Welcome back and we're going right into it.
A while back I made this post, in which I explain what a Wine Cellar team is and some of the problems with the one Bill Simmons puts forward in his Book of Basketball. My team is much better, and not just because a lot of good seasons have happened since 2009. Although for the record a lot of good seasons have happened since 2009. Here's the Wine Cellar team, in the order I think of it.
Starting PG: 2016 Steph Curry
I mentioned this in the previous post, but three-point shooting is the great basketball revolution of this millennium and Steph Curry is its prophet. You cannot pretend to make a serious Wine Cellar team without Curry on it; his skillset is too valuable, too unique. 400 made threes at 45.4% is one of the great achievements in basketball history and you're not getting it from anyone else.
Starting SG: 2003 Kobe Bryant
Okay, here we go. Jordan is not on this team. There are many reasons for this, including his terrible three-point shooting (it's much worse than you might think because he benefited from a temporarily shortened line in the 90s), his being an asshole (he punched Steve Kerr in the face), his inability to play on a team with anyone better than him (he only succeeded on the Bulls because Pippen had such a huge dick he was willing to let Jordan pretend to be the best player on the team although in fact he was THIRD), and the fact that I hate him. Kobe's much better from three. James Harden might be better still (although not as much as you think -- Harden's best 3pt shooting season by volume was in 2019, when he made the second-most threes of all time but shot only 36.8%, which is actually WORSE than Kobe's 38.3% in '03, although on 3x the volume), but his atrocious defense compared with Kobe's elite defense makes the difference here. Kobe is also great at playing with other star teammates, which will be helpful on this team.
Starting SF: 2013 LeBron James
You really can't go wrong with LeBron, but 2013 is about the best he's ever looked. LeBron vs. Bird used to be a interesting conversation but that stopped around 10 years ago. Bird's still an all-time great and a player I personally love despite his affiliation, and I'd bet good money he makes it on this team somewhere, but LeBron is starting.
Starting PF: 1992 Dennis Rodman
If you think this is a weird pick at all, take a couple hours and go read this. Rodman is the most valuable player in NBA history (and has the most thorough statistical case for why he's great of any athlete I've ever seen). '92 gives us a nice combination of his rebounding dominance (it's his first of seven consecutive seasons leading the league in rebounds, his first of 7 at 14.9 RPG or higher, and his second of eight leading the league in TRB%) and defense (hard to quantify but his DWS is at an all-time high here).
Starting C: 2000 Shaq
For years I argued this should go to Hakeem, but ultimately this is a team of mismatches and there's never been a bigger mismatch than STEPH. But Shaq is second.
Now for the unpopular picks.
Sixth Man: 2014 Kevin Durant
Whatever. I can't find someone better for what I'm looking for here: a guy to come off the bench and score a bunch of points in a bunch of ways at some position 2-4. Again, there's no substitute for shooting, and Durant's really good at it. I also considered '03 TMac and I guess Giannis.
Bench PG: 1996 Gary Payton
We're running 2.2 units: a starting unit, a 6th man, and a 5-man bench unit that plays as a group. Our units are constructed to be complements to each other, so that if need be (e.g. we're getting destroyed by Allen Iverson and Kobe is busy guarding James Harden or something), we can sub in our backup PG, who just so happens to be the best defensive guard in history. Additionally our 5-man bench unit will play well and be balanced as a whole. Anyway, Payton is a god-tier defender, if only competent on the offensive end. This is the year, if you're wondering, that he guarded Jordan in the Finals and held him to under 40% shooting in the last four games of the series.
Bench SG: 2019 James Harden
Okay, so I just explained why Harden's three-point shooting is a little overrated, and yes, I hate him. But there's just not a substitute for a guy who makes 378 threes in a season, scoring 36.1 PPG. (I mean there is, and it's Steph, but we've already got him.) We need an offensive creator to pair with Payton and Harden is -- and I'm choking back vomit here -- good for that.
Bench SF: 1986 Larry Bird
A player of dubious athleticism, who took threes before they were cool (or meaningful) and made a really high percentage of them at really low volume, one of the most competitive players in history without being a gigantic asshole (cough cough Jordan). I really like Bird. I think he's a phenomenal passer, a proven shooter, and a great teammate. I genuinely considered including him in the starting team, which is saying a lot because, again, he played in 1986. And for the Celtics.
Bench PF: 2004 Kevin Garnett
Yeah I'm the asshole who thinks Garnett was better than Duncan. Guess who my coach is? Not Popovich. I love Garnett's fire, I love his passing, I love his defense. If you're the kind of person who likes jacking off to advanced stats, Garnett has the better advanced stats across the board. I don't know what to tell you, man. Garnett's just better. Duncan's reputation got inflated in a big way by winning five rings, but he was never actually as good as he looked.
Bench C: 1990 Hakeem Olajuwon
Honestly I'm just taking a wild swing at the year. I'm pretty sure Hakeem was being a god for pretty much the first 12 years of his career. You might want '94 for the awards but he was just better in '90. Anyway, Hakeem was the best post player ever and an astonishingly versatile defensive player. Center is really a gimme in these kinds of exercises, though. Anyone except like Bill Russell or Walton would be fine here.
12th Man: 1996 Scottie Pippen
Pippen is much better than a 12th man, but he's not quite good enough to start in either unit and so he finds a place here. We don't have a real lockdown defender at the 3 (and Kobe at the 2 might be more focused on offense at times) so Pippen fills that need for us. But I don't expect him to see a lot of minutes. It's a shame, because he's one of the overall best and most versatile players in NBA history.
Coach: 2010 Phil Jackson
Do not say Greg Popovich's name to me right now. Pop is a great coach, and his five rings aren't decorative, but Phil has ELEVEN. He is TWO POINT TWO times more accomplished than Pop. The only guy who's close is Red Auerbach, who coached 15 Hall of Famers -- 15! I counted them! -- and still only won nine rings. No one else has more than five. Phil Jackson is both the most accomplished coach in history (possibly in any sport, certainly in any good sport) and the only remotely reasonable coach for this team. He was legendarily good at getting big egos to coexist, whereas Pop forced Rodman out because he didn't get along with the uber-Christian David Robinson (of course Rodman immediately joined Phil's Bulls and won three rings). I could hire Jackson's former player Steve Kerr as an assistant coach to run the offense, but Phil's basketball mind is so far above mine (and any mortal's, i.e. everyone's but Kobe's) that I'm just gonna let him pick out the rest of the coaching staff. I'm sure he'll take Tex Winter though, and deservedly so. (For what it's worth, my Small Basketball Mind is telling me that the Triangle might actually work really well with these personnel -- Kobe, LeBron, and Shaq, with Steph and Rodman off doing whatever the off guys do in the Triangle, which seems like a good fit for them. On the bench we get Harden, Bird, Hakeem or Garnett, and it should work too, but not quite as well.)
Notable Exclusions:
- Jordan is the obvious one, but I talked about him in the Kobe blurb. I just don't need him, and frankly I don't want him. If anything's going to bring this team down, it's a lack of chemistry, and while Jackson can do a lot, I'm not going to throw the powderkeg of Jordan into this clockwork.
- Magic is still, to me, the greatest point guard of all time, but no one is good enough to displace the value of Curry on the starting team, and we'd really like to have a great defensive guard on the bench, so Magic gets left out.
- Part of me really (really really) wanted to include '07 Steve Nash -- he's one of my favorite players ever, maybe the most all-around offensively gifted point guard ever, and incredibly fun to watch -- but I couldn't justify it. He's not good enough at shooting to displace Curry (he's phenomenal, but low-volume and with nowhere near the kind of gravity), and while he's the second-best passer to ever play point (after Magic, not Stockton), that's not enough to knock Curry off either. And again, we like having an elite defender at our bench point guard.
- As I mentioned, I was close to including either Giannis or McGrady as my sixth man, but Durant just does what I want a little better. But I was close on '03 McGrady.
- Big men are always hard -- Duncan, Kareem, and even Wilt are always considerations. But the four I chose were never in any real jeopardy of being left out.
- I love Scottie Pippen but we have four SFs on this roster. He's not better than LeBron or Bird and he doesn't quite bring to the table what Durant and Bowen do at their respective specialties. On a team of all-around players he'd be the backup SF, for what it's worth. Actually you know what I just decided to put him in over Bowen.
Lineups:
The full roster, to reiterate, is
PG: '16 Curry, '96 Payton
SG: '03 Kobe, '19 Harden
SF: '13 LeBron, '86 Bird, '14 Durant, '96 Pippen
PF: '92 Rodman, '04 Garnett
C: '00 Shaq, '90 Hakeem
So what kinds of lineups can we make? Well, aside from the obvious starting 5 + bench 5, we can make
The God Shooting Lineup: Curry, Harden, Durant, Bird, Shaq
The God Defensive Lineup: Payton, Kobe, Pippen, Rodman, Hakeem
The God Smallball Lineup: Curry, Harden, Kobe, LeBron, Rodman
The God Bigball Lineup: LeBron, Durant, Bird, Garnett, Shaq
The God Old Guy Lineup: Payton, Pippen, Bird, Rodman, Hakeem (avg '92)
The God Young Guy Lineup: Curry, Harden, Durant, LeBron, Garnett (avg '13.2)
FAQ:
Q. Why are they all so young? You have only five players from before 2000, and four in the last 10 years alone.
A. Honestly the difference is shooting. You can see that the young guys are largely the guards/wingmen (avg. 2006), and the older guys are largely big men (avg. 1996), because the latter have skillsets that hold up better in the modern game. I'd love to be able to include guys like West, Cousy, and Baylor, but the fact is their inability to shoot threes (and in Cousy's case, lack of athleticism) hamstrings them in comparison to modern players. This is also the single biggest reason Jordan is unplayable on this team. If you take out the three years with a shortened line, he shot 28.8% from three, a full 10 percentage points below Kobe's '03 shooting.
Q. You don't have Jordan.
A. Yeah. And my team is better for it.
Q. Why don't you have Jordan?
A. I've answered this question repeatedly, but in summary: I think he's overrated, he's bad at shooting threes, he's a bad teammate, he's overly competitive, he's not actually all that valuable (wait on my Jordan article I swear it's gonna kick your ass), the points he scores are heavily duplicable, and I don't think he's good enough at defense to merit a spot. Nor do I think he's uniquely valuable to a winning team like Simmons seemed to,
Q. What's your problem with Jordan?
A. I'm writing a whole article on this. It'll come out eventually. Chill.
Q. Is Harden really good enough to deserve a spot on this team?
A. Honestly, I don't know. I didn't watch 2019 so I don't have an intuitive judgment, but it seems to me that he's doing pretty much exactly what I want from a backup 2, which is be the primary scorer from the outside and create for his teammates. If it's not Harden I'll probably make it Michael Cooper and play Steve Nash at the 1, which might be a better team (and certainly more fun) but loses the relative advantage of Payton's defense over Cooper's and the huge advantage of Harden's high-volume distance shooting over Nash's.
Q. Where is (my favorite player)?
A. They didn't make the cut because they're terrible. But really, this team is built around a specific image and a couple outstanding players. The only guys on this team I absolutely would not substitute are Curry, LeBron, and Rodman. Yes, I would even bench (or cut!) Kobe if given a sufficiently convincing reason.
Q. If Garnett is so good why does Duncan have five championships and Garnett only one?
A. Because Duncan was handed one of the best situations of any rookie in history and capitalized effectively, whereas Garnett was handed a terrible one and then mistakenly chose to go to Boston over LA. So he has bad judgment. Nobody's perfect.
