5 Minutes of Hell: How The Golden State Warriors Deconstructed the Indiana Pacers

It only took 5 minutes for the Golden State Warriors to dismantle the Indiana Pacers during Tuesday’s marquee matchup.

It is easy to say you’ll be doing something in 5 minutes. No matter if you mean 10 or 30, or actually 5, it is the standard amount of time we use to say we’ll get a simple task accomplished.

For the Indiana Pacers on Tuesday, 5 minutes was all it took for them to go from leading 21-15 to trailing 37-21. Unsurprisingly, it turned into a loss as well.

How does that even happen? It helps to go 8 of 10 shooting and 3 of 4 from beyond the arc if you’re the Warriors and 0 of 9 if you’re the Pacers. It helps when Golden State grabs 9 of the 11 available rebounds during that stretch. Indiana only turned the ball over twice during that 5-minute span, but with the way the Warriors were playing it just didn’t matter.

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The run got started with a simple Draymond Green dunk when Paul George got caught sleeping on defense after a made basket, prompting a Frank Vogel timeout.

Things didn’t get any better after the timeout, though.

From about 6:29 to 1:37 left in the first quarter, the Pacers settled for the shots the Warriors wanted them to take too often. Indiana would run a few sets that usually have brought them success, but during this stretch, nothing would work. The Monta Ellis/Jordan Hill Pick and Roll failed. C.J. Miles 3-pointers clanged out. Paul George came up short. Even the usually reliable Rodney Stuckey threw up an airball during the stretch. A mix of pressure from Golden State and bad luck came together to keep Indiana off the scoreboard.

That’s not to say Golden State wasn’t part of the reason. They clearly were. On C.J. Miles’ first 3-point attempt during this run, he was originally guarded by Draymond Green. Miles tried to lose him in traffic, but the Warriors switched at the right time to make sure it wasn’t an easy basket for Miles.

Lost in the flurry of 3-pointers made by the Golden State Warriors is how disciplined they are on defense. It always looks like they help just enough to rarely get caught out of place, or at least not often enough to lose games. The particular play shown above is a perfect example of how they operate, or at least how they did in this stretch.There isn’t really a secret to how they play, other that to say they are extremely well-disciplined, especially during their 22-0 run. They picked the right screens to run under, the right ones to roll over, and swarmed players when they attacked the basket, leading to a 0 of 9 run for the Pacers on offense.

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Even when the Pacers had chances at easy baskets, it always seemed to rim out and tease the Pacers as they hoped to break up the Warriors run. Missing 9 straight shots were bad enough, but on the other end of the floor, things were actually worse for Indiana.

The Pacers got outworked and caught with their pants down several times early on. Paul George fell asleep on the first basket of the run as Draymond Green was allowed a dunk and on the next possession, Miles was caught asleep as well. After a Green miss, the ball was tipped out and then passed to Klay Thompson as Miles was caught looking the wrong direction. Thompson calmly knocked down the 3-pointer.

The next Golden State basket wasn’t due to lackadaisicalness, but it still showed the ruthlessness of the Warriors offense. Curry wrapped around an Andrew Bogut screen, putting Monta Ellis out of position and forcing Jordan Hill into a position where he either allowed Curry an easy shot or left Bogut. He took a step towards Curry as Monta played catch up, which allowed Bogut plenty of room for an easy alley-oop from Curry.

I’m not sure what the best course of action here is with my only possible suggestion being for Ellis to go under the screen, but even then that seems to invite Curry to step back and knock down a shot. Perhaps Jordan Hill could have laid back a little more, but you run into the same problem of giving Curry any room. Maybe Rodney Stuckey and Jordan Hill could switch but I’m not going to pretend like I have the answers. There are many reasons why the Golden State Warriors are the best team in the NBA, and forcing teams into situations like this is one of them.

On the next Warriors possession they picked apart Indiana once again, this time Klay Thompson feigned a screen to slow down C.J. Miles but he was really just trying to create space for himself as he ran to an open area beyond the arc and caught C.J. trying to recover to hard, dismissing him with a ball fake.

Once Miles passed him, Thompson moved into the open space inside the perimeter and casually knocked down his shot. The Warriors’ offense followed up on the next possession with a high screen to set up another Bogut alley-oop.

