The Warriors’ path to an efficient offense besides Steph Curry lies in shoring up their defense

Without a bona fide secondary shot creator behind Curry, the Warriors must lean into their defense to give him much needed offensive support.

The month of March hasn’t been kind to the Golden State Warriors. After tonight’s game against the Miami Heat, they have a March record of 6-7, including losses to the Chicago Bulls and the San Antonio Spurs — two winnable games where letting go of the rope massively cost them.

The difficulties on offense have been well documented. The downstream consequence of inconsistent offensive support behind Steph Curry has seen him struggling to capture his pre-All-Star-Break rhythm, with the load that he has been carrying on offense getting monumentally bigger. It’s especially apparent on nights where nobody else has it going.

It’s no coincidence that Curry’s March has been one of his worst statistical stretches of his career: 21.8 points, 4.8 rebounds, and 4.2 assists, while shooting 50.7% on twos and 35.7% on threes. His true shooting percentage has been below his usual standards: 55.6%.

With Curry struggling, the offense has struggled as a whole. They are scoring a middling 115.8 points per 100 possessions in March (with garbage time eliminated) — good for 15th over that stretch. But more than just the offensive struggles, it’s what has resulted on the other end that has been the more crippling consequence.

It doesn’t help that not being able to score means having to constantly scramble back to set their defense while not necessarily being in a position to choose matchups. Not being able to get stops on defense results in having to take the ball out of the basket and letting the other team set their own defense — which means it becomes more difficult to create advantages on offense.

In other words, the relationship between offense and defense is a feedback loop of sorts. The better one end is, the higher the chances of the other end being equally better — and vice versa, which has been the norm for the Warriors as of late.

They were reminded of that lesson by the Heat, who aren’t afraid of throwing out unconventional schemes on defense to put tons of pressure on opposing teams’ half-court offenses. Their solution: make it so that by the time their opponents cross half court, little time is left on the shot clock for them to have traction with their sets.

What makes it even more difficult is the fact that the Heat seamlessly fall back to their patented zone defense after a full-court press — which means opponents have to quickly concoct zone beaters, which aren’t typically part of their scripted half-court plans.

In the possession below, the Warriors don’t even get to cross half court in time because of the Heat’s ball pressure and the Warriors’ lack of urgency to get across:

Per Synergy, the Heat are at the top of the list when it comes to zone-defense frequency. They run it in 13% of their defensive possessions, during which they allow opponents to score 1.017 points per possession — a middling mark when directly compared to other teams, but they run it at a relatively high frequency which makes that number passable.

The Warriors don’t run as much zone as the Heat (3.6% of their defensive possessions — 10th in the league), but they do it from time to time, often as a change-of-pace tool in-between possessions or as a way to force opponents into zone-beater mode after timeouts to blow-up planned ATO sets. This conservative approach allows them to get the jump on unsuspecting opponents such as the Heat, who were disadvantaged without key personnel on offense.

The Heat weren’t afraid to zone the Warriors, especially whenever Curry was on the bench. But the Warriors themselves weren’t hesitant to whip out their own version of the zone — a 3-2 formation that is difficult to break when there isn’t anyone to self-create:

The Heat try to beat the 3-2 zone by having Jaime Jaquez Jr. post up on the left block — the logic being that the most vulnerable part of the 3-2 is the area where there are the fewest number of defenders. But a timely double by Brandin Podziemski, sprung when Jaquez makes his move along the baseline, forces Jaquez into a tough spot. He tries to pass out of the double, but Podziemski gets the deflection and forces the turnover, leading to a fastbreak layup by Jonathan Kuminga.

These are the possessions that the Warriors needed more of all month long — defensive stops that turn into efficient offense on the other end and largely independent of the presence of Curry (although having him there certainly helps in terms of making opponents pick their poison on the break). That was the identity they needed to regain — and one they picked up in time during their third quarter run against the Heat.

The one who established that tone was Andrew Wiggins, who not only got the Warriors’ offense going in the second half — he defended Terry Rozier, the Heat’s sole perimeter scorer tonight, with the kind of verve that was once the norm from him in 2022:

What stood out to me about the Warriors’ defense in the second half was less about the scheme and coverage choices — i.e., playing zone, playing man, going under or over screens, dropping back or up to the level of the screen, etc. — and more about execution. No matter what coverage they chose, the managed to succeed because of how they managed to go about it.

The Heat’s shot-creation and shot-making deficiencies tonight were made all the more apparent whenever the Warriors perfectly executed what they wanted to do on defense:

The moving parts of the Heat’s set above leads to an elbow touch by Nikola Jović, with the intention of finding Rozier around the Bam Adebayo pindown. But peep at Gary Payton II — he does his work early by top-locking (denying) Rozier away from the screen. This forces an audible toward a secondary action, which is staggered screens for Jović. While Jović may have gotten a paint touch on his curl, the Warriors can afford to pack the paint against him because of the dwindling shot clock, made possible by stifling the primary action.

Being sharp on the nitty-gritty micro details on defense translates to a pretty macro picture. Everything was more crisp in the second half — in particular, the switching, both on (Kuminga and Klay Thompson switching on the double-drag action below) and off the ball (Thompson and Podziemski switching the corner pindown):

Flattening out a half-court set increases the likelihood of desperation from opponents. Bona fide offensive stars thrive in moments of desperation. The Heat did not have a bona fide offensive star on the perimeter tonight, and the Warriors pounced on that truth. Rozier is forced to make something out of nothing along the baseline and throws the ball away, leading to an open Thompson three on the break — defense leading to offense without Curry on the floor.

Curry had another rough shooting night (17 points on 3-of-10 shooting on threes) but had offensive support in Thompson (28 points on 11-of-20 shooting, 6-of-14 on threes), Kuminga (18 points of 8-of-13 shooting) and Wiggins (17 points on 7-of-12 shooting). That support mostly came in the form of advantage situations created out of successful defensive stops.

That is the formula they must keep in mind during this final stretch. While they won’t be facing many teams without their main offensive moneymakers, that doesn’t nullify the overarching principle of defense leading to efficient offense — one they should lean on as the regular season winds down with their play-in chances hanging on a thread.