Writing about Draymond's contributions and intangibles can be summarized: he's a winner. He would be a very annoying team-mate, because he allows himself to be vulnerable (to being disliked) by calling things as he sees them - for the good of the team. But the NBA isn't grade school. Draymond cares intensely about winning, and players/coaches who recognize this set aside their defensiveness in order to get better. One aspect of this attitude is the willingness to admit one's own contributions to team failure. Like anyone, Draymond doesn't like this, but I believe he's able to accept responsibility for his mistakes. Draymond Green is a winner.
Thinking about Green’s on/off numbers, it seems like they could be largely influenced by Steph. Before his back injury, he was usually playing (and resting) when Steph did. When he returned, there was no Curry, but Draymond played a lot with Klay, who was gumming up the offense quite a bit.
I don’t know how difficult it is to look at “The Curry Effect” on Draymond’s numbers over the years, but I suspect they might drive a lot of the volatility you were talking about. In other words, can we see Drays on/off number with Steph and without Steph?
29 mpg last year, but more like 31 in Oct-Dec prior to getting hurt. Can they get that number down to 24-25...22?
I wouldn't add onto Looney's minutes. That 20 mpg had him fresh and extremely effective in the playoffs.
That's a great spot to give Wiseman and Kuminga more minutes.
For a historical comp: Completely different players/positions but similar importance in terms of talent and heart/culture. Manu for the Spurs was an All-Star 30mpg player in his age 33 season. The next year they dropped him to 23 mpg where he was at the next four seasons. Those four seasons included one Western Conference Finals, two Finals, and one title where he was still a playoff rotation guy.
It's a tricky needle to thread, but I believe so. They were a 3 seed w Steph playing 64 (I'd sign up for this number right now, BTW), Dray at 46, and Klay at 32.
Dray could play the same total minutes as last year if he played 55 games at 24 mpg.
I'm pretty bullish in general on the total wins and seeding. I believe they'll come out pretty motivated. They'll have some lineups to sort out, but there's a lot of versatility. Donte/Jamychal is a downgrade from GP2/Otto, but Donte is more versatile. Klay and Moses will both play a lot more and can play with any configuration. Those more versatile players can all help get the best out of Wiseman and Kuminga.
It's all a balancing act, based on far from perfect knowledge about outcomes. Last year Draymond missed slightly less than half the season. So if his minutes are lowered to closer to 20 this coming season, do we get a full season of his play? How many more games do we win then? How many games do we lose if he's out for another 40 games?
What about the next three years? Lower usage of Draymond leads to higher likelihood of him being able to contribute next year, and the year after that. Maybe.
There's no easy answer and my best guess is that the Warriors will play the vets more than I think is necessary. The vets usually get the minutes. But if I had to choose between 5 more wins this year and lots of veteran minutes, but 10 fewer wins each of the next three years vs. 5 fewer wins this year and more wins in the next few years, and better developed young guns ... well then I'd prefer a long term series of winning seasons.
The Warriors have somehow managed to get Jordan Poole AND three lottery draft picks in the last few years. It's time, IMHO for them to actually play the young guys enough to see them really develop and impact the team.
I expect Draymond will be the second best Warrior this season as per usual. The decline will happen eventually, but I'll have to see he's not #2 on the Warriors first to believe it.
I'm hoping Klay can give him a run for his money this year. It's probably too much to expect, but I'd love to see Klay be a legit all-star candidate.
As for Green, I'd be happy for him to go on load management for the regular season -- maybe 25 minutes a game -- to save him up for the playoffs. I don't know that his body can stand up to the rigors of an 82-game regular season, but he's still a 16-game player if he's healthy.
Nothing gets me more excited than an opportunity to gush over Draymond Green. Yes, his shooting form is like he is giving a piggy back ride to Oliver Miller. Yes his body at some point is going to completely give out due to him taking on guys twice his size. Yes he seems to have taken his filter and thrown it into the Saginaw River.
You could go on and on... but, the reality in my opinion is that Draymond is a basketball savant. Draymond is everything to this team and everything to this teams future. Like that tweet mentions above, what Draymond can do in chaos is shear brilliance. What he can do in real time, I can't even figure out watching in super slow-motion replays.
