Overview
So, here we are. The season hasn’t even begun and the Dubs are scrambling to make up for injuries.
Couldn’t we at least have waited until January?
Regardless, this is the reality for the time being. Draymond Green is out for the entire preseason and highly questionable for the beginning of the regular season. The Warriors are rolling out a smaller version of the new-look squad for their first preseason game on Saturday against the Lakers. Chris Paul will be starting in the backcourt, and Klay Thompson will transition to guarding power forwards (4s) in this new-look unit.
So, how is this going to work for Klay? Let’s look at his new responsibilities, how he has fared in the past, and how he can translate in the near future to this defensive role
Post-Ups
First and foremost, post-ups are a trump card against the bigger wings of the league. If Klay is going to be guarding taller, bigger players, the more skilled ones of the bunch will look to get him in the post to isolate. But over the last two seasons, Klay has held up very well in the post.
On 95 post-ups over the past 2 seasons, Klay surrendered 0.979 points per possession, putting him squarely in the league average zone by PPP. But when you dive further into the tape, you can see why he’s a strong post defender for a wing.
He’s exceptional at leveraging his strength against larger guys, digging in to concede very little ground. You hardly ever see a post mismatch end with feet near the restricted area. He may allow a good amount of post fades or hook shots, but you’ll take those all day in a 1v1 size mismatch.
You’ll notice all three of these possessions come without Draymond on the floor, where Klay is ostensibly playing the 4. He gets a low base, fights with strength, and does his best to hold up as long as he can to let his help defenders read the play. This is his more conservative form of post defense, but he has some Iguodala-like strips when the opportunity presents itself.
Though he is capable of winning 1v1 in the post, his main job is to stay sturdy while help is sent. Golden State usually offers early help when he’s being posted up by some of the league’s premier post-up talents, like these clips you see against LeBron James below:
A lot of this is a result of strong team defense. Take the below clip for example, and notice how the help affects where the 264-pound Naz Reid chooses to go:
The idea here isn’t to leave Klay on an island all of the time and expect good results. There are plenty of wings and bigs he could handle in these 1v1 situations, but the wings and bigs showing help against the more prolific post-up threats helps him to be more effective on the whole, and ultimately become a solid-to-good post defender.
Screen Action Defense
This is where things get fuzzy. And by that, I mean very little changes, but some things will change and it’s hard to predict how.
There are very few possessions where Klay truly guards a roll man, due to A) the nature of Golden State’s switching scheme and B) the kind of assignments he draws along with the help he gets. If he’s guarding the man setting the screen, he will usually just defer to the switch and let the other defender make a decision on whether to send the double or defer to the other 3 helpers. Here’s a handful of examples of the quick switching:
That last clip against new teammate Dario Saric is the closest approximation to a real roll-man possession, with early help sent by his teammates. It still ends with a layup by The Homie, but you can see the general idea.
Smart teams will bring Klay into the screen action hoping he will switch, assuming the other defender is smaller and has to cover the bigger player. This version of Klay post-injuries is less adept at shading the ballhandler and allowing the screened defender to recover back to the ball, forcing more switches and more mismatches for his teammates. Whether he is guarding 4s, wings, or guards, this would be the case.
Most commonly, the bigs he is guarding that can shoot will try to pop or fade across the arc in order to take advantage of the switching and his lack of burst. This “55” double drag set by the Utah Jazz with Klay guarding Lauri Markkanen is designed to do just that, even if the result is subpar:
Klay tallied a total of 32 PNR defending possessions across the last two years, with many coming in the playoffs. Ultimately, teams will not employ this enough to take a big chunk out of his defensive impact in the regular season, and hopefully Draymond will have returned before Klay gets torched too often.
Rotations/Weak Side Protection
This is another potential problem area, where Klay put forth a very mixed bag on the tape. There were some solid possessions where Klay rotated on the back line from the weak side, using timeliness and verticality to affect opponent shots. He was even capable of getting some authoritative blocks when everything panned out:
Again, Klay can only go as far as a rotator as his teammates allow him to go. Notice the timing of Gary Payton II sinking inside to pressure Derrick Favors while Klay rotates onto the spinning Kenrich Williams. Everyone has to move on a string to help Jordan Poole with the mismatch, similar to what we saw above when Klay was tasked with guarding LeBron post-ups.
