Two first-round picks, Mike Dunleavy (the player) and Jiri Welsch, are on board. So is second-round smurf Steve Logan. With Danny Fortson and Antawn Jamison, Golden State suddenly has more players at the ready than a baseball All-Star Game. Or just to be on the safe side, we can call it a tie.

	“	If anybody is ready from this draft, to be in the NBA and the NBA life, it's me. I've been around it my whole life. ”
		— Mike Dunleavy

They're still the last-place team in the Pacific Division for the moment -- the rebuilding Suns will be worse than their 36 wins of 2001-02 and the Warriors will be better than their 21, but a 15-game swing remains a major bite. But the Warriors also just addressed their two most pressing concerns -- shooting guard and point guard. They didn't answer the ballhandler issue in dramatic fashion, because the very available Andre Miller is still in Cleveland, but the versatile Welsch is well-regarded and in the Brent Barry mold of the tall, lanky combination guard who, in time, will be able to handle. Dunleavy can help here as well, and Gilbert Arenas will return with the momentum of a commendable finish to his rookie season.

The response to the obvious need for a perimeter game, however, is unquestioned. Not that it had become a pressing matter or anything, but Chris Mullin was still the best shooter in the Bay Area last season, and he was all but officially retired. Dunleavy knew as much. He would watch the Warriors on TV, while a junior at Duke, and noticed the thirst.

So look who becomes the solution.

The rub being that Golden State provides Dunleavy with a very unique situation compared to the other lottery picks. That weapon will allow him to make an immediate impact even off the bench, if no trade is made and Coach Insertname Here stays with Jamison at small forward and Fortson at power forward at the outset to ease Dunleavy into the NBA world. And, whatever pressure does come with being the No. 3 pick and the supposed solution for the team that finished 26th in the league in shooting and 27th in three-point percentage, is greatly diminished because so is interest in the Warriors in the area.

"If anybody is ready from this draft, to be in the NBA and the NBA life, it's me," Dunleavy said. "I've been around it my whole life."

His father is a former player and a head coach in the past with the Lakers, Bucks and Trail Blazers, and probably a head coach in the future, somewhere. In any other time, Dunleavy Sr. might be a top candidate to fill the vacancy in Oakland, where Brian Winters continues to hold the job on an interim basis and the assistants from last season run the summer league team. Right now, though, the issue of the father and child reuinion at the very time both would most need to establish their own credibility, even when maturity and professionalism has never been in question for either, is an unnecessary element. Things with the Warriors, of course, are already complicated enough.

On his own, the younger Dunleavy is a natural fit. He prefers small forward, but has played some at shooting guard, has been told by the Warriors he might play some power forward during summer league in Long Beach, Calif., and Golden State needs bodies most everywhere. The pressure won't be new. The attention will be old news. The perimeter game is proven. The only other lottery picks who arrive as close to guarantees for immediate success, considering No. 4 Drew Gooden may have to spend time behind Shane Battier and Pau Gasol in Memphis, are No. 2 Jay Williams in Chicago and No. 10 Caron Butler in Miami.

So great an impact is Dunleavy likely to have from the start, compared to the other rookies, that his very presence will create opportunities for teammates. A shooter like Dunleavy will stretch the defense, thereby generating more scoring chances for slashing shooting guard Jason Richardson, who went from 11.3 points per game before Feb. 1 to 17.9 over the final three months, without the air cover that should come now. It's the same thing Williams should do for the Bulls, unlike the series of top picks made much more on spec (Yao, Hilario, Tskitishvili, Stoudemire, etc.)

"It will open things up for me," Richardson said. "I was very excited when I saw that we took him. That was the guy I was hoping we would take."

Said the guy: "I'm sure there's going to be high expectations and all that. But I can't pay attention to that. I sort of have to run my own race and improve as I go along, game by game. But the only thing I have to live up to is the expectations of my teammates."

It's everything around Dunleavy that's more uncertain. Arenas and Welsch will contend for starting point guard. The Jamison-Fortson issue needs to be resolved, at last, because Fortson won't go quietly to a reserve role. Neither Erick Dampier nor Adonal Foyle could lock up No. 1 center for all of 2001-02, although the Warriors did still finish fourth in rebounding. The coaching situation is unresolved. General Manager Garry St. Jean has been taking heat from several directions, between getting blasted in his own locker room as disgruntled Marc Jackson pushed for a trade last season to the countless shots from the fans and media.

It doesn't help that the most prominent speculation is that his replacement would be Mullin, one of the most popular players of the Golden State era. The crowd favorite during two stints with the Warriors -- and a semi-regular at the training facility last season when few were around to see him continuing to work in hopes of getting a call from a contender to help in a playoff push -- Mullie has known all along he still had a job with the Warriors when he wanted to make his retirement official. The exact role was never defined. It could have been as an assistant coach, since he was great at working with young players in Golden State and Indiana, or it could be upstairs in scouting and personnel.

What is sure is that he won't jump at a front-office job, even if it means the chance to stay in basketball in a city he long ago came to love. Mullin doesn't need the money that bad, won't take any job that would mean being a puppet to St. Jean or owner Chris Cohan and won't use his good name and reputation as collateral just for the opportunity, or so an organization can score a public relations hit.

That aspect is far more important to Cohan than he projects. He is more conscious of the media and stung by criticism than he usually lets on, like with the initial wish list during the coaching search a few years back that included Michael Jordan, Julius Erving and John Calipari. He may have gone with Dave Cowens, P.J. Carlesimo and Rick Adelman, but the idea of grabbing the big headline is important. That he whiffed on the chance to so much as get in the game with Jerry West, let alone bring the Logo to Oakland for a credibility infusion, might bother Cohan the rest of his life.

No matter who's making the call in the front office -- St. Jean, Mullin, Brad Pitt -- the coaching situation still has to be addressed again, and Jordan and Dr. J still don't look like good bets. The familiar names remain in play, from Winters to Eddie Jordan to Dunleavy. The elder Dunleavy. The son, at least, already has a future in front of him.

Scott Howard-Cooper, who covers the NBA for the Sacramento Bee, is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.