I wish he was given more respect, but then again I think it is what drives him. I love the guy... ok, enough gushing....
Steve Kerr on teams around the NBA playing bigger:
“I like it. I like when teams zig when everybody else is zagging. I think it's smart. I think our advantage has always been Draymond Green. He gives us the flexibility to play big or small.”
Here is another interesting post from SIS on Advantages Prevented. Compare Dray to the other leaders. Even though he has the fewest opportunities, he still have the 2nd highest advantages prevented. If my math is right, if you extrapolate his prevention rate to the same number of opportunities as Thybulle, his advantages prevented is 8.18. Put another way Thybulle's prevention rate per opportunity is .114, while Dray's is .143. Not that you can guarantee that more opportunities will always net the corresponding number of additional preventions, but it is clear to me that he is in a class of his own.
One of the replies accurately summarizes the list as a who's-who of the players who are most underrated because their impact is only on the defensive end.
Which makes sense, because defense is about making something *not* happen, and you can't see something that didn't happen. (If you're paying attention, you might notice when something could have happened but then didn't, which is why the "eye test" helps with this!)
Sep 22, 2022·edited Sep 22, 2022Liked by punk basketball
Not that this is exactly a 'stop the presses' take, but:
I don't care all that much what Draymond does during the regular season. If we can get 'playoff Draymond' defense in roughly half of the playoff games, then he's still an elite force, even when his shot isn't there (which is most of the time).
The question is just how often he can do it any more. It felt to me like it was more uneven this last playoffs than previous ones, and that was with two elite on-ball defenders (GPII and Wiggs) and two good ones (recovering Klay, playoff Steph) to make his job a little easier.
Age or injury or podcasting or ? is likely to reduce his effectiveness going forward (though I really hope that is a few years off, still).
I don't really know if he's re-signable at the end of his current contract. If he takes a reduced amount (<$30 mil), then sure. But, I doubt he will be OK with a number the Warriors can live with.
It's actually a huge pet peeve of mine - using the head graphics for charts like that (where the image is super small). I have no idea who else is up there, all I know is that one of those outliers is Dray!
Sep 22, 2022·edited Sep 22, 2022Liked by punk basketball
Thanks Duby, good summary.
I know we here at the HQ generally think that what makes the Dubs special is the unique skill set and synergy of Steph, Klay, and Dray. Wiggs is the generic “really awesome wing” that plugs in nicely. Looney is another unusual skill-set built for this team and it’s method.
But I wonder if this is true - is the Dubs’ playing style unique and dependent on these guys? While I firmly believe that Steph and Draymond are 100th percentile anomalous skill set players (sorry Klay), does that mean the Warriors are truly impossible to copy? I would be sad if that’s true because I find ISO ball combined with drive and kick 3 pointers far less entertaining.
Can other teams build a high movement and passing style play, with more or less positionless roles, around players with different skill sets? Is the reason they don’t because they lack of players with the right capabilities, or lack players with willingness to learn these skills? Or is it just unimaginative or conservative coaching?
Sports is always a copy cat world. You’d think 6 finals appearances and 4 rings would get copied quite a bit more aggressively. Or maybe it’s happening and I’m just not noticing.
The league certainly has copied parts of the Warriors' success. I think sometimes we don't notice because we're so used to seeing the parts of the Warriors that still haven't been (effectively) copied.
The game is more positionless than ever. Every team in the league has embraced the efficiency of the three-ball. Passing centers who can handle the ball and knock down open shots are a feature of many contenders. Other guards now do the "relocation 3" as a natural part of their game. Offenses push the pace in transition and throw "touchdown" passes more than ever before. Even individual plays like "post splits" are being copied by other teams. Every team is looking for roles like "score-first point guard", "3-and-D player", and "tweener defender"; it's no coincidence these match the profiles of Warriors stars, because the Dubs defined and proved them in the modern context. These are all things that were once signatures of the Warriors' style and are now standard across the league.
