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Why follow the norm, when u can be a trailblazer?

www.wsj.com/articles/the-golden-state-warriors-have-revolutionized-basketball-1459956975

OAKLAND, Calif.—On every NBA
court, about 24 feet from the
basket, there is a thin stripe of
colored paint. The flat-sided
semicircle it forms is the boundary
between shots that count for two
points and shots that are worth
three.
When the NBA added the lines in
1979, the players weren’t sure what
to think. They sniffed and pawed at
them like cats with a new toy. Only
3% of the shots they put up that
season were 3-pointers.
Over the next three decades, that
number crept higher. When it
reached 22%, the growth curve
flattened. It seemed that the sport
had found its optimal ratio.
Then the Golden State Warriors
came along and blew that
assumption to pieces.
The Warriors, the National
Basketball Association’s defending
champion, now stand three wins
from tying the league record of 72 in
the regular season, set in 1996 by
Michael Jordan ’s Chicago Bulls.
Much of the credit belongs to the
star guard Stephen Curry, who is
having, by almost every measure,
one of the best seasons of any player
in history.
But there is another tale to be told
about the Warriors. It involves a
group of executives with limited
experience, led by a Silicon Valley
financier, that bought a floundering
franchise in 2010 and set out to fix it
by raising a single question: What
would happen if you built a
basketball team by ignoring every
orthodoxy of building a basketball
team?
The process took many twists and
turns, and there were times when it
nearly failed. But the dominance the
Warriors have displayed this season
can be traced back to one of the
most unusual ideas embraced by the
data-loving executives: the notion
that the NBA’s 3-point line was a
market inefficiency hiding in plain
sight.
This season the Warriors have sunk
1,025 3-pointers, by far the most in
NBA history. Not only has Mr. Curry
taken more threes than any other
player, he is making them at a rate
of 45.6%, higher than the NBA
average for all shots. He has
shattered his own record for most 3-
pointers in a season by 34%.
Moreover, distance seems to have no
significant effect on his accuracy.
Mr. Curry is a better shooter from
30 to 40 feet than the average NBA
player is from 3 to 4.
The result is a basketball style no
one has yet figured out how to
defeat.
“What’s really interesting is
sometimes in venture capital and
doing startups the whole world can
be wrong,” said the team’s primary
owner, Joe Lacob, a longtime
partner at Silicon Valley venture-
capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield
& Byers. “No one really executed a
game plan—a team-building
architecture—around the 3-
pointer.”
In 2010, the Golden State Warriors
hadn’t won an NBA title since 1975.
They played in a dumpy arena
beside an interstate and had made
the playoffs just once in the last 15
years. The previous owner, Chris
Cohan, was loathed by many loyal
fans.
Still, competition to buy the team
was fierce. To fend off the other
finalist, Oracle Corp. founder Larry
Ellison, Mr. Lacob and
entertainment mogul Peter Guber
paid $450 million, which was, at the
time, the highest price for a team in
NBA history.
It wasn’t long before Mr. Lacob, who
is 60 years old, installed a basketball
brain trust akin to a board at one of
his companies. The team’s
executives are always
communicating—a group text
message hums on their phones
during games—and every decision
brings vigorous debate. But from the
beginning, the Warriors brass
placed an unusually strong emphasis
on numbers.
The data dive yielded many insights,
but the Warriors eventually zeroed
in on the 3-point line. NBA players
made roughly the same percentage
of shots from 23 feet as they did
from 24. But because the 3-point line
ran between them, the values of
those two shots were radically
different. Shot attempts from 23 feet
had an average value of 0.76 points,
while 24-footers were worth 1.09.
This, the Warriors concluded, was
an opportunity. By moving back just
a few inches before shooting, a
basketball player could improve his
rate of return by 43%.
Mr. Lacob wasn’t the only team
owner in sports to delve into
statistics—baseball has been doing it
for years—and the Warriors weren’t
the first NBA team to see the
potential of the 3-pointer. Starting in
the 1990s, a string of teams with
brutally effective defenses had
prompted teams like the Phoenix
Suns and San Antonio Spurs to
search for different ways to score,
and that meant shooting more 3-
pointers. More recently, as the data
improved, it became clear that
teams weren’t taking nearly enough
of them.
