BREAKING: LeBron’s decision was just a Hennessy ad

FROM ABOVE ARTICLE:

This was supposed to be a mega game preview for the first Lakers–Mavericks matchup on Friday. For obvious reasons, these are the two teams I’ve watched closest over the last two seasons, and Luka facing his old team, even with Nico Harrison gone, will always be a special game. The potential return of Anthony Davis only adds intrigue.

But instead of a straight preview, I decided to zoom out. Watching the Mavericks struggle to score all season while ranking dead last in offense, and seeing the Lakers and most of the league in the middle of another scoring explosion, got me thinking. Offensive rating is at an all-time high, Dončić leads the league at 35.2 points per game, three other players are averaging 31 or more, and 14 players are at 27.9 or higher. And all of it makes me wonder how Nico Harrison misjudged the direction of the NBA game this badly.

For all my Mavs-fan readers, I don’t want this to turn into another kicking-the-dead-horse piece, even if the names Luka Dončić and Jalen Brunson are impossible to ignore in any honest analysis. That’s why I’ll also share a few thoughts and past examples of what it looks like to build a championship offense around a player with a Cooper Flagg-type profile. And for the Lakers, the Dončić–Austin Reaves duo echoes so many past Mavericks iterations that the comparisons are unavoidable.

But most of all, this was just a fun exercise of looking at and comparing the abundance of offensive talent we have the privilege of watching on a game-by-game basis.

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Today’s highlights:

Data and methodology

Offensive engines: tiers and categories

The makeup of title teams from the past decade

Paths to contention: Lakers with Luka, Mavs with Flagg

1-Data and methodology

The idea for this analysis started with the same question everyone in the Mavericks and Lakers orbit asks themselves after every Dončić outburst: how can you give up a generational one-man offense? That led me to a second, even more interesting question. How many players in today’s NBA are actually that — a guaranteed engine or the main piece of an elite offense?

So to answer that, I ended up looking at three different data sources (all using data from 2022–2025):

Cleaning the Glass On/Off data: points per 100 possessions scored with the player on the floor

source: Cleaning the Glass

This is where I started, because I wanted a look at how many players over the last three and a half seasons were part of offenses that scored at least 120 points per 100 possessions with them on the floor. I know 120 is a round-number bias, but it’s also the mark of a truly elite offense. There are four players who reached that threshold: Jokić, Dončić, Brunson, and Jamal Murray, with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander putting up outstanding numbers since the 2023–24 season. You could argue Murray is there because Jokić is so absurd — and there’s truth to that — but the rest of this exercise also reaffirmed my belief that Murray is an underrated offensive creator.

EPM – Offensive Estimated Plus-Minus

source: EPM — DunksAndThrees

EPM is one of the most popular all-in-one advanced metrics, and for this exercise I focused on the offensive side of it. More specifically, I looked at how many player-seasons had an offensive EPM of 5 or above. Another round number, and another mark that only elite offensive players can reach. Jokić is in his own stratosphere when it comes to advanced metrics, with Shai and Luka sitting right below him.

Self-created shot volume and efficiency

I looked at both the volume of self-created shots (the share of self-created attempts per 100 shots) and the efficiency of those attempts, defined as shots with two or more seconds of touch time. Luka and SGA are in a category of their own in terms of both volume and efficiency, with Jalen Brunson and Tyrese Haliburton being the two other guards who stand out.

Inefficiency on these shots — which also shows up in the On/Off data — is why I excluded some of the less efficient high-volume scorers like Trae Young, Ja Morant, LaMelo Ball, Scottie Barnes, and Paolo Banchero from my final lists.

2-Offensive engines: tiers and categories

I put four players in my elite tier: Jokić, SGA, Luka, and Giannis. You could also call this the “size matters” tier, because all four are prototypes of the league’s recent shift toward big ball-handlers and creators with size.

There are two smaller guards, Steph Curry and Jalen Brunson, who I could easily include in the elite tier, but I decided to place them just a step below. Curry only because of his age, and Brunson because his advanced numbers are still a notch below the true elite. Tyrese Haliburton is another tweener who could be added to the Brunson and Curry category. He’s an elite playmaker, maybe just a bit smaller and with slightly less overwhelming numbers, but he has already shown he can be the engine of a team that reached the NBA Finals.

I would put six other guards in the next category, again mostly smaller but highly efficient, high-volume shot creators and capable playmakers. These players are Donovan Mitchell, Kyrie Irving, Jamal Murray, Tyrese Maxey, Austin Reaves, Darius Garland, and De’Aaron Fox.

Then there is the next category of wings or score-first shooting guards, players like Jayson Tatum, Anthony Edwards, Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, Kawhi Leonard, and Jaylen Brown. They score at a high rate, but they don’t have the playmaking or passing abilities of the elite tier. I think the top players from both of these last groups can be the best player on an elite offense, but they need more supporting talent around them than the elite tier does.

