Andrew Wiggins returned to the Warriors facility on Tuesday. But his return to NBA action will not come until the regular season has concluded.
In an interview with Tolbert & Copes on Wednesday, Warriors head coach Steve Kerr said that Wiggins participated in his first scrimmage since returning, but that he would remain sidelined for the final two regular season games of the season.
“He scrimmaged today and he looked really good,” Kerr said. “Wiggs is one of those guys, he’s just naturally gifted and in shape, but he needs more. It’s not going to come from playing one pickup game. He’s not ready to play in an NBA game, so he won’t play in these last two games of the regular season.
“But he’s getting work in every day, and the benefit of potentially getting into the top six is he’d get almost a week off, at least five or six days. It would be great because we would scrimmage during that time and we could put him back in the mix. The idea would be to ramp him up as quickly as possible, but we have to do it responsibly.”
That’s not a major departure from what Kerr said before the Warriors’ 136-125 win over the Oklahoma City Thunder on Tuesday night, but it’s definitive.
He said before Tuesday’s game, “… there’s no way he’s playing in the next few days,” adding that Wiggins would be evaluated by the Warriors coaches and medical staff in the coming days. The fact that he’s ruled out both games, especially Portland, is new.
Wiggins acknowledged that he was not in NBA shape when addressing media before the Thunder game. He described his conditioning status as “not terrible.”
“I’ve been working out,” Wiggins said. “Obviously the NBA is a different type of conditioning, but I don’t think it’ll be too long before I’m ready.”
Andscape’s Marc J. Spears said earlier in the day on KNBR that he thinks Wiggins “needs to play” in the final two games if he’s to properly shake the rust off and be fully available in the playoffs.
That won’t happen, and it leaves a lot of question marks for the Warriors’ rotations heading into the playoffs, play-in tournament, or both.
Listen to the full interview below. You can listen to every KNBR interview on our podcast page at knbr.com/podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Catch Tolbert & Copes weekdays from 2 p.m. – 6 p.m. on KNBR 104.5 / 680 and streaming live on KNBR.com.