Monday, February 8, 2010

My Hastily Thrown Together "Wine Cellar" Team of the 2000s

I got this idea, obviously, from Bill Simmons' epic The Book of Basketball. The idea, basically, is to take the best "vintages" (aka great seasons) from players and put them together to form a super team (in Simmons' conception, to defeat aliens in order to save our planet).

As I know the NBA of the 2000s fairly well (esp. from 2004 on) I humbly present my Wine Cellar team (and I am taking both regular season and post-season performance into question):
Starters:
'00 Shaquille O'Neal
'03 Tim Duncan
'09 LeBron James
'01 Kobe Bryant
'07 Steve Nash
Bench:
'08 Kevin Garnett
'07 Dirk Nowitzki
'04 Ben Wallace
'09 Trevor Ariza
'09 Dwyane Wade
'07 Chris Paul
'07 Baron Davis

Comments: My team does admittedly skew toward the latter half of the decade, but that's because a) I watched way more basketball in the later half, and b) the level of play was just better 05-09 than 00-04. '07 Dirk gets on for his regular season (which, despite what Simmons thinks, was his best season) and '07 Baron gets on for kicking Dirk's ass in the Playoffs. '07 Chris Paul makes it over '09 Chris Paul (who was probably better/more experienced) for the sensation he caused in every Basketball fan who realized we were watching the Next Great True Point Guard. '09 Wade makes it over '06 Wade (despite '06 Wade owning the Finals) because he didn't so much as own the Finals as take advantage of ridiculous refereeing and just barreling to the hoop every other play. '07 Nash makes it over the MVP years based on Simmons' logic in his book. '00 Shaq makes it because it was his first title, only MVP, and only season where he gave a shit the entire season. '04 Ben Wallace makes it because even though I hated those Pistons teams, I respected them. And the Afro. '03 Duncan and '09 LeBron are obvious. '08 Garnett for his defensive mastery and title run.

Toughest Omissions: '06 Paul Pierce (when he was killing himself for a shit Celtics team aka a guy who plays hard every night); '06 or '08 James Posey (bumped him for '09 Ariza for the three-point shooting); '01 Reggie Miller (I wanted another stone-cold free throw shooter, but I couldn't bring myself to bump Baron and his beard); '09 Dwight Howard (got bumped by KG, a more mature defensive force who won the title).

This is obviously quite subjective, but I like what I put together. Would get crushed by Simmons' Wine Cellar team, but he had the superstars of the 80s and 90s at his disposal. My team probably could take a game or two out of seven though.

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