Golden State Warriors: 5 Reasons To Resist Panicking

5. Signs Of Life From David Lee

In the first three games of the series, we’ve seen Marreese Speights and Festus Ezeli step up a few times on the offensive end to make up for a pretty miserable series from Draymond Green and Andrew Bogut. In Game 3, we saw Steve Kerr dust off David Lee out of desperation…and the rarely used power forward brought a whole new dimension to Golden State’s offense.

In the process, that revelation may have helped Kerr crack the code to Cleveland’s suffocating defense.

As soon as Lee entered the game, the Warriors used him effectively as the roll man out of pick-and-roll sets with Curry. When the Cavs hedged out and doubled Curry, he found Lee open with space to work the 4-on-3. Lee made the right read with just about every pass.

He found Andre Iguodala in the corner for a three that cut Cleveland’s lead to nine just a few minutes into the fourth. He had a three-point play against LeBron James on the next pick and roll. On the possession after that, he found a wide open Leandro Barbosa for a layup out of — you guessed it! — the pick and roll.

Draymond Green showed a ton of improvement this season with his decision-making as the roll man, but he’s struggled with it in this series so far, throwing potential alley-oop passes out of bounds and failing to add that stretch-4 dimension to the offense with his sudden hesitance to shoot the three-ball.

Lee is a liability defensively, so there’s no reason to give up on Green or anything drastic like that. But the former All-Star definitely needs more run in small-ball lineups for this series, which Kerr recognized, pledging that we’d see more of Lee moving forward in his postgame press conference.

Next: No. 4