During the first five games of the season, it was hard to overstate how bad the Golden State Warriors looked. They were ranked 30th and 29th in defense. Against the three teams playing in the playoff they faced, they lost by 90 points combined. Stephen Curry, by his standards, was struggling, flinging in sequence to a 32 percent deep clip and scoring a decent portion of his 26 points per game during the minutes of hitting formality.
This, of course, started many conversations. The Warriors were finished. Curry cannot carry a team. The latter is a distorted narrative when you begin to assess the legacy of Curry, who is already cemented as one of the top 20 players of all time, and undoubtedly one of the top 10, no matter what he or the Warriors do from hence. None of this is about what Curry has done up to this point. If you’re trying to argue, you’re stupid.
The only logical point of discussion revolves around Curry moving forward, and whether he can still be the magician who made kamikaze shots he was in pre-Kevin Durant days. After all, he was 26 at the start of his first MVP season. He’s 32 now. It can at least be argued that a slight decline occurred over that period, only that it was undetectable within an all-time system, alongside an all-time teammate.
On Sunday, Curry proved that he still has everything to become nuclear, reaching his career record with 62 points in Damian Lillard and the Portland Trail Blazers. There were a number of reasons why Curry, who was named Western Conference Player of the Week on Monday, appeared to be what he was before and the Warriors looked like a real NBA basketball team against Portland. The best player on the ground attacked all night, mostly.
Curry wasted no time letting the game come for him; he hunted his kick from the jump, attacking downhill, reaching the basket and creating space for his patented 3s outside the dribble. He fired 31 times. He made 18 free throws. A very hard line can be drawn: if Stephen Curry makes more than 30 shots and reaches the free-throw line more than 10 times, the Warriors will be a tough team to beat now that Draymond Green is back.
Ah, Draymond.
After five paragraphs, I am reaching one of the ten most important players in the league in the last half decade. It is a fitting tribute. Green tends to come after Curry in the Warriors’ conversations, but his legacy is also cemented. The Warriors would not have become a dynasty without Green; they may not have won a single title. Casual fans assume that Green’s impact is limited to defense, but that is not even remotely true.
Green’s way of playing and his sense of when and where to get the ball to Curry has been one of the main keys to unlocking the Golden State attack. This has never been more evident than in your absence to start this season. Warriors coach Steve Kerr prefers a movement-based attack that uses Curry in a heavy off-ball function, which requires capable facilitators to actually get the ball back to Curry as soon as he gives up.
It is not just the real ticket. Most passes that lead to a clean look for Curry are quite routine. It is the moment. The feeling and the expectation, not just of what Curry will do, but of what the defense will do in reaction to him. Green’s perception of all this is at another level. He processes defenses, especially when it comes to finding Curry, as a genius, so often one step ahead of a defense that he will lose Curry’s battle in a nanosecond of relaxation, and he makes decisions quickly enough to take advantage of these tiny moments of freedom by the most aggressively tracked sniper in NBA history.
The play below perfectly illustrates Green’s improvised staging:
Don’t mind the fact that Curry didn’t shoot. The question is he got the shot, and it was 100 percent because of Green. At this point, Curry was approaching a high point in his career and Portland was throwing the kitchen sink at him defensively, so it’s more difficult to open it. You have to be creative. Think about how many times Draymond made that same pass over a double Curry team and explored a 4 against 3 downhill situation. It is second nature for him to turn and attack the paint and look for snipers in the corners.
The point is: the defense also knows this. After Curry gives up on the ball so far from the ring, it is assumed that he is out of the game and there is a moment of relaxation. That’s all it takes with someone as perceptive as Green, who works as a freelancer outside of his standard reading and immediately reverts to a dribbling-hand-off / ball screen for Steph, who went into an open look.
That’s the kind of chemistry that was lacking in Golden State’s first five games, when Curry, through Kevin O’Connor of The Ringer, “touched the ball in the middle of the court 31 times every 36 minutes, a lower rate than who in any season since Mark Jackson was still the head coach in 2013-14, according to advanced NBA statistics.
“Even his brother, Seth Curry, averaged more touches in the middle of the court (33.2), as well as 86 other players,” continued O’Connor. “That changed on Sunday, with Curry setting the season highs in total touches (88), half-touches (44) and possession time (6.6 minutes).”
That changed, again, because Curry was more aggressive and Kerr has already seen the light he has to improve Curry’s ball activity without the same types of snipers and game makers around him. But even when Curry pick-and-roll, the defenses will still do what the Blazers did above and try to trap him out of the game. Even when he is attacking in the dribble, they will send two or even three defenders against him, because no one else in the Warriors scares you like a sniper or gunner.
The point is: the ball cannot be in your hands all the time, from the beginning of a possession to the end. The problem is not Curry giving up; is getting back. With Green on board making plays like the one above, the Warriors are in a much better position to return the ball to Curry, instead of having their belongings dying in the hands of inferior players while Curry is kicked out of the ball.
Green is no stranger to the way Curry is defended, and he has a Rolodex of instinctive accountants accumulated over years of experience that no one else in the Warriors can access mentally, let alone execute physically. And there is no better illustration of this sixth sense connection between Curry and Green than this improvised transfer of dribbling that only seems routine because of the quick thinking and experience of the tandem that drives it.