Al Horford and Paul Millsap: Redundant?
Horford and Millsap can easily by themselves work as massive advantages for your team, but I would argue it is unlikely they would ever consistently realize their dominance together. The issue with these players is more one of system placement and mentality than skill.
Both Millsap and Horford are All-NBA talents: capable of producing against any kind of defender while dealing with the added defensive attention that “star” players get. However, for multiple reasons, neither Horford nor Millsap produced as much or as often as players of their talent level typically do.
Horford’s extremely versatile skillset allowed him to simply play a complementary style in an Atlanta Hawks system that emphasized ball movement and shooting off of guard penetration. The system, however, tended to de-emphasize Horford’s (and to a slightly lesser extent Millsap’s) ball handling, isolation and scoring skills that make him significantly more valuable than players with fewer physical tools.
His superior ability to act as a basketball chameleon compared to Paul Millsap (as Horford is statistically a better mid range and three point shooter than Millsap) ironically led Horford to be featured less. Horford did what he was asked to do fantastically, but he was rarely asked to stand out, and players of his caliber usually maximize their talents when they are.
On a team like Atlanta, it perhaps would have been wise for Horford to stand as tall as he could. Millsap had a game more suited to ball dominance and was thus less marginalized than Horford, but even he often fell into the cracks instead of standing out. A star is unlikely to truly shine if he’s not asked to produce to his full ability, and Horford and Milsap weren’t.
In the regular season, this generally worked well enough. Aside from Millsap’s slightly larger scoring tendencies, Millsap and Horford also fill very similar roles on offense as offensive fulcrums from similar areas. They both operated from the mid post, passed to open three point shooters, attacked close outs, and shot open jump shots.
They could both parlay their advanced face-up games into consistently burning slower big men off the dribble in the post and from the top of the key, but they both seemed to do so only occasionally.
Technically, they could have probably been even more effective if they “took turns”, with one scoring and making plays continuously while the other shoots open shots and makes the extra pass. However, players are people and people don’t always function optimally. Both players essentially took the supplementary role; playing more opportunistically than assertively.
Both were not accustomed to anything else by the end of the season, and they rarely adjusted when situations called for a change. It is difficult to change from something that works into something potentially better. There’s always a risk that the change will backfire and result in a situation worse than before.
It is therefore understandable why Millsap and Horford would be reluctant to cease fundamental play in favor of isolation ball. With different personnel, this would not be a major issue, as long as the players passed to can produce. On last year’s Hawks team, however, that was not consistently a fact, and that became a problem.
Next: System Failure