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On the concept of ‘kills’ and how the Warriors’ offense was killed by the Wolves’ defense

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All season long, I have been tracking a certain defensive metric called “kills” from the Golden State Warriors. Obviously, it’s not a metric tracked by typical box-score sites such as the official stats page of the NBA, Basketball Reference, ESPN, etc. — nor is it present in any of the advanced tracking sites such as Synergy, Second Spectrum, Inpredictable, and others.

Rather, it’s a metric hand-tracked by basketball programs at the high school and college level; I wouldn’t be surprised if some NBA teams track it, as well. It’s known by different terms (e.g., “turkeys,” “locks”) depending on the program — but “kills” has a certain oomph to it that makes it provocative and describes rather well what it (figuratively) entails.