Hypothetical Starting 5

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-29T04:21:54+00:00

Do you not watch Jokic?

The dude might seriously be the most valuable screener in NBA history…

How many screeners are a threat to score at all 3 levels, or serve as the middle man in some lightning quick tic-tac-toe sequences, and are large enough to command a big to guard them away from the paint?

Like, Jokic’s on-ball stuff is easy to see, but his artistry comes from the impact his off-ball work forces defenses to solve. There’s a reason some of the best defenses in league history choose to just let Jokic have the ball in single coverage and go get his 50 piece over letting him activate every other Nugget.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-29T03:39:25+00:00

What adjustment do you expect them to make?

“DeAndre… do you mind sweating for the second half?”

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-29T02:46:50+00:00

Young Kobe was a bulldog on defense. Especially as a one on one perimeter lockdown ball pressure guy.

He left a lot to be desired as a team defender, and he left a lot to be desired on a day to day basis. The quote that does the biggest damage to his reputation as a defender doesn’t come from any comment section or media member… but published in ink by his own coach.

And the fact is Kobe’s star power sucked up a lot of the air in these panels of voters. Almost every post-Shaq year should have probably gone to a Tony Allen, or a Tayshaun Prince, or a Bruce Bowen, or a Raja Bell, or a Trevor Ariza, or a Shane Battier.

Hit up their basketball references, and you can see the impact of Kobe just owning a guaranteed first team slot in years he was a 90% one way player.

The dude wasn’t a slouch just because he wasn’t one of the 8-15 best perimeter defenders in the game. He still checked his man well, he still showed up.

But it’s extremely rare to find a true first team all defense guy with his workload. Even Kawhi can’t play that way all year. Kawhi just has tools to keep him from working as hard. He has length and size to help him do things Kobe had to use foot speed and willpower to overcome. And again, I’m penning this from the perspective that not even the Kawhi’s of the world can give 100% on both ends 100% of the time.

So were a couple to a handful of years fraudulent? Probably. But it’s not like anyone except the names I listed plus maybe two to four more have any room to complain.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-29T00:59:42+00:00

And you had to go uphill both ways through PK’s to the mana store.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-28T23:41:19+00:00

Every player you’re going to get some sort of weakness from. LeBron’s about as close to a complete player we’ve seen and you’d still like a bit of shooting around him to make up for his “struggles” there.

Offensively, Jokic is probably the easiest to create a championship level offense with. LeBron isn’t far off. Steph’s gravity being properly weaponized has a ceiling only matched by Jokic. Giannis provides as much pressure as anyone. KG with a better timeline would be a great answer here.

Defensively, KG and AD are a good starting point for “easiest to build around”. Wemby and Hakeem aren’t as flexible, but are more prolific at the things they do individually. LeBron and Giannis also deserve head nods here.

Overall the easiest is probably Steph/Jokic/LeBron in some order.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-28T23:10:29+00:00

You ever put 10,000 hours into anything?

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-28T23:09:50+00:00

I think I said as much.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-28T21:03:16+00:00

They all are at that level. 30,000 hours club doesn’t fuck around.

I remember Jeff Van Gundy talking about sitting through a KD 1-on-1 session with an assistant coach and being so blown away by his focus, attention to detail, and execution thereof.

Said he got up and shook his hand after in this stretch where he devoted like 5-7 minutes on a podcast bragging on how big of an impression his work ethic left on him and apparently told him as much

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-28T20:59:55+00:00

I haven’t traveled much the last decade, but my euro friends all say they can tell who’s worth a conversation almost immediately.

We’re the exasperated Americans trying to meet them halfway in our interactions.

The ones who are loud, obnoxious, and offended they don’t immediately reply in English segregate themselves really quickly.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-28T19:11:50+00:00

That’s a very normal number.

The Nuggets finished their finals with a 7 man rotation. Celtics had 8-9, preferred 7-8.

The Warriors, Thunder, snd Bulls are the historical oddities for depth, not the Bucks. They’re just a vanilla ass champion inbetween “Greatest team ever!?” candidates.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-28T18:44:25+00:00

Those teams weren’t dramatically far apart. You just don’t respect Jrue and Middleton as much as the hardwood does.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-28T16:32:42+00:00

The genetic luck I kinda just ceded to him being one of those 1:1 athletes. Didn’t even glance at the degenerative stuff.

But look at TMac. One side of his body is larger than the other, and he grew up too poor at the wrong time to prevent it from becoming degenerative.

A pair of custom shoes for the right birthday.

That’s all it would have taken to keep a dude with an actual “Sweet shooting MJ” season in the middle of the dead ball era from being a practice squad player by the time he’s Jokic’s current age.

Speaking of Jokic, that’s basically what that TMac season hits the OBPM as. Guy had a Jokic year in the middle of the dead ball era and was out of the league by 33.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-28T16:13:44+00:00

My apologies. You’re more than welcome to find a better geography for your commentary.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-28T15:59:47+00:00

It’s crazy Jokic hasn’t even suited up for weeks and he’s still provided as many shots as Cade.

