How The Warriors Duped the NBA

Mavric · June 14, 2017

There is a simple explanation for how that works: The Warriors have style. For all the systemic differences between the aspirant 2013-14 team led by Mark Jackson and the swashbuckling 2015 champions led by Steve Kerr, the most transformative was that Kerr’s Warriors have style and Jackson’s did not. And style endures. Even after bringing on Kevin Durant, the Warriors never acceded and played like a traditional powerhouse, grinding teams down with sheer force of talent. Instead, the team continued playing its chaotic brand of offense, with Stephen Curry just as likely to be setting off-ball screens to free up Ian Clark as he is to be working in a high pick-and-roll. The unanimous MVP just in your grasp, the undrafted journeyman springs free for a look. Setup and payoff. The coyote roller-skates off the cliff.

The leading example of the Warriors turning audacity into efficiency is the team’s signature shot: the pull-up 3. When Curry began pulling up from the cheap seats a few short years ago, the reaction was first one of awe, and then one of appreciation: The shots were fearless, and few could make them as often as Curry, but they also worked because most defenses never dreamed that that was a shot anyone wanted. Only recently, as a wave of pull-up 3s has swept across the league, have we begun to appreciate how Curry’s trademark opens up the floor for the Warriors.

But pull-ups are just one of several ways the Warriors have bucked orthodoxy to remake the league’s ideas about smart basketball. Seeking out free throws has been a hallmark of the modern analytic game for as long as Derrick Rose has been harangued for avoiding them. Yet the Warriors don’t shoot very many of them. They ranked just 20th in free throw rate during this regular season, and while they’ve drawn more fouls in the playoffs, their postseason rate was about average among the playoff field.

Meanwhile, the team has moved away from the league’s most popular play, which powers hyper-modern offenses like the Rockets’ and the Raptors’: the pick-and-roll. Golden State was last in the league in percent of plays that finished in the hands of a pick-and-roll ball handler at about 11 percent,1 less than half the rate posted by league leaders Toronto and Charlotte, and last in the league in percent of plays used by a pick-and-roll roll man at 4 percent.2 The NBA is increasingly a pick-and-roll league, but the Warriors have gone in the opposite direction, even if they have their moments of doubt.

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