Lesson from the finals: wings are out, load up on guards?

[Black Jack]

The real lesson....trade stars like PG for a haul quickly once your team stalls out below contender status.

[Doctor MJ]

If we're looking for team building lessons from the 2025 playoffs and the finals in particular, the one that stands out to me is that both OKC and Indiana invested heavily on guards even when they already had a deep rotation (the return of the more traditional PF/C combo is another but that's a separate topic). Not just any guards, but specifically the big, long, 6'4" - 6'6" types with on ball skills and tenacious defense.

The Thunder, despite already having SGA (6'6") and Lu Dort (6'4") at the beginning of their rebuild, have drafted a guard in the lottery every year since 2021. Not only that, but last offseason they extended Aaron Wiggins (6'5") and Isaiah Joe (6'3"), traded for Alex Caruso (6'5"), and drafted Dillon Jones (more of a F, but 6'6") and Ajay Mitchell (6'5") outside of the lottery. I remember questioning why they drafted Cason Wallace when Lu Dort was on the team (maybe Wallace is Dort's successor?), and then after trading for Caruso it became clear that they were purposefully loading up on those types of players to play together.

The Pacers have also invested in these types of guards when it didn't look like an immediate need, drafting Chris Duarte and Bennedict Mathurin (both 6'6") in 2021 and 2022, using a high 2nd round pick on Andrew Nembhard (6'5") when they already had Haliburton and McConnell and trading for Aaron Nesmith (6'6"). For a few years the criticism with the Pacers was that they had a bunch of shooting guards but no wings, and interestingly the guy they invested a lottery pick in that is wing sized (Jarace Walker - 6'8") is not in their playoff rotation.

It's not just OKC and Indiana, in recent years this player type has been critical for Boston (Derrick White and Jrue Holiday), Denver (Bruce Brown and Christian Braun), and other high level playoff contributors (Nickeil Alexander-Walker, Josh Hart, Brandin Podziemski).

The commonality with these players other than their height and wingspan is that they generally came into the league having played PG in college or internationally, but weren't necessarily projected as PG prospects. But their on-ball experience gave them a baseline level of skill and IQ to act as secondary creators when called upon, their quick instincts translate on defense, and their size gave them enough positional versatility to be able to stack those skills together in lineups with at least 3 of these big guard types playing together. For years the "Big Wing", the 6'8" all-around versatile forward with shooting and some ball skills was seen as the ideal player archetype and that teams would want to hoard as many as possible. But I wonder if in the current NBA these slightly smaller but more skilled, more tenacious big guards are the new ideal.

I think you've got good insight here but if course a "big, long guard" is just a wing who can handle and make decisions, right? I mean, LeBron may get listed as a forward, but certainly from this perspective he fits as one of these guards.

This then to say that I think what we're seeing more broadly is that there's just less and less room for specialists who can't do a lot of things for you.