The Warriors literally changed the way the game is played so much, over time we've had to refine our definition of "Warriors basketball" to focus on the parts that are still different from the rest of the league. Even things like high rates of assists are no longer the sole domain of the Warriors, so we've had to redefine the Warriors style as more egalitarian vs. heliocentric.
(The stats back this up: The Warriors were a mediocre passing team until Kerr took the reins; from 2014–2019 the Warriors were a high outlier in assists per game; since then, the Warriors have still been highly ranked and their numbers haven't particularly gone down, but they're no longer separated from the rest of the pack because other teams have elevated their assist numbers. Even the bottom of the pack has steadily trended up over the past decade.)
I hope the Warriors brain trust isn't baking on Wisemans availability this season. That seems like a poor way to spend what should hopefully be a more relaxing/celebratory/stress reducing activity.
Unless Green has a ‘miss 30 games’ injury or regression on his back issues, it seems like the way to manage him is to back him down to closer to 25 minutes a game. Would he tolerate it, do the coaches have the intestinal fortitude to stick to it, I don’t know. I’d love to see the same with Steph and possibly Klay as well. But there’s always the ‘what if the Dubs start losing a bunch of games?’
I predict we’re going to see a pretty reduced minute load on the old fellas in the first 10 games, with the young guns getting a lot of minutes. There will be a fairly fixed rotation. If we win 6 or 7 it will stick. If we lose a lot then … who knows?
“Very few players have better recognition and awareness in chaos”
That’s it right there. Steph is a master at creating chaos and weaving order from it. Clearly Dray is a big part of how that works. There is a mutualistic symbiotic relationship in that regard.
Yup, remember how lost the offense felt when Dray missed the beginning of the season two years ago? Sure, some of that was starting Wiseman, but there were just so many passes and actions that guys like Oubre and Baze simply were not capable of seeing and hitting.
I think that the Splash Bros being so... splashy... (sorry) actually clouds what the real core of this team is. While Klay and Steph are super lethal as a duo, I'm definitely willing to hear arguments about how Dray has been Steph's most critically important teammate. At some point, who cares, right? But it's certainly interesting fodder for offseason blog talk.
Myers touches on it a little bit, but Dray is absolutely essential to this championship core.
Yeah, honestly, I think it's really tricky to figure out because Steph, Klay, Dray are an all-time great trio.
Each of them is good individually, any pair of them makes more than a sum of its parts, and they're even better when all three are together. They complement each others' strengths, compensate for each others' weaknesses, and balance each others' personalities.
That's not an accident. They were drafted to play together, they built and grew their games with the express intent of playing together, and they all drive each other to be the best they can at the whole game. They have something like ten years together in the league, which is such a rarity there's no comparison for the kind of synergy they have.
Reminder: the rest of the league *still* hasn't figured out how to beat the Warriors when all three of these guys are available for every game.
Once again, I will remind everyone here that Steph's "slump" last year coincided with the months that Draymond was off the court. So was it really a slump, or was it that Steph was missing the exquisite screens and passes that Draymond sets for Steph?
I'm just going through my spell books to see about making his back invulnerable.
So which one did you end up using?!
Writing about Draymond's contributions and intangibles can be summarized: he's a winner. He would be a very annoying team-mate, because he allows himself to be vulnerable (to being disliked) by calling things as he sees them - for the good of the team. But the NBA isn't grade school. Draymond cares intensely about winning, and players/coaches who recognize this set aside their defensiveness in order to get better. One aspect of this attitude is the willingness to admit one's own contributions to team failure. Like anyone, Draymond doesn't like this, but I believe he's able to accept responsibility for his mistakes. Draymond Green is a winner.
Welcome back Duby!
Thinking about Green’s on/off numbers, it seems like they could be largely influenced by Steph. Before his back injury, he was usually playing (and resting) when Steph did. When he returned, there was no Curry, but Draymond played a lot with Klay, who was gumming up the offense quite a bit.
I don’t know how difficult it is to look at “The Curry Effect” on Draymond’s numbers over the years, but I suspect they might drive a lot of the volatility you were talking about. In other words, can we see Drays on/off number with Steph and without Steph?