The difference between the
Warriors and everyone else was
what the team decided to do with
this information.
For many years after James
Naismith invented basketball in
1891, the prevailing view was that
the most important area of the court
was near the basket. From Wilt
Chamberlain’s finger-rolls in the
1960s to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar ’s sky
hooks in the 1970s to Mr. Jordan’s
soaring dunks in the 1990s, the NBA
was the dominion of players who
owned the rim.
When the Warriors, under their
previous owners, drafted Mr. Curry
in 2009, he wasn’t a prototypical
NBA superstar. Though his father,
Dell, had played in the NBA, Stephen
Curry was so lightly recruited out of
high school that he had attended
tiny Davidson College near his
hometown of Charlotte, N.C. He only
emerged as a tantalizing NBA
prospect after his team made an
improbable run to the regional
finals of the 2008 NCAA tournament.
Even after his first two seasons with
Golden State, Mr. Curry wasn’t a
sure thing. Still, as the team’s new
executives settled on their plan to
exploit the 3-point line, they became
convinced Mr. Curry would be their
centerpiece.
The first test of their commitment
came in the form of a controversial
decision: trading the team’s leading
scorer, Monta Ellis. Some believed
Mr. Ellis was too similar to Mr.
Curry and that he was costing him
shots. Others thought it was crazy to
banish the most popular player. At
one point, just before the deal, Mr.
Lacob tested the confidence of his
basketball executives by telling
them he was getting cold feet. They
defended their plan and pulled the
trigger.
The week after the 2012 trade, Mr.
Lacob was booed by fans. The team
finished that season with one of the
NBA’s worst records.
Team building
The Warriors already were building
a team around Mr. Curry that would
allow him to take more 3-pointers.
The most critical step had come in
the 2011 draft when they selected
Washington State guard Klay
Thompson. He, too, was the son of an
NBA player and an excellent
shooter. At 6-foot-7, he was 4 inches
taller than Mr. Curry.
The team believed Mr. Thompson’s
shooting ability would make
defenses too frightened to leave him
alone, and that would limit their
ability to double-team Mr. Curry.
But because he was tall, he could
defend the other team’s best guard
and shoot over defenses without
being blocked, which could help the
Warriors compete against teams
that hoped to use their size to
contain Mr. Curry.
What made the move most
attractive was its novelty. Most 3-
point-shooting teams had one
superb shooter surrounded by a
collection of supporting players.
“Imagine if we could have two of
those guys,” Kirk Lacob, the owner’s
27-year-old son and the team’s
assistant general manager, recalled
thinking at the time.
“It’s once in a lifetime,” said Joe
Lacob.
The day after Mr. Ellis was traded,
Mr. Thompson was inserted into the
starting lineup. After that, according
to the general manager Bob Myers,
when the team was drafting and
signing players, the strategy shifted
from wondering whether they could
play with Mr. Curry to asking: “Who
can play with Steph and Klay?”
By the time the 2014-15 season
began, the Warriors had padded
their roster with Andrew Bogut, a 7-
foot center who protects the rim and
shores up their defense; the
position-defying Draymond Green,
the steal of the 2012 draft; and rangy
guards Andre Iguodala and Shaun
Livingston, whom they acquired in
free agency. “They complemented
shooting,” Mr. Myers said, “even
though they’re not shooters.”
The Warriors then had a chance to
trade for one of the league’s
premier players, Minnesota
Timberwolves forward Kevin Love.
The move would have been a no-
brainer for most basketball people.
But the Timberwolves wanted a
player in return whose departure
would have scuttled the Warriors’
master plan. “They kept asking for
Klay, and we kept saying no,” Mr.
Lacob said. “We weren’t going to
trade Klay, and they weren’t going
to do a deal without Klay.”
The team doubled down on its 3-
point plan by replacing coach Mark
Jackson with Steve Kerr, a member
of five NBA championship teams
who had retired with a 45.4%
shooting rate on 3-pointers, the
highest in league history. It was his
first NBA coaching job.
That season, with all the pieces in
place, the Warriors fielded five
players between 6-foot-3 and 6-
foot-8 who all were threats to shoot
3-pointers. This “small-ball” lineup—
widely known as the “death lineup”
or, as Barack Obama called it, the
“nuclear lineup”—helped the
Warriors take 9% more 3-pointers as
a team than the year before and
make a higher percentage than
anyone in the league.
