The Ringer NBA Show - Do Positions Even Matter Anymore? | The Answer

Episode Date: January 29, 2021

Chris is joined by Yahoo Sports NBA reporter Seerat Sohi to discuss the “Draymond position” and building around positionless players like Zion Williamson and Ben Simmons (02:00). Later, Chris is joined by The Ringer’s Rob Mahoney to build a positionless all-star lineup (21:00). Host: Chris Ryan Guests: Seerat Sohi and Rob Mahoney Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Ringer NBA show. It's The Answer. I'm your host, Chris Ryan, and where we're going, we don't need fours. Hey, everybody, thanks so much for listening to The Answer. This week on The Answer, we're asking the question, do positions even matter anymore? As we go further into this season, as we go further into humans history, it just seems like positions matter less and less. It seems like the best players are the players who are the most flexible, who can play

point guard from the power forward position, who can play the dunker position, who can play the dunker position from the point guard position. And in my conversation with Sir Ratsohue that you're about to hear, can play the Draymond position, which is a position that is really only like less than a decade old. But Syriot wrote a really cool piece on Yahoo about this new generation of players like Lou Dort and Xavier Tillman and Eric Pascoe who are coming into the league and using Draymond almost as a paradigm to find like a new position and a new place of value. But there's like a dark side of that too, right? Which is what happens when you're somebody like Ben Simmons or Zion Williamson who is unbelievably talented, two unbelievably talented players, but don't seem to quite fit in

in any one spot on the court with their teams? And because of that, I think get a lot of fair and unfair speculation about how they're being used by their coaches, whether or not they're surrounded by the right talent or whether the problem is them, and they don't really fit in anywhere. And this idea of fit, we talk a lot about, like in terms of putting together, a bunch of superstars. But really what happens is it's the guys like Danny Green. It's the guys like JJ Reddick. It's the guys like Mikhail Bridges who make other players seem logical and seem like they

fit on a court. So I wanted to talk to Syriott Sohi about her article about the new Draymons because I thought that was a really interesting way of talking about positions. And then I talked to Rob Mahoney because I wanted to put together a super lineup of positionless players. So Rob was nice enough to join me again on the answer. Let's get into the show right now. now I'm joined by Yahoo Sir and Sohi and she wrote this article about Draymond Green.

She wrote an article about the idea that Draymond Green is almost a position unto himself that now new players coming into the league are filling in. So I want to talk to her about that. And I thought it was a fascinating piece because you identified a bunch of guys whose value, I think, are, we're only just now starting to understand. So before we get into our conversation about like positions and how we're thinking about positions in the league across the board, can you just tell me a little bit about what attracted you to this idea in the first place? Was there a big bang moment that you were like, I think I, I think Lou Dort is also part of this. Yeah, there actually was.

I was watching, I was watching the Rockets take on the thunder in the playoffs. And there were a few moments where Stephen Adams just couldn't close out on PJ Tucker, who's obviously playing the five. And then they had to put Lou Dort in at the five. Yeah. And he's six four. It was already crazy that PJ Tucker, Six Five Center was starting.

and that was a response to that. It was a natural response, and it was a right response. It's underplayed way better with him at the five. And they went away from it, which is, I think, why they lost the series. And it was just kind of interesting to me. You know, you didn't have the Warriors in the playoffs, but Stephen Adams is being squeezed on both sides. He just can't get away from this thing that Draymond started.

Like, on one end, it's who he can't defend. And then on the other end, like, there's this young guy who's coming for his spot. And if you watch Stephen, I know we're going to talk about this later, but if you watch Stephen Adams now, not exactly fitting on offense. No, I mean, I almost now wonder whether or not Stephen Adams was like an enormous tax for like a locker room guy.

