Refs’ emphasis giving Curry emphatic boost
The Warriors are like freerange chickens: Allow them to roam and they are much happier and more productive. More cluck for your buck.
This season, the NBA has uncaged them, and in doing so might have enhanced Stephen Curry’s shot at a third Most Valuable Player award.
Whether the NBA did this to exploit the popularity of Curry and the Warriors’ free-flowing offense, or simply to make the game more of a ballet and less of a hugfest, is anybody’s guess.
But Curry, cagey cager that he is, especially when uncaged, is taking advantage of the league’s new freedom-of-movement emphasis in officiating.
After scoring 42 points against the Cavaliers on Wednesday, Curry is averaging 30.2 points, up from 26.4 last season and better even than his career-best 30.1 in 2015-16, his second MVP season. His fieldgoal percentage is 51.9, 1.5 percentage points over his career high. And his three-point percentage is up dramatically, to 50.3 from 42.3 last season.
During the offseason, the league decided that defensive tactics had evolved — or devolved — to a wrestling level. Even in the tough old days of the Pistons’ Bad Boys, when refs allowed a lot of contact by defenders, there wasn’t as much grabbing and holding as had crept into the league in recent years.
Referees were sent to training camps to show video and explain the new emphasis on “freedom of movement.” Referee Jason Phillips told the Houston Chronicle, “Once (the defender) disrupts the rhythm, speed, balance or quickness of an offensive player, that is a foul.”
The NBA talks a lot of talk. In the past, the league would announce a crackdown on, say, flopping or traveling, then quickly revert to the previous norm. This time?
“There’s been a radical difference, and we’ve played over 20 games,” said one knowledgeable NBA source, who requested anonymity to avoid risk of a league fine for commenting on officiating. “They were trying to clean up the holding on cutters — the draping, the bear-hugging of cutters, which I think they’ve done effectively. I think it has been a very consistent application, offense over defense, very consistent.”
Although the new emphasis seems good for Curry, Steve Nash scoffs at the notion that Curry’s fast start is a product of coddling. The old-timers, some say, would have crushed Curry.
“They would have killed Steph,” said Nash, the Warriors’ player-development consultant, “and he still would have scored a hell of a lot of points.”
Nash should know. A puny guy himself (6-foot-3, 190 pounds), he managed to survive to the tune of seven AllNBA selections and two MVP trophies.
“When I started my career (in 1996), it was very, very physical; you could really put the lumber on people,” Nash said. “You could hold a guy’s hip (for the) length of the court, you could put two hands on a guy. It’s progressively become a point of emphasis to have more fluidity and more grace and more athleticism to our game, and to cut out that element that’s more wrestling and combat, because it takes away from a lot of the beauty of the game, which is free and fast and dynamic . ...
“I think the game is aesthetically so much better than it was back in the ’90s, when it really bogged down.”
The importance of flow to the Warriors’ offense was demonstrated dramatically Monday in a win over the Hawks. In Curry’s second game back after missing 10 games because of a groin injury, the offense unclogged. Curry scored 30 points on 10-for-17 shooting, and the Warriors had 33 assists.
Klay Thompson also would seem a likely beneficiary of the new emphasis, but his offensive numbers are down. That is partly because of long absences by Curry and Draymond Green, severely curtailing the team’s flow.
Although the new guidelines benefit the Warriors’ offense, they might work against their defense, which has been a major contributor to the team’s four-year run of dominance. Many opponents have copied the Warriors’ offense, and to defend those cut-and-flow teams, the Warriors’ defense has had to recalibrate this season.
The NBA source said the new guidelines have made it harder to guard the player with the ball, which “puts more importance on your help side, your defenders behind the ball. And I really think it has encouraged people who can drive to just drive kind of bat-out-ofhell, jumping into the defense, that kind of thing.”
He added, “We have a lot of good defensive players in this league who are aggressive, they’re physical, and when you kind of limit those people, there’s also a grace and beauty to that, certainly to the whole aspect of team defense, the connectedness.”
The new guidelines punish defenders who tend to reach. Curry would fall into that category.
The freedom-of-movement reffing has “spilled over into other areas,” the source said. “What I see happening is we’re getting a lot of superficial calls being made. We’re seeing (for example) rebounding fouls that are minimal.”
Officiating is a delicate dance, a constant balance and re-balance. Assuming the new emphasis stays consistent during the regular season, a big question for the Warriors is, what happens in the playoffs, when — by NBA tradition — the play gets rougher?
“I don’t have a crystal ball,” he said, “but it always seems to be kind of a sea change (in officiating) in the playoffs.”
The closer the Warriors come to another title, the louder will be the whining from critics that the league’s new Curry Rules give golden-guy Steph an unfair advantage over honest, hard-working defenders.
The opposing argument is that Curry thrived during the grabbiest and holdingest period in NBA history, and doesn’t deserve criticism when the league decides to swing the balance back from the Hulk Hogans.
Last word to Nash, who was and is a conditioning freak, and attributes Curry’s fast start less to reffing changes and more to Curry’s extreme mental and physical preparation.
“I think Steph would have had a great start this year no matter what the rules were,” Nash said. “If it was rugby, he would have had a great start.”