While Stephen Curry’s knee injury has placed their playoff run on shakier footing, the Golden State Warriors are still in a class by themselves. Their regular season dominance set a new record for wins and their style of play has made them a nightly highlight factory. Golden State’s focus on spreading the floor with speed and shooting, all while sacrificing nothing in effectiveness or intensity at the defensive end, is something the NBA has never really seen before. Over the past two seasons, the Warriors have revolutionized how the game is played.
Or, at least we assume that’s what’s going to happen. Two years is not much time for a transformative revolution.
Heading into this season we saw several teams make intentional shifts to their rosters and playbooks, trying to grab a little piece of Golden State’s magic for themselves. The Indiana Pacers, New Orleans Pelicans, and Charlotte Hornets all looked to incorporate pieces of what has made the Warriors offense so powerful, and they were successful to varying degrees. With a full regular season behind us, we can begin to see exactly what this Warriors revolution looks like as it oozes into the organizational structures of other teams.
When we talk about copying the Warriors, it’s really a conversation about offensive style. The idea is that if you use something approximating their process you should expect similar results. To get a picture of the Golden State style, we can use these offensive style charts from Nylon Calculus. These charts graph a team’s offensive style by four characteristics — pace (average length of an offensive possession), ball movement (average length of an offensive touch), player movement (average distance traveled per 24 seconds of possession), and shot selection (the effective field goal percentage we would expect from a team given their shot distribution by distance, catch-and-shoot rate, and defender distance). Golden State’s offenses from this season and last season are graphed below.
The Warriors fall on the extreme ends of all four stylistic traits and this is the process that other teams are theoretically trying to copy — uptempo, maximum movement, hyper-efficient shot selection. This season, Golden State ranked in the 90th percentile or higher in all four categories. No other team, this season or last, hit that mark in more than two categories.
Although it feels like the Warriors have been squashing dreams forever, their pace-and-space revolution really only began last season. That means there is only one season’s worth of offensive changes to sift through, looking for teams trying to copy the Warriors template. Chasing the Warriors stylistically can be measured statistically by looking at each team’s change in percentile rank in each offensive style category from last season to this season, and calculating how much closer it brought them to Golden State’s ranking. Here are the teams that became most ‘Warrior-like’ in style this season.
It makes sense that the team that would drawn the closet to the Warriors in style would be the Pelicans, who hired former Golden State assistant Alvin Gentry as their head coach last summer. By far, his team had the most radical change. The Wizards, Hornets, Kings are not surprises either, all three dramatically remade their shot selection this season, emphasizing three-pointers of long twos. Indiana tore down their roster for a sleeker, faster model. The Magic and Bulls were both working under new head coaches tasked with fighting offensive stagnation. What’s interesting is that the vast majority of the change for all seven of these teams appears to have come in two categories — pace and player movement.
Subjectively, these two categories would appear to be the two most easily influenced by intention. Generating more ball movement or creating more open and high-value shots requires a certain measure of collective skill. Pushing the pace and moving more in the half-court is a matter of planning and then exerting effort. For teams making changes, it is logical that the effort end would manifest before the skill.
The other thing that’s interesting is that, in terms of efficiency, the group didn’t derive much success from their changes. The Hornets offense did improve fairly dramatically but they were the only team in this group to finish the season ranked in the top-ten in offensive efficiency. The Magic also received a small bump but for everyone else, the effect was small and both the Bulls and Pelicans were actually worse on offense this season.
There are a few reasonable explanations for this — these teams don’t have Golden State’s personnel or the same sort of experience in running this system. Perhaps another year of roster tweaking and repetition would yield better results. These are also all teams that were trying to fix some fundamental flaws, teams that were trying to build themselves up. After all, if they had an offensive system that was working, they wouldn’t need to go chasing something else. Lastly, the Wizards, Pelicans, and Bulls were also hit by injuries to varying degrees this season, meaning they were working with less than the full complement of their talent.
The last column in the table is also important because it shows the change in defensive efficiency for each team this season. The Hornets, Pelicans, Wizards, and Bulls were all worse on defense this season, to a fairly significant degree in the case of the last three. The teams who improved on defense made small gains. What makes the Warriors great is not just how they play offense. It’s the fact that they can maintain that offensive pace while still playing suffocating defense. Any team working to emulate Golden State on offense also needs to make defensive adjustments to ensure they aren’t just giving all that efficiency back at the other end.
Golden State’s offensive system is certainly not the only path to efficiency. The three offenses that were most similar to the Warriors by style this season were the Boston Celtics, Atlanta Hawks, and the Philadelphia 76ers. Boston ranked 13th in points scored per 100 possessions, Atlanta was below average, and Philadelphia had the worst offensive efficiency in the league. If we compare the Warriors (the most efficient offense in the league this season) to the rest of the top-five in efficiency, it becomes clear that many different approaches can work.
The San Antonio Spurs and Oklahoma City Thunder are almost mirror opposites of each other — San Antonio emphasizing movement, the Thunder focused on pace and shot selection. The Cleveland Cavaliers and the Toronto Raptors are able to lean on the individual brilliance of the star players, so the system around them requires much less complexity.
The Spurs are also worth singling out because of how much their offense changed this season away from Golden State’s style. Their offensive style became less similar to the Warriors by nearly the same degree as the Chicago Bulls’ moved towards Golden State.
The additions of LaMarcus Aldridge and David West, and the blossoming of Kawhi Leonard, meant that San Antonio could lean more heavily on post-ups and mid-range jumpers and still yield efficient scoring.
The message from these last two charts is really about a synergistic fit between system and players. Asking DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry to play like Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson would probably not yield the same results. We have the sample of Mark Jackson’s tenure and the iso-heavy offense that predated Steve Kerr’s arrival in Golden State to prove that the opposite is true as well — Curry and Thompson wouldn’t be quite so transcendent in a system like Toronto’s.
In terms of style of player, and success in that style, the Warriors are far ahead of the rest of the league. For teams that are struggling towards competitiveness, they present an enticing template to try and emulate. The players to make it work and the execution at both ends to hold the whole thing together do not come easy though. Playing like the Warriors is not nearly as simple as running and shooting more three-pointers. The next phase of the NBA’s evolution is going to come in player evaluation and training — figuring out how to make this system work for more players and how to find the players who work for this system.
Like any instigation to revolution, Golden State is probably far more extreme than what will settle in as the status quo. They will likely continuing to push the league towards speed and shooting but it is doubtful that anyone will ever do it quite as well as they do.