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Team executives saw the 3-point line as a market inefficiency and unleashed Stephen Curry to exploit it
By Ben Cohen Wall Street Journal
OAKLAND, Calif.—On every NBA court, about 24 feet from the basket, there is a thin stripe of colored paint. The flat-sided semicircle it forms is the boundary between shots that count for two points and shots that are worth three.
When the NBA added the lines in 1979, the players weren’t sure what to think. They sniffed and pawed at them like cats with a new toy. Only 3% of the shots they put up that season were 3-pointers.
Over the next three decades, that number crept higher. When it reached 22%, the growth curve flattened. It seemed that the sport had found its optimal ratio.
Then the Golden State Warriors came along and blew that assumption to pieces.
The Warriors, the National Basketball Association’s defending champion, now stand three wins from tying the league record of 72 in the regular season, set in 1996 by Michael Jordan ’s Chicago Bulls. Much of the credit belongs to the star guard Stephen Curry, who is having, by almost every measure, one of the best seasons of any player in history.
But there is another tale to be told about the Warriors. It involves a group of executives with limited experience, led by a Silicon Valley financier, that bought a floundering franchise in 2010 and set out to fix it by raising a single question: What would happen if you built a basketball team by ignoring every orthodoxy of building a basketball team?
The process took many twists and turns, and there were times when it nearly failed. But the dominance the Warriors have displayed this season can be traced back to one of the most unusual ideas embraced by the data-loving executives: the notion that the NBA’s 3-point line was a market inefficiency hiding in plain sight.
This season the Warriors have sunk 1,025 3-pointers, by far the most in NBA history. Not only has Mr. Curry taken more threes than any other player, he is making them at a rate of 45.6%, higher than the NBA average for all shots. He has shattered his own record for most 3-pointers in a season by 34%. Moreover, distance seems to have no significant effect on his accuracy. Mr. Curry is a better shooter from 30 to 40 feet than the average NBA player is from 3 to 4.
The result is a basketball style no one has yet figured out how to defeat.
“What’s really interesting is sometimes in venture capital and doing startups the whole world can be wrong,” said the team’s primary owner, Joe Lacob, a longtime partner at Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “No one really executed a game plan—a team-building architecture—around the 3-pointer.”
In 2010, the Golden State Warriors hadn’t won an NBA title since 1975. They played in a dumpy arena beside an interstate and had made the playoffs just once in the last 15 years. The previous owner, Chris Cohan, was loathed by many loyal fans.
Still, competition to buy the team was fierce. To fend off the other finalist, Oracle Corp. founder Larry Ellison, Mr. Lacob and entertainment mogul Peter Guber paid $450 million, which was, at the time, the highest price for a team in NBA history.
It wasn’t long before Mr. Lacob, who is 60 years old, installed a basketball brain trust akin to a board at one of his companies. The team’s executives are always communicating—a group text message hums on their phones during games—and every decision brings vigorous debate. But from the beginning, the Warriors brass placed an unusually strong emphasis on numbers.
The data dive yielded many insights, but the Warriors eventually zeroed in on the 3-point line. NBA players made roughly the same percentage of shots from 23 feet as they did from 24. But because the 3-point line ran between them, the values of those two shots were radically different. Shot attempts from 23 feet had an average value of 0.76 points, while 24-footers were worth 1.09.
This, the Warriors concluded, was an opportunity. By moving back just a few inches before shooting, a basketball player could improve his rate of return by 43%.
Mr. Lacob wasn’t the only team owner in sports to delve into statistics—baseball has been doing it for years—and the Warriors weren’t the first NBA team to see the potential of the 3-pointer. Starting in the 1990s, a string of teams with brutally effective defenses had prompted teams like the Phoenix Suns and San Antonio Spurs to search for different ways to score, and that meant shooting more 3-pointers. More recently, as the data improved, it became clear that teams weren’t taking nearly enough of them.
The difference between the Warriors and everyone else was what the team decided to do with this information.
