Vogel gets the Warriors defense, and its shot blockers played 1,425 minutes
Golden State finished 26th in blocks and 25th in defensive rebounding last season. The three men still on the roster who blocked shots at a center's rate appeared in 65 games between them, and the club's third- and eighth-leading shot blockers are both somewhere else now.
Al Horford blocked 51 shots last season and played 45 games. Kristaps Porzingis blocked 16 and played 15. Charles Bassey blocked seven and played five.
Of the Warriors who played for the club last season and are still under contract, those three are the only ones who blocked shots at better than one and a half per 36 minutes. Between them they were on the floor for 1,425 of the team's 19,805 minutes, which is 7.2 percent, across 65 games.
Golden State finished 26th in the NBA in blocks.
The defense took the ball away and could not end the possession#
Golden State went 37-45. NBA.com has it allowing 114.4 points per 100 possessions and scoring 113.8. That is the summary figure, and the shape underneath it is the useful part, because its two halves point in opposite directions. Per-game figures and league ranks of 30 below are from Basketball Reference's team and opponent tables, except the opponent effective field-goal percentage, which is its defensive four factors.
| Measure | Per game | Rank of 30 |
|---|---|---|
| Steals | 9.7 | 2nd |
| Turnovers forced | 15.9 | 6th |
| Opponent effective field-goal percentage | .553 | 20th |
| Defensive rebounds | 31.0 | 25th |
| Blocks | 4.2 | 26th |
| Points allowed | 115.2 | 14th |
Two of those rows sit in the top six of the league and two sit in the bottom six, and they describe the same defense. The Warriors took the ball off opponents more often than all but one other team. When they did not, opponents shot .553 on an effective basis and the Warriors were 26th at knocking a shot down and 25th at collecting the miss.
That is not a scheme that failed. It is a scheme that did one half of its job and ran out of bodies for the other.
Who actually blocked the shots#
Every Warrior under contract for 2026-27 who played for the club last season, sorted by blocks per 36 minutes. The minutes column is there because two of the top four rows rest on very little of it. Games, minutes and blocks are from Basketball Reference and the rate is derived from those totals. L.J. Cryer and Malevy Leons are on two-way contracts. Yaxel Lendeborg, Georges Niang and Brandon Williams did not play for Golden State last season and are not in the table.
| Player | Games | Minutes | Blocks | Per 36 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Charles Bassey | 5 | 100 | 7 | 2.52 |
| Al Horford | 45 | 969 | 51 | 1.89 |
| Kristaps Porzingis | 15 | 356 | 16 | 1.62 |
| Malevy Leons | 25 | 276 | 9 | 1.17 |
| Draymond Green | 68 | 1,869 | 42 | 0.81 |
| Moses Moody | 60 | 1,540 | 34 | 0.79 |
| Gary Payton II | 73 | 1,142 | 21 | 0.66 |
| De'Anthony Melton | 49 | 1,125 | 20 | 0.64 |
| Gui Santos | 68 | 1,395 | 22 | 0.57 |
| Stephen Curry | 43 | 1,329 | 17 | 0.46 |
| Will Richard | 69 | 1,377 | 9 | 0.24 |
| Jimmy Butler III | 38 | 1,182 | 8 | 0.24 |
| Brandin Podziemski | 82 | 2,333 | 15 | 0.23 |
| L.J. Cryer | 18 | 292 | 0 | 0.00 |
Bassey's 2.52 is seven blocks in 100 minutes and nobody should hold it still. Horford's 1.89 is 51 blocks across 969 minutes, and it was the best rate of any Warrior who played more than 300 minutes, including the ones who have since left. Below Porzingis the roster drops to 0.81 and stays under one the rest of the way down.
Horford turned 40 in June. He averaged 21.5 minutes a game last season, the lowest figure of his nineteen seasons, and still blocked 1.1 shots a game, his highest per-game figure since 2021-22, when he was playing 29.1 minutes a night.
Porzingis has not played 60 games in a season since 2022-23, and his last three seasons read 57, 42 and 32. His 15 games in a Warriors uniform are not the whole story of his absence: Golden State played 31 games from the February 5 trade that brought him, so he missed roughly half of what was available to him rather than most of a year. The rate he posted here, 1.62 per 36, is below what he carried in New York a decade ago.
