Joey Wheeler wrote:Some interesting teams. Though I think people are generally overrating the importance of fit; yes it's important, but in the NBA/basketball in general overwhelming talent tends to prevail. There's at least one currently active player I have in mind who's so much more talented than many of the role guys already selected that I'd have selected him for sure regardless of any fit considerations.
And of course there's Jordan getting picked 8th. Can't see any scenario where it's advantageous to have say Steve Nash on your team rather than Michael Jordan, regardless of how the rest of the team is constructed.
Well, I'll say up front that I had no expectation I could convince voters that a Nash-led team would win the title. I'm certainly hoping the truth is otherwise, but the way I see basketball is out of alignment with most people, so I'm going to try to just have fun with it.
You should know up front that that this is a FGA-limited league. That means that whatever your ranking of players would typically be, the guys who shoot more are now less valuable, and the guys who shoot less are more valuable. Jordan shot about twice as much as Nash, depending on the year, and so the question is whether you can use those extra FGAs on other teammates to make up for the edge Jordan has as an all around player.
If you say the answer is "No", again, that's what I expect most would believe so I get it, but I might ask the question:
How big of a FGA teammate handicap would Jordan need to have before it would be too much? If you can't imagine an answer, you're not thinking it through with enough depth.
Now, part of what I find interesting here is the premise that I believe to be truth:
I think Nash led the most dominant run of offenses in NBA history and did so by being at the bleeding edge of a paradigm we now understand he and his team could have gone further with. There's therefore no reason why I can't have the best offense in this league.
If you scoff at that, well, then I was never going to convince you in the first place.
Accepting the premise, the question becomes defense. How do you build the best defense around Nash so as to mitigate his weaknesses (and take advantage of his strengths, which exist as well). Whether it is "good enough" to win the championship here or not, it's an interesting challenge to just see how good you can make the team.
Last thing, about "fit". I built my team knowing how I wanted my players to play within the scheme and how they would function in tandem with one another on the court...which is what fit is about. When you talk about fit dismissively, to me that's like hearing you say that none of that is really factoring in to how you're deciding who would win, which seems like a problem.
Now, I think the truth is that you're imagining it how you imagine it and I'm imagining it how I imagine it, and it's okay that we do it differently. I'll tell you though I think you're naive if you think that just throwing talent on to the court and having them play bunched like 1960s era grapes is going to give you a better offense than one built around state-of-the-art paradigms with the ability to choose from all the guys of the past 40+ years.