For many years after James Naismith invented basketball in 1891, the prevailing view was that the most important area of the court was near the basket. From Wilt Chamberlain’s finger-rolls in the 1960s to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar ’s sky hooks in the 1970s to Mr. Jordan’s soaring dunks in the 1990s, the NBA was the dominion of players who owned the rim.
When the Warriors, under their previous owners, drafted Mr. Curry in 2009, he wasn’t a prototypical NBA superstar. Though his father, Dell, had played in the NBA, Stephen Curry was so lightly recruited out of high school that he had attended tiny Davidson College near his hometown of Charlotte, N.C. He only emerged as a tantalizing NBA prospect after his team made an improbable run to the regional finals of the 2008 NCAA tournament.
Even after his first two seasons with Golden State, Mr. Curry wasn’t a sure thing. Still, as the team’s new executives settled on their plan to exploit the 3-point line, they became convinced Mr. Curry would be their centerpiece.
The first test of their commitment came in the form of a controversial decision: trading the team’s leading scorer, Monta Ellis. Some believed Mr. Ellis was too similar to Mr. Curry and that he was costing him shots. Others thought it was crazy to banish the most popular player. At one point, just before the deal, Mr. Lacob tested the confidence of his basketball executives by telling them he was getting cold feet. They defended their plan and pulled the trigger.
The week after the 2012 trade, Mr. Lacob was booed by fans. The team finished that season with one of the NBA’s worst records.
The Warriors already were building a team around Mr. Curry that would allow him to take more 3-pointers. The most critical step had come in the 2011 draft when they selected Washington State guard Klay Thompson. He, too, was the son of an NBA player and an excellent shooter. At 6-foot-7, he was 4 inches taller than Mr. Curry.
The team believed Mr. Thompson’s shooting ability would make defenses too frightened to leave him alone, and that would limit their ability to double-team Mr. Curry. But because he was tall, he could defend the other team’s best guard and shoot over defenses without being blocked, which could help the Warriors compete against teams that hoped to use their size to contain Mr. Curry.
What made the move most attractive was its novelty. Most 3-point-shooting teams had one superb shooter surrounded by a collection of supporting players.
“Imagine if we could have two of those guys,” Kirk Lacob, the owner’s 27-year-old son and the team’s assistant general manager, recalled thinking at the time.
“It’s once in a lifetime,” said Joe Lacob.
The day after Mr. Ellis was traded, Mr. Thompson was inserted into the starting lineup. After that, according to the general manager Bob Myers, when the team was drafting and signing players, the strategy shifted from wondering whether they could play with Mr. Curry to asking: “Who can play with Steph and Klay?”
By the time the 2014-15 season began, the Warriors had padded their roster with Andrew Bogut, a 7-foot center who protects the rim and shores up their defense; the position-defying Draymond Green, the steal of the 2012 draft; and rangy guards Andre Iguodala and Shaun Livingston, whom they acquired in free agency. “They complemented shooting,” Mr. Myers said, “even though they’re not shooters.”
The Warriors then had a chance to trade for one of the league’s premier players, Minnesota Timberwolves forward Kevin Love. The move would have been a no-brainer for most basketball people. But the Timberwolves wanted a player in return whose departure would have scuttled the Warriors’ master plan. “They kept asking for Klay, and we kept saying no,” Mr. Lacob said. “We weren’t going to trade Klay, and they weren’t going to do a deal without Klay.”
The team doubled down on its 3-point plan by replacing coach Mark Jackson with Steve Kerr, a member of five NBA championship teams who had retired with a 45.4% shooting rate on 3-pointers, the highest in league history. It was his first NBA coaching job.
That season, with all the pieces in place, the Warriors fielded five players between 6-foot-3 and 6-foot-8 who all were threats to shoot 3-pointers. This “small-ball” lineup—widely known as the “death lineup” or, as Barack Obama called it, the “nuclear lineup”—helped the Warriors take 9% more 3-pointers as a team than the year before and make a higher percentage than anyone in the league.