Unfortunately, his athletic limitations and tendency to overhelp/help late showed up all too often. Take the below possession, and see if you notice where Klay goes wrong, even though the play works out:
Klay makes the correct read to rotate from the corner as Keon Johnson rejects the screen, catching both Jonathan Kuminga and Otto Porter Jr. off-balance to create an easy path to the strong side of the rim. However, he rotates quite early, abandoning the corner shooter with a window where a pass can be made. Johnson, a relatively raw rookie, does not see the read but that doesn’t excuse the timing by Klay. I am tapping the “process over results” sign here.
Then we have possessions like these. Granted, the defense is scrambling a bit as Klay tries to navigate Steph rotating back to Moe Harkless in the corner, so it’s not exactly a normal gameflow. Yet he’s early on the jump and off-balance with his verticality, doing little to impede Damian Jones while giving him the foul to boot. Typically, Klay is really good at preemptively wrapping up bigs that he cannot contest and forcing them to earn it at the line, but this was not the case here.
I think overall the back line rotations are my biggest area of concern with Klay’s defensive potential if he will guard more 4s. This means more corner-based possessions and more responsibilities rotating from the weak side or acting as the low man. He needs to be paying attention, crisp with his timing, and making plays within the construct of the defense to turn good shots into worse ones.
Corner Digs and Tags
I came away pretty impressed with how Klay digs and tags out of the corners, which I would qualify as different than a full rotation. A dig is when a wing defender rotates over to impede a player driving on their side of the floor, and a tag impedes a roll man in a similar fashion, often before they get the ball to discourage a layoff pass and narrow the window. Thompson was largely successful in both of these areas over the last couple of seasons.
Primarily, Klay is going to be asked to tag the middle rolls off the weak side. But what happens when the ballhandler is clever enough to see this and make the skip pass across the defense?
Notice the timing of when Klay plants his foot inside, and how that gives him the spring to get back out to the perimeter and contest Bobby Portis’ shot. He struggles more if this player were to collect and drive off the closeout attack, but his responsibility with most spacing bigs is just to get out there in time. His ability to break down and contest without overtly conceding the drive improved in 22/23, and will be much needed in 23/24 if he gets tough assignments who can both shoot and put it on the deck.
The tagging aspect was solid, but a bit of a mixed bag like his rotations. Those quick and strong hands can make for some strong possessions, like you see below:
This one is especially relevant with Klay guarding a 4 in Aaron Gordon and using his dig to prevent a higher-value shot (whatever Jokic does driving off the short roll) over the Aaron Gordon corner 3. Ultimately, the Warriors will try to force non-stars to beat them from beyond the paint at every turn instead of letting the offensive focal points get the shots they want.
Rebounding
This is the opposite of ending on a high note. We know Klay hasn’t been the greatest rebounder in his career, and it’s not going to get better when guarding larger guys. I could only find a few clips of him trying to fight for rebounds with bigs, and they were not great:
I labeled the first clip “boxed out, didn’t matter” because the process is as solid as it can be from Klay, there’s just nothing he can do about Isaiah Stewart being a gigantic beef castle.
The technique in the second clip is where the criticism comes from; he easily concedes the inside position, doesn’t make an effort to force Julius Randle under the rim where he is less effective, and predictably loses the battle.
This is where his teammates will be counting on him. Nobody expects Klay to win 1v1 board battles against these bigs, but they expect him to do the little things necessarily so that Kevon Looney, Andrew Wiggins, Kuminga, and Saric have chances to come clean up the mess. More of the former clip, and less of the latter one, please.
Conclusions
Ultimately this comes down to what, if anything, changes in the system. If Klay is still switching everything, as the Warriors do, it has little bearing on screen actions. It also has put him in a position in the past to be the back line guy, the corner dig/tag guy, and the post-up mismatch guy. These are not unfamiliar concepts to Klay Thompson, and it’s hard to imagine he will be scrambling to keep up with any of these responsibilities.
The main question is how far the adjustments go without Draymond in the lineup. With CP3 in the backcourt instead of a taller guard like Moses Moody or a vertically explosive one like GP2, will he be asked to get more aggressive with his help? Should he be expecting less help in the post considering the personnel of the starting lineup? And how will the switching go on guard-big PNRs with Chris Paul at the point of attack?
We will start to get answers to these questions tomorrow. Yet I am still counting on Klay Thompson to be the defender he has always been, just with a different alignment of priorities.
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