Like that he was brought in now, you can almost make the argument that he's there to give veteran leadership and just like establish like a certain culture of the Pelicans because obviously on court it doesn't really work. The way I don't buy that theory at all about veteran leadership, I feel like they signed some guys

and then they were like, yeah, that'll play well. They had Drew Holiday last year. They've had JJ Redick for the past two years. They have veteran leadership. Sure. Especially since I feel like Griff is also, I read KOC's piece earlier this week. Griff was trying to roll Bledso into that as well.

I was like, no, no, no, no. You guys got Bledso on the back end of that deal because that's who you got. Right. I see what they were trying to do, which is like they have like the young guys and then they have like this mix of old guys so that the young guys never turn into the wolves

and wind up not knowing how, like, which way is up at all. But they're only like a few steps better than the wolves to owe Stephen Adams this much money. Also, the wolves beat them. Yeah, that's true. How much better are they really? They mean the wolves look real smart on offense. Yes, which is impossible.

So I wanted to ask you about this idea that I've been thinking about, especially as regards to Ben Simmons, which I think has become like a little bit of an obsession of mine this season, but it's like where is he appropriately situated on the court? There's like the physical, like, where does he stand part? And then there is the conceptual like, do we think of him as a point guard? Do we think of him as a four? Or are we starting to introduce like a certain new kind of lexicon of the way we think about players,

like whether it's the dunker or like a cling capella roller or a guy who is, you know, there's all sorts of like a huge constellation of terms we could use? Is that a better way to think about these guys and does it change their value at all? Because I thought, like, your idea here that the Draymond is almost a new position that you could look for was fascinating. I mean, there's no question to me that it changes the value of the players. One of the things I noticed while reporting that article was just the fact that once you name something, you start seeing it everywhere. Like, that's a phenomenon that you see in life all the time. And it was, it was plain to the detriment of a lot of these guys because they were doing these things in the court.

And a lot of the people I talked to, just one of the things that stuck out was the scouts were just like, you just don't doubt winning. If the guy is contributing to winning plays, this was from one of the college scouts that scouted Grant Williams. So if the guy's making winning plays, don't outsmart yourself just because you can't find a way to put it in a box. It's probably just something that you don't quite understand yet. Just because you can't understand it doesn't mean it's not effective. And that definitely, I think, plays a role with a lot of guys in the league. So, yeah, to that, like, to that point, definitely it changes your, it changes your value. Just because, like, this league is a lot more, I think, a lot more vain than I think people realize it.

Yeah. Like, a lot of people are out to win press conferences. And, you know, if you can't quite explain what you're going for with a certain player, then I think it, A, it makes it harder for you to recognize. And it also makes it harder for you to sell, which matters on every level. It matters when you're, you know, scouting and you're trying to convince your head coach, your GM or somebody else. And then for the GM, it's like you're trying to convince the owner.

And then, you know, that's going to be defined, depending on the franchise. You are some of that is going to be defined by how the media will perceive a certain selection, too. But yeah, it's interesting. I think I'm kind of, I'm kind of going to this place where my pet theory now, watching the heat, watching the Sixers has become that you can, you're allowed to have, if you're really smart and if the other shooters around you are really good, and they can make plays, you're allowed to have two guys that aren't very good at shooting on the court.

Right. And I think that's kind of where the sixers are sort of getting to. Yeah. Like, it's a little bit feast or famine with them. I think, like, when you are, you're just, like, holding your breath, hoping it's a good Danny Green night, basically. I mean, like, last night I thought it was crucial that Tobias Harris, I'm recording this on Thursday, but on the Wednesday night game against the Lakers, Tobias Harris scored the game

winning shot. And I was like, that's actually probably the recipe. because by the very end of the game, likely Joel is probably going to be a little bit gas. No matter what good shape he's in, the amount of usage that he's getting right now is going to make it so that in those final minutes of the game, he's probably going to be a little bit more tired

than he was in the third quarter. And Simmons just can't manufacture a half-core offense for himself or sometimes for others either. So it's like Tobias really has to step up and be that end-of-the-game guy for the Sixers. I think you're right about the heat too. I think we see the problem with that when you look at somebody like the Pelicans,

a team like the Pelicans that just somehow does not have the shooting. Yeah, exactly. I think the problem with the Pelicans right now is it's not to me that they aren't playing well. It's that they're not even allowing themselves to figure out who they should be. And it's because of their lack of shooting. I remember watching, like, one of the things you can look at is, hey, does Stephen Adams fit with Zion Williamson? I think that's a worthy question to ask yourself if you're building around Zion.

