Poole: Brace for Warriors ugliness that even Steph can't prevent

The Warriors' dreary state was vividly illustrated Monday night, when they stepped onto their home court with a show of energy, determined to rinse a 0-5 road trip, and needed four minutes of perfect shooting to do it.

If Stephen Curry or Andrew Wiggins or Draymond Green miss any of their combined shots in the final 4:02 against the Kings, the Warriors likely slink into the locker room with full-scale emotional torture.

Instead, Curry made all four, Wiggins made both and Green made the only one he took. The 7-of-7 closeout and an uncalled foul on Klay Thompson in the final second spared the Warriors from the misery that would have come with six consecutive losses -- with five administered by sub-.500 opponents.

Yes, it’s early for the Warriors. But it’s undeniably ugly.

Though there is plenty of time for the Warriors to recover from a discouraging first 11 games, 47 points from Curry and an impeccable four minutes merely overcame -- but did not vanquish -- the turmoil within. The fault lines were as visible in victory as they had been in the five losses.

“That fourth quarter was just win-at-all-costs mode,” Curry said after the game. “We were just trying to make plays. Thankfully, shots went down. We needed some results. We’ve still got some issues. We’ve still got to play better.”

Curry is scoring wonderfully, averaging 32.6 points per game while putting up 50-40-90 shooting percentages. Wiggins has been good on offense, too, averaging 18.2 points, and shooting 47.9 percent overall and 40.3 percent from deep. Green’s scoring has ticked up, and his defense has been good. Klay Thompson is struggling more often than not; he’s the team’s only player shooting below 40 percent.

Not to dismiss the bad overall defense and the worse transition defense -- which we’ll get to shortly -- but the Warriors’ biggest problem has been a lack of production and efficiency from reserves, beginning with Jordan Poole. When the offense is humming, they can outscore most any team.

Poole has not found his 3-point shot (30.1 percent) and is having difficulty finding a balance between his scoring and his playmaking; he seems to pick one and ride it most of the game. The result is indecision best reflected in an alarming number of turnovers. His last six games: 24 assists, 23 turnovers.

“He’s getting the best defender each night,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said Wednesday, contrasting it with last season, when Poole started alongside Curry. “He was getting maybe the third-best defender on the perimeter. Now, he’s getting the very best because teams know he’s the key to our second group. He’s facing more high-level defenders and more game-planning. And, frankly, we’ve had a lot of different rotations out there with him. We haven’t found our footing as a team, rotation-wise, and that hasn’t helped Jordan. We need to find some consistency in terms of the combinations of guys he’s playing with.”

Poole will adjust because he’s too talented to continue down this path. But Kerr’s acknowledgement of the inconsistent rotations is important. Do the Warriors have the right players on the bench to get the most out of JP and, therefore, the second unit?

No. They don’t. At least right now.

That’s what Kerr’s new rotation, unveiled Monday night, was supposed to address. James Wiseman, a liability more often than an asset, was out. So was JaMychal Green, the only available veteran off the bench whose floor-spacing attributes have yet to appear. In their place, minutes went to forward Jonathan Kuminga and two-way wing Anthony Lamb.

The switch was a disaster, torched to ashes in a matter of minutes by the Kings. Kuminga was minus-17 in nine minutes, Lamb was minus-7 in 16. Golden State’s reserves were outscored 49-15.

The Warriors rank second in bench turnovers, averaging a whopping 6.9 per game, according to StatMuse.com, which has them 28th in 3-point shooting percentage (28.8 percent) with a collective plus-minus of minus-433, an average of 39.7 each game -- by far the worst in the NBA.

It’s unreasonable to believe the starters, no matter how well they play, can offset such dreadful play from their teammates on the bench. After Curry and Thompson each logged 38 minutes against Sacramento, while Wiggins was pushed to 40, Kerr conceded those figures and Curry’s insane production are not “sustainable.”

Kerr is correct, and Curry doesn’t disagree.

“It’s part of our story right now,” he said Monday night. “But it’s something that we need to correct if we really want to be a serious team that’s going to try to be who we say we are. Whatever it takes to make those changes as a group, we’ve got to do that.”

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Perfection in the clutch bought the Warriors a reprieve Monday night. Closing a game with 7-of-7 shooting almost never happens in the NBA, and can’t be expected to happen again for the Warriors this season.

As Kerr and his staff diagnose and experiment, they will realize the bench is built to fail more often than it succeeds. With such a lack of experience, this will continue indefinitely, unless rotational explorations somehow strike gold.

In the wake of the cathartic victory, we can conclude that even Curry can’t push this boulder uphill, and that Wiseman is more of a symptom than the problem.

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