re: Analyzing Pelican Players and How to Fit Talents Together

Article from Sports on Earth today about what the Heat are doing in reference to Shoals/Ziller, positional revolution, and the Z Chart.

Longish read, but well worth it if you find the premise of this thread interesting.

LINK

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"I started wondering," Shoals recounted, "if there wasn't something bigger going on when there were individual KGs and Dirks and teams like the Wizards where interplay took precedence over a fixed system." This notion of interplay over rigidity comes up a lot in writing about the Positional Revolution, and it's also crucial to the way the Heat play basketball.

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Ziller told me that the purpose of the "Z" charts was to illustrate that a lot of current NBA stars confound positionality--point guards who are good at "shooting guard things," power forwards who are good at "point guard things"--and to emphasize that the "pure" player isn't inherently more valuable. All you need is a collection of players who can pool their skills together to give you everything you need to win basketball games, positionality be damned.

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Not that orthodox positionality is dead...There will probably always be good teams with 7-footers and pass-first point guards. Rather, the Heat are a novelty, and novelties are useful because they force conventional wisdom - which is not just annoying but intellectually stifling -- to justify itself in a manner it normally isn't required to. The recitation of old clichés -- defense wins championships, good pitching beats good hitting -- don't help us grow or learn. When a team comes along and wins in a new and unexpected way, it compels us to interrogate The Way Things Are rather than just accepting it as a given.

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