homecourtloss wrote:lessthanjake wrote:I just don’t really subscribe to a take that involves saying KG provides particularly great spacing. He certainly provides some spacing, since he had a very good mid-range shot, but LeBron has usually had at least one big who actually has three-point range (Love, Bosh in the later Miami years, 2020 Davis, role players like Frye and old Rashard Lewis, etc.), so a PF that has sub-three-point range would arguably be *less* spacing than LeBron had for a lot of his career. Of course, Garnett can definitely make up for that in a lot of other ways (being a very good passer, amazing defender, etc.), but on the issue of spacing I just don’t see Garnett as being a particular positive. He’s not a negative (unless we put him in today’s NBA and didn’t assume he improved his three-point shooting—in which case he would be a spacing negative), but I don’t think it’s a particular positive or something that you really want your offense geared around.
Again, he was able to create all-time impact with non three point shooters in Andy and Z as well as TT as the sole big, so whether KG doesn't provide ideal spacing wouldn't matter.
LeBron got much more consistently good offensive results in the playoffs when he had three-point spacing from his bigs.
I feel like this should be obvious to anyone who has followed LeBron’s career, and it also just makes a huge amount of sense based on LeBron’s style of play, but just for reference, see the numbers in Djoker’s offensive legends thread: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?t=2448658. The general story is that LeBron’s playoff offenses often struggled or at least weren’t great until the Heat started experimenting with lineups that were small and/or had three-point spacing from a big. And that includes not great playoff offenses in years that were in the heart of his best years (2010, 2011), so this isn’t a he-wasn’t-as-good-back-then thing. Subsequent to that, the one prime year that he didn’t really get that small ball and/or three-point spacing from a big (2015 due to injuries) was the year where the playoff offense went back down to the levels it had generally been at before. The only real exception to this storyline was the Cavs playoff offense being great in 2009. Credit to LeBron for that, but it’s pretty clearly more of an exception to a general storyline than it is the rule, and that makes sense when we realize it was easily the best he shot from mid-range in the playoffs. Him being on fire from mid-range basically made him completely uncounterable even without good spacing, but that mid-range shooting was not the norm for him in general. In general, spacing from bigs definitely helps him a lot, because it massively facilitates his drive-and-kick game. This is not a particularly bad thing to be the case, because you actually want spacing from your bigs anyways. But it is a reason to think that a pairing with Garnett isn’t entirely ideal.
All that said, I’m not convinced Garnett couldn’t develop three-point range if it was deemed important. He did have a good mid-range shot but just played in an era where spacing out to the three-point line wasn’t considered particularly important. If Garnett played with LeBron (or just in the modern era), maybe he’d develop a three-point shot. It wouldn’t surprise me at all. In which case, I don’t really have any concerns about fit with LeBron.
The other thing I’d note about this is something I believe I already mentioned: A team with LeBron and Garnett could potentially go small and put Garnett at the C position, and potentially with LeBron at the PF. At that point, the team would have the kind of spacing LeBron wants, even if Garnett didn’t exactly space out to the three-point line (assuming that the PG, SG, and SF are all guys who can shoot, but that isn’t exactly a huge lift in terms of roster construction). The negative there is that going small hurts the team’s defense and rebounding. I guess you wouldn’t really want Garnett guarding a massive center like Shaq or Jokic, but it’d probably generally be fine. You do lose some rebounding advantage by slotting Garnett at C instead of PF, but he’s a great rebounder, so I don’t think the team would get killed on the boards. So perhaps that’s what the team would do. And it would probably work very well. But there’s still some compromise there caused by Garnett’s relative lack of spacing.
