Can the Utah Jazz beat the Golden State Warriors using the OKC, Cleveland mold?
The Golden State Warriors have been better than every team in the NBA for three straight years, but one thing has given them consistent problems: size. That could be a problem in their Round 2 series against the Utah Jazz, which begins on Tuesday.
Of the nine playoff series the Golden State Warriors have played dating back to 2015, seven have ended in six games or less. The two exceptions: Last year’s Western Conference Finals against the Oklahoma City Thunder, and the subsequent NBA Finals against the Cleveland Cavaliers.
The difficulty of those two matchups could be attributed to pure talent, as they were clearly the most loaded teams Golden State has faced during the Steve Kerr era. It could also have been a product of the Warriors’ own health and fatigue concerns.
Watching those series play out, it was clearly more than that. The tools each team used to challenge Golden State—namely size, length and tempo—were similar, and no other playoff opponent has possessed them to the same degree.
The Utah Jazz do, though. Most look at the Warriors’ upgraded roster, dominant season and convincing first round sweep and assume they’ll roll in the conference semifinals, but the matchup says otherwise.
No team is as large as Utah. It starts a 6’3″ point guard with a 6’9″ wingspan in George Hill, two 6’8″ wings in Rodney Hood and Gordon Hayward, a 6’10″ power forward in Derrick Favors and a 7’1″ center in Rudy Gobert (who has the NBA’s largest wingspan at 7’9″).
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It also has two uber-long 6’6″ guards in Dante Exum and Alec Burks, the exceptionally strong Joe Johnson (6’7″, 240 pounds) and the 6’8″ Joe Ingles rounding out its perimeter rotation, while Jeff Withey (7’0″) and Boris Diaw (an extremely rotund 6’8″) add mass up front.
Size helped the Jazz finish No. 3 in both rebounding rate (51.8, per ESPN.com) and defensive efficiency (102.7) during the regular season, and it will give them a potential pathway against the league’s best team.
Those that try to run and shoot with the Warriors get burned every single time (Houston and Portland have both been victims of this twice over the past three postseasons). There is a belief that the high-variance of three-point shooting and chaos is the best way to beat a juggernaut (this is how the 42-40 Warriors upset the 67-win Mavericks in 2006-07), but not when that juggernaut has mastered that style of play on both ends like no team ever has.
No, the best way to counteract the Warriors’ trademark style is by slowing tempo and going big. Fewer possessions means higher variance, and more size tilts the advantage in those possessions away from the Warriors, whether it’s through wearing down Draymond Green and monopolizing the glass or through exploiting the team’s mediocre, traditional bigs.
The Warriors are less susceptible to this tactic than last year, however. Kevin Durant is twice the rebounder and rim protector that Harrison Barnes was, making the team’s small-ball lineup more viable against giant frontcourts.
The true center rotation is better, too. While Andrew Bogut at his best was a far superior player to Zaza Pachulia, JaVale McGee or David West, he wasn’t usually at his best come playoff time. He was also only one person, and Pachulia, McGee and West are three different options.
Every minute that Bogut and Green did not occupy at center was occupied by either Festus Ezeli or (gulp) Anderson Varejao (replace Varejao with David Lee in 2014-15). Even if we generously give Bogut the edge over any current Warriors center, they are all significantly better than any other option the Warriors had over the last two years. What’s more, each of their current centers provide distinctly different skills, allowing Kerr/Mike Brown to play matchups with more dexterity than in years past.
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That still won’t help much against Gobert. Pachulia generally struggles with athletic pick-and-roll finishers who can ignore him on the other end. McGee tends to get dominated by diligent rebounders with the length to break up lobs. West is the best all-around player of the three, but is also the smallest, and struggles against size. Gobert is all of these things, and that’s why Green is Golden State’s best option against him.
That choice is still far from perfect. Gobert is a boar on the offensive glass, and if Green leaves him to help elsewhere, he’ll eat for days. While Green’s theoretical shooting is enough to lure some centers from the paint, he’ll have to catch fire to smoke Gobert out.
Derrick Favors’ health may be the biggest factor in this series. If he is less than 100 percent, the Warriors can try and match Green’s center minutes with Gobert as much as possible, and then exploit Favors’ immobility with McGee, outsize and out-hustle him with Pachulia or simply match him with West, who is a comparable player to an 80 percent version of Favors.
If Favors plays like he did in Game 7 against the Clippers (17 points, 11 rebounds, 8-of-11 shooting), the Jazz have a chance to shake this series up. Not only will they have a sizable edge at center every minute that Green is resting or at the 4, but they’ll have a chance to play he and Gobert together. Their ability to keep up on the perimeter and in transition while monopolizing the boards has a ton of Steven Adams/Serge Ibaka potential.
Utah’s size extends to the perimeter, which also correlates to last year’s OKC team. Russell Westbrook, Andre Roberson and Kevin Durant were used to contain Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson while laser-alarming passing lanes, and that strategy is workable for Quin Snyder.
It is important to note, however, that no one defender on Utah has the defensive skill of Roberson, the monstrous length and versatility of Durant, nor the ability to convert turnovers into points like Westbrook. They compare more accurately to the 2014-15 Grizzlies, who guarded Golden State admirably with Mike Conley, Tony Allen and Courtney Lee.
That Grizzlies team was tabbed the Warriors’ “nightmare matchup” before the playoffs began, and Grit-N-Grind did manage to jump out to a 2-1 series lead (making them the only team besides the Cavs and Thunder that have pushed the Warriors past five games).
Utah falls somewhere in between those Grizzlies and last year’s Thunder/Cavs. That would put the threshold at about 6.5 games for this series, but the presence of Durant changes things.
Had Durant been present against Memphis, Oklahoma City (ignore the time-space continuum paradox) or Cleveland, you can figure each series would have swung at least a game towards Golden State. That isn’t a “Durant is worth a game” type of oversimplification, but rather a specific assessment of how his skills counteract the “big and slow” strategy.
His isolation-scoring brilliance should keep the offense efficient in sluggish conditions, and the interior defense and rebounding boosts he can provide from either forward position should counteract any disadvantage the Warriors face at center.
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If projecting this series’ length, five games is a good starting point (a sweep is exceedingly unlikely). Continued brilliance from Derrick Favors would swing the ledger towards six. It’s hard to see it going further than that, but Utah has the roster to make the league’s best team uncomfortable.