Sports Nut

How the Warriors Saved Their Season

A conversation with ESPN’s Ethan Sherwood Strauss about Golden State’s Game 6 win against the Oklahoma City Thunder. 

Stephen Curry signals that the Warriors and Thunder will play a Game 7 in the Western Conference Finals, at Oklahoma City’s Chesapeake Energy Arena on May 28, 2016.

Maddie Meyer/Getty Images

On May 26, I presented 10 theories about the Golden State Warriors’ collapse. Two days later, the Warriors overcame a late-game deficit to beat the Thunder 108-101 and tie up the Western Conference Finals at three games apiece. Golden State and Oklahoma City will now play a decisive Game 7 on Monday night, with the winner facing LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA Finals. Sports!

After the Thunder demolished the Warriors in Game 3, Stefan Fatsis, Mike Pesca, and I spoke with ESPN’s Warriors beat writer Ethan Sherwood Strauss about what went wrong for Golden State. On Sunday morning, I checked back in with Strauss to get his thoughts on how the Warriors saved their season. We discussed how Klay Thompson made himself into a great player, whether Stephen Curry is really healthy, and why it’s important to criticize whatever team loses. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Josh Levin: The Warriors lost Games 3 and 4 in Oklahoma City by a combined 52 points. What was different in Game 6—do you think it was better individual play, better team play, or something else?

Ethan Sherwood Strauss: In Games 3 and 4, I made the analogy to the movie Gravity, where once the Thunder built a big lead, it’s sort of like when one of the astronauts slip away from the tether and they’re just flying away from reality and salvation. That’s the sense I get in that particular building when the Warriors lose contact. But in Game 6, after the Thunder took a double-digit lead in the second quarter, the Warriors actually had a response, and closed it to something reasonable—five points—at the half. It was really just maintaining that distance in Game 6, and Klay Thompson performing CPR on the offense for a huge stretch until it finally woke up and started functioning.

Levin: I realized in the last five or six minutes—a lot of what you recounted in your piece on the anatomy of the comeback—that I hadn’t noticed that certain things weren’t happening for the Warriors in previous games. For one thing, I remembered, Oh yeah, Andre Iguodala did used to steal the ball like that.

Strauss: I think they simplified their strategy, and that allowed them to return to being what they were. I think they might have outsmarted themselves at the beginning of the series. I liked the defensive game plan of having Andrew Bogut operate as a free safety, sagging off Andre Roberson and really packing the paint that way, because then you have Draymond Green on Steven Adams, who also doesn’t really shoot, and then you have Curry guarding Russell Westbrook, but it’s OK because he has all that insurance.

But that might have been too complicated. It worked when Bogut was in the game, but once Bogut was out and they used Green as the free safety, it didn’t really play into his instincts—he’d prefer to be involved in the action rather than be hyperaware of what this guy slinking behind him might be doing. And so I think that by returning to the base defense, and having everybody switch everything—especially when they went small— that helped in the moments where they needed it the most. They still came really close to the season being over, but I think that’s what ultimately made the difference.

Levin: Before the series started, a lot of the conversation was about who was going to make the other team adjust. Based on what you’re saying, it seems like rather than force the Thunder to adjust to what they did, the Warriors thought they needed to change what they do. Going back to what they did when they were NBA champions—that’s what ended up working. It seems obvious in retrospect.

Strauss: Yeah, it does, but some of that gimmickry they’ve used in the past has really helped them. Steve Kerr has talked about getting advice from Phil Jackson, and being told that the most flexible coach has the best chance of winning. So when the Warriors were down 1-2 to the Grizzlies last year and they had Bogut guard Tony Allen, that was the kind of adjustment that ultimately ended that series. I think they wanted to get that series-winning adjustment in before everything started. They probably chose wrong, but I can understand why they chose wrong.

Levin: Who do you think is a good historical comparison for Klay Thompson? The way he plays is a manifestation of how different the game is now—he shoots at such a high volume with such a high percentage of those shots from three-point range. I can’t think of anyone from the past who put up a performance like he did in Game 6, scoring 41 points with 11 three-pointers. Obviously you can’t think of a comparable performance because no one has ever made that many threes in a playoff game.

