HONOLULU – Warriors coach Steve Kerr had preached patience for the past seven days.
Habits ingrained by a dozen years of practice, honed under the pressure brought by four championship runs with Steph Curry and Draymond Green, would need to be forgotten.
“Draymond and Steph, I told them midsummer, ‘It’s going to feel a lot different and I’m going to need your patience. You need to trust me on this,’” Kerr said. “We have such a great relationship, they have full trust in me and I have full faith in them.”
The old tricks had long grown stale, the nightly improv defined by read-and-react verve now lethargic.
Albeit stricken with injuries among their aging roster, the once-cutting-edge Warriors fell to 18th in offensive rating and 22nd in points per game in 2025-26.
The methods that had brought Curry and Green a fistful of trophies and accolades over the first decade of their careers were considered much of the reason the Warriors sputtered in their late 30s.
Altering the very essence of what defined the Warriors since 2014 would take time. And if Sunday’s turnover-and-brick-filled 104-101 loss to the Clippers was anything to go by, it would take a lot of it.
Replacing the intricate split-cuts out of the low post, a speciality of Green’s, was a new five-out offense that spaced every player along the 3-point line and used set plays.
“We’ve never really run sets; I feel like it was very read-based,” Green said. “This is just patterns, so we’re just figuring out the patterns.”
Green scored two points and had two assists in his 14 minutes against the Clippers. Aside from a line drive that resulted in free throws, he was not aggressively searching for his shot.
Curry put up an efficient 10 points in just 13 minutes, wowing the crowd with some vintage shotmaking even as he navigated the new patterns.
But the team scored only 43 points in the first half, and Curry and Green were both in the negative when it came to plus-minus rating. The learning curve was steep, even for surefire Hall of Famers.
Standing in a stuffy hallway at the Bankoh Arena in Honolulu, Curry downplayed the magnitude of the changes Kerr was attempting to cultivate this season.
After all, the offense still ran through Curry and Green, even if the plays had changed.
“You’re always going to get to a point where the best players have the ball and you’re going to try to make plays, and as you get deeper into the game, you kind of go to your pet actions that work,” Curry said. “But over the course of 82, and the course of 48 minutes every night, I think we understand what the task is.”
Green had his own take on the updated game plan, where the forward played more off the ball. Instead of directing traffic from the high or low post, he stood around the arc and waited for the ball to come to him.
“Yeah, definitely feel it,” Green said of the difference between his role in the old offense and the new system. “Whether I like it or not, it’s going to happen. So I don’t wanna get off into it, whether I like it or dislike it. It is what it is.”
Green and Curry will have an opportunity to further acclimate to the five-out offense on Tuesday. After flying back to the Bay Area on Sunday night and taking Monday off, the Warriors will host the Lakers. Then, they’ll have four more preseason rehearsals over two weeks before they open the regular season in Los Angeles against those same Lakers.