48minutes.net

By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

OAKLAND — Warriors coach Don Nelson knew what other teams thought when they came into Oracle Arena.

“Not being able to win and not being able to do what we want in the fourth quarter . . . good teams figure they can beat us,” Nelson said.

With Stephen Jackson back, that no longer can be considered a safe assumption for Warriors opponents. Just ask the Boston Celtics after Jackson dropped 15 of his game-high 28 points on them in the fourth quarter of Golden State’s 99-89 win on Friday.

As mentioned in the live thread, this was the perfect setup for an underdog to knock off the Celtics: Not only was it the second half of an all-road back-to-back for Boston, but the Warriors also had 72 hours between games.

What tipped the scales, however, was Jackson’s return from a four-game absence to allow his sprained left hand — an injury that coincided with a brutal 26.9 percent shooting stretch (21-for-78) — to finally heal.

More specifically, it was Jackson’s fourth-quarter presence that made the difference. After a first-quarter individual showdown with Paul Pierce that ended in pretty much a draw (Jackson had 11 points, Pierce 13), Jackson disappeared in the second and third periods, shooting a combined 1-for-5 and committing five turnovers.

But there were signs of a recovery in the third. Jackson didn’t cough the ball up once in the final 17:45 of the second half. His one make came with the shot clock in single digits and against some tight defense from Pierce [3, 3:19]. And his specialty, the touch pass, led to an open 3-pointer for Marco Belinelli [3, 0:55.7].

When Jackson launched an ill-conceived drive down the lane, was blocked by Leon Powe and unleashed a frustration foul on Brian Scalabrine in the scramble for the rebound [4, 9:15], it seemed like Friday’s top storyline would be how the captain was still not fit for duty.

A layup off a crisp entry pass from Anthony Morrow got Jackson rolling [4, 8:42], and he didn’t stop the rest of the way.

The Warriors trailed by five before that bucket; they led by nine a little less than 4 1/2 minutes later, with Jackson scoring 13 of Golden State’s 18 points and assisting on three more — a trey from Kelenna Azubuike [4, 7:46].

Jackson drained a pair of 3-pointers of his own in that stretch, one with Pierce’s hand in his face on the left wing [4, 7:03], the other after getting sprung from a nice back pick by Belinelli [4, 5:32]. He undoubtedly got lucky when he rolled in a 10-foot fadeaway over Kevin Garnett to give the Warriors their first lead since less than 3 minutes into the game [4, 6:03], but Jackson is a guy who, frankly, makes his own luck sometimes.

I’d be fascinated to see what Jackson’s shooting percentage is on attempts where the Warriors are within five points of the opposition (either ahead or behind) in the second half. Anecdotally, I think it would be far higher than the 38.5 percent he’s put up as a whole this season.

The Lineup Project
Catching up after the Christmas holiday, we have three games’ worth of data and some new year-to-date numbers:

12/22/08: Magic 113, Warriors 81

12/23/08: Heat 96, Warriors 88

12/26/08: Warriors 99, Celtics 89

Year-to-date through 31 games (per 48 minutes)

Let’s give credit where it’s due: Without the performance of the Small group against Boston on Friday, the Warriors don’t even come close to mounting that comeback. Golden State was helped by Doc Rivers’ insistence on sticking with his own small group, despite the obvious fact that they were dog-tired and thus unable to hang with the hosts’ unit, but that shouldn’t detract from the quality of Warriors’ smallball-driven comeback.

With the blowout in Orlando and two other subpar performances, the Medium lineup (two bigs, not including any Turiaf-Biedrins pairings, plus three wings) has come back to Earth and the Smalls have gotten somewhat closer to the team totals (Golden State is averaging 103.7 ppg while giving up 109.5 for a delta of minus-5.8).

Monta’s return a month off?
Don Nelson said Friday that he didn’t expect injured guard Monta Ellis to play — or possibly even practice — for at least a month. I’ve heard Jan. 15 knocked around by members of the organization as a potential return time, but that’s been a very fluid date from the get-go.

