Steve Kerr is really, really good at this. “This,” of course, meaning coaching at the highest levels of basketball. He’s proven it over and over and over again. As a rookie head coach, he won 67 games and took home a Larry O’Brien Trophy. He followed that up by leading his squad to a history-making 73-9 record. These playoffs he’s consistently made the right tactical decisions to get his team where they need to be.
One strategy that’s been much talked about, but seemingly not understood, is Kerr’s lineup choices. Kerr has perplexed many with some of his decisions on who he plays, when, and for how long. The principal cause of this consternation and confusion has been Kerr’s insistence on rolling with a deep rotation, despite the conventional wisdom that you shorten your rotation in the playoffs to reduce the number of minutes your worst guys see in the most important games.
In Friday night’s game Game 4, Kerr did something very curious at the 3:01 mark in the first quarter: He called for James Michael McAdoo. If you’re unfamiliar with McAdoo, don’t feel too bad, as the second year big man has played just 399 regular season minutes in his two-year career. He had played just 20 playoff minutes this year before Game 4. Kerr trusted him in a pivotal game of the NBA Finals on the road. Not only did Kerr trust him, but so did his teammates. Check out McAdoo’s involvement on this tiki-taka pick and roll dive to the rim:
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Kerr would go to McAdoo two more times, each for roughly two to three-minute bursts. When asked postgame why he essentially replaced Festus Ezeli with McAdoo, Kerr responded that he needed more speed. Kerr didn’t just recognize the importance of getting his best players rest throughout the game, despite the importance of every minute in the Finals, but he recognized the right player at the end of his bench to provide the best chance of staying afloat against the Cavs’ speedier lineups. McAdoo finished each two-minute burst, leaving the Warriors up an additional point over when he came in, ultimately finishing the game with a +3 on/off rating. Pretty perfect execution of the vision Kerr likely had in making the swap.
Kerr’s strategy allowed the Warriors to steal rest for their best players, while not killing them in the stretches where those guys rested. Postgame, Kerr acknowledged the rest strategy saying, “I thought we got some really good minutes off the bench from McAdoo and Varejao, they came in and it may not seem like much but just a handful of minutes when you’re scrapping and clawing. That was important.”
Kerr has done similar things throughout the playoffs with Leandro Barbosa (who did not play in Game 4) and Anderson Varejao. The two Brazilians are, like McAdoo, not guys that you would expect to be able to contribute at the highest levels, but Kerr has trusted them enough to give them spot minutes, which has kept his best at their freshest coming down to the highest leverage minutes in the fourth quarter and crunch time. In Game 4, McAdoo and Varejao were able to give Draymond Green and Harrison Barnes, respectively, a puff here and there to keep their legs under them come the end of the game.
Kerr similarly went with Shaun Livingston in the early goings of the second and fourth quarters to rest Stephen Curry. Livingston is a more capable player than McAdoo or Varejao by a significant margin, but the player he replaced is even more important than anyone else on the Warriors, and yet, Kerr rocked with Liv and was rewarded. Livingston finished the stints he replaced Curry in a +3 and finished the game a +2 overall.
Looking at the Game Flow information from PopcornMachine.net, it’s easy to see the difference between Kerr’s strategy and Cavs coach Tyronn Lue’s.
You can see that Kerr buttressed his breaks for Curry by doing them — as he’s done all year — to start the second and fourth quarters, further augmenting his star’s rest period. LeBron just got the one break.
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Kerr played his best players around 40 minutes each, but he got them rest throughout the game and especially around the end of quarter breaks, which lengthened the rest they received in real-world minutes. Lue, on the other hand, rode Kyrie Irving and JR Smith from midway through the end of the second quarter all the way through to the end of the game. Worse still, Lue played LeBron James for 3 straight quarters after getting him a little rest in the first quarter. James finished playing more than 45 of a possible 48 minutes.
When asked about fatigue possibly playing a role in the Warriors outscoring his team by 9 in the final frame, Lue, ignoring all available science and common sense about how fatigue works said, “When it’s time to win and you’re in the NBA Finals you gotta play as many minutes as you need to. If you gotta play 96 minutes, you gotta play 96 minutes. We’re trying to win. We’re in the Finals. [James] could have got tired and could have been fatigued, but in the NBA Finals you gotta lay it all on the line. In nine days, you can rest all summer.”
To which I say, that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works. You can’t tough talk your way through fatigue. If your opponent is better rested than you, you can struggle through and give it all you’ve got, but all you’ve got isn’t going to be your best, because you’re freaking tired.
The Cavs have fought fairly valiantly against a superior Warriors squad, but even with as mightily as they’ve struggled, it looks like their head coach got put into check by Steve Kerr and his superior tactical mind. Down 3 games to 1 headed back to Oracle, Kerr’s great rotations and Lue’s poor ones may have made all the difference in these NBA Finals.
