Quotatious wrote: Getting back to Kobe vs Harden - I don't want to sound condescending, but I don't think any other player's fanbase shows such a massive pushback against box-score metrics as Kobe's fans. Let's face it- the reason for that is because Kobe's box-score metrics are not quite as great as his reputation, so his fans dismiss those stats as nonsense to trivialize the fact that he doesn't measure as a fringe top 10 all-timer based on that. Kobe was never the best in the league based on plus/minus, either. Many people think it's crazy to take Garnett over Bryant (not so much on this board, but outside of it, you would be looked at as a weirdo if you took Garnett over Bryant), but KG was the league-leader in box-score metrics in '04, AND the league leader in plus/minus. There are pretty much no rational reasons to say that anybody other than Garnett was the best player in the NBA in 2004. Kobe never approached that level of separation from his peers, yet he's considered a better player than Garnett by most people. Actually, Kobe never gained any separation from his peers, at all, considering that in 2006, which was one of Kobe's finest season, and his magnum opus offensively, he wasn't even the best player at his own position - Wade was better. He's just as good as Kobe (or slightly better) in terms of box-score metrics, and he obliterates Kobe in single year RAPM (almost doubles Bryant's rating). Wade also has a better on/off because of his massive defensive advantage (which is bigger than Kobe's offensive advantage, based on on/off net rating). Notice that I didn't even mention the playoffs, where Wade was so dominant in '06. I just focused on the regular season. .
There are normal and natural reasons for this push back. Obviously there are some Kobe fans who pushed the delusion that Kobe was better than/ on the same level as MJ, although this was patently false. However, there were a lot of Kobe/Laker fans, as well as basketball fans in general who watched games and had the perception that Kobe was having elite seasons (as good as anyone on offense in particular- I will get to this later) during his prime years (05-09). On top of that, coaches in general and other ATGs rated Kobe’s impact and ability on the court very very highly, and much more highly than folks on this forum do.
But then, this almost universal consensus amongst folks who actually watched Kobe play, and did not let their dislike get the best of their objectivity, was supposedly undermined by these metrics that said otherwise. So of course there will be a push back, because what these metrics suggest is that all those folks who agreed on Kobe’s game were fooled. They were fooled by his narrative, and by his spectacular moments. No one wants to be in this position, and so evidently on a human level, there will be a push back. When you’ve invested much energy on something, and then some “evidence” comes out to undermine it, your reaction is to get defensive.
Now there were two responses to this- Kobe fans who just completely ignored dealing with these metrics, and went on with their narrative that Kobe was GOAT/near MJ level. You would see this type of fan on laker forums such as lakersground. Conversely however, there were Kobe fans who whilst taking these metrics into account, suspected that they severely underrated Kobe’s play and impact. I would put myself into this latter category, and I will discuss this position further below.
The card that was most often used against Kobe back in 05-09 was that his PER was often underwhelming in comparison to how he was perceived as a player. ‘He never led the league in PER… never got close to 30, and was being beat out by a number of his contemporaries’ it was said.
I often found this argument pitiful, because PER (and also win shares and pretty much most box score derived metrics) said relatively little about a player’s abilities and his impact on a game. It said nothing about how a player was accumulating these statistics, or what his efficiency meant in real terms. Kobe could for example go for 7-21 but having extraordinary offensive impact on the game, yet his PER would suffer as a result. When you’re comparing superstar to superstar, it is their impact that is the major barometer, with box score production and other offensive metrics coming into serious play when it appears their impact is relatively equal, or when their impact requires further analysis. PER when properly utilised should thus act as a filter of who is a star and who isn’t. If a guy is putting up top 10 in PER in 35mpg then most probably he is having a star season. However, this is where PER analysis reaches exhaustion- it doesn’t tell you too much beyond this, and to go any further, you need to analyse games in context and utilise better metrics. Then if everything looks decently equal, you can then return to PER and other box score metrics. This IMO is the most sensible approach.
