Golden State Warriors: Ranking every member of the team’s bench

The Golden State Warriors’ season is officially underway, but there will be season-long questions about the bench unit. Who will emerge as the top bench options this year?

Last season, the Golden State Warriors proudly trotted out their branding team and had them plaster Oracle Arena with banners that read “Strength in Numbers.”

At the beginning of last season, such a slogan for the year seemed somewhat laughable. The Warriors were trotting out a lineup of five all-stars at some point in the season. They would have their traditional bench pieces to eat up minutes of playoff basketball.

But that slogan eerily crept up on the Golden State Warriors, who hobbled their way through six games in the NBA Finals, even giving minutes to Andrew Bogut and Jonas Jerebko in the go-home showdown.

Things have changed.

As the Warriors leave behind their Oakland history and prepare to open the doors to their newly constructed basketball mecca, that slogan couldn’t possibly fit better. If the Warriors wish to discover any success this season, they’ll have to find strength in numbers.

While the national media has focused on and will continue to focus on Kevin Durant’s departure and how the starting lineup will look compared to past seasons, the bench unit will be what feels completely different.

There will be no Shaun Livingston to secure an automatic bucket on a leaner. There will be no Andre Iguodala orchestrating a mob of young players and making them look like capable starters.

In truth, there will only be a handful of names that are carried over from last season to this one. There are openings for various roles on the team. There will be battles to earn minutes throughout the season.

The bench will be ever-evolving.

The front office understandably took their chances on a number of names that could turn out to be complete failures — guys who may never actually make it out of camp but are fun to talk about because they were good half a decade ago in college or overseas.

But the hope is that there will be some diamonds in the rough, that head coach Steve Kerr will be able to flex his coaching prowess and find the perfect roles for each of the players contained on this list so that the Warriors can circumvent the loss of Iguodala and Livingston’s veteran presence.

Before we dive into this list, there have to be a couple of caveats that set the framework for these rankings.

First and foremost, the toughest part in guessing who will be the best bench player is predicting the average starting lineup for the team throughout the season.

Part of what makes a ranked list like this one so challenging is that it demands a prediction of what the starting lineup will be like.

There’s going to be a slim glimmer of hope that follows Dub Nation all season long — that Klay Thompson will go against Kerr’s statement that he’ll be out for the entirety of the year.

Even if Thompson is able to overcome the long recovery process, there will be a number of different guys who might get the starting nod. With Alfonzo McKinnie now off the roster, it could be a trial-and-error process to figure out who starts on a consistent basis.

Who starts at the five will be just as much a question in the opening weeks of the season. With three of the Warriors’ big men sidelined at the current moment, we might see some split starts from several centers on the roster throughout the year.

We don’t even fully know who will be starting where. So, to limit some of that speculation, we’re going to work off of the perceived starting lineup in a hypothetical world where nobody is hurt.

Here’s the seemingly consensus prediction for the average starting lineup and the one we’ll be basing the bench off of: Stephen Curry, D’Angelo Russell, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, and Willie Cauley-Stein.

It’ll be discussed all season long how the Warriors choose to utilize their minutes once they have a fully healthy squad, but we’ll leave that to a future article.

Who knows?

And, secondly, a definition of what we’re trying to define here by ordering the top bench players for the season.

For the sake of transparency, players ranked here will be ordered by their ability to consistently contribute off of the bench, in both statistical and intangible senses.

They will not be judged by their eventual peak — as many of these young players will surely develop substantially — but by what they can offer this season.

They will also be judged by what they can contribute to the team as a whole. Some of these players on this list, while not starters, may play in key stretches that echo the past forms of the Death Lineup.

With the groundwork laid out, let’s get into our list — ranking the top 10 bench players on the Golden State Warriors for the 2019-2020 season.