It's time for the Warriors to stop fooling around
— -- The Golden State Warriors have won 87 games, including two blowouts of the Cleveland Cavaliers to start the NBA Finals. That might be the problem.
The Warriors' consistent approach throughout the long regular season allowed them to win an NBA-record 73 games. That same mindset, however, proved costly in Wednesday's Game 3 of the NBA Finals.
From head coach Steve Kerr on down, the Warriors didn't approach an opportunity to take a seemingly insurmountable 3-0 lead over the Cavs with the necessary urgency. In the wake of their 30-point loss, now is the time for Kerr to play the lineups that give his team the best chance of winning.
Warriors save their best performances
As Benjamin Morris observed on FiveThirtyEight earlier this week, Golden State's consistency is actually a matter of playing relatively up or down to the level of competition. Unlike most teams, the Warriors don't tend to play worse against better opposition -- with the notable exception of their blowout road losses in the playoffs.
A key underlying reason for why Golden State can summon better performances when needed against the best competition is the way Kerr has managed his lineups -- and specifically his use of the team's "Death Lineup" with Andre Iguodala in place of starting center Andrew Bogut, moving Draymond Green to center.
Not wanting to tax Green and forward Harrison Barnes, who must defend bigger opponents in the Death Lineup, Kerr generally reserved it for the fourth quarter of close games during the regular season. According to NBA.com/Stats data, 74 of the Death Lineup's 172 minutes this year came in the final period, when it was the Warriors' most-used lineup.
Consider that 10 times this season, Golden State has been outscored with non-Death lineups on the court but won the game anyway because of the Death Lineup's performance. Nine of those game during the regular season, the difference between the Warriors finishing second in the Western Conference behind the San Antonio Spurs and setting an NBA record for wins.
In no small part because of the Death Lineup, Golden State dominated late in close games to pull out a number of the close victories or comebacks necessary to get to 73 wins. The Warriors' plus-38.6 net rating in what NBA.com defines as "clutch situations" (the last five minutes of the fourth quarter, as well as overtime, when the margin is five points or fewer) was the second-best in the NBA.com/Stats database dating back to 1996-97.
Amazingly, Golden State's clutch performance has been even better in the postseason, when the Warriors have outscored opponents by 49.3 points per 100 possessions in such situations.
Alas, that clutch ability does Golden State no good when the team loses by 30 points.
Warriors' starters lost Game 3
Remarkably, in a game they lost by 30, Golden State actually outscored Cleveland in Game 3 during the 17 minutes that Green played at center. Since the Warriors were plus-nine in the second quarter, with Green in the middle for the duration, they were plus-3 overall in his time at center.
The primary culprit was Golden State's starting lineup, which played a little less than nine minutes combined at the beginning of the both halves. During that span, the Warriors were outscored 18-7. The league's most potent offensive attack shot 3-of-15 from the field and had as many turnovers as field goals.
It would be easy to dismiss that performance as a fluke if it hadn't been going on all series. Even though Golden State leads the Finals 2-1 and still has outscored the Cavaliers by 18 points in total, the Warriors' starting five is a minus-22, posting a sickly 68.9 offensive rating. Golden State pulled away in Games 1 and 2 with Green in the middle, and has posted a 124.4 offensive rating while outscoring Cleveland by 35 points in 58 minutes with such lineups.
Of course, we don't need to look just at this series to know that playing Green at center is the Warriors' best option. With the exception of two games in Oklahoma City where the Thunder seemingly neutralized the Death Lineup with their own smaller fivesome, it's been the best lineup in the league all season.
Time for repeat of 2015 change
Though the Death Lineup moniker wasn't coined until last fall, the Warriors' small lineup emerged as their greatest weapon at this point in last year's Finals matchup between these two teams. Down 2-1 to the Cavaliers and struggling to crack a bigger Cleveland defense, Kerr opted to move Iguodala into the starting lineup in place of Bogut. Golden State won the next three games and the trophy, and Iguodala was named the Finals MVP.
Still ahead in the series, the Warriors aren't in as desperate a situation now. Kerr sounded a call for patience instead of overreaction when asked whether he considered replacing Bogut at the outset of the second half.
"We didn't feel like we had to match what they were doing because of their change in their starting lineup," Kerr said in the postgame news conference Wednesday. "We can always make a quick substitution. So I don't think that had anything to do with losing the game. It wasn't lineups. It wasn't substitution patterns. We just got our tail kicked."
In fairness, the Death Lineup itself wasn't particularly good in Game 3, getting outscored by five points in about five and a half minutes. And no lineup will look good when Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson are shooting as poorly as they did Wednesday night -- though Curry has tended to shoot far better with the Death Lineup on the court because of the superior floor spacing, as Tim Kawakami of the Bay Area News Group noted before the series.
While Kerr is right that Golden State shouldn't be too quick to change based on one game, the Warriors also shouldn't need an excuse to go to their best lineup.
The Finals are precisely what Golden State has been saving the Death Lineup for all season long. Now is the time for the Warriors to make the change in order to take a commanding 3-1 lead by winning Friday's Game 4.
