Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion

by Andy Glockner

  The end result is the Warriors have up to half a dozen players with wingspans of nearly seven feet to rotate among the shooting guard, small forward, and power forward positions (or even point guard when Curry’s on the bench). This personnel flexibility shows up in the halfcourt, where the Warriors can switch any ball screen and still have a defender capable of moving his feet well enough to defend the handler, and they also are difficult to post up against at any position. The length also really helps in transition defense, as the Warriors don’t necessarily have to find a specific cover in the open floor; with multiple guys capable of guarding multiple positions, they just find the guy closest to them as the opponent is pushing up the court.

  “Small guys have somewhat taken over the NBA to an extent,” Kerr said. “That’s where Draymond and Andre and Harrison and Klay have come into effect for us. When we’re trying to chase all these quick point guards of pick and rolls, you have to have that athleticism and length and versatility, and I think that’s a big part of the way the NBA’s played today.

  “We’re a quick team,” Kerr added. “We have a lot of interchangeable parts. We switch quite a bit. We have a lot of rangy, long-limbed athletes. Rebounding can be an issue when we play small, but we have to be on edge and active. When we are, we get to the ball quickly.”

  Green became the principal catalyst of this group, blending an elite mix of rim protection, post defense, perimeter defense, and wing scoring into a player who quickly agreed to a new five-year, $85 million contract with the team after the 2014–15 season. He’s representative of the type of more positionless player that’s now thriving in the NBA, and his impact on the Warriors was pronounced.

  Per NBA.com’s statistics database, the Warriors had a plus-16.5 rating (the net of the team’s offensive and defensive points per one hundred possessions) in the 2,490 minutes Green was on the floor, and only a plus-2.5 rating in his 1,456 minutes off the court. On the Warriors, only Curry had a larger spread between his “on” and “off” ratings. Golden State also allowed 102.4 points per one hundred possessions without Green on the floor, which was the worst mark on the team by almost two points per one hundred.

  “Draymond just has a knack for being in the right place at the right time, whether it’s getting a key rebound or covering guards on the pick and roll, penetration,” Kerr said. “He’s quick, he’s strong, he’s really, really intelligent. He just understands angles and schemes. He’s really kind of the key to our defense. We have a lot of excellent defenders. I mean, Andre is one of the best in the league and was All-League last season. [Andrew] Bogut’s our rim protector. Steph and Klay are excellent, too, but Draymond really ties it all together.”

  Another significant change under Kerr was the increased appreciation of the physical, rim-protecting Bogut, a seven-footer who missed the Warriors’ tough seven-game playoff series loss to the Los Angeles Clippers in 2014. Bogut’s presence in the lane in the 50 percent of each game he typically played allowed the Warriors’ wing players to more aggressively push up on their men, knowing that if they got beat, at least they could steer the ballhandler into Bogut’s path. During the regular season, the Warriors were five points per one hundred possessions better defensively with Bogut on the floor, and his 95.2 points per one hundred possessions “on court” defensive rating was the best on the team.

  While teams ultimately will be able to adjust to some of what the Warriors did in 2014–15, this team is far from a one-year wonder. The core is quite young, and the team-building has been fueled, in part, by analytics assessments and an overarching philosophy that seem to be spot on. While assistant general manager Kirk Lacob admits Golden State is not at the top of the league in terms of either personnel or resources thrown at data analysis, the Warriors still have made a series of very prudent—and ultimately potent—decisions.

  As an example, Lacob details one of the less-heralded ones, the free-agent signing of Andre Iguodala, a player the team had been after for a long while.

  “We’ll look for patterns, we’ll look for weak spots, and then we’ll determine how valuable those are to us because you can’t—I mean, there’s no way you’re going to construct a perfect team [that’s] perfect in every position,” Lacob said. “The only way to do that is if there are like five twenty-eight-year-old LeBrons available, and you can’t afford to pay all of them, right? You actually need ten of them, because you need guys off the bench.

  “We came to a head two years ago, where we saw a guy who was available—Andre Iguodala—a guy who we liked for like three or four years,” he added. “We thought he did so many things well, and so many of the small things that you could really fit a lot of different pieces around him. He’s like kind of the glue, or the base, whatever, that holds a team together. He makes it easier to put guys in different spots because he does so many things.”

  Iguodala spent the 2014–15 regular season coming off the bench, but became a crucial factor late in the playoffs as a starter (as will be discussed in the Epilogue).

  “[When] he became available as a free agent, we decided he was a guy that we really liked,” Lacob said. “We thought he fit our timeline a little bit, and we went after him, and that enabled us, I think, this year, to really focus on three or four things that, we thought, based on our analysis, that we really could do better.”

  A new coach, a few new faces, player development—it all came together better than anyone could have hoped. The result was a truly historic team that navigated a brutal conference with aplomb. While critics like Charles Barkley kept derisively referring to them as a “jump shooting team,” in part because of their low free throw rate to go with all the talented guys on the perimeter, the Warriors kept running, kept scoring and kept suffocating opponents. They were the best team in the NBA, and they lived up to that billing on a near-nightly basis in very sexy fashion.

