NBA All-Star Weekend is a love letter to the most beautiful superfluousness that we’ve come to associate with basketball, its most successful professional sports league, and all the gravitational characters who make it worth treasuring. It’s a time to celebrate physics-obliterating athleticism, unteachable skill, and every spectacle that dances on the periphery.
What the weekend mostly bypasses, though, are some of the key elements that make basketball basketball: competition and strategy. Sunday’s All-Star Game will attempt to reincorporate both by essentially turning each quarter into its own game before the final frame becomes a chase to score 24 more points than the leading team has accumulated up until then.
And it’s within that game where competition and strategy have an opportunity to leap into the forefront like never before. Since the exhibition’s result has no tangible impact on games that actually matter, let Sunday’s star-studded contest also serve as test tube. On that note, what I want to see is Team Giannis exploit its captain’s impressive roster by leveraging size in a way we’ve never seen before.
Even in a league where the three ball is king, imagine trying to score against this lineup, one Nick Nurse (a creative coach who doesn’t care what others think) should experiment with for the sake of experimentation: Giannis Antetokounmpo, Joel Embiid, Rudy Gobert, Bam Adebayo, and Pascal Siakam. If you can’t picture these five on the floor at the same time, nobody will cast blame. It’s five players who either embody positionless basketball or thrive at a position that’s become an endangered species. Instead of downsizing, let’s race in the opposite direction.
Adebayo, at 6’9 with a 7’1 wingspan, is the lineup’s “smallest” player. (Siakam is also listed at 6’9 but his wingspan is two inches longer.) There are unstoppable post-up players (Embiid and Antetokounmpo) and roll men who take no prisoners once they leave their feet (Gobert and Adebayo). This unit spits on so much of what we think about the game’s current pace-and-space revolution, but in a way that isn’t backwards.
Collectively, they’d redefine the court’s geography by combining historically great rim protection with revolutionary versatility along the perimeter. Without flinching, Adebayo, Siakam, and Antetokounmpo can switch onto literally anyone Team LeBron has. Embiid and Gobert might be the two most game-influencing defenders alive, and opponents can forget about scoring anywhere around the paint with both in the game.
They might not have great three-point shooters, but they do have guys willing to let it fly—everyone except Gobert won’t be shy. And once the ball goes up, on either end, it’s hard to picture anybody on the other team grabbing a single rebound. Anthony Davis, Nikola Jokic, and Domas Sabonis are beasts on the glass in their own right, but each would starve against this group.
If you control the ball, you control the pace. And in a half-court offensive setting, Adebayo, Siakam, Antetokounmpo, Embiid, and Gobert have just the right combination of vision, passing, strength, and touch to punish whatever stands in their way. Imagine chasing Siakam around a thicket of screens set by two (or more) of those other bodies? Total nightmare. Or what about Antetokounmpo running a high pick-and-roll with Gobert diving towards the rim and Embiid in the dunker spot? It doesn’t matter how tight you pack the paint if those three are rumbling into it to corral a lob.
In extended minutes, these five would run into some natural spacing issues, and whenever they don’t grab an offensive rebound life could get hectic trying to retreat in transition (especially against a team that has Ben Simmons and Russell Westbrook). But overall, this unit would stretch the boundaries of what we think basketball can and should be in 2020. Adebayo just won the skills competition, while Siakam and Antetokounmpo are plenty familiar with running their team’s respective systems. Mix those three with the game’s most dominant low-post presence and another seven-footer who doesn’t need the ball to make a positive difference and who knows what can happen?
If Team Giannis wants to pull off the upset Sunday night, this group could be what tilts the scales in their favor, functioning as one mountainous position-free blob that will push basketball forward in a way that used to hold it back. Let’s hope Nurse agrees.
The All-Star Game is a perfect time to get weird, and there’s nothing weirder than this five-man unit.