After practice on Tuesday (report from Wednesday coming soon), Steve Kerr was asked by Danny Emerman of the SF Standard if Kerr was excited about running split cuts with Kristaps Porzingis as the trigger man.
Historically, this has meant he’d have the ball in the wide elbow/wing area with two shooters cutting off him, maybe à la Andrew Bogut, except with the added bonus of envisioning Bogut with the nice shooting stroke that Porzingis has.
Bear in mind, the Warriors have done a ton more pick-and-pop and pick-and-roll this year than split cuts, especially with spot-shooters Quinten Post or Al Horford at center.
Steve’s response:
I’m actually more excited about having him in the split with somebody else having the ball. When we throw him the ball in the post, we’re gonna ask him to score quite a bit, but he’s such a dynamic player that you can also run pin-downs for him. He can shoot it on the move. He’s not just pick-and-pop which means you can put him in the splits as well, either to set the screen and dive or come off the screen and shoot it. So he should fit into everything we do pretty smoothly.
The question before that was Anthony Slater of ESPN asking Kerr how much he spent the All-Star Break thinking about the different ways Porzingis could be utilized.
Steve replied, “We’ve gotta recognize when there’s a mismatch, when we want to just go to Kristaps and everybody has to understand the spacing around him, so yeah, that was something we worked on.”
See full transcript below, per usual.
And so the thought of a tall and lanky Klay Thompson 2-guard type angling here and there off the ball to get shots, perhaps covering as much ground as our former Splash Brother, considering KP is 7’2” and has long strides, should have Warriors fans tuning in to the home matchup tonight against the Boston Celtics.
Let’s not forget that Porzingis was once nicknamed “Unicorn”, which shockingly I have a related video of:
That’s right, Kevin Durant took credit for giving KP that nickname lol.
YouTube also directed me to this random call back of the Unicorn hitting a tunnel shot at Oracle, although the one on YouTube was laced with music and drowned out all the background:
Then I searched for that on Twitter and found what seems to be the original, above. I noticed the voice was that of Marc Spears of ESPN. I quickly texted him to see if it was his video and he said, “Believe so.” And that’s why you see Spears’ handle watermarked above, something I added here.
Of course, I wish I had filmed KP splashing the tunnel shot myself, but back in the Oracle days, I rarely attended the opposing team’s shootaround because it was usually not at Oracle.
They were usually at spots in San Francisco (Equinox or the Olympic Club) because teams never stayed in Oakland, as the lone hotel there wasn’t really that posh. I usually covered Warriors shootarounds at the Oakland facility, though, which were around the same time as the opponents’. We are blessed that Spears decided to interview a New York Knick at a random Oracle shootaround, that day.
Back in present day, there will be a minutes restriction for Kristaps, though, as you’ll see in the next article when I post the transcripts from Wednesday’s practice. And my guess is that KP does not start, as hinted by Kerr in the Wednesday podium — but, like Al Horford in the first stages of his minutes restriction, coming off the bench might afford Porzingis the opportunity to close the game. We’ll see.
00:00 Biggest questions for y’all coming out of the Break, Steph and Kristaps. I was just wondering just where they’re at right now.
00:06 STEVE KERR, PRACTICE, TWO DAYS BEFORE BOS-GSW: We gave the vets an extra day, so Steph will be here tomorrow and but Kristaps has been here the last handful of days and practiced today with the team, looked good. He’s feeling good. We won’t make a determination until after tomorrow. When we practice tomorrow afternoon, we’ll get up and down the floor and scrimmage which we didn’t do today. We did more skill work and went over some things, so tomorrow we’ll have a better feel for both those guys.
00:43 You, entering the Break, were pretty optimistic on both fronts. Are you, I mean, obviously, like you said, you’re gonna get the final determination tomorrow, but it’s still the hope that both could be cleared?
00:53 That’s the hope, but yeah, again, we haven’t seen Steph yet and we have — Kristaps needs to participate in a scrimmage first and so, yeah, we’ll just see how it goes tomorrow.
