The Golden State Warriors have created history with 16-0, but is that the best they can do?

The Golden State Warriors can certainly make it a repeat of titlesWith a 111-77 blowout of the hapless Los Angeles Lakers, the Golden State Warriors waltz into history winning their 16th straight game to start the season. The Warriors followed their tried and true blueprint to wins this year, summed up in one simple statement: blow the doors off the other team.This marked their 11th win in 16 games by more than double digits, and with a 19 point lead at the end of the first quarter, there was never any doubt that we would be witnessing history on this night. The Warriors were able to get contributions from up and down the roster, as it seemed that anyone interim coach Luke Walton put in the game came up roses. The only Warriors who had a minus rating in plus/minus were the subs who played the fourth quarter, when pace slowed down and the game turned into a glorified pick-up game.Playing their 5th game in seven nights, Golden State showed no ill effects of travel and tired legs, playing surprisingly crisp basketball, complete with only eight turnovers and a defense that allowed very little open room for which the Lakers to run an offense.Granted this is a Lakers team that can barely get out of their own way, but to come out and win the first and third quarters by a combined score of 65-28 showed the Warriors weren’t going to mess with history.After watching all or parts of their last five games, I want to dive into just what makes this Warriors team so awesome this year. A perfect blend of small and big ball, offense and defense, and joy and execution that can draw any observer in.

#1 Passing

The Warriors play unselfish, cohesive basketball

Plain and simple, the Warriors are passing fiends. They have used the space and pace direction the league has taken in the last four or five years, put multiple unselfish, high IQ players on the court and pushed the pace while allowing these guys to have free reign with which to express themselves.

Now while most basketball players love to express themselves with one-on-one scoring exploits, players such as Draymond Green, Stephen Curry, Andre Iguodala, and the like love doing this by setting up their fellow teammates for wide open threes, layups, and dunks.

It becomes readily apparent that the Warriors’ passing is something seen rarely, because they just get open shot after open shot after open shot. Most teams will pass the ball around and look to get one shot that is pretty open, but the Warriors chase the wide open shot, the one where there is absolutely nothing a defense can do to contest it.

This was never more apparent than against the Los Angeles Clippers and Chicago Bulls this past week, as the Warriors found themselves in a tight game late in the fourth quarter, needing a few shots to put them over the top.

Their record shows that they did, but how they got there, on eerily similar plays is what has the rest of the league grasping for ideas with which how to stop this juggernaut. In both games, they started the penultimate action of the possession by having a player breakdown the defense with a drive down the middle of the key, sucking the defense in and beginning the sequence of death passes.

From here the driver, kicked it to a guy in the corner, who followed it up with a pass to a player on the wing. With the defense now scrambling, the Warriors and everyone watching knew what was coming next. In the Clippers game, it was a pass back to the guy in the corner, in the Bulls game a pass to a player on the opposite wing, but in both instances, it resulted in a wide open three for Harrison Barnes and he did what every Warrior seems to do with wide open threes these days. He drained it.

At this stage of the season, Warriors are the clear leaders in assists per game, dishing out 29.6 per game, with the next closest team the Atlanta Hawks at 26.2. No doubt, they have the guys who can make the shots when the passes come, but they just consistently work so hard to get the wide open shot, it is going to surprise me if this number drops with any significance.

Take this stat for example, in their game against the Toronto Raptors last week, the Warriors assisted on 14 of their first 18 baskets. These guys just want easy shots and will work tirelessly until they get one. The best part about these numbers is they don’t do them with a big assists guy, but with everyone in their nine-man rotation, except rock hand center Festus Ezeli and instant bench offense Leandro Barbosa who is averaging at least two assists a game. This is an equal opportunity group that is more worried about getting the good shot than who actually sets it up, and it is a joy to watch.

#2 Joy and chemistry

The Warriors’ have fun while dominating the other team

Don’t let these classic cliches fool you, these are two very important ingredients to the Warriors success and something their coaching staff preaches daily. You can see it oozing from them as they play, trying their daring passes that sometimes result in turnovers, constantly having smiles on their faces and enjoying the little things that help you get through an 82 game grind, working their butts off to cover for each other defensively.

They epitomize what a team can do when everyone puts ego aside and chase a common goal. For this Warriors team that goal seems to be shutting everyone up who said they were lucky for winning last year.

Pat Riley, in his book Showtime, coined a phrase “the disease of more” when describing what usually derails championship teams from repeating. He said that after winning, everyone wants more shots, more points, more money and more opportunities for fame that come with winning the championship, and, in turn, this leads to dissension and the breaking apart of what was once a great team.

However, when I watch this Warriors team I see a group that only wants more championships and more wins to add to their resume. How else would they survive with Stephen Curry being the fifth highest paid player on the team? Or how else could they get through games where it seems like Curry is throwing the ball up immediately after he crosses half court (doesn’t matter that he’s making a shade under half of his 11 threes a game)?

Or how are they surviving someone as proud as Andre Iguodala, fresh off a Finals MVP, again accepting coming off the bench and only for 28 minutes a game? Because they don’t care about the accolades, the press, the fame or anything else. They just want to win, and it is so apparent by how they talk and carry themselves game after game.

Everything the Warriors do is about having more and more fun with each passing game. You don’t play defense, pass, and sacrifice minutes if you are worried about getting more for yourself, you don’t laugh and enjoy the game as much as it seems the Warriors do without loving going to work with your co-workers every day. Watching Golden State makes me want to find people who have the same passions that I do and work amongst them every day, gaining more and more joy like I see in the Warriors.

