KG/Jason Terry or Dirk/Jason Terry

[mtron929]

Yes, I have a not-so hidden agenda here, but if the goal is to win a championship, who would you build with? KG Jason Terry or Dirk Jason Terry? In other words, if you were a GM and you have these guys for 10+ years, which team would be easier to build a championship caliber team?

The reason I make this particular comparison is that all of the KG comparisons here puts him with an all time top 20 player (in which case KG is an excellent excellent candidate as a 2nd banana), which I feel like inflate his value. How would his value look if you put him with a typical 3rd (or at best 2nd) option player?

[Clyde Frazier]

Hmm... wouldn't the comparison be more apt with a player both guys didn't play with? We know what happened with dirk and terry, and have a huge sample size, too. Any of terry's faults or struggles weren't a result of dirk's play, either.

Someone like prime Joe Johnson probably fits the question well enough.

[Timmaytime]

I think it depends on a lot more than just the second option. As a premise, I guess i'll go with Dirk, simply because I have more faith in him as a primary offensive option, although I still think KG is a better player

[drza]

Interestingly, Terry is a player that I always identified as a good fit next to Garnett. Terry was a combo/shooting guard in a point guard's body, so ideally he'd be in a position to score and distribute as necessary without having to be a full-time floor general. In his prime, Garnett played enough point-power-forward that scoring guards were able to thrive next to him. We saw guards like early Chauncey, Troy Hudson and Sam Cassell each have career years next to KG during those seasons and Terry stylistically would fit well in that mold. Thus, on the court, I think Garnett and Terry would have had great stylistic synergy. Terry would have been able to maximize what he does best, and Garnett's game was built for 2-man combos with scoring on-ball guards that can knock down the jumper.

Impact-wise, Terry's footprint is very interesting. He measures out Terribly on defense. On DocMJ's scaled single-season RAPM spreadsheet from 1998 - 2012, using his method of grouping the top-5 marks for every player and ranking them, Terry comes out DEAD LAST among all 1605 players measured. That's somewhat deceptive because of the way that the spreadsheet is set up (e.g. to measure worst defender you'd want to group by lowest 5 scorers, not best 5 scores, and by that measure Terry is poor but nowhere near the bottom of the league, a mark likely held by Troy Hudson). But the point comes through: year-by-year his presence on the court correlated with his team playing worse defense on a very consistent basis. The defensive component is why his overall impact, as measured by yearly RAPM, is a bit depressed (118th in the 5-year Doc MJ scaled RAPM method). But, the generally held rule is that for point guards their defensive footprint isn't as important as their offensive one.

And on offense, Terry measures out with a very strong positive outcome. Using that same scaled RAPM method, Terry measures out as 26th on offense, just ahead of a very interesting name: Sam Cassell. Looking more closely at their top-5 individual ORAPM seasons, in descending order, we get:

Terry: +5.3 (2007), +4.6 (2011), +4.1 (2008), +3.9 (2006), +2.8 (2005)
Cassell: +4.6 (2004),+4.6 (1998*), +3.9 (1999), +3.5 (2000), +3.1 (2005)

First, those are very similar marks over multiple years, arguing that offensively Terry and Cassell tended to have a similar impact. Second, both of them had their maximum offensive impacts when healthy next to dominant bigs (Dirk and KG). Terry' s offensive impact was larger in Dallas playing off of Dirk than it was in Atlanta where he was more "the man", helping illustrate (to me) that he was meant to be a second option playing off a great big.

So if we're trying to picture what Terry would look like as the second piece on a team built around KG, to me the obvious comp is Cassell. In a way, Terry is like a stylistic morph between Cassell and Hudson, but with an offensive impact more similar to Cassell's.

So, per the OP, consider what the Timberwolves would have looked like with a decade-plus of Garnett next to a slightly scaled down but much healthier Sam Cassell as the building points.

My 2 cents.

*1998 is a year where Doc MJ and Lorak identified an error that causes all marks from that season to scale incorrectly upward.

[JordansBulls]

Dirk and Terry. KG could only win 1 title with Paul Pierce and Ray Allen on his team.

[Colbinii]

Dirk and Terry. KG could only win 1 title with Paul Pierce and Ray Allen on his team.

Dirk couldn't win with Steve Nash on his team and only won once with Marion/Terry/Kidd on his team.