The Two-Timelines Bracket is rolling. The question isn’t who performed best; it’s who did you believe in the most? Eight ex-Warriors drafted after Kevin Durant left.
Jordan Poole ran through Alen Smailagic 85% to 15% in the first matchup, and James Wiseman crushed Ryan Rollins 80% to 20% in the second. Now we get to the matchup I’ve been genuinely curious about: the 4 seed versus the 5 seed.
This matchup doesn’t have a clean villain or a clean hero. Jordan Poole carried the 1 seed’s narrative gravity with the rise, the ring, the punch, the fall. Wiseman carried the weight of a No. 2 overall pick and a fanbase that never stopped grieving what could’ve been. Both of those stories arrived with enormous expectations already attached.
Eric Paschall and Trayce Jackson-Davis carry something different. Paschall was a second-rounder who made a Warriors team with 15 wins feel worth watching. TJD was the 57th pick who showed up at Chase Center and immediately looked like he’d been running pick-and-rolls with Steph Curry his entire life. Neither of them was supposed to mean this much to anybody. That’s exactly why they do.
(4) Eric Paschall: The People’s Champion
The 2019-20 Warriors were genuinely hard to watch. KD was gone. Klay was rehabbing. Steph broke his hand five games in and disappeared for the season. What was left was a 15-win wreck of a roster that made the whole fanbase question whether the dynasty had officially ended and taken all the joy with it.
And then Eric Paschall walked in from Villanova the same program that produced Donte DiVincenzo and Jalen Brunson -- as the 41st pick, a second-rounder with no promise of anything, and he just started hooping. In 60 games that season he averaged 14.6 points on just under 50% shooting, made the All-Rookie First Team, and gave Dub Nation something it desperately needed in the middle of a rebuilding nightmare: genuine excitement about a new player right now, not in three years.
The birthday game against Portland lives in a specific corner of the Warriors fan memory. He dropped 34 points and 13 rebounds on the Trail Blazers on his own birthday, and you could feel something shift in how the fanbase thought about him. This was not a project. This was not a development case you hoped would figure it out eventually. This was a guy who showed up and produced, night after night, on a team that had almost nothing else going for it.
When Steph and the veterans came back the following season, things got complicated fast. Bob Myers went on 95.7 The Game’s “The Morning Roast” and said what everyone was quietly thinking: “We were trying to fit him into this style that we play. Steve had him at the five, and then it became a glut there. And so trying to figure out how he could play the four was a challenge. And I think Steve would acknowledge that.” Paschall played only 40 games that year, shuffled in and out of roles nobody could fully define while Wiseman was eating the big-man minutes and the Poole-Paschall bench synergy from the previous season never had time to breathe.
The deeper issue was something Paschall eventually explained himself, on the Entirely NBA podcast: “I was not wired to set a screen, pass up an open shot -- like if I’m open, I’m shooting it. It gave me a false reality of how the NBA works.” He was built to hoop his way through any situation. Steph’s universe required a different kind of intelligence, and Paschall by his own admission wasn’t wired for it yet.
Golden State traded him to Utah before the 2021-22 season for a protected second-round pick, and then won the championship without him. He never found his footing in Utah, signed with Minnesota on a two-way deal and was waived before the season started, and last played professionally for Leones de Ponce in Puerto Rico. Steve Kerr had said in March 2020 that Paschall looked like a guy they could throw into a playoff game and he’d hold his own. By August 2021 he was gone. Crazy how fast things change.
The Paschall window was 100 games. The love was completely, unambiguously real.
(5) Trayce Jackson-Davis: The Quiet Revelation
The 57th pick in the 2023 draft had no business making Warriors fans feel. He was a four-year college big from Indiana who analysts spent years debating, because the NBA questions attached to his game were legitimate ones: too paint-dependent, no reliable outside shot, positional fit uncertain at the next level. The case for him coming out of Bloomington required you to believe the intangibles were good enough to outrun the limitations.
Then he arrived at Chase Center and immediately made the argument for himself.
TJD is the son of Dale Davis, the bruising Indiana Pacers center who dropped 20 points on the Shaq-Kobe Lakers in the 2000 Finals. The basketball bloodline runs deep, and it showed from the first week. In 68 games during his rookie season he averaged 7 points, 5 rebounds, 1.2 assists, and 1.1 blocks while shooting 70% from the field. The screen IQ, the roll timing, the finishing around the rim with both hands were all things that had Warriors fans rooting for TJD almost immediately, quietly, the way you fall for a player before you’ve consciously decided to root for him.
The moments announced themselves. He set a franchise rookie record for most field goals made without a miss in a single game (nine of them) against the Knicks, finishing with 19 points, 9 rebounds, and 3 blocks. He had 112 dunks in his rookie year, good enough for 18th in the entire NBA. He posterized Victor Wembanyama, the No. 1 pick in his own draft class, which is the kind of thing that gets clipped and rewatched and brought up in bar conversations for years.
And by the end of the season there was a genuine fanbase debate about whether TJD was already the best center option on the roster, with a Dub Nation HQ poll wrestling seriously with whether he’d earned a starting spot. This is from the 57th pick!
He got two seasons in Golden State before the front office traded him to Toronto at the 2026 deadline. He’s been fighting for rotation minutes in Toronto, which is a familiar story by now right? TJD perpetually producing more than the situation gives him credit for, perpetually waiting on a front office somewhere to give him the keys. The talent was never the question. It’s always been the fit.
Two players who snuck up on this fanbase and made people care when nobody told them to. Both gave everything they had with what they were given. Who were you secretly rooting for more?