The Warriors are 36-39, three games under .500, and Brandin Podziemski has been on the floor for almost all of it.

However you want to slice it, whether it’s NBA.com, lineup data, or just watching the season unfold night after night, the same reality keeps surfacing. Podziemski is right there at the top of this roster in minutes and games played. I’m talking ahead of the names the offense is supposed to orbit around; the veterans who were meant to stabilize everything. And somewhere in that, this season quietly decided he wasn’t a supporting piece anymore.

Podz is a 23-year-old guard learning the job while doing it.

He’s out there running point, crashing the glass, AND getting ran over attempting to take charges. Trying to read the game at full speed while the structure around him kept shifting. That kind of workload isn’t something cosmetic that sits all pretty on a stat page. It sticks to you. It says you were here for this season in a way nothing else really can.

Through the stretches where the offense barely held together, and through nights where it looked like something had finally clicked before slipping away again, Podziemski kept showing up in the middle of it.

And the thing about showing up like that, in this particular moment of Warriors basketball, is that it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. This isn’t just a young guard getting reps. He’s openly talked about what those reps are building toward in terms of earning trust and potentially one day being the guy they hand this to when the current era finally lets go.

“When they leave this thing, they got to leave it with somebody,” Podziemski said. “How can I have their trust?”

That’s not a quiet ambition or “I’m just here to help.” That’s someone looking at a dynasty and thinking about what it means to be next. And once you say that out loud and put that idea in the air? Everything you do starts getting filtered through it.

Every pull-up that comes a beat too early or a missed read when a better option was sitting there can fall under the microscope. That’s where the tension comes from.

You saw it again in Sunday’s loss to Denver. Podziemski forces a look, Kristaps Porzingis is standing open, and Steve Kerr’s voice cuts through the possession like he had a megaphone.

Because if you’re going to talk about holding the baton someday, people are going to watch how you handle it now. To his credit, he hasn’t backed away from that. He’s rebounded like someone who refuses to let position define effort, pushed the pace like he’s trying to solve problems before they fully form, and kept stepping into moments that don’t come with guarantees. He hasn’t answered the question perfectly. That was never really on the table. But he’s answered it in real time.

Night after night, in a season that has asked more questions than it’s answered, Podziemski kept taking on possessions that didn’t have easy solutions. These aren’t empty minutes or safe reps tucked inside a functioning system. These are decisions that live with you, that show up on film, that get talked about in ways young players don’t always get exposed to this early.

This is what the early part of 10,000 hours looks like when it’s happening in public.

It’s uneven. It can be frustrating. It doesn’t always reward you right away. But it builds something underneath the surface that box scores don’t fully capture. Availability is part of it, sure! But this goes deeper. It’s exposure to blinding levels of accountability. It’s a young guard being handed responsibility on a team that didn’t have the luxury of easing him into it.

And he kept going.

So when this season settles into memory (and it will, because seasons like this always end up meaning more later than they do in the moment) it won’t really be about the record. It’ll be about who was out there when nothing felt settled. Podz is absolutely out there in the trenches. What matters now isn’t whether he’s ready, it’s that the season already decided he had to be.