RealGM

Peak only, which duo would you rather have?

Having peak LeBron to run or anchor an offense is too much of an outlier relative to the other players(more so if we are talking about for today's game). It's still sort of close but also factoring in Kawhi's health I think LeBron/AD is harder to deal with.

In terms of building around a team in the modern era, I’m taking James/Davis. Davis being an effective scorer while being off-ball to an extent neither of the three are combined with James being the best volume creator out of the group is moving the needle for me. While I think Hakeem is certainly a better defensive anchor than Davis, I see the same being true for peak/prime James over 17 and onwards Kawhi (when he took a notable offensive leap).

Dont like this vision of hakeem and kawhi taking turns with isolations

Is Kawhi assumed to be healthy? I’m *very* high on healthy Kawhi and regard peak, healthy Kawhi as being about as good as anyone ever. Just for reference, from 2016-2017 onwards, Kawhi has a 29.1 playoff PER (and 26.1 in the regular season), along with being an elite defender. And his teams have averaged being about 7% above league-average offensive efficiency when he’s on the court in those years, which is up there with peak LeBron. So I’m actually not sure that the difference between peak LeBron and peak Kawhi is as large as the difference between peak Hakeem and peak AD. I kind of think it’s not—though of course peak Kawhi is almost a hypothetical, so if we don’t assume health then this is a no-brainer. All that said, I’m also not sure Kawhi and Hakeem would fit well together offensively, though Kawhi’s got a very Jordan/Kobe-esque offensive game and that sort of game did work with Shaq, so it could probably work with another major post threat in Hakeem.