The Warriors are scrambling to keep their season on track, and this one alarming stat is a big reason why

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The Golden State Warriors eked out a 119-116 win over the Phoenix Suns on Saturday, and if you went off the exhilaration in play-by-play broadcaster Bob Fitzgerald’s voice with every play the team made to inch closer to victory you would’ve thought Stephen Curry was drawing in on a fifth championship. 

Usually Fitzgerald is way over the top in just about every way, but in this case it was a really big win. Which is sort of a problem. You know your season is skidding to stay on the track when a three-point triumph over the Suns, at home, in December, to improve your record to 14-15 is actually being celebrated. 

That’s how desperate the Warriors have become for anything positive to latch on to of late. They’ve lost 10 of their last 14. The win over Phoenix snapped a three-game skid that coincided with Curry’s return from a two-week absence in which the Warriors were finding hope in Pat Freaking Spencer. 

Again, no knock on Spencer, but you’re really reaching if you expect to contend for a championship and Pat Spencer pulling rabbits out of his hat is your recipe for success. The Warriors, plain and simple, just haven’t been a good team this season. There are a number of reasons for that, but there is one extremely alarming stat that has been, perhaps, the principle thorn in Golden State’s side. 

From NBA.com’s Jon Schuhmann:

The Warriors have seen the league’s biggest drop in shot-opportunity differential, from +3.8 (fourth) last season to -1.1 (20th) this season. They’ve seen the league’s second biggest jump in turnover rate, it’s fifth biggest drop in offensive rebounding percentage and its sixth biggest drop in defensive rebounding percentage.

Shot opportunities are different than pure possessions. You can, for example, turn the ball over and it still counts as a possession. If you give up an offensive rebound, that’s still considered the same possession. 

By contrast, if you turn the ball over, you lose out on a shot opportunity, and if you give up an offensive rebound, that is an extra shot opportunity for your opponent. So let’s say the Warriors turn the ball over against the Rockets, who then go down on other end and miss two shots but grab both of the available offensive rebounds before finally making the third shot. That would be one possession for each team, but it would be zero shot opportunities for the Warriors against three for the Rockets. 

Over the course of games, and, ultimately, seasons, NBA basketball has become about getting more shots at the basket than your opponent. That’s why teams are jacking up horrible 2-for-1 shots at the end of quarters, because even horrible shots are shots and it’s a numbers game. Same as soccer or hockey. If you get more shots on goal than your opponent, your chances of winning rise dramatically. 

So for the Warriors, that seemingly little -1.1 number is a big deal. That means they are getting, on average, 1.1 fewer shots per game than their opponents, whereas last year they were getting 3.8 more. This number has totally flipped for two main reasons: Because the Warriors are turning the ball over on 16.2% of their possessions this year (up from 14.2% last year), and because they give up 12.1 offensive rebounds per game, the fourth most in the league. 

Now, the Warriors’ currently third-ranked defense does force its opponents into a lot of turnovers, too, and they grab 11.5 of their own offensive rebounds per game. They also shoot 22.2 free throws per game while giving up 23 to their opponents. 

On their own, those are all fairly small discrepancies. But they add up to a negative shot-opportunity ratio. Or, put another way, they have erased the significant shot-opportunity advantage the Warriors enjoyed last season, and these days the Warriors need every advantage they can get. 

See, that’s the difference in the Warriors now as opposed to the juggernaut they once were. In the dynasty years, they had the firepower to render mistakes moot. They could turn the ball over like crazy (which they did) or give up a gazillion offensive rebounds, which they also did (bottom five 2014-2016 and dead last in Kevin Durant’s first season), and it didn’t matter because they had the firepower to shoot their way out of any hole and then some. 

Now they don’t. They have the 21st-ranked offense. Steve Kerr has been hammering the turnover point all season. He believes it’s the number one reason the Warriors haven’t been able to get out of their own way, and he’s not wrong. It begs the question if the Warriors should still be running this high-wire offense that is predicated on precise timing and movement and a lot of needle-threading passes that are never far from an interception, or at least if they should be pretty much exclusively running it. 

Kerr recently admitted he needs to put the ball in Jimmy Butler’s hands more often when Curry is out of the game, if only to settle things down by playing a more conventional, even conservative, style. Cut out some of the Princeton stuff that is mostly designed for Curry. Let Butler play pick and roll and control the ball and if nothing else you give yourself a better chance of getting a shot up every time down the floor. Again, shot opportunities are deciding games these days, and any team that wants to call itself a contender has to be getting more than its opponents. As long as the Warriors aren’t doing that, they’re going to be a .500 team. 

This news was originally published on this post .

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