This combination of frequency and
efficiency had a fascinating effect on
opponents. It forced them to spread
out, extending their defense all the
way to the 3-point line instead of
packing the paint, leaving the
Warriors with lots of open space.
Mr. Curry set a record for 3-point
shots and was named the league’s
Most Valuable Player. Mr.
Thompson made the All-Star team.
The Warriors overcame the
Cleveland Cavaliers to win their first
NBA title in 40 years.
A step further
The tinkering could have stopped
there. The Warriors clearly had hit
on a winning formula. But then they
began thinking about an audacious
idea that would make them even
better.
The plan had started to take shape
in 2013, during a playoff game
against the Spurs, one of the NBA’s
top teams. Mr. Curry was just then
coming into his own, showing signs
that he could be both dazzling and
deadly. During one possession early
in the first quarter, Mr. Curry
dribbled around a screen and found
himself in a pocket of open space.
Immediately, even before he had
time to set his feet, Mr. Curry pulled
up and fired a 3-pointer.
Mr. Myers, the general manager
who was in the arena watching that
night, couldn’t believe his eyes. As
the ball swished through the net, he
turned to the other Warriors
executives around him to confirm
what he had just seen. “Did he just
shoot that off one foot?” he asked.
“Who shoots a three off one foot?”
The shot was only one of dozens of
stunners Mr. Curry had made
during his young NBA career. But it
played a crucial role in firming up
another idea the team was batting
around. The Warriors were
dreaming about what would happen
if they gave Mr. Curry a green light
to take more shots, and more crazy
ones, too—not off one foot, exactly,
but from places on the floor where
nobody had ever routinely taken
shots.
Mr. Curry had already reached the
point where he could take as many
as 10 threes in one game without
anyone noticing. It didn’t matter if
the shot was off one foot, from 5 feet
behind the 3-point line or the
popcorn stand in the concourse. His
accuracy didn’t seem to suffer
much. Before every game, in fact,
Mr. Curry practices these kinds of
bombs by shooting from the half-
court logo.
The team realized that any
possession that ended with a 3-point
attempt by Mr. Curry was
worthwhile—and that they would
never discourage him from taking
one. In this, the season of Mr.
Curry’s unleashing, the Warriors are
shooting 17% more threes than a
season ago. Mr. Curry is attempting
more than 11 a game. No NBA team
had ever had a player attempt more
than nine. Last season he hit 286
threes. This season he is on pace for
about 400.
What amazes fans even more is the
location of those shots. NBA players
shoot an average of 28% from 27
feet or beyond. Most players don’t
even take them unless the shot clock
is running out. Mr. Curry has taken
253 such deep shots this year and
made 47% of them. The result is that
defenders have strayed even farther
from the basket to guard him,
opening even bigger spaces for his
teammates.
“Stretching a defense makes it
easier to score,” Mr. Myers said.
The success of the Warriors this
season has turned Mr. Curry, who is
28 years old, into one the NBA’s
biggest stars. He has an everyman
appeal because he isn’t a giant.
His celebrity has raised the profile
of the 3-point shot. This year, like
the last four years, NBA teams are
taking more 3-pointers than ever.
They now amount to 28.3% of total
shots. College teams also hit another
high in 3-pointers attempted per
game this season. High school teams
have caught the bug, too.
Mr. Guber, the team’s co-owner, said
other NBA teams will try to emulate
the Warriors’ original approach as
they attempt to end the team’s
reign.
“Other teams will do it in a different
way,” he said. “They’ll take chances
and challenge the incumbent and
come up with another way to create
the magic.”
For now, the Warriors have it. They
turned the 3-point line into a
boundary in time. The kind of
strategy that unfolded inside the
line belonged to the game’s past.
The future of basketball, they
believed, lay behind the line—and
Mr. Curry showed it was farther
behind that line than even they
imagined.
“I don’t know why it took so long,”
Mr. Lacob said. “You would think in
sports that this would’ve been tried
a long time ago.”
Write to Ben Cohen at
ben.cohen@wsj.com

Too a piece
I differ all the same even without going through it all.