that's good information for later down the line. But if Eric Bledsoe is also starting, and you're also going to throw, like, Michael Alexander Walker into the mix, and I hate saying this. I hate saying this, my Canadian brother. I was watching his play, and you have Adams running a dribble handoff on one end,

which is smart. I think it's with Ingram, so he's on one end of the court, and the defense is zoned in on that because they don't want Ingram to get open. And that's on the other side, you had Zion with the ball. kind of perfect, right?

Because hypothetically, the court should then be open. But it's not because Eric Blexo is still in the game. And I think defense has very quickly figured out how good Dion is in the paint. So now you have to figure out a way to make that, that equation just way, way harder than it is right now with the guys that they have on the floor. And it's honestly like, it really frustrates me because they have the guys. Yeah. I cannot understand for the life of me why J.J. Reddick isn't starting on this team.

It's another, by the way, great veteran leader who's actually a great veteran leader. Do you think that that's just SVG, like, defense orthodoxy and, like, him not liking JJ getting targeted, like, even early in a game? But that's not who JJ is anymore. It's like he thinks JJ is a guy that he coached way back when he couldn't start him. Even then, by the way, I think you should have started him. I was a big proponent of starting JJ Redick in 2010, and I still am. He's a lot better at defense now.

He's a lot smarter. Do you have, like, 2010-20s? tweets that are like start JJ. I was, thank goodness I wasn't tweeting in 2010. But for a guy like Zion, so obviously the emergence of Dremont is tied to the emergence of the death lineup and this idea. I mean, obviously Iguodala comes in for Bogut in that lineup, but Dremon kind of blossoms into this defensive stopper slash playmaker.

And I think that's a lineup that was thought of as like in case of emergency or like this is the thing that we close with, or this is especially potent in the playoffs. And now we're however many years later, five, six years later, seven years later, and we're looking at this Pelicans team, for example, and I think that logic would suggest that Zion should play five, right? Like, Zion should be the Draymon, like the world-killing Draymon at the five for the Pelicans, and that would change the dynamics of that team entirely. Why is that still kind of thought of as like a taboo idea then?

I couldn't answer that question because I think he should be playing center. Yeah. I don't even think it's, I don't think it's even really that big of a question. Super small sample size, but when Zion and Ingram played together and Zion's at the center, they're, they're plus 19. And they don't go, they're not close to plus 19 with anything else, especially when you put Adams at center. And I think it doesn't allow, like, again, like it just doesn't allow you to even figure out,

I think people are already asking the question of do Zion and Ingram fit together? Right. I think they fit together perfectly, at least on paper. They're two very different players who dominate on different ends of the court, and you can put them in a pick and roll together, and it should all work out. Who in the NBA is going to be switchy enough that they can guard both of those guys? That's kind of a pick and roll that you're going to have to guard straight up, and they both have a lot in their bag in terms of things they can do off of it.

Obviously, Zion's not going to be popping anytime soon, but other than that, like, they kind of got it. But you're never going to figure that out if all you have to do is just help off Adams guy. Do you think that that's just like Zion adopting some adapting some like AD-esque? Like I don't want to put my body through playing center early in the season stuff? Maybe. I don't know that he necessarily, you necessarily want his body to be going through closing out on fours either. Like what is really the most taxing position?

at this point. Is it even playing center? It feels like they're trying to keep him close to the rim anyways. They're kind of like they're not necessarily switching, but I feel like they're doing some matchup switching where he's pretty much camped out in the lane all the time anyways. He's not really doing a lot of moving around. And he's the heaviest player in the NBA. Like who's really, you know, who's backing him down?

