It’s the middle of the third quarter of a late December game between the Golden State Warriors and the Sacramento Kings, and Draymond Green lofts a pass over the head of two defenders to Shaun Livingston on the left baseline for an easy floater. Livingston records two points, Green gets credited with the assist, and two plus two still equals four. The earth keeps spinning.

Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors is so prolific with a basketball, so good at knocking down shots with tiny slivers of space to squeak through, that opposing teams must duct tape a defender to him at all times the second he enters the frontcourt. What’s more, the other four opponents must constantly remain hyper-vigilant of his whereabouts in case their teammate loses him.

Set aside for a moment the ankle-breaking, trifecta-raining, finger roll-making sweetness that makes Curry so lethal with the rock in his hands. Silly things like Vine, shooting percentages, and Stephen A. Smith can tell us how valuable he is in that realm. Curry’s game runs much, much deeper. It’s what he does without the ball that makes Golden State’s offense so productive.

He’s guided by an invisible hand, a hand that channels his personal aims and movements toward socially desirable ends: Warriors buckets. The only difference between the invisible hand that guides Curry and the one that Adam Smith set forth in his Wealth of Nations (1776) to describe the machinations behind capitalist economic production is that Curry is being led by a hand that isn’t invisible at all. It’s there. It’s glaring.

It’s Warriors head coach Steve Kerr.

The single most important thing Kerr did upon earning the job in Golden State was to take the ball from Stephen Curry’s mitts. He realized that running Curry through a symphony of down screens, having him set flares, back picks, and, sometimes, just fucking stand there on the wing, would not only help Curry get more open looks but elevate his teammates’ productivity to boot.

The system works from top to bottom. General Manager Bob Myers and the front office have supplied Kerr with ample ball handling ammunition at all five positions. Green, Livingston, Andrew Bogut, Andre Iguodala, Klay Thompson, Leandro Barbosa, Harrison Barnes, and Ian Clark are all capable. If you, like me, define “point guard” as the player who brings the ball up the court and initiates offense, then each of these guys, to varying degrees, is a part-time point guard.

That small ball death lineup that everyone talks about? It’s so effective because all five players can rebound misses and push the ball up the court themselves, eliminating the time-consuming step of seeking out the point guard and handing him the ball. A Golden State defensive rebound is one of the most exciting events in basketball because you know a thunderous transition attack is coming.

This season, Curry has the 9th-lowest time of possession of all point guards who regularly start for their teams. The average number of ticks he holds the ball for when he does get a touch, 3.81 seconds, is laughably lower than any mark set by one of his peers, a testament to the hot-potato brand of ball Golden State plays.

So what’s he doing for the 25 minutes a night he doesn’t have the ball? Spotting up in the corner with his dick in hand? Hardly. He’s doing stuff that the box score doesn’t take into consideration. Like setting up Shaun Livingston for those easy baseline floaters:

I have a theory that defenders are so frenzied chasing Curry around down screens that they’re often tardy alerting teammates of picks set by Curry. The results are deadly. Here’s another example:

OK, yes, that looks like clumsy defense from Omri Casspi, but he also seems to be completely blindsided by the action. Is that his fault, Collison’s, or both of theirs?

Having Curry and Thompson set screens for one another is one of Golden State’s favorite actions. Against particularly ditzy opponents, the Warriors will get four to eight free points per game on layups where both defenders stick to whichever Splash Brother runs to the 3-point line.

Even when Curry is thumbing his nuts in no-man’s-land, like he is here, it has an effect:

Darren Collison, per Sacramento’s game plan, tethers himself to Curry. Just by floating on the weak side, Curry erases any thoughts of helpside, and only an errant pass prevents an uncontested dunk for Green.

Stick him on the strong side of a pick-and-roll toward the middle, and watch as the screen-setter rolls to the basket unchecked:

There’s so much going on here for what looks like such a simple play. Thompson comes off the screen knowing that, if he can lure DeMarcus Cousins toward him, he’ll have an easy lob to Ezeli rumbling toward the hoop. The help can come from one of two places: Curry’s man can conceivably drop down and bump Ezeli off his path, but that’s not happening because no one in his right mind is leaving the best 3-point shooter in history with a wide open look. On the weak side, Green and Iguodala run some convincing down screen decoy action, which makes Rudy Gay commit just enough to clear the paint. Only focused defense from Cousins––it’s efforts like these that inform Boogie’s 3.12 defensive RPM––drowns the action.

Let’s not forget: MVPs aren’t selected for setting killer back screens and spacing the floor. Curry is a magician running the pick-and-roll, and the threat of his pull-up jumper bends the defense in extraordinary, ways.

By now, we all know that he consistently draws both his defender and the roll man’s defender toward him to create four-on-three opportunities for Green and others:

And another:

But there are subtler effects too. Check out how far Rudy Gay, the weak side help defender, has to step over to bump Ezeli on this high pick-and-roll:

Gay has to bite this hard because Cousins, the guy in charge of corralling the screen, must take an extra step or five closer to Curry than he would for, say, anyone else in the NBA. For reference, here’s where a weak side defender positions himself on a normal pick-and-roll against normal NBA players:

The difference is easily identifiable. Roy Hibbert drops back because, simply, he’ll concede that midrange jumper to Brandon Knight. Since Hibbert is deep enough to scurry (“crawl” would be a more apt word) back over to Alex Len, D’Angelo Russell, standing rather inattentively on the weak side, can stick closer to the Suns’ T.J. Warren in the corner. It’s easier to neuter the same basic motion when the ball handler isn’t Stephen Curry.

Ironically, Kerr’s once quite-perceptible guiding hand has become, for all intents and purposes, invisible to the public. Golden State’s head man has been making a slow recovery from back surgery to fix the mistakes of, well, a previous back surgery.

But, according to USA Today’s Sam Amick, he’s been far from AWOL. Throughout the season, Kerr has been hanging around the Warriors’ home practice facility and attending games in Oakland. He’s speaking with interim head coach Luke Walton before games, at morning shootaround, and even outside the locker room during halftime.

Walton’s the man with the clipboard, the curlicued commander drawing up new action in the huddle during timeouts and, ultimately, the one stirring up five-ingredient potions in the Warriors’ lineup cauldron. Kerr is in the stands. But Curry, Thompson, and the rest of the Warriors embraced Kerr’s offensive system last season, and they’ve carried it with them into 2015-16. You can see it on the court.

Kerr is omnipresent, even if he’s not there.