Or, “See, this blog’s mission is not over because ESPN haters still exist!”
The other day, Chris Broussard listed the top Big Threes in the league. The Hornets came in at #5 with Chris Paul, David West, and Tyson Chandler. “These three have tremendous chemistry,” is how he leads off, citing CP’s general amazingness, D West’s versatility, and TC’s defense. The ordering of the rest of the list, though, is sort of wacky to my mind, not just because I’m a Hornets fan. And, since it’s been awhile since I pointed out why someone on ESPN was wrong (waahhh, the offseason is no fun), I’m going to point out my biggest issue with two of the “Big Threes” ranked ahead of the Hornets.
#1 Boston: Garnett, Pierce, Allen. OK, moving on.
#2 San Antonio: Duncan, Parker, Ginobili. Old, but good. They have great past success together, so I’ll agree.
#3 Los Angeles: Bryant, Gasol, Bynum. See, OK, I’m aware that he got the idea for this article from the fact that, with the Ron Artest trade, Houston now has a three and the NBA is currently stacked with Big Threes rather than great duos. But. This three has never played together. If I was making this list, I wouldn’t be putting “paper” threes in there. I mean, we could just have a paper season if you want to do it that way.
#4 Houston: Yao, Artest, McGrady. Big fat ditto. If you’re going to say chemistry is one of the main reasons NO is so good, how can you rank totally untested trios higher?
#5 New Orleans. Move us the hell up until these dudes above have proved they can play together.
#6 Phoenix: Nash, Stoudemire, O’Neal. Not buying it. Just on rep? Past individual success? Phoenix got worse in the second half of the season. No way should they be above…
#7 Detroit: Billups, Hamilton, Wallace. Right? How many successive deep playoff runs have they had together?
#8 Dallas: Nowitzki, Howard, Kidd. Broussard: “Man, I’m giving the old trios lots of credit.” Yeah. Ya are. And this is why you are wrong. In fact everyone but Dirk sucks. Did he watch our series?
#9 Washington: Arenas, Butler, Jamison. Provided they’re healthy, higher.
OK, now that I’ve had my fun telling ESPN why they’re wrong– I feel refreshed, really– let’s step back for a sec and realized that I’m not really offended by this list. Why? Well, the Hornets don’t actually have a Big Three, do they? If that’s our Big Three, we’ve also got a nasty extra 16 points per game coming from Peja, who is definitely not the fourth offensive option. We could swap him and Tyson in that list and still have a pretty decent Big Three. So it’s pretty much the Lakers and us alone at the top of the Big Four list, huh? Bryant-Gasol-Bynum-Odom vs. Paul-West-Chandler-Stojakovic. Who else has as good a Big Four?
Fun year coming up in the West.
P.S. Totally off topic, but I have NBATV on and they have NBA Stories: Rookie Life on, and it’s rather funny. They filled someone’s entire car with popcorn. Interestingly enough, they had Kobe on and he was just raving about how lucky he was to have Byron Scott his rookie year telling him what to do. And there’s a clip of Byron directing little Kobe.