This isn't really that league anymore. Obviously, the best guys in the league will be able to do if they're going to be able to do it to anybody. It doesn't really matter who you put in at center if it's going to be Anthony Davis, right? But aside from that, like, I just kind of wonder, it's like, do you really want somebody with his dimensions to be running all over the court trying to guard fours? I don't know if that's ever going to be tenable for him in his career,

but I do see, like, a future where, you know, he figures out angles and he can be a rim protector, and he can kind of, like, he doesn't really have the wingspan. I don't think he'll ever be, like, that intuitive of a defender, which also just gets to my other thing of, like, if you're building around Zion, obviously any team that has championship aspirations has to take that end of the force seriously,

but I don't really see how like that can be your identity. Yeah, that can't be like a pen, you can't be punitive against him for like his interior defense. That should be like the seventh thing that you care about with him, right? Exactly, exactly.

You should be running a lot more than they are, probably playing Lonzo a lot more too. But it's fascinating like how, like we tend to punish guys like Zion and Ben for their weirdness, I guess, for lack of a better term. Like they're almost like, You get punished if you're like a great player who doesn't have a fixed position

rather than a guy like Lou Dort who's basically like exceeding expectations for that same sort of positional flexibility. I wonder if that's just because Lou Dort went undrafted and those two are two number one pitch. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I think, but both of those guys are like you've been saying, victims of spacing issues that are beyond their control. Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, why isn't it more imperative on somebody else to help them figure that out? I think Zion, it's just way too early to criticize him for it, just because he hasn't been through the NBA developmental gauntlet yet. We don't really know what he's going to turn into. And there's so much stuff going on with his body that I think it's just going to take him a while to get acclimated before he can even really start to develop some of that stuff. With Ben, I think the thing you can criticize, though,

is that there just hasn't been a lot of offensive improvement on any end. We were talking earlier in the week, and you were talking about how the hardened trade and everything, it seems like it impacted him. I feel like since then, he started to accept his role more maybe. Well, Andrew Sharp came on a couple weeks ago right after the trade happened,

and he was like, I think that the truth is that Ben Simmons is closer to Karas Levert than he is to Janus, in terms of how good he is. And I took that very personally. But I think the truth of the matter might be that Ben Simmons might be closer to national TV Rondo

than he is LeBron. And I think I can accept that. You know, like, when I watched Ben Simmons last night, I just saw a guy, like, and we could make all sorts of jokes about, like, LeBron pumping up clutch stock by allowing Ben Simmons to, like, go off. But he does seem to kind of rise to- Well, I'm talking about stock today, by the way. Yes, I know.

I do think that he has definitely maybe been humbled by the whole trade thing, you know, and the fact that I, you know, for as much as Daryl Morey and everybody might be like, Ben Simmons is like we want to win a championship with Ben Simmons. I think that like it was pretty candidly out there that like he was on the trading block. And that's got to be like, you know, he was really close to being used to Rocket. So he probably sulked about it for a little while, but seems to have like figured out that like if he plays all defensive team defense every night, like he's an incredibly valuable part of this team. Yeah, it almost feels like, you know, if I try to put myself in his mind, if I think I'm going to be traded, I'm not going to start trying to do. all this new stuff,

just to make, A, just to make my team happy, but B, what's the point? Like, I might get traded and, like, I'll be in Houston, just doing whatever the hell I want all over again. So you're saying he's saving his jumper for his next team? No, no.

That would be really funny if you got into the rocket system and all of a sudden it was just, like, guns blazing. I feel like that's like a Judd-Apital movie where the guy breaks up with his girlfriend and then immediately gets like a dot-com job and, like, starts tucking his shirts in. and like just completely grows up and like oh man i messed up we should still be dating set rogan do you think that as we go forward it is like the years go by you talked a little bit

about this idea that draymond could be a position almost who's another player out there that you think could become their own position oh that's a good question because i think there are some that are unattainable like kawai like it's like sure good luck you you know you we would all like to duplicate a kawai but like that seems to be like a singular talent skill set. Kauai is also, he's very prototypically a small forward, right?

Like he's exactly what you'd build in the lab as a small forward. I don't think he like really necessarily pushes the envelope in terms of, in terms of futures. Like probably the seven foot shooter, right?

Yeah. Jaron Jackson Jr., younger guy that's in the league. That's pretty much, I think, the prototype of what you'd want for, you know, your future center.

Yeah, like if Weissman can really develop a shot from outside. Brooke Lopez figured it out later in his career. I think the big, biggest thing is just figuring out which one of these skills is replicable, right? Like, you're not going to figure out how to be Janus or LeBron.

You're never going to be as smart as LeBron or as athletic. But if a big guy can figure out how to shoot, then yeah, maybe you're on to something. We've probably seen enough evidence of that that, you know, there's a good chance that we might be able to see some more AD's done a good job of developing a shot. Like that the whole thing before where it used to be that, you know, if you were a certain height, maybe the geometry was just difficult for you. Maybe there's been enough of those guys that that's been sorted out. maybe that was a myth, but that whole, that idea just seems to be over now.

Yeah, they figured out how to teach guys how to shoot from that far out if they're that tall. Does any part of you feel like any longing for like much more classical designations of positions? Like, do you ever like enjoy watching, say like a Utah that seems to have a much more like, that's the point guard and that's the combo shooting guard and that's their seven foot defensive center? Like, and obviously that's really working for them, although they do have a lot of, multifaceted wings also running around the court. Yeah, I love basketball diversity, you know. I think that's like just one of the most fun things about the sport

is the fact that you can have a seven footer on the floor with a guy that's six feet tall as well. Like Dennis Schroeder being on the court with Anthony Davis is just, you know, that to me is like what makes a game so cool. It's just a fact that it's such a, you know, it's like looking at like this diverse ecosystem, these coral reefs all just kind of like melting together, right? So yeah, definitely.

I don't love watching when there's just a bunch of guys that look like they're trying to be PJ Tucker on the court. Right. Even though I guess some of my piece did kind of suggest that that's what we were heading towards. But I don't really necessarily find that fun. I think it's cool that those guys have found a place in the league just on an individual level, right? But if everyone keeps trending towards this, I don't know. We're going to miss out on some stuff. Yeah.

I mean, I think that for as much as you might get a team of Dremont, you also might get like the Larry Drew Hawks, where you have like Josh Smith and Marvin. Williams and Joe Johnson and everybody is 6-8 and doesn't really yeah so like I think that there's there's probably a dark side to that I think also the fact that we've referenced judd Apatown movies and coral reefs means that we have we really like is this a ringer podcast yeah exactly I should have been I should have been ready for a for a better come back to like a pop culture reference I will if we ever do this again next time yeah I'll make sure I'll I'll I'll spend the night, kind of on IMDB, doing some studying.

And like, oh, yeah, that'd be funny. Thanks so much. There will be a quiz at the end. Cyril, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me. All right, I'm more than thrilled. I'm ecstatic to be joined by Rob Mahoney, who's making his return appearance to the answer. Rob, what's going on?

Chris, this is where I live. You know, you asked me to come on to talk positionless basketball. It's so much in my lane. I kind of thought you were a spam bot serving me a targeted ad for a second. So the reason I wanted to have you on, because I wanted to try and build a dream lineup with you, you're going to do positionless basketball. You're going to take guys who don't seem to fit in anywhere,

but subsequently fit in everywhere. It can do all sorts of different things on the court from all sorts of different positions. And then I am going to try and come up with the platonic classical lineup of current NBA players where they all have to fit into at least my conception of what those positions do. So, Rob, why don't we start with your lineup

of positionless all-stars. And I would say we could start a point card, but I don't even know if we're going to have a point card. That's a good point. First, I have a proposal for you, which is right now I want to take LeBron off the table. Agreed. And I think, I think, you know, one, it's kind of cheating.

He's obviously a very eight-positional player. He's great. You can't really compete with him. And LeBron knows about cheating because he almost broke Joe Unbeats back on Wednesday. Okay, okay. But also, I think philosophically, if you're building a positionless team, there's something about putting LeBron on the court

that creates a hierarchy that's almost antithetical to it. I think players would defer too much to him when if you're going to be positionless, you kind of have to have a free-flowing mentality about it. So I'm putting LeBron in his own category. And so if I'm starting with my all-positionless all-star team, I'm kind of building it around a duo to start.

And I want to give a shout-out to Kyle Mann for putting this bug in my head. But I'm starting with Nicola Yokic and Ben Simmons as kind of the core of my positionless team. I think those two guys compliment each other really well, and you're kind of starting to set the foundation of what a positionless offense and defense can look like. You know, we're not going to have a traditional point guard in this team by any means.

Roles are going to change within possessions, much less within games or within quarters or anything like that. So sometimes Nicola Yoak is the hub of your offense, sometimes Simmons is, sometimes it's the other guys, but having that flexibility of the best playmaking big we've ever seen and a guy who can stretch the floor, that's kind of where I'd want to start. Yeah, I don't think you're cheating by doing that.

will, I would say that, like, Yokic, it's hard to imagine with his body, you just look at him and you do think of center, but, and I do think that he is like this sort of, like, next sort of iteration of the subonis slick passing European

center guard sort of hybrid, but I love, I love going off on these two. What, what made you put Simmons in there just because you feel like, how would he work with Yokic? I think it's the combination with Yokic, where Simmons can be a secondary playmaker.

He can be a cutter. We've seen him be very successful in the dunker spot this year and moving without the ball. But also I like him as a pace accelerant. If Yok is going to be so important to our half-court offense, I want someone who can get us up and down the floor

and then on the defensive side, someone who can guard all kinds of players. I think that's, when you're talking about positionless basketball, finding guys who can chase point guards might be the weak spot of it. You can find long, wingy types who can guard centers,

but can you find guys who are going to chase the best shooting point guard, the Dame Lillards of the league, around a high screen. And Simmons has done a great job of that kind of stuff, that kind of shadowing.

So I like the flexibility that he gives me there. But if you have Ben Simmons on your team, you know, Yokic is a good start in terms of having a shooter, but you want as much shooting as you can get around him. Yeah, I was going to say,

we're building a brick house today. So let's see what you do with the last three. Well, positionless basketball, I think, in the most practical NBA terms, you know, if you ask Eric Spolstra, When he says positionless basketball, what does he mean? I think he's talking about players who can pass, shoot, and dribble, any position on the court

that can kind of flow around. So I'm looking at it from that perspective, and here I'm trying to max out my shooting. I'm putting Kevin Durant on this team, who I think from a certain point of view is a prototypical small forward. But then you stretch that player out to seven feet. And then you also, when you really think about it, there isn't a single thing on a basketball court that Kevin Durant can't do. And that's what I think gives him this kind of positionless flexibility.

So he's, I think he's instrumental on both sides of the ball. And we can get to the rest of the defensive part of that later. But in terms of stretching out our shooting, that's where I think we get to, and you may push back on this in terms of whether this guy is positionless or not. But I'm throwing Steph in here as a positionless player. Interesting. And some of that is, I think this kind of exercise really illuminates how positionless he is. Because you can go through this list.

You can go through LeBron, you can go through Yokish, Simmons, Durant. say, could Steph play with this guy? And any positionless player in the league, and Steph can play with them. Oh, yeah. I think that kind of hints at the flexibility in his game. The fact that he is point guard size

but doesn't need to be a point guard, he just has so much give to his game. There was a play going around on Twitter, which is one of my favorites of the year that just went around. We were recording this on Thursday. It was from the Wednesday night Warriors game. We're essentially like Steph brought the ball up,

then did like six Rip Hamilton curls, like did a one touch like tiki-taka pass with Draymond and then wound up in the corner for a three. And that was Steph playing like four different positions in just one offensive set. So I totally agree with you. Absolutely. And the best screening guard in the league, it should be added too.

So, you know, you have all of these qualities that if you're going to have playmaking and passing bigs and wings, you need a guard who's going to give some of that stuff up and the best shooter we've ever seen. So I think that's helping to kind of flesh. things out in terms of what this attack would look like. The fifth spot is where it gets tricky. You could go in a lot of different directions with those four guys and what you would want

to see and a compliment to them. I kind of defaulted to the easy way out, which is I'm going to take the gigantic, stampeding, matchup breaking MVP of the league in Janus. Another guy who I think on this team plays a very different role. He is similar to Simmons and that he's getting us up and down the court. But then I'm basically triangulating my defense here. You know, we're going to be doing a lot of switching. We're going to be doing a lot of inventive defensive concepts.

But it's basically Simmons and Janice and Durant. You know, the defensive player, an all-league defender, and a guy in Durant who can basically be a first-team defender whenever he decides to be. And they're going to be flying around the court just being bigger than everybody else. Putting length on every position we can, we'll hide Steph wherever we need to. Yokic, I think you can build a good defense around him, even if he's not the center of that defense, the anchor of that defense. So I like kind of where that would put us balance-wise.

and in the flexibility in the spirit of positionless basketball. I think it's, isn't it crazy how close this team is to, like, an all-MBA first team or second team? That's true. Or a combination of, like, the first three teams is that we've gotten to the point where this is in and of itself an incredibly valuable part about being an NBA player. Now, like, I think you could quibble with some of your designations there. Like, Durant, yeah, like, I think that his physicality and his ability to simply just shoot over any perimeter, defender makes him in some ways like the unicorn of all unicorns and we're seeing that right now with his comeback from the Achilles. And, you know, it's almost like we've lived with Steph

too long to realize how revolutionary he is and how he's changed like the physics of the NBA game entirely. But like I love that team. I mean, like those are five of my favorite NBA players. So it really makes a lot of sense. You're right about though that this is, this stuff has almost come so mainstream now. And, you know, that's the development of the league, that's our acceptance of it as the way we talk about basketball, the way fans embrace basketball. I'm curious for you, as a fellow member of the Republic of positionless basketball, what is the next nation left to conquer?

Like, now that this stuff kind of is the status quo, what is the next evolution of positionlessness? I kind of think that the NBA, this is a weird place to put this in like the end of a podcast, but I kind of think the NBA is do a coaching revolution. I think that there are a couple of guys like Spoh and Popovich and Stevens and maybe even Carlisle or really, like, I'm not, I'm not being like sweeping or anything, but I think that I don't know if the NBA coaches have caught up with like just how multifaceted the NBA players are.

And I wonder whether or not, because like you've seen this in soccer where there's been a generation of coaches and a lot of them are concentrated in the Premier League right now who are just, fucking geniuses. And when you go and watch Yergen Klop teams or Pep Cardiola teams

or Marcella Bielsa teams, they're doing things that football teams were not doing 20 years ago. And I don't know necessarily that you can always say that about basketball teams.

I think you can say that about basketball players. But I think that there's a lot of orthodoxy built into the tall guy needs to stand over there, the guy who can shoot stands over here.