29 mpg last year, but more like 31 in Oct-Dec prior to getting hurt. Can they get that number down to 24-25...22?
I wouldn't add onto Looney's minutes. That 20 mpg had him fresh and extremely effective in the playoffs.
That's a great spot to give Wiseman and Kuminga more minutes.
For a historical comp: Completely different players/positions but similar importance in terms of talent and heart/culture. Manu for the Spurs was an All-Star 30mpg player in his age 33 season. The next year they dropped him to 23 mpg where he was at the next four seasons. Those four seasons included one Western Conference Finals, two Finals, and one title where he was still a playoff rotation guy.
If they replace 7-9 Draymond minutes per game with Wiseman/Kuminga minutes, are they going to be a top 4 seed?
It's a tricky needle to thread, but I believe so. They were a 3 seed w Steph playing 64 (I'd sign up for this number right now, BTW), Dray at 46, and Klay at 32.
Dray could play the same total minutes as last year if he played 55 games at 24 mpg.
I'm pretty bullish in general on the total wins and seeding. I believe they'll come out pretty motivated. They'll have some lineups to sort out, but there's a lot of versatility. Donte/Jamychal is a downgrade from GP2/Otto, but Donte is more versatile. Klay and Moses will both play a lot more and can play with any configuration. Those more versatile players can all help get the best out of Wiseman and Kuminga.
It's all a balancing act, based on far from perfect knowledge about outcomes. Last year Draymond missed slightly less than half the season. So if his minutes are lowered to closer to 20 this coming season, do we get a full season of his play? How many more games do we win then? How many games do we lose if he's out for another 40 games?
What about the next three years? Lower usage of Draymond leads to higher likelihood of him being able to contribute next year, and the year after that. Maybe.
There's no easy answer and my best guess is that the Warriors will play the vets more than I think is necessary. The vets usually get the minutes. But if I had to choose between 5 more wins this year and lots of veteran minutes, but 10 fewer wins each of the next three years vs. 5 fewer wins this year and more wins in the next few years, and better developed young guns ... well then I'd prefer a long term series of winning seasons.
The Warriors have somehow managed to get Jordan Poole AND three lottery draft picks in the last few years. It's time, IMHO for them to actually play the young guys enough to see them really develop and impact the team.
And while they're at it, do the same for Steph. And maybe Klay.
I expect Draymond will be the second best Warrior this season as per usual. The decline will happen eventually, but I'll have to see he's not #2 on the Warriors first to believe it.
“#2” is another term for “shit”. Your sentence works either way.
I'm hoping Klay can give him a run for his money this year. It's probably too much to expect, but I'd love to see Klay be a legit all-star candidate.
As for Green, I'd be happy for him to go on load management for the regular season -- maybe 25 minutes a game -- to save him up for the playoffs. I don't know that his body can stand up to the rigors of an 82-game regular season, but he's still a 16-game player if he's healthy.
Hell of a "I'm Back!" article Duby.
Nothing gets me more excited than an opportunity to gush over Draymond Green. Yes, his shooting form is like he is giving a piggy back ride to Oliver Miller. Yes his body at some point is going to completely give out due to him taking on guys twice his size. Yes he seems to have taken his filter and thrown it into the Saginaw River.
You could go on and on... but, the reality in my opinion is that Draymond is a basketball savant. Draymond is everything to this team and everything to this teams future. Like that tweet mentions above, what Draymond can do in chaos is shear brilliance. What he can do in real time, I can't even figure out watching in super slow-motion replays.
I wish he was given more respect, but then again I think it is what drives him. I love the guy... ok, enough gushing....
From a fellow gusher, probably not news here but Thinking BB did video declaring Draymond "the best defender of his era". https://youtu.be/jbNS09Rt4u8
Gush, gush, gush.
EDIT: bonus: "Steph Curry and Draymond Green are an all-time duo" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHPvcM246v0
Yes! These are great!
Kerr on Dray today!
> @markhaynesnba
Steve Kerr on teams around the NBA playing bigger:
“I like it. I like when teams zig when everybody else is zagging. I think it's smart. I think our advantage has always been Draymond Green. He gives us the flexibility to play big or small.”
