The relative lack of mutual assists didn’t get in the way of their team success, of course, or their scoring: As I calculated before this season, Shaq and Kobe compiled the top two Big Two scoring seasons in league history and four of the top seven.īut if it seems strange that this ranking would include more Wall-Gortat–style pairings than two-star duos, that’s why.
Playing in the Triangle system and dominating the ball as they each did, there wasn’t as much opportunity for Shaq and Kobe to assist each other’s made baskets. Since 2000-01, Kobe assisted Shaq for 117.3 buckets per season, and Shaq assisted Kobe just 45.5 times on average. But the Shaq-Kobe partnership was somewhat different than the ones depicted here. At All-Star Weekend last month, I asked current players their favorite duos growing up, and many picked Shaq and Kobe. Note that many of the guards here were passers first, scorers second, and many of the bigs didn’t dominate the ball. Not every possession ends the same way-from Gortat’s hammer slams to Nowitzki’s rainbow jumpers-but mastery of the same basic premise can lead to incredible results, as defenses still can’t stop a guard and big with years of familiarity and repetition. The guard-big pick-and-roll has long been an offensive staple at every level of basketball and often inspires the most productive pairings. (Because the 2019-20 season isn’t over yet, this ranking doesn’t include this season’s statistics.)īest Assist Combos Since 2000-01, Outside the Top 10 RankĪs the pairings in this chart and the upcoming top 10 demonstrate, the assister-to-scorer dynamic can manifest in a few different positional archetypes: The Guard and the Big But first, here’s a look at the top combos who missed out on the top 10. With those methodological considerations in mind, we’ll count down the best pairings this century in a moment.
But Parker-to-Duncan produced an average of just 102.2 assists per season, which ranks 59th among all combos who played three-plus seasons together. Overall since 2000-01, the combination with the most total assists is Tony Parker to Tim Duncan, because they shared the court for 15 seasons. And instead of focusing on the top assists duo based on career totals, we’ll look at the top combinations on a per-season basis-or else we’d merely be rewarding the partnerships who spent the most time together. But instead of analyzing only the best single-season assist combinations, which can include bizarre outliers due to the smaller sample-for the 2001-02 Cavaliers, Andre Miller assisted Wesley Person 256 times!-we’ll look over players’ entire multiseason partnerships, for those who played together for at least three seasons. So today, we’re going to search for the highest on record. (Full play-by-play data extends back to 2000-01.) That’s a lofty total, especially considering that both players have missed games and that their minutes have been staggered more than almost any other star pairing’s-yet it’s nowhere near the highest on record. In 61 Lakers games before Sunday’s big win over the Clippers, James had assisted 164 Davis baskets this season, per, which puts that combination on pace for 220 assists in their first run together. James-to-Davis is in first place this season, and it’s not particularly close. LeBron James is leading the league in assists for the first time in his storied career, and new teammate Anthony Davis is his favorite target. The top two-man assist combination in the 2019-20 season is a new pairing-but it’s not much of a surprise. And while there are numerous ways to measure the effectiveness of any pairing of players, one simple, appealing method involves the “Stockton and Malone” of it all-one player passes to a teammate, over and over again, to score a bevy of buckets all season long. With the NBA shifting from the decade of Big Threes to a new league landscape of Big Twos, these pairings are highly relevant once again. Hear the word “Stockton” in a basketball context, and the mind instinctually continues “. Like peanut butter and jelly or Drake and Josh from Drake & Josh, some NBA players naturally fit together.
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