Is the Warriors’ Offense Too Complicated for Rookies?
For the last few seasons, the Golden State Warriors have been in a transitional period. They are no longer the title contending juggernauts that they were from late 2014 to 2019. They have had some notable player defections and also, their core group has simply gotten older. Injuries have hit them pretty hard over the last couple of years. In particular, Klay Thompson has missed two full seasons due to tears in his ACL and Achilles’ tendon. Therefore, they have had to re-shuffle their roster quite a bit by breaking in some new players, which includes a few high lottery picks. In the 2020 Draft, they drafted James Wiseman with the second overall pick. However, Wiseman struggled to adapt to the Warriors’ system, as he looked confused and lost on both ends of the floor. His struggles were scrutinized to the point that some wondered if the team were better served by simplifying the offense to allow him to adjust more seamlessly. As the season progressed, the Warriors didn’t really have to address these concerns because Wiseman tore the meniscus in his right knee, which caused him to sit out the rest of the year. The team moved on without him and their overall play improved to the point where they finished with a berth in the play-in tournament. Coming into this season, the Warriors again have lottery picks on their roster in Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody, but it’s unlikely that either of them will play major minutes in the rotation. With this in mind, there seems like there is some kind of pattern developing. The question of whether or not the Warriors offense is too complicated for young players may be a relevant one, so it will be interesting to unpack this and try to figure out why this might be the case.
The first way to figure this out is to see if there’s a way to quantify the complexity of a team’s offense. This could be hard because any given possession features a number of different movements, which are not always tracked, especially by readily available sources. I had to take a different approach to estimate the complexity of any given team’s offense. Because there’s no reliable service at my disposal that tracks all movements on the court, I decided to use data from Synergy to figure out the simplicity level of different offenses from last season. Specifically, I totaled up the percentage of possessions that ended in any kind of pick-and-roll, isolation, or post-up to get an offense’s Simplicity Value. Based on last season’s stats, teams used simple plays for an average of around 34.9% of the time. At the high end, here are the five most simplistic offenses in the league last season. The percentage of simple plays, or Simplicity Value, is in parentheses.
Portland Trail Blazers (42.3%)
New York Knicks (40.7%)
Los Angeles Clippers (39.8%)
Dallas Mavericks (39.6%)
Atlanta Hawks (38.7%)
Interestingly enough, three of the top five teams featured attacks that were built around a singular ball handler. It would make sense that they would rely heavily on simple pick-and-roll actions. The Warriors, even though they have one of the best ball handing guards in the league in Stephen Curry, were actually at the opposite end of this spectrum because they had the lowest Simplicity Value in the league last season at 26.5%. This was last in the league by a considerable margin, as their offense was 2.8% less simple than the team directly ahead of them, the Indiana Pacers. This makes sense for Golden State because they have finished in the top five in Passes Made per Game, according to the league’s tracking data, in every season since the team hired Steve Kerr to be the coach. In fact, I ran a correlation to test the relationship between Passes Made and the simplicity level of an offense. The relationship between the two ended up being an inverse one, with a correlation value of -0.574. This indicates that there’s a moderately strong relationship between these two variables, suggesting that more passes tend to result in a less simple or more complex offense. Therefore, we can conclude that Golden State runs one of the most complicated offenses in the NBA right now.
The question from here is, “how does this complexity impact rookies?” This question is trickier to answer for a number of reasons. For starters, the sample of rookies that have played for Golden State in Kerr’s tenure as head coach is fairly small, so it’s hard to use it to draw a real meaningful conclusion. Also, this question assumes that the rookies that the team had were the best possible options that they could acquire. Additionally, the team has been in different positions while Kerr has been the coach, as they gone from no doubt title contenders to the worst team in the league and back to a competitive playoff team in a span of seven years. Therefore, the developmental conditions that these rookies have been subjected to has been different each time. Even so, we can sift through some of this noise by getting a better sense of the available data, starting with the actual performance of rookies in the time that this offense was implemented.
In the five seasons where the Warriors were contending for championships, there wasn’t a lot of playing time available for rookies. Only one player, Patrick McCaw played 1000 or more minutes in his rookie season. This could be a bit misleading because necessity played a role in McCaw’s early playing time. Specifically, in that season, the Warriors didn’t have a lot of wing players on the bench and Kevin Durant missed 20 games due to injury. Performance-wise, McCaw put up middling efficiency numbers in a pretty simplified role as a rookie and he wasn’t able to improve himself to grow beyond that. In the season after that one, McCaw’s minutes were gradually reduced, and he was eventually let go after his second year. Of the rookies that made their debuts during the team’s title runs, Kevon Looney is the only one that is still with the Warriors. He didn’t really play at all in his rookie season, but he gradually improved to eventually become one of the team’s more reliable big men in the later years of their run. Aside from Looney, Chris Boucher is the only former Warriors’ rookie that is currently a regular rotational NBA player. The other six players have either flamed out or are still hanging around the fringes of the league. This lends some credence into the notion that the Warriors’ system is unfriendly to rookies.
The next couple of seasons haven’t really dispelled this idea in a significant way. Wiseman’s struggles in grasping the system have already been discussed. The season before that provided a greater opportunity for younger players to contribute because Curry and Thompson were both out for a considerable length of time due to injury. Three rookies were able to play in the regular rotation, but only one of those three are still with the Warriors right now. After a rough rookie year, Jordan Poole found his footing and he improved rapidly to become a valuable scoring guard off the bench. On the flip side, Eric Paschall got off to a fast start, earning a spot on the 2019-20 All-Rookie 1st Team, but he was unable to build on that strong season. His efficiency dropped a bit, his minutes were significantly reduced last season, and he was eventually traded to Utah in this past offseason. Finally, Ky Bowman was let go after his rookie year and he hasn’t played another game in the NBA since. All of this helps to reinforce the notion that it’s pretty difficult for young players to adapt and stick around in this unique, motion-oriented, offensive system.
