Moderators: Clyde Frazier, Doctor MJ, trex_8063, penbeast0, PaulieWal
Doctor MJ wrote:I don't understand why people jump in a thread and say basically, "This thing you're all talking about. I'm too ignorant to know anything about it. Lollerskates!"
NO-KG-AI wrote:That's my problem with Garnett arguments. It's always a shifting of the goal posts when evaluating him. Never any consistency in people's criticisms.
He's either putting up empty numbers, the advanced metrics are lying, or he needed too much help, or his team couldn't be as bad as we think, just because it couldn't have been.
His numbers count against him... until we realize that he led his team in scoring and rebounding (raising his scoring up from the regular season) on the way to a title. THEN the numbers don't tell the whole story, and Paul Pierce was really better
Doctor MJ wrote:therealbig3 wrote:I just wanted to point out that KG is considered a far better defender in terms of all time status than D12. Yet the reason why he never anchored a top 5 defense in Minnesota was because he was surrounded by terrible defenders. But what about D12? The complaints from Magic fans over the years has been that D12 has been surrounded by terrible defenders too, but the Magic are consistently a top 5 defensive team. So what does that say about the value as a defensive anchor that KG has? Is it fair to say that regardless of help, an elite defensive anchor should be able to lead his team to a great defense?
We just had a 27 page thread where that was debated in detail:
viewtopic.php?f=64&t=1113634
Not that that means you should necessarily be persuaded, but it's hard to feel like getting into that again when we just went through it.
therealbig3 wrote:drza wrote:therealbig3 wrote:...
You've put so many different debate topics into this brief thread so far that really all could be topics on their own.
1) The title, while a bit leading, could be its own thread: has KG been "ineffective" in the postseason? The first round exits are often cited, and you mention his TS%...so, then, we could talk about whether or not that really adds up to "ineffective" in the postseason, even compared to other greats.
2) The OP seems to focus a lot on KG in the postseason vs Robinson in the postseason. Another worthy debate topic, that a few folks now have taken a stab at.
3) KG vs Barkley, Malone, or Dirk. More of the them of your most recent post, all three of these could be (and often are) threads of their own. Similar threads on Dirk and Malone have been swirling around the main page for the last several days.
4) Why were the Wolves' regular season records what they were. Yet another topic, one that's often covered in depth, that has in fact been covered in depth in the last few days in other threads.
All of these are interesting, but I don't know of a coherent way to discuss all of them at one time in any kind of depth. My answers to each of the 4 would be that 1) KG was extremely effective in the postseason, with a huge individual impact, 2) as others have pointed out, KG's value is tied less into his shooting/scoring efficiency than was Robinson, and thus his decrease there didn't hurt his ability to have a dominating impact while Robinson without his high efficiency/high volume scoring was not able to contribute as much, 3) KG was the best of the three for different reasons that ultimately add up to having a larger impact, and 4) KG's supporting casts on the Wolves were not similarly bad to anyone of his generation. Dirk and Duncan never had it as bad, and when LeBron's casts were similar he posted similar results.
I could (and often do) respond to any of the 4 in more depth, but with them all on the table at once not really sure which, if any, is worth it to tackle here.
Lol, well I first just wanted to discuss KG's individual playoff numbers, namely his TS%, but then thought of more and more discussion topics that I've been thinking about and just added them on.
As for point #1, I agree, KG has a huge individual impact, he's a great player after all, top 20 all time imo, so he's going to have a huge impact. So no need to argue that point.
But #2, Robinson was at least as good defensively as KG, and he was a great rebounder in his own right. I'm sure you can delve into much more advanced ways of discussing this than simply raw averages, which I'm not very knowledgeable of. But it seems to me that Robinson is one of those players whose impact was especially beyond just scoring.
#4, LeBron had a Finals appearance and back to back 60 win seasons with a comparably bad supporting cast. I don't understand why you say he had similar results.
So if you could elaborate on points 2 and 4, that would be greatly appreciated.
