Why NBA Teams Don’t Need Elite Point Guards to Win

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Why NBA Teams Don’t Need Elite Point Guards to Win

Matt Reevy Google+ Twitter MORE ARTICLES
April 14, 2015





Stephen Dunn/Getty Images



There’s a strong possibility that the 2015 NBA MVP will be a point guard. ESPN named Chris Paul as the most important player in the NBA — and he’s not the MVP favorite, that’d be Steph Curry of the Golden State Warriors. There’s little doubt that point guard is the deepest position in the league today. It’s also the least essential, at least when it comes to winning championships.

Consider: Over the last 15 years, the most decorated point guard in the league is none other than current New York Knicks head coach Derek Fisher, who has one hand’s worth of championship rings as the point guard for the Los Angeles Lakers. If you really want to argue about minutia, Fisher was only starting for four of those teams, but the fact remains that Fish, given a generous helping of the triangle offense and Los Angeles’s ability to continually field winning teams, has more championship hardware than any of his contemporaries in this discussion.

Out of the seven point guards who have started on an eventual NBA Champion roster, Fisher is arguably the least impressive. The full list, in chronological order, runs Fisher into San Antonio’s Tony Parker into Detroit’s Chauncey Billups into Miami’s Jason “White Chocolate” Williams into Boston’s Rajon Rondo into Dallas’s Jason Kidd into Miami’s Mario Chalmers. That’s the entire list. You’ll notice a conspicuous absence of, well, more or less anyone involved in the conversations of the greatest point guards of their era (save Kidd). But is this correlation or causation?


We’ll come back to Parker in a second, since his status as an NBA Finals MVP affords him a clear and defined seat at the table in this discussion, but the best playoff performance by a point guard over that same 15-year span wasn’t a championship contender at all. In fact, he was on a team that suffered a first round loss. The player? Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was Chris Paul, and it was the 2010-2011 series between the Los Angeles Lakers and the New Orleans Hornets (now the Pelicans). That series, which ended after six games in L.A.’s favor, saw CP3 completely and utterly eviscerate the Lakers — he averaged 22 points, 11.5 assists, and nearly 7 rebounds per game while posting an absolutely insane Offensive Rating of 128 while played just under 42 minutes per game. Needless to say, he was the undisputed best player on the floor. The Hornets still lost.

Of the players on the list of championship winners, only two of them, Parker and Rajon Rondo, could plausibly make the case for being the best player on their respective teams, but both fields are crowded, to say the least, and Rondo’s defining playoff performance came in a losing series to the Miami Heat in 2011, and while he was able to wrest the title of “best player in the game” from LeBron James in that series, he was definitely the fourth wheel on the team when they won it all in 2008. Parker came up big in San Antonio’s 2007 sweep of the Cleveland Cavaliers, but that win, like their 2014 victory, was more of a team effort than anything else, and there’s no way that Parker makes it to the finals if he isn’t playing with the best power forward of all time. To put it another way: Norris Cole finished his second season in the league having won a pair of NBA championships, but he wasn’t getting there without LeBron.

That brings us to the two Miami point guards — Mario Chalmers and Jason Williams. They’re in much the same mold as Parker: Two guys who were competent and adequate, but hardly the stars of the show. We love White Chocolate’s handles, but Miami ran much of its offense around Wade and Shaq, and there’s not much that Williams actually did on that team that couldn’t have been replicated by, say, Gary Payton. Jason Kidd was a shell of himself by the time he teamed up with Dirk and Tyson Chandler, and Chauncey Billups remains the exception that proves the rule: He got hot in the playoffs, but the Pistons were nothing if not a team effort anchored by the (certainly underrated) Wallace Twins.


While the Golden State Warriors will finish the season with the best record in the NBA, they’re not altogether that different from the team that has had considerably difficulties getting out of the semifinals (or the first round) under Mark Jackson, and we’re reminded of yet another Conference-winning team with an MVP point guard which was totally eviscerated in the playoffs. To be sure, there’s a whole host of differences between Steph Curry’s MVP-caliber season and the one that saw Derrick Rose and the Chicago Bulls get completely shut down by LeBron and the Heat: For one, the Dubs have an offense that extends beyond “give the ball to Steph and watch him drive into the defense,” but there are some startling similarities, as well. If adequate point guard play is the easiest thing to replicate in the modern NBA, and the depth at the position would indicate that it is, then having the best player on the team be a point guard would seem to be a mistake.

Naturally, talent wins out in the NBA nine times out of 10. This is subject to a bit of inescapable hindsight bias, because the best players are considered the best players on the merits of their championship-winning ways, but for every Charles Barkley or Karl Malone there are a dozen lesser players held in equal stead because they were able to hoist the Larry O’Brien trophy. No one can doubt the talents of Chris Paul or Steph Curry, but what can we say about them when, as far as positional competencies are concerned, teams seem to have more success with Mario Chalmers or Derek Fisher?

All data courtesy of Basketball-Reference.



bob



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Faulty logic matt. Rondo, Tony, and Chauncey were damn good point guards, and LeBron was virtually a point guard. The game moved thru him. Stef can win it. Let's wait and watch.

The least essential position in winning championships, huh?  Maybe on teams that are oriented toward free-lance play.  When I googled this writer's name, all I got from my computer was extended laughter.  

Sam

Mario Chalmers played on teams with a point forward. Derek Fisher played on teams that ran a motion offense that spread assists around.

What this guy is trying to get at is that championship teams of recent years don't have a traditional point guard-initiated offense. That trend started with the Bulls in the '90s and the triangle, which is a motion offense, not a point guard-initiated offense. The triangle won five more times with the Lakers. LeBron's teams haven't run a motion offense, but he dominates the ball and they're not point guard-centric. Even this year with a much better point guard, LeBron averaged 7.4 assists and Irving averaged 5.2.

Whether this is indicative of an evolution in the game or a trend is debatable, but the author doesn't even consider that point. He instead goes off the rails by drawing the conclusion that having an elite point guard is actually bad for a team's championship prospects, which is ridiculous.

You can say having an elite point guard isn't essential, as the title of the article does, and you'd be correct. But when the author says, "Having the best player on the team be a point guard would seem to be a mistake" and "No one can doubt the talents of Chris Paul or Steph Curry, but what can we say about them when, as far as positional competencies are concerned, teams seem to have more success with Mario Chalmers or Derek Fisher?", that's just dumb.

"'No one can doubt the talents of Chris Paul or Steph Curry, but what can we say about them when, as far as positional competencies are concerned, teams seem to have more success with Mario Chalmers or Derek Fisher?'", that's just dumb."

Plus 1 Outside.

Teams have more success when they have players who rank among the all-time greats regardless of position.

Russell's teams won five titles after Cousy retired with guys like KC Jones and Larry Siegfried bringing up the ball--no one called them "point guards" then--and Russell initiating much of the set offense.

The early to mid 70's Celtics won two titles with JoJo White playing what now would be called point guard. JoJo was a great player but not a classic PG.

The same can be said about Dennis Johnson.

Rajon Rondo was not an elite PG the last time the Celtics won it all. He played a great close out game six but was often on the bench at crunch time when Doc wanted to spread the defense with five outside threats.

Of the 17 Celtic title teams seven were won with elite classic point guards--Cousy six times and Tiny Archibald once.

I think Bill Russell said that whoever makes the plays is the playmaker.

I saw this article. Didn't find it compelling. Sounded like a guy looking for an angle for a story, and decided to be contrarian for sake of being contrarian. His argument sounded half-assed, as others have pointed out.

Once the NBA bans layups we will not need centers.

dboss

dboss wrote:Once the NBA bans layups we will not need centers.

dboss

responding to myself here...  hey dboss how would that work?

Well the NBA could institute a rule where any basket made too close to the basket would be disqualified.  In the event of disputes we can use instant replay to see exactly where the ball was shot from and then one of the refs can use a measuring tape to check the distance.

dboss

It isn't a well-considered argument and some of the statements are so wrong-headed as to be laughable, but the topic deserves some thought, especially when teams have to make decisions like the Celtics recently did; i.e., whether to trade a talented point guard or give him a large, multi-year contract.

The article does make it clear that having a great point guard isn't a necessity for winning a championship. Unfortunately, it doesn't go any further than that, or, discuss how and in what circumstances a point guard can contribute to a championship. And that's the real issue.

It's too big a subject for one post, so let's confine it to an analysis of one individual, arguably one of the greatest point guards of all time - Bob Cousy.

Cooz may not have invented the point guard position, but he helped establish its parameters for all time. The game was changing dramatically when Cooz entered the league in 1950. The fast break was speeding up the pace of the game and increasing the number of shot attempts, at the same time that the jump shot was becoming more prevalent and making it possible for anybody to become a scorer.

Prior to Cousy, the point guard's role had consisted mainly of bringing the ball up the floor and feeding the center in the post. In the post-war era, the center had emerged as the game's primary offensive weapon. Cousy's bete noire, his most troublesome opponent at the point guard position, was Slater Martin, whose arrival in Minneapolis served as the catalyst for a string of championships for the pre-L.A. Lakers. Martin wasn't much of a shooter or passer, but he could protect the ball, feed George Mikan in the post, and play chewing-gum defense.

Cousy introduced a greater dimension to the role - that of playmaker, moving the ball down the court at breakneck speed and passing it to the open man. It wasn't simply an aesthetic improvement: with Cousy controlling the offense, the Celtics started on a championship run unsurpassed in the history of professional sports. Obviously, it wasn't entirely due to Cousy's excellence: it was a paradigm of fast breaking offense and brilliant passing, mainly at the point guard and center positions, to go along with a take-no-prisoners team defense.

Nevertheless, when considering the example of Bob Cousy, the contradictions inherent in the role of point guard become glaringly obvious. For example, in the 1953 playoffs, when Cousy was emerging as a scoring machine, tallying 50 points in one playoff game, the Celtics didn't win the title. While in 1957, when Cousy couldn't throw the ball in the ocean in Game 7 of the Finals, the Celtics won their first championship.

Last but certainly not least, for your consideration, in Game 6 of the 1963 Finals, Cousy sprained his ankle early in the fourth quarter with the Celtics holding a double-digit lead. The Lakers gradually overcame that lead while Cousy sat on the sidelines until, in one of those heroic gestures that sports occasionally produces, Cooz limped back onto the court and led his team to the title. It was Cooz's last game and it's no wonder, after that performance, that people questioned whether the Celtics could do it without him.

The moral? It isn't about stats or even what position a player plays, it's about savvy, a feel for the game, mental toughness, and leadership.