By now it’s no secret that the NBA has a great crop of point guards taking “The Association” to higher heights in this era of no hand-checking and high on-ball pick-and-roll.
Six-foot-seven off-guard Klay Thompson used to be the designated stopper of opposing star point guards for the Golden State Warriors.
This season, new head coach Steve Kerr has re-switched that back to the traditional point-guard-on-point-guard matchup, and this has put Stephen Curry‘s defensive game under the microscope.
Thus far, Curry has performed to the delight of his observers.
“Every point guard in the NBA now, when they come off screen and roll, they kind of do that snake action where they come around the screen and weave thru the lane,” Kerr said at Warriors practice yesterday. “If you don’t come off that screen, it creates all kinds of mismatches because you’ve got to switch. Steph just has been staying with his guy, chasing him and following him so we can stay home. Between his ball pressure and pick-and-roll coverage and pursuit, he’s been terrific.”
“He’s always been better at defense than people think, stronger than he looks,” said Andre Iguodala today at Warriors’ morning shootaround prior to the game against the Utah Jazz. “He’s such a nice guy that people tend to overlook his toughness.”
Here’s a compendium of more accolades for Curry’s defense:
Rusty Simmons of the San Francisco Chronicle:
…that all changed this season when assistant coach Ron Adams challenged Curry to start defending point guards and set the team’s defensive tone at the initial point of attack.
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“The things we see him do on a daily basis are just getting crazier and crazier,” said center Andrew Bogut, who believes Curry is on trajectory to become the NBA’s best point guard. “When he gets it going with the shots that he makes and the pressure he puts on the defense, it’s very hard to guard. … Now we’re demanding more from him on defense, and he’s doing a great job for us.”
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Shutting down rivals
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A night before he shut out Lin, Curry held Charlotte point guard Kemba Walker to eight points on 3-of-14 shooting. A game earlier, Brooklyn point guard Deron Williams, who was in the discussion as the league’s top point guard not too long ago, had 18 points on 7-of-14 shooting — meaning Curry has held his past three opponents to an average of 8.7 points on 33.3 percent shooting and 3.7 assists.
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Curry is watching much more video on upcoming opponents and sticks with the team’s defensive game plan, trying to force the opposing point guard away from his strong hand and into the teeth of the defense. As he’s gotten stronger each summer, he’s gotten better at fighting through screens, and he’s become a dangerous help-side defender who has sneaked in for a second-place tie of 2.3 steals per game.
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“The level of Steph’s defense this year is beyond what I expected,” Kerr said. “I knew he was better defensively than people gave him credit for, but honestly, what he’s done this year at that end is remarkable.”
Ethan Sherwood Strauss interviewed Adams and filed this report:
Could Curry’s defense tilt toward great?
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“He’s really taken it upon himself,” Golden State’s defensive guru Ron Adams said. “I give all the credit to him as a top-flight performer of internalizing stuff defensively that has made him better and has made his team a lot better.”
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Adams, once Tom Thibodeau’s top assistant in Chicago, is the guy Curry credits for recent defensive improvement. “Coach Ron Adams has been on me, watching film, and it’s all about positioning, effort and having that focus every possession,” he said…
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The expectation isn’t that Curry actually gets credit for improved defense, though that might happen. The expectation is that Curry sacrifices for his teammates in ways that are noticeable on the coaching level of scrutiny. His improvements won’t be obvious in a lock-and-trail defensive set-up where much of the job is shading and chasing your mark to certain spots on the floor. The task isn’t to dramatically wreck your opponent — it’s to funnel him to help, like a slanted putting green subtly guiding the ball away from its target.
Elijah Abramson provides some of the number-crunching and analysis of Curry’s defense so far this season. If you’re statistically inclined, take a look, as Abramson covers most, if not all, of the aspects of Curry’s defensive prowess:
defense is not just an individual concept. This can be monitored on a macroscopic level (the Warriors defense as a team is one of the best in the league) but also on a microscopic, play-by-play, level. It’s clear that Curry has bought into the system and his role while also knowing how to play opponents.
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Here is one of those microscopic examples where he is matched up against Deron Williams (both Curry and Williams were Players of the Week for the week prior to this game). D-Will runs a pick-and-roll with Mason Plumlee, except this time counters by not taking the screen and getting a step ahead of Curry going to the basket. (Side-note: it’s worth noting that Curry intended on, as he usually does, to go over the screen. As you may already know, poor defenders tend to go underneath screens which allows more open jump shots.) Curry catches up to his man but also knows Mo Speights is there to help. Curry jumps to contest the shot and this ends with a Speights block. This play won’t appear in the box score affirming Curry’s part in the defensive stop, but he was clearly valuable in walling off the middle of the paint and allowing Speights to get the block.
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