EDIT: Actually, point 3 is what I'm most interested in, how does KG have a larger impact than guys who were/are considerably greater scorers than him, so if you want to respond to a point, point #3 is most interesting to me. If you've already responded to it in another thread just point me to it, and I'll go read what you wrote.
therealbig3 wrote:Even with the drop off though, Robinson still put up better numbers. Wilt's and Karl Malone's numbers drop off more than most superstars I've seen, but how many people do you take over them all time?
KG's TS% in the playoffs is just bad, no way around that. And I've always chalked it up to having a bad team around him that didn't take any pressure away. But other great big men, who KG is always mentioned with and is always compared to, have also had bad teams, yet their scoring efficiency didn't significantly decline like KG's did.
What I'm getting at is how valuable is KG's defense, rebounding, and passing, that it can overcome, quite frankly, a massive difference in scoring ability? And compared to the 3 great PFs other than Duncan (Dirk, Malone, Barkley), I would say KG only has a slight advantage as a rebounder and passer, and only considerably beats them in terms of defense. I've actually had KG above guys like K. Malone, Barkley, and Dirk (the comparisons have been piling up recently) before I've decided to re-evaluate exactly where KG stands. Let me use Barkley as an example.
Barkley in the playoffs is a 23/13/4 player with a .584 TS%. KG in the playoffs is a 20/11/4 player with a .519 TS%. Barkley scored with more volume and on WAY better efficiency. He rebounded better and accumulated a similar volume of assists. Before KG showed up in Boston, Barkley destroyed him in terms of leading a team to anything of note in the playoffs. Yet KG is ranked higher by a lot of people, including myself, why? Because of better defense and that one ring? I don't know if I believe that argument anymore.
And why did they end up with a low seed every year until 04? Duncan with the Spurs didn't have great help some years, still took them to 55-60 wins and a top 2-3 seed almost every year. LeBron, who many people will say is not as good as KG, took a terrible Cavs team to back to back 60 win seasons. Malone, Barkley, Hakeem, Robinson, Dirk...all of them took bad teams to lengths above and beyond what they should have been able to do...KG never did that with the Wolves. Yet he's always compared to them, is always ranked above many of them...but what qualifies that kind of ranking? It seems to me there are always excuses used to bring down those great players, like they lost to teams they shouldn't have, while KG never did, but nobody explains why KG couldn't carry his team to 60 wins, so he faced an easier 1st round opponent, like those guys did. In a way, putting yourself in a position to be upset and sometimes losing is better than never putting yourself in a position to be upset, and always losing.
drza wrote:Sigh. I've been trying my BEST to stay out of this thread today. I have a big deadline, and I knew if I even glanced in here I was going to get sucked in. I made it to this afternoon, but I've finally given in. I'm pretty interested in talking out some of these things with you, actually, as I prefer discussing things with people that actually will weigh my words and decide if they have merit vs coming in with mind already made up. So, let's get to it.
*KG vs DRob in the postseason. A friend of mine once described what he called "the ten step test", where he would see something from a distance and think he knew what it looked like...then he'd take 10 steps and look again...then 10 steps and look again, until he was close enough to make out all of the warts and really see up-close what the thing really looked like. Bring it back on-topic, from a distance (i.e. looking at a B-R page) Robinson does often look better than Garnett (and I'll limit this as much as possible to the postseason for clarity sake). But with each 10 steps you take, with each closer look you take, in comparison to each other Robinson's postseason performances start looking a bit worse while KG's start looking better. At least IMO, I of course let each reader judge for themselves.
*KG's 51.9% postseason TS%. Firstly, I agree with Doc MJ's post that we should keep it in perspective. His postseason TS% is 3 points lower than his regular season TS%, a difference that if played out is worth about .5 ppg. And if you take 10 steps in and look at it, KG had the highest 9 TS% regular seasons of his career in his last 9 years...and in 4 of those years (including the year he set a career high in TS% on heavy minutes played) he didn't play in the postseason at all. Now, whether he should have been in the postseason those years could be another full topic. But the point for this topic is, him not being in during those 4 years likely skews his postseason career TS% down slightly. Which means, on the whole, the effect of KG's postseason TS% is likely a bit smaller still.
