DON’T FORGET THE DEFENSE
The fancy passes and showtime dunks might make the highlights, but it’s defense that fuels the Warriors’ rise to historic heights.
When the Warriors talk about playing good defense, they occasionally use a version of the phrase “playing on a string.”
They are tied together. Think of the Warriors on defense as five Swiss mountain climbers, moving in calculated rhythm. It’s tricky. You either make it to the top, all of you together, raising your flag in triumph, or you make a hell of a mess on the mountain.
Cue the sound effect of Goofy, yodeling as he tumbles off an Alpine cliff.
“When one person moves, everyone has to move in concert to be effective and maintain what we call a shell, and to react out of it,” said Ron Adams, Warriors assistant coach and untitled defensive coordinator. “It’s interesting, you’ll play a team with a great player, and someone on your team will get credited with stopping this great player. That happens, occasionally, but a more accurate way of looking at it is a player does a good job on a great player with the help of his four teammates, and utilizing your schemes and your fundamentals.”
If that sounds a bit dry, know that Adams, “the Professor,” doesn’t look at defense as merely a technical group skill.
“I think there’s a rhythm and poetry and a natural beauty to defense,” Adams said.
It’s the Warriors’ offense, the most spectacular in basketball and maybe in all of sports, that best lends itself to poetry. But the beauty of the team’s defense does not go unappreciated among hoops connoisseurs.
“You see the basketball savvy on the offensive end, with the passing and the cutting and just their feel for each other,” said Utah Jazz head coach Quin Snyder, “but it’s equally true on the defensive end.”
The Warriors didn’t become poetic demons of defense overnight. During the Mark Jackson regime (2011-14), there was a clear departure from the Warriors’ traditional non-philosophy of defense as afterthought. Steve Kerr, Adams and the Warriors’ players credit Jackson with that dramatic cultural shift.
Kerr, wanting to keep defense a high priority, brought with him Adams, then a veteran of 20 seasons with six NBA teams, almost all of which played solid and often inspired defense under the Professor.
Adams doesn’t claim any mystical secrets. He says the Warriors try to pressure the ball, challenge shots and strangle passing lanes. They do a lot of switching, and they do a lot of communicating, talking.
Here’s how basic it can get: I asked Andre Iguodala how the Warriors manage to talk on defense when an arena sound level becomes deafening.
“You just gotta be louder,” Iguodala explained.
On the subject of talking, Iguodala added, “It doesn’t just help our defense, it also kind of intimidates the offense, let’s ’em know that we’re locked in, that we know (their) schemes and we’re going to put you in a tough situation to score the ball.”
The Warriors lost a great communicator when Andrew Bogut left. They still have a big voice in Draymond Green, but everyone has to talk.
“Even if you’re in a corner guarding (away from the ball) and you see a guy in a vulnerable position, you gotta speak out and help him,” Iguodala said.
On the Warriors’ defense, no man is an island.
“We’ve got the best defender in the league (Green), who can guard one through five,” Kevin Durant said, “and that makes it a lot easier for you back there. But we can’t just rely on him, and I think that’s what makes our defense good, is everybody chipping in.”
It’s that invisible — and not always audible — connection, Snyder said, that sets the Warriors’ defense apart.
“Sometimes it’s nonverbal communication,” Snyder said. “They just anticipate one another. They anticipate what you’re doing because they’re smart players, they’re able to adjust to each other throughout the course of a possession, and that makes it really difficult. Any type of counter or reaction you have to something they do, they usually have something again on top of that for you. It makes them hard to play against.”
Adams said he and Kerr didn’t arrive three seasons ago with rigid schemes and rules, but with basic principles that they molded and adapted to fit the players they had. For instance, they are able to do more switching because they have versatile and long players, like
Green and Klay Thompson, who can guard more than one position, making them a hard team to exploit with mismatches.
The Warriors also have a high IQ defensively, individually and as a group. Kerr and Adams maximize this by encouraging input from the players, at practice and in the heat of games.
“We have some really astute, plugged-in people who see the pictures of the game pretty quickly,” Adams said. “There’s a lot of give and take. In terms of group dynamics, we have a highly functioning group — Level 5, if there’s five levels.”
Do the players and coaches ever butt heads?
“Oh, yeah,” Adams said. “Draymond is a very strongwilled guy, and he’s blunt and he says what’s on his mind, and I understand him extremely well in that regard. I can be fairly blunt. Steve (Kerr) is a very good listener and because of that is able to solicit good ideas from his players. They know what they say is going to be listened to and respected.”
Iguodala is one of the Warriors’ deep thinkers, so you have to take him at his word when he says defense isn’t really an intellectual exercise. When I asked him the secret of the Warriors’ defense, Iguodala said, “I don’t know if it’s a secret . ... I don’t know if it’s a formula. At the end of the day, defense is you gotta have guys that want to do it.”
That’s what the Warriors are most proud of when it comes to their defense, that it goes so much deeper than physical talent or intellectual scheming.
“Defense is kind of like the everyman activity,” Adams said. “It’s something you can be good at if you have the heart to be good at it. Everyone can contribute, you’re dependent on your teammates. It’s like life — we’re all dependent on each other, whether we think that or not. Some people try to isolate themselves, but it’s a very connected world, in ways that we’re oblivious to at times.”
The Warriors are not oblivious, they are hyperaware of being connected on defense by that imaginary string, or rope. They are about to leave base camp and begin the two-month climb toward the summit. There will be only one winner: the mountain or the Warriors.