Andrew Wiggins has been enjoying arguably his best season since he came into the NBA as he is set to make his All-Star game debut in February. Wiggins was chosen as a starter in the Western Conference, which led to a bit of a backlash from fans and media members alike, but it cannot be denied that he has been instrumental to the success the Golden State Warriors have enjoyed this season.
In their recent history, the Warriors have managed to build excellent rosters around their core consisting of the Splash Brothers and Draymond Green. Harrison Barnes was an excellent complement to the trio during their first NBA championship in 2015 and then the addition of Kevin Durant in 2016 made them nearly unbeatable. Richard Jefferson has compared the impact of Andrew Wiggins to those two players, describing him as a mix somewhere between HB and KD (via TalkBasket.net).
“I think for me when I look at this Warriors team when you go back and look at the 2016 team, they had Harrison Barnes as that kind of the third scorer Harrison struggled in one of the postseasons, then they replaced him with Kevin Durant,” Jefferson said on ESPN’s NBA Today.
“That’s an absolute different problem that was never going to be addressed. And so then when you have Andrew Wiggins, now Wiggins is kind of like an in-between Harrison and KD. With all due respect to my guy HB, he’s a little bit more aggressive offensively and more athletic but he’s not quite Kevin Durant.
“So if Wiggins plays like that, everything else is going to be fine. If you’ve got a third-tier scorer that is a started in the All-Star Game, they still don’t have Draymond, they were still able to win the game only shooting 39 percent, that was my biggest takeaway is that if Steph can struggle and all that can happen and they can still win that game, the Warriors are going to be a problem fully loaded.”
Wiggins has averaged 18.3 points this season, not close to the sort of output that Kevin Durant managed with the Warriors, but still enough to earn him widespread admiration across the league. It’s not the highest tally of his career either, meaning that he still also has the potential to unlock another gear when they need him to. The Warriors are a comfortable 2nd seed in the Western Conference, and they will be aiming to make another run to the championship following Klay Thompson’s return.
