One of the six teams Kevin Durant will be visiting is the Golden State Warriors. Where he can help the Warriors most: “switch everything” defense and shooting.
The world has known for a while that Kevin Durant is an elite shooter. What might fly under the radar is that Durant has emerged as a versatile stopper.
One of the reasons the Warriors are so dangerous is their versatility – both offensively AND defensively. On the defensive side of the floor, they’ve gained a reputation for switching everything, a tactic most teams simply don’t have the personnel to do. Golden State switched 24 percent of the screens ran against them last year, by far the highest percent in the NBA. The team that switched the second-most is the Clippers who did it less than 15 percent of the time.
Swapping our Harrison Barnes for Kevin Durant makes this prospect even scarier for the other 29 teams. With his incredible length and agility, Durant is able to switch on to pretty much anyone. Durant statistically ranked as one of the NBA’s best defenders after switches last season and is far superior in that role than Harrison Barnes who allowed more points per play after switches and ranked in just the 39th percentile in terms of points allowed per direct pick after switches.
Durant allowed 0.75 points per direct pick after switching last season, good for the 83rd percentile. Barners allowed 0.96 points per direct pick, which put him in the 39th percentile.
Defense aside, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the best shooting team in NBA history could be adding yet another of the NBA’s elite shooters. It’s like adding horsepower to a Ferrari.
Quantified Shooter Impact measures the difference between how a player shoots given his shots and how an average player would be expected to shoot on those same attempts. Among the nearly 100 players with at least 350 catch-and-shoot attempts last season, Durant ranked third in Quantified Shooter Impact... just between the Splash Brothers. Should Durant sign in Golden State, it will roll out three of the NBA’s top four catch-and-shoot players.
In a vacuum, that alone would be major addition. It’s even larger considering that Harrison Barnes – the man Durant would likely take over for – had a negative Quantified Shooter Impact on catch-and-shoots, meaning given his shots, he performed worse than what could be expected from a league average player. Barnes had a qSI of -1.1 which ranked 66th among the 89 players with at least 89 catch and shoots.