How the Warriors Are So Good and the Houston Rockets Are…Not

The Warriors are 48-4, the best 52-game start in NBA history. They've only lost one game with a healthy starting lineup. They are undefeated at home in Oakland. They're winning games by an average of 12.5 points, which would be the second highest margin of victory of all time—currently being edged out by this year's San Antonio Spurs by two-tenths of a point. All of which is to say this: the Warriors are quite good, and if the second half of the season is like the first, it will complete the greatest regular season run a team has ever made in the NBA. And yet, in spite of all their obvious success, it's surprisingly difficult to find an emotionally satisfying explanation for how the Warriors are not just good but an all-time great team. You think you've seen the solution from far off, shimmering above the horizon in the distance like a mountain, but once you get closer, the mountain seems strangely small.

Steph Curry, for instance, seems like a good place to start looking for the source of the Warriors' greatness. Golden State is outscoring teams by 21 points per game when he's on the court, and being outscored by 6 when he's not. Discussing his numbers, you end up putting him in sentences with Michael Jordan, who is by acclamation considered to be the greatest player to ever live, and Wilt Chamberlain, a man who was so ahead of his time that the NBA changed the rules to give teams a fair chance to stop him.

But Steph cuts an unimpressive figure, even when he's standing right next to you. Though he's about average height and weight for his position, he has none of the coiled power of a player like Russell Westbrook. He doesn't, in fact, look like an NBA player, but disconcertingly like a guy who does Crossfit on the weekend to stay in shape. When he runs back on defense, he often has the loping gait of someone pushing through the end of a long jog. ESPN's beat reporter Ethan Sherwood Strauss likes to joke that if you saw him walk onto the floor at your local gym, you wouldn't be sure if you'd even want him on your team.

When you watch Steph play, the mystery only deepens. Although his technical skills are undeniably sharp, his handle tight, and his range wide, the effortless way in which he plays has the perverse effect of minimizing how good he really is. Where other dominant offensive players like Kevin Durant or Shaquille O'Neal make the defense seem irrelevant, Steph instead makes the defense look incompetent. When Steph pulls up for a deep three, his relaxed form, like someone throwing balled up socks in the laundry, gives no tell as to how distant he is from the rim, and so you wonder why someone isn't standing close enough to disturb his shot. When he drives to the basket, smoothly sliding past defenders, casually flipping arcing shots over and around their outstretched arms, you wonder why they don't contest his shots better or force themselves into his flight path.

These two men are professionals, paid millions of dollars to play basketball in the best league in the world. Steph Curry makes them look like patsies in a cartoon. Instead of looking unstoppable, Curry produces the nagging sensation that he's quite stoppable, if only someone would just do what it takes stop him.

You get a similar feeling when you watch Draymond Green, whose on-court/off-court impact numbers are almost as striking as Curry's. While it used to be the case that Draymond's impact wasn't seen in the box score, this year he's racked up triple-doubles at a rate faster than anyone since the 1980s, other than Jason Kidd and Magic Johnson. He's omnipresent on defense: only DeMarcus Cousins, the hulking last line of the Kings' porous defense, contests more shots. But, like Curry, Green is not physically imposing. He's a scant 6'6'' in socks, with average athleticism and a solid but unhewn physique. It just doesn't seem likely a player that looks like that could have this sort of impact on all parts of the game, and so the season he's having this year is often attributed to Golden State's "system"—and so our search continues.

Steve Kerr was hired last year and he took the team from a second-round playoff exit to a historic season and a NBA championship, so he seemed a likely culprit for the Warriors' breakout… until he missed the beginning of this season with back problems and the Warriors jumped out to the greatest start in NBA history without him, going 24-0 before finally losing. Maybe it's not Steve Kerr, then, but the system that he and his assistants installed last season. Perhaps that system is so good that the Warriors have become a machine that needs no operator? While there's no doubt that the Warriors have some effective sets, their offense isn't exactly rocket science. Many of the pieces are standard, off-the-rack plays that lots of teams have run for years and with which defenses are familiar. And anyway, the Warriors seem to be at their best and most dangerous when the order of the game disintegrates, collapses into an improvisational playground frenzy of loose balls and fast breaks.

The difficulty of singling out an individual reason for the Warriors' outsized success sometimes leads people to believe that perhaps there is no reason, that maybe the Warriors aren't actually as good as they seem. This idea is most often expressed by theorizing that while the Warriors are good team today, in a different NBA era they wouldn't have the same success. There's a grain of truth here. Basketball has changed over time. For instance, it's possible to imagine that hand-checking rules would allow defenders to challenge Curry's jumper more effectively. Since it would be easier to hamper him when he drove, maybe they wouldn't have to give him as much of a cushion and thus less space to get off his shot. Or perhaps the Warriors offense, which is heavily reliant on putting players into motion, would be less crisp in an era in which defenses were freer to bump players in space. But this era of basketball and its associated rules is no more or less authentic than any other, and every player and team adapts their game to the circumstances in which they play. This means we're in dicey territory when we try to project players and teams into eras that aren't their own, because we only see new challenges without the accompanying adjustments. The best way to compare teams across eras is to compare them to their contemporaries, and by this standard, the Warriors really are this good.