Kobe in 05-09’s PER (which is the time period here that I will discuss) was obviously in the star category, although you really didn’t need to refer to PER to know that he was having star seasons. All you needed to know is watch games and have a quick glance at his basic per game averages to know this.
Now where does one go from here? There are two avenues here- tracking games and examining the “impact” metrics. The former is obviously more subjective than the latter (although the latter must be understood within context of the former), however what is amusing to me that a lot of the people who try and undermine Kobe’s play during those years didn’t really watch too many of his games (particularly in 05-07, when they probably only caught the games on national TV/TNT & ESPN).
This is why they do not suspect Kobe’s defensive metrics in 06 and 07, which implies that Kobe playing worse d and having worse impact in the former than the latter, although anyone who seriously watched Kobe play during those years would tell you otherwise (when Kobe earned all D honours in 06-07, many a laker fan, including yours truly were confused because Kobe’s D was bad that year, in large part to being relatively out of shape, lacking the stamina he did the previous year, and being slower in general- Kobe in 05-06 played at worst, average D, based on my own and other laker fan assessments- the same ones who decried Kobe’s bad D in 06-07. Hopefully one day I’ll get my hands on the game tape to prove this once and for all).
We get to the impact metrics (RAPM specifically) and it’s here that things get interesting. Prior to coming on this forum, I honestly thought that it was a consensus point in basketball that the impact ceiling is far higher for one player on offense than it is on defense. The adage went “good offense beats great defense” and I always understood this as meaning that whilst great defensive teams require an all rounded defensive effort, an elite offensive anchor can literally offensively will his team on his own.
My thoughts on this were obviously challenged, when I kept on reading posters put DRAPM and ORAPM on some equal footing, as if they equally tell you something about the impact a player is having on a game. So I went away and did some research, and as it turns out, this research backed up the former belief that in most, if not all cases, an elite offensive player’s impact will trump an elite defensive player’s impact significantly. I will use one example here to illustrate this point.
KG in 06-07 in terms of defensive metrics lead the league by a clear margin. IIRC correctly, he was posting something like +4 on DRAPM on some sets, on evidently defensively challenged teams. In any case, he was clearly having a very good-elite defensive season. Kobe meanwhile in 06 and 07 was posting +5-6 on ORAPM on equally offensively challenged teams (the 07 team was slightly better offensively, but were decimated by injuries). Obviously Kobe had a raw advantage in terms of the + he was coming with, but does this advantage explain the fact that Kobe anchored his team to 8th and 7th on offense during those years, whilst KG that season anchored his team to 21st in defense?
Why was the gap so large in terms of impact on the broader team’s play?
I would strongly contend that it is because an elite offensive player’s ability to impact his team’s offense is far higher than it is for an elite defensive player to his impact his team D. This makes logical basketball sense- an elite offensive player, particularly a perimeter player can create offense from anywhere on the court, and can in fact impact his team’s offense whilst being on the opposite side of where the ball is at. Conversely, there is only so much ground 1 defensive player can cover. An offensive player also had the added advantages of being able to act proactively, whilst on defense, you’re always being reactive, thus limiting what one player can do on the latter on a common sense level. This is why KG could have a great defensive season in 03 but his team did pretty poorly on D- he lacked the defensive structure and talent needed that year, but yet Tmac in 03 could lead an offensively challenged team to top 10 in O during the very same season. You put KG on the Spurs that year, and they are top 5 on D still. Conversely, Kobe lifted offensively challenged offensive teams to top 7-8 on offense during his peak.
To summarise again, what this tell me is an elite offensive player’s ability to impact his team’s offense is far higher than it is for an elite defensive player to his impact his team D, which means that the former will overall have a much bigger individual impact on the game than the latter. This is why KG +/- against Kobe never really got to me, because in the most impactful aspect of the game, Kobe outshined KG significantly. KG was the master of all roundness, but he was doing a lot of things that simply didn’t have the biggest of impacts.