As my wife and I were watching the Golden State Warriors pound the San Antonio Spurs into obscurity, she asked me, “Are they that good, or is it Stephen Curry that makes them that good?”
“That’s the question that everyone wonders,” I answered. “Both are true.”
The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like the question merited not just an article, but a series of articles.
You have to think about Curry and the Warriors like a race car. Curry is the engine; they’re the body, tires, shocks, etc. Now, you can have a really nice frame, but put an average engine in it, and it’s more or less just a fancy-looking car. But if the engine isn’t put in the optimal car, it will still be limited.
Curry is the ultimate “engine,” but the “car” he powers is perfectly engineered to maximize his “horsepower,”and that’s what makes the Warriors such an unstoppable force.’
This part will address what the team philosophy as a whole is and how that makes them so successful. The second part will address Curry’s specific contributions, followed by Klay Thompson and then Draymond Green’s.
STRETCHING THE COURT
If you’ve watched a basketball game in the last two years, you’ve heard the phrase “stretching the court.” That’s at the crux of what the Warriors do and do better than anyone else.
But sometimes a bunch of things get conflated, and there’s a bit of a misleading narrative. This summer there was all kinds of bigs, including Anthony Davis and DeMarcus Cousins, who were practicing their corner threes so they could stretch the court. That’s an aspect of it, but fans shouldn’t equate “corner threes” with stretching the court.
Bigs shooting them empties out the paint, but it doesn’t really “stretch” the court so much. The reason is that corner threes are in the corner (duh!). But those are the shortest threes, and if a player steps back too far, he goes out of bounds.
When we’re talking about “stretching the court”, what we really mean is stretching the defense. The more ground they have to cover, the harder it is for them to defend. So, to use another analogy, think of a giant rubber band. Every place an offense can consistently hit a three, put a “thumbtack” in.
If you just make them in the corners, it doesn’t get stretched that much. But now start putting some in the threes above the break, or at the top of the key. The space which that rubber band has to cover grows a lot, and as it grows, the more strained the elasticity of the rubber band is. Eventually, it’ll become so thin it’ll break.
The goal of stretching the court is to metaphorically “break” the defense by making it so that there’s more ground for them to cover than they can.
THE WARRIORS ABOVE THE BREAK
The Warriors aren’t just good at shooting threes, they’re good at shooting threes above the break, and they’re good at shooting them way above the break.
First, let’s look at the threes made by every team above the break and the percent of their attempts that go in:
The take-home from the chart above isn’t just that the Warriors are better than anyone else; it’s that they’re way better than anyone else.
But even just looking at that doesn’t fully appreciate what the Warriors do. They don’t just shoot above the arc. They consistently knock down shots well behind it. As a team, they’ve knocked down more than 100 from at least 26 feet. No one else comes close:
Look at their shot chart (courtesy of NBA Savant) of their shots from that range and fully appreciate what they do. Look how far back those green dots go:
That’s relevant because that’s as far back as defenders must challenge them, which to refer to the rubber band metaphor, means that much more stretching.
TYPES OF THREES
In addition to where the threes come from, there’s how they’re come by. Some come off the dribble; some come off the pass. Some are contested; sometimes the defense can’t get there in time. From there you can break them down into four categories: Contested and Unassisted, Contested and Assisted, Uncontested and Unassisted, and Uncontested and Assisted. The Warriors have the most or second-most in all four types:
The Warriors are masters at not just shooting the three, but getting teams to come out and contest them, and make them anyway. The striking thing isn’t just the volume of bombs they drop, but the accuracy with which they do so. As a team, they’re over 42 percent on contested threes above the break. That’s just not fair.
That’s how you stretch the court.
And if you’re stretching the heck out of a defense, then what you should see is a team that makes a defense run all over the place, and lo and behold, that’s exactly what we see, according to Nylon Calculus’ Seth Partnow:
Here you go @KellyScaletta https://t.co/RmC6X3VcYR pic.twitter.com/bgolhlbL1h
— Seth Partnow (@SethPartnow) January 27, 2016
The Warriors stretch the defense more than any team.
RESTRICTED AREA
So you might get the idea from all this that the only reason that the Warriors are so unstoppable is that they hit a lot of threes. That’s not true. There’s another, equally important area of the court, the area inside the little arc:
If the Warriors aren’t the “best” team in the restricted area, they’re close to it. No team has a higher efficiency and more makes than them there.
And that’s not unrelated to the threes. All that space they create with their shooting from deep, they use passing, cuts and secondary assists to create easy shots at the rim. The closest defender on their shots at the rim is 3.853 feet, the third-best range in the league trailing only the Los Angeles Clippers and Spurs, teams much more noted for what they do inside the paint.
Combining what they do inside the little arc and outside the big one is where the true meat of their dominance is. From those “Morey Zones,” they’ve notched 3,332 points — almost 100 more than the second-best Houston Rockets in two fewer games. They have an eFG% of 63.7, besting second-place San Antonio’s 62.4 percent:
That’s the sausage. Over the next three articles, we’ll show you how it’s made. And for once, that won’t be a bad thing.
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