Do the Golden State Warriors need more shooting?
The Warriors might not have enough shooting.
Wait, come back! Seriously! I’m not doing a bit, just bear with me here. When the Warriors are wholly healthy, they certainly have enough shooting. The ability to stagger lineups to have any pairing of Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Kevin Durant on the floor provides at least one deadeye alongside a primary creator. Now that Durant is out of commission until the playoffs, the delicate balance has been dislodged just a bit.
The Warriors have a lot of talented role players. Any team would love to have Shaun Livingston, Andre Iguodala or David West. JaVale McGee has revived his career in Oakland, and Patrick McCaw has shown flashes of being a fairly useful rookie. These role players are all incredibly versatile and help fuel Steve Kerr’s offense with the ability to pass, dribble, cut and finish effectively at the rim while defending at an above-average level.
When you choose role players that are well-rounded, there’s a trade-off. Players at this skill level have weaknesses; if they didn’t, they’d be stars! For the Warriors, that tradeoff was filling out the end of the bench with players who aren’t particularly adept at long-range shooting. Last year, the Warriors had one less superstar in their lineup, but they had shooting across the board to kill the opposition when the defense collapsed.
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Last season, outside of Steph and Klay, the Warriors had seven players that were shooting over 35 percent on 3-pointers, including Brandon Rush, Marreese Speights, Harrison Barnes and Leandro Barbosa, who are all no longer with the team.
This season, with Durant sidelined and Draymond Green slumping from distance (31.9 percent this season), that number is down to two. Practically, it’s really down to one, as Ian Clark has fallen out of Steve Kerr’s regular rotation (excluding his big night against the Spurs) with Matt Barnes and Patrick McCaw absorbing more minutes.
It’s not just the percentages either. Outside of the Splash Bros., there’s an issue of volume. Iguodala, McCaw, and Matt Barnes, who the Warriors would need to act as release valves, aren’t exactly guys who are comfortable firing away. Andre Iguodala takes 2.3 three-pointers per game, and 2.0 of those attempts come when he is either “open” or “wide open” per NBA.com’s tracking data. Similarly, 1.5 of McCaw’s 1.7 attempts per game are either open or wide open. For Matt Barnes, it’s 3.4 of his 3.7 attempts per game.
Basically, these guys aren’t big “gravitational pull” players. You can afford to help off a bit to shut off penetration as long as you’re diligent in getting back in coverage. All of this information may be true, but we haven’t really dived in to what matters here: is this “issue” actually hurting the Warriors?
To be clear, any nitpicking of problems on a team like this is going to be the ultimate “first-world problem.” This team is still unbelievably good, so it would be silly to say that the lack of shooting from their role players is the primary reason behind their four losses in five games without Durant (that the team actually suited up players and tried to win).
That said, there are some warning signs, and they mostly come with Klay on the court and Steph on the bench. The Warriors are getting wrecked in the last six games in these lineups, with a net rating of -19.0 and a true shooting percentage of 46.3 percent. The most common configuration Kerr has used for minutes Curry has sat has featured Klay, Iguodala, Livingston, Green and West, and there’s just not a ton of room for Klay to operate.
(Klay Thompson shot chart in last six games with Curry on the bench)
Teams have mostly been free to help off Klay with reckless abandon in these lineups, and he hasn’t had a ton of clean looks (with an admittedly small sample size). Take a look at how many defenders are in his airspace when he comes off curls for jumpers or even tries to drive to the rack.
Curry’s Klay-less lineups have mostly been successful (+8.0 per 100 possessions) which speaks to Curry’s higher-level creating ability as well as some good old-fashioned random chance on 3-point shooting that you’ll see in a six-game sample.
Turnovers are up in both Curry-less lineups and Klay-less lineups. When Curry is on the floor but Klay isn’t, the Warriors average 4.5 more turnovers per 100 possessions than if Klay is on the floor during this six-game stretch.
That makes sense. The team has less space to make the precise passes that make them so beautiful to watch at times. Also, as Steve Kerr famously laments, sometimes they’re just not very careful with the basketball.
The boring answer for the Warriors recent struggles is that Steph and Klay aren’t hitting 3-pointers, like, at all. Stephen Curry is shooting 27.7 percent from deep on 10.8 attempts per game while Klay is at 27.3 percent on 9.2 attempts per game. Once those normalize, the Warriors will likely look amazing yet again.
Even so, the Steph-less lineups are a problem that doesn’t seem to be going away. Per NBAWowy, Klay has played 279 minutes without Curry or Durant on the floor, and those lineups have not fared well all season. The Warriors have scored 98.0 points per 100 possessions in those lineups and allowed 103.7.
Kevin Durant is the elixir to these problems. With Kevin Durant and Klay, but no Steph on the floor, the team has an offensive rating of 110.8 and a defensive rating of 105.7. If the Warriors are outscoring you during the minutes Steph is sitting, they’re nearly unbeatable, which holds for most teams with a transcendent star. You have to make up the margins against their lesser units, and that is where the Warriors suddenly look much more fragile.
To help aid some of these spacing issues, it might be wise to downsize the Warriors second units and re-insert Ian Clark into the rotation. With the Warriors healthy, he’s not as important, but he’s probably the closest thing to a deadeye shooter that the Warriors have among their cadre of role players, jacking 5.4 3-pointerss per 36 minutes and hitting 42.1 percent of them. They can stick him on opposing point guards while tasking Livingston with guarding twos and adding an injection of gravitational pull to these lineups.
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These issues shouldn’t bother the Warriors much in the playoffs when Kevin Durant returns, assuming he’s playing at 80-90 percent. However, they very well could be problematic in their chase for the number one seed in the West with the Spurs lurking. Steve Kerr’s ability to figure out how to survive in Golden State’s Curry-less minutes could very well determine how easy their road will be in the playoffs once they get their star forward back.