colts18 wrote:I do find it out that D Wade gets criticized for fitting poorly with LeBron when he is the only superstar in history who has been put in that position. When in history has a star had to play with a player who's skillset overlapped so much and had to take a backseat at the same time? How would Michael Jordan look if the Bulls traded for Clyde Drexler then made MJ the 2nd option? I imagine it wouldn't look pretty. How well would Shaq fit if Kareem Abdul Jabbar came to his team?
If Steve Nash had a similar player like CP3 come to his squad with Nash moved to the 2, I bet you Nash's "Historical" offensive impact will not look so historical anymore. In fact it did happen to Nash. Nash played with Jason Kidd and Kevin Johnson. He wasn't exactly lighting the world on fire back then.
1. I think you need to ask yourself whether you'd rank Wade higher if the Heatles had reeled off 7 straight 70 win seasons and titles. If the answer is "Yes", then you're already holding poor fit against Wade, and the notion that you and I are actually diverging on this is a false dichotomy. If the answer is "No", I don't think you're actually being honest with yourself. We all credit and criticize players for their ability to fit with other players.
2. It's true that if you put a guy next to another great talent with identical skillsets his ability to impact in that context decreases no matter who the guy is, but different guys degrade more gracefully than others. We have conversations about portability, scalability, ceiling-raising because we're identifying which skillsets are the graceful ones, and a volume scorer with limitations as a passer and shooter is very much not one of the graceful ones.
3. If Jordan was a 2nd option...it does matter that Jordan is good enough that there is no one better at his role than he is. Doesn't make him portable necessarily, but it does make him more scalable.
4. It also matters that Jordan was an excellent mid-range shooter while also being taller than Wade. That's what makes him more portable than Wade.
5. Re: Nash with CP3. It's worth noting that Nash would be fantastic in a read & react scheme. His +/- impact is going to go down if he's on a team with mega BBIQ improvisers, but the team itself would only get better. Worth noting that CP3 would not fair as well because he's a control freak who likes to play slow. For this reason as offensive players, Nash is more portable in addition to more scalable.
6. On Suns with Kidd/KJ. It has to be noted that the Suns weren't trying to play all these guys together so we're talking about an entirely different thing. That said, by Nash's 2nd year the +/- data appears to indicate that he was already a more impactful player than Kidd and that they were wrong to keep him on the bench and then trade him. Folks with the organization said as much at the time and this memory has everything to do with why they later traded Kidd and pursued Nash.
7. But as with CP3, Kidd isn't anywhere near as portable as Nash if only because of his shooting handicap.
