Conventional Basketball

[Uriel]

I originally posted this upstairs initially, but I figured it applied to NBA basketball in general as much as it did to the Spurs, and since the NBA Forum is more heavily populated at the moment, I figured I could get a wider audience for it if I posted it here too.

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I've never really understood why a basketball team has to consist of a PG, SG, SF, PF, and C. When the game of basketball was invented, those positions seem to have been arbitrarily created without a specific tailor made purpose for doing so, but rather, merely for the sake of it. It's almost as if the inventors (and obviously, I'm not referring to James Naismith per se, but to all the people who have come and gone through the years contributing to the game) simply decided that the 5 players playing for each team had to have respective positions and they just made up a bunch of names for them.

Now, as basketball has evolved through the years, there is no doubt that each position has come to occupy its own role on the floor. Centers for instance don't normally go dribbling the ball up the court in the same way that point guards don't hang around the paint to hunt for blocked shots. But I simply don't understand why the 5 players on the floor have to get progressively taller as you go up the positional ladder (that is, from point guard to center). And for that matter, I don't understand why they have to fill the specific roles their position is designated for, and how this designation somehow necessarily relates to their heights.

For instance, why do centers have to be bruisers or bangers in the paint as opposed to hanging out on the perimeter looking for 3 pointers? Those who do occupy the aforementioned rare niche are, more often than not, berated for it, in part because they don't play basketball the way people think big men should (see: Matt Bonner). Similarly, why do shooting guards have to be the designated perimeter scorer instead small forwards, why should power forwards hunt for the rebound instead of centers, or why should point guards take care of floor general duties instead of shooting guards? For that matter, who is to say that a team even needs a floor general at all? Or a bruiser, rebounder, or 3 point shooter for that matter.

Granted, players in different positions occupy multiple roles, and as a consequence, their niches tend to overlap. That explains why, in the Spurs' system, shooting guards and small forwards as well as power forwards and centers are more or less interchangeable. But if that's the case, doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of the whole system of positioning to begin with? Why can't the Spurs then run a basketball team with 5 PGs or 5 Cs or 2 PGs, 1 SF, and 2 Cs, or any combination thereof? Why can't Tim Duncan see the floor at the floor at the same time as Tiago Splitter and Matt Bonner, and then pair them up with James Anderson and Danny Green or something? Or for that matter, why can't the Lakers run a starting lineup of:

PG - Kobe Bryant
SG - Ron Artest
SF - Lamar Odom
PF - Pau Gasol
C - Andrew Bynum

Those 5 guys are easily the team's 5 best players, and running a lineup like that gives them a significant size advantage over any lineup any team can trot out that basically doesn't involve 5 7-footers on the floor at the same time. But those 5 guys have never played together. Andrew Bynum gets benched in favor of the corpse of Derek Fisher when the Lakers play down the stretch, because that lineup lacks a true point guard, and Fisher fills that need. But that immediately begs the question, why does that lineup need a true point guard? Who is to say that adding Fisher to run the triangle offense (which I can conceivably see the Lakers doing without him) is a better idea than throwing in another dominant interior defender and rebounder? Of course, one can always argue that Fisher provides intangibles that Bynum simply cannot at this stage of his career. But if that's the case, why don't the Lakers just employ a lineup of 5 Fishers or the equivalent of it? Why do they have to stick with the conventional designated basketball positions? For the record, though it doesn't really mean much, I've used that lineup in NBA 2K11 whenever I've used the Lakers, and it's often led to great success (and the general consternation of other players I've played against).

How do basketball coaches know that trotting out a lineup that involves the traditional 5 positions represents their best chance at winning basketball games? What evidence is there to back up the notion that a lineup involving the aforementioned conventional basketball positions cons utes a better overall team than one that plays any combination of said positions while still occupying diverse enough roles to not occupy other people's niches, but rather, enhance one anther's roles simply by virtue of the fact that one's role is tailor made to inherently do so? Of course, I'm not seriously suggesting that a lineup involving 5 PGs or 5Cs is better than the conventional one. But I do often wonder how we somehow decided that the conventional lineup is necessarily the most effective one.

[DMC]

Many of the terms are positional terms, job roles, not individuals.

The Lakers could run with the lineup you suggested. They cannot play 48 minutes and have no 2nd unit though. You have to have good talent on the 2nd unit, which leaves Odom out of the starting role. The rest have been starting as far as I know. Kobe is too tall to be a PG. He would always be up top distributing, and we know he cannot pass the ball.

[NewcastleKEG]

SF is never an ELITE shooter. And you need always need a ball handler

So unless your SG can run the point, your giving up a lot of shooting for rebounding AND you will get torched in the open floor