Nylon Calculus: Will Davis and Cousins fit well together?

Last week, I wrote an article about how University of Kentucky big men are dominating the NBA, particularly DeMarcus Cousins, Anthony Davis and Karl-Anthony Towns. The article was from a fantasy basketball perspective, and concluded that while Cousins has had the highest volume of production and Davis has been the best fantasy option thus far this season, Towns was the one you’d want on your fantasy team for the rest of the season and moving forward.

I had no idea just how right I was, and through no genius of my own.

Because of Vlade Divac’s and the Kings’ decision to trade Cousins to the Pelicans, Cousins and Davis will now be in the same frontcourt and thus no longer each putting up world-beating individual box score numbers. Just by dint of them having to share one ball, their box score counting statistics will necessarily have to decrease. But the more important question here, as far as real basketball goes, is: can they maximize their impact as a duo, even as their individual box score stats decline?

Read More: LeBron James is playing an astounding number of minutes

Cousins and Davis have vast potential but to get there will require one or both of them to make a fundamental decision to emphasize their defensive impact. At least one of them, if not both, will have to make defense their priority 100 percent of the time, then allowing their offense to come from the energy and focus that remains.

Davis and Cousins both have the physical ability and timing to do whatever they want on the basketball court. However, they are both currently considered superstars primarily because of what they do on the offensive side of the ball. Here are their boxscore stats for this season, to date:

Cousins: 27.8 pts (20.3 FGA, 10.0 FTA, 56.2% TS), 10.7 reb, 4.9 ast, 3.8 TO, 1.4 stl, 1.3 blk
Davis: 27.7 pts (20.2 FGA, 8.6 FTA, 57.8% TS), 12.0 reb, 2.2 ast, 2.6 TO, 1.3 stl, 2.5 blk

Since 1980, there have only been 25 total seasons of any player 6-foot-9 or taller averaging 20 or more shots per game, if you eliminate Larry Bird and Kevin Durant that number drops to 19 seasons. None of those seasons were involving two bigs on the same team. In fact, let’s consider some of the most talented NBA big-man pairings in the last couple of decades:

• DeAndre Jordan/Blake Griffin
• Pau Gasol/LaMarcus Aldridge
• Marc Gasol Zach Randolph
• Tim Duncan/LaMarcus Aldridge
• Andrew Bogut/Draymond Green
• Al Horford/Paul Millsap
• Dwight Howard/Pau Gasol
• Tyson Chandler/Dirk Nowitzki
• Andrew Bynum/Pau Gasol/Lamar Odom
• Shaquille O’Neal/Kevin Garnett
• Amare Stoudemire/Shawn Marion
• Ben Wallace/Rasheed Wallace
• Shaquille O’Neal/Karl Malone
• David Robinson/Tim Duncan

Each of these pairings involve two bigs that were each named All-Stars within recent years, both of which were starting for their given teams. The good news is that these pairs of talented bigs headlined seven NBA championship teams between 1999 and 2015 (bolded above). However, four of the five pairs include at least one partner that has finished no-worst than top-two in a Defensive Player of the Year vote in his career, and in the fifth combination (the Lakers’ trio) none of the bigs averaged more than 13 field goal attempts as each were in a secondary/tertiary scoring role while instead helping dominate the paint on both ends of the court.

This matches with the generally held adage, which I agree with, that offense generation is usually more the purview of perimeter players while big men are key to a dominant defense. Thus, the key to almost every successful Twin Towers pairing circles around them providing dominant defense as a tandem.

Another aspect to effective Twin Towers is physical compatibility. At least one of the two, if not both, has to have the athletic ability and versatility to guard a power forward and operate on the perimeter. In today’s NBA of stretch 4s and even stretch 5s, it helps if both big men have that type of versatility.

Davis and Cousins definitely meet the second criterion of physical compatibility, as both are among the most physically gifted big men in the NBA. Cousins is stronger and carries more weight, but on both offense and defense he has shown the foot speed to operate effectively outside the paint. And Davis is essentially a 6-11 guard (he’s literally a guard that grew almost a foot after he reached high school), similar physically to Kevin Durant, and has the agility to cover any stretch big in the league.

Thus, the question is: how likely is it that Davis could channel his impact primarily to defense, while Cousins focusing his more on offense? Despite what the box scores said above, as it turns out, their current Real Plus-Minus (RPM, via ESPN) scores are pretty diverse and support the idea that they would have synergy.

The above plots the offensive RPM (ORPM) score vs the defensive RPM (DRPM) score for 22 of the biggest impact, starting bigs in the NBA. An arbitrary setting of vertical and horizontal lines separates the plot into four quadrants:

• High offensive impact, low defensive impact (upper, left)
• High offensive impact, high defensive impact (upper, right)
• Low offensive impact, low defensive impact (lower, left)
• Low offensive impact, high defensive impact (lower, right)

As it turns out, thus far on the season, Cousins has one of the highest offensive impacts in the NBA for a big man, with a neutral defensive impact as measured by RPM. Conversely, Davis has a high defensive impact this season, with a lower offensive impact. These numbers haven’t necessarily been consistent over their careers, but thus far this season, Davis’ and Cousins’ defense/offense split is almost perfect.

As bonus coverage, there is another big-man pairing just formed by trade in the last week or so: Nikola Jokic and Mason Plumlee (orange, on the chart). The mesh isn’t as good physically since both are pretty clearly natural centers, but both have excellent passing ability and comfort at the top of the key so it’s not an impossible match. But their mechanisms of impact also call the pairing into question, as both are on the left side of the chart, indicating that their pairing wouldn’t be as strong defensively as a good Twin Towers approach would require.

Next: The Kings' struggles weren't Boogie's fault

Davis and Cousins have a skillset that could mesh well together, they are physically compatible with the ability to span different areas of the court on both offense and defense, and at least thus far this season their mechanisms of impact are also compatible. Whether all of the other variables, from attitude to personality to coaching to injury supporting personnel to everything else works out enough for them to reach maximal success, still remains to be seen. However, scouting and analytics at least support the notion that their combined ceiling is extremely high, and that there are some tangible reasons to expect that they very well might achieve that ceiling.