The guy with the best handle brings the ball up and initiates the offense, but needs to make sure other people get their shots first. And also, like, just these ideas of, like, are there positions or are there just like spaces on the floor that you want people to occupy? That's the thing that they're doing in football right now or in soccer is like, it's not so much whether or not this guy's a fullback or a winger. It's that he is on the left and he has

the right to come in. But for the most part, he patrols this huge zone. And he can create from there and he can defend from there and he has responsibilities. But I'm not thinking about this in terms of like whether or not he can do X, Y, or Z as a fixed position. I'm thinking about what he can do because he has those skills. And I'd be kind of fascinated to have this conversation in like three or four years. I don't know

who the next like game changing coach is who's going to come along and really like fundamentally reimagined. And I also don't know if NBA teams have the patience or the tolerance for somebody who might like take on a lot of water before his ideas worked out. Can you think of like who's the last coach

where it was like, wow, this person's really trying to different. Who's the last person to do that? I mean, there's lots of differences, but it's within the same orb of sameness, right? Like, there's variations within the scope of the league. But I don't know, in terms of really pushing boundaries, those are the kinds of things that often will get coaches fired or really will prevent them from trying adventurous things in the first place. Yeah. So, I mean, I was going to come up with like a pretty classical lineup for you, like of current NBA players. And I realized after kind of sorting through them that the

classical lineup that I'm thinking of is the Sons. That the idea that I was thinking about was if somewhat undersized like a floor general offense initiator, person who was going to make sure that everybody got the ball in their hands, especially in the first three quarters, but was capable of adding a lot of offense in the end of games. That's Chris Ball. I was thinking of a sweet shooting mobile two guard

who can also do a little bit of playmaking, but for the most part is the guy that if you need to get bailed out late in the shot clock, Or if you want to find him coming off of a screen and do a off the catch shot, that's Devin Booker. When I'm thinking about the guy who in my mind is like, you know, obviously, Kauai is like probably the small forward that we think of when we close our eyes. But I don't think McHale Bridges is that far off from that. He's not, he's pretty far away from being Kauai, obviously. But when I think of a small forward in my mind, I'm kind of thinking of McKale Bridges at this point.

Like decent handle, really good defense. solid, solid outside shooter and is obviously adding things to his game and getting better and better. And then DeAndre Aden, for all his flaws, is kind of like a pretty prototypical center that you would want. He's like got rim protection. He gives you some offense. He gives you easy buckets, especially early in the game. And yeah, he might get played off the court in the playoffs. But if you want like the prototypical five, you could do a lot worse than Aiden. I guess my job is to figure out who's my four is. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's the tricky part. Who's my six nine bangers?

Because like those, I feel like now six, nine bangers are either in the way of the center or are in the way of the big guard who's trying to get in. Like the power forward position is now, it's more often than not, you're expecting those guys to be stretches. Yeah. Or they just have straight up become centers now. Yeah. Right. So can you think of like who your favorite classic power forward is right now?

I'm trying to run through the list in my head. I mean, all due respect to AD, like he's not a power forward. He's just a center on vacation. Yeah, and I think his game might be too adventurous for a like box in orthodox power forward kind of skill set. I mean,

it has to be somebody with some back to the basket game, which we're just our exposure to who can actually do that right now is pretty limited just because guys aren't given the opportunities. And they're not, they're not funneled in that way, developmentally anymore. That's it as much as anything. I wonder if we're just kind of developing out

the prototypical power forward to the point where, there certainly aren't any guys operating at like an all-star level or a near-all-star level who fit that bill. No, I mean, in some ways, I don't think I've thought about that position in the same way since Chris Bosch. You know, ever since Bosch and those heat teams played, like, I don't think I've thought about, wow, what you guys really need is another dude to stand on the blocks and box out. You know, and the whole idea of rebounding is such like a debatable, like, not skill, but it's a debatable of value to teams because you see teams just completely abandoning the offensive rebound anyway. So maybe our listeners can tell us who they think the classic power for is right now. But for the most part, I think that the suns pretty much capture the classic lineup. Rob, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you so much for your positionless All-Stars. Hey, anytime. Yeah, we'll talk to you again soon.