Steve Kerr, who is essentially qualified to coach the best team in American team sports (not of all time, not yet, but for the moment), likes to harp on his team's occasionally cavalier treatment of the basketball it fights so hard to obtain.
It's what coaches do – complain about lost possessions due to turnovers.
And frankly, the logic is unassailable. You never make a shot the other team gets to take instead of you. Can't be plainer than that.
But here's the odd thing. Based on the only metric that truly matters even in this math-engorged world -- wins -- the Warriors' turnover rate is actually minimally instructive (all numbers brought you by the genii at BasketballReference.com).
Their average number of turnovers per game in the Kerr Era is 14.9 per game, so we can round that off to 15. In the 135 games the Warriors have played with 14 or fewer turnovers, they are 117-18, the season equivalent of 71-11.
But in the 125 with 15 or more, they are 99-24, the equivalent of 66-16. Those five games are a difference without distinction.
Odder still, when the Warriors commit the same number or fewer turnovers as their opponents, they are 106-31, or 63-19, but when they commit more, they are 110-11, or 74-8.
This is not an advertisement for the Warriors to start throwing the ball into the crowd like souvenirs; turnovers are still bad things. They just don't undermine this team.
What does undermine it, to the extent that is underminable, is having a defensive rating worse than its league-leading 103 (109-39, or 60-22) or shooting below its league-leading .488 field goal percentage (58-24), or effective field goal percentage (60-22).
In other words, we will need to find something else to obsess about in our frantic attempt to find some drama in the Golden State Era. The worst team they are statistically is a team that is third-best in the league at any time, and if that isn't good enough for you, you're in for a very hard fall when this train finally pulls into the station, its journey completed.
Kerr, we cannot help. He must be what he must be. The handbook says he must hate turnovers, so he must hate turnovers. Otherwise, practices wouldn't even be worth having, and then coaches would start roaming the land unsupervised barking orders at total strangers, and who needs that?