Lastly, there are four other names worth mentioning. LeBron James and James Harden are both prototypes of big ball-handlers who spent a long time in the elite tier but, although still great, have declined with age. Cade Cunningham, on the other hand, is at the opposite end of the spectrum, another big ball-handler who looks like he is on the verge of a breakthrough into, or at least close to, the elite tier. Similarly, Alperen Şengün is another young player who could follow Jokić and Giannis as the next game-changing, playmaking big man.

3-The makeup of title teams from the past decade

Another question I kept coming back to (and this is where the Cooper Flagg or Kyrie-Irving-on-the-Mavericks perspective becomes interesting) is whether you can build a team that can win an NBA title without one of the elite top 3–4 offensive engines, the players currently in the Jokić, SGA, Giannis, or Luka mold. Here’s a quick chronological look:

2025: OKC won the title with an elite offensive hub in SGA, plus historically elite defense.

2024: The Celtics are one of the rare outliers without an elite offensive hub. But they had two high-scoring wings in Tatum and Brown, a unique supporting cast with two high-level secondary playmakers in Jrue Holiday and Derrick White, and elite shooting.

2023: The Nuggets had an elite hub in Jokić, plus a high-level secondary playmaker in Murray.

2022: The Warriors had an elite hub in Curry, a unique system, and elite defense built around Draymond Green.

2021: The Bucks had an elite hub in Giannis, plus a secondary playmaker in Jrue Holiday and a wing scorer in Khris Middleton.

2020: The Lakers had an elite hub in LeBron and a peak-level secondary scorer/finisher in Anthony Davis, who also anchored a dominant defense.

2019: The second outlier, with no elite playmaking hub. But they had prime elite wing scoring in Kawhi, another wing scorer in Pascal Siakam, and two secondary playmakers in Kyle Lowry and Marc Gasol.

2018: An elite hub in Curry and a second elite scorer in Kevin Durant. An unfair combo, not even mentioning Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, and the rest of the supporting cast.

2017: Same as above.

2016: The Cavaliers had a prime elite hub in LeBron James and a secondary playmaker/scorer in Kyrie Irving.

2015: The first Warriors iteration with an elite hub in Curry and a great system and supporting cast in Draymond Green, Klay Thompson, Andre Iguodala, and others.

Looking even further back, there are a couple of other iterations of teams built around elite wing scorers — like the last Spurs title team led by Kawhi or the 2011 Mavericks with Dirk — that did not necessarily have an elite playmaking offensive hub.

The NBA has evolved since then, and we will see when the next team without an offensive hub breaks through. The 2024 Celtics and the 2019 Raptors showed it can be done, but you need an incredibly balanced and versatile cast around that star to make it work.

4-Paths to contention: Lakers with Luka, Mavs with Flagg

The roadmap for the Lakers with Luka looks clearer and more imminent, but it’s still anything but straightforward or easy. The Mavericks’ 2024 Finals and 2022 Conference Finals teams were built around the same model: an elite offensive hub in Luka, a high-level secondary playmaker in Irving or Brunson, and a defensive-minded supporting cast. The current Lakers roster, with Austin Reaves taking another leap this season and filling the secondary creator role, and LeBron James — even at 40 years old — still capable of doing that as well, looks like the best offensive iteration of this proven model.

The problem is that defensively the supporting cast is not close to the level the 2024 Mavs had, and the roadblocks on the way to the promised land are massive. The Thunder are a juggernaut with an absurd abundance of defensive talent, youth, and athleticism around SGA, and the Nuggets remain the team with the most continuity and a proven championship model built around Jokić, Murray, and Gordon.

The Mavericks’ future is more murky. It seems like the injuries to Irving and Anthony Davis will prevent us from ever seeing whether a team built around two elite number twos and defense could be a winning formula. At its best, it was still a risky proposition because of Irving’s and Davis’s age, injury history, and the top-tier talent on the other contenders. Now the priority should be to build the team around Flagg. It is extremely hard, and honestly unfair, to talk about limitations for an 18-year-old, especially one as talented as the Mavericks rookie. Based on what I have seen so far, I would project Flagg’s ceiling more in the elite wing-scoring, not necessarily elite playmaking, mold, closer to players like Tatum, Kawhi, or Jaylen Brown. Flagg’s size, athleticism, and motor also make it much easier to build an elite defense around him, which makes the 2024 Celtics and 2019 Raptors the most relevant team-building blueprints.

However, like the Lakers, the Mavericks do not have an abundance of assets, which is why both teams will need to be very creative and probably a bit lucky if they want to eventually challenge OKC, which currently looks like a dynasty in the making.