plans are always in whatever we’re doing player development wise.”

It has Kerr’s stamp of approval.

“Every organization now is so big,” Kerr said. “Since I arrived in 2014, I want to say, if you combined front office and coaching staff — basically all of basketball operations — I’d guess we tripled in size. So you have a lot of mouths to feed. There are a lot of opinions, a lot of thoughts, more scrutiny, more pressure. So I think part of being a good organization is constantly aligning and working to align. It’s not enough to just say, ‘Hey, we’re aligned.’ Then have a conversation once in a while. You have to actively pursue alignment.

“That’s what we’re doing. Literally running player development with a combination of Fatoki and Cooper. One coach and one executive. They’re putting their minds together every single day. And that allows the flow of conversation and information to be really free at all levels of the organization. It allows for much easier conversations as to why somebody is playing or why somebody else isn’t playing, what we’re looking at as a coaching staff or what the front office is looking at roster wise. So I really like it as a format and a natural extension of what we’ve built the last couple years.”

(Top photos: Noah Graham/NBAE; Art by John Bradford / The Athletic)

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