Seige's MLK Day Thoughts: Monday, January 16th
Hopefully everyone is excited and ready for a great day of holiday basketball. I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback about the “contrarian” format of my homepage articles, so I’m going to keep them up (as long as you guys like them; let me know in the comments section if you do).
This week I’m going to take a look at how position depth/options can affect your lineup decisions and how those decisions can vary slate by slate, even on the same day.
For this lesson, I’m going to use the small forward position:
List of Small Forward Options — E for Early Slate, L for Late Slate
Kevin Durant – L
LeBron James – L
Carmelo Anthony – E
Paul George – E
Gordon Hayward – L
Danilo Gallinari – E
Wilson Chandler – E
Jae Crowder – L
Robert Covington – E
Michael Kidd-Gilchrist – L
Evan Turner – E
Kelly Oubre – E
Now, looking at this list of players for the all-day slate, you have the whole array of options. You can go to the top, play the mid-tier or play two cheapies, all while not playing poor plays just to do it. Durant and LeBron are elite, while Hayward/Crowder are very good mid-tier plays. Turner/Oubre are good cheapies if Harkless and Porter miss. All are profitable plays, so we don’t have to force a bad play to fit a salary demand; we can let the rest of our roster construction dictate our choice at SF. Obviously, you would like to have the full set of options, but it doesn’t always work like that, as we’ll see here in a minute.
When we separate the slates we get this list of choices for the early slate:
Carmelo Anthony – E
Paul George – E
Danilo Gallinari – E
Wilson Chandler – E
Robert Covington – E
Evan Turner – E
Kelly Oubre – E
This slate has limited our options, as the “top” is no longer elite. We have Carmelo and Paul George in sub-optimal spots, and the mid-tier is weaker as well without a clear-cut value. Now, we do have the value options still, but the players on the slate have dictated our strategy. Of course we can pay up for raw points, but again you are sacrificing the highest quality plays, which are the punts in Oubre and Turner.
If we then separate this list for the late slate, we get a completely different looking player pool:
Kevin Durant – L
LeBron James – L
Gordon Hayward – L
Jae Crowder – L
Michael Kidd-Gilchrist – L
On this slate we have the top end options in LeBron and Durant, but we also have a very strong mid-tier with MKG and Hayward. We can also mix and match a high-end with a mid-tier play as well, which gives us a whole bunch more options than the early slate. We still don’t have the high-quality punts to pay up for a CLE/GSW full game stack (for example) at this position, so if you are looking to do that, optimally you’ll have to pay down at SG and/or PF. Again, it’s not to say that you can’t play a value option if you want a game stack that badly, but is it optimal to play someone like T.J. Warren on a slate with these mid-tier and expensive options? Probably not. Take the road of least resistance — don’t play a sub-optimal play just because you like watching Westbrook and you’ll do anything to play him every time out.
The point of this is to not get married to a particular player you want before seeing what the slate is giving you. This is only one position, but it certainly applies to every position on a slate. When I look through a player pool for a particular slate, I am looking through every different option I have. The best part about NBA is every slate is unique. Sometimes the optimal approach is the mid-tier at every position, sometimes it’s stars and scrubs. Sometimes it’s stars and scrubs on the main slate, but on the five-game late slate the optimal approach is balanced. Each slate is a different puzzle; don’t try to force the same approach on every slate. Look at it and find what the slate is giving to you and go with it. There are no bonus points for making it harder on yourself. By keeping an open mind and evaluating the slate position by position instead of player by player, you’ll find yourself making more optimal decisions instead of picking players you like and then forcing in scrubs to fit around them.
Hopefully this was helpful, and as always, if you have any questions leave them in the comments section below!