By: Alexis Madrigal
The Warriors won 67 games last year, tore through the playoffs and won the NBA championship. They were then, and remain, subjected to all kinds of doubters who try to explain why the best two-year run in NBA history is somehow invalid.
Why is it so hard for NBA fans (and players and ex-players and GMs) to accept the Warriors dominance? I am going to argue that it is not just because they shoot a lot of three-pointers. No, it’s a match-up problem for most teams. When people look at Steph Curry and Draymond Green, they see role players, not superstars.
What’s funny is: they are right. Steph and Dray have role-player skill-sets, but all-NBA skills. And the combination of those things is what makes the Dubs confusing. No one has ever seen stars that look like this before, but they have seen plenty of journeymen who possessed these players’ key attributes.
Steph Curry’s three-point shooting, as singular as anything sports has seen in decades, has transformed the NBA. People lob stats like: Steph’s hit more three pointers in the last two seasons than Larry Bird did in his whole career. Or they note that he had the second-highest usage rate in the NBA (after Boogie), but also shot 45 percent from long distance. Or they just stare at their television sets, screaming every time he displays his range, his release, and his movement.
One way to think about Steph’s impact on the league is that he has taken a role-player skill and elevated it into something that is the core of his stardom. Take a look at the list of career 3-point shooting percentage leaders. Steve Kerr, Steph Curry, Hubert Davis, Drazen Petrovic, Jason Kapono, Steve Novak, Tim Legler, Kyle Korver, and BJ Armstrong. This is not a list of the game’s stars. Steve Nash and Ray Allen (much further down the list) were high impact players, but even then Curry has surpassed that.
The idea of a superstar whose supernatural power was 3-point shooting, that was not really thinkable until Curry arrived. Before nobody believed a jump shooting could be successful in this league. Now, a jump shooter who can barely dunk can be the league’s back-to-back MVP.
But maybe this case does not need to be made for Curry. His greatness is obvious to anyone who watches him play. The man can lift Oracle with a flick of a wrist. He leaves other NBA all stars in awe.
But I think this frame helps us understand the greatness of Draymond Green, the Warriors second-best player. Green is a glue guy gone superstar.
You know the glue guy. He “fills up the stat sheet” but doesn’t necessarily score. He sets a great screen. He hustles back on defense. He is probably even a lockdown defender, and even better at playing his role in the team defensive scheme. He is a great passer and doesn’t necessarily even look for his shot. He’s a key presence in the locker room.
Do all these things better than anyone and you get Green’s stat line: 14.0 points, 9.5 rebounds and 7.4 assists per game. You get the only player in the league in the top 10 in rebounds and assists, but who is not even in the top 50 in scoring. Green also has a better Real Plus-Minus than LeBron and top 10 showings in Win Shares, Defensive Rating, and Value Over Replacement.
But, as the name implies, the biggest role of the glue guy is keeping the team together, by whatever means necessary.
In that way, the glue guy is primarily a psychological and not just a physical specimen. Go listen to Bill Simmons’s interview with Green after the 73rd win of the season. What is immediately apparent is that Green’s primary advantage is psychological. He knows himself, his teammates, his environment, and his opponents so much better than other players and he can articulate their goals and roles—as well as shape them.
It’s classic Draymond, the glue guy superstar.
Now, you take the two of them combined and I think it’s clear why everybody in the NBA underestimated the Warriors. There just have not been superstars like these two players, who have elevated undervalued skillsets into two of the most efficient and dominant players in the league.
Guys like Charles Barkley and Scotty Pippen just do not consider Curry and Green more than role players, who do not deserve to be called superstars. That’s why Barkley takes every opportunity to down grade and pick against the Dubs, no matter how much success they have. He is jealous of their rings because he never got one, and he considers his era and game superior to theirs.
Steve Kerr is the real superstar of the GSW.
As a player, he was a long-range sharpshooter, and a good one at that.
He’s now the coach and leader of a club which asked a very interesting question: since a 3-point bucket is worth more than a 2-point bucket, is there a statistical opportunity which everyone else in the league was ignoring? The answer was, maybe.
