Besides a joyous game-winner in Game 2 of the regular season, the Golden State Warriors have failed to impress during the first three games of the season, often involved in choppy, flow-less action.
Not only have the Warriors committed more fouls than their opponents in each game, but they've also seen a huge free-throw attempt disparity, allowing 108 fouls shots while attempting only 60 through three games.
“It's been called pretty tight,” said Draymond Green after his team's first loss of the season, a 100-98 defeat to the Denver Nuggets, according to ESPN's Nick Friedell. “We were told that. Defense isn't really an emphasis anymore in this league. So I think you're seeing it all around the league with these high scores. We know what the emphasis is. Just got to be better, and we haven't done that in three games. Maybe we win two of them, but it caught us tonight.”
One of the referees' points of emphasis has been off-ball action. They have been asked to reinforce foul calls on screens and picks that are set while inciting contact, something guards like Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson have fallen victim to in the early going. Asked of what can be done to fix it, Green is still looking for answers.
“I don't know,” said Green. “Some of them are questionable. Like Klay's one, Gary Harris is a hell of a cutter, you got to be into his body. He's flying off the screen to his right hand, he's great at that. So you body up and then you get called for going over the screen, I don't know what you do right there, but in the same sense, some of the fouls we have are just dumb as hell. Like we're in the bonus like six, seven, eight minutes to go in every quarter, we're still fouling — so I think some of [the calls] are a bit questionable, and then some of them are on us, just ridiculous.”
Head coach Steve Kerr had warned his players during the preseason, knowing officials would make a point to enforce the rules before eventually wearing off it like a New Year's resolution. Curry's solution? Fix what is under the Warriors' control.
“We got to be smarter,” he said. “We can't sit there and act like every foul call on us is wrong throughout the course of the game. The officials are going to get some wrong, that's just the nature of the beast, they're human, that's the game we play. To clean that up, to combat that, we can't have the stupid ones because what they do is an inexact science. So they're not going to get them all right, how do you combat that? Clean up our defense, stop using our hands as much, stop reaching. And right now we're not doing a good job of that.”
The Warriors already have a bad reputation with the officials, as Green and Kevin Durant combined for 28 technical fouls last season. Eliminating the silly fouls would go a long way toward fixing the issue and eventually letting officials call them more loosely over the course of the season.
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