OhayoKD wrote:Variance is a thing.
This is not a good application of context:
Lessthanjake wrote:superstarksfan wrote:The cavs did shoot well from 3 against the raptors but guess what it was off the offensive brilliance of Lebron James. Most passes made 56.0,secondary assist 1.3, potential assists 19.0, ast% of 47 and a tov% of 8. Jordan handles the ball less and doesn't attract the defensive attention as Bron does,Bron leaves teams they collapse Jordan leaves they barely feel an inch. 1986 Bulls had a 1.4 relative ortg without jordan better than any Bulls team pre triangle and Phil ascension as a head coach.
I believe the stats presented in this thread by others showed that the Cavs shot abnormally well from three in that series even when looking specifically just at wide open threes. And they shot much better than their own average—which is itself an average they got with LeBron. Like, are we really saying that LeBron’s passing is the reason that they shot much better on wide open threes in that series than they generally did with LeBron’s passing?
Well no. The specific claim was it was Lebron's passing, Lebron calling out and blowing up the raptors game-plan(this bit is well documented), and Lebron drawing more defensive attention by handling the ball more(with minimal turnovers).
And of course, if you are going to take the simple Basketball Reference approach to evaluating players, you should probably look at the assists:turnovers fluctuating before you pull put the incredulity appeal.
Against the Raptors Lebron posted an assist percent of 47 to a turnover percentage of 6 which would be one of the best BBR playmaking series of all-time. That is half the turnover rate he managed in the regular season on an even smaller assist percentage. Good chance that explains some of your "variance" right off the bat.
"Solving" Toronto schematically is also a playoff-specific benefit that would be harder to replicate in the regular seaosn with less games to scout and prepare. So there is another potential explanation of that 3-point jump.
If Lebron is also handling the ball more/drawing more defensive attention(seems plausible), that's 3 lebron-related factors contributing to the 3-point jump. In other words, this:
That doesn’t make much of any sense, and we’re talking about something (three-point shooting) that we know there can be a lot of variance in. The most reasonable conclusion is that it was just random variance.
is just a horrible application of logic. The most "reasonable" conclusion without a deeper dive would be all of the above with 3-point variance playing a factor as well, especially when a jump happens 3 postseasons in a row with one major common denominator. It being "just" one of those factors is you making an assumption with no basis, iow, not remotely reasonable.
There’s nothing in this long rant that explains how any of this would be expected to make the Cavs supporting cast make an abnormally high percent of their *wide open* threes (which is what the data others have posted about related to). It might be an explanation if the effect we were talking about was that a higher-than-normal percent of the team’s 3PA were wide open (I’m not sure either way whether that was the case, and no evidence has been posted about that, as far as I’m aware), but it’s not much of an explanation for the team making an abnormally high percent of wide open threes.
Of course, it’s also a funny point when we realize that the 1989 Bulls supporting cast shot way better from three in general after Jordan went to PG—likely due to Jordan producing tons of wide open shots in that role (I’ve provided you video evidence of this before). The supporting cast shot a below-league-average 31.9% from three before Jordan went to PG, and then shot 39.2% the rest of the season with Jordan at PG. That 39.2% was 6.9% above league average that season. Meanwhile, the supporting cast shot 36.6% from three in the playoffs, against a slate of teams that were very good overall defending against the three. The r3P% of the supporting cast (relative to opponent) in the playoffs was +6.6%. And it was +7.8% in the Cavs series. Some of all this was, of course, Hodges having a higher percent of minutes in the Jordan-as-PG games (though note that he didn’t start most of the Jordan-as-PG regular season games, so, all else equal, we’d expect a higher r3P% for the Bulls in the playoffs than in the Jordan-as-PG regular season games), but it’s also a function of Jordan’s creation in that role. And, either way, the Bulls’ three-point-shooting in the Cavs series wasn’t really particularly different from their three-point-shooting overall with Jordan at PG. So, I’d say the argument that their teammates higher three-point-percentage in the series in question wasn’t really random is, if anything, stronger for Jordan (who was playing in a different role where his teammates otherwise shot similarly well from three) than it is for LeBron (who did not change roles, and whose teammates shot idiosyncratically well even just on wide open threes). (Of course, the Jordan-as-PG timeframe isn’t a massive sample (25 regular season games + the playoffs), so perhaps even the higher three-point-percentage in those games overall was just randomness, but the argument here that the increase wasn’t random certainly seems stronger for Jordan than it does for LeBron).