Strauss: I’m no authority to really tell people who Klay Thompson is, because I never expected this from him. When he started out in his career, I had the sense that he might’ve been overrated. What does this guy do? He’s a good three-point shooter off the catch, but other than that, he’s not creating efficient shots. He takes a bunch of long twos, and he doesn’t hit them at an insane rate. He finishes badly at the rim—Warriors fans used to have a derisive nickname for those shots early in his career, calling them Klayups. And defensively, I thought he was overrated because he’s not an incredible athlete. Sure, he tries hard, but I think you need that athleticism to truly be a great defender.

It shows you that Jerry West knows more about basketball than I do, because not only was West in charge of the pick, but also was a strong political force in preventing the Kevin Love trade that they were considering. For all the grumbling that West does about analytics, he often talked about how the Warriors were last in passes per possession in Mark Jackson’s last season as head coach, and that if only they would get a coach who would move the ball, then Klay Thompson would break out. And he did. Plus, he’s really grown into a defender who executes the scouting report and gives full effort on that end.

And this is a quality that’s more subjective: Klay Thompson might not be as good as James Harden, but Klay Thompson is totally OK with being Klay Thompson. That’s a big deal in the NBA, where people want their shots and want their fame, and Klay’s very much the good soldier. The coaching staff loves him. Upon exiting Game 6, the first thing said by Chris DeMarco, who’s on the coaching staff, was “Klay’s a fucking monster.” It really sounds cliché, but he’s an incredibly hard worker, and that’s something I couldn’t have known to factor into it. And now he’s like … Reggie Miller with defense? That seems to be what he’s turning into.

Levin: The Warriors team from the last six minutes of the fourth quarter was much better than the one that played the first 42 minutes. They were in the game because Klay, and to some extent Steph, was making these three-pointers. I saw it as a refutation of this idea that a jump-shooting team is going to shoot themselves out of games. The only reason they were able to be in the game and have that last run mean anything is that three-pointers are worth as much they are.

Strauss: I think the comeback is going to be a little underrated because the free throws at the end pushed it to not such a close-looking win. Also, they came back from seven points with a little under six minutes to go. It doesn’t seem miraculous. But they did it at a time when the Thunder were in the bonus and the Warriors had drawn no fouls. That is impossible. You don’t win in that circumstance unless you shoot a lot of shots that count for three. The comeback recipe was playing incredibly diligent defense and counting on the fact that your shots—threes instead of twos—count for 50 percent more.

Levin: It was also important that they were getting steals at the end, because they were unable to get rebounds. The best way to stop a team if you can’t rebound a missed shot is to just take the ball away from them.

Strauss: That Andre Iguodala swipe-down is a risky play. It’s one where he hopes the confidence he has in it influences the referee, and it also helps that those were clean swipes. I don’t think down the stretch of the game he was getting away with hacks; he was just taking an aggressive risk. Anything that makes Durant burn calories on a possession, I think that matters. He had a couple swipes like that on Durant and a couple more where he forced Durant into inefficient shots. And he also got that steal on Westbrook on a switch. He beat him to a spot and when Westbrook loaded up to take a jumper, Iguodala just took it, then immediately popped an outlet pass to Klay Thompson for the three to put the Warriors up by three. That’s as good a defensive performance as I’ve seen. Iguodala was incredible.

Levin: Draymond Green played really well on defense for the second game in a row. On offense, it seems clear that he’s lost confidence. How much of his struggles on offense do you think are a confidence thing versus him being overmatched physically against the Thunder’s bigger players?

Strauss: I think some of that might be trying to focus on the things he does well, since it’s been a difficult series for him and he’s been the subject of so much scrutiny, but I’m not sure he lacks for confidence. At the rim at least, he hasn’t been as good and his decision-making hasn’t been as good, but I don’t have a good explanation for it. Sometimes guys just have a series of bad games, and I’m not sure how much to read into it. Shaun Livingston is having a bad series against the Thunder. Maybe that’s because the Thunder put a center on him sometimes and he doesn’t know how to deal with that, and maybe it’s because he’s had a series of bad shooting games. I honestly don’t know.

Levin: With Draymond, he manifests his confidence in a way that you can see it. Other players might be just as confident—Klay Thompson is probably as confident as Draymond Green, it’s just that he’s not expressing it so that people can see it from 1,000 miles away. Also, there’s the fact that Draymond was a second-round pick, and he can recite the 34 guys taken in front of him.

