What's the Greatest NBA All-Initial Team?

A light diversion to start the week

Some nightmare fuel off the prompt “nba team players starting with K”

There is an outbreak of the never-ending “Two Cultures” argument happening on social media over the last few days that seems even more aggressively stupid than usual. I flagged a bunch of tweets as things to comment on, but it’s a little too maddening for first thing Monday morning, so I’m going to go with something light and fun instead.

The weather forecast for Saturday was pretty dire, so I reserved an indoor batting tunnel for a half-hour at a place about half an hour away, so The Pip could get his daily swings in. This degenerated slightly because they had a three-wheel pitching machine, so we ended up spending some time dialing up weird-ass breaking balls that nobody playing 12U travel ball will have in their bag, but it was fun. On the way home, though, he posed a question that I’m borrowing for this post:

What is the best team you could make from NBA players whose first names start with the same letter?

He initially phrased it as “same letter as your first name,” but this quickly expanded. So, for example, to use me as a starting point, the All-Time C-Initial All Stars would be (we decided after much discussion and some Googling):

PG: Chris Paul

SG: Clyde Drexler

SF: Carmelo Anthony

PF: Charles Barkley

C: Chris Bosh

First off the bench would be Chris Mullen, and I guess if you needed size you could go Carlos Boozer at the 5. That’s not a bad team, but it is weirdly loaded with guys in the “Best [position] Without a Ring” conversation.

If you wanted to go with The Pip, you could have the T-Initial All-Stars (his choices, not mine):

PG: Tony Parker

SG: Trae Young

SF: Tracy McGrady

PF: Toni Kukoc

C: Tim Duncan

And the P-Initial All-Stars:

PG: Pete Maravich

SG: Paul Pierce

SF: Peja Stojaković

PF: Pau Gasol

C: Patrick Ewing

Or, you could go with the first letter of his actual given name, rather than his nom du Net:

PG: Damian Lillard

SG: Dwayne Wade

SF: Dominique Wilkins

PF: Dirk Nowitzki

C: David Robinson

Those are all pretty solid collections of talent.

This is a fabulous sports-bar discussion topic, as it combines “Remember Some Guys” with the potential for silly legalistic arguments to try to make the strongest team possible. For example, do you count nicknames? If you do, you can put Manu Ginobili and Magic Johnson together with Michael Jordan on the M team; if not, they probably still end up together, but with Elgin Baylor. Go one way and you can put Bill Russell and Bob Cousy together on the B team, go the other and they’re split up to play with Wilt Chamberlain and Ray Allen.

(The Pip’s other inspired suggestion was that Yao Ming could hold down the 5 for the M team, since “Yao” is his family name. If you count nicknames, it almost doesn’t matter who the fifth guy is at that point (Moses Malone, probably)…)

There’s also the question of alternate spellings and disused names: The Pip was pulling for putting Olajuwon on the A team since when he was younger most media spelled his first name without the H, but I’m dubious about that. Another list he Googled up (we are, unsurprisingly, not remotely the first people to think of this game) had the L team anchored by Lew Alcindor, which is definitely cheating…

We spent a bunch of time on this, and eventually decided that there seemed to be a clear winner for the best overall collection of talent (assuming you get players in their prime, and trying to put people at somewhat plausible positions). The likely champion of the All-Initial Team Tournament is the K Team:

PG: Kobe Bryant

SG: Kawhi Leonard

SF: Kevin Durant

PF: Kevin Garnett

C: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

That’s a terrifying collection of talent. The best hope for any of the other letters would be that these are a bunch of kind of prickly personalities, so there’s a chance of a catastrophic collapse of chemistry leading to a complete meltdown. Otherwise, I don’t know what you do with these guys.

Anyway, that was our Saturday diversion, which I offer up on Monday as a happier alternative to the stupid shit happening on social media. If you want to float some alternative teams— the whole point of this sort of exercise is to argue about the options, after all— the comments will be open:

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This is not my usual line of content, but as I said, it was fun on Saturday and might help some other folks ease into the work week. If you want more of this down the road, or just hope to see me eventually respond to the stupid shit I referenced, here’s a button: