The Golden State Warriors need an offensive boost, and Steve Kerr is tasked with finding ways to achieve that with a similar roster to last season.

The Warriors finished 19th in 2025-26 offensive rating, per Cleaning the Glass. That was their worst ranking in five years.

One way Kerr thinks the offense can improve is by having Draymond Green take more wide-open threes.

“We have to cut back on the turnovers. I want him shooting the three when he’s open,” Kerr said on the Tom Tolbert Show. “When he shoots a three, he may not be a super high percentage shooter, but possessions are good for us when he shoots because number one, it’s worth three. Number two, we get offensive rebounds. Number three, there’s a flow to the game that has to happen that if someone is open and they shoot it, the game keeps moving.”

The Math Supports Kerr’s Point

Green shot 32.6 percent on threes last season. That means his effective field-goal percentage when attempting threes was 48.9 percent.

The NBA’s average effective field-goal percentage was 54.6 percent last season.

So a Green three isn’t an efficient shot, which I’m sure you didn’t need me to tell you.

But when Green was wide open—a defender not within six feet of him, as measured by NBA.com—he shot 34.7 percent on threes last year.

That’s a 52.0 effective field-goal percentage, which is still below the league average, but much better.

There’s no data on how many offensive rebounds the Warriors corralled on Green’s missed open threes. But one would assume it was close to their offensive rebounding rate of 25.8 percent.

To get a full-picture view of the value of Green taking a wide-open three, we have to take the expected points per possession on Green’s wide-open three-point looks (1.04) and combine it with the expected points per possession the Warriors score after he misses.

That number is approximately 1.23 points per possession. That means if every single possession resulted in a Green wide-open three-point attempt, the Warriors would top the Celtics for the most efficient offense in the league.

Of course, there are several caveats here. I’ll limit you all to one, which is that every team’s expected points per possession when filtered for wide-open three-point attempts is sky high.

But the point is the math supports having Green take these shots when he’s wide open, and we haven’t even gotten into how often he turns it over after turning down a shot, which anecdotally feels like a more common result than it used to.

It’s commendable that Green turns down shots in an attempt to get Stephen Curry more looks, but the bigger-picture issue is that Green led the NBA in turnover percentage by a big margin.

Lowering that turnover rate is key, and the easiest way to do it is to shoot more when wide open.

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