HOW TEAMS MIGHT (POSSIBLY) (BUT PROBABLY NOT) BEAT THE WARRIORS

I walked around Las Vegas for four days asking NBA people the only question that really matters next season:

Everyone in the NBA is asking the same question right now, and none of them are even pretending to have a convincing answer. The question is, how on Earth are teams supposed to defend the Golden State Warriors next season? And no, “very carefully” is not an answer. When you take a team that had the third-best league-adjusted offense of the three-point era — the Warriors scored at a rate 7.5 percent better than the league average offensive efficiency, behind only the Steve Nash-led 2004 Dallas Mavericks and 2005 Phoenix Suns — and add KEVIN FREAKING DURANT to the mix, things get complicated.

When I headed out to Las Vegas for four days of NBA Summer League action, I found that no one had really started tackling this vexing question in any depth. Durant’s decision to head west was still so fresh that most everyone was talking about the moral dimensions of it — if the talk radio binary of “He’s a coward!” and “Players can do what they want!” can be said to rise to that level — or just how it will work for the Warriors themselves when they have the ball.

So when I went around asking scouts, personnel people, execs, agents, and media members what actual basketball tactics they’d enact in an attempt to slow down this expected juggernaut, the most common response I got was some variation of what one Western Conference personnel man said: “Shit, man. I haven’t even started contemplating that yet.” But when I pressed the issue, a few trends began to emerge.

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