IS GOLDEN. STATE.... VULNERABLE?. Key question for Dubs fans: Which squad will we see in the playoffs? The pre–All-Star juggernaut that was dynamic on offense and engaged on defense? Or the post-All-Star version, an outfit that sank to mediocrity sans Steph Curry? A title might rest in the balance.
and Carlisle helplessly watches Curry take aim with three seconds left and … well, what can you do? Curry smiles looking back, considering his warning and how it played out for Carlisle and the Mavericks on that final play. “Hopefully,” Curry says, still smiling, “we’ll get you either way.” KEVIN DURANT IS sitting off to the side of a Chicago court after a morning shootaround in mid-January, hours before he and his teammates will force the Bulls to, in the words of Chicago coach Fred Hoiberg, “lose their minds.” Durant is almost giddy, describing how when teams scramble to respond to the Warriors’ ball movement and collapse on a guy like Zaza Pachulia, a guy like Pachulia can feed wide-open teammates for an easy bucket. “Everybody is touching the ball, so everybody is feeling it. It’s good,” he says. “And Coach is clapping on the sideline.
60 ES PN 05. 07. 2018
Pre-All-Star Game Offensive rating: 113.7 (1st) Defensive rating: 103.7 (5th) Net rating: 10.0 (1st) Post-All-Star Game Offensive rating: 108.7 (10th) Defensive rating: 105.6 (12th) Net rating: 3.1 (11th)
Everybody on the team is clapping. It’s just good energy.” It’s also damn effective. Since Kerr took over, the Warriors have led the league with 38,958 possessions with at least five frontcourt passes—2,066 more than second-place Cleveland. They score 1.13 points per possession on those, which also leads the league. Which is to say, when everyone on the Warriors is touching the ball, they’re lethal. “You’ve got guys that are just simmering,” Durant says. “Steph is simmering when he don’t got the ball. Klay is simmering. Everybody is just simmering.” Trying to diagnose the why of how it starts leads to a chicken-or-egg dilemma. Do the stops lead to the runs, or do the runs lead to the stops? But what is true, by and large, is that the Warriors believe it’s the former. That’s why Kerr preaches three stops, three stops, three stops, trusting that if his team strings together three in a row, it can lead to three straight 3-pointers. “Three possessions is the difference between a close game and a blowout,” Curry says. “That’s what makes us dangerous—that it can happen at any time.” Ask Curry and he’ll tell you that some runs are the product of the Warriors’ wearing teams down for 48 minutes, water rising until the dam bursts. When the Warriors start a possession after a live-ball turnover or defensive rebound, they average 1.18 points per possession, tops in the league.
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But there are also quick-strike runs—we’ll call them “bursts”—30-second runs that skyrocket a team’s chances to win, and the Warriors are the masters of these. A “knockout” occurs when a team has a greater than 90 percent chance to win a game at the end of a burst, and the Warriors are the masters of these as well. In fact, over the past four seasons, the Warriors have 37 third-quarter knockouts, best in the league. And once the Warriors land a knockout, their opponent feels the effects. During these, the Warriors’ opponents move at an average on-court speed of 4.8 mph, but once the Warriors land the knockout, they slow down by over 10 percent, averaging just 4.2 mph. Kerr, for his part, preaches singles, not home runs—make the simple, routine play— and after a few of those? “That’s when the home run hits,” Thompson says. “A backdoor dunk for somebody or a pull-up 3 or a heat-check from Steph.” Then here, the Warriors say, is when teams start becoming frenetic. “Teams start thinking about so many things out there because of our movement, and that’s how we go on runs,” Durant says. “It’s not the 3s that kill teams. Because we don’t make all our shots from the 3-point line. It’s the movement and the body movement and the ball movement, boom, we drop off to Zaza, he hits a layup. That’s what will crush a team.” What starts as a spark becomes an
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