National Post (National Edition)
HOW TALENT WINS
Golden State Warriors are the culmination of basketball’s pace-and-space revolution — started by Steve Nash
The Golden State Warriors won the NBA championship because they managed to marry the right style of play with the talent they had.
The Golden State Warriors were the best team in the National Basketball Association all season long. From November to June, they always seemed to represent something beyond their staggering success — mark down their final record as 8320. They were supposed to represent something more symbolic.
They were winning without a hint of an offensive post presence. They were winning by launching the fourth-most three-pointers in the league. They were winning by playing at the NBA’s fastest pace. They were winning by playing a guy charitably listed at 6-foot-7, Draymond Green, at power forward and, eventually, at the most pivotal point of the season, centre. They were the culmination of basketball’s paceand-space revolution, started by the Steve Nash-led Phoenix Suns more than a decade earlier.
“Tell (former Suns coach) Mike D’Antoni he’s vindicated,” associate coach Alvin Gentry shouted as the Warriors celebrated on Tuesday night, according to ESPN’s Ethan Strauss. “We just kicked everyone’s ass playing the way everybody complained about.”
“I think Steve (Nash) kind of laid out a vision for a whole generation of young point guards. And with the game changing, Mike D’Antoni kind of initiating that style in Phoenix, the floor starting to spread, the whole league kind of playing shooting (power forwards and centres) and playing a little faster,” head coach Steve Kerr said at the podium after the game. “I think Mike and Steve in many ways set the table for Curry. And I think Steph would tell you that too. He has great respect for Steve.”
Yet, as much as the Warriors’ victor y might seem to be about this particular style of play, it is really more about open-mindedness. It was about marrying the right style to your talent.
And for that, Kerr and his coaching staff deserve tons of credit. Under former coach Mark Jackson, the Warriors were excellent defensively — third in defensive efficiency in 2013-14. Somehow, they were only 12th on the other end, which seems impossible now given the talent at hand. Of the 10 Warriors who played the most minutes per game in the Finals, only reserve guards Shaun Livingston and Leandro Barbosa were summertime additions. The rest of the roster was there last year. While some of that offensive bump can be attributed to individual improvement — Klay Thompson, in particular, took a leap this season — a lot of it has to do with how the Warriors’ system changed, on both sides of the ball.
To over-simplify, Kerr made two basic changes. First, he encouraged the team to pass more, and the Warriors went from throwing the fewest passes of any team per game last year to throwing the seventh-most this season. Moving away from straight isolations took advantage of the Warriors’ plethora of wing players who could do two things reasonably well: hit three-pointers and create off of the dribble when Curry inevitably drew extra coverage in the pick-and-roll and got rid of the ball. That Green ended up taking nearly all of David Lee’s minutes helped the transformation along, a happy accident nudged along by Lee’s preseason injury.
On defence, the Wa rr i o r s switched on pick-and-roll coverage more often, creating more turnovers — going from 16th to seventh in the league in opponents’ turnover ratio. That created more opportunities to score in transition, leveraging Curry and Thompson’s shooting ability as much as possible.
“We don’t have Kareem (AbdulJabbar) or Hakeem Olajuwon to throw the ball in to in a half court setting, so we feel like we’re best off playing with pace,” Kerr said before his team destroyed the Raptors in Toronto at the end of February. “The key for us is, how well are we defending? … For the season we’re number one in defensive efficiency. And if we can play our defence where we are connected and attacking and solid, that converts into fast offence, and we like that. That’s our style. And teams have won that way in the past.”
Sure, there is a reason that more and more teams are playing faster, and that the league is becoming more perimeter-oriented. The enforcement of hand checking and the incoming talent demands it. There will and should be teams that try to mimic the Warriors — there already are. Some will have success, while others will realize Curry’s shooting ability is a generational talent that is impossible to replicate.
The real lesson, though, is something that nearly every coach agrees on, especially when his job security is evaporating: talent wins. However, it only wins if it is both transce nd ent and given the proper framework in which to flourish. The Warriors should kill the notion that there is a proper way to play, a correct way to win in the post-season. Not even their forward-thinking style fits all.
Steve kind of laid out the vision for a whole generation of young point guards