How Warriors failed to show discipline, focus against elite Lakers

It’s no secret that the marquee matchup between the Golden State Warriors and the Los Angeles Lakers nowadays is, in truth, a marquee matchup between two of the league’s biggest individual box-office draws.

LeBron James vs Stephen Curry is a guaranteed seat-occupier – at home, mind you, since we’re all still in the midst of a pandemic – and the narrative and hype going into the ESPN Sunday night game was obviously focused on the long-standing rivalry between the NBA’s bona fide megastars.

But basketball junkies like myself and a few others were anticipating a more low-key clash of titans in one aspect, albeit one that doesn’t nearly captivate the attention of casual viewers. 

The Lakers and the Warriors are two of the league’s stingiest defensive teams, with the Lakers leading the league in defensive rating at 105.8 points allowed per 100 possessions going into the game. The Warriors are 4th in that department, allowing 108.5 points per 100 possessions prior to the game.

With two of the league’s proverbial brick walls colliding, something was bound to give, and there was sufficient reason to believe that for both teams, the dam could break and the waters could flow unabated at any moment. 

For the Lakers, they were without Anthony Davis, their defensive anchor and Defensive Player of the Year candidate. While the Lakers experience minimal drop-off defensively without Davis playing – their defense allows an additional 1.8 points per 100 possessions without Davis on the floor – being without their second star provided a small element of danger and made the possibility of an upset bigger, if ever so slightly.

While the Warriors were healthy and had their anchor in Draymond Green for most of the first half (before he left due to an ankle sprain), there was always this nagging feeling of everything falling apart at any moment – such is the precariousness of the Warriors’ situation this year. On some days, they look like they can beat any team in the league. On others, they fall flat on their face and every terrible habit of theirs is magnified to the extreme.

Inconsistency has been a theme for these Warriors: inconsistent offense, especially when Curry and Green sit and rest during the first 6 minutes of the 2nd and 4th quarters; and inconsistent defense, giving up a few blowout losses to superior teams such as the Milwaukee Bucks, the Brooklyn Nets, and the Utah Jazz, despite their solid standing within the top 10.

This latest 117-91 blowout loss to the Lakers has been no different from those other beatings, which begs the question: Are the Warriors a team which is built to be nothing more than a low- to mid-playoff team, clawing and scratching in the proverbial mid-card of the Western Conference for the chance to make the playoffs but not necessarily excel in them?

That is looking like the case. Even with the talents of an all-time great in Curry and a defensive floor general in Green, the Warriors just can’t hope to compete for a championship with the kind of personnel who surround their two stars, with their third – Klay Thompson – being out for the season due to an extensive Achilles rehabilitation.

“[We’ve been] a bit average,” Curry said after the game when asked for an assessment of his team heading into the All-Star break. “We’ve been playing better as of late, trending in the right direction before tonight. Our confidence is high and our resiliency has always been there.”

“I feel like some of our losses have been tough to swallow because they’ve been like tonight and some of our big wins have been kind of exhilarating and playoff-type atmospheres and emotions.”

The Warriors looked out of sorts against the Lakers. The energy was nonexistent. Rotations on defense they would normally make with near-flawless execution against other teams weren’t there, replaced with backdoor cuts being given up way too easily:

The lack of defensive awareness was so prevalent that at one point, the Warriors did what was previously unthinkable: send a double team toward the left block against someone not named LeBron James, with the man coming over to double leaving someone who is named LeBron James:

Simply put, you do not leave James alone – with a cutting lane opening right before his very eyes – under any circumstances. He will burn you to the highest degree, a lesson that Juan Toscano-Anderson learned the hard way.

Rotations and misplaced double teams aside, the Warriors reverted to their early-season tendency of fouling profusely. They had slightly improved in that department as of late – from being 29th in the league in fouls per game during December and January (23.3) to 23rd during February (19.9) – and seemed to have turned a bit of a corner in terms of discipline and balancing physicality with clean defensive execution.

