What to expect from the new big three
By John Hollinger
ESPN.com
So, how's this gonna work anyway?
LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh all put up amazing stats by themselves for their respective teams a season ago, but it's inconceivable that they'll put up identical numbers now that they're together.
That's not necessarily a bad thing -- their shooting percentages, for instance, are likely to improve as a result of better shots and fewer double-teams. But the most interesting phenomenon will be what happens to their touches.
There's a bit of a zero-sum game in basketball when it comes to shots and touches. There is only one ball and only one player can have it at a time. As a result, combining high-usage rate players from different teams almost by definition requires them to use fewer possessions in their new environment.
To provide an extreme example, let's say we had three players who each took half their team's shots. If they all joined the same team, obviously they couldn't take 150 percent of the team's shots. They would each have to shoot less, and their new teammates would presumably also shoot dramatically less.
Something akin to that is likely to happen in Miami. Last season Wade led the NBA in usage rate, James was second and Bosh was tied for 11th. To give an example of how these things are normally distributed, the two highest-ranked teammates were No. 6 Kevin Durant and co-No. 11 Russell Westbrook; San Antonio was the only team with three players in the top 35 and pulled that off only because two of them missed big chunks of time with injuries.
Percentages paint a stronger picture. Last season, when they were on the floor, James used 38.2 percent of the Cavs' possessions, Wade used 39.5 percent of Miami's possessions and Bosh used 30.1 percent of Toronto's possessions. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out this can't hold up when they're on the court together -- even if the three of them were to use every single possession, be it a shot, free throw, turnover or assist, they would still have about 8 percent fewer possessions each.
Of course, not all their minutes will come together, and they can compensate with blizzards of touches when their fellow stars aren't joining them on the court. In fact, a good chunk of their minutes may come apart. Some of these will come when one misses a game, others during bouts of foul trouble, and others still because of normal substitution patterns -- especially since one presumes the Heat will seek to minimize the time both James and Wade are off the floor.
So what's realistic? I started by modeling the rest of the roster with replacement-level players with a usage rate around 15, which is typical for that species. (Among the players at or near that mark last season were Chucky Atkins, Matt Barnes, Anthony Tolliver, Solomon Jones, Jason Williams and Jarvis Hayes. For all we know, those might be the other six members of the Heat's rotation next season.)
I also assumed the scrubs would have the court to themselves for an average of five minutes a game -- this accounts for blowouts, foul trouble situations and random minutes during the second quarter of a back-to-back in Minnesota.
I inserted Wade, Bosh and James into the picture at 36 minutes a game, playing alongside the scrubs I mentioned above. In doing so we come to a surprising conclusion: The awfulness of their teammates may allow them to keep their usage rates near the levels they enjoyed when they were separate. So they may not need to dial things back as much as an initial look at the numbers portends.
All three would lose about 5 percent off their usage rates from a season ago. In such a scenario Wade would still have led the league in usage rate last season, and James would have been third. Bosh would have fallen to 27th.
The interesting part is what happens to their PER. If they don't rate as highly as I projected in my original analysis, then they may fall short of my initial benchmark of 61 wins. But the decline in usage rate should cost them only about a point and a half of PER even if their percentages remain unchanged. And, as I noted above, their percentages are likely to improve as a result of playing together.
If they don't, however, the impact will barely be noticeable anyway. If they do things at the exact same percentages and just create 5 percent fewer plays each, the Heat still project as a 56-win team using the same assumptions I did in the last exercise. That's not quite as rosy as 61 wins, perhaps, but still a clear championship contender.
And of course, their percentages are likely to compensate with increases to offset the dip in touches -- especially in the case of Bosh, who should benefit from plentiful feeds from Wade and James near the basket. If the effect is dramatic enough, their PERs could hold level or even increase.
So basically, the zero-sum game has much less sway in our evaluation of a Bosh-Wade-James partnership than we might have expected, at least in Year 1. That's likely to change as they get more talented players around them in subsequent seasons -- something that is a virtual certainty to happen unless the new CBA does away with cap exceptions entirely -- so we may see more dramatic impacts in the following seasons.
For now, however, I'd expect only about a 5 percent drop in usage from the big three. And given how much they had the ball in their hands last season, it's going to seem like a drop in the bucket.
