The Warriors Will Carry Fifteen And Dress Thirteen

Golden State has thirteen players under standard contract and two roster spots left. On Wednesday the general manager said he intends to use both of them.

"I think we'll go 15, based on the injuries to Moses and Jimmy," Mike Dunleavy told reporters, per Dalton Johnson of NBC Sports Bay Area. "That puts us at 13 on opening night, available players."

The first sentence is the news. The second one is the story.

A full fifteen would be the first one this franchise has opened with since the 2021-22 championship season, which is Johnson's count. Four straight Octobers a man short. That was never an accident.

The spot they never fill#

Last October, Golden State was one of sixteen NBA teams that started the season without a full complement of standard contracts. Hoops Rumors counted the league on October 22 and found 522 of 540 available roster spots filled, leaving eighteen open across seventeen clubs: sixteen standard spots and two two-way slots. The Warriors held one of the sixteen.

They were also on a shorter list inside that list. Hoops Rumors named Golden State, Houston, both Los Angeles teams, New York and Orlando as teams that "actually can't" sign a fifteenth player, "since they're operating so close to their respective hard caps."

That is the part worth holding onto. The empty spot has not been a preference at Chase Center. It has been a condition.

And a condition is a thing that can change, which is what happened here, though not in the direction anyone would have drawn up.

January 19 and March 23#

Jimmy Butler tore the ACL in his right knee on January 19 in a win over Miami and had surgery on February 9. Both dates are Anthony Slater's reporting at ESPN. When Slater talked to him in late June, Butler could jump and dunk off the left leg and could not yet land on the right.

Moses Moody ruptured the patellar tendon in his left knee on March 23 against Dallas, going up for an uncontested dunk after a steal. Surgery came five days later, on March 28. The club's announcement gave no return date at all. It said Moody would be sidelined indefinitely, would begin rehab immediately, and that his progress would be updated at training camp in September.

Moody had been the best version of himself that season. Sixty games, 12.1 points, 3.3 rebounds, 1.6 assists, 44 percent from the floor and 40.1 percent from three. He is owed $12.5 million this coming season. Butler is owed $56,832,773 on an expiring deal, per Spotrac, the largest number on Golden State's cap sheet after Stephen Curry's.

Dunleavy told reporters neither man will be available on October 21, and that they will not be available in the near term after that. So the roster arithmetic looks like this:

The Warriors are going to carry the maximum and dress the number they have been carrying all along.

What a full roster costs#

The fifteenth spot is a February option, held in October. That is what makes it worth having and it is what makes filling it expensive.

The rulebook is where the value comes from. A team has to keep fourteen or fifteen players on its active and inactive lists through the regular season, and it may drop to twelve or thirteen for up to two consecutive weeks, and for no more than 28 days in total. Two-way contracts sit outside the count entirely. So a club at fourteen can add a man the day the buyout market produces one, and a club at fifteen has to cut somebody first.

Dunleavy knows exactly what that option is worth, because he said so at a different availability the day before, talking to Danny Emerman of The San Francisco Standard: "We have multiple ways to get better during the season, which is something we've done the last few years."

They have. His best example is sitting on his own roster.

Charles Bassey signed five ten-day contracts in 2025-26. A hardship deal with Memphis in October, two with Philadelphia in January and February, then two more with Boston in March, the second of them on March 25. Golden State signed him on April 5, with two weeks left in the regular season, because Golden State had a place to put him. He gave them 10.6 points, 7.2 rebounds and 1.4 blocks in 20.0 minutes across five games. In twenty appearances for Santa Cruz he averaged 20.5 points, 12.5 rebounds and 2.2 blocks. (That second line is a G League line against G League centers, and it is worth what a G League line is worth. The first one is five games in the NBA, which is not much either. Both of them are still more than the roster spot was producing empty.)

The Warriors re-signed him on July 9 for a year. Spotrac has his salary at $2,845,883, his cap charge at the two-year veteran minimum of $2,449,421, and a guarantee date of January 10, 2027. Hoops Rumors counts twelve fully guaranteed contracts on this roster and one that is not.

The names, and the price#

The players attached to the two spots are all the same kind of player. Marc Stein reported that Brandon Williams and Georges Niang continue to draw legitimate interest from Golden State. Jake Fischer reported interest in Dalen Terry, who would most likely get a non-guaranteed training-camp contract. Kelly Olynyk has been linked to the Warriors on and off all summer and remains unsigned.

None of that is a rotation. Four names, every one of them at the bottom of the market, and Dunleavy has not committed to a single one. "We'll have a solution by opening night," he told Johnson. "But nothing in stone yet."

Golden State opens at Crypto.com Arena on October 21 against the Lakers, 7 p.m. Pacific, on ESPN. It is the second straight year the schedule has given them Los Angeles on that date.

Whoever takes the fifteenth spot is signing into a job with a shape. He is on the roster because two better players are hurt, and he is the one who has to come off it the day somebody better comes free. Bassey has worked that job five times for three teams, and he is the one man here who has seen it from the other side. The date on his own contract is January 10.