How good would Team Trinity be?
By John Hollinger
ESPN.com
LeBron, Wade and Bosh.
The dream of every team in the free-agent chase is to unite those three All-Stars on one roster, creating a powerhouse trio unlike any the league has ever seen and seemingly ensuring a steady stream of championship parades in the coming years.
There's just one little catch for Team Trinity, regardless of the city the esteemed trio plays in: assembling the rest of the squad.
Putting three superstars together via free agency requires a full-on roster evisceration that would make even the 1998-99 Bulls shudder. Miami, for instance, is pursuing the trio by working a sign-and-trade of its last three contracted players to Toronto for
Chris Bosh. If successful, the Heat could have a roster of
Dwyane Wade,
LeBron James, Bosh and 10 empty slots that could be filled only with second-round draft choices and minimum-wage contracts.
New Jersey, New York and Chicago could put together the triumvirate only by similarly denuding their rosters. As a result, a fair question on the eve of free agency is whether the cure is worse than the disease. Is it possible to become a contender with 10 players, including two starters, pulled off the scrap heap?
[h4]MINIMUM-CONTRACT PLAYERS[/h4]
An example of 10 veteran players who signed for the minimum last year. (Team Trinity would need to sign 10 to meet the league's roster minimum.)
[th=""]Pos.[/th][th=""]Player[/th][th=""]2009-10 PER[/th]
And I do mean scrap heap. It's easy to say, "Anyone would flock to play with those three!" but that isn't quite accurate. Hamstrung by an inability to pay the usual low-level salaries required to lure veterans (the midlevel or biannual exception amount), Team Trinity would be left to pick up the scraps -- replacement-level talents available for the veteran's minimum, second-round draft picks and D-Leaguers. The only respite might come from a veteran waived or bought out at midseason -- a la
P.J. Brown in 2008 or
Joe Smith in 2009 -- but even so, we're talking about eighth-man types.
How good could such a team be? Believe it or not, it still could be quite good -- even if the three never got a decent teammate. Using my preseason prediction model, I plugged in a team with those three players and used fairly conservative estimates for what they might produce in the coming season -- a player efficiency rating of 29 for James, 26 for Wade and 23 for Bosh. I gave James 3,100 minutes, Wade 2,850 and Bosh 2,600.
For every other minute played by Team Trinity, I inserted my replacement-level figure of a 10 PER -- this is what I input when a team has an empty rotation spot or has it filled by a player projected to produce less than 10. I never go any lower than this and have never felt a need to, as virtually anyone who produces at a lesser rate (once we include defensive value) is quickly replaced.
OK, that's my methodology; now for the result. This team, believe it or not, is projected to win 61 games.
And, of course, that is in a worst-case scenario -- it might not be filled
entirely by replacement-level players. At least one decent veteran might decide it's worth taking the plunge, especially if the exposure can get him a contract next year after he's on national TV twice a week playing with Team Trinity.
Mike Miller, for instance, reportedly has meetings with both the Knicks and Heat scheduled for Thursday. While adding him to a deeper roster might not change the outlook much, having him replace 35 minutes a night of replacement-level stinkiosity would add several wins over the course of a season.
Even if Team Trinity didn't get somebody as good as Miller, a lesser player could help. In fact, pretty much any half-decent player --
C.J. Watson, let's say, or
Rodney Carney -- would add a couple of wins to this projection.
On the other hand, the biggest liability for Team Trinity would be the potential of one of its three stars missing time with an injury. A prolonged absence by any one of them would turn the club into a .500 outfit; if two of them went out, it would be awful.
I should stress that all this depends on a single team amassing three superstar talents. It really works only with a James-Wade-Bosh combo; once you start replacing one of those three with a
David Lee or a
Joe Johnson, the rest of the roster becomes a much greater liability.
But nobody has ever put together three stars in their prime of the magnitude of James, Wade and Bosh -- in fact, if not for
Kevin Durant, they would have been the top three players in PER this past season. Of course, nobody has ever surrounded three stars with an expansion team, either. Nonetheless, it says here they'll have a heck of a team -- even in Year 1, before they can start filling out the rest of the roster. About the worst I can say is that they might not be champion-caliber right away, but if not, they'll be darned close.
