This team has so many options because it has so many good players. It was understandable that figuring out who could play together best was going to be the challenge. We've discovered that starting Brown and Tatum together along with Kyrie, Horford, and Hayward doesn't really work. For some reason, they just don't click.
Brown coming off the bench and leading his own unit along with Hayward doing the facilitating, has worked well for him.
It's very likely that other than Kyrie we probably won't have anyone else average 20ppg. What we will have is a lot of people in the 10-16 range. That's how many scorers we have. If you assume the following averages:
Kyrie 21
Tatum 16
Morris 14
Brown 13
Hayward 13
Horford 13
Rozier 10
That's 100 points from just 7 players, so Smart and the rest of the bench would contribute the remaining 10 to get us to our season average of 110. Individually you could look at those averages and say wow these guys have regressed from last year how come they're averaging less than Avery Bradley did his last year here?
It's because you have to feed everyone and that score distribution is what you want. We all know any of those players is capable of putting out a 25-point game when it's their night, and could possibly average 20 if they were the primary option with not a lot of other options on a team, but over the entire season they have to sacrifice (and put up with fans saying they suck because they're only averaging 12-14. Only way that changes is someone gets injured or we start averaging 125+
What should ideally happen though is that, if they are truly sharing the load, as their scoring averages go down their scoring efficiency and assists should go up. We can already see it with Kyrie, his ppg is down but his apg is up.
Nobody ever said you can't become a star in the NBA coming off the bench.
Totally agree. Unfortunately its trying to change a paradigm that has existed since the start of basketball that the best players start, and get the best contracts, and get the chance to get voted onto All Star and All-NBA teams. You'll get the likes of Charles Barkley saying "well I can't consider any of them All-Stars because All-Stars don't average 12-14ppg".
Because very few teams have had the depth that we do right now, probably the only one I can remember in the recent past was San Antonio in 2014.