A Brave New Ballgame

A Brave New Ballgame:

How the Warriors continue to push basketball’s limits

The Golden State Warriors are in a strange position this year. They could have had the chance to go for a three-peat this last season. This would have cemented their legacy as one of the best teams of all time. Yet somehow, they might even be better than that. On a recent Podcast with NBA journalist Zach Lowe, Steve Kerr was asked a fascinating question, “If god came to you on the night of game seven last year, and said, “You can either win this game, or loose and sign Kevin Durant, which would you have picked?” Kerr, smartly, didn’t pick either. He just replied by saying, “Time will tell.” He’s right, the Warrior’s could easily run off a new three-peat if everything breaks right, or this could be an unstable chemistry experiment that ends with Durant opting out of the second year of his deal. Experiment is a good word for what the Warriors will be doing this season. Since this core group has been working together, they’ve been making us all question what “winning” basketball looks like. This is the year it could go from chem-lab to mad science.  

   The style they play, much to the ire of many retired players, is very perimeter centric. Conventional wisdom has always held that you need a surefire way of producing baskets inside in order to win at the highest level. Shooting, no matter how great, is much more erratic, and therefore cannot always be relied upon to win you games. To say the Warriors are some live by the long ball team on a perpetual hot streak is greatly underselling the beauty of Kerr’s system and the skills of the players within it. The Warriors do produce buckets in the paint, but they just do it by ball and player movement as opposed to much more conventional post ups. Though their success speaks for itself, these critics were somewhat validated on the final play of the Warriors season. With the clock winding down, point guard Stephen Curry, laid out a combination of ineffective dribble moves, and hoisted a fading three over Kevin Love. Curry makes these shots on a routine basis, but with everything riding on the percentage of that shot going in it's understandable to prefer a simple post up 10-feet from the basket.  

Durant solves this problem. Besides Shaun Livingston, the Warriors have almost never posted the ball to score in the last two seasons. Draymond Green and Andrew Bogut are and were great playmakers out of the post, but you were never going to throw it to them in order to get a basket late in the game. Durant is a walking mismatch. In the post or on the perimeter, giving him the ball and getting out of the way will almost always produce a high quality look.  Unlike in Oklahoma City, where Durant was simply one of two threats to score, the thing that will make this team unlike anything we’ve seen before is the sheer amount of passing and shooting skill they will be able to put on the court at once.

Durant is a very heady basketball player, something that gets overshadowed because of his scoring ability, and should be able to fit right in with the other offensive weapons around him. On paper, it looks like they have thrown conventional basketball to the wind. With Bogut in the lineup, they always had some kind of insurance against teams with dominating big men. Though Zaza Pachulia is a very good replacement for him in wake of the Durant signing, he isn't the same defensive player that Bogut is. The Warriors are going all in on this bet now. A bet that a combination of heady, undersized basketball players will be able to beat a physically larger team more often than not. The result will probably cast ripples across the basketball landscape for years to come, and watching how it play out will be fascinating.