James “Nice Guy, Lobster Hands” Wiseman is gone, but the wars over the future will continue along the same path.
and Gary Payton II was en route back to the Bay Area, where he belongs. But much more than swapping a benchwarmer and five recently purloined second-round picks for the joyous return of both Payton II and his joie de vivre, this was a move that revealed quite a lot about the current state of Golden State’s back-of-house factionalism and the tug of war between lofty dreams of the future and the cold hard, mediocre reality of the present day.
We’re officially in a new phase of the holding pattern that has held Golden State semi-hostage for three seasons now, three seasons in which the team has oscillated between barely mediocre and NBA champion. The oft-referenced"Two Timelines" gambit — the ambitiously VC brain spin on the old adage of “have your angel investors and eat them too” — was until yesterday a stubbornly sacrosanct tenet.
Wiseman’s eviction feels like an almost unbelievable turn of events. This is a franchise that typically operates as if it doesn’t make mistakes, especially franchise-altering ones. Light-years and all that. Trading Wiseman — famously selected just before LaMelo Ball, but that’s a counterfactual fraught with other potential landmines — was the smart thing to do; it was even incidentally noble for Wiseman’s career and development as a player.
Let’s not get too excited about killing off one of the timelines. This feels more like a tactical retreat from Lacob rather than a wholesale refutation of the strategy. In the parlance of my favorite show about a magical island that redeems various damaged souls, James Wiseman was “the sacrifice the Island demanded.” The center was the giant apple of the owner’s eye, but even the stubbornly optimistic Lacob couldn’t miss his glaringly bad fit with the team.
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