Through advancement and evolution, but not massive change.
It’s been a very busy offseason for the Golden State Warriors, which can make evaluating the team’s prospects for the 2024-25 season fairly difficult. The Dubs lost a pair of Hall of Famers when Klay Thompson and Chris Paul chose new homes in free agency. They gained a trio of high-level role players with the additions of Buddy Hield, De’Anthony Melton, and Kyle Anderson. They added a talented and fairly NBA-ready rookie in the NBA Draft when they picked Quinten Post.
All of those changes can make it easy to forget about the moves on the sideline, where the team lost lead assistant Kenny Atkinson, who accepted a head coaching role with the Cleveland Cavaliers, but made two high-profile signings, adding Jerry Stackhouse and Terry Stotts to Steve Kerr’s staff.
Kerr, who is busy coaching Team USA ahead of the Paris Olympics, recently spoke about the coaching additions, and made one thing clear: he hopes that Stotts — who served as head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers for Damian Lillard’s first nine seasons — can help the offense evolve.
“Portland, you know, they always had a lot of motion and movement, but it was probably more patterned than what we’ve done,” Kerr recently told the media, as reported by The Athletic’s Anthony Slater. “Terry can really help us put in some new things that may be easier to run but maintain the motion.” Kerr said that the Warriors are “not going to shift dramatically,” but admitted that “We’ve always been a team that has had to rely on execution and movement because we’re not a great one-on-one team. But with the group that we have now, I think we need more work and more repeatable patterns” while specifying that the team’s practice routines will need to be updated so that the Warriors are more prepared to run their systems on game day ... music to any fan who has watched this team the last few years.
Stotts, for his part, understands his role on his new team. He praised Kerr’s motion offense and stressed that he won’t be in charge of anything, but added that “What I like to have is — you can have a play call, but within that play call, you don’t know what’s going to happen. You might have splits or flares or pindowns or pick-and-roll and that freedom within a structure.”
Again: music to Warriors’ fans ears. In the last few seasons, Golden State’s offense has excelled when it gets to the right spot and the right read, so long as Steph Curry and Draymond Green are on the court. But once that first option is taken away — or when one or both of those quarterbacks are sidelined — the offense often morphs into something more closely resembling a pickup game at the local Y.
Despite employing Curry — one of the greatest offensive players in NBA history — Golden State’s garbage-time adjusted offensive rating of 117.8 last season was just 10th in the NBA, per Cleaning The Glass. In 2020-21, Stotts’ last year with the Blazers, Portland was second in the NBA in garbage-time adjusted offensive rating, despite having a roster that wasn’t very notable on paper. Much of that was due to the many options that Stotts’ motion offense created, and the many actions he implements are sure to impact the team’s secondary scorers like Andrew Wiggins, Jonathan Kuminga, Brandin Podziemski, Trayce Jackson-Davis, Moses Moody, Melton, and Hield.