Here is another interesting post from SIS on Advantages Prevented. Compare Dray to the other leaders. Even though he has the fewest opportunities, he still have the 2nd highest advantages prevented. If my math is right, if you extrapolate his prevention rate to the same number of opportunities as Thybulle, his advantages prevented is 8.18. Put another way Thybulle's prevention rate per opportunity is .114, while Dray's is .143. Not that you can guarantee that more opportunities will always net the corresponding number of additional preventions, but it is clear to me that he is in a class of his own.
https://twitter.com/SIS_Hoops/status/1569368570378731520
I must admit I don't understand these metrics/analyses much but seeing GPII up so high reminds me of my sellers remorse.
One of the replies accurately summarizes the list as a who's-who of the players who are most underrated because their impact is only on the defensive end.
Which makes sense, because defense is about making something *not* happen, and you can't see something that didn't happen. (If you're paying attention, you might notice when something could have happened but then didn't, which is why the "eye test" helps with this!)
> and the Warriors are baking
*puff* *puff*
Not that this is exactly a 'stop the presses' take, but:
I don't care all that much what Draymond does during the regular season. If we can get 'playoff Draymond' defense in roughly half of the playoff games, then he's still an elite force, even when his shot isn't there (which is most of the time).
The question is just how often he can do it any more. It felt to me like it was more uneven this last playoffs than previous ones, and that was with two elite on-ball defenders (GPII and Wiggs) and two good ones (recovering Klay, playoff Steph) to make his job a little easier.
Age or injury or podcasting or ? is likely to reduce his effectiveness going forward (though I really hope that is a few years off, still).
I don't really know if he's re-signable at the end of his current contract. If he takes a reduced amount (<$30 mil), then sure. But, I doubt he will be OK with a number the Warriors can live with.
The graph that you posted with green in the upper left hand quadrant, who were the other two players up their with him. I could not tell.
Interesting how much better Green was compared to Payton.
It's Thybulle & Danny Green.
NB The original graph has someone much higher than either Green or Thybulle.
Is your handle a reference to the John Butler who was the GM of the Chargers (the "Lord with No Rings", as detractors called him)?
Used to be a Chargers fan ... have been wondering this for a while.
nope
Are there a trio of reasons for your handle?
It's actually a huge pet peeve of mine - using the head graphics for charts like that (where the image is super small). I have no idea who else is up there, all I know is that one of those outliers is Dray!
One is Thybulle, but I can't tell who the other is.
Thanks Duby, good summary.
I know we here at the HQ generally think that what makes the Dubs special is the unique skill set and synergy of Steph, Klay, and Dray. Wiggs is the generic “really awesome wing” that plugs in nicely. Looney is another unusual skill-set built for this team and it’s method.
But I wonder if this is true - is the Dubs’ playing style unique and dependent on these guys? While I firmly believe that Steph and Draymond are 100th percentile anomalous skill set players (sorry Klay), does that mean the Warriors are truly impossible to copy? I would be sad if that’s true because I find ISO ball combined with drive and kick 3 pointers far less entertaining.
Can other teams build a high movement and passing style play, with more or less positionless roles, around players with different skill sets? Is the reason they don’t because they lack of players with the right capabilities, or lack players with willingness to learn these skills? Or is it just unimaginative or conservative coaching?
Sports is always a copy cat world. You’d think 6 finals appearances and 4 rings would get copied quite a bit more aggressively. Or maybe it’s happening and I’m just not noticing.
The league certainly has copied parts of the Warriors' success. I think sometimes we don't notice because we're so used to seeing the parts of the Warriors that still haven't been (effectively) copied.
The game is more positionless than ever. Every team in the league has embraced the efficiency of the three-ball. Passing centers who can handle the ball and knock down open shots are a feature of many contenders. Other guards now do the "relocation 3" as a natural part of their game. Offenses push the pace in transition and throw "touchdown" passes more than ever before. Even individual plays like "post splits" are being copied by other teams. Every team is looking for roles like "score-first point guard", "3-and-D player", and "tweener defender"; it's no coincidence these match the profiles of Warriors stars, because the Dubs defined and proved them in the modern context. These are all things that were once signatures of the Warriors' style and are now standard across the league.
