REAL TALK: The Golden State Warriors and Versatility
We’re mostly about goofin’ around and having a good time here. Most of our posts will be silly, comedy-basketball nonsense, but sometimes we’ll have an actual opinion on things. This is real talk.
The Golden State Warriors are 4–2 in the early stages of this NBA season. While losses to the Spurs and (to a lesser degree) the Lakers shouldn’t be cause for worry just yet, the team is showing signs that their off-season roster moves have done more than simply make them the super team most expected.
Adding Kevin Durant to your basketball team is a no-brainer, that’s for sure. Replacing Harrison Barnes with Kevin Durant in a five-man rotation already billed the “Lineup of Death” is downright scary. That line-up (Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, Andre Iguodala, Kevin Durant, Draymond Green) should be the best five players any team in the league could hope to get on the floor together at one time. The only question about it would be chemistry — and that doesn’t seem to be an issue. This line-up knows how to play together, share the ball, play swarming defense, get open shots, and can knock them down with lights-out efficiency.
What the Warriors gave up to get Durant, however, is where you begin to see the holes in their roster. If it were as simple as dropping Barnes and signing Durant, this very well may be the team some pre-season simulators had winning between 80 and 82 games. But it wasn’t that simple. Subtracting Andrew Bogut, Leandro Barbosa, Festus Ezeli, and Marreese Speights (and bringing in Zaza Pachulia and David West) has caused the team to give up one of their biggest strengths: their versatility.
Last year, the Warriors roster allowed them to throw out combinations of players to match or counter anything their opposition wanted to throw at them. They could mix and match their deep roster to create line-ups that could pound the ball inside, fly around the court, shoot from the outside, play position-less basketball, or trot out the old tried-and-true “One through Five” style lineup.
This year’s squad, while still one of the deeper teams talent-wise in the NBA, sacrifices some of this versatility for top-of-the-rotation talent. This talent might not matter against most teams, but at the early point in the season we have seen how some teams may cause matchup nightmares for the Warriors. The Spurs specifically are deep in talent, versatile, and can throw out players that can cause the Warriors fits in the post they may not have encountered with last year’s squad.
And of course there’s the fact that the even-more versatile Warriors of last year came up short against Cleveland in the NBA Finals.
It probably isn’t realistic to expect that Warriors would have been able to return the same roster they used to set a record for regular season wins last year. A few players would have had to turn down major money to come back. Being able to bring in Kevin Durant while losing those players is a major victory itself. However, it is not the guaranteed championship many thought it would be.
