Golden State Warriors: Why the team’s motion offense is better than isolation
Golden State Warriors
The Warriors are well-known to have a motion offense. Everything they do is based on reading the defense and just flowing into actions.
If Stephen Curry or Klay Thompson is on the baseline then they will automatically get a down screen from one of the bigs on the side they run towards. Occasionally the Warriors will run set plays but this is almost always straight after a timeout, but rarely any other time.
With Durant, they did run some isolation too, especially against the Rockets in the playoffs but there was still a majority of motion offense. His highlights from the 2018 Western Conference Finals are almost all post-ups or isolations of some sort.
This was done in order to exploit the Rockets’ heavily switching defense. It is interesting that as soon as they got to the NBA finals that year against the Cavaliers, they removed a lot of the isolation from their offense.
They went back to their motion offense with a little bit of Kevin Durant isolation here and there — but not nearly as much as in the previous series.
This was also successful as they swept the series, thanks in part to Game 1’s hilarious J.R. Smith blunder.
Overall it is fair to say that the Cavaliers were a much worse defensive team that just relied on James’ offense to get them as far as they did.
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The Cavaliers had a defensive rating of 111.1 compared to the Warriors who had a 102.0 which was the best from the playoffs that year. That’s a large discrepancy. The Rockets fell somewhere in the middle that year with a rating of 107.0 which is very respectable.
Of those three teams in that 2018 playoffs run, the Warriors had an isolation frequency of 11.4%, which was less than the Cavaliers who ran it 13.7% of the time and the Rockets who ran it a lot more at 19.4% of the time.
Comparing that to the 2016 playoffs (which is the earliest these numbers were recorded), the Warriors ran isolation only 10.0% of the time.
This year, the Cavaliers beat them in the Finals of course. Cleveland had an isolation frequency of 13.8% at the time, which was second highest of all playoff teams, behind the Memphis Grizzlies.
The 2014-15 and 2015-16 Warriors without Durant were even more motion-reliant. Because of the two clear different eras, they’ll have to have two separate ratings.
Motion-to-Isolation Spectrum Rating: 10 (pre-Durant)
Motion-to-Isolation Spectrum Rating: 25 (with Durant)