Whenever Ellis does come back, it will be interesting to see how the Warriors’ standing in the standings factors into the decision.

As of today, it looks like a nine-team race for eight playoff spots in the West, with the Warriors already 9 games behind two teams tied for seventh: Dallas (17-12) and Utah (18-13).

On the other hand, Golden State is already 5 1/2 games behind Oklahoma City in the race for the other extreme — the worst record and corresponding highest concentration of pingpong balls in the 2009 draft lottery.

Twenty years ago, back when fantasy sports involved buying USA Today every Tuesday and crunching your own stats on a Mac SE (with a 30-meg hard drive!), one of the originators of the field — Dan Okrent, who would go on to become the New York Times’ first ombudsman, among other accomplishments in journalism — described a place he dubbed “The Fenokee Triangle,” where you’re never quite good enough to compete for the top spot, yet never bad enough to want to tear things down entirely.

It feels like the Warriors are at risk of once again taking up residence in the NBA’s version of that spot, winning too many games to grab an impact player, but not enough to be anything more than first-round fodder for the Lakers, Spurs or Hornets.

Contact: geofflepper@48minutes.net

By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

Warriors center Ronny Turiaf has an easy fix for Golden State’s problems when it comes to securing defensive rebounds:

“Plain and simple, go get the ball,” Turiaf said. “That’s it.”

Except that hasn’t been it, of course. Not by a long shot.

Including last night’s horrific 20-offensive rebound performance for the Indiana Pacers in their 127-210 victory, Golden State has chalked up a defensive rebound rate (DRR) of just 67.0 percent through its first 26 games.

The DRR — a team’s defensive boards divided by the sum of a team’s defensive boards and the opponents’ offensive rebounds — is a rough ratio of how many defensive rebounds a team gets (it doesn’t include team boards, so it’s not as exact as you would want).

At 67.0, Golden State ranks last in the NBA by a wide, wide margin. There’s a chart to illustrate that point below, but here’s some specifics as well: The Kings are 29th in the league at 70.5 percent and the league average is 73.1. The top-ranked Spurs are at 77.8.

Consider: Even if the Warriors closed half the gap between their DRR and the league average . . . they’d still be the league’s worst, at 70.05. So the data begs the question:

How bad are the Warriors, historically speaking?

Well, how about this: They’re the second-worst defensive rebounding team this century.

OK, I realize the 21st century is only in its ninth year, but still, the last time a team posted a DRR lower than 67.0 was in 1999-2000, when the Dallas Mavericks — put together and coached by familiar, white-haired adherent of small ball by the name of Don Nelson — pulled down 66.1 percent of their opportunities.

In an attempt to solve that team’s failings — both on the floor and at the ticket office — Nelson and new Mavericks owner Mark Cuban brought in a 38-year-old Dennis Rodman. Though the Worm helped somewhat — Dallas’ DRR in 12 games with him was about 3.5 points better than in the 70 without — it wasn’t enough to make it worth dealing with his particular brand of crazy.

I’m sure that Rodman would be game to pull down more NBA coin, but let’s assume for the moment that a washed-up, 47-year-old ex-husband to Carmen Electra isn’t the answer for Nelson & Co. this time around.

What can the Warriors do to solve this problem, which keeps biting them at critical junctures (such as the possession Wednesday where Jeff Foster simply bulled over Jamal Crawford, collected his own miss and allowed Stephen Graham to give the Pacers a second-chance layup for a five-point lead)?

“Well, it’s a very complicated thing,” Nelson said last week. “It’s not just one thing. There’s lots of different coverages, there’s lots of different assignments. It takes a while before it’s a natural thing for young players.”

It’s interesting to look at the Warriors’ individual DRR numbers this season compared to last season, when Golden State still ranked last but had a 70.3 mark that was at least within hailing distance of the rest of the league.

In 2007-08:

In 2008-09:

A few things that stand out: Harrington’s dramatic slide (-5.2) reiterates just how little he cared to toil in a Warriors uniform this season.

