Our Tuesday Teasings piece checks in this week with local flavor, as we peek at the Golden State Warriors for the first time in a long time. We don’t do much NBA coverage in real time, of course, as it’s our least-favorite league of the bunch. With a 15-15 record, the Warriors occupy the eighth spot in a weakened Western Conference, although their sabermetric rating actually puts them sixth. However, we know what counts …

Surprisingly, Golden State is allowing the third-fewest points per game in the West, so it’s the offense that is suffering, scoring just enough to be the fourth-worst unit in the conference. That doesn’t seem to make sense when you have players like Stephen Curry and Jimmy Butler on your roster. Yet Curry has missed nine games already this year, and his three-point shooting (39.8 percent) is impacting his effectiveness.

It’s really age, as we have noted before with Curry: he is in his age-37 campaign, but with all the playoff mileage, he’s closer to being 40 in basketball years. Participating in almost two extra seasons’ worth of postseason games has taken its toll on him, and he was never the most durable of guys, either, thanks to his slight frame and the pounding he has taken from opposing defenses trying to slow him down any which way.

Only one regular—third-year guard Brandin Podziemski—has played in all 30 games for the franchise this year, and he ranks just eighth on the team in Win Shares per 48 Minutes Played. Butler leads the team by a mile in that category, actually, and he’s made it to the court for 26 games, so that is a positive at his age (36). The key to saving this season for the Warriors will be keeping Butler healthy and Curry healthy enough.

One of the nice surprises for this team has been rookie shooting guard Will Richard: he ranks third among regulars in WS/48, and Golden State would be wise to keep developing him as they have. However, as usual, the team is drastically underusing frontcourt body Trayce Jackson-Davis—he is right behind Richard in WS/48 rate but has gotten barely half the minutes that the rookie has received. Something is off there.

We have touched on this before: now in his third season, TJD has put up a very solid .184 WS/48 rate in his brief career, but Head Coach Steve Kerr doesn’t seem to want to give him the minutes (just 12.9 per game this season, a career low). We’re sure Kerr has his reasons, but the math doesn’t jibe with that rationale. For an organization that claims to be on the cutting edge of advanced talent development, GSW is screwing this.

This is not to say TJD playing twice as many minutes is the answer to what ails the .500 Warriors, but it’s one thing, of course. Another problem is continuing to give Draymond Green so many minutes when he’s so mediocre (.024 WS/48, 12th of out 13 regular players on the roster). Like Curry, this guy has a lot of postseason mileage on him, and while this is just his age-35 season, Green always has been a third banana.

At best.

Now? He’s just not worth giving 27.0 minutes per game to every night. Giving more of his minutes to TJD would make sense, as would cutting back on minutes for Curry (31.6) and Butler (31.4); they should be playing less than 30 minutes each game if the Golden State organization wants to make a deep playoff run. Of course, you have to make the postseason first, and right now that could be an iffy proposition. Dilemma!

We get that. We don’t pretend to be “smarter” than Kerr in this way, but we can point out the flaws in the process right now from the sidelines. Because whatever the team is doing, it’s not really working at the moment, and the season is close to being half over soon. Something’s gotta give, folks. Figure it out!