Originally posted on RealGM | By John Wilmes | Last updated 2/9/21
There is, within the team-building exercise that happens at all levels of the NBA discourse, much talk about “fit.” Sometimes this talk is explicit, with the word itself being used as a cudgel for or against various roster moves, however hypothetical. Other times, the word is thinly masked, often simply replaced with an ostensibly deal-breaking conclusion that a potentially signable, draftable, or tradeable-for player “can’t shoot.” There are other codes and phrases used to reject certain team makeups, but the subtext of this ever-going calculus is typically buried. What, exactly, is a team supposed to be?
The most common answer here tends toward the unrepeatable blueprint of the 73-win Golden State Warriors. Or, more specifically, toward their limited-use “death lineup,” which, five years later, seems to be a spectre that still haunts the league’s imagination. With its smaller front-court, the lineup maximized speed, switchability, and spacing on both ends of the ball, often running teams off the floor. But lost in the reverential sauce is how minimally this set was actually deployed, how much the Warriors juggernaut actually relied on über-traditional big men, and that three of the “death lineup” members were merely okay three-point shooters, enjoying career clips but mostly just benefiting from the peaking gravity of Steph Curry and Klay Thompson.
The logical endpoint of teams failingly trying to replicate this unicorn season was last year’s Houston Rockets, who went into the playoffs with zero actual centers on their roster. It will take a bit longer to see if this is the case, but the blind spots of that team—not enough size or rebounding, mostly—were likely demonstrated thoroughly enough in their hopeless battle against the super-big Los Angeles Lakers that the experimental, now-disassembled Rockets could, hopefully, mark the bookend of a specific era in team-building assumptions. That many of the statistical and analytical minds who most profoundly grew in audience and influence since that legendary Warriors squad wrongly expected the Rockets to challenge, perhaps even defeat LeBron’s Lakers, should help to reset the collective basketball imagination, as well.
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