These are the eight combinations with whom he was most often paired.įor example, he played 1,615 offensive possessions with one playmaking ball handler, one dynamic shooting wing, one spot-up shooting wing, and one stretch big from 2010-11 to 2021-22 (which would include a 2013-14 lineup with Mario Chalmers, Ray Allen, Shane Battier, and Chris Bosh). LeBron has teamed up with 409 unique four-man combinations of our 11 offensive roles. Surprisingly, having more shooting wings surrounding LeBron has not tended to result in better offensive lineups (at least not in an obvious way). But is that right? Let’s see how often LeBron has played alongside different amounts of dynamic shooting wings, spot-up shooting wings, and stretch bigs and how well those lineups have performed on offense.
Initially, my own hunch was that the best way to build around LeBron was just to surround him with shooters. Additionally, there’s an obvious tradeoff between the losses on offense and the gains on defense when you add an extra big. These patterns aren’t specific to LeBron or his teams, we would find the same result throughout the league. The flip side is that more wings lead to more offense. We find a predictable pattern between the number of bigs on the floor and offensive efficiency, where more bigs mean less efficient scoring for LeBron’s lineups. Thirdly, it’s surprising to see that the shooting groups – dynamic shooting wings, spot-up shooting wings, and stretch bigs – don’t immediately jump to the top of the list (more on this later!).Īnother way to sort LeBron’s lineups is by the number of teammates from each offensive grouping – organizing them by how many ball handlers, wings, and bigs were on the court. Secondly, the biggest detrimental impact is made by rim-finishing bigs whose presence on the court tends to depress the offensive rating of LeBron’s lineups. First, the three playmaking groups – ball handlers, wings, and bigs – are each on the “red” side of the table, indicating that these types of players tend to add a scoring boost to LeBron’s lineups. It’s a little tricky to evaluate the effect of each type of teammate on LeBron’s lineups one at a time like this (because really you need to consider how all five players fit together) but a few themes stick out from the table above. We can look at how often LeBron’s lineups featured each type of teammate and how those lineups performed on offense throughout his career.
You can read all the nitty, gritty details about how we’re using Synergy data to define our offensive roles in a separate post but, basically, we’re sorting players based on different combinations of their play-type and shot-type rates (%TIME stats) that best describe the ways in which they try to help their teams score. These offensive roles are defined by how a player tries to help his team score points, either through the shots that he takes himself or the ones he sets up for his teammates with his playmaking. LeBron has played with each of the 11 different types of players in our offensive role system. We can use our new offensive role system to look back at the combinations of player archetypes that have worked well next to LeBron on offense (as well as some of the combinations that haven’t worked so well). Over the years, he’s played with every type of player in every possible lineup combination.īut what type of lineup works best around LeBron? Our Actionable Analytics squad has been working on a system for classifying player’s offensive roles – learn more about how coaches and scouts can use this new feature to develop winning team strategies.ĭuring his 20 seasons in the NBA, LeBron James has played with 214 different teammates – from Norris Cole to Cole Swider and from Ray Allen to Alan Henderson, teaming up with 7 different Mr.
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