This combination of frequency and efficiency had a fascinating effect on opponents. It forced them to spread out, extending their defense all the way to the 3-point line instead of packing the paint, leaving the Warriors with lots of open space. Mr. Curry set a record for 3-point shots and was named the league’s Most Valuable Player. Mr. Thompson made the All-Star team. The Warriors overcame the Cleveland Cavaliers to win their first NBA title in 40 years.
A step further
The tinkering could have stopped there. The Warriors clearly had hit on a winning formula. But then they began thinking about an audacious idea that would make them even better.
The plan had started to take shape in 2013, during a playoff game against the Spurs, one of the NBA’s top teams. Mr. Curry was just then coming into his own, showing signs that he could be both dazzling and deadly. During one possession early in the first quarter, Mr. Curry dribbled around a screen and found himself in a pocket of open space. Immediately, even before he had time to set his feet, Mr. Curry pulled up and fired a 3-pointer.
Watch the Video: During a 2013 playoff game against the San Antonio Spurs, Stephen Curry hit a 3-point shot off one foot. The shot helped inspire the team to give Mr. Curry the green light to take more crazy shots. Photo: NBA Entertainment
Mr. Myers, the general manager who was in the arena watching that night, couldn’t believe his eyes. As the ball swished through the net, he turned to the other Warriors executives around him to confirm what he had just seen. “Did he just shoot that off one foot?” he asked. “Who shoots a three off one foot?”
The shot was only one of dozens of stunners Mr. Curry had made during his young NBA career. But it played a crucial role in firming up another idea the team was batting around. The Warriors were dreaming about what would happen if they gave Mr. Curry a green light to take more shots, and more crazy ones, too—not off one foot, exactly, but from places on the floor where nobody had ever routinely taken shots.
Mr. Curry had already reached the point where he could take as many as 10 threes in one game without anyone noticing. It didn’t matter if the shot was off one foot, from 5 feet behind the 3-point line or the popcorn stand in the concourse. His accuracy didn’t seem to suffer much. Before every game, in fact, Mr. Curry practices these kinds of bombs by shooting from the half-court logo.
The team realized that any possession that ended with a 3-point attempt by Mr. Curry was worthwhile—and that they would never discourage him from taking one. In this, the season of Mr. Curry’s unleashing, the Warriors are shooting 17% more threes than a season ago. Mr. Curry is attempting more than 11 a game. No NBA team had ever had a player attempt more than nine. Last season he hit 286 threes. This season he is on pace for about 400.
What amazes fans even more is the location of those shots. NBA players shoot an average of 28% from 27 feet or beyond. Most players don’t even take them unless the shot clock is running out. Mr. Curry has taken 253 such deep shots this year and made 47% of them. The result is that defenders have strayed even farther from the basket to guard him, opening even bigger spaces for his teammates.
“Stretching a defense makes it easier to score,” Mr. Myers said.
The success of the Warriors this season has turned Mr. Curry, who is 28 years old, into one the NBA’s biggest stars. He has an everyman appeal because he isn’t a giant.
His celebrity has raised the profile of the 3-point shot. This year, like the last four years, NBA teams are taking more 3-pointers than ever. They now amount to 28.3% of total shots. College teams also hit another high in 3-pointers attempted per game this season. High school teams have caught the bug, too.
Mr. Guber, the team’s co-owner, said other NBA teams will try to emulate the Warriors’ original approach as they attempt to end the team’s reign.
“Other teams will do it in a different way,” he said. “They’ll take chances and challenge the incumbent and come up with another way to create the magic.”
For now, the Warriors have it. They turned the 3-point line into a boundary in time. The kind of strategy that unfolded inside the line belonged to the game’s past. The future of basketball, they believed, lay behind the line—and Mr. Curry showed it was farther behind that line than even they imagined.
“I don’t know why it took so long,” Mr. Lacob said. “You would think in sports that this would’ve been tried a long time ago.”