Two of the men who blocked the shots are not here#
Golden State's third-leading shot blocker last season was Quinten Post, with 35 in 67 games. Its eighth was Trayce Jackson-Davis, with 19 in 36. Neither appears on the club's 2026-27 roster. Memphis signed Post to an offer sheet the Warriors declined to match in July, and Jackson-Davis went to Toronto in a trade this club is still carrying an unused exception from.
Add the other departures and the arithmetic is blunt. Of the 346 blocks Golden State recorded last season, 75 belong to men who are not on this roster. Of the 2,540 defensive rebounds, 578 do.
The three players added since are Yaxel Lendeborg, a rookie taken 11th in the 2026 draft; Georges Niang, a power forward; and Brandon Williams, a guard. None of them is a center.
The rebounding number has the wrong name on top of it#
Golden State's leading defensive rebounder last season was Brandin Podziemski, with 347. The club lists him at six feet four inches and he plays guard.
He led it because he was the only Warrior to appear in all 82 games. Per 36 minutes he was seventh. Six Warriors who played at least 300 minutes rebounded the defensive glass more often: Jonathan Kuminga at 6.66 in 20 games, Horford at 6.50, Post at 6.24, Porzingis at 6.17, Green at 6.16 and Jackson-Davis at 5.69, against Podziemski's 5.35. Three of those six are no longer on the roster.
The season total measures who was available. The rate measures who rebounds. Last season those were two different questions with two different answers.
What Vogel has done with this before#
The Warriors announced their staff on Thursday, September 17. Frank Vogel arrives as associate head coach, taking the title Terry Stotts held. Chris DeMarco left during last season to coach the New York Liberty, and Stotts and Jerry Stackhouse left after it. Monte Poole of NBC Sports Bay Area reports that Vogel takes the defense with Jacob Rubin and Anthony Vereen, and that Kerr keeps the offense. Kerr, to Poole: "I'm going to turn the defense over to him."
Vogel has been a head coach for twelve seasons. Three of his defenses finished with the best defensive rating in the NBA: Indiana in 2012-13 and 2013-14, and the Lakers in 2020-21. Two more finished third, Indiana in 2015-16 and the Lakers in 2019-20. The other seven finished 7th, 9th, 12th, 13th, 18th, 21st and 22nd.
Those two Indiana teams had Roy Hibbert, who blocked 206 shots in 2012-13 and 182 the season after. The 2019-20 Lakers had Anthony Davis, who blocked 143. Golden State has nobody in that category and is not going to acquire one.
The 2020-21 Lakers are the season that complicates it. They led the league in defensive rating, and their leading shot blocker was Davis with 59, in 36 games, with Marc Gasol on 58 and Montrezl Harrell on 49. That team blocked 5.4 shots a game. Golden State blocked 4.2. The distance between a first-place Vogel defense and last season's Warriors, measured in blocks, is a little over one a game.
Rim protection is one input into a defensive rating and not the whole of it. What separates it from the other inputs on this roster is that last season's figure was set by men who were not on the floor, so it can move without anybody changing a scheme.
What happens next#
Camp opens on the campus of BYU-Hawaii on Tuesday, September 29 and runs through Saturday, October 3. The preseason opens against the Clippers in Honolulu on October 4. The regular season opens on October 21 at the Lakers.
Hawaii is where the first evidence shows up, and it is a minutes chart rather than a scheme. Horford is 40. Porzingis has three straight seasons under 60 games. The third big man's job is open between Bassey and Lendeborg, with Niang behind them. The 4.2 blocks a game came from a team whose shot blockers were on the floor for 7.2 percent of its minutes, and whether that stays true is readable off a rotation long before it is readable off a defensive rating.
Sources: Basketball Reference for the 2025-26 Golden State team, opponent and player tables, the Horford and Porzingis career pages, the Vogel coaching record and the Indiana and Lakers team pages; NBA.com's team advanced statistics for the two ratings; RealGM for the 2026-27 Golden State roster and schedule; Monte Poole, NBC Sports Bay Area, September 18, for Kerr's quotation and the division of the staff; Brady Klopfer, Golden State of Mind, September 17, for the club's staff announcement; warriors.com for the training camp and preseason dates.
