Hakeem Olajuwon praises 16-0 Warriors, but 'small ball is nothing new'
At 16-0, the Golden State are off to the hottest start in NBA history. Now is a time to celebrate the team that's making every other one look like it's coming straight from the Yorkville Athletics 11-and-under league.
But let's not forget about the teams the Warriors surpassed — specifically, the 1993-94 Rockets squad, who rode a hot start of their own to the first of back-to-back championships.
No one other than these Warriors knows what it's like to be 16-0. But Hakeem Olajuwon, the Hall of Fame center on those Houston teams, knows 15-0. And he's not surprised by Golden State's dominance. To the NBA legend, the Warriors are defending what's theirs while enjoying their time in the stratosphere.
"When I watch the games and I see how hard they work to get their shots off as a unit — they're playing team basketball. The sky is the limit. Once you get up there and you realize it, you start to think, how can I maintain? How do you stay up there? That's the real challenge," Olajuwon told FOX Sports. "You won the championship. OK, but can you defend it now?"
Olajuwon speaks from experience. The '93-94 Rockets didn't just start 15-0. After losing their first game, 133-111 to the Hawks, they reeled off another winning streak. This one was seven games long; come Dec. 22, 1993, the Rockets were 22-1. They eventually finished with 58 wins, second in the Western Conference to the Seattle Sonics — the same team that eliminated Houston from the playoffs the previous season and helped motivate its hot start.
Those Rockets were an astounding team, one that dominated on the defensive end during all of 1993-94 and during the '95 postseason en route to its second championship. They're overlooked because their titles came during the almost two-year retirement of Michael Jordan, but this was a team that was prepared for anything. That includes small ball, which this year's Warriors have dominated with — and which Olajuwon says isn't as revolutionary as some might think.
Hakeem Olajuwon says a good big man can still beat small ball.
"You have to understand small ball has always been popular, but anytime you have a dominant big man, it causes so much trouble on that end, meaning lots of double-teams," Olajuwon said of the best way to counter Golden State's schemes. "When you double-team, that leaves opportunities for wide-open shots or three-point shooters."
Actually, these Warriors aren't even the first iteration by the Bay running out successful mini-lineups, though you have to go back two-and-a-half decades to find evidence of big play from small guys in Golden State.
"The small ball is nothing new," Olajuwon continued. "How about Don Nelson with his big three? It was (Mitch) Richmond, (Tim) Hardaway and Chris Mullin. That's how they played. ... They played small ball. But in the playoffs, we'd run and set up and post up even back then. They won a lot of games. But when it came to the playoffs, they got killed. That was the problem with small ball."
Nelson's Warriors teams made it to the second round of the Western Conference playoffs just once. Of course, this version of the Warriors has found far more success, winning 67 games and the title last year. So, say we put Stephen Curry's Warriors in a time machine and drop them into the Summit during 1993. Who wins that game?
"I can't say," Olajuwon laughed. "I really can't say."
What he could say, though is how he'd go up against the successful Golden State lineups that run without a conventional center, units which statistically have been some of the most successful the NBA has seen in years.
"If a 6-(foot)-7 guy is guarding me, I'm going to get a layup all day," Olajuwon said. "He's too small. He doesn't have the size. So, now what do they do? Guard with two or three guys, double-team. Then you swing it around to shoot threes."
It's a distinctly modern answer from someone who played his prime in the 1980s and '90s. Using post-ups to get spot-up threes, understanding the value of the long ball and baiting double-teams were all concepts Olajuwon and the mid-'90s Rockets used with great effectiveness during their championship runs. Draymond Green might be the NBA's most versatile two-way player in 2015, but it's fun to imagine exactly what Olajuwon, maybe the most versatile big man who ever played the game, would be like in today's post-hand check, zone-defense league. Would we be talking about Hakeem Olajuwon, stretch-center?
"No, no, no," Olajuwon protested in response to the prospect of playing differently if he were in his prime nowadays. "You've got to use the inside game and win the battle. People who are saying the post game is dead don't know anything about basketball because you can always have that guy to dominate the post."
Fred Katz covers the NBA for FOX Sports. Follow him on Twitter: @FredKatz.