By Ben Cohen Wall Street Journal
OAKLAND, Calif.—On every NBA court, about 24 feet from the basket, there is a thin stripe of colored paint. The flat-sided semicircle it forms is the boundary between shots that count for two points and shots that are worth three.
When the NBA added the lines in 1979, the players weren’t sure what to think. They sniffed and pawed at them like cats with a new toy. Only 3% of the shots they put up that season were 3-pointers.
Over the next three decades, that number crept higher. When it reached 22%, the growth curve flattened. It seemed that the sport had found its optimal ratio.
Then the Golden State Warriors came along and blew that assumption to pieces.
The Warriors, the National Basketball Association’s defending champion, now stand three wins from tying the league record of 72 in the regular season, set in 1996 by Michael Jordan ’s Chicago Bulls. Much of the credit belongs to the star guard Stephen Curry, who is having, by almost every measure, one of the best seasons of any player in history.
But there is another tale to be told about the Warriors. It involves a group of executives with limited experience, led by a Silicon Valley financier, that bought a floundering franchise in 2010 and set out to fix it by raising a single question: What would happen if you built a basketball team by ignoring every orthodoxy of building a basketball team?
The process took many twists and turns, and there were times when it nearly failed. But the dominance the Warriors have displayed this season can be traced back to one of the most unusual ideas embraced by the data-loving executives: the notion that the NBA’s 3-point line was a market inefficiency hiding in plain sight.
This season the Warriors have sunk 1,025 3-pointers, by far the most in NBA history. Not only has Mr. Curry taken more threes than any other player, he is making them at a rate of 45.6%, higher than the NBA average for all shots. He has shattered his own record for most 3-pointers in a season by 34%. Moreover, distance seems to have no significant effect on his accuracy. Mr. Curry is a better shooter from 30 to 40 feet than the average NBA player is from 3 to 4.
The result is a basketball style no one has yet figured out how to defeat.
“What’s really interesting is sometimes in venture capital and doing startups the whole world can be wrong,” said the team’s primary owner, Joe Lacob, a longtime partner at Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “No one really executed a game plan—a team-building architecture—around the 3-pointer.”
In 2010, the Golden State Warriors hadn’t won an NBA title since 1975. They played in a dumpy arena beside an interstate and had made the playoffs just once in the last 15 years. The previous owner, Chris Cohan, was loathed by many loyal fans.
Still, competition to buy the team was fierce. To fend off the other finalist, Oracle Corp. founder Larry Ellison, Mr. Lacob and entertainment mogul Peter Guber paid $450 million, which was, at the time, the highest price for a team in NBA history.
It wasn’t long before Mr. Lacob, who is 60 years old, installed a basketball brain trust akin to a board at one of his companies. The team’s executives are always communicating—a group text message hums on their phones during games—and every decision brings vigorous debate. But from the beginning, the Warriors brass placed an unusually strong emphasis on numbers.
The data dive yielded many insights, but the Warriors eventually zeroed in on the 3-point line. NBA players made roughly the same percentage of shots from 23 feet as they did from 24. But because the 3-point line ran between them, the values of those two shots were radically different. Shot attempts from 23 feet had an average value of 0.76 points, while 24-footers were worth 1.09.
This, the Warriors concluded, was an opportunity. By moving back just a few inches before shooting, a basketball player could improve his rate of return by 43%.
Mr. Lacob wasn’t the only team owner in sports to delve into statistics—baseball has been doing it for years—and the Warriors weren’t the first NBA team to see the potential of the 3-pointer. Starting in the 1990s, a string of teams with brutally effective defenses had prompted teams like the Phoenix Suns and San Antonio Spurs to search for different ways to score, and that meant shooting more 3-pointers. More recently, as the data improved, it became clear that teams weren’t taking nearly enough of them.
The difference between the Warriors and everyone else was what the team decided to do with this information.
