DavidStern wrote:Why you guys vote for Gasol?
I think he's the product of the system/Kobe (yes, Bryant makes his teammates look better) and before Lakers he never looks so good. Food for though: Gasol with/without net (team efficiency differential) in Mermhis:
2005 -1.4 (!), 26 games missed
2007 -1.6 (!), 23 games missed
That's awful, worse than Dantley when he was on his own (Jazz).
Gasol's RAPM:
2002 -0.3 (221st place)
2003 -0.8 (250th)
2004 -0.2 (150th)
2005 +0.2 (137th)
2006 +1.1 (83rd)
2007 -1.3 (313rd)
2008 +2.3 (38th)
2009 +2.6 (35th)
2010 +1.3 (70th)
2011 +3.8 (12th)
So again - before LA his not even top100 during those seasons ;] and he improved when joined Lakers but except of one year (2011) he wasn't too impressive.
Well see this is where I think it's important to look at a variety of studies before jumping to any huge conclusions.
In Ilardi's plain APM '03-04 to '08-09, Gasol ranks 20th in the league, and on an earlier version of Engelmann's 6-year list Gasol ranked 29th.
Engelmann's study now has him at 51st so clearly Engelmann's done some new tinkering that has really ended up pushing Gasol down, and I'm skeptical about it all. The whole basis behind RAPM is essentially adding in some neutral data to soften extreme values, but the larger the sample size the less it makes sense to do that. I trust multi-year studies so much more than 1 year studies precisely because I think the sample size gives it a lot more credibility, and I tend to treat the 6-year study of APM with at least as much respect as anything I get from Engelmann.
Let's also note that by ranking Gasol in the 20s, we're not actually talking about anything that bold. This isn't saying "Treat Gasol like a megastar", just that there is APM evidence that Gasol had solid impact and thus there's no good reason to reject general opinion of him as long as it's in that same ballpark (which it is).
Beyond that, I have feel like you're falling into the same "system player" trap so many other people do with Nash.
Again, a system player is not someone who becomes extremely valuable when used a certain way by a system but rather someone whose stats skyrocket simply because he plays in a system where people playing his role tend to have huge stats. A system player is about being far more replaceable than the box score stats say...and that by definition basically means a player who isn't racking up good APM numbers.
Even the numbers you're using to damn Gasol make quite clear that he's been pretty hard to replace in LA, which makes the idea that he's a product of Kobe a bit of a non-starter. After all, if Kobe had a track record of making big's look really good, Gasol wouldn't have gotten so much attention. When you remember that Gasol had really huge numbers for a good part of this year with and without Kobe, it starts looking even sillier to dismiss Gasol.
So yeah, I think you're using a specific group of +/- stats that I don't consider to be the most accurate even among the +/- stats to come to an extreme conclusion deviating from what most other things tell us, and I think that's exactly what I try to make sure I avoid doing.
). But what people often forgot, and what Lakers fans could better explain than me, is that Lakers during 2007/08 season were already very good team before Gasol trade: