Quote Originally Posted by gut View Post
A fun thought experiment that only works in the NBA. There are 8 teams currently winning more than 60% of their games, call them the contenders (GS, Hou, Min, SA, OKC, Cle, Bos, Tor). Build an all-star roster of anyone from the remaining 22 teams, does that team win the title? Hypothetically, that roster could look like:

Guards: Damian Lillard, CJ McCollum, Bradley Beal, Kemba Walker, Victor Oladipo, Devin Booker

Wings/Bigs: Ben Simmons, Greek Freek, Kristaps, Marc Gasol, Joel Embiid, Blake Griffin, Anthony Davis, Nikola Jokic


Now obviously that team has insane depth, but in a playoff series with GS's main guys playing 40 minutes, who wins? I think it is actually possible Golden State wins, or at the very least it is a moderately close series.

I suppose this experiment could work in baseball also, assuming the top team, say Houston right now, has 3 starters all on the top of their game (kuechel, verlander, cole) they can win a 7 game series vs an all-star team of the bottom 22 teams. part of that though is the randomness of baseball, and 7 games still being a small sample size.

Wouldnt work at all in the NFL or NHL, the 2 leagues with an actual hard cap.

Even given time to gel, I still think Golden State would win. The guards aren’t good enough, particularly as defenders. A few of those bigs are good defenders or good scorers, but like a Greek Freak, as good as he is, can’t shoot 3s. Simmons can’t shoot. Davis can’t really shoot from 3 at any volume. They’d own the boards, but the guards aren’t nearly good enough and the bigs have holes in their game. It’s possible they’d be able to go 90s style and just beat them up inside, but I wouldn’t bet on it.