The really insane number is Harden-to-Capela: one assist every 8 minutes. It's still quite a feat for the Dante-Gobert connection to be halfway in between the Ingles-Gobert and Harden-Capela rate.
(
TLDR version: the Dante-to-Rudy combo was really good last year, among the league's best 2-player combos. It seems worthwhile to give it a chance to work again this year. They'll likely only become more effective with more time together.)
After calculating some more numbers, as best I can tell (since it's way too hard to check every possible 2-man combination, I only checked based on the league's top 35 asst./possession players or so), this means that the Dante-to-Rudy connection was the
26th most prolific 2-man combo in terms of
assists generated per minute played together in the entire league last year.
If you do slightly different calculations -- to incorporate the assisted player's usage -- you can figure out how often a
certain player's possession ended with an assist from another certain player when the two shared the court.* Again, the Harden to Capela combo blew everyone else out of the water. More than 30% of Capela's possessions ended with an assist from Harden when the two played together. By this measure, the Dante-to Rudy connection was the
league's 16th best. The list follows.
31.2% Capela from Harden
26.6% Harris from D. Russell
24.0% Grant from Westbrook
23.6% Adams from Westbrook
22.6% Horford from Irving
22.0% J. Collins from T. Young
21.9% Harrell from L. Williams
21.8% Dedmon from T. Young
21.8% Ibaka from Lowry
21.8% Cauley-Stein from Fox
20.8% R. Holmes from J. Crawford
20.5% E. Gordon from C. Paul
20.3%
Gasol from Conley
19.8%
Rubio from Favors
19.7% Ayton from J. Crawford
19.5%
Gobert from Exum
*The measurement is not exact, since I didn't have access to either possession data or usage data for the 2-man combinations. Therefore, I calculated based on general usage of the assisted player and the league's general possession/minute averages.