For many years after James Naismith invented basketball in 1891, the prevailing view was that the most important area of the court was near the basket. From Wilt Chamberlain’s finger-rolls in the 1960s to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar ’s sky hooks in the 1970s to Mr. Jordan’s soaring dunks in the 1990s, the NBA was the dominion of players who owned the rim.
When the Warriors, under their previous owners, drafted Mr. Curry in 2009, he wasn’t a prototypical NBA superstar. Though his father, Dell, had played in the NBA, Stephen Curry was so lightly recruited out of high school that he had attended tiny Davidson College near his hometown of Charlotte, N.C. He only emerged as a tantalizing NBA prospect after his team made an improbable run to the regional finals of the 2008 NCAA tournament.
Even after his first two seasons with Golden State, Mr. Curry wasn’t a sure thing. Still, as the team’s new executives settled on their plan to exploit the 3-point line, they became convinced Mr. Curry would be their centerpiece.
The first test of their commitment came in the form of a controversial decision: trading the team’s leading scorer, Monta Ellis. Some believed Mr. Ellis was too similar to Mr. Curry and that he was costing him shots. Others thought it was crazy to banish the most popular player. At one point, just before the deal, Mr. Lacob tested the confidence of his basketball executives by telling them he was getting cold feet. They defended their plan and pulled the trigger.
The week after the 2012 trade, Mr. Lacob was booed by fans. The team finished that season with one of the NBA’s worst records.
The Warriors already were building a team around Mr. Curry that would allow him to take more 3-pointers. The most critical step had come in the 2011 draft when they selected Washington State guard Klay Thompson. He, too, was the son of an NBA player and an excellent shooter. At 6-foot-7, he was 4 inches taller than Mr. Curry.
The team believed Mr. Thompson’s shooting ability would make defenses too frightened to leave him alone, and that would limit their ability to double-team Mr. Curry. But because he was tall, he could defend the other team’s best guard and shoot over defenses without being blocked, which could help the Warriors compete against teams that hoped to use their size to contain Mr. Curry.
What made the move most attractive was its novelty. Most 3-point-shooting teams had one superb shooter surrounded by a collection of supporting players.
“Imagine if we could have two of those guys,” Kirk Lacob, the owner’s 27-year-old son and the team’s assistant general manager, recalled thinking at the time.
“It’s once in a lifetime,” said Joe Lacob.
The day after Mr. Ellis was traded, Mr. Thompson was inserted into the starting lineup. After that, according to the general manager Bob Myers, when the team was drafting and signing players, the strategy shifted from wondering whether they could play with Mr. Curry to asking: “Who can play with Steph and Klay?”
By the time the 2014-15 season began, the Warriors had padded their roster with Andrew Bogut, a 7-foot center who protects the rim and shores up their defense; the position-defying Draymond Green, the steal of the 2012 draft; and rangy guards Andre Iguodala and Shaun Livingston, whom they acquired in free agency. “They complemented shooting,” Mr. Myers said, “even though they’re not shooters.”
The Warriors then had a chance to trade for one of the league’s premier players, Minnesota Timberwolves forward Kevin Love. The move would have been a no-brainer for most basketball people. But the Timberwolves wanted a player in return whose departure would have scuttled the Warriors’ master plan. “They kept asking for Klay, and we kept saying no,” Mr. Lacob said. “We weren’t going to trade Klay, and they weren’t going to do a deal without Klay.”
The team doubled down on its 3-point plan by replacing coach Mark Jackson with Steve Kerr, a member of five NBA championship teams who had retired with a 45.4% shooting rate on 3-pointers, the highest in league history. It was his first NBA coaching job.
That season, with all the pieces in place, the Warriors fielded five players between 6-foot-3 and 6-foot-8 who all were threats to shoot 3-pointers. This “small-ball” lineup—widely known as the “death lineup” or, as Barack Obama called it, the “nuclear lineup”—helped the Warriors take 9% more 3-pointers as a team than the year before and make a higher percentage than anyone in the league.
