There are only so many possessions in an NBA game, and a finite amount of shots to get divided amongst the different players on the team.

With Kevin Durant set to join forces with a lineup already consisting of Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green, it’s improbable for them to all continue to put up the numbers they’ve been accustomed to producing.

Baring some historical efficiency, those statistics will go down for most if not all of them, as Durant will take some of those shots aways from a combination of those 3.

The best precedent to look at is what happened in Miami when LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh began playing together. Those 3 were superstars in their own right, and the inevitability of that type of cohesion is that at least one guy is going to have to sacrifice statistics to make it work.

That sacrifice isn’t necessarily evident in the collective performance of the team, but in the stats column. A quick glance of a player’s box scores may cause the assumption that their performance suffered a decline, but that’s not fair when shot attempts and a generally altered role are factored into the equation.

In Miami, it was Bosh who took the hit. He went from averaging points per game in the low 20s with 8-10 rebounds per game in Toronto to averaging points per game in the high teens with 6-8 rebounds per game in Miami.

Miami got two championships out of the experiment, so it’s not like Bosh regrets those sacrifices, although he did end up warning Kevin Love about the challenges of learning to accept a reduced role in the presence of fellow superstars in the lineup.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss has a great article on ESPN that speculates that it’s going to be Thompson who ends up sacrificing the most from this Durant acquisition.

He’s probably the most likely to, because he has the ball in his hands less frequently than Curry and Green, and a lot of his shots are created for him through ball movement.

Not only is his style adaptable to the addition of another superstar, but Thompson has the right personality to accept any statistical decline.

In the article, he makes it clear that he’s secure in his ability as a player, and that going forward, he values collective team success more than individual accolades.

Although having 4 superstars coexist on the court always has a certain risk attached to it, it’s a fantastic problem for a team to have.

Each of these superstars are especially selfless, and their playing styles don’t give any negative warning that this experiment wouldn’t work.