*That said, shooting efficiency is important. The correlations between shooting efficiency and successful team outcomes are at the foundation of many advanced box score stats. So let me not just dismiss the whole thing as minor. Instead, let's go back to the KG/Robinson comparison to talk about why KG's lower TS% effected his ability to impact games to a lesser degree than when Robinson's TS% dropped (even though Robinson's lower value was still generally higher than KG's). At their peaks, Robinson was scoring more than KG on higher efficiency while KG was hitting the glass harder and playing a larger role as the offense generator for his team. Their defensive impacts are arguable, with incomplete stats for a direct comparison. But the point is, Robinson's team role and his claim to being better than KG are entirely tied into his ability to score efficiently. In the playoffs, Robinson's TS% dropped to a larger extent than KG's, and also that drop meant that he was not providing his main contribution to the team. KG, even when his efficiency dropped, was still rebounding and distributing like a madman and still maximizing his contribution.
*Let me illustrate my above claim with an example. Note, this is an example, not a rigorous proof. But I think it's an illuminating one. For my example, I point to the worst postseason TS% performances that Robinson and KG had during their primes:
KG's worst, a 39.7% effort, came against the Trailblazers in 2000, a championship-caliber team that was MUCH better than the Wolves (9 more wins, SRS 3.7 points higher in regular season). But in that series KG had 2 triple-doubles in 4 games; was obviously drawing the defenses attention (I like NO-KG-AI's description on page 1: "that was about as much double and triple teaming as I've ever seen a team do") and distributing well (9 apg) which helped contribute to teammates shooting well; he defensively erased the best player on the opposing team in his 1-on-1 match-up (Sheed averaged 13.5 ppg in 42 min/game against Wolves in round 1, 22.3 pp42 against Jazz and Lakers in next 2 rounds), and was the anchor for a defense that held the Blazers to 3 pp 100 possessions fewer than the Jazz and Lakers were able to in the next 2 rounds (Blazers averaged 97.5 ppg, 47% FG reg season; 87.3 ppg, 43.6% against Wolves).
Robinson's worst TS% in his prime years came in '94, which was right at his peak. His 47.1% TS was better than KG's in the previous example, and like KG it was also over 4 games, though against a Jazz team that was a bit worse than Robinson's Spurs in the season (2 fewer wins, SRS 1.0 points lower). But whereas Garnett was demonstrably making a huge impact outside of his shooting efficiency, Robinson wasn't able to contribute as much without his. His primary defender (Karl Malone) drastically outperformed him (Malone outscored him by more than 9 ppg with a FG% higher than Robinson's TS%); Robinson averaged only 3.5 assists (not much of setting up his teammates), and the Jazz team offense as a whole was reasonably effective (by their standards) against the Spurs (Reg season averaged 101.9 ppg, 47.7% FG; against Spurs averaged 96.3 ppg, 46.8%).
Again, it's one example, but it illustrates the trend as I see it for why Robinson is more looked down upon for his postseason struggles. With KG, his biggest postseason black marks (the 1st round exits or not making the '05 - '07 postseason) are at the very least partially, if not entirely understandable due to his teams. No matter what the actual team outcome, if you go back and look at it in depth you see that the only reason the Wolves were even as competitive as they were was due to KG pulling a superman load. If the defense was taking away good scoring looks, he might turn in a Jason Kidd-like offensive performance mixed with a Tim Duncan defense performance like that 2000 series. He might grab 19 boards a game like he did when the Mavs swept them a couple years later. He might play Tim Duncan to a standstill like he did in '99 and '01. Whatever the case, when you look at the postseason KG was doing some huge lifting.