That was just one piece of the across-the-board decrease for returning players, such as Wright (-2.7), Azubuike (-2.3) and Jackson (-1.1).

Turiaf attributes some of the team’s problem to a habit of standing around and watching Biedrins (third in the league at 12.0 rpg): “Because Goose gets so many of them, sometimes we’re like, ‘OK, Goose, just go get it.’ We become somewhat complacent; ‘You average 13 a game, so we’ll just box out for you.’”

Yet even Biedrins is down 1.3 percent.

It’s been fun to watch the Phoenix Suns play this season and witness, even as they’re disintegrating because of Steve Nash’s disenchantment with new coach Terry Porter, Matt Barnes having a career year. Much like Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” where you “don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone,” Barnes’ tenacity on the glass has become so much more noticeable now that it’s not here, replaced by the pale imitation that has been Corey Maggette’s work as a “power” forward.

Watson deserves praise for his concentrated effort on rebounding, which has been rewarded with greater numbers, and so to a lesser extent does Belinelli. And, not to beat on a dead horse, while Randolph may have his problems in making the transition from teen-ager to NBA pro, going up and securing loose balls is not one of them.

But Crawford is as bad as he was advertised to be. And Turiaf, the Warriors’ alleged answer to such bangers as Utah’s Paul Millsap (20.4 career DRR) and Dallas’ Brandon Bass (17.4), is at a career-low number, continuing a slide that has not stopped since his rookie year: from 19.0 to 18.3 to 15.4 to 13.6.

There are a number of factors that lead back to different causes. That Golden State’s guards are doing a remarkably poor job at keeping opposing ball-handlers from turning the corner seemingly at will means that Turiaf and Biedrins are constantly pulled out of prime rebounding position to provide last-line-of-defense help around the rim. Nor is it helping that wings are supposed to be heading downcourt, seeking out early offense in Nelson’s system, rather than dealing with the heavy lifting of defensive rebounding.

Turiaf claims it’s all mental, and doesn’t blame even the Warriors’ near obsession with a small-ball setup that the coach keeps saying didn’t work because the opponent’s small squad was just flat-out better.

“It has nothing to do with not being strong enough, being small, blah-blah-blah,” Turiaf said. “It has nothing to do with that. . . . Regardless of what happens, just go get the ball. I’d rather have a turnover — I don’t think coach is going to agree with me on that one — but I’d rather have a turnover with two guys going to get the ball than not getting it. That’s pretty much it.

“Just go get it.”

Hendrix goes, Williams stays
The Warriors couldn’t bring themselves to pay Marcus Williams almost $1 million not to show up for the rest of this season, so they cut rookie forward Richard Hendrix instead to make room for Monta Ellis’ move off the suspended list. The decision saved the team costs the team roughly $600,000 less than losing Williams and makes sense from one perspective: There is no way Don Nelson was going to use either of those two players the rest of the way, so the team simply chose the option that represents less wasted money.

The Lineup Project
I don’t want to give anyone a stroke, so I’ll just point out that the 7:15 in the Medium line encompassed Brandan Wright’s entire evening.

Without Monta. . .
So it’s 7-19, then. I thought I was being pretty good at tamping any optimism when I wrote that the Warriors would be 9-17 by the time Ellis’ suspension ended. Guess I was wrong.

Contact: geofflepper@48minutes.net

By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

At a Warriors practice last week, Golden State captain Stephen Jackson stood on the sideline talked for roughly 10 minutes with team president Robert Rowell and minority owner Michael Marks.

I have no idea what the gist of the conversation was, but Rowell needs to have another meeting with Jackson, with one simple message:

Sit down until you’re healthy.

Like Oscar De La Hoya’s cornermen after watching him get pummeled for eight rounds at the hands of Manny Pacquiao last week, someone has to step in and say it, because Jackson refuses to admit what’s obvious to everyone — that his injured left hand is crippling his effectiveness on the floor right now.

