One reason the NBA playoffs are great is that the postseason's competitive structure and tactical complexity make something like the Buddy Hield Game not only possible, but necessary.
The Golden State Warriors won a thriller in San Francisco on Monday night to take a 3–1 lead in their first-round series against the offensively inept and defensively murderous Houston Rockets, and they did so despite a straight-up bad game from Steph Curry. Watch any of the first three games from this series, and consider the state of Jimmy Butler's ass, and you would come to the logical conclusion that the Warriors were not set up to win any less-than-stellar Curry game, let alone a game in which Fred VanVleet made eight three-pointers. Unless Curry is forcing double-teams and bending Houston's strong, flexible defensive structure, Golden State's offense is largely incapable of making the Rockets sweat. Draymond Green, once and occasionally still a good passer, has been excised from the attack, and on Monday, Curry didn't have it.
One moment of perfection aside, Monday's was a hesitant Steph. He was loose on the ball—three assists to four turnovers, all of the latter dribbling errors—and he didn't shoot well. The assist tally is particularly damning, less of Curry than of how difficult of a time the Warriors had breaking down the Rockets in Game 4; Gary Payton II's 11-point Game 3 fourth quarter, by comparison, was all Steph. Curry also missed a wide-open runner with 14 seconds remaining that gave Alperen Sengun a chance to put the Rockets ahead.
To win, the Warriors had to attack the 4-on-3s and long rotations the Rockets were happy to give up for the sake of containing Curry, which is where Golden State's most consistent player, Brandin Podziemski, and their most unlikely hero, Hield, come in. Podz was critical, making plays on the second side, hitting six of his 11 mostly open threes, and grabbing four of his team's nine offensive rebounds. They lose Game 4 without him. They also lose without Hield.
I have always had an inexplicable fondness for Buddy Hield, a player whose gifts as a movement shooter are matched only by his apathy for almost everything else. It's not that he is necessarily a bad passer or defender or rebounder, it is that he only shows he can do any of those things in isolated bursts. He also, critically, tends to make an embarrassing number of pretty bad decisions, which he clearly knows are bad on some level, because he will rein that stuff in and be brilliant for seven-game stretches here and there in between long stretches spent looking off open teammates for ill-advised pull-ups. I watched Hield shoot the Sacramento Kings (his former team) into and then out of games for years, then play very well in Indiana alongside Tyrese Haliburton, and thought nobody would ever really get him to change. But Steve Kerr has.
After hardly featuring in Games 1 and 2, Hield played a huge role in the two home games, logging 29 minutes off the bench in Game 3 and 30 more as a starter in Game 4. The shocking thing is, he didn't shoot well on Monday (3-for-9 on a diet of open catch-and-shoot threes) but he was still critical to the win with his general offensive play and—Kerr is as shocked by this as anyone—his defense. From the jump, Hield was engaged and feisty. The Warriors put him on Amen Thompson and Jalen Green, theoretically two guys who could roast him. But Kerr's gambit was that Hield, who is athletic and fast and can move laterally, could give them a fight—and also that baiting the Rockets into dancing for 14 seconds with a defender they didn't respect would make their bad offense worse. It was a trap, and it worked. Hield held up and Green was basically unplayable by the second half.
The Warriors came into halftime down seven, only to rip off an 18–1 run with pure veteran wile. In that stretch, Hield grabbed three tough rebounds and did simple stuff like make good outlet passes and sprint to the corner. Unlike Moses Moody, whose starting spot he took, Hield runs around all over the place on offense, which is what a Curry teammate needs to do. It was the most contained performance I've seen from him all season, and it helped his team get a critical win.
This type of stuff is the real juice of a seven-game playoff series. The Rockets found ways to take away so much of what Warriors are comfortable with, forcing them to seek new solutions, and Hield was ready. Kerr's instincts tend to lead him to turtle up and play guys like Payton, Draymond Green, and Kevon Looney—all defensively responsible and offensively limited—a ton at the expense of the offense, but Houston's defense is so good that the actual smart move is to accept the gamble and run with the inverse of those guys, players like Quinten Post and Hield. What a long way Buddy has come this season, from the guy who had to be sarcastically introduced to his star teammate by his coach because he had such blinding tunnel vision.