Even though the system is difficult for most rookies to pick up, it’s not likely to change any time soon and it probably shouldn’t. After all, this system has been in place for several years because it essentially unlocked the full offensive potential of the team’s primary core players. Before Kerr was hired as the coach, Curry, Thompson, and Draymond Green were pigeon-holed into traditional roles under former coach, Mark Jackson. In Jackson’s last season as head coach in 2013-14, he ran simple plays around 42.1% of the time. To put that number in perspective, the 2013-14 Warriors would have had the second simplest offense in the league, if they had played in 2020-21. Jackson’s simplistic offense didn’t get the most of these three players because it was just too predictable. Curry had to dominate the ball and was forced to create a lot of his own offense, so defenses could key in on him a little easier. Thompson was limited to scoring on pre-programmed movements while Green was left to spot up and play an unfamiliar position. The switch to Kerr’s motion offense changed everything because it effectively leveraged Curry and Thompson’s ability to play without the ball. Essentially, it made them unpredictable, moving targets that the defense had to account for on every possession, which produced breakdowns that gave them easier shots. Also, it decentralized the playmaker role to make passing skills valuable at positions other than the traditional point guard. All of this enabled their core players to be the best versions of themselves on offense, which took the Warriors to the next level. Therefore, the offense is probably going to remain in place as long as their core group is still together. If this is the case, then what do the Warriors need to do to integrate newer players into the system more smoothly?
If dumbing down the system isn’t a viable answer, then the organization probably has to improve its ability to identify and acquire better fitting players. It’s uncertain if the Warriors are able to do this as well as they did in the past because they have gone through a bit of a brain drain in recent years. In particular, several key front office and coaching staff members from the title contending years have moved on to other teams. For example, Travis Schlenk is now General Manager and President of the Atlanta Hawks. Jerry West is now an executive board member with the Los Angeles Clippers. Also, Willie Green and Jarron Collins are the head coach and the lead assistant coach, respectively, of the New Orleans Pelicans. All of this means that the Warriors haven’t had the same personnel in place to bring in and develop players. Also, it suggests that this newer group of staff members may not be as well-versed in the system as the people that they have replaced, so there’s probably less of an understanding of how to find individuals that can seamlessly fit in with the current structure.
Then again, a simpler explanation could be that it just takes time for everybody involved to learn the system and become comfortable in it. There has only been one game in this new season, but it seems as if the front office has turned a corner. Specifically, their veteran free agent acquisitions seem to have paid off because those players looked like they fit into the team, and they didn’t seem like they needed any additional adjustment period. It helped that they re-acquired a familiar face in Andre Iguodala. In addition to this, Nemanja Bjelica and Otto Porter consistently made smart plays to keep the offense flowing in their opening game. At least with veteran players, the Warriors might be getting a better feel for the kinds of players that they need to make their system more effective in the coming years.
Developing younger players is still uncharted territory for the Warriors because they didn’t really need to integrate youth into the lineup in their title runs. Their lineup on opening night was almost exclusively filled with veterans, aside a short stretch from Moses Moody. It’s probably not sustainable for them to only use veterans in the next few years, so they will have to get some younger legs into the rotation because their older core has gone through a lot of wear and tear in the process of chasing championships. The process of developing their youth is likely to be much more gradual one. Though it’s tempting for the team to want immediate results, it’s better if they treat a player’s rookie season as an introductory learning year. From there, an increased understanding of the system should give them a better chance to grow into valuable contributors. Their most successful draft picks, Looney and Poole, have followed this path, as they either rarely played or started off very slowly as rookies. Later, they found their footing, adapted their games to fit into the system, and eventually they both became key rotational players. Most likely, the hope for the Warriors is that the newest group of young players develop in a similar pattern. That being said, the Warriors could benefit by targeting players in the draft that excel at playing without the ball and aren’t really reliant on simple plays to get scoring opportunities. This way, they can improve their chances of getting some immediate production to increase the team’s depth and build more confidence to allow them to improve at a faster rate.
In general, any concern about the complexity of the Warriors’ offense is probably an overreaction. It is true that the offense is arguably the most complicated one in the league and it takes time for new players to figure it out. Even so, the Warriors have gained much more value in having this system in place. Mainly, it unlocked the talents of their primary core players. Also, it differentiates them from the rest of the league in a way that could become a systemic advantage. Specifically, it can allow them to find value in under-appreciated players at different levels and acquire them at below the market rate. So far, they seem to have found a hidden gem or two by getting Bjelica and Porter at the veteran’s minimum this past offseason. The only blind spot that they seem to have is in drafting players because they haven’t been able to get rookies to immediately produce. However, it’s too early to count out any of their young lottery picks because they are all still under the age of 20. If they find a way to identify and develop draft picks to smoothly fit into their system, they could jump up another level and possibly become contenders once again. To get back to this level, they just have to embrace their system and view it as a potential advantage, not a hindrance. Their offensive system creates a more complex problem to solve. If they crack this part of it, they could extend their run further than expected, which could launch an interesting new era where the team blends youth and experience to embark on more title chases in the coming years.