last Warriors The title team had five available centers with different skill sets. Kevin Durant A younger version of his best rim protection season Draymond Green When Andre IguodalaBefore injury Klay Thompson And Shaun Livingston, a 6’7 backup point that can protect your wings. You can build any type of lineup combination to deploy any defense scheme.
Today’s Warriors don’t have that luxury. Healthy athletes on the roster do not exceed 6 feet -9. Their only true center, Kevon Looney, Not a reaper. The depth of their wings is shallow. They have three recent lottery picks that they still don’t fully trust in the most leveraged playoffs situation.To their best small ball group Jordan pooleLast month, an explosive young scorer with a defensive target on his back.
As a result, the Warriors needed more creativity and regular attention to detail in order to develop and maintain championship-level units in the defensive end. But they did it. The Warriors produced the best defensive ratings in the league in the first few months, but fell to second place throughout the season despite the long absence of the Green. The defense held up well against the Nuggets, Grizzlies When Mavericks To win the Western Conference, and now the Warriors are at the doorstep of another person NBA The title because they remained stingy against the best teams in the east.
Warriors Celtics He won 104-94 in Game 5 of the NBA Finals on Monday night and 3-2 in the Best of Seven series. They gave up 16 first quarter points and only 20 fourth quarter points. The Celtics in this series scored 88, 94, and 97 points in three defeats. They ran through the east and couldn’t reach 100 points only twice in 20 games. The Warriors nudged within 48 minutes of the title because they stopped the Celtics better than any previous opponent.
Draymond Green still sets a defensive tone. There is no explosion he enjoyed in his late twenties.Green once blocked 17 shots in a 4-game sweep Blazers.. He has only 2 blocks in the entire series and 20 blocks in the playoffs.
However, his instinct for help was still sharp, swelling towards Game 5, and he identified mistakes and fixed leaks all night.
Look at the green here at the beginning of the second quarter.Clip starts with Jaylen Brown Search for and get a pool switch that is a matchup that rings the green alarm bell.The moment Brown starts driving against the pool, you can see the green — who is defending Robert Williams — Take a leap further towards the center of the lane and show help early on. Brown passes through the pool, but Green is there to compete vertically for layups and steal rebounds.
Another part of that slow motion sequence is noteworthy. When the green scoops to help the pool, Nemanya Bierika Back up to prevent Williams from crashing the aggressive glass. He chips Williams as the green rises for a rebound.
Return to Training Camp — Warriors use two draft topics for teenagers with Bjelica Otto Porter Jr. — Given the restructured personnel, there was considerable skepticism about how to maintain the top 10 defenses. Green was among those who had the first question.
However, Bjelica used his size and brain better than expected. Porter surprised his teammates with his rebound toughness and instinct. Stephen Curry There was his most rugged defensive season. The pool raised his care factor. Rooney has evolved into an elite interior anchor. Gary Payton IIWith the arrival of the Warriors, the Warriors became the league’s leading border hound with steals per 36 minutes. Andrew Wiggins Developed into a wing stopper. Green preferred his surroundings more than expected and quarterbacked them into an elite unit.
“Mike Brown has been great in reestablishing the importance of that aspect of basketball from the training camp to the present,” Curry said. “Make sure no one slips on that edge of the floor from an accountability standpoint.”
The coaching side of this defensive revival should not be conservative. This is the story It goes into the details behind the scenes. But the point is that Steve Kerr handed over the defensive reins to Brown this summer. Brown has added versatility to the playbook and debuted an internal metric system that publishes the individual defenses of each player. If you stumbled defensively during a week, you’ll hear about it in front of the entire team.
“We tried many different things throughout the year,” Curry said. “Traditional one-to-one defense, of all the box-and-one zones we can sprinkle from time to time. But after all, it’s effort, concentration and a kind of relentlessness in that regard. I did a really good job of keeping it up for the most part of the year and trying to plug it in a bit — I think I call it a flaw compared to past teams. “
In the finals of the conference, the Warriors were more confusing than ever and tried to throw away by sending various zone schemes and pick and roll coverage. Luka DoncicRhythm. That wasn’t the case for Boston. They limit the appearance of the zone, stay on the man base, rely on veteran players to know each player’s tendency and shooting ability.Who will leave, and as mentioned in the broadcast, with Brown Jayson Tatum To their left.
That’s part of the reason you’ve never seen Jonathan Kuminga Also Moses Moody.. Car and Brown have been defensive at every tense moment during the playoffs. That is their tendency. They are more concerned about coverage mix-ups and whimsical boxouts than some spacing issues and the lack of extra spectacular athletes on the floor.
It still implements the scheme and results in a player making a play. In Game 5, various players performed extensive defense performances. Wiggins, who played for another 44 minutes as the team’s irreplaceable wing defender, was a defensive co-star next to the green.
This is a back-to-back Wiggins clip that is joined together. First, he stones Tatum in a one-on-one situation, forcing him into a difficult fade away fighting with an airball. Second, Wiggins carefully jumps from the weak side to block Brown’s jumper trying to shoot through the curry.
Wiggins finished with 26 points, 13 rebounds, 2 steals and 1 block. Those 13 rebounds give him 29 rebounds in the last two games, and most of them aren’t cheap varieties. In the next clip you’ll see him fly into the traffic for a defensive rebound.
But let’s start with Klay Thompson on the wings. When Thompson is asked if this was his best defensive series in the playoffs, he doesn’t say, but it feels like it. Thompson made a big strip and a few stops in Brown in the second half of Game 4 and had some great moments again in Game 5.
Here he jumps out to Tatum on the switch, sticks with him on the drive, forcing a passout without the need for help to undermine defense.It leads Al Horford For unpleasant drives and missed floaters. Ownership ends with Wiggins rebounding in traffic.
The return of Peyton added additional ball hounds around it, bringing such uses to the Warriors throughout the season. Peyton played Game 5 for 26 minutes, stealed three times, and was a plus 16.
Don’t look at Payton at the beginning of this next clip. The action is taking place in the opposite wing. The Celtics have set up an off-ball screen to put the curry on Tatum, but Wiggins doesn’t allow it. He has fought better and better through the screen in the last two rounds.
Wiggins passes through the first screen and stays at Tatum, on which Curry hedges the double.Tatum does it Marcus smart, And that’s when Peyton goes into the agenda. He is as fast laterally as any other guard in the league. So he jumps around the smart and puts his body in the mix, but still can go back to brown and scatter to get rid of the three. Brown puts it on the floor and Peyton removes him.
But again, when the Warriors are the most stingy, they start on the green. They temporarily gave up the lead in the third quarter, but were detained in the fourth quarter due to the season’s most important defensive quarter and 14 minutes to the Celtics before the bench was finally empty. Limited to points.
This is one of those that stopped in the middle of the fourth quarter. Tatum is fighting Wiggins and is actually a little sunshine on a left-handed drive. This is not the traditional switching situation. The screen is not set. But Green is always reading every part of the floor. He switches to Tatum to shut off the drive, and Wiggins carefully shuffles Williams to put himself on Boston’s best rebounder. Tatum fades into another mistake and Green grabs the rebound.
If the Warriors win the title this week, the credits will be sprayed in all directions. Many are rooted in the willingness and ability to reconstruct championship-level defense units, despite more challenging materials and skill sets.
(Photo of Draymond Green defending Jaylen Brown in Boston: Cary Edmondson / USA Today)
