lessthanjake wrote:AEnigma wrote:lessthanjake wrote:If you think the eye test on LeBron’s 2018 defense and Kawhi’s 2017 defense are similar, then I don’t really know what to tell you.
Amusingly, you’ll find that in one of my first couple posts in this thread, I specifically said that “sample sizes for a single season aren’t enormous (especially the “off” samples) so in theory this could just be random bad luck rather than reflecting real defensive weakness.” I then went on to say “But it comports with the eye test, in which LeBron wasn’t putting much effort in on the defensive end.” The Kawhi 2017 numbers likely fall in that “random bad luck” category, since essentially no one would say the eye test supports him being a weak defender in 2017 (including the passage you quoted—which is presenting the data as a surprise, implying it’s contrary to the eye test). The same is not at all true of 2018 LeBron. It’s also worth noting that, even just at the data level, it’s not a good analogy, because Kawhi doesn’t look nearly as bad in RAPM. For instance, Kawhi has a +0.9 DRAPM in 2017 in Engelmann’s RAPM (which was like top quarter of the league), while LeBron had a negative DRAPM in 2018 (and, as mentioned, it was like bottom 10% of the league).
In other words, for one player, there’s awful on-off data, awful RAPM data, and a general consensus that the eye test was bad. For the other player, there’s awful on-off data, decent RAPM data, and a general consensus that the eye test was really good. These are not the same at all.
And what was Kawhi’s RAPM in 2016?
You just did exactly what I predicted. No capacity to assess either as defenders, but hey, Kawhi still qualifies as a mild positive in DRAPM, and you know what, it is true that he does not look as good as he was in 2016, so no need to give it any more thought. It is the same argument, and pretty much the same indicated drop-off, just different in degree because 2016 Kawhi was starting from a Pippen-tier base and 2017 Lebron was not.
You gesture at sample size problems, but only dismissively, because here the data needs to be accurate for the narrative to work. No interest in looking at when Lebron is “bad” defensively. No interest at looking at the lineups. Nope, Lebron had possessions where I feel he looked bad, and I remember those possessions, and the data says he was bad, so he was bad. Very serious stuff from very serious people who for some reason never understand how poorly it reflects on them to only selectively care about nuance and context. So once again we are back to me not knowing whether you are just being dishonest about whether you feel Lebron “being bad” cost the team anything meaningful — they lost ten games all season by single digits, and literally only one of them was during his actual stretch of indifferent play (and it was a game where the primary issue was offence) — or whether your eye test is sincerely so out of touch that you only notice the same lowlights that everyone pounced upon and legitimately believe that the rest of the team stepped up to cover him. As always, not sure which is worse, but both are horrifically embarrassing.
The difference is that LeBron being a significantly worse defender in 2018 was something corroborated by the eye test, while Kawhi being a significantly worse defender in 2017 was not something corroborated by the eye test. It’s not analogous.
By whose? Plenty of people said Kawhi was worse — and he was, but the reason why he was worse was multifaceted. Lebron was worse on average, but again for multifaceted reasons, and the biggest reason being that he was willing to scale down his effort once games reached at a certain point. I am not saying that as praise per se, although the important bit is how it worked for the Cavaliers, but it is essential context that is not being caught by data that treats his defence as equally meaningful in a lost game as in a competitive one.
There’s a lot of reasons to believe LeBron was a substantially worse defender in 2018, which all coalesce into a convincing picture.
Chief among them being “I want to believe it so I can more easily argue for other players.”
You’re trying to draw an analogy to a different situation in which some of those reasons exist but others don’t (and others don’t exist to the same extent), and so the picture is naturally not nearly as convincing. It’s clearly not at all inconsistent to draw different conclusions in these two situations. And it’s honestly a little odd you can’t see that. Anyways, the rest of your post is just sarcasm and insults masking the lack of any real substantive point.
I can see that you desperately want them to be different, but the same issues with lineups were present, the same issues of diminished effort were present (albeit Lebron’s were more extreme and targeted), and essentially the same data decline was present (although again from different baselines). The substantive point is that half-hearted eye tests, produced either with significant internal bias or at minimum a skewed focus, will not address any of that. You need to make the effort, and multiple people in this thread have said as much. You have repeatedly disregarded them because you had a predetermined result to advance. To whatever extent you want to call that non-substantive, it is as a direct reflection of your abandonment of substance in favour of whatever you think you can use to argue a point.
You apparently read it as an insult, but if you agree with data that says Lebron was a bottom 10% defender in 2018, your eye-test is descriptively bad. And if you do
not agree, then you constantly pushing that data is descriptively dishonest. The Cavaliers were a terrible defensive roster for most of the season playing heavily skewed lineups with Lebron (just like 2022, where again people thought that Lebron decided to give up on defence because Carmelo/Lebron frontcourts unsurprisingly produced terrible results). Lebron would be selective in his efforts, conserving energy that he would generally only bother to expend in competitive fourth quarters. It is not complicated, but evidently many would prefer the even greater simplicity of pretending Lebron became a bottom 10% defender.
In that middle 18-game stretch, he probably did veer into outright bad — although still nowhere near “bottom 10%” — and in that stretch, the Cavaliers were 2.5 points worse on defence than they were during the rest of the season
and their offence was 10 points worse than during the rest of the season (funny how that goes). When people talk about Lebron completely half-assing his play as a signal that the team was not good enough, that was the stretch. But six years removed, now that we have people unironically trying make those same “wait, is Kawhi hurting the Spurs defence????” arguments about Lebron as a season-long performer, yeah, I think it is pretty clear who paid attention to the season and who has only ever been looking for a narrative cudgel.
