This sophisticated admirer of the warriors says, 'More Draymond, please'

The Warriors’ offensive sets were stagnant. Nobody was setting screens away from the ball. Kevin Durant was trying to create too much by himself off the dribble, and the ball was not finding Draymond Green in the middle of the floor.

Good things happen, Reeve said, when Green gets the ball around the elbow. His teammates tend to set screens around him, and Green is terrific at finding cutters zooming to the basket for layups.

“They would just pick you apart with that,” Reeve said as she watched the game on television. “But I just don’t see as much of it anymore.”

Perhaps the Warriors began to realize that, too. By the second half of their 115-86 victory, they had rediscovered components of their old formula, and it was the good stuff: the motion, the passing and the cutting.

Their improved play was summed up nicely by one sequence of the fourth quarter, when Nick Young set a screen for Stephen Curry away from the ball, and Green — back at the elbow, where he makes his millions — located Curry in the corner for a 3-pointer: Swish.

“Such a good screen,” Reeve said, “and Draymond found him. He has so much less value when he doesn’t have the ball in his hands.”

The Warriors can advance to their fourth straight NBA finals with a win over Houston on Monday night in Game 7. At times this season, Golden State has seemed to wage battles with boredom, with complacency, with slippage — inevitable products of the team’s success. These are pitfalls, Reeve said, that are impossible to avoid but need to be navigated.

“When you get a little older, you do start thinking, OK, maybe we’re not chasing the most wins in the regular season anymore — that doesn’t matter so much,” she said. “It’s all about health and getting ready for the playoffs. I don’t love it, but that’s the reality. And I think that’s where we, as a team, also find ourselves.”

If anyone can relate to the first-world problems that face coach Steve Kerr of the Warriors, look no further than Reeve, 51, who has coached the Lynx to four WNBA championships. She took a break from studying game film of the Washington Mystics — whom the Lynx were scheduled to play Sunday afternoon — to watch Game 6 of Rockets/Warriors in her hotel suite near Dupont Circle. She shared her insights with me.

I had watched previous games of the series on couches with coaches in Iowa, Alaska, California and Nevada. But they were all enjoying their offseasons. Reeve is just now wading into her ninth season with the Lynx, who were 2-1 after defeating the New York Liberty on Friday. She expected the Mystics to pose problems.

“The night is young,” said Reeve, who checked her phone periodically for scouting reports from one of her assistants.

Minnesota has appeared in three straight WNBA finals, winning two of the last three titles. (Sound familiar, Warriors fans?) Last season, the Lynx won it all in part by suffocating opponents, limiting them to a league-low 74.2 points a game. Their offense, led by Sylvia Fowles and Maya Moore, was high-powered, too.

Much the same team has returned this season, and the goal, as usual, is to sustain the same high level of play. But it gets more difficult over time, Reeve said. She cited the difference between “the climb,” when a team is still chasing greatness, and “the staying there,” when so much can go wrong. The climb, she said, is easier.

“Considerably,” she said. “Staying there requires your personnel to continue to buy in. Sometimes after you’ve reached a championship or two, the players who were key players might want something different — something more — so how does that change the balance that made you so good in the first place? That’s why it’s so hard to repeat, because of change. Life happens to people. Agents get involved. Building brands becomes important. We’ve been able to avoid most of that.”

Early in Saturday’s game, a couple of plays resonated with Reeve. The first was when the Rockets’ P.J. Tucker wrapped up Durant to prevent an easy layup.

“That’s a great foul,” Reeve said. “Nothing easy.”

It reminded her of a play that Lindsay Whalen, her point guard, made last October. In the early moments of Game 4 of the WNBA finals, Whalen leveled Odyssey Sims of the Los Angeles Sparks after Sims had escaped on a fast break. Whalen was assessed a flagrant foul — and fined by the league — but the Lynx went on to win the game and the series.

“She said it was the best $200 she ever spent,” Reeve said.

Reeve also could not help but notice that Tucker immediately went to Durant to help him up after his foul, which she viewed as a cagey move: Tucker did not want to be called for a flagrant, so perhaps a show of sportsmanship would help.

“Soften the refs up,” Reeve said.

Later, Reeve pointed to a defensive gaffe that was emblematic of the Warriors’ slow start. Durant was defending Harden, who had the ball outside the 3-point line. But a half-beat before the Rockets’ Luc Mbah a Moute even arrived to set a screen, Durant had vacated Harden to switch onto Mbah a Moute. The problem was that the Warriors’ David West was still guarding Mbah a Moute, which left Harden wide open — albeit from 30 feet. Harden made the shot anyway.

“It wasn’t an aggressive switch,” Reeve said. “You have to be aggressive.”

Reeve added that few players in the WNBA are better at feasting on that sort of defensive indecision than Sue Bird of the Seattle Storm. She pounces on openings when she comes off screens.

The Rockets, meanwhile, in an outlandish display of outside shooting, went 8 of 12 from 3-point range in the first quarter to bolt to a 39-22 lead. But Reeve was skeptical.

“They can’t sustain this, can they?” she asked.

The answer, of course, was no.

Reeve liked that the Warriors operated with more movement coming out of halftime. Green touched the ball early and often.

And even when the ball did not necessarily move, the players did. On one early possession of the third quarter, Durant soared for a dunk when potential help defenders were being occupied by screens being set by his teammates on the opposite side of the floor.

The Warriors erased the Rockets’ lead, then their hope. Reeve commiserated with coach Mike D’Antoni when he started screaming at the officials. She knew the look.

“This is that time when we start begging as coaches,” she said.

The game got ugly in a hurry. The Rockets, who were outscored by 39 points in the second half, were obviously affected by Chris Paul’s absence. But the Warriors benefited from outsize performances from players like Klay Thompson (“He’s just so steady emotionally,” Reeve said) and Nick Young, who told reporters after the game that he had been visited in a dream by Dennis Rodman, who had advised him to play defense. So Young played defense.

As she looked ahead to Game 7, Reeve still saw areas where the Warriors could improve.

“I want more Draymond,” she said. “There’s just an element to the way he plays.”

It is an element that defies easy description — but good coaches know it when they see it.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

This sophisticated admirer of the warriors says, 'More Draymond, please'

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This sophisticated admirer of the warriors says, 'More Draymond, please'

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