Strauss: This is a touchy conversation, because Draymond is into the idea of when he can be criticized and when he can’t. He reached out to me after Game 4 and said I could take my best shot at him, because he was “fucking awful.” In theory, I don’t need permission to take a shot at him, but as far as Draymond Green’s concerned, permission was granted. He even reached out to me the next day and said effectively that he’s on media blackout, but he hoped that I took my best shot. And then after the last game he said that there’s no free pass, that he cannot be ripped after this game. So, those are the rules according to Draymond Green, and it’s also maybe a little bit of insight into how he tries to get himself going.

Levin: Are we looking at the results from Game 6 and saying that Steph Curry is healthier, or is there something different in the way he’s moving where even if they had lost, you would have said that he was back to his old self.

Strauss: Steph has missed six playoff games, missed game action due to injury in eight, and then twice has just sort of thrown himself back into the fray. He’s never really communicated that he is, as the sports phrase goes, “100 percent.” He talked about knee pain until the very moment they lost a game in the series and then didn’t want to use it as an excuse, and so would curtly say, I’m fine and I can do what I need to do to be able to play, which is not the same as saying, “I’m healthy.” He had a bit more burst in Game 6, and was decisive in throwing himself in the paint at a time of desperation. But I don’t think people understand how injuries work. The idea that you’re just always going to be compromised, or that you’re always going to be pain-free and injury-free and it’s just totally binary—I don’t think that’s the nature of this particular issue.

Levin: There’s no way for us to know if he’s healthier or if this is a desperate time, and he’s maybe even subconsciously pushing through and forcing himself to make moves that he would’ve shied away from if it wasn’t an elimination game.

Strauss: The thing that had gone away for me—he does a sideways leap to get open. That obviously freaks out whatever big guy is guarding him, and at that very moment of hesitation, he pushes off. I’ve seen him do it a couple times pushing off the left in this particular series, but he just lurches sideways. If you noticed at the end on the dagger play on Serge Ibaka, it was one where he set up to do that, pushing off his left foot.

He hesitated a little bit, and that moment of hesitation as he was about to push off caused Ibaka to jump, and that’s what allowed him to get by him. I think in some ways, Steph is robbing a bank with a candy bar, and leveraging the threat of what he does at peak form to open up the drive.

Levin: I’m out of the prediction game, and out of the declaring-a-collapse game, but it feels funny that there’s a Game 7 now. It feels like the Warriors have come all the way back. On the other hand, it is hard to count on a team winning if that team cannot rebound. It seemed like for long stretches of the game, the Warriors had to defend two or three times in a row if they wanted to get a stop on a particular possession, and that has to be exhausting.

Strauss: They couldn’t rebound or draw fouls. They’re sort of bleeding points in both respects.

The other writers I hung out with after the game, they had the strong sense of the inevitability of a Warriors victory in Game 7, because teams know when they just missed a shot at closing it out, and it’s emotionally devastating. I don’t necessarily feel that way. As I told you the last time we talked, in sports we often conflate probability with inevitability, and we’re quick to jump from one to the other. I think the Warriors will probably win Game 7, but Game 7 is the ultimate in variance. I wouldn’t be shocked if it’s another closely contested game where the Thunder have a chance.

We do ourselves a disservice by in retrospect thinking things are inevitable. I was talking about that with Steve Kerr, and how nobody cares that the Warriors were down 1-2 twice last postseason, and there was extreme doubt and criticism before they turned things around. It’s viewed in retrospect as, of course Memphis was overmatched and the Cavs were outmatched. In the moment it didn’t feel that way.

Levin: Do you think that a hypothetical series victory for the Warriors would be validating for them in a way that nothing else has been in the past two years? This Thunder series has been tougher than any challenge the Warriors have faced in last year’s regular season and playoffs or this year’s regular season and playoffs. One part of me thinks that it would be validating, and that the people it would be validating for are dumb people.

Strauss: But we need those dumb people. Those dumb people are so important. In my sphere, a lot of people say, Oh, I hate all the hot takes and the stupid narratives that are going to result from this series. And I think, no, we need all that, because otherwise what does it really matter? We’re just going to exit the game saying that both teams are great at basketball and that one made more of their shots and there might have been an element of fortune and variance. No, we need an idea that there’s going to be a massive cultural hammer swung at the loser. That’s important to me.