A starting lineup with Grimes, Robinson, and Bridges in it would mean three of those guys would be combining for like 38% usage, which means Brunson and Randle have to acocunt for the other 62%.

You’d need Brunson and Randle to both be up in the 30+ usage range, or one of Grimes/Robinson/Bridges is going to have to take more shots they are accustomed to taking. It’s tempting to want to put a low-usage all-star team out there, but you can’t expect all of those guys to maintain their efficiency levels.

The invisible sixth man lives, but he’s moved on to beating up opposing star players before tipoff.

The streak survive, long live the streak 🙂

That's the theory and I tend to agree with it (you), except then I looked at his on/off data for 20-21 and 21-22 and it tells me the team wasn't much better with him on the court even when his TS% was in excess of 60%.

That's something I rarely see.

So then I looked at the rest of the team and his overall record to see if there was some kind of not so obvious noise in that data, but all I see is red and negative numbers for his entire career.

I'm not buying 9 years of noise and quirky lineup issues. I'm going with he's wildly overrated in his average years and not so hot even when he's very efficient. Most likely defense is a major component of that, but there could be other things. Either way, I’m not trading good assets for the idea he should be contributing very positively when it’s not holding up with this player on/off unless I’m 100% sure I can explain it.

I’m not sure Zach LaVine makes his team better. He can score well and sometimes even scores very efficiently, but his teams practically always suck when he’s on the court and compared to when he’s off.

At his current shooting efficiency, you might be right. When he was shooting 11% better than league average and taking the 13th-most shots in the league, nah — he was real good for his team.

It’s important to remember that offense is intentional — you can’t accidentally score a basket (don’t @ me about no-look heaves etc.; they’re irrelevant) — but players will routinely miss open jumpers and blow layups (hello 2009 Courtney Lee).

The only way a hyper-efficient backcourt player is giving up as much as he puts up is if he’s doing the Houston-era James Harden matador D and simply allowing players to penetrate with no one there to assist in the paint. And even then, James Harden was arguably the best player in the league for a few years because of how insanely efficient he was on record-breaking usage.

tl;dr don’t trade for Zach Lavine in 2023 but if he could replicate 2020 over and over he would be worth it to a defensively-loaded team struggling with scoring efficiency