  The Houston Rockets: Beyond the Three-for-All

  If you only watched one Houston Rockets game from the 2014–15 season, you still would be able to identify their primary offensive calling card: they shot as many threes as they could squeeze off.

  Per Basketball-Reference.com, the average NBA team took around 22.4 3-pointers per game. The Rockets exceeded that total in all but four of their ninety-nine combined regular-season and playoff games. They never attempted fewer than twenty in a contest, and launched a season-high forty-six against rival Dallas in a 3-point win on November 22, 2014. On twelve different occasions, the Rockets took at least forty threes in a game, and they made fifteen or more shots from behind the arc an incredible seventeen times.

  They set NBA records for most 3-pointers made and attempted in a season. Both shooting guard James Harden and small forward Trevor Ariza each attempted over five hundred fifty threes. Point guards Patrick Beverley and Jason Terry each shot well over three hundred. In all, eight Rockets attempted at least one hundred shots from behind the arc during the regular season.

  That wasn’t the entire picture of what was going on—the Rockets also were second in the league in free throw attempts, and had the fifth-best 2-point field goal percentage (thanks to taking so few of them and taking most of those close to the rim)—but the visual of threes being coldly and relentlessly launched is what will codify most in the minds of basketball fans. To interpret the Rockets through that extreme lens, though, would be selling their path and their evolution short.

  For much of Daryl Morey’s tenure as general manager, the Rockets have been the NBA’s “almost” franchise—not as much for their relative lack of playoff success as for a series of transactions that either nearly happened and may have made them a legitimate contender sooner, or did happen and undercut their progress. Here’s the primary chain of events that eventually led to the composition of the 2014–15 Rockets:

  • The seeds were planted as early as 2009, when Morey traded starting point guard Rafer Alston to Memphis for point guard Kyle Lowry.

  • In February 2010, Morey acquired forward Jordan Hill from the
Knicks as part of a deal that enabled the Knicks to clear cap room for the summer of LeBron free-agency chase.

  • In early 2011, Morey traded point guard Aaron Brooks to the Phoenix Suns for point guard Goran Dragic and a protected first-round draft pick.

  (The combined Alston/Brooks moves comprise one of the largest trade heists in recent memory. It was a shocking upgrade from two deals where players at the same position changed teams, and Houston nabbed a first-rounder on top of that. Incredible.)

  • In December 2011, two crucial things happened—one large, and one seemingly small at the time.

  First, the Rockets were the third team in the infamous Chris Paul-to-the-Lakers trade, which ultimately was nixed by then-commissioner David Stern because the league technically owned the New Orleans franchise at the time and it wasn’t felt that the Hornets were getting sufficient value in the deal. Houston would have received the star it was searching for in power forward Pau Gasol, and Dragic would have been part of the group leaving in the deal.

  Later that month, the Rockets released little-known Harvard point guard Jeremy Lin in order to sign journeyman big man Samuel Dalembert, because the three other point guards on the roster had guaranteed deals. Lin signed with the New York Knicks and created the phenomenon of “Linsanity” with his excellent play over a short stretch there.

  • In February 2012, Morey tweeted that he had made a mistake in waiving Lin.

  • In March 2012, Morey traded Hill to the Los Angeles Lakers and received a first-round pick back as part of the deal.

  • In July 2012, Morey traded Lowry to Toronto and received another protected first-round pick. Morey was accumulating assets so the Rockets could try to work a trade for Orlando Magic star center Dwight Howard, who wanted out of Orlando. The team also saw Dragic leave in free agency to sign with Phoenix. Suddenly short on point guards, the Rockets re-signed Lin in free agency through a unique $25 million “poison pill” contract that New York declined to match because of the ramifications on its own cap space.

  • In August 2012, Howard was traded to the Lakers in a four-team deal. Morey continued to hunt.

  • In October 2012, Morey finally landed his star, working the deal with Oklahoma City that landed Harden. The first-round picks acquired in the Lowry and Hill trades were major parts of the package that went to the Thunder.

  • In July 2013, after one disappointing season in Los Angeles, Howard spurned more money from the Lakers and signed with the Rockets. A rumored byproduct of that signing was Houston letting swingman Chandler Parsons out of his bargain rookie deal a year early, which then made him a restricted free agent after the 2013–14 season.

  • In July 2014, the Rockets had cleared enough room to land high-impact free-agent forward Chris Bosh from the Miami Heat and then re-sign Parsons to a big, market-level deal, which would have given Houston a core of stars as good as anyone in the league. Bosh, though, elected to re-sign with Miami, and then Parsons signed with the Dallas Mavericks after they put together a contract offer that the Rockets felt was too restrictive to match. Instead, Houston signed Ariza as Parsons’s replacement, and then acquired the veteran Terry for what was thought would be bench depth.

  Whew. Did you follow all of that? That’s how Houston came into the 2014–15 season with two stars in hand, but with an overall roster that most NBA observers considered weaker than the one from the season before, when the Rockets were eliminated in the first round by Portland in six thrilling games, thanks to a series-winning, buzzer-beating three from point guard Damian Lillard.

