Our top 5-man units last year were seriously awful by comparison. Seriously, here are the two 5-man units that we played the MOST last year:
Bradley-Crawford-Green-Bass-Sullinger (372.5 minutes)
Rondo-Bayless-Green-Bass-Humphries (124.2 minutes)
just curious, but do we know which of these two teams produced more wins last year after evening out the playing time?
I'm leary of answering that because simplistic types will almost certainly do the knee-jerk thing and assert that the differences are solely because of Rondo ...
Still, in the interest of sharing information:
On a per-possession basis, both of those lineups were nearly identically (in) efficient on offense, managing just 0.97 and 0.96 points per possession.
On defense, the first lineup was on the bad side of mediocre, giving up 1.03 points per possession. The second lineup, though, was definitely bad, giving up 1.13 points per possession.
If you look at more of the various 5-man combinations, Bayless sticks out like a sore thumb on many of the really bad defensive units. He was just too undersized to be playing SG and unlike Bradley, nowhere near quick enough or savvy enough to make up for the lack of size with defensive skill.
It drove me nuts that for much of the Spring we had him in the starting unit such that he literally got more time next to Rondo than Bradley did. Of course, Bradley's injuries didn't help.
Our better units tended to have Rondo at PG & Bradley at SG, but we just didn't see that combination on the floor all that much.
Just as bad as those backcourt issues though, is the simple fact of how chronically undersized we played up front. Bass, Sullinger & Humphries are all decent power forwards, to different extents. Not one of them comes close to being tall enough to play center on a consistent basis. And that killed us.
Because the vast majority of the time last year we had some combination of two of those three on the floor up front.