What if the Pels’ best five doesn’t include their best player?

Had a blast watching the Pels close out Memphis tonight. (Final 113-102.) The most interesting thing was how dynamic the closing five was: CJ McCollum, Jose Alvarado, Brandon Ingram, Herb Jones, and Larry Nance.

This was advertised as McCollum’s wake-up game as a show-runner (rightly so with 30 points and 9 assists!), but the closing quarter showed how effective Alvarado and Nance can be around CJ and BI on the offensive end.

Meanwhile, the real story was that with Alvarado and Jones doing their extreme defensive disruption thing, and Nance being a viable small-five rim protector, this five could get real stops consistently in crunch time. So, in the final minutes of this game against one of the best teams and players in the league, the Pels completely outplayed them on both sides of the court.

And it should be totally natural to say, “And wow, they did this without their best player, Zion!” But the question that comes up is, who do you take off the court to let Zion in? If you take out Alvarado, you lose the perimeter defensive complement to CJ. Teams have shown that they can force mismatches with dynamic guards (like Ja Morant in particular) on Zion, and he regularly gets blown off the court. Everyone else has to compensate and wide-open threes appear all over. If you take out Larry Nance, you have absolutely no interior defensive presence, and someone like Morant can go feed at the rim all he wants. And the Pels have learned that if you take Herb off the court, bad things start happening, period.

So you can’t take any of those three off and get better as a team. You could replace either CJ or BI and maybe keep the offense running at the same level, but is there really any clear improvement to be made there?

My point is that, because CJ, BI, and Zion are all minus-defenders (CJ and BI are better than they are given credit for, but they’re not staying in front of number one options anytime soon), that leaves and “Big 3” lineup with major defensive deficits and unable to get stops when it counts.

Strangely, and maybe this is a feature and not a bug when you think about the reality of injuries in the NBA, but strangely, the Pels seem better when only 2 of their Big 3 are available. This great through the middle 36 minutes of games, where it is completely natural to stagger minutes of your stars, and it works fine for the first six minutes of games where fast offensive starts can get games going in the right direction. That last six minutes though … I don’t know.