How the Warriors can return to the NBA Finals
Dieter Kurtenbach argues: Keep ‘crafty’ Rockets off the free-throw line
OAKLAND – The Warriors know what’s coming. Everyone knows. In the Warriors’ upcoming Western Conference Finals series with the Rockets, Houston is going to put the ball in James Harden’s or Chris Paul’s hands and run high pick-and-roll over and over and over again.
The Rockets’ offensive goal is to create mismatches on the perimeter and to let their two elite guards cook, either by driving, which collapses the defense, allowing them to kick the ball out to an open 3-point shooter, lobbing the ball to the roll man, or isolating.
And if they isolate against their defender, you can bet that these two Masters of the Dark Arts are going to use all of their craftiness and guile to try to draw a foul.
“It’s a game plan that’s been very consistent,” Stephen Curry said Friday.
It’s game plan that has also delivered results – the Rockets posted a historic offensive season and claimed the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference Playoffs with 65 regular-season wins – so while the Warriors’ superswitching defense presents a difficult challenge in this series, there’s little reason to think Houston will deviate what carried them here.
That puts the onus is on the Warriors in this series – yes, they know what’s coming, but they’ll still need to stop it. And the key to doing that is to be disciplined.
“We know that James and Chris are two of the craftiest players in the league,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said. “If they drive and you want to stick your hand in the cookie jar, they’re going to grab your hand and pull on it and the ref is going to give them two free throws.”
Take a moment to let the latter part of Kerr’s statement settle: if a defensive player sticks his hand out against Harden or Paul, the offensive player will grab that hand and somehow be rewarded for doing so.
I’ve heard “if you reach, I teach” but for these Rockets, it’s “if you reach, I will exaggerate contact and go to the line for two
– joke’s on you.”
Everyone exaggerates contact – the Warriors are hardly without sin – but the Rockets’ top two players are truly the best in the NBA at making a scene.
Yes, it’s downright unsporting, but alas, sometimes the wicked prosper.
Harden’s skills in this area, in particular, pose a serious a problem for Golden State. The Rockets combo guard is the NBA’S pre-eminent foul drawer and his notorious arsenal of borderline unscrupulous moves is so legendary that the league had to outlaw his most famous tactic last offseason.
So far this season – regular season and playoffs combined – Harden has drawn 561 fouls, a comically large number, particularly when you consider that the majority of them have been drawn when he was squared up one-on-one with a defender. (For reference, Kevin Durant, who is downright unguardable, has drawn 373 fouls.)
In the regular season, he shot 16 percent more free throws per game than any other player in the league in large part because he led the league in fouls drawn on “shooting attempts.” A league-leading 17 percent of all of Harden’s “shots” resulted in a foul per Cleaning The Glass stats.
This guy has no problem spending all game at the line – in fact, that might be his No. 1 goal. It’s all so very gross. And Paul isn’t far behind Harden when it comes to drawing fouls – the former Clipper might not be as brazen as his teammate anymore, but he is one of the best free-throw shooters in the league (91 percent in Kevin Durant of the Golden State Warriors scrambles for a loose ball with Rudy Gay of the San Antonio Spurs during the first half of Game Four of the 2018 NBA Playoffs at AT&T Center in San Antonio, Texas.
the regular season) and has drawn 4.5 fouls per game in the playoffs.
Both of these guys getting to the line this often isn’t happenstance – that’s a concerted effort.
In this series, that effort is likely to be for both players to isolate against Stephen Curry early and often. After all, while Curry isn’t a bad defender, he’s hardly a lockdown guy like his four Death Lineup teammates. Plus, he’s coming off an MCL injury, which would theoretically limit his ability to move side-to-side.
When asked how often he expects to be matched up against Harden or Paul in this series, Curry sounded more than ready for the challenge:
“Every single play. I hope it’s every single play,” he said. “I’ll be fine ... I would probably do the same exact thing if I was coaching against me – you got Klay (Thompson), Andre (Iguodala), Draymond (Green), and KD (Kevin Durant) out there. I
embrace those opportunities to get stops, try to make it tough in this iso situations, just do my job. At the end of the day, for us, we have a pretty good game plan going into it, we’ve played teams that try to do that, constantly – whether it’s Cleveland in the Finals the last three years or (another) team that tries to do it. We handle our business.”
The Warriors are also expecting some help from the referees in this series as well.
“The big thing is, in the playoffs in general, refs don’t call a lot of fouls – it’s very physical,” Kerr said. “They let the players go and I’m very confident that if we are smart and we don’t reach then we’re going to put ourselves in great position. It’s a risky play when you try to draw a foul and you don’t get it – you’re very vulnerable in terms of transition defense. If we play without fouling, we’re going to have a lot of openfloor opportunities.”