The NBA’s Five Most Surprising Lineups

Warriors and Kings headline the five most surprising lineups—good and bad—to start the NBA season.

The five most surprising lineups—good and bad—to start the NBA season.

The Kings’ starting five: +22.5 pts per 100 possessions in 41 mins over five games

The grouping of De’Aaron Fox, Kevin Huerter, rookie Keegan Murray, Harrison Barnes and Domantas Sabonis has had a little bit of everything.

Elite rebounding marks, grabbing nearly 30% of its own misses while gobbling up nearly 83% of its opponents’ misfires. Ample shooting, knocking down almost 53% of its shots and 42% of its triples, even with Barnes and Sabonis struggling mightily from deep so far. (The smooth-shooting Murray’s been such an instant fit in this way.) And the defense has been surprisingly solid. That’s due in large part to this group, which has allowed 93.2 points per 100 possessions—a rate that would stand as the league’s best mark on a teamwide scale thus far. The lineup also plays at a blistering pace of 104 possessions per 48 minutes.

But here’s an enormous key: playing uptempo on offense hasn’t resulted in a lack of effort on defense. At least not yet. In a key development from a season ago, Sacramento—which has preached the importance of committing to transition defense—is relatively average in that regard so far, ranking 13th. That’s a night-and-day improvement from the 2021-22 campaign, when the Kings finished as the league’s fifth-worst transition D.

The Nets’ starting five: -14.2 pts per 100 possessions in 67 mins over six games

It’s a hell of a thing to look at Brooklyn, which employs Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving—a pair of stars who are part of NBA history’s elusive 50-40-90 club—and see the club’s starting lineup is generating an anemic 101.5 points per 100 possessions. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s near-the-bottom-of-the-league bad; on par with the wayward-shooting Lakers, and the Clippers, who’ve largely played without Kawhi Leonard so far this season.

Yes, we assumed there’d be growing pains for Ben Simmons and, because of his shortcomings on offense, the guys around him. But we didn’t know there’d be this many minutes—97 so far, or almost 17 per night—with Simmons and starting center Nic Claxton sharing the court each night. (Wing Royce O’Neale rounds out Brooklyn’s starting five.)

The Simmons-Claxton pairings are understandable given that Simmons will often be assigned to the opposing team’s best wing scorer, whereas Claxton is more keen to defend traditional bigs than Simmons. But things get cramped quite quickly, even with scorers Durant and Irving, with two non-shooting threats on offense. Especially when you have a shooter like Joe Harris (who started Monday as Simmons sat out with a sore knee) who can be plugged in instead.

It will be interesting to see how Steve Nash seeks to go small, with Simmons at center, more often once Seth Curry is back. Using lineups like those would allow the team to better use its shooters, but would come with the downside of making a finesse Brooklyn club even less effective on the glass.

The Warriors’ “PTSD” lineup: -8.3 per 100 possessions in 37 mins over six games

It’s been a relatively common refrain so far this season as it relates to the Dubs: The team’s youngsters haven’t performed well as a second unit, and largely to blame for Golden State’s struggles to start the year.

That isn’t completely wrong, of course. Jonathan Kuminga in particular has been rough, shooting 33.3%. Lineups with him, Jordan Poole and James Wiseman have been blasted by 38.5 points per 100 possessions over 28 minutes so far, while ones with Kuminga, Poole and Moses Moody have lost by 17.3 points per 100 possessions in 22 minutes. With Wiseman, specifically, there just isn’t much second-unit cohesion just yet.

But the early returns on the PTSD lineup—composed of Poole, Klay Thompson, Steph Curry, Draymond Green and Andrew Wiggins (who gets no part of the acronym here, apparently)—haven’t been very good, either. Especially not when compared to last postseason, when the Warriors outscored playoff opponents by 13.8 points per 100 possessions with that grouping, and logged a 64% true-shooting percentage.

The Warriors have struggled to start the season.  :: John Hefti/USA TODAY Sports

To this point, the five-man unit has defended very poorly, surrendering 117.2 points per 100 plays while being a sieve from a defensive-rebound perspective. Opponents are grabbing nearly 32% of their misses. Both are marks that would rank near the bottom of the league on a full-time scale.

Coach Steve Kerr has been vocal in calling out his team’s lack of communication defensively. And a struggling Klay Thompson has spoken about continuing to try to work himself back to where he was before his injuries.

If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that the Warriors also have one of the best statistical lineups in basketball so far, and it requires just one quick swap: plugging in Kevon Looney for Poole, which immediately mitigates the defensive-rebounding problem. The Dubs are a plus-25.3 per 100 over 81 minutes when Looney plays with that group.

Washington’s (former) starting five: +21.6 pts per 100 possessions in 69 mins over six gms

Perhaps the biggest pleasant surprise on this list comes from the Wizards, who’ve seen fantastic results when playing Bradley Beal, Kristaps Porzingis, Kyle Kuzma, Deni Avdija and surehanded newcomer Monte Morris. In fact, Washington’s had more success on offense with that group—a blistering 128.6 points—than any other five-man lineup in the league with at least 50 minutes played.

Interestingly, though, coach Wes Unseld Jr. opted to shake up his starting five Monday night, plugging in 30-year-old forward Anthony Gill in place of the 21-year-old Avdija. It was a move he’d soft-launched a game earlier, against the Celtics, by bringing Avdija off the bench to begin the second half.

Unseld said the club had a need for more playmaking in the second unit following the hamstring injury to Delon Wright, which will sideline the guard for six to eight weeks. Avdija, who possesses point-forward skills at 6' 9", figures to have more of a chance to handle the ball with that second group than he would with Beal and Morris in the starting five. (As a starter, Avdija was often taking on the most demanding defensive assignment from night to night.)

Just in case anyone was planning to go to Unseld with a pitchfork over the decision, it’s worth noting that the metrics with Gill as the fifth member of the group are more than solid, too: +12.8 per 100 possessions in 38 minutes of work so far.

The Clippers’ lineups with Kawhi, who’s only been able to play twice so far

It feels too soon to be “out” on the Clippers, who many of us—myself included—picked to reach the Finals this year. And to be sure, it is still a bit too early to have a change of heart, in my opinion.

That said, I wasn’t expecting Kawhi Leonard to have only played two games out of the Clippers’ first seven outings. And he’s going to miss at least the next two games as well, based on what coach Ty Lue said yesterday.

Lue said Leonard was feeling “frustrated” over his inability to be back at this point, after having missed a season and rehabbing for the better part of a year from a partially torn ACL in his right knee.

Numbers probably don’t matter that much for Leonard and Paul George, a pair of players who would illustrate the ability to contend if both are healthy simultaneously. Still, in the 39 minutes those two played alongside each other, Los Angeles was 13.7 points better than its opponents per 100 possessions while notching a 62.2% true-shooting percentage.

Seeing Leonard get more reps with new Clipper John Wall, along with the other roster additions, would be an enormous plus for this team. But the question of how often we’ll see that this season seems very much in the air at the moment.

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