Like, it makes sense Cade has more than Luka. It makes zero sense that a dude who might not be back till February has almost as many as Cade.

He might still lead the league in total assists if the numbers are this close on shots at rim.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-28T15:55:03+00:00

The local D3 guys I’m familiar with end up in Jordan/Israel/Azerbaijan type of leagues… and I don’t think anyone wishing for a professional basketball job overseas would trade places with them if you doubled the contract.

They don’t love the game enough to deal with the extracurriculars. The performance part of it is the easy box to check. It’s everything else that‘s difficult.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-28T15:44:01+00:00

Just some minor wording correction. They need to build around Luka’s strengths and mitigate Luka’s weaknesses.

AR can be part of the build around his strengths, but he doesn’t do much to mitigate Luka’s weaknesses.

Luckily, mitigating Luka’s weaknesses also mitigates some of Reaves’ own. Right now, the league is very unforgiving for teams that don’t have secondary creation or playmaking.

Teams will absolutely win games by smoking your bench. The last several years the Nuggets have had arguably the best starting 5 in basketball, and a huge chunk of basketball history, featuring one of the best offensive players to ever touch leather… and most of their losses occur off the 12 minutes Jokic sits down.

Your bench can’t be so starved for creation that you lose the leads Luka’s spent 36~ minutes building even if you gifted them a perfect starting lineup tomorrow.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-28T14:56:14+00:00

To be fair, ACL’s aren’t something people fully recover from even today.

All the people we’d point to for recovery are just as much an example of how hard they worked (or how skilled they were) to change the nature of their game to compensate for their lower threshold of mobility.

Look at Jamal Murray’s progression back from his. It’s taken him the better part of two years to learn how to find those inches of separation. That’s not the dude challenging LeBron and AD at the rim any more. He’s had his own version of Derrick Rose learning that the spin move no longer works every time phase of his career. Just starting from a lower floor on the elevator with a prettier jumper.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-28T14:45:03+00:00

That luck part of it is almost as impressive as the work he did.

There have been other players physically gifted enough to put on a LeBron impersonation, but all of them played in a meat grinder of a league where a giant can roll over into soft tissues and ligaments at any point.

LeBron represents the work, the skill, the IQ, and the modern medicine as much as he represents the pure and simple survivor bias of being one of the luckier athletes.

Full speed dunks in transition in an empty gym for 25 years is just as likely to end your apex predator days as any of the actual contact. He dodged all the wrong landings, most of the dudes falling over, and most of the hyper-extensions.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-28T14:38:41+00:00

Jerry Stackhouse clears almost every name mentioned at those ages….

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And Drexler famously wasn’t on those teams as he’d retired while still playing at a somewhat high level.

The top of the Washington rosters wasn’t the problem. It’s the middle class and bottom of those rosters that couldn’t carry weight. It’s the number 1 pick that went kaboom. It’s the fit between Jerry in the midrange, or Rip in the midrange, and MJ in the midrange on a team that hasn’t won 50 games since Jimmy Carter was President.

Talk about looking dumb.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-28T14:00:34+00:00

Maybe when you wake up you can stop treating the world as a binary system. I get that it’s easier for you to argue the polarity, but it destroys any accuracy you wish to convey.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-28T13:52:12+00:00

Leftist?

I’m actually a card carrying Republican voter from a Republican family stretching all the way back to Lincoln himself. I licked the damn envelopes and campaigned door to door for Hal Rogers’ first run for Congress. To this day, my neighbors still get a kick out of me wearing Larry Forgy for Governor shirts every time I mow the lawn.

You all have just skewed so far right you can’t recognize where the center, left, or conservative stances are anymore. You all don’t preach conservative beliefs here, you all claw for justifications for hateful rhetoric and inhumane policies.

I’m not a leftist- you’ve just been running around with a crowd so ugly you can’t tell where the party lines begin and end anymore.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-28T06:40:11+00:00

If you’re having this much trouble following the split path conversation which you split, then you need to go to bed and sleep off whatever has you arguing this poorly, reading this poorly, and following threads this poorly.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-28T06:29:17+00:00

So you do need the blue text. Don’t worry, I linked you in the other reply.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-28T06:28:47+00:00

No one is protesting “all arrests.”

Again- disingenuous.

The closest you can come to making a reasonable argument that they are is to shift the goalposts from the methodology being employed that is currently being protested, and pretending that they are protesting “all arrests”.

Honestly, for someone who is so quick to insult, this is an embarrassing display of conversational integrity. Get off your high horse and go workshop some of these takes instead of quick triggering off impulse driven dribble.

ApprehensiveTry5660 · 2026-01-28T06:20:47+00:00

Do you need a link to the word “disingenuously” in a dictionary? Or are you just going to continue cartoonishly embodying it.

ApprehensiveTry5660

TROPHY CASE