How Kevin Durant Makes The Golden State Warriors Even More Unstoppable

A day later, it still seems surreal to write: The Golden State Warriors, a team that won a NBA-record 73 regular season games and featured two of the greatest shooters the sport has ever seen, have added quite possibly the league's best player, almost certainly its best all-around scorer, and arguably one of the its three best shooters to that core. At first glance, plugging Kevin Durant into the Warriors' lineup seems a bit like strapping 100 tons of dynamite on the end of a nuclear warhead; it'll blow up real good, but also feels like overkill. Mostly, though, it's just a challenge to imagine how much better this team—which was already the most versatile and unstoppable in the league—will be with Durant's additional offensive punch and defensive versatility in the mix.

Of course, the Warriors were stopped in last month's NBA Finals. It took a pair of injuries to Steph Curry, a Draymond Green suspension at a pivotal moment, a cold shooting streak Harrison Barnes that seemed to go on and on, and the loss of starting center Andrew Bogut to put the final nails in the coffin, but Golden State nevertheless ended four points shy of its second straight title. The question of whether the Warriors were better than they performed throughout the 2016 NBA playoffs may never be answered. They lost; in this context, nothing else really matters.

That defeat, however, gave life to what once seemed like an inconceivable scenario: Golden State actually improving its roster by signing Durant. Sure, Durant will have to mesh into a Warriors core that has been building up chemistry for two consecutive years, but it's hard to imagine another superstar-grade player so uniquely capable of doing so. Unlike some NBA super-teams of the past—think LeBron James and Dwyane Wade's early my-turn/your-turn struggles to share the ball in Miami—Golden State and Durant seem perfectly designed for each other, both on offense and defense. Durant does everything that Barnes did, only ten times better, from catch-and-shoot three-pointers to post-ups to defending multiple positions. He's arguably the league's best player, so of course he does.

Let's take a closer look at how Durant fits into Golden State's game-plan, and what we can expect to see once the 2016-17 season tips off:

Pick-and-roll plays are the staple of most offensive possessions in today's NBA. Sometimes, teams run cuts and screens as a sort of prelude to the pick-and-roll; sometimes, they go straight into it with players spread out around the arc. But, sooner or later, most possessions find their way to pick-and-roll action.

Last season, Draymond Green and Steph Curry were the deadliest pick-and-roll duo in basketball. Defenders could go over the screen, but would then be left to chase Curry as he raced to the rim. They could go under the screen, but that would concede a wide open three-pointer to the greatest shooter in league history. They could trap Curry, but that would allow Green to roll downhill against a scrambled defense. Or they could switch, and leave a lumbering big man to guard Curry in isolation or an undersized guard to check Green on the elbow.

And if the Green/Curry duo wasn't enough, the Warriors also had Klay Thompson, one of the best catch-and-shoot jump shooters of all time, on the wing and Barnes and Andre Iguodala in the corners. Those three guys had enough gravity to pull defenders far away from the paint.

Now swap Barnes for Durant in that scenario. Ruh-roh. While Barnes was an above-average shooter, Durant is in another league when it comes to knocking down open shots. Standing roughly seven feet tall, Durant has a high enough release that any defensive cushion he is given means his shot will be effectively uncontested. His height and accuracy from deep will force defenders to stick a half-step closer to him than they did to Barnes, leaving the paint a half step more open on his side of the court. Alternately, when the defense decides to collapse and help in the paint, defenses will have to recover a half-step faster in order to contest the shot from the lengthy Durant. Neither option is optimal!

Here's where the real fun begins. While Durant provides a nice upgrade over Barnes as a stand-still shooter, he is far more deadly as a playmaker, especially as the focal point of the pick-and-roll. Swap Green with Durant in last year's Curry/Green pick-and-roll sets, and you've got the two best scorers on the planet in playing off each other. Trap, hedge, drop, or switch all you want, but that pick-and-roll combination leaves one of the two guys attacking with a head of steam or open for a pull-up jumper.

The Warriors will also have the very rare opportunity to utilize 4-5 pick-and-rolls, with Green screening for Durant with Curry, Thompson, and Iguodala spacing the floor. Just look at the shot chart for those three guys and imagine the defense having to decide whether or not to sag off Curry enough to support a helpless front court duo as they attempt to contain Durant and Green:

If that shot chart isn't enough to scare you, consider my favorite potential pick-and-roll of all, with Shaun Livingston running point and Durant, Curry, and Thompson surrounding the arc. Among those three, whom does the defense help off?

