By The Numbers, Golden State Should Be Able To Stay Afloat Until Steph Curry Returns

This article is part of VICE Sports' 2016 NBA Playoffs coverage.

From the moment Steph Curry limped off the court in Game 4 of Golden State's first-round NBA Playoffs series against Houston, the question about the Warriors has been how they'll perform without the league's reigning and presumptive two-time Most Valuable Player. So far, not so bad: Golden State pummeled Houston on Thursday night, 114-81, winning the series 4-1.

Yet with all due respect to the Rockets, a game-and-half of play against against a near-holographic opponent doesn't tell us much. As the postseason moves forward, the Warriors' opponents will be far more engaged than the seemingly miserable, already-vacationing Rockets.

At first glance, Curry's absence figures to be a big problem.

According to Basketball-Reference, the Warriors were outscored by 4.3 points per 100 possessions with Curry off the floor. By comparison, the 31-win New Orleans Pelicans were minus-3.9 points per 100 and the 29-win Milwaukee Bucks were minus-4.4. Even the depleted Los Angeles Clippers—should they somehow overcome the losses of Chris Paul and Blake Griffin and defeat the suddenly-surging Portland Trail Blazers—might be able to handle a team playing at Golden State's regular season sans-Curry level.

That said, that regular season number isn't a great measure of the Warriors without Curry. As great as he is, he didn't win 73 games by himself. Draymond Green and Klay Thompson were All-Stars; both might make not only the All-NBA teams, but also the All-Defensive teams. Andre Iguodala and Andrew Bogut remain superb defenders themselves, and not exactly without talent: Bogut is a former No. 1 overall pick; Iguodala was last season's Finals MVP. Curry's replacement, Shaun Livingston, can use his height, length and post-up ability to be a different kind of matchup nightmare.

So: the cupboard is hardly empty. Moreover, the Warriors likely weren't bringing their A-games to bear when Curry was sitting during the regular season; typically, the team already was winning comfortably, spending more game time with leads of greater than 10 points than any team since at least 1996-97, the first season for which detailed play-by-play logs are available.

Is Golden State—coming off a record-setting 73-win regular season, hungry to win back-to-back titles, led by recently-crowned NBA Coach of the Year Steve Kerr, and locked in at playoff-level intensity—really worse than New Orleans and Milwaukee? It's hard to imagine that's the case, regardless of what the general numbers say.

No, what we need is a better approximation for what the what the "best effort sans-Curry" Warriors would look like. As such, let's examine just the minutes played with Green and Thompson on the floor. In those 296 regular season minutes, the Warriors outscored opponents by 6.3 points per 100, according to NBAWOWY.com. Over a full season, that's about what would be expected of a team winning somewhere in the neighborhood of 56 games—still a very good team!

(Incidentally, Curry was "worth" about 17.8 wins this season according to Basketball-Reference's Win Share metric. If that's the case, the current Warriors aren't the 2010-11 Cleveland Cavaliers without LeBron James, a 19-63 dumpster fire; they're the 1993-94 Chicago Bulls without Michael Jordan, a team that lost in the second round to a New York Knicks team that reached the NBA Finals).

Of course, extrapolating from such tiny sample sizes is always dangerous. And Curry's importance to the Warriors goes beyond his individual production. Curry's defense-breaking ability to rise and fire off the dribble creates much of the space that allows Green to become a deadly 4-on-3 playmaker; it also attracts considerable extra defensive attention, permitting Thompson and Harrison Barnes to focus more on spotting up than creating their own looks. Thompson especially has become better at creating for himself, but along with everyone else, he is more efficient when someone else sets the table for him.

This Warriors team is rightfully praised for the way they share the ball and zip it around the floor, and they produced the highest rate of assisted field goals of any team in over a decade. Among Golden State's main rotation players not named Curry, only Livingston was assisted on fewer than 70 percent of his makes. Interestingly, the team's overall percentage of assisted field goals went up with Green-Thompson-and-no-Curry lineups, from 67.8 percent to 76.8 percent, even as the Warriors' overall efficiency dropped from 60.3 percent Effective Field Goal Percentage to 53.8 percent. In other words, Golden State will now be even more dependent on drawing help defenders and moving the ball quickly, even as the team becomes less proficient at drawing that help.

The farther the Warriors advance in the playoffs, the fewer defensive mistakes their opponents are likely to make. Whether they face Portland (presumably) in Round 2 or the San Antonio Spurs in the Western Conference Finals, opponents will force Green, Thompson and others to demonstrate their ability to score before sending extra defenders. And that's a tough road to travel, particularly against the Spurs' sticky individual defense. The good news for Golden State? Given that Curry's knee sprain reportedly is not severe and that he is expected to return at some point in the next two weeks, the Warriors only need to stay afloat until his return. Their performance all season—and not just their beatdown of Houston—suggests that Green, Thompson and company will be able to do just that.