Hybrids

The best starting five but each position we get to use a hybrid of two players. We're being fairly but not totally strict about positions and we're not reusing players. The players bring their pluses but not their minuses -- two players with bad passing will take whosever is better, and two players with complementary skills in the same category (e.g. Steph's distance shooting plus Kobe's midrange) will bring the best of both.

PG: Steph Curry / Chris Paul

If we were to define our Ideal Point Guard Skillset, it would probably look something like Shooting -- Passing -- Defense. For Shooting there are a few options: Steph is first by far, and Nash is like a much lower-volume Steph (and consequently has nowhere near the impact through his shooting that Steph does). For Passing we'd ideally like to see Magic or Nash, but Paul isn't that far behind. And for Defense, my traditional choice is Payton but Paul has been so good while defending against by far the best, quickest, and most athletic group of point guards we've ever seen that I'm actually not convinced he's that much worse. So we're compromising here a little bit.

How could we possibly look to improve? Nash/Payton is always an option, but we lose the impact of Steph's shooting. Initially I was going to go Steph/Payton, but I think the difference between Paul's passing and Steph/Payton's is a little bigger than the difference between Payton's defense and Paul's.

SG: Kobe Bryant / Ray Allen

This one is a little strange. We still like the Shooting -- Passing -- Defense triad, but with less emphasis on Passing and more on Shooting (and particularly we'd like to see versatility in scoring -- finishing at the rim and midrange scoring ability are desirable here). But the shooting guard position is a little weird. We have Kobe and Jordan at the top, then like Wade, Harden, Jerry West... It's a mess. And there are no outstanding defenders up there. We could talk about like Tony Allen, but then you're settling for Kobe or like James Harden (eww) on offense, and I think we can do a little better.

Kobe's defense is good enough for me here, and his midrange scoring and finishing is in my opinion a little better developed and more sophisticated than Jordan's. As far as distance shooting, my initial inclination was Klay Thompson, but prime Allen was about as productive on similar efficiency with a lot more of his own shot creation: Thompson's % of 3s assisted in '16 was 92% compared to '06 Allen's 75%. Of course neither is elite -- '16 Steph, amazingly, was assisted on only 55% of his threes (!!) and '19 James Harden, the ultimate 3-point chucker, was assisted on only 16% of his threes. I think we're okay with our 2-guard settling somewhere in the middle here. Allen will work fine.

Actually I want to take a second and marvel at those percentages. 16% for Harden!! 92% for Thompson!! What the hell!! Okay I'm done.

SF: LeBron James / Kevin Durant

What is missing from LeBron? He's the most perfect basketball player we've ever seen, and hence both a very forgiving and very challenging player to work with in this exercise. Do we want to improve his already-strong shooting with someone like Bird? Improve his shooting and scoring with Durant (spoilers: yes)? Improve his defense (slightly?) with Kawhi or Bowen or something? Improve his passing with, uh, maybe no one because he's probably the best passing non-guard of all time?

Anyway, what we decided we wanted to do is improve his shooting and scoring. Durant has a very complete offensive game and patches up the closest thing LeBron has to a weakness: inconsistent three-point shooting. Durant isn't exactly the picture of consistency either, but his numbers skew better. Take it for what it is: a marginal improvement on what was already basically an ideal player.

PF: Dennis Rodman / Larry Bird

This one was tricky until I remembered that Bird was basically half PF and qualified. Rodman is basically an ideal player for this exercise: he's the best defensive PF ever and the best rebounding PF ever, so all we needed was the PF with the most complete offensive game, rebounds aside. But that's not immediately obvious -- guys like Garnett and Duncan are great but generally better on defense; Karl Malone was extremely productive but didn't have the range or the passing skill I'm looking for. So who's the answer, right? It's Bird. The answer is Bird. Passing, scoring, range. That's it. I did it.

(Swear to god I looked up Jokic's 3pt% before I remembered. Spoilers: it's not great. Also he's a center apparently.)

C: Shaquille O'Neal / Hakeem Olajuwon

Center is a complicated position. There's unending talent but it's not easy to divide the skillset up into anything more specific than like Offense / Defense. On the Offensive end, we essentially have two choices: take a guy with a lot of skill and decent range like Hakeem, or we take a steam engine who can just score two points fourteen times a game with extreme consistency. My sense is that we're a little better off going with Shaq here, if only because there is no center in history we'd rather have taking a shot from outside 3 feet than any of the other four guys we're starting here.

Defensively it's simpler. Hakeem or Ben Wallace? Honestly, my sense is that Wallace is a little better. That said, he doesn't have quite the same defensive versatility and his best years came playing with a defensive juggernaut stacked top to bottom with talent (the '04 Pistons had four of the top 25 and seven of the top 80 players by DWS that year, for a very rough approximation). Additionally, since we're only taking the best from each player, it's nice to get Hakeem's midrange (shaky though it may be) to pair with Shaq's dominance at the rim. Ideally we'll see some decent judgment here and probably not as many midrange shots as Hakeem took, but it's not clear where we're getting that good judgment from. Maybe Wallace is better just because he's never going to take midrange shots, and neither is Shaq. But I generally think that more skill is better than less, so let's maximize what we can.

Coda: If you buy into the "Ben Simmons is a Passing Genius" myth (I don't) then Simmons/Steph starts to look really fun, and it's current players. Harden/Kobe would be fun to watch if only to see what the shot selection looks like. Wilt/Wallace was a brief thought. Steph/Magic is absolutely disgusting (in a good way) on offense, and (in a bad way) on defense. Part of me wanted to use Garnett/Wallace, but it felt dishonest to characterize Garnett, who overwhelmingly played PF, as a center. That said, I trust Garnett's midrange more than Hakeem's.