Golden State Warriors center Kevon Looney will likely be in the rotation in Game 7 against the Houston Rockets on Sunday, coach Steve Kerr told reporters Saturday. It is possible that forward Jonathan Kuminga will get another shot, too.
For Looney, the job is simple: Screen shooters open and battle with Steven Adams on the inside. Adams gave the Rockets 31 almost flawless minutes in Game 6 and, when he has shared the court with fellow big man Alperen Sengun, they’ve been dominant on the boards.
“I trust Loon implicitly, based on being together for 10 years, seeing him perform in so many of these big games,” Kerr said. “So I would expect Loon to play more than he did last night.”
The Warriors typically try to play traditional bigs like Adams off the floor, and they might have done this successfully if Houston had simply put Adams on Draymond Green. Since Houston has put Adams in the middle of a zone defense that Adams himself described as “bizarre,” Golden State has not been able to pull him out to the perimeter.
“What we’ve been able to do in the past is put bigs in pick-and-roll and that’s generally how you play them off the floor,” Kerr said. “You put ’em in pick-and-roll. But they’re basically in kind of this hybrid zone whenever he’s out there and he’s just manning the middle. It’s kind of a 2-1-2, and then they start chasing Steph [Curry] around. I’m not sure they know what they’re doing, other than staying glued to Steph, and then it just kind of becomes a pseudo-zone. So that’s how they’re protecting him, and it’s very difficult to expose him in any way to get him off the floor.”
After the Warriors’ 115-107 loss in Game 6, in which the Rockets went on a 20-5 run at the beginning of the fourth quarter, Kerr’s coaching staff has a philosophical question to answer: Is it better to combat Houston’s physicality with size and strength or shooting? Golden State shot just 30.6% from 3-point range on Friday, which did not exactly discourage the Rockets from sticking with the zone.
Looney, a non-shooting big man, played just two minutes in Game 6. He is essentially the inverse of stretch big Quinten Post, who has averaged 19.3 minutes in this series. He’s not going to punish the Rockets’ zone by making jumpers, but he could mitigate some of the damage that Adams has been doing.
“The challenge in this series has been finding the right combinations based on trying to put together two-way lineups,” Kerr said. “If they’re going to go zone, like they have quite a bit, then we have to have some shooting and spacing, but we have to get stops on the other end, too, so we’ve gotta craft our lineups pretty carefully.”
Golden State knows what it’s getting with Looney. Kuminga is more of a wild card. The 22-year-old forward has been mostly out of the rotation since the last game of the regular season, and he didn’t make a strong case for himself in the limited minutes he got when Jimmy Butler was unavailable. Kerr said he liked the defense Kuminga played against Jalen Green in Game 3, though, and sounded open to giving him another opportunity with the season on the line.
“The key is what’s the combination around him,” Kerr told reporters. “We know they’re in zone an awful lot. Can we find the right combination with JK, with the shooting and spacing we need and passing to expose the zone? So these are all the questions that we’re asking. And I think as I’ve made very clear, the arrival of Jimmy made the combinations much tougher for JK, and so that’s what’s been sort of standing in his way. And I’ve gotta feel the game. And I’ve love to get him out there because I think he can help us, and if I can do that early and get his feet wet, I think that would be helpful for him and for us. But again we’ve gotta feel good about the combinations and what we’re facing with the way they’re guarding us.”
If the Game 7 rotation includes Looney and/or Kuminga, who is Kerr taking out of the mix? Well, Gary Payton II — who started Game 6 — will be out for Game 7 with an illness. Another candidate to get taken out of the rotation is Post, whom Houston clearly sees as a weak link defensively.
This series has been full of schematic and lineup-based adjustments. Ahead of the deciding game, though, Kerr said that he thought the Warriors’ biggest problems in Game 6 were not being locked in on shooters after giving up offensive rebounds and getting “out of sorts” emotionally late in the game.
“My biggest concern for [Game 7] is just our overall emotional response to a night where we really weren’t ourselves,” he said.
If Looney plays a big role on Sunday, that could be part of it. He has been in situations like this before, and he knows exactly what his team needs from him. Maybe it makes sense to sacrifice some spacing for that.