The answer, of course, to the question of how the Warriors are so good—the answer that's emotionally satisfying—is that it's Steph, their depth, their system, or any other individual factor. It's all of them at once. The Warriors play in a system that's a perfect match for their personnel, and their personnel maximizes this system, a system which is itself well suited for the era in which they play. And their players enjoy playing together, in that system. In the business world, they call this synergy; in economics, complementarity. In sports, we call this chemistry, and the Warriors have a surplus of it.

Chemistry is a concept that's intuitive, but sometimes it's easiest to see its impact in its absence. And to see a lack of chemistry, all you have to do is look to Houston Rockets. After a great regular season despite losing their second best player for long stretches, and a surprising run to the conference finals, the Rockets brought back almost their entire roster this season. With the addition of Ty Lawson, they seemed poised to take a step into the ranks of Western Conference contenders. Instead, their season has collapsed with very little warning. They fired their coach after a 4-7 start that looked even worse than that, and have basically broken even since then. Instead of contending, they're tied for eighth in the West, clinging to the last playoff spot by the slimmest of margins.

The Rockets are run by Daryl Morey, a man who, famously, was the vanguard of the analytics movement—the adoption of new metrics for quantifying basketball and using that those metrics to help guide decisions. Every team in the NBA now has an analytics department, which they take to varying levels of seriousness, but Morey was among the first. And Morey sometimes seems to run his team as if he only believes what he sees in the numbers, and is indifferent toward the squishy concepts that fans use to capture aspects of the game which are hard to quantify, stuff like "chemistry," "heart," "leadership," "intangibles." The Rockets look like a team that was assembled by spreadsheet, and they often play like a team writing Excel formulas.

One of the simplest insights of analytics—so simple that it can hardly be called an insight—is this: shots that are close to the rim are good, because they are easiest to make. Three-point shots are also good, because they give you three points instead of two. Shots that fall between these two (midrange shots) are to be avoided, because they are difficult without an extra point to reward their difficulty level, which is to say that they are inefficient, and teams should generally avoid shooting them. The human embodiment of this principle is James Harden, the Rockets' best player. His game is an analytics dream which has excised midrange shots almost entirely. He's incredibly efficient in this system, which relies on him to create essentially all of their offense.

But the Rockets have a bunch of role players, like Jason Terry and Corey Brewer, who get going in loose, high-energy games. Playing a system in which they mostly stand around at the three-point line and wait for Harden to pass them the ball just doesn't work for them. The result is that other than Trevor Ariza and Marcus Thornton, nearly every single Rocket is shooting near their career worst from three-point range for a season. And they just traded Thornton. Even when the Rockets are playing well, it feels like they are playing poorly somehow, and when they are playing poorly, they look like they could be beaten by a scrappy YMCA team. The Rockets add up to something decidedly less than the sum of their parts.

Ironically, the easiest way to visualize the Rockets lack of chemistry is to look at this chart, done by Nylon Calculus founder and VICE contributor Seth Partnow. On the vertical axis is effective eFG%, which is a stat that sums up how well a team is shooting. On the horizontal axis is expected eFG%, which is a measure of how well one would expect a team to shoot, given where on the court they are taking their shots from and how closely the opponents are guarding those shots. So teams on the diagonal are shooting about as effectively as one would expect, teams above are shooting more effectively, and teams below are shooting less effectively.

The Rockets are to the bottom right. They know where the mathematically correct shots are, and take more of these "good" shots than any other team in the league. Yet, their effective FG% is only about average. The Rockets know some metrics that winning teams produce, but as Partnow wrote last week, you can't replicate success by aiming at the indicators of it rather than the process. A "good shot" is not about just the things you can measure, it's about the things you can't: whether the shots are coming in rhythm, whether the passes are arriving when and where the players expect them to, whether the right players are taking the shots, how effective the teams' contests are given that they know what's coming, and on and on—a list of slippery unquantifiables. It's chemistry, and the Rockets don't have it.

That's just one example, and it isn't the whole story, of course. The Rockets are still ranked eighth in offensive efficiency, partially because of all the free throws Harden and Howard draw. Their 24th-ranked defense (out of 30) is an even bigger mess—terrible communication, blown assignments, poor effort. And the Rockets' best players just don't have the kinds of personalities that can hold teammates accountable and demand a higher standard. In fact, their own play is a significant part of the problem.

The Warriors and the Rockets met at Oracle before All-Star break. The Warriors jumped out to a huge early lead, despite not playing anywhere near their ceiling. The Rockets gradually reeled them in, even taking a lead late in the third quarter. But despite this, at no point during the game did it feel like the Rockets were going to win. And they didn't. The game was over as soon as Golden State decided to reassert themselves, and they won comfortably enough that there was still garbage time at the end. A couple days later, the Rockets lost again, to the Portland Trail Blazers. Rockets head coach J.B. Bickerstaff called them "broken," and it's hard to argue with him.

The Warriors are a miracle of chemistry. Teams like this don't come along that often, and when they do, they don't stay at these heights for very long. More on that next week. Tonight, the Warriors begin the second half of the season against those very same Portland Trail Blazers. The run to the playoffs starts now.