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For the Golden State Warriors, Practice Makes Perfect Silliness
OAKLAND, Calif. — The Golden State Warriors are a joy to watch. Their offense is based on movement and spacing, all five players working together to create open shots. If Coach Steve Kerr is the conductor, Stephen Curry is his soloist, a 6-foot-3, 190-pound virtuoso in high-tops.
So their practices must be incredibly organized and disciplined, right? Laser-beam focus and all that? It is the only reasonable conclusion, given the way the Warriors steamrollered their opposition en route to the N.B.A. finals. But Golden State, whose best-of-seven series against the Cleveland Cavaliers starts Thursday, has a dirty secret.
“I’ve told Steve, if someone came in and watched the way you practice, it would be embarrassing for you as a coach,” said Bruce Fraser, one of his assistants.
Specifically, it has to do with the way the Warriors start their practices. The players form four lines to jog and get loose, which is normal enough, but then things get weird.
They warm up by launching a series of court-length shots — heaves that graze light fixtures and ricochet off shot clocks, total prayers that occasionally reach the rim but more often than not leave members of the coaching staff scrambling for safety.
Yes, the Warriors typically turn the first five to 10 minutes of every practice into something that looks more like middle-school recess.
“When we’re warming up and stuff,” Curry said, “you see balls just flying everywhere.”
Kerr, in his first season with the Warriors, contributes by having Nick U’Ren, a special assistant and the team’s manager of advanced scouting, blast loud music to ratchet up the energy. It all happens behind closed doors, so there have been few witnesses to the actual chaos, but players cite those first few minutes of practice as surprisingly important, a subtle key to their success this season.
“The whole atmosphere of our team is very relaxed,” said Festus Ezeli, a backup center. “It’s only basketball, so why not have fun?”
Kerr did not set out this season planning to have his players hone their shooting touch from different ZIP codes. It more or less happened by accident, at training camp, with a nudge from Brandon Rush, a reserve forward who picked up a ball one day as the team was jogging between baselines. Rush turned and fired a shot toward the basket at the opposite end.
“And then it turned into a complete circus,” Rush said.
It helped that Curry, the team’s best player, was among the first to join in, lending instant credibility to the festivities if not exactly gravitas.
“Dudes just started doing it, and everybody’s competitive, so they want to try to make it, too,” said Justin Holiday, a guard who added that Kerr “likes to keep things loose.”
The exercise has persisted with Kerr’s approval and even his occasional participation, which tends to be unconventional. Kerr likes to drop-kick his long-range attempts.
“The first time he tried it, he kicked the ball from halfcourt and made it,” forward Marreese Speights said. “I don’t think he’s made one since.”
Fraser quantified the whole routine as 60 percent camaraderie and 40 percent getting loose. Curry, who puts his entire body into his court-length shots, slinging the ball like a discus, sank one at the start of Friday’s practice, a good omen with about a week to prepare for the finals.
“Steph is definitely the best at it,” Ezeli said. “I’m not bad. I’m a close second. Don’t ask anybody about that, though.”
Yet all of their heaves may have a more practical purpose than many of the players realize. John Fontanella, a professor emeritus of physics at the Naval Academy and the author of the book “The Physics of Basketball,” said he suspected that the Warriors were giving themselves a psychological edge by attempting so many long-distance shots.
“There is absolutely something to this idea of extreme training,” Fontanella said in a telephone interview. “When you go beyond what you’re required to do, it makes your job seem a lot easier.”
For the Warriors, Fontanella said, that most likely means that the 3-point line seems much closer, and the hoop much larger, after they have hurled shots from the far baseline. The Warriors shot 47.8 percent from the field and 39.8 percent from 3-point range during the regular season, leading the league in both categories.
“I would say there’s a correlation,” Fontanella said. “I don’t think it’s a fluke, actually.”
Speights agreed with that assessment, saying that normal shots did not seem as difficult after “throwing the ball that far and trying to make it go in that little hole.”
Given how much they practice the craft and the supreme confidence that has resulted — “I think we’ve become pretty good at it,” Holiday said — one might assume that the Warriors are relatively proficient at sinking them in games.
Alas, the Warriors could not be much worse at it.
During the regular season, the Warriors missed all 25 of their buzzer-beating attempts from beyond halfcourt. That is worth emphasizing: 0 percent. Their lone make out of three tries so far in the playoffs was a 62-foot jumper that Curry buried in the Western Conference semifinals against the Memphis Grizzlies.
“I knew we had a couple seconds left,” Curry said, “so I just chucked it up there and it looked good the whole way.”
There is a reason these shots are known as prayers. Sinking them requires more luck than skill. The rim has an 18-inch diameter, which makes for a tiny target from the far reaches of a playing surface that is 92 feet long. N.B.A. players have combined to make 15 of 514, or 2.9 percent, of their shots from beyond halfcourt since the start of the season, according to the N.B.A.’s statistical database. By that standard, then, the Warriors are decent, shooting 3.6 percent over all.
They are not shy about taking them. The same cannot be said of players from other teams. Consider the Atlanta Hawks, who attempted a total of three shots from the backcourt during the regular season, missing them all. No team attempted more of them during the regular season than the Warriors, with Curry hoisting eight of the 25.
“I love Steph because he doesn’t care about his percentage,” Kerr said. “When I was a player, every once in a while I’d pause and say, ‘I don’t want to miss another one here because my percentage will go down.’ Steph doesn’t care. He shoots them all the time.”
Curry’s teammates would probably be annoyed that he passed up his cracks at 70-foot jumpers. What was the point of practicing them so much?
“I think if we get into that situation at the end of a quarter, whoever has the ball is most definitely excited,” Holiday said, “just because we do it so much and want to see what happens.”
Fraser said he was surprised that nobody had broken anything at the practice facility this season. No cracked backboards. No pulverized clocks. Then again, there is always tomorrow.
An article last Sunday about the opening minutes of Golden State Warriors practices, when players launch a series of court-length shots, erroneously attributed a distinction to their coach, Steve Kerr, in some copies. The N.B.A.’s coach of the year award was given to the Atlanta Hawks’ Mike Budenholzer this season, not to Kerr.
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