With Robinson, on the other hand, his biggest postseason black marks tend to be cases where he individually was overmatched. It's ironic, because Robinson is actually one of my favorite players of the 90s and I used to vigorously protest that so much of his legacy was tainted by that one lost series against Hakeem. I still do tend to believe that, in general, but in the RPoY project last year one poster went out of his way to highlight that the Hakeem situation wasn't a one-time thing. Instead, in every postseason Robinson played between the 93/94 season and the 97/98 season he got outplayed directly by the man guarding him (either Hakeem or Malone), and in each of those seasons Robinson's team lost to a team with a comparable record in large part because he got outplayed as an individual. I didn't love reading those threads, and I still think Robinson tends to be underrated in general around here, but the sheer consistency of it made a strong case for why Robinson's postseason failures should be held against him, personally.
Sigh. Just as I expected, another book-like post. I guess I touched mainly on points (1) and (2) from my last post, when you ended up settling on wanting to talk about point (3), but I can say that I talked a lot about (3) and (4) in that 27-page thread that Doc MJ referenced a few posts up. If you feel like wading through that thread you could get at least a good sense for my stance on those two points.
GYBE wrote:Funny how you ignored everything I said about 05-06, one of the 8 or so years you asked about. I did 2002. It's not up to me to prove KG's cast was worse every year. That's the conventional wisdom from people who follow basketball. Your claim is the strange one and the onus is on you to prove it. Thus far you haven't used one piece of objective evidence to back it up.
I never said he was elite in 2003. I don't care what you posted on D-Rob, your posts thus far have given me no reason to believe in your analysis. Splitter played 738 minutes this year. Robinson played 2303 minutes the year I referenced. Obviously you can't use per-minute stats for a 10 MPG player or whatever, but Robinson played a lot. Just not as much as Duncan.
You couldn't be more wrong. In 2002 D.Rob was useless in the playoffs (particularly), he played 4/10 games and played for only 20mpg, which resulted in 4.5ppg and 5.8rpg, and in the Spurs only win against the Lakers in that series D.Rob didn't even play. He didn't play for games 1 or 2 either, where the Spurs only lost by 6 and 3 points. The idea D.Rob was a factor of any significance is nonsense. The closing game he put up 0-3-4 (4 fouls).
In 2003 against the Lakers he was the definition of suck. Take out game 1 and he was useless. In game 2 (where the Spurs won by 19) D.Rob played 17 mins for 4-4. In game 3 he played 15 mins for 4-4. In game 4 (a 4 point loss for the Spurs) D.Rob played 14 mins for 0-3-6 (6 fouls). He was less awful (but not good) in the Spurs game 5 loss, and in game 6 the Spurs won by 28, with D.Rob again not contributing much, 7-5-2 in 23 minutes. You have fallen into the trap most people do of the myth of D.Rob still being good in his later years. He was not.
2002 Defensive Rating
1. Ben Wallace-DET 92.9
2. David Robinson-SAS 94.9
3. Tim Duncan-SAS 95.7
4. Malik Rose-SAS 96.8
5. Alonzo Mourning-MIA 97.1
So you can understand my skepticism over your repeated claim of Robinson being "useless." Data has no agenda.
What's funny is you're screwing around with time to try and make it seem like KG had more help. Brandon was healthy for exactly one playoff series with Minnesota. That year "Solid" Joe Smith put up 4/3, All-Star Wally had 6 PPG and solid Rasho had 6/3. That wasn't when the Mavs swept them. Brandon never played against the Mavs.
Against the Mavs, Chauncey ripped it up in the playoffs to the tune of a 16.6 PER. That was actually worse than his regular season performance. The year before in the playoffs he had 14.1. Awesome!
Throw in his bad defense (tied with Wally for the teams worst DRtg) and I'm shocked the Wolves didn't get farther.
Joe Smith was a horrific defender. Actually, he was just a horrible player and your touting of him as part of a good supporting cast is probably your most dubious claim.
What do you think Joe got paid for by so many teams to do, if he was terrible on O and D? In reality he was generally regarded as a solid role player on both ends, which is why so many teams signed him to be just that.Wally is useless on the defensive end. Actually useless, not "I'm saying D-Rob is useless when he's still a top 5 defender." When KG came to Boston, he was the main reason they put out a historically great defensive team. Better than any defensive team the Spurs ever had. He just needed help.