OhayoKD wrote:PS: The Bulls also shot unusually well from 3 that series, jumping by 9 points against Cleveland.
I'm not sure why the hot shooting is only brought up for the cavs when this comparison comes around(Though I have a hunch), but it doesn't really make sense to make the point for one without comparing it to the other
The degree to which each player helped generate that unusual shooting is pretty relevant and it's been brought up enough I might do some tracking at some point.
This is a really odd point.
And by odd, you mean fundamentally necessary for what you are arguing? It being less of a factor is fair(though the percentage jump
is double), but is a factor.
This part is selective
Meanwhile, the 1989 Bulls supporting cast shot abnormally badly on FTs against the Cavs, while the 2018 Cavs shot abnormally well on FTs against the Raptors. The overall net result of all this is that random shooting variance didn’t really help the 1989 Bulls against the Cavs almost at all, while it had a huge effect on the 2018 Cavs against the Raptors.
Let's start with selective.
Yes, Chicago's ft% dropped by roughly .4.,but 89 Cleveland's
dropped by roughly .3 while the raptors ft%
increased by 0.06. Cleveland's 3 point
also dropped by 2 while the Raptors 3-point percent
stayed exactly the same. Cleveland's ft percentage actually dropped but I'm going to assume you were referring to teammate ft% and you/djoker calculated out what the ft% would look like without lebron's shooting sub-60.
Nonetheless, the Bulls benefitted from variance by the same type of evidence provided for cleveland benefitting. Not sure why you're calling that "odd" to point out.
First of all, the relevant FT% drop for Chicago was 9.9% (the drop in FT% by non-Jordan players compared to the non-Jordan regular season average), because it doesn’t make sense to treat Jordan’s own FT shooting as a random variable he isn’t responsible for.
If we want to account for randomness of opponents’ FT percentage as well, the net result is that the drop in non-Jordan Bulls’ FT% was still a bigger negative than the decrease in the 1989 Cavs’ FT%. Meanwhile, the increase in the non-LeBron Cavs’ FT% was a bigger positive than the extremely tiny increase in the 2018 Raptors FT%. Random variance in teammates’ and opponents’ FT%’s hurt Jordan in the Cavs series and helped LeBron in the Raptors series. Meanwhile, the effect of the 1989 Cavs’ three-point shooting being slightly lower in the series is tiny, because the Cavs shot very few three-pointers in the series.
The bottom line is that teammate and opponent FT% variance hurt Jordan against the Cavs and helped LeBron against the Raptors. Meanwhile, three-point-shooting variance helped both teams, but by virtue of the fact that three-pointers were *way* more common in 2018 than 1989, this helped LeBron’s team way more. So yes, comparing variance in the series as if they were even remotely in the same ballpark was an odd point for you to bring up.
Unless you are saying Jordan was the one who added Hodges to the roster, the distinction between "random variance" and roster-improvement isn't relevant beyond further weakening the "the Bulls actually got significantly worse after 84 and 86" concept your impact-claims about Jordan rest on. Speaking of.
Lol, starting Hodges was not about the team having picked up a player that was a “roster-improvement” over the players whose minutes he was taking in the playoffs. As we have previously discussed at length in the past, he was starting and getting more minutes in the playoffs that year because he could pretty naturally play as a SG (while Paxson and Vincent were more purely PGs) and Jordan was playing PG. Hodges had been played by the Bulls as a bench player before that and was consistently played as a bench player after that. Hodges was a bench player, who was starting simply as a knock-on effect from Jordan being at PG. Of course, it was certainly a “roster improvement” in the very narrow area of three-point shooting (which contributed significantly to the Bulls shooting better than normal from three in that series), but giving a lot of Paxson’s and Vincent’s minutes to Hodges wasn’t a real “roster improvement” in a vacuum, since Hodges was deficient to them in many other ways (hence why he was bench player for the Bulls otherwise). It was a roster change that simply fit better with the more important tactical change the team had made.
JohnStarksfan wrote:lessthanjake"=objectively worse without him on the court
And the cavs were objectively worse without Lebron in the game or on the roster. Not sure why it's tough to grasp the reasoning for valuing games and seasons over spot minutes. Particularly when you complain about
[quote="lessthanjake wrote:
also