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Yours truly built a bracket around the most important question of the Two-Timelines era. It’s not about who was the best, but who did you believe in the most? Eight ex-Warriors drafted after Kevin Durant left. Three rounds. One crown. I seeded it by emotional gravity: draft expectations, peak belief, and how long you kept the faith. And now the voting starts.
First matchup: the #1 seed Jordan Poole against the #8 seed Alen Smailagic.
Current matchup: the #2 seed James Wiseman against the #7 seed Ryan Rollins
There is a version of this story where James Wiseman becomes the most important Warrior of the next decade.
Joe Lacob saw it. He called Wiseman a “once in a decade” kind of player in November 2020, barely a month after the draft. That is not a throwaway line from a man who does not throw away lines. That is a vision statement. Lacob looked at a 7-foot-2 athlete who was 19 years old, who had barely scraped together 39 college games before the NCAA shut the whole thing down on him, and decided this kid was the foundation of everything that came next.
Dub Nation believed it too, and that collective belief is exactly why he is the #2 seed in this bracket.
When you pick second overall you are not picking a rotation piece. You are picking a cornerstone. And from the jump, Wiseman had the physical gifts to justify every ounce of that faith. The dunks alone were an exhilarating experience. He led all NBA rookies with 84 slams in just 39 games, 20th in the entire league. He shot 51.9% from the field and 76% at the rim, landing in the 89th percentile per Cleaning the Glass. The 84% free throw percentage told you the shooting touch was real if you gave it room to grow. The transition upside and the lob threat. All of it was right there in Year 1, visible, pointing somewhere exciting. Sure he didn’t have a training camp or have people in the stands to watch him play which is pretty insane, but those were the pandemic times.
And then Year 2 didn’t happen.
An injured knee ended his sophomore season before it ever got going. He played zero games in 2021-22. The Warriors won a championship that year and Wiseman watched it from the bench in street clothes. No reps. No rhythm. No chance to build on what the rookie season started.
So when September 2022 rolled around and the Warriors took the team to Japan for a preseason exhibition against the Washington Wizards, the entire Dub Nation energy around Wiseman was basically: okay, this is it. Year 3. This would be his first full training camp with a healthy body. He’s finally going to show us what this whole thing was supposed to look like.
And for one night in Tokyo, he absolutely did.
He went 20 points, 9 rebounds on 8-of-11 shooting off the bench in 23 minutes. Five dunks. He delivered a poster so thoroughly that “WISEMAN SEASON 3 ACTIVATED” was being typed in capital letters across every Warriors forum on the internet. I wrote about that game with full optimism and zero apology because if you watched it, the optimism was mandatory. This was the guy. This was finally the guy.
Then the actual season happened. He played 21 games in a Warriors uniform that year, averaging 6.9 points in 12.5 minutes, and by February the front office was done waiting. The trade to Detroit came on February 9, 2023, Kevin Knox and draft picks heading out, Gary Payton II coming back through Portland. Monte Poole wrote the definitive autopsy in his NBC Sports Bay Area piece that day: Wiseman was the only center in the Warriors’ recent dynasty history whose best skill was his shot and whose weakest skills were orchestrating a defense and setting screens. Every center who thrived in that system before him was built around the opposite profile. The mismatch was not fixable within the championship window that remained.
Legendary DNHQ journalist and GSOM alumni Eric Apricot framed the bigger picture well in his farewell piece around the same time. The front office was running a high-variance portfolio strategy across all their young picks. You cannot look at one pick in isolation and call it a disaster. Big miss, Eric said, but not an incompetent one.
Steph Curry said his piece on it too, eventually. Reflecting on the Two-Timelines era with ESPN, he said: “I think the postmortem on some of the two-timeline stuff is not great. We picked Wiseman, who’s had a rough go. It’s not his fault, but we had an opportunity when we were at the bottom of the standings and had the No. 2 pick, and picked Wise. We thought there was going to be a way to bridge that gap, and it didn’t work out that way.”
In total we’re talking 60 games across three seasons and one championship he watched in street clothes as year 2 was completely missed. The Japan game resurrection that turned out to be a curtain call. That collective hope was enormous, and losing it slowly over three seasons hurt in a way most Warriors draft stories simply do not. That is why he is the 2 seed. The emotional peak of believing in James Wiseman was higher than almost anything else this era produced.
Let’s talk about Ryan Rollins.
The Warriors paid $2 million in cash to move up seven spots in the 2022 draft to take a youngster from Toledo. Joe Viray’s GSOM deep-dive at the time laid out what they saw: a potential three-level scorer with a 6‘10″ wingspan on a 6’3″ frame, passing lane instincts, and a physical profile that a coaching staff could shape into a real rotation piece. The organization liked him enough to spend actual cash to get him. That is not nothing.
He played 12 games in a Warriors uniform. Then a stress fracture in his foot ended his rookie season before it found any kind of footing. And when the summer of 2023 arrived and the Warriors needed to move Jordan Poole to Washington, Rollins got packaged into that deal as the salary filler that made the numbers work. He was not the story, rather he was a part of the fine print. Most of Dub Nation barely registered his name leaving because the Poole trade was the only thing anyone was reading that week.
Washington gave him 10 games before off-court issues ended his time there entirely.
This season with Milwaukee he’s opening eyes, but don’t take my word for it. That is the player who walked into Chase Center on October 30, 2025 with no Giannis to bail him out. Just Rollins, the 44th pick who got 12 games and a line in a trade announcement, laying the smackdown on the franchise and ex-teammates where his NBA story began. He dropped 32 points, 8 assists, and 5 treys as Milwaukee won 120-110. Rollins was the best player on the floor against the team that let him walk out the door as an afterthought.
Milwaukee Bucks blog Brew Hoop’s Jack Trehearne said it plainly this week: “Men lie, women lie, numbers don’t. This is a stone-cold killer.” He is averaging 17.2 points, 5.4 assists, and 1.5 steals on 42% from three. In clutch situations he is shooting 55.6% and ranks second in clutch shooting percentage among the 13 players with the most clutch attempts in the entire NBA.