Why Andrew Wiggins is the biggest surprise of this Warriors season full of surprises
Sports // Warriors Column
SFGATE Warriors columnist Alex Siquig on the long-maligned Wiggins becoming a stabilizing force
Alex Siquig
Andrew Wiggins of the Golden State Warriors dunks the ball over Karl-Anthony Towns of the Minnesota Timberwolves in the first half at Chase Center on Nov. 10, 2021, in San Francisco.
Ezra Shaw/Getty Images
A minor miracle has penetrated the fog of the Bay Area this NBA season. A new reality is slowly starting to take shape. It is charging downhill, spinning around old truisms and attempting to posterize conventional wisdom. In the blink of an eye, even as your hypothetical trade package for a superstar is ready to be declared to Twitter, you've just realized something terrifying. Shock is plastered across your face. You feel unmoored from the world.
Andrew Wiggins is good now.
Well, let's be fair. He's mostly always been better than his reputation. It's more so that he's successfully, slowly shedding the roving stigma of being Andrew Wiggins, a specific dishonor of not exactly living up to expectations, not being the charismatic chosen one to deliver a moribund franchise to great, or even good, heights. Not living up to expectations is something we're all extremely familiar with, but for most of us, our mistakes play out on a much smaller, less viciously public scale, like not filing a column on time or tweeting out spoilers for "The Great British Bake Off." Having to read, repeatedly, year after year, that you don't have the requisite mental fortitude to play basketball is on another level entirely.
NBA fans long since stopped searching for Wiggins' spark. Luminaries such as beloved/not beloved Warrior Stephen Jackson have publicly lambasted Wiggins. And imagine getting called out by Jimmy Butler, the Patron Saint of Having the Exact Opposite Personality as Wiggins. Compound that by losing the support of the legendarily friendly state of Minnesota, the only state to vote against Reagan in 1984.
That would crush most of us into humiliated dust, yet Wiggins never seemed particularly bothered by it. He rarely seems bothered by much of anything. That's the trap he's fallen into because apparently, he's supposed to be bothered and fired up, out for blood, ready to make a statement, however one might track intangible athletic shibboleths like desire and heart and passion. Wiggins' stoicism and cerebral nature is thus mistaken for indifference, for nonchalantly clocking in at work to consistently give you exactly the amount of energy he's willing to give and nothing more.
But this season, after a somewhat rocky start and some regrettable vaccine theatrics, Wiggins is more than proving what we already knew: that he's good at basketball and you still probably wouldn't cast him in a Broadway play. The good at basketball part shouldn't be a shocking revelation, but watching him contribute to a winning team in real time hopefully relegates most armchair psychoanalyzing of his soul to the dustbin of history. This guy was never Andrea Bargnani! He certainly wasn't Anthony Bennett!
In many ways, Wiggins entered this season less as Golden State's starting small forward and more as a competent placeholder that some fans hoped might eventually (with the help of picks, some youth and luck) snag the Warriors a true difference maker who could vault Golden State back to the top of the pecking order. Because Nostradamus doesn't cover the NBA anymore, the Warriors surprised most everyone with an insolent surge of nostalgia for kicking ass and taking names. They (along with the Phoenix Suns) have clawed their way to their own stratosphere of early season success (getting less early every day), looking like legitimate potential contenders to make it out of a fractured and uncertain Western Conference. As the Giant in "Twin Peaks" warns, "It is happening again." Most importantly for our purposes, Wiggins has not merely been a lucky stowaway for this resurgence. He's been in the thick of things.
Most of us wouldn't deny that Wiggins was a frustrating player to watch last season. The entire team was frustrating. A mess of good, bad and so much ugly. Up until recently, Wiggins touching the ball felt like a coin-toss of fate. This season, an obviously engaged Wiggins is wreaking havoc on my conception of reality. One of the strangest moments in my life thus far was realizing I wanted Wiggins to take a contested mid-range relatively early in the shot clock. My brain knew that was not the move, but I was sure he'd make it. I was sure Wiggins wouldn't disappoint me! I'm sure there's a word for that incredible feeling. But it's something we've all been feeling more and more, an insidious shifting of perception.
Wiggins is making an impact and you no longer even have to squint to see it. Mastery of an increasingly smooth Penny Hardaway spin step-back move. Floating up like a wuxia swordsman to grab an offensive board against the Los Angeles Clippers. Erasing Karl-Anthony Towns from existence twice in the revenge game that was not a revenge game. He's scoring efficiently and finishing through contact, something he perhaps picked up from his teammate, the strongest man in the league, Stephen Curry.