Jackson showed reporters this week how his middle finger is misaligned, and said that the ligaments had been pushed out of place when he originally incurred the injury against Boston on Nov. 26 (his hand got caught in a Celtic’s jersey as Jackson tried to fight through a screen). Nevertheless, he steadfastly refuses to ask off the floor in games, even after he takes a shot and can clearly be seen between plays rubbing the hand to try and ease the pain.

The team has not given any indication that Jackson needs anything other than rest to get better. If that’s the case, then the rest should start immediately.

Jackson was 1-for-13 from the floor in the Warriors’ 123-105 loss to the Nuggets on Saturday. Teams are overplaying his right hand now, knowing that he can’t get anything going on a dribble with his left.

That’s bad enough, but let’s be honest: Even if Jackson had been playing at his 2007-08 level against the Nuggets on Saturday, does anyone really think that would have turned the tide? On a night where Don Nelson’s top three possibilities at power forward — Corey Maggette, Brandan Wright and Ronny Turiaf — are all off the floor? Maybe an 18-point defeat becomes an eight-point margin. But there’s not much more to it than that.

The only way the Warriors are going to make the playoffs — assuming you’re not joining the Tank Brigade after a quarter of the season — is if they win a stunning proportion of the games once Monta Ellis comes back. We’re talking a 65, 70, 75 percent proportion.

Running Jackson out for 31 minutes on back-to-back nights in games where the Warriors already have next to no hope because of their myriad other injuries is time he could be spending recovering. And getting ready so that when Ellis returns, it’s with a full-strength Jackson alongside.

Notes
Jamal Crawford may or may not be the reason why the Warriors’ defense went from “merely poor” to “catastrophically bad” in the past few weeks. But there’s no reason whatsoever why he should stand around near halfcourt and watch, dumbstruck, while Kenyon Martin streaks past him to set up a breakaway dunk after Chauncey Billups collects a missed 3-pointer and launches a lead pass. At least give an effort. Act like you care. . . . I’m going to search through the tape later today with an eye on Rob Kurz’s performance. I will stipulate that he was one of only two Warriors that could hit any kind of shot, but this no-mistake defense I keep hearing about was belied by two plays that jumped out on the first viewing: Kurz got pushed down the lane by Nene on the very first play of the game, which allowed Kurz’s cover, Martin, to cram home a dunk. (Thankfully, Kurz turned away at the last second, otherwise Martin would’ve given him the full Frederic Weis treatment.) Then, 90 seconds into the second half, Kurz came from the right block all the way across the lane to try to provide C.J. Watson help covering Anthony on the left wing. Except all that did was leave Martin open to tap home Anthony’s alley-oop pass. . . . Given that he couldn’t even get into a 25-point blowout until the final 3:02, it’s pretty clear that third-year guard Marcus Williams is the leader in the clubhouse in terms of being the player the Warriors to shed after Monta Ellis’ suspension ends on Dec. 17. Barring a very poor showing by DeMarcus Nelson on Wednesday while he fills in for Watson (who will be attending a family funeral), the only question would seem to be whether the Warriors can salvage a second-round pick for Williams, or just have to cut him loose with no compensation at all. . . . Anthony Morrow needs to learn to stay home when matched up with a 3-point gunner such as J.R. Smith.

The Lineup Project
Once again, no real chance to go big without Turiaf and Wright in the building.

Lineup               GS      DEN      Time
Large                   0        0          0:00
Turiaf-Biedrins      0         0          0:00
Medium               41       49        18:56
Small                  64      74         29:04

Here’s a season-long update, per 48 minutes

Lineup                GS      OPP      +/-
Large                   99.7     92.5      +7.2
Turiaf-Biedrins      107.1    97.4      +9.7
Medium               103.6    109.6    -6.0
Small                  107.3    116.6    -9.3

Without Monta. . .
7-19, here they come. Only two games remain, and both of them, like the Denver game, were predicted to be defeats.

Contact: geofflepper@48minutes.net

By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

Turns out that changing course with an NBA team in the middle of a season is not all that simple.

After the Warriors’ 119-108 defeat to the Houston Rockets on Friday — a game in which Golden State shot just 37.2 percent through three quarters, 40.2 overall — it’s easy for fans to say, “Look, the ball movement experiment failed.”

