Zach Lowe has a great article on Grantland spelling out the high-wire act that Monty Williams will have to perform in molding the disparate pieces Dell Demps has assembled this off-season into a cohesive bunch. One reservation I have about the piece, though, is a notion that I have seen repeated throughout the basketball blogosphere - that lineups with both Davis and Anderson will be huge defensive liabilities.
It's a significant issue, since many assume that the closing lineup the Pelicans will deploy will be Holiday-Gordon-Evans-Anderson-Davis, the team's five best players. If this lineup were to be a defensive catastrophe, any of the mouth-watering offensive possibilities that the lineup presents would be worthless.
The notion that Davis-Anderson lineups are defensively challenged is certainly a reasonable conclusion. Davis, as Lowe rightly notes, hasn't developed the strength to handle centers, and he has yet to master the nuances of playing defense at the NBA level. Anderson, meanwhile, isn't noted as anything more than a mediocre defender. Moreover, Hornets lineups that featured both Anderson and Davis on the floor ceded a cringe-inducing 1.208 points per possession over 690 minutes, almost 15 points per 100 possessions worse than league average.
However, when you dig deeper into last season's lineups, the data starts to tell a different story. Take, for instance, three different permutations of lineups that featured Vasquez at PG, Gordon at SG, and Aminu at SF. Lineups with those players at the 1, 2, and 3 positions accounted for 21% of the team's minutes last year, and were certainly Monty's preferred starters. The three permutations based on this backcourt involve combinations of Anderson, Davis, and Lopez, the Hornets bigs with the most minutes last season. (Note: all the lineup data for this post comes from nbawowy.com.)