Q. How have you overcome Simmons's mistakes?
A. Excellent question. First off, we've annihilated all bias: we are drawing only two players from the Lakers, Kobe and Shaq, although several more (Payton, LeBron, Rodman, and hopefully one day Curry) eventually played for the team. Meanwhile the Celtics are well-represented with Bird and the future Garnett (can you blame me? the Celtics suck). Second, I stick to his "formula" much more closely: unselfishness + character + defense (!) + rebounding (!!) + MJ (lol). Notably, unlike Simmons, we have some defensive specialists: Payton, Pippen, and Rodman. Third, I am stronger at literally every position.
Here's a comparison:
PG: '16 Curry, '96 Payton ||| '85 Magic, '09 Chris Paul
SG: '03 Kobe, '19 Harden ||| '92 Jordan, '09 Wade, '01 Allen
SF: '13 LeBron, '86 Bird, '14 Durant, '96 Pippen ||| '86 Bird, '92 Pippen, '09 LeBron
PF: '92 Rodman, '04 Garnett ||| '03 Duncan, '86 McHale (lmfao)
C: '00 Shaq, '90 Hakeem ||| '77 Kareem, '77 Walton (lmfaoooo)
Notice a few things. First, there is very little overlap here -- it's Bird (the only player we took from the same year), Pippen, LeBron, and that's it. Second, Simmons has NO shooters anywhere close to mine -- the best shooters on his roster are Paul, Wade, Allen, Bird, and LeBron, none of whom come close to Curry, Harden, LeBron, or Bird. Third, despite my heavy use of current players, note how I don't have three guys from 2020 specifically just because that's the most recent year. That's because I'm not a hack.
Finally, I didn't take Jordan.
(In all honesty, I think Simmons's team is fine, except for the weird vintages, the glaringly wrong McHale/Walton picks, the Kobe omission, and the lack of shooting. I just think mine's a lot better, largely because we fixed those mistakes and benefit from a few phenomenal seasons.)
Q. How many balls are there?
A. Just one. And that's why we only have so many guys who need the ball to survive: Kobe, LeBron, and Harden. Everyone else will be fine working off-the-ball.
Q. Where's Wilt?
Ahh. Yeah. So I literally wrote the article (9 years ago, hot damn) on why Wilt is special, and I stand by that. So why do I have Shaq and Hakeem above him? There are three main reasons: he's risky, he's early, and he's a center. First, we don't know how Wilt would do today, and although I think he'd do fine, there's no reason to risk it when we have the much more modern Shaq and Hakeem, who we KNOW would dominate. Second, while Wilt was an incredible player in the '60s and '70s, the position has evolved a lot since then (for instance, Hakeem's innovations in the post can still be seen in the footwork of current players like LeBron, who learned from Kobe, who learned from Hakeem). Wilt would be behind the curve technically, even if he would still dominate physically. And finally, because Wilt is a center (the most deeply talented position), it's not hard to replace him with any number of all-time-great centers. Sure, Wilt might be the greatest, but he's not that much better than Shaq. Whereas there's no replacing guys like LeBron or Steph.
Q. Where's Russell?
Trash heap.
Q. Where's Klay?
Exactly one spot behind Harden. Yes, that's right, Jordan was not in my top three considerations at SG. Klay is, if not a better shooter than Harden, a very close one, and would fit better than Harden into the starting lineup. But ultimately I want Harden to be the primary scorer and creator on the bench unit and Klay is just not cut out for that role.
Q. Where's Magic?
A. I don't know. My heart hurts. I love Magic. But I need an elite defensive guard, right? And there's no counterfeiting Payton.
Q. Where's Karl Malone/Charles Barkley/Dwyane Wade/Chris Paul/Clyde Drexler/...
A. I genuinely think these players are outclassed by the guys I have.
Q. But Phil benefited from so many great players.
A. So did every coach who's ever won a title (except, astonishingly, Larry Brown). And Phil turned his talent into twice as many rings as any other modern coach. I don't know what you're not getting here. It's like if there were a player who averaged 50 points per game and he lost his spot to the guy who averaged 25.
- A
