The Golden State Warriors Have Revolutionized BasketballApril 6, 2016
The Wall Street Journal
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-golden-state-warriors-have-revolutionized-basketball-1459956975Team executives saw the 3-point line as a market inefficiency and unleashed Stephen Curry to exploit it
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?
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.