If you needed another example of why pressing the tempo is such a valuable tool for the offense, much less the Warriors, Curry demonstrated it by pushing the ball up the court and forcing the Pacers into a panicking defensive set up instead of something more structured. Paul George cut off Curry and forced him to find Andre Iguodala open under the basket, but Solomon Hill and Jordan Hill had recovered enough to force Iggy to look elsewhere. But he soon found Curry open for another 3-pointer.

Paul George has started out making the right choices to first cut off Curry and then make sure Iguodala wasn’t getting an easy bucket, but his mistake came when he got caught watching the ball instead of recovering into a useful defensive position. Solo had Iggy and Jordan Hill was guarding the paint, so there wasn’t any reason for PG to stay there. Andre made him pay by giving the ball to a wide-open Curry for another 3-pointer.

The Warriors, much like the Pacers during this whole 5-minute stretch, failed to score on their next possession but followed it up with Curry catching Monta just like Klay had gotten Miles a few plays before. He drove further to the basket than Klay had, but the results were the same.

The final play of the 22-0 run was fittingly a transition 3-pointer by Curry where Rodney Stuckey’s only mistake was not covering the reigning MVP as soon as he crossed half-court.

22 points later, it felt like the game was out of hand and Indiana was forced to play catchup the rest of the way. They nearly caught Golden State, but that 5 minutes in the first quarter proved to be enough.

This isn’t to dismiss what the Warriors did, but it is worth noting that the Indiana Pacers outplayed the Warriors for all put this 22-0 run in the game. Before Golden State’s run, Indiana led 21-15. After the run, Indiana outscored the Warriors 102-94. Indiana played an extraordinarily poor stretch of defense both by their own doing and by what the Warriors forced on them. If anything that makes the win more amazing as Golden State only needed 5 minutes to alter the game’s outcome.

Neither team played great defense on the night as the Pacers 122.9 points per 100 possessions compared to the Warriors’ 110.4, both well above each team’s average. But that brutal 22-0 run is what truly set the teams apart on Tuesday. The Pacers are trying to master what the Warriors already have, something Tom Lewis over at our ~~sworn enemy’s~~ friendly rival’s Indy Cornrows pointed out.

"Prior to the game, Frank Vogel mention he always has the urge to add some smashmouth basketball to what the Pacers do, but not against the Warriors.“This game is going to be played with space and speed and three-point shooting and uptempo styles of play on both ends,” Vogel said.Yes it was and the Pacers couldn’t handle the pace, instead flying off the rails.Vogel also said that the Warriors are “light years ahead” of where the Pacers are in terms of their space and pace attack. Also true, and the effort to beat the Warriors at their own game turned out to be a flawed plan which was evident before the end of the first quarter."

While I don’t fully agree that the plan was entirely flawed, in the short-term it may not have been the winning plan but for Indiana’s long-term plans it might have been best. Our own Tim Donahue posted today how the Pacers have really been two teams this year, trying to balance the new small ball approach with Vogel’s old smashmouth ways.

"C.J. Miles says this is just all part of the process.“We just gotta continue to keep working at it,” Miles said after the loss to Golden State. “There’s too much talent in our locker room. Too many guys willing to give up parts of themselves to do the right thing. Too much toughness here for us to continue to have a losing streak.”He knows that will require adjustments and growth. “[At] the beginning of the year, we had the 0-3 [start],” Miles explained, “and we said ‘Oh, we gotta figure it out.’ Then we went on the winning streak. There are going to be other times like that, because everything is gonna be different, because everything is new.”Further complicating matters is the fact that – while the Pacers try to learn to be something new – they face an opponent each night whose job it is to make them fail.“Once you figure out one thing, and you play well with that one thing, and another team decides, ‘All right, we’re gonna take that away.” he continued. “It’s like, ‘All right, now how do we play well within that system with this gone?’ It’s about figuring out how to step up, and knowing counters and knowing ways to play within a system, and that’s the point we’re getting to now.”"

Fans are being asked to trust the process, and though it has had some issues in the last 3 games, we’ve also seen how damn good it was in November. On Tuesday, it didn’t quite work, and completely failed for a 5-minute stretch. Some of the mistakes came from not being in the right positioned and being undisciplined, but some of can be blamed on trying to make this two-headed team into one mind. Tuesday was a rough spot, but also not a reason to assume everything has failed either. It was the best team in the NBA, after all, that beat them.

Next: The 2016 Indiana Pacers - Two Teams Becoming One

However if they figure out and learn to master it, maybe the outcome reflects the other 43 minutes of the game, not the Pacers’ 5 minutes of hell.