WASHINGTON — It was early enough on Saturday night that Game 6 of the N.B.A.’s Western Conference finals was still competitive, and Cheryl Reeve, the coach of the defending W.N.B.A. champion Minnesota Lynx, attempted to diagnose all that ailed the Golden State Warriors in their series with the Houston Rockets.

The Warriors’ offensive sets were stagnant. Nobody was setting screens away from the ball. Kevin Durant was trying to create too much by himself off the dribble, and the ball was not finding Draymond Green in the middle of the floor. Good things happen, Reeve said, when Green gets the ball around the elbow. His teammates tend to set screens around him, and Green is terrific at finding cutters zooming to the basket for layups.

“They would just pick you apart with that,” Reeve said as she watched the game on television. “But I just don’t see as much of it anymore.”

Perhaps the Warriors began to realize that, too. By the second half of their 115-86 victory, they had rediscovered components of their old formula, and it was the good stuff: the motion, the passing and the cutting. Their improved play was summed up nicely by one sequence of the fourth quarter, when Nick Young set a screen for Stephen Curry away from the ball, and Green — back at the elbow, where he makes his millions — located Curry in the corner for a 3-pointer: Swish.