01:07 Did any of — how much of the Break were you thinking about Kristaps and the way you can utilize him and it just seems like such a massive factor in the second half?
01:16 Yeah. Well, he’s an easy fit you don’t have to change a whole lot. The biggest difference, I guess, that he provides is his post-ups. He’s a pretty good post-up player especially against switches. You throw him the ball at the foul line, the elbows, even the low block, he can score in those spots. And so it was one of the things we did today. We worked on our spacing. It’s a little different than spacing around Jimmy. Jimmy’s a guy who is going to attack the rim, get to the basket and kick out from that area, whereas Kristaps is a little bit more of a scorer, shooter from iso spots, but similar concepts for everybody else. We’ve gotta recognize when there’s a mismatch, when we want to just go to Kristaps and everybody has to understand the spacing around him, so yeah, that was something we worked on today.
02:19 Does Porzingis’ ability to punish mismatches in the mid-posts and work in those areas, does that get you excited about running some of your split actions with him, kind of as a trigger man?
02:31 Yeah, I mean, we can do that. I’m actually more excited about having him in the split with somebody else having the ball. When we throw him the ball in the post, we’re gonna ask him to score quite a bit, but he’s such a dynamic player that you can also run pin-downs for him. He can shoot it on the move. He’s not just pick-and-pop which means you can put him in the splits as well, either to set the screen and dive or come off the screen and shoot it. So he should fit into everything we do pretty smoothly.
03:09 Steve, how comfortable would you say Kristaps is as a passer in the system? I guess how comfortable do you say — would you say he’s running some of those actions where he’s looking for Steph or looking for —?
03:20 I’ll tell you in a couple weeks.
03:21 All right.
03:22 Obviously, he’s a really skilled player and I don’t foresee too many issues for him fitting in, but you never really know until you get a feel and usually end up discovering a few things and maybe changing a few things because of the discovery. And so we’ll get a good feel these next couple weeks and go from there.
03:44 Steve, I just want to do a roll call. So Steph, Draymond, Al, they were off tonight. They’re all back tomorrow. Have you talked to Jimmy? How’s he doing a week after surgery?
03:56 I talked to him or texted with him after the surgery and he was doing well and he seems to be in really good spirits and, yeah, I mean it’s — obviously he’s got a long haul ahead, but good to get the surgery behind him.
04:13 Everybody else is here, everybody’s fine, nobody’s got a linger —
04:17 Yeah, I think, I mean, we do this now every year, especially with some veteran players. We give them an extra day and so Draymond, Steph, Al will all be here tomorrow. Just trying to think if that included anybody else, so some of the — yeah, Melt came. Melt practiced, Gary practiced, so some of the guys were already back from their Break and they came in, they had the option and they came in and worked. So good turnout.
04:48 Kind of in a similar spot to last year where back after the deadline, it’s gonna be kind of a sprint. How do you kind of feel about where you guys are at right now as you’ve kind of approached these last 27 games?
05:00 Yeah, I mean, we’re well aware of how this whole thing works. We’ve been in the Play-in a few times so we wanna win as many as we can and if there’s a chance to get to six, that’s the goal, but the only way you can do that is just winning a bunch of games. So we don’t even talk to our team about the standings or any of that stuff. We just kinda lock in and go play. I like the way we’ve played of late without Steph. We’ve been really competitive, scrappy, guys are playing well. Watching the San Antonio game, we really played a great great game last quarter-and-a-half. We just couldn’t make the same shots we were making earlier and that’s a game, against a team that talented, you just have to shoot it really well for most of the game and we just kind of went dry there the last 15 minutes or so. But I couldn’t have been more happy with just the effort and the intensity and the competitiveness and that’s gotta continue, obviously, for us to make a move.
06:17 Your future’s obviously gonna be kind of an unavoidable topic over the next few months coming out of the Break. I mean, are you still in the same place that you were prior?
06:26 Yep. Yep, not at all concerned about anything. Not something I really want to discuss, so yeah, I’ll just leave it where I left it last time when you asked me. So, whatever — however it plays out at the end of the year, it’ll play out.
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