3-point shooting has long been used to spread the defense and create opportunities in the paint. GSW does that, too, but unlike any team before them, they lean on shooting beyond the arc as a *primary* means of putting up more points than their opponents.
GIve Kerr credit. He greenlighted taking the open looks from beyond the arc – not only for Curry but for practically the entire team, including reserves. He told his guys they would not be scolded for taking those shots, and he emphasized drills and practice at range.
This was a gamble. Before last season, no ‘experts’ in the NBA or sports media could have imagined that it would pay off. The conventional wisdom was you needed talented, athletic, muscular big men in the paint to get to a championship title. LeBron James, touted as the best basketball player on the planet, was the epitome among current players for this conventional view. Sportswriters awarded Cleveland the championship last year before the regular season even started.
Kerr had to dump the collective wisdom of practically every know-it-all in basketball, believe his statisticians, and believe in his players to make that leap.
So GSW won the 2014-2015 championship, Curry set the record for 3-point conversions in a regular season at 286, and the conventional wisdom was that it was a fluke. Pure luck. Older players, retired from the game, vowed that the GSW pansies would be swept by their old teams if they could have all played in their primes. But the experts sometimes sounded a little hesitant about making that proclamation, didn’t they?
Kerr doubled down. He pushed his players to take even more 3’s. The statistical advantage his team generated by doing this let them set a new league record for wins. Curry reached 402 made 3’s in a regular season – a record that should leave us astonished and flabbergasted. But the team total was far higher. Curry scored less than half of the team’s 3’s.
Taking so many shots from long range means there will be hot streaks and cold streaks. Can’t be avoided. When they’re cold at range, GSW can be beaten by almost any NBA team; they all have talent, after all. But the cold streaks netted them fewer losses than even Jordon’s Bulls at their best.
GSW has role-players, yep. They have a very talented crew who believe in their coach and in themselves. But it’s the coach who unleashed their potential, the coach who backed this major strategic change. He took good players and gave them a strategy that the rest of the league, so far, hasn’t been able to execute.
Curry was injured in game 1 against the Rockets yesterday, and he may be out for a while with a damaged ankle. Losing Curry is bad, of course, but the team will put up 3’s anyway. They’ll pass. They’ll defend. They’ll penetrate. Curry isn’t the only 3-point sharpshooter they have; he’s just the best of a good lot. It’s the strategy that drives this team, not one player. And the entire team knows how to make that strategy work. Barnes, Thompson, Green, Barbosa and several others will take those shots. They’ll make enough of them to generate the advantage that has placed GSW at the top of the league.
Kerr has made himself the most influential coach in this generation. This fact is showing up everywhere, as high school, college and NBA teams shift emphasis towards more 3-point shooting. A few coaches probably haven’t figured it out yet, but most are angling towards developing or acquiring high-percentage range shooters, and that’s going to be the hot topic at this summer’s NBA draft and trade season. Building a team around penetrators and dunkers no longer makes nearly as much sense.
The Jordan age of basketball is officially ended. That style was glorious fun to watch. But so is Kerr’s game.
Perhaps best of all, Kerr’s game is approachable by many more players. You don’t have to be huge and tall and powerful. Regular guys and women can be sharpshooters, too, if they have the talent and the discipline to perfect their skills. Basketball has just become a lot more relevant to a lot more people.
Steve Kerr is the guy to thank for it.
Good post, Alex.
I will say that I don’t think Curry’s super-power is described accurately as 3-point shooting. His true super-power is RANGE, combined with great handles and the ability to finish near the basket. It’s not just that he shoots the 3 so well, though he clearly does. It’s that he can shoot if from 25 feet consistently. And 28 feet consistently. Even from 30 feet consistently. Teams have to pick him up at half court, lest he launch one from 35 feet which has about a 40+% chance of going in.
And that range means that the defense is always stretched when he’s in the game. Yes, all 3 point shooters spread the floor, but no one has ever done it like this. It makes everything easier for other players — driving, passing, shooting. And since Steph himself has a great handle and great quickness, he can drive and make defenses pay if they crowd him too much. Add in that he’s a master at finishing in the paint, and he’s a creative, unselfish passer, and you’ve got a definite superstar.