#3 Murder ball

The best part of the Warriors’ line-up is that there are no Big 3

One of the biggest finds the Warriors have stumbled upon in these last 14 months, is their line-up that ESPN.com writer Zach Lowe has dubbed ‘murder ball’. This lineup that features Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, Andre Iguodala, Harrison Barnes, and Draymond Green has been terrorizing the league since the start of last season and might be the single biggest reason they won the title last year.

Now, they have upped the ante with this small ball line-up, currently sporting a net rating (points scored per 100 possessions minus points allowed per 100 possessions) of 72.1 in the 62 minutes they have played.

That number is just obscene when you think the Warriors are beating the breaks off of people right now and “only” have a net rating of 15.6 per game. Right now, murber ball is more like end of the world ball, there is nothing a team has been able to do once this onslaught begins on the court.

What makes this lineup even more devastating, is that interim coach Luke Walton has been saving it only for moments of high leverage, knowing that it would be impossible for this group of five to play with the necessary reckless abandon needed to make a lineup with nobody taller than 6’7” work.

What makes this lineup so unique is it has Draymond Green, a player capable of banging and rebounding against players five and six inches taller than him on defense, allowing the Warriors to then reap the benefits of having him run circles around these behemoths when Golden State switches to offense.

But don’t think this is all Draymond, as was evident when the Warriors used murder ball to finish off their comeback against Clippers last week. In that game, they had to face 6’8” Blake Griffin and 7’0” DeAndre Jordan, both players who are taller and more physically imposing than any Warrior in the murder ball lineup.

No matter though for the Dubs, as they flew around like their pants were on fire, gang rebounding, denying passes, applying pressure on the ball handlers, and then running and passing at every opportunity until the Clippers waved the white flag. It was an impressive display in competitive fire and desire to never lose that you can see fuelling this lineup and the team in general.

#4 Holes

Steph Curry himself has admitted that irrespective of how good a game he’s had, turnovers always bother him

So with an undefeated record, you might ask if the Warriors have any holes that they need to fix. In short, the answer is no, there is not a glaring hole that would effectively doom the Warriors as the season goes on, but that is not to say they are playing perfectly.

Until last night when they faced a joke of an NBA team, their defense had started to suffer as they faced a rise in competition. Mainly against the Raptors and Clippers, two of the better offenses in the league, Golden State put forth two of the worst halves they had played in recent memory.

In the second half of the Raptors game, they gave up 63 points in which they had way too many lapses in defensive rotations and concentration, giving up way too many layups and short jumpers. They also played with a glaring lack of focus, which resulted in 12 fouls in the final period alone.

The Raptors are a good offensive team and do a fabulous job of imposing their desire to get to the free throw line on people, but the Warriors just caved with basic defensive fundamentals like moving their feet and rotating properly to cut off a drive, to the point that it became a little worrisome as the game went on.

They followed up that half with an equally bad one against the Clippers, where they gave up 68 points on 60% shooting, including 58% on threes. Again, they were constantly slow on rotations, seemed sometimes disinterested in trying, and generally brought a lack of focus that is not characteristic of this team.

However, it is a switch that they don’t want to get too comfortable trying to turn on because one day, there will be nothing to flip. The Clippers game almost caught them re-dhanded, as they had to fight tooth and nail to pull off an epic comeback, but playing with this lack of attention to detail is the first sign when the disease of more begins to creep in.

It would be one thing if the Warriors were giving up a few mid-range jumpers (something everyone is fine with giving up), or a layup here and there, but to see it happen over and over for 24 minutes is not something the Warriors want to get into a habit of. With this said, Golden State still sports the fourth best defense in the league, but they cannot rely on their offense to keep playing so well, and will need to tighten the screws some in order to sustain this high level of play.

The other sign that the Warriors sometimes lack attention to detail is in how many turnovers they commit. Right now they are currently 18th in the league in turnover percentage (the percent of how many of their possessions end in turnovers) and it is a problem that dates back to last season.

Sometimes, with how free the Warriors are allowed to play, they get caught up in chasing the highlight reel pass, which in turn can lead to many live ball turnovers that gives the other team the easy baskets they need to break the otherwise stout Warriors defense.

You can see them sometimes getting so excited with how well they are playing that they want to push the envelope of their greatness and fall prey to playing great outside of the fundamentals that actually make them great. It is a constant battle that they will have to fight against all year long as they make their quest to become repeat champions.

#5 Going forward

The Warriors must eschew short term accolades for the long term prize

What the Warriors have to protect against as the year goes on is chasing regular season records too hard. Yeah it is cool to set the record for most wins to open a season, or maybe chase the regular season win streak record (33) or wins total (72), but none of those will matter if they don’t win the title.

Three years ago the Miami Heat won 27 games in a row, but none of it would have mattered if they had lost game 6 of the NBA Finals to the San Antonio Spurs that year. Likewise, when the New England Patriots of the NFL went 16-0 in the regular season in 2007, only to lose the Super Bowl, nobody cares that they made it through the regular season undefeated. All that matters is when crunch time came, the Patriots couldn’t pull off the ultimate goal.

Now I don’t think the Warriors are going to have a problem with chasing regular season records. If they happen, they happen, but much like that Heat team from the 2013 season, they are a group of professionals that knows they have a higher goal than just records. They want that title and validation that comes with it. So if they end up falling short, don’t go rushing to say it was because they tried too hard in the regular season, but rather congratulate the team that will no doubt have played an exceptional series to knock this team off.