All of the above presumes that Golden State players stand around and run stagnant pick-and-rolls with no off-ball action. That won't be the case. The Warriors are masterful at setting up plays with trickery and misdirection, getting the defense moving, thinking, and reacting before hammering it with a high ball screen. Throw a pair of pin-down screens in the corner, short-cut off the elbow, slice back and forth through the paint and then BAM, they're perfectly aligned for a high pick-and-roll while the defense is still catching its breath and figuring out who switched where:

On the rare occasions when the pick-and-roll doesn't produce the wide-open shot that Golden State hoped for, the Warriors will still be left with the best collection of isolation scorers in the league. Curry scored an insane 1.07 points per possession on isolation shots in the 2015-16 regular season, in part because the collection of shooters around him helped space the floor. That number might actually increase as Durant's gravity is added to the equation, drawing help further away from the shifty point guard. The same goes for Durant, who will benefit from having Thompson and Curry pulling help-side defenders further and further away.

But the biggest winner on isolations will be Thompson. He emerged as an incredibly dynamic and versatile scorer last season, improving both his first step and his handle. If there was any doubt that he could be the NBA's top scorer, it was erased during the Oklahoma City playoff series, when he carried the Warriors' scoring load throughout two straight must-win games. With Durant in the mix, Thompson likely will draw opponents' third or fourth-best defender, a matchup that he is certain to dominate more often than not.

And then there are post-ups. Durant scored an absurd 1.23 points per possession on post-ups during the last regular season. Imagine the Warriors running their infamous splits action off Durant in the post. With Durant isolating on the block against a helpless defender, the help-side defenders will be fighting through the most unguardable off-ball action in the league. Durant will have more one-on-one opportunities in the post than he has ever had in his life, and he's bound to take full advantage:

Durant's Bay Area arrival doesn't come without a few sacrifices. Chief among them will be the Warriors' rim protection and defensive rebounding. Golden State was forced to trade Andrew Bogut to the Dallas Mavericks in order to clear cap space to sign Durant, and the Warriors have also parted ways with backup center Festus Ezeli, who looked like their center of the future early last season, before fading away once a nagging knee injury flared up.

Golden State already has added Zaza Pachulia to fill their interior void. The perpetually underappreciated center may be a very nice fit. Offensively, his role will be very narrow, but he'll be relied upon to protect the paint and grab defensive rebounds. Durant and Green are long enough to help contest shots inside, but as the playoffs demonstrated, the Warriors may still need more muscle against teams with interior size and skill. Pachulia is tough, but no match for strong, mobile centers like the Thunder's Steven Adams. Green usually can hold his own and then some against bigger opponents, but players like Enes Kanter are too long, strong, and just plain big for him to effectively guard.

In the past, Golden State has solved this problem with some basic math, trading two-pointers for three-pointers. With Durant in the fold, that tradeoff should be even more reliable. On the other hand, the downgrade at center reduces the Warriors' margin for error on the (probably rare) nights that their outside shots aren't falling. In the playoffs, we saw Golden State struggle to grab rebounds, score in the paint and avoid foul trouble, and those remain potential problems. Against teams like San Antonio, Memphis, the Los Angeles Clippers, and Oklahoma City, Golden State will have to protect the rim against bigger opponents without picking up too many fouls. Expect teams around the league to use the regular season to experiment with big, slow lineups against the Warriors, the better to bang and beat on Durant and company. Will it work? Possibly for stretches. But Golden State has enough length to at least contest shots at the rim, and counting on that same strategy to pay dividends over a seven-game playoff series is a bad bet, unless your team has LeBron James.

The Warriors have a deadly seven-man rotation with Iguodala and Livingston coming off of the bench, but for the moment, the rest of their lineup is a pretty big question mark. That could matter if Durant or Curry—who have struggled to stay healthy before—suffers a major injury. Of course, every NBA team can say the same about their star players, and no team now has more or better stars than Golden State. Indeed, the Warriors appear poised to make a tremendous run, and to play some of the most exciting and overwhelming basketball the league has ever seen. Their strengths greatly outnumber their weaknesses, and their answers on the offensive end greatly outnumber the questions they'll face on the defensive end.

Looking ahead, the Warriors have the talent to not only perfect basketball's current state of the art, but also to create an entirely new one. Like chefs given new and better ingredients, Golden State coach Steve Kerr and his assistants will be able experiment on offense in ways that no other team ever could; win or lose, the 2016-17 Warriors figure to push the envelope for what the sport is and can be. For those of us who enjoy basketball as an athletic exercise and exhibition—and not just as dramatic clashes among players and teams—it will be fascinating to watch, even if it makes the NBA far less competitive.

And make no mistake: the competitiveness probably will be gone. The Warriors won 73 regular season games last year without Durant. Through 82 regular season games, they were more than four times more likely to win by double digits than they were to lose. They looked mortal at times in the postseason, but were still within four points of a championship despite a crippling amount of misfortune.

Durant will make everything that Golden State already did well much easier, while also opening up new possibilities on both ends of the court. The Warriors might not win 73 games again, but there's no question they'll be even more unstoppable.

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