The defintion of playing the wing?

[wwharton]

Re: The defintion of playing the wing?

i always thought the ideal heights for the positions were as follows:
pg - 6'0" - 6'4"
sg - 6'4" - 6'7"
sf - 6'6" - 6'9"
pf - 6'8" - 7'0"
c - 6'10 - anything bigger

That looks about right but has changed over the years with some of the athletic freaks we see these days. With guys like AI, Billups, Gordon, etc. there's now a place for undersized SGs (Rodney Monroe wishes he were coming into the league today) and since shooting a 15-18 footer has gone down from year to year, long wing players have more of a place than they used to.

[Dewie12]

Re: The defintion of playing the wing?

www.Espn.go.com/nba/depth

Most SFs on these teams are much bigger and much more phsyical than the SGs. Flip the sg and sf on each teams as if they were interchangeable and it doesn't work. Marvin Williams shouldn't be playing the 2. Neither should Gerald Wallace.

The SF and SG have similar skillsets often times, but I do think their positions are fairly well-defined as far as roles, size and athletic ability

In some systems they may be very defined. But I can't think of one team that doesn't run similar sets with either the 2 or 3. Even back in the day a lot of teams ran a lot of box sets with the 2 and 3 having the exact same initiation for the offense.

I think for most NBA teams there are far more similarities in their system between wing positions than differences. The only thing that really matters is the oppositions matchup.

[Dewie12]

Re: The defintion of playing the wing?

You must mean the 60% that's not in the playoffs, because in the playoffs the difference is HUGE. It determines what defensive packages you can use, whether you can switch on pick and rolls and which ones you can switch on, defensive transition options and where you bring your help defense from. Offensively, it determines spacing above everything else.

Players that are versatile enough to switch in the regular season are often locked into one position during the postseason, both offensively and defensively. The playoffs separate the men from the boys in terms of versatility, and great coaches know how to exploit this in their favor. The shorter rotations in the playoffs also filter out pseudo versatile players.

Yeah because Don Nelson destroying Dallas the other year taught us nothing? Basically he played all wings and two point guards....and beat the top seed.

I don't think this theory of playoffs separates anything. There are individual matchups but the "positions" are not very defined and certainly don't matter unless you take into account the matchup against other teams.

My point is that positions are not definite and in most systems coaches are not defining players as "2's" or "3's". They are simply wings who can guard certain players.