The Warriors literally changed the way the game is played so much, over time we've had to refine our definition of "Warriors basketball" to focus on the parts that are still different from the rest of the league. Even things like high rates of assists are no longer the sole domain of the Warriors, so we've had to redefine the Warriors style as more egalitarian vs. heliocentric.
(The stats back this up: The Warriors were a mediocre passing team until Kerr took the reins; from 2014–2019 the Warriors were a high outlier in assists per game; since then, the Warriors have still been highly ranked and their numbers haven't particularly gone down, but they're no longer separated from the rest of the pack because other teams have elevated their assist numbers. Even the bottom of the pack has steadily trended up over the past decade.)
I'm so glad there are people here who pay way more attention than I do. Excellent feedback.
How do you find the stats you mentioned? Stathead, some other source, or do you just have all NBA stats memorized ;) ?
For the team passing stats, I did a search for "nba team assists per game" and ended up here: https://www.teamrankings.com/nba/stat/assists-per-game?date=2018-06-09
Maybe Golden State style of play is an evolution of Popovich 2013 Spurs' basketball?
I hope the Warriors brain trust isn't baking on Wisemans availability this season. That seems like a poor way to spend what should hopefully be a more relaxing/celebratory/stress reducing activity.
NVRMND, maybe they are baking....
Lol. I was working on a joke around this.
Given the high caloric demands of the life of a professional athlete, I’m sure there is more room for baked goods in the diet. Let them eat cake!
Nothing says lovin like somethin in the oven. (So many interpretations of this are relevant 🎂🤱🏽🍞).
Unless Green has a ‘miss 30 games’ injury or regression on his back issues, it seems like the way to manage him is to back him down to closer to 25 minutes a game. Would he tolerate it, do the coaches have the intestinal fortitude to stick to it, I don’t know. I’d love to see the same with Steph and possibly Klay as well. But there’s always the ‘what if the Dubs start losing a bunch of games?’
I predict we’re going to see a pretty reduced minute load on the old fellas in the first 10 games, with the young guns getting a lot of minutes. There will be a fairly fixed rotation. If we win 6 or 7 it will stick. If we lose a lot then … who knows?
“Very few players have better recognition and awareness in chaos”
That’s it right there. Steph is a master at creating chaos and weaving order from it. Clearly Dray is a big part of how that works. There is a mutualistic symbiotic relationship in that regard.
Yup, remember how lost the offense felt when Dray missed the beginning of the season two years ago? Sure, some of that was starting Wiseman, but there were just so many passes and actions that guys like Oubre and Baze simply were not capable of seeing and hitting.
I think that the Splash Bros being so... splashy... (sorry) actually clouds what the real core of this team is. While Klay and Steph are super lethal as a duo, I'm definitely willing to hear arguments about how Dray has been Steph's most critically important teammate. At some point, who cares, right? But it's certainly interesting fodder for offseason blog talk.
Myers touches on it a little bit, but Dray is absolutely essential to this championship core.
Yeah, honestly, I think it's really tricky to figure out because Steph, Klay, Dray are an all-time great trio.
Each of them is good individually, any pair of them makes more than a sum of its parts, and they're even better when all three are together. They complement each others' strengths, compensate for each others' weaknesses, and balance each others' personalities.
That's not an accident. They were drafted to play together, they built and grew their games with the express intent of playing together, and they all drive each other to be the best they can at the whole game. They have something like ten years together in the league, which is such a rarity there's no comparison for the kind of synergy they have.
Reminder: the rest of the league *still* hasn't figured out how to beat the Warriors when all three of these guys are available for every game.
You nailed it, G & B.
Once again, I will remind everyone here that Steph's "slump" last year coincided with the months that Draymond was off the court. So was it really a slump, or was it that Steph was missing the exquisite screens and passes that Draymond sets for Steph?
Dray enables Steph.
> So was it really a slump
Yeah, it really was a slump, he was missing even wide open looks and often badly. Of course, Green being absent did have a big negative impact.