This combination of frequency and efficiency had a fascinating effect on opponents. It forced them to spread out, extending their defense all the way to the 3-point line instead of packing the paint, leaving the Warriors with lots of open space. Mr. Curry set a record for 3-point shots and was named the league’s Most Valuable Player. Mr. Thompson made the All-Star team. The Warriors overcame the Cleveland Cavaliers to win their first NBA title in 40 years.
A step further
The tinkering could have stopped there. The Warriors clearly had hit on a winning formula. But then they began thinking about an audacious idea that would make them even better.
The plan had started to take shape in 2013, during a playoff game against the Spurs, one of the NBA’s top teams. Mr. Curry was just then coming into his own, showing signs that he could be both dazzling and deadly. During one possession early in the first quarter, Mr. Curry dribbled around a screen and found himself in a pocket of open space. Immediately, even before he had time to set his feet, Mr. Curry pulled up and fired a 3-pointer.
Watch the Video: During a 2013 playoff game against the San Antonio Spurs, Stephen Curry hit a 3-point shot off one foot. The shot helped inspire the team to give Mr. Curry the green light to take more crazy shots. Photo: NBA Entertainment
Mr. Myers, the general manager who was in the arena watching that night, couldn’t believe his eyes. As the ball swished through the net, he turned to the other Warriors executives around him to confirm what he had just seen. “Did he just shoot that off one foot?” he asked. “Who shoots a three off one foot?”
The shot was only one of dozens of stunners Mr. Curry had made during his young NBA career. But it played a crucial role in firming up another idea the team was batting around. The Warriors were dreaming about what would happen if they gave Mr. Curry a green light to take more shots, and more crazy ones, too—not off one foot, exactly, but from places on the floor where nobody had ever routinely taken shots.
Mr. Curry had already reached the point where he could take as many as 10 threes in one game without anyone noticing. It didn’t matter if the shot was off one foot, from 5 feet behind the 3-point line or the popcorn stand in the concourse. His accuracy didn’t seem to suffer much. Before every game, in fact, Mr. Curry practices these kinds of bombs by shooting from the half-court logo.
The team realized that any possession that ended with a 3-point attempt by Mr. Curry was worthwhile—and that they would never discourage him from taking one. In this, the season of Mr. Curry’s unleashing, the Warriors are shooting 17% more threes than a season ago. Mr. Curry is attempting more than 11 a game. No NBA team had ever had a player attempt more than nine. Last season he hit 286 threes. This season he is on pace for about 400.
What amazes fans even more is the location of those shots. NBA players shoot an average of 28% from 27 feet or beyond. Most players don’t even take them unless the shot clock is running out. Mr. Curry has taken 253 such deep shots this year and made 47% of them. The result is that defenders have strayed even farther from the basket to guard him, opening even bigger spaces for his teammates.
“Stretching a defense makes it easier to score,” Mr. Myers said.
The success of the Warriors this season has turned Mr. Curry, who is 28 years old, into one the NBA’s biggest stars. He has an everyman appeal because he isn’t a giant.
His celebrity has raised the profile of the 3-point shot. This year, like the last four years, NBA teams are taking more 3-pointers than ever. They now amount to 28.3% of total shots. College teams also hit another high in 3-pointers attempted per game this season. High school teams have caught the bug, too.
Mr. Guber, the team’s co-owner, said other NBA teams will try to emulate the Warriors’ original approach as they attempt to end the team’s reign.
“Other teams will do it in a different way,” he said. “They’ll take chances and challenge the incumbent and come up with another way to create the magic.”
For now, the Warriors have it. They turned the 3-point line into a boundary in time. The kind of strategy that unfolded inside the line belonged to the game’s past. The future of basketball, they believed, lay behind the line—and Mr. Curry showed it was farther behind that line than even they imagined.
“I don’t know why it took so long,” Mr. Lacob said. “You would think in sports that this would’ve been tried a long time ago.”