spree8 wrote:Oh boy that's my bad lol...read them wrong. If Duncan has the edge, I wouldn't say it's as big as the edge Kobe has on offense though. I'm also not saying the defensive teams are everything, but they do count for something. That's why they're there...I mean to have only MJ KG and Glove having the record...I'd say that trio is amongst the best ever...so people had to be getting it right no? Kobe is up there with them and although he could be lazy at times...it wasn't the constant.
If we look at Duncan & Kobe using offensive & defensive RAPM (let me know if you need me to explain more on this), we see a drastic difference on the defensive end.
Averaging their 5 best years together on offense:
Kobe +7.39
Duncan +4.75
An on defense:
Duncan +6.22
Kobe +0.79
As you can see by that metric, it absolutely supports that Kobe's the better offensive player, and also says Kobe's offense is more impressive than Duncan's defense. But whereas Duncan looks like a star on defense, Kobe's All-Defensive Team reputation never materializes.
How could the authorities be so wrong? The sad truth is that whenever we have accolades that are determined by folks who aren't using stats, the results suck. That might sound subjective of me, but it really isn't. Players get reputations for being good, and basically continue getting accolades until something extremely blatant happens to change it.
Now, there are certainly plenty of times where the actual gaining of the reputation comes as a result of actual spectacular impact, and in such cases then we're simply talking about a player who might have a little bit of cushion on their accolade longevity. Not such a big deal.
Kobe's a more egregious case though. Basically at no point in his career is their any major positive correlation with his presence and actual defensive efficacy. Yet, he made All-D tons of times. What happened?
1) In the absence of good stats, reputations tend to come anecdotally. A player who shows some aptitude for strong man defense in a few circumstances while his team succeeds is likely to be viewed in general as a good defender even if he doesn't play like that in general.
In Kobe's case, we're talking about an offensive star who often conserved energy on the defensive end. Hence there's an explanation already for why his actual impact is pretty far off from what you'd expect in his best moment.
I'll also note that part of the advantage bigs tend to have in terms of two-way impact is that it takes less energy for them to have that impact on each end. A big can have defensive impact while essentially waiting for the play to come to him, whereas a perimeter player who isn't moving all over the place basically isn't doing that much. This means that All-D accolades aside, Duncan getting the edge over Kobe here isn't really a weird thing saying something about Kobe.
2) In the absence of complete stats, reputations tend to be built on what's available. Hence, a guy who gets blocks or steals is going to stand out even if what he's doing is problematic. This is especially true for guys getting steals, and Kobe's a great example of this. If you're on defense, and your man doesn't have the ball, the biggest play you're likely to be able to make is to go away from your man and steal the ball from the unsuspecting ballhandler. When you do this successfully you have huge impact - and you also often get a couple of points in your box score.
When you attempt to do this though, you're opening up holes in your team's defense that can be exploited when you fail. This is why you don't see constant double and triple teams after all. It's risky business, and many players who pull this sort of thing too often are yelled at and benched. But of course Kobe's not some random player, he's Kobe. So he gets to keep doing this sort of thing - and thus keep having flashy "help" defense plays in addition to his "lockdown" reputation.
The added irony to this is that it goes without saying that you can't be both of these things - man defender & help defender - at once, and as such it should be seen suspiciously when a guy gets a reputation for both things....
3) but when you win titles, people have a tendency not to look at things you do wrong. You get a lot more "Well, he must know what he's doing". An understandable thought...but we've got the stats to really evaluate things now, and it's just not true.
4) Kobe's been able to develop the reputation of being extremely smart and extremely hard-working. Put these together with the questions above and they appear to assuage the doubts. "How can he be great at both man & help defense?", "Well, he works so hard all the time, and he's so smart he knows just when to switch roles!"
But of course, the fact that the data says the concerns about this behavior hold more true than the reputation makes things swing in a very different direction:
If a guy capable of significant defensive impact typically doesn't actually pull this off while making choices like this, they basically say that he isn't working THAT hard on defense and his BBIQ isn't THAT great.
And so then, that gets us to impasse we reach with cognitive dissonance with regards to Kobe. While all agree he had superstar impact, the gap between the typical fan's perception of Kobe and what the data actually shows is big enough that many will simply ignore the data.
Exactly.
Even if you are very low on Isiah, and I know that I've personally often been very critical of Thomas, but there's no doubt in my mind that he was a better player than Parker. His superiority as a playoff performer might be enough to make a convincing case for him. He might be generally overrated by most fans, but he's still IMO a top 40 player quite firmly.