On a night where that discipline was needed every single second of the game, they faltered. The Warriors sent the Lakers to the line a total of 38 times, 26 of which were taken during the first half alone. Overall, the Lakers shot 26-of-38 from the line.

Fouling also made it extremely difficult for the Warriors to capture any sort of rhythm on offense. The best chance for the Warriors on that end was to make stops, force turnovers, and constantly put the defense on the back foot. Facing a Lakers defense in disarray was the more preferred outcome.

Constantly sending them to the foul line destroyed any chances of the Warriors catching the Lakers unaware and allowed them to set their halfcourt defense – the best in the league at 90.3 points allowed per 100 halfcourt plays, per Cleaning the Glass.

“If you give a defense time to set up and get organized, it’s hard,” Curry said. “They’re getting easy points at the line if they’re making them, and then we’re facing a set defense every possession.”

“We had gotten much better with [keeping fouls down] over the recent weeks, so it was disappointing to kind of go down that hole again,” Warriors head coach Steve Kerr said. “It started right from the very beginning. We reached on one of the first plays of the game on a drive and they had shot 10 free throws by the time the first timeout came, it felt like anyway.”

“That was just disappointing because we’ve talked ad nauseam about defending without fouling and rebounding and taking care of the ball, and we didn’t do any of those things tonight.”

Taking care of the ball, or the lack thereof, was another problem that surfaced during the loss.

A team with a system predicated on constant motion, heavy passing, and hard cuts is always prone to turning the ball over, but the Warriors have steered away from any sort of excessive turnover problems for most of the season.

Prior to their game against the Indiana Pacers last Wednesday, February 24, the Warriors turned the ball over 14.3 times per game, 16th in the league at the time – by no means an excellent number but also not as dire as one would expect from a team who is 5th in passes made per game – 303.8, according to NBA.com.

But the last 3 games against the Pacers (18 turnovers), the Charlotte Hornets (23 turnovers), and the Lakers (20 turnovers) have exposed what the Warriors could suffer against teams who are aware of their tendencies on offense, who know how to break up and disrupt all of their pristine movement and passing. They were able to get away with it against the Pacers and the Hornets, two teams who are much closer to their level and therefore allow a more considerable margin of error.

But not against a top defensive unit such as the Lakers, who seem to have an extremely high collective IQ on defense, which is all the more bolstered by the presence of James. He has shown a knack for knowing what teams are running on offense, and is capable of snuffing out actions mid-execution.

He does so through a combination of positioning and a seemingly preternatural ability to know where the ball is going to be at:

Other times, his knowledge of his opponent’s pet plays and tendencies allows him to be one step ahead during situations where most other teams and players don’t possess such cerebral proficiency. He knows what’s coming – in this case, a Curry-Green pick-and-roll, with Green on the short roll and Kelly Oubre Jr cutting from the corner:

James anticipates the action. He sees Green ready to whip a pass to the cutter. He’s in position to jump the passing lane, intercept the pass, and go all the way to the other end for the easy points off of a turnover.

“LeBron had a couple of anticipation steals,” Kerr said. “They’re the No. 1 defense in the league for a reason. They’ve got really good personnel even without [Anthony Davis]. LeBron is a genius defensively; he can play center field and he knows what’s coming.”

Which pretty much sums up where the Warriors are stationed in the pecking order. Their offense can carry them against teams who occupy the lower rung of the ladder, and can squeak by against those who are of equal caliber. Their defense is among the best, and it has largely been their saving grace in periods where offense has been pretty hard to come by.

But against the Lakers and the Nets of the world, an offense ranked 21st in efficiency isn’t enough, not when those elite teams have their tendencies well scouted. A defense that has proven to be rock solid can break when small cracks present themselves, which can easily turn into bigger ones by those who know how to apply enough pressure. The focus and discipline must be on at all times for the Warriors to overachieve, but that is a tall task for a team lacking in complementary talent and court savvy. – Rappler.com