Jordan Poole's emergence has freed Wiggins to operate more off the ball and to focus on being a weapon on that end of the court, rather than a clumsy creator. Last season, watching Wiggins trying to make something happen as the shot clock thundered down often ended with you punching yourself in the face. This season, you've probably only punched yourself in the face a handful of times. He's making the right plays, by and large, and unlike some of his more socialist teammates, you rarely have to worry about Wiggins falling into the trap of spread-the-wealth over-passing. In a bizarre but hilarious twist, Wiggins has become a stabilizing force in a starting lineup consisting of a streaky shooting guard, the perpetually fiery Draymond Green and the brilliant chaos that once or twice a game gets away from Steph Curry and just becomes regular, sort of weird and counterproductive chaos. There's more room on this year's team for a man slightly out of step, unafraid of some occasional offensive freelancing.
One of the biggest indicators that Wiggins has embraced Strength in Numbers was when he gritted his way through that first Phoenix game last week, despite having a completely justifiable excuse for sitting out. The All For One, One For All stuff is a lot easier to get into when you're on one of the best teams of the league, but still, I believe what that showed was … heart. The thing that according to Cap'n Jack, Wiggins apparently doesn't possess.
Wiggins provides the Warriors with an alluring counterpoint to the rags-to-riches stories of Damion Lee, Gary Payton II and Juan Toscano-Anderson, plucky go-getters who scrapped and clawed from the margins like feral cats to find a home. Wiggins took the opposite path, handed the keys to a broken kingdom at 19 years old, his greatest achievement being a Rookie of the Year award and getting scared straight by Jimmy Butler during the one season he's reached the playoffs.
Narratively, Wiggins is slotting in as this team's reclaimed Harrison Barnes, another highly touted, athletic dynamo who was never as paradigm shifting as certain analysts predicted. Shaky handle, timely corner 3-pointers, the occasional momentum-shifting dunk in traffic? It's all feeling triumphantly like 2015 again. Wiggins isn't the small-ball four that Barnes was (the Black Falcon was strong as hell), but he's still earned himself a place in whatever this team's version of a Death Lineup will be in the postseason.
Wiggins also came into this year as the obvious successor to Barnes as the designated sacrifice to get one's grubby hands on a superstar/difference maker. (It has just occurred to me that Kevin Durant and Steph Curry together might have been unfair. Sorry about that, world.) In any case, Wiggins probably still more or less occupies that space, ready to be jettisoned if the right deal manifests itself, but each game feels like it's trending less and less in that direction. The failed leading man has become a prized character actor and he's making the most of his time in the sun.
People still may complain about his contract, his "price tag" as it is slightly garishly put. To that I say, sure, OK, but Rashard Lewis made like a billion dollars as the third- or fourth-best player on an Orlando Magic team that reached the Finals. When you are winning, everything else starts to matter less, not the least of which is who gets slightly too much of owner Joe Lacob's money.
Amusingly enough, Wiggins somewhat factors into the Warriors Dynasty origin story, as the crucial piece of the trade that sent Kevin Love to Cleveland, at the request of LeBron James, who was waging his own personal arms race. That trade formed Cleveland's own Big Three, who would go on to clash with the Warriors roughly 700 times in the NBA Finals. While the Cavaliers and the Warriors battered each other year after year, Wiggins quietly went about his business in Minnesota.
It would be some sort of cosmic justice — or playfulness — if the resurgent Warriors were to end up owing so much to the person who facilitated the creation of their greatest nemesis (we can't count Klay Thompson's injuries as a nemesis). Losing the Finals in 2016 shouldn't be the defining moment of the Dubs' dynasty, yet it's what people will remember about the Pre-Durant Strength in Numbers powerhouses. It isn't fair, but it's undeniable that the 73-win season now feels like a pathetic asterisk instead of a monumental achievement. Durant's inclusion only further pushed them into a different sphere of the discourse. It's only now (two Durant championships later, lol) that everything feels back on track, perhaps where it was supposed to be all this time. There's a chance, albeit a small chance, that Wiggins helps the Warriors on their push to drop that final chapter and shift the legacy closer to where it always belonged. That would be a rather nice feather in the cap for a guy with no heart.
This is not to say Wiggins has played himself out of the Trade Machine or that he's ever going to "truly unlock his potential" or that he will eventually emote appropriately enough for the masses, or even that he can maintain his current stretch of consistent play on a winning team. It's just that up to this point of an unexpectedly successful and rather uncomplicated and enjoyable season, Wiggins has done good work for the cause, and when someone does something worthy of praise, they deserve to be praised. So thank you, Andrew. Keep on rocking in the free world.
Alex Siquig (@ThomasAwful on Twitter) is a Bay Area expat based in Baltimore who still stays up way too late to watch Golden State play. He's previously contributed to The New Yorker, Vice, GQ and more.
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