Basketball on fire I am more than a little excited that the Golden State Warriors are returning to San Francisco. Even better, they bring with them NBA championship titles, and it’s looking like they will be back-to-back. There’s an old adage of, “if you can’t beat them, join them.” In the case of professional teams with a losing tradition, it can be very difficult to recruit the talent you need to overcome and turn the franchise back around. In that case, you could ignore the old adage and instead innovate and create a new way to play the game. One of the great things about California is that people here learn to dream big and figure out new ways to approach situations such as this. The Golden State is home to many innovators and creators, and recently California transplants Joe Lacob and Peter Guber applied their good business sense to an NBA team that had mostly forgotten what the playoffs are. Lacob and crew took a close look at all the statistics and analyzed them with the same critical eye they would use to evaluate any other business. Disregarding the normal strategies for building a basketball team, the Silicon Valley financiers identified a severe market inefficiency within the NBA, and decided to build their business...I mean their team...around that. What was that completely open market? Three pointers. Stephen Curry shooting three pointer By Keith Allison from Hanover, MD, USA (Stephen Curry) [CC BY-SA 2.0  via Wikimedia CommonsThere is no significant difference in accuracy when shooting a basketball from either 23 feet or 24 feet; NBA players make those shots at the same rate. But, the return on those shots is very different, because the space between is where the three point line lies. This means, shots made from 23 feet have an average value of .76 points, whereas shots from 24 feet have an average return of 1.09 points. Simply instruct your players to take a tiny step back from where they might normally shoot, and your return on that shot can go up by as much as 43%. With this information in mind, they began building a team around their amazing marksman Stephen Curry.

Nothing But Net

Keith Allison from Hanover, MD, USA - Stephen Curry CC BY-SA 2.0 The last couple of years have moved the Golden State Warriors from the bottom of their division to the top of the NBA. The Warriors have put up more 3-pointers than any team in history, and Curry has made more of them than any other player in a regular season; currently beating the 2nd place record by more than 100 shots. Which is even more impressive because it’s his own record he is smashing. What’s even crazier? His accuracy proves he is the Carlos Hathcock of basketball, having better accuracy at 30-40 feet than most NBA players have at 3-4 feet. With a large, talented sidekick in Klay Thompson, and a support team built around the “Splash Brothers”, our Warriors have been dominating the NBA. This season has been an absolutely stunning display of teamwork and dedication. The Warriors had the strongest start in NBA history (and possibly every American professional sport, ever) with a 24-game win streak, finishing a 54-straight home game winning streak. Curry just surpassed the 400 three-pointers mark, and three of the Warriors (Curry, Green, and Thompson) have been named to the All-Star Game.

From Downtown

This season proves it’s not a fluke. The Warriors were struggling to stay afloat only a few short years ago, but with a shuffling of the roster, new management, and a new strategy, the team has exploited a marketing inefficiency in full-effect. The Golden State Warriors just finished off the Grizzlies, giving them a record of 73-9 for the season, making them the winningest NBA team of all time, beating out the legendary ‘96 Bulls under Michael Jordan (Michael who?). We will keep our eyes on the Warriors as we move into post-season, but they are the easy favorite for the championship. We’ve already seen that even the NBA’s best defense can’t stop them, and in my opinion, there is only one way the Warriors lose - if they beat themselves. As a roofing contractor in South San Francisco, we love to see the Warriors do what we’ve always known they can and renew our sense of pride in the community we love! %Mr. Roofing San Francisco’s residential & commercial roofing experts