  Instead of slipping, the Rockets ended up winning fifty-six games and landing the 2-seed in the Western Conference playoffs for two related reasons: the guys they brought in ended up being terrific fits, and Harden’s rise to superstardom was complemented by the rest of the team playing very much like him.

  For the season, Harden led the league in total minutes played, was one field goal attempt behind Russell Westbrook for the most shots attempted, and also led the league in free throw attempts by a preposterous margin. Harden attempted more than ten free throws a game in 2014–15, which is outrageous for a guard. While eras are different and game tempos vary, Harden now has two of the twenty-six all-time seasons where a guard had ten-plus free throw attempts per game (minimum sixty games), per a search of Basketball-Reference.com. Only seven guards in history have at least two such seasons, a list that includes basketball immortals Michael Jordan, Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, Allen Iverson, and Kobe Bryant.

  Harden is tremendously clever and versatile in how he drives to the basket, and also is extremely well-versed in enhancing contact to draw foul calls. Mix in his huge number of 3-point attempts, and he’s an offense unto himself.

  “He can shoot the three, he can drive—he can drive to pass, he can drive to finish, he drives and gets fouled. So you can put him in a multitude of positions which gives you some flexibility,” head coach Kevin McHale said of Harden during the season. “We don’t have the record we have [right now] if James is not playing at his level.

  “I go back to when I came into the league in 1980,” McHale added. “It’s a players league. It always has been a players league, and it always will be a players league. Guys just have to step up and play. This is the highest level in the world, and the top players are really phenomenal players, and he’s right up there with them. So I’m happy for him. He’s just taken on every challenge and done great.”

  Harden also became the offense within the Rockets’ offense, almost to an eerie level.

  The Rockets’ offensive efficiency dropped off to a significant extent in 2014–15 as their shot selection became even more polarized. Part of that is they replaced offense with defense when they brought in players like Ariza, and a good portion of it is they suffered a significant number of lengthy injuries during the season. Howard missed half of the team’s eighty-two games. Forward Terrence Jones only played in thirty-three. Point guard Patrick Beverley (another defensive specialist) missed twenty-six games, as did swingman Corey Brewer. Streak-shooting forward Josh Smith arrived midseason and played in fifty-five games.

  Yet in the midst of this lineup chaos, even with fatigue dragging down both Harden’s and the Rockets’ efficiency numbers in the second half of the season, there was nearly perfect symmetry. BBallBreakdown’s Kelly Scaletta illustrated this in an August 2015 article where he showed how Harden, Russell Westbrook, and Chris Paul all fuel their teams in different ways, but their team offensive footprints are largely related to the strengths of their ball-dominant players. The image below, from Scaletta’s piece, shows a radial diagram of Harden’s offensive contributions by category, with the Rockets’ team breakdown mapped over his:

  The shapes are nearly identical, which means the Rockets as a whole were basically an extension of Harden himself, despite all of the moving pieces around him as the season unfolded. There is no team in the league that operates more in tune with its primary star. Mix in the much-improved defensive capabilities, especially when Howard was mostly healthy, and you have a better team.

  Then there’s the chemistry and leadership portion of the equation, some of the stuff that’s hardest to measure quantitatively but remains a crucial part of what makes good teams into great ones. In part because of all of Morey’s chopping and changing in pursuit of the ideal team, the Rockets’ roster hadn’t spent very much time together, and a good number of the players hadn’t spent a ton of time in the NBA. While the summer additions didn’t excite a lot of people from a basketball standpoint (which turned out to be pretty wrong), opinion also undershot the leadership aspect.

  “I think a big part of that is Trevor Ariza has come in and helped us, ‘Jet’ Terry’s come in and helped us, I think Pat’s maturity—those guys all talk and are all very frank and honest with each other,” McHale said about his team’s improved chemistry and accountability. “The maturity level of our team, even though we have ten guys with two or less years of [NBA] experience, our team is more mature t
his year from the Arizas and the Terrys and just their interaction with everybody, and I think that’s a big thing. I think that helps James, and James helps us. It’s a nice relationship. Everybody’s got a part in that.”

  The Atlanta Hawks and the No-Star System

  In a season where the preseason expectations were that Cleveland, reloaded with LeBron James and Kevin Love, would romp through the East, it was another heavily Spurs-influenced team that instead took the conference by storm.

  To say no one saw Atlanta’s sixty-win season coming would be an understatement. The Hawks, hindered by injuries a season earlier, had limped to a 38–44 record in 2013–14, garnering the 8-seed in the weak Eastern Conference almost by default before taking the top-seeded Indiana Pacers to the limit in the first round of the playoffs. The Hawks were a nice, modestly successful franchise, but hardly looked like a burgeoning powerhouse, even in a watered-down conference that was in considerable flux.

  The 2014–15 season was Hawks head coach Mike Budenholzer’s second with the franchise after spending nineteen years with the Spurs, the last seventeen as an assistant coach under the legendary Gregg Popovich. Budenholzer brought a lot of the same team-building philosophy and mentality to the job, including his mentor’s notable terseness with the media, but he certainly didn’t have legends like Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, and Tony Parker on his roster, nor the years of continuity that allow the Spurs to not only maintain their culture but also execute so seamlessly on the court.