Changing of the Guard

On of the reasons we started this site was to point out things that us common folks see as obvious but somehow get ignored by the higher ups. These sort of oversights occur in social issues, politics, and sports. So here is one common sense thing that I’m sure everyone reading this who doesn’t work for ESPN, Fox Sports, The Sporting News, etc. already knows but get repeatedly forgotten by the so-called experts.

In basketball we have spent this new millennium in a new epoch; the epoch of the guard. The old school thinking was that if you were starting a team from scratch the first player you would select to be the center piece for your team would be a ‘big man’. They actually brought this question up on Pardon the Interruption the other day in regards to the upcoming NBA draft and both Tony and Mike insisted that the smartest move was to take a big inside player before you take a guard. I’m not surprised that Tony and Mike cling to that mentality, which was true in the past, because they and their sports writer/sports analyst brethren have continued to perpetuate this myth despite two very recent basketball incidents that prove the opposite to be true.

First, as all my friends know, because I am still bragging about it, I picked Davidson to make it to the elite eight of the NCAA tournament. No one I know of made that same pick. In fact, Tony and Mike, many of my friends, and many more sports analysts picked Georgetown to advance to the elite eight at least if not the final four. Of course, as it turned out I was right and all those other people were left to experience me being a sore winner. The reason I gave Davidson props before the tourney started is because in the 2007 Southern Conference Championship Stephon Curry singlehandedly dismantled my alma mater College of Charleston. Then at the start of this past season, I watched Curry and Davidson nearly beat my Duke Blue Devils and then go one to seriously outplay North Carolina in a game that UNC was lucky to escape with a win from. Now I wasn’t the only one to notice that Davidson was bad ass, but what prevented the so-called experts from having the foresight that I had concerning Davidson’s NCAA run was that they are stuck in a bygone era in which the ‘big man’ is always more valuable than the ‘little guy’. Operating under that presumption, of course all the ‘experts’ picked Georgetown to walk over Davidson because all Davidson had was a skinny little guard while Georgetown sported the giant Roy Hibbert. But if you are living in “the now” and realize that in this era guards are more important than centers, you knew, as I did, that Davidson could upset not only Georgetown, but any team who relied entirely on inside play and lacked a high caliber perimeter defender. Thus, in filling out my bracket I knew that Davidson would make it to the elite eight and then lose to Kansas, a team that had good perimeter defense and had their own guard players who could run the court, slash to the basket, and shoot threes.

The second instance of proof for this new guard driven era is Chris Paul’s play this season. Prior to the season everyone was too excited about Greg Oden and Kevin Durant to pay any mind to the little point guard for the Hornets. But as the season went on Paul put up numbers that were unprecedented. Even still, the pundits refused to believe that a team without a classic ‘big man’ could realistically keep up that pace, let alone make any noise in the playoffs. And yet here we are with the Hornets finishing second in the West and then destroying the Mavericks and now (as of when I am writing this post) forcing a game 7 against the defending champion San Antonio Spurs. The pundits, again caught napping in a bygone era, refused to pick the Hornets in the first round even though the Mavs have a proven track record of choking in the playoffs, and then refused to believe that the Spurs would do anything other that brush off nothing more than a frisky Hornets team in round two. In both cases the thought was that even though the Hornets clearly had the best player on the court in Chris Paul, he was just a guard, and his team would certainly lose to their opponent because the opponent had a ‘big man’ that the rest of the team play around.

The fact of the matter, which the analysts must begrudgingly admit unless they want to continue to make bad picks, is that this is the era of the guard, not the center. This is blatantly obvious when you look at the three best players in the NBA. Number one is Kobe Bryant, then LeBron James, and then (I would say) Chris Paul (the only reason I put Kobe ahead of LeBron is because Kobe is far better on defense and has a better three point shot). All those guys are backcourt players. None of them center their offense on ‘back to the basket moves’ and none of them get to play defense by just standing in the paint and shifting from block to block. The best low post player in the game right now is Tim Duncan who’s team is getting dominated by Chris Paul’s Hornets (by the way, who would’ve thought that 2 of the top four/five guys in the league would have played college ball at Wake Forest?). And while we’re talking about Chris Paul’s playoff dominance; last year when LeBron led his team over the much more overall talented Pistons he cemented his spot as one of the best two players in the league and the heir apparent to Jordan, meanwhile if Chris Paul leads his team of the overall more talented Spurs he will cement his spot as the best point guard maybe since Isaiah Thomas and ensure that he is spoken in the same breath as Kobe and LeBron (a spot that a couple of years ago most people, myself included, thought Carmelo Anthony would have eventually filled).

Before I get too off topic, let me get back to the original point of this being a new epoch in basketball. Part of the reason that mid-majors are able to make more noise in the NCAA is that while ‘big men’ of high quality are exceedingly rare and therefore typically snatched up by the big name schools, guards are in abundance. A mid-major can snap up a couple of solid guards, let them develop and run an offense suitable to guard-focused play and all of a sudden they can cause problems to the big name schools who are still running the old school half court offense that relies on inside play. In the NBA, where just about every team has adopted a more up-tempo style of offense due to a short shot clock and the need to make the game exciting in order to bring in fan interest and thereby make money (the Suns are an extreme example of this), there just isn’t enough time or enough motivation to run a lethargic half court offense that would allow a ‘big man’ to set up inside, have the ball fed to him, make his drop step and take a shot.

Moreover, think about how hard it is to guard Kobe as compared to someone like Shaq. With Shaq you can just double team the guy to try and keep the ball out of his hand and make sure he doesn’t get the ball right next to the basket, and if he does the ball in close you just foul him with your bench players. Conversely, the likes of Kobe or LeBron or Chris Paul can score from anywhere and play away from the basket, which means that to double team them you are pulling one guy away from the hoop and out into the court and that opens up the inside for the other guys on his team. It is harder to defensively scheme to stop an outside shooter who can drive to the hoop and make good passes to open players if you collapse on him with a double team than it is to just collapse down on a big inside player who sets up in the lane.

So if in today’s game, you are asked to play the imaginary role of General Manager for an NBA team, don’t fall back into the outdated mindset that Tony and Mike and the other sports analysts are stuck in, but rather realize that today’s game is dominated by guard play and so pick the best guard you can and build around that. A solid guard, in today’s epoch of basketball, will get the other players on your team involved with greater ease and cause nightmares for opposing coaches trying to come up with a defense to stop him. Think (or bet) accordingly.