Bradley Beal is not 6'6", he's listed at 6'3" everywhere for some reason which was his height barefoot at the combine so unless he shrunk, 6'4" seems accurate. I see what you're getting at and I do think think the roles have shifted recently but lumping all 2s, 3s, and 4s together as one position seems a bit much to me. The category becomes so broad at that point that it's not very useful for describing what the player is doing on the court. I guess this is what's meant by "position-less basketball" and it's not uncommon now for a 2 guard to play a lot of minutes at the 3 position or a SF to shift down to the 5 position so that you have more guards and wings on the floor but I personally don't think that means they're no longer a guard just because they're defending the other team's SF. The categories do not need to be mutually exclusive. Buddy Hield is still a guard even if Luke Walton wants to play him at PF.
When comparing the NBA now to 15 years ago I think the biggest significant changes are that your starting PG with a few exceptions was typically not your leading scorer and your PF typically did not shoot threes or face up to the basket and drive from outside the 3pt line. So those distinctions matter less now. It used to be you had a 1 (PG) who brought the ball up, directed traffic, and started your offensive sets and then you had two wings which were your 2 and 3 (SG/SF) who would either catch and shoot or create a shot from the perimeter or midrange, then you had a 4 (PF) who ideally could operate out of the high post and was a scorer and screen setter, and then you had a 5 (C) who was either a defensive anchor or a post scorer and would rarely venture much outside the paint except when changing sides. In the big man era of the 90s and early 2000s we even blended the PF/C positions together because the prevailing wisdom at the time was that you needed two bigs on the floor and one of them was probably going to be your leading scorer because you wanted to take advantage of those high-percentage shots near the basket. I can't speak to the NBA before the early 90s as that's when I started watching.
The way I see teams working now is that you have two guards who are more or less interchangeable. One of them is a primary scorer and the other is probably a little more of a complimentary role-player who takes tough defensive assignments or spots up outside the 3pt line. The shorter guard is often labeled the PG but a lot of them don't initiate the offense. In fact, guys like Pat Beverly and Seth Curry are hardly ever handling the ball and guys like Kyrie Irving and Donovan Mitchell are more likely to lead their team in shot attempts than assists so the PG/SG distinction is pretty arbitrary now. Additionally, most teams are tasking taller wing players with playing PF so that they have their best shooters on the floor. A typical SF and a typical PF used to be very different players and that was a matter of play style not of size. But with everything moved to the perimeter, the 3/4 positions are really interchangeable so we just call them forwards now. On the NBA All-Star ballot they've eliminated the C position all together and just lumped the big men in with the forwards but it does seem like most teams still have one player whose role is to grab rebounds, discourage layups, and fulfill most of the roles of a typical big man. Some teams are playing two traditional bigs still but usually that's because they have one of the modern PFs who has all the skills of a SF but relies more on strength than foot speed for their physical advantage.
So when I'm projecting team rosters now I use G/G/F/F/C rather than the old 1/2/3/4/5 distinctions and I don't care if that means I have two PGs or two SGs as long as they can handle well enough to run a pick and roll. If you have a point forward type like a Ben Simmons, Luka, or Giannis maybe you don't need any guards but you still need to think about defending the other team and it's pretty rare for a taller wing player to have the footspeed to stay in front of someone like De'Aaron Fox. It sounds like you've just eliminated the guard label entirely and folded everyone who isn't a primary initiator into the wing position which, I mean, fair enough. But then why did you go out of your way to tell me I'm wrong to call it a guard-driven league when I was referring to the scoring being tilted
heavily toward guards and you seem to agree with that you just call them either ballhandlers or wings depending on their role in the offense.
I guess what you're really talking about is defense and I don't want to rehash everything I already wrote
here but the impression I get from your comments is that you agree with most NBA coaching staffs that the way you solve the Steph Curry/Trae Young problem is to load up on bouncy 6'6" dudes with long arms and have them blanket the court with their wingspans. I contend that if that strategy were
actually working these ballhandler dudes wouldn't be averaging 30 points a game. There's cause and effect here and it's tough to tell whom is wagging whom but my theory at least is that loading up on versatile switchable wing players because of their, pardon the pun, wingspan
is the problem and it would be a lot more difficult for fancy dribblers to get wherever they wanted on the court if you just stuck one really agile 6' dude on them and had them get into their grill all game and use everyone else to cut off the passing angles.
