Steve Kerr Explains How Chris Paul Will Help Warriors
The big question everyone has been asking since Chris Paul was traded to the Warriors is how will the offense look? They're one of the fastest teams in the league, but he's a slower and methodical player. Steve Kerr shed some light on the potential of the offense.
In an interview with Tim Kawakami of The Athletic, Steve Kerr gave a very detailed answer of how Chris Paull will help the Warriors' offense.
“If you think about the Lakers series and maybe the last game of the Sacramento series, we pretty much ran high pick-and-roll a hundred times, over and over and over again,” Kerr said. “Steph is obviously lethal with that. But it also limits what you’re capable of in terms of generating offense elsewhere and it puts a lot of stress on Steph’s shoulders. We’re obviously going to be more capable of running that style if we want. But also of getting Steph off the ball. One of the most powerful forces we’ve had on this team is Steph’s versatility playing on or off the ball.”
One thing Kerr noted in particular, was that Steph Curry believed the Warriors didn't have enough ways to score. If there's one thing that adding Chris Paul will do, it's that the Warriors will have a variety of new ways to score the ball.
“One of the things Steph said … I thought his most revealing quote after the Lakers series was that we didn’t have enough variety in the ways that we could score,” Kerr said. “And everything was high pick-and-roll with Steph. That whole series. We just couldn’t create enough. When we’ve been our best, this team has had a lot of good passing, a lot of connectors, a lot of guys who understood how to play with Steph and free him up and use his gravity to slip for layups or create shots on the other side of the floor. We have to maintain that type of variety in our game somehow. We lost some of that this year. So hopefully we can regain some of that next year. … When we had to have a bucket, we’ve leaned on the high pick-and-roll, Steph/Draymond. It’s our best play. That’s our 98-mph fastball. But if you throw that down the middle enough, somebody’s hitting it into McCovey Cove. And that’s what happened against the Lakers, we just didn’t have the variety. We didn’t have the changeup, as Steph said.”
Chris Paul on the Warriors is the x-factor move of the off-season that everyone is waiting to see pan out. People have an idea of how Bradley Beal will look on the Suns, an idea of Marcus Smart on the Grizzlies, but no one has any idea how Chris Paul will look on the Golden State Warriors. Paul is a smart enough player to make it work, but it's still going to take some acclimation time.