But in addition to just plain bad luck — such as Stephen Jackson’s missed dunk attempt — there were plenty of instances of Warriors pulling up for jumpers that clanged off the iron without the benefit of a pass to set up the shooter.

In the first 8 1/2 minutes alone, Jackson, C.J. Watson, Kelenna Azubuike (twice) and Jamal Crawford (twice) were all guilty of such infractions. Five of those six shots were misses; the only make was when Azubuike ducked behind a ball screen from Andris Biedrins and knocked down a fading 17-footer.

There were some positives: Several Warriors were aggressively using up-fakes to get past their man at the 3-point line — a place the Warriors, the NBA’s next-to-worst 3-point shooting team (30.3 percent), shouldn’t be firing from — and then stepping in for open 15- to 18-footers.

And kick-out passes made a reappearance, including a couple from Azubuike, who tied his season-high with four assists (a level he hadn’t reached in more than a month).

** The absences of Brandan Wright, Ronny Turiaf and Corey Maggette forced Jackson into spending 31 minutes at power forward, which was doubly damaging to the Warriors: Their best individual defender was relatively wasted shadowing Luis Scola while a rookie (Anthony Morrow) was tasked with shutting down Tracy McGrady. When you include the fact that Jackson is possibly the worst rebounding 4 in NBA history, you can see why it’s a problem.

** I will say this for Jackson at 4: He made some superb rotations defensively, including the first-quarter play to draw a charge on Yao Ming. The rest of the team was nowhere near as successful. Even when one player would make the right move — such as when Marco Belinelli came across the lane to shut down a drive by Luther Head, who had gotten past Jackson on a screen-roll play — a teammate would fail to make the next necessary rotation — i.e., Crawford not sliding down to the baseline to cover Shane Battier, who drained an open 12-footer.

** Crawford still needs to push the ball faster, even when the Warriors don’t have numbers. It’s more about stoking the tempo of the game than anything else; when he would jog it upcourt, it fed into the idea that the game was going to be played at Houston’s pace.

** Anthony Randolph may have finished with 15 points and 10 rebounds, but he also made his share of rookie mistakes. In one particularly cringe-worthy sequence in the second quarter:

Randolph chased hopelessly after an offensive rebound, and the Rockets capitalized on his late arrival at the other end with a 3-pointer from Aaron Brooks.

Randolph missed an open 18-footer off a pick-and-pop with Belinelli.

Randolph switched onto McGrady after a screen-roll play, leapt into the air at the sight of McGrady’s up-fake and gave up two easy points at the foul line.

I did wonder, if a fuller bench had been available, whether Nelson would have yanked Randolph and buried him on the bench at that point.

** Speaking of rookie mistakes: Why does Morrow keep overplaying people on their weak side? First it was Oklahoma City’s Damien Wilkins, who blew by Morrow for an uncontested slam on Monday. This time, it was Von Wafer who had a couple of easy layups at Morrow’s expense by using that same baseline route.

* * Do you think Yao will be buying Carl Landry a nice Christmas gift after Landry nearly impaled Randolph with his first-half dunk?

The Lineup Project
Hard to go anything but small when two of your five bigs are on the bench and two of the three remaining are rookies.

Lineup             GSW     HOU     Time
Large                 N/A       N/A       0:00
Turiaf-Biedrins    N/A       N/A       0:00
Medium              47        40        16:46
Small                 61        79         31:14

Without Monta. . .
I predicted a 9-17 record for the Warriors when Monta Ellis’ suspension was over, so at 7-16, they have some work to do.

Contact: geofflepper@48minutes.net

By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

OAKLAND — Maybe the sky really is falling for the Warriors this time. Not that that’s a bad thing, in this instance.

Lost amid all the hoopla over Monta Ellis sitting down for a 12-minute discussion with the media after Thursday’s practice was the fact that Golden State coach Don Nelson said that he was going to continue, long-term, his two-game experiment with greater ball movement.

