Golden State Warriors: Taking A Page Out Of The Cavs’ Book

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery; but after the Game 4 beatdown the Cleveland Cavaliers endured courtesy of the Golden State Warriors, the heightened sense of trepidation surrounding the state of Ohio is slowly clouding over the Cavs’ aura of adulation.

By all accounts, the Warriors had been severely outplayed through three games. Despite being the heavy favorites, the undermanned Cavs had out-grit, out-scrambled, and out-schemed the Dubs en route to taking an unforeseen 2-1 lead.

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However, going into Game 4 of the 2015 NBA Finals, Warriors head coach Steve Kerr would nonchalantly disregard the core morals in which we base our contemporary society on — specifically, the attributes of honesty and integrity — and ambush the Cavs with a game-time change to his starting lineup.

All is fair in the game of war, I guess.

The move of inserting veteran swingman Andre Iguodala into the starting lineup in the place of their resident interior anchor, Andrew Bogut, was made with the intention of curating more flow and an enhanced presence of pace and space — characteristics that defined Golden State’s season long identity.

Simply put, Bogut had proven to be borderline unplayable thus far in the series. With the Cavs taking away the Draymond Green-Andrew Bogut lob, as well as face guarding/stunting the Dubs’ pindowns and dribble-handoffs, Bogut had become an obsolete commodity as his inability to score while unguarded had hampered the Warriors’ offensive effectiveness.

Sure enough, with Iggy, Harrison Barnes, and Draymond Green headlining the Dubs’ front court, Golden State finally found their offensive groove.

Most notably, the trio played with a much needed aggressiveness and boldness in capitalizing the Cavs’ consistent efforts to hedge the Stephen Curry-Draymond Green pick-and-roll and string the reigning MVP out to ultimately force the ball of out the sharpshooting Baby-Faced Assassin’s hands.

With Green attacking the rack off of the short roll, unleashing his refined giant-killer (floater), while Iguodala rained down corner 3 after corner 3, Golden State successfully established their preferred tempo and pace to pour in a series-high 31 first quarter points.

Their decisiveness on the offense end, as a whole, would reinvigorate their spread pick-and-roll game. Driven in large by Green’s rediscovered confidence, the efficiency of the Curry screen-and-roll skyrocketed on Thursday night.

Specifically, the Warriors enjoyed a sterling 1.33 points per possession (PPP) on the 28 screens Curry negotiated in Game 4.

Without Bogut burdening their offensive jive, despite Curry’s stick-to-itiveness to make the right play and pitch it back to the roller off of the soft trap, Golden State scored on a blistering eFG%* (effective field goal percentage) of 60 percent on Steph Curry pick-and-rolls, per NBA.com’s SportVU Data.

*eFG% = (FG + 0.5 * 3P) / FGA

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What really turned the Warriors fortunes around, however, were their recalibrated defensive scheme.

Explicitly, Kerr countered David Blatt’s extended efforts to make every game a grind by deploying an eerily similar strategy. For three games, the Cavs found success doubling Curry and forcing a timid Bogut, a rattled Green, and a hesitant Barnes to beat them.

Conversely, the Warriors, for the most part, chose to cover LeBron James with a single defender, while zoning up the strong side to pack the boxes and elbows. However, the four-time MVP would cerebrally time the 2.9 seconds the Warriors’ interior anchors were allowed to camp in the paint, and attack the rack once Bogut or Festus Ezeli retreated back to the weak side.

After dropping 41.0 points, 12.0 rebounds, and 8.3 assists a contest through the first three games, the Dubs finally changed their coverage on LeBron in Game 4.

In particular, the Cavs have steadily tried to exploit Curry on the defensive end by running a LeBron pick-and-roll with Steph’s man. To counter, through three games, the Warriors had Curry show and recover to maintain their mano-a-mano defensive principles.

But with their newly formed super small-ball lineup, Golden State decided to let Curry hedge the James screen-and-roll, string him out towards the sideline — a la what the Cavs are doing to him — and force the Cavaliers’ battalion of perimeter role players, such as Matthew Dellavedova, Iman Shumpert, and J.R. Smith, to beat them with open jumpers.

Likewise, when Cleveland reverted back to their preferred style of play, a.k.a. the LeBron isolation, the Warriors’ perimeter front were much more aggressive on their hard digs and stunts — often forcing James to kick it back out to his spot-up shooters.

Unfortunately for the King, his serfs failed to exploit on their bevy of open looks. In fact, the trio of Dellavedova, Shumpert, and Smith shot a combined 7-of-35 from the field (20 percent), including 3-of-22 (13.6 percent) from beyond the arc.

In addition, the small-ball Warriors successfully seduced the Cavs into dumping the ball down low to Timofey Mozgov in their plight to “exercise” the size advantage the gargantuan Russian had on the 6’7″ Green.

By doing so, they unknowingly conceded to Golden State’s crafted gameplan of taking the playmaking duties away from LeBron. Mozgov may have had a career-defining individual performance, but his efficiency as a post-up player lags miles behind Golden State’s team-oriented offensive efficaciousness.

Going into Game 5 — perhaps the most pivotal game of the series — it will be interesting to see how the Cavs combat the Warriors’ refurbished scheme.

Will Blatt take a page out of Kerr’s book this time and go small with LeBron at the 4? Will they continue to stay big and hope their guards reclaim their shooting touch? They can’t possibly shoot much worse than they did in Game 4 … can they?

What they can’t do is play at Golden State’s pace. The worst thing could have happened to the Cavs last game was running out to a 7-0 lead via an avalanche of early-game transition points.

Thereafter, they would repeatedly try to push the ball up the floor, instead of controlling the tempo and limiting their possessions — aspects of the game in which they perfected through three games.

Golden State also fine tuned their offense early on by giving Curry a couple isolation sets to start off the game. He may not have produced an eye-popping stat line, but Steph has seemed to have finally figured out the Dellavedova riddle.

The series now shifts back the Oracle with both teams just two wins away from capturing the Larry O’Brien Trophy. Sunday should be another nip-and-tuck affair.

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