Harrison Barnes is calm about his place on the Warriors, calm about any recent shooting slump, calm about everything that might elicit the exact opposite reaction out of anybody else.
He’s aware of it all. He hears what’s being said. He measures it, he thinks about it. And mostly, he just stays calm. Even about the prospect of his pending restricted free agency and the Warriors chasing Kevin Durant this summer, precisely to replace Barnes.
Because Barnes has heard his name in trade rumors before, and has shrugged about them every time. Because he’s Barnes.
“It was after my first year, was that when Dwight (Howard) was thinking about leaving?” Barnes said on my podcast last week. “So it was funny, (Andrew) Bogut texted me and asked me, ‘Are we going to L.A.? Because he was going to come here ... “And last summer it was Kevin Love thing, is he going to come here? So me and David Lee were joking about the fact that we might have to buy winter coats.
“You always kind of take it with a grain of salt. We’re a great team. And this is a place where people want to play now ... You don’t really get too personal about it, or say, ‘Oh, my gosh, they’re looking at other players.’ Because that’s how business goes.”
On this historic Warriors team, Barnes, who turns 24 at the end of this month, is the youngest member of the main rotation and also the single lightning rod for fervid debate.
Is he an underrated piece of the Warriors’ puzzle because he’s versatile enough to play big minutes at both forward positions and because he is so willing to defer to Stephen Curry, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson?
Or is Barnes terribly overrated as he heads to free agency — after reportedly turning down the Warriors’ four-year, $64 million offer last summer — because he can be passive on offense and because he probably will cost upward of $20 million a year this summer?
I think the true answer falls safely in the middle; Barnes is very valuable to the Warriors for very specific reasons, but it’s not wrong for management to see if the team can make a major upgrade after this playoff run. But Bogut, for his part, warns about making snap decisions if you don’t know what Barnes really does for the Warriors.
“People are idiots,” Bogut said of Barnes’ critics. “Everyone looks at it, ‘Oh, he only scored four points, he played bad.’ No, not necessarily.
“His defense has gotten a lot better; he’s starting to make the right play for us, with the hockey assist, which we haven’t seen early in his career.”
This was a strange season for Barnes, who started it by jointly announcing with the team that he had not agreed to an extension by the November deadline, which meant that he intended to test the market this July.
Then Barnes struggled through an ankle injury that cost him 16 games in the first half of the season and didn’t have his normal explosion for weeks after returning.
Through it all, Barnes averaged a career-best 11.7 points per game this season and, despite a late shooting slump, still made 46.6 percent of his shots, better than his career average
The Barnes grumbling started again when he shot less than 30 percent in the Houston series, despite being mainly guarded by James Harden.
But Barnes has picked it up in the first two games of the Portland series, making 9 of his 15 shots (including a flying one-handed dunk over a defender in Game 2) and grabbing 15 total rebounds.“Look if he’s on a bad team, he’s averaging 20 a game, you know?” Bogut said.
Kerr doesn’t put it that specifically, but he absolutely insists that Barnes’ value cannot be measured by his game-by-game field-goal percentage. Barnes blends in with the Warriors’ supertalents _ that’s part of his strength and also why Warriors fans aren’t always overjoyed by his play. “Harrison’s not ever going to be as consistent a shooter as Steph or Klay or Mo (Speights),” Kerr said last week. “His shot’s going to come and go. “But Harrison’s value is so much more than just his shooting. His versatility allows us to play the lineups that we do.”
That’s the unique situation for Barnes: Sometimes he can be good when he looks bad and he can be less than good when he looks great.
“It’s funny, there’ll be some games I’ll be shooting the ball well, I’ll be feeling good and coach will look at me and be like, ‘Hey, man, we need you to get some rebounds,’ “ Barnes said.
“And then there’ll be other games where I just can’t throw it into the ocean and he’ll be like, ‘Hey, you’re playing fantastic right now.’ “
Maybe Warriors fans would like it better if Barnes wasn’t so unruffled by everything, and if he demanded a larger part of the spotlight. But for right now, that’s also exactly why Barnes fits so well and so calmly and with so much control.