After two practices in which players were ordered to pass the ball a minimum of four or five times before shooting in half-court sets and two victories that featured none of the stagnation of the previous 20 games (15 of which were losses), Nelson declared an end to the days of allowing Golden State’s offense to dissolve into an endless procession of isolation plays for the likes of Corey Maggette, Stephen Jackson and Kelenna Azubuike.

“I wasn’t enjoying watching the team, the way that we were playing,” Nelson said. “I think the game of basketball should be fun, and you can only have fun if you move the ball and we play together. And I can only have fun coaching when my players do that. The ball basically was stopping too much, and that’s got to change. And it’s gonna change.”

Was the sound I just heard outside my window that of atmospheric debris smashing into a parked car? Or did the sanitation workers on my street just get a little careless with their driving?

That’s the problem: You can’t really tell the difference sometimes when it comes to Nelson, who seems to make as many pronouncements as Chicken Little — and sometimes sports a similar track record for accuracy.

Just last week, frustrated Warriors guard Marco Belinelli told Italian newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport: “I can’t trust Nelson any more. . . . The things he told me haven’t come to pass.”

But with two of his best half-dozen offensive performances this season in the books, Nelson appears set to follow the same blueprint — at for now.

The obvious winners in such a scenario would include Belinelli, who has flourished in the victories against Oklahoma City and Milwaukee — scoring a combined 28 points in 39 minutes in hyper-efficient style (11-for-14 FG) — and Anthony Morrow, who had his first double-digit games (15 and 16) since his two-game outburst in November that first alerted many folks to his very existence.

“I think that’s great, because when we play like this, I think the game is fast,” Belinelli said. “We enjoy the game, we make passes to everybody.”

Nelson has historically felt that the Warriors lack passers; the abortive Chris Webber return last season was an attempt to address that concern. Without someone such as Baron Davis on the roster who can force a defense to leave a teammate open and then find them with a spot-on delivery, the hope is that a quickened pace and greater volume of passes will achieve the same, simple goal:

More open shots.

“I didn’t make them, but that’s the most open shots I’ve got all year, because we moved the ball,” Jackson said of the Warriors’ 119-96 win over Milwaukee on Wednesday. “The two times we moved the ball the most in the season, we won, so something must be right. . . . That’s how we’ve played the last two years: We moved the ball, we got open shots, we made plays for the next guy.”

Precious little of that was on display as the Warriors opened 5-15 with an offense based in large part around individual skills rather than a team concept.

Nelson himself admitted that part of the problem was his veterans calling their own number too often: “Well, we were isoing too much, and it wasn’t always the coach calling those plays. We were looking there too much, and we need to look for ball movement. Players have to understand that’s what’s going to happen.”

Understanding and adapting are two totally separate things, however. Jackson, with his ability to pass, should be able to rapidly find his equilibrium in the new system. Maggette, on the other hand, has shown no such proclivity. In addition, he’s spent the majority of his NBA lifetime — five full seasons with the Clippers — following the densely detailed stylings of Mike Dunleavy, Sr., a guy who is so regimented, Hans Gruber could’ve based an elaborate heist on his tendencies.

Can a guy whose game is so dependent on isolation plays — “It was a 98 percent iso team. They dropped it down, they posted up, they isoed. That’s all they did,” Jackson said of the Clippers — remake himself this radically? Can he drop a half-decade of conditioning on a dime?

“He’s the coach and this is what he wants to do, and I think as a player, you have to make adjustments,” Maggette said. “I think we’re really trying to do that. I think everyone is really buying into it. At the end of the day, you want to buy into whatever philosophy it takes to win. And the past couple games, we’ve won by this new philosophy. Hopefully, we can keep it up and just be a better team.”

On that last point, Nelson and Maggette agree.

“We want to be a good basketball team, I think is the main thing,” Nelson said. “And we haven’t been up to this point. So we’re working hard to become a better team. If that results in wins, that’s fine.

“But at least let’s play the game the right way.”

Contact: geofflepper@48minutes.net