Passing out
Relying on their star forward can result in stagnant offense
Relying on Kevin Durant too much costly for Warriors.
During the Warriors’ blowout loss to the Rockets in Game 2 of the Western Conference finals, Mary Babers-Green — the mother of Golden State forward Draymond Green — took to Twitter to criticize Kevin Durant for dominating the ball.
When someone contended that Durant needed only 22 shots to score 38 points, BabersGreen pointed out that there is “more to a game than shots! It left everyone else standing around, never to get into position. SWING THE BALL.” It was an astute observation: Though Durant is one of the best one-on-one scorers in NBA history, the Warriors’ offense stagnates when players stop to watch his one-man show.
In Wednesday night’s 22point drubbing at Toyota Center, Durant again tried to will his team to victory, only to remind Golden State about the perils of over-relying on a single player. The Warriors’ movement-heavy system gave way to Durant’s repeated isolation situations. Without their teammates making the extra pass, Klay Thompson (eight points, 3-for-11 from the field), Stephen Curry (16 points, 1-for-8 from 3-point range) and Green (six points) settled for contested jumpers and never got into a rhythm.
“We didn’t play well, obviously, at either end of the floor,” head coach Steve Kerr said. “I thought their defense was great. This is a team that’s gotten much better defensively this past year. I thought they did a really good job putting us on our heels.”
Passing up passes
After each game, Kerr checks Golden State’s passing totals. Three hundred passes suggest solid ball movement, but 320 is the goal. The Warriors only dished out 272 passes Wednesday. With Durant trying again and again to beat his man off the dribble, Golden State had 21 assists — more than eight below its league-leading average.
Two nights earlier, in their Game 1 win over Houston, the Warriors weren’t zipping the ball around the floor as much as normal. The difference was that they were still working off screens and getting in position. When Durant kicked out of isolation plays, he often found Thompson wide open along the perimeter.
With that in mind, Golden State will try to return to its movement-happy ways in time for Game 3 on Sunday at Oracle Arena. It is chasing those beautiful sequences in which players are spread throughout the court and in constant motion. The ball darts from teammate to teammate with so much speed that defenders are left scrambled, only fully grasping what has unfolded after the shot is hoisted.
“For the entirety of the game, we’ve just got to be a little bit more aggressive, a little bit more assertive on the offensive end,” Curry said after Game 2. “When the ball is in your hand, make a play for yourself or your teammate, and that will soften them up a little bit.”
In May 2014, when Kerr took over as the Warriors’ head coach, he made overhauling their offensive system one of his top priorities. Under former head coach Mark Jackson, Golden State had hunted mismatches and subsisted on pick-and-rolls. Kerr, who came to master the art of movement playing for Lute Olson, Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich, knew that Curry and Thompson — two elite shooters with a knack for getting open — were an ideal fit for motion principles.
When Durant signed with the Warriors in July 2016, those desperate to nitpick a team stocked with All-Stars pinpointed Durant’s tendency to break down defenders one-on-one. Would one of the league’s most potent isolation scorers infringe on Golden State’s free-flowing system?
What those critics might not have realized is that Durant has long valued team assists more than any other statistic. Dating to his early years in Seattle and Oklahoma City, he checked box scores to see whether his club had reached the 30-assist mark.
In his second season with the Warriors, Durant averaged 5.4 assists per game, just shy of his career-high. But Durant is more than willing to bail Golden State out, and sometimes the team becomes too reliant on his one-onone brilliance.
‘An every-possession game’
There is no such thing for the Rockets. As ball movement becomes a league-wide trend, Houston head coach Mike D’Antoni refuses to deviate from the isolation-heavy offense that his team rode to an NBA-best 65 wins this season.
The Rockets showed Wednesday that it’s the execution of the system, not the system itself, that matters. For the Warriors to be at their best, they must stay in constant motion and not draw the ire of Babers-Green.
“This is an every-possession game,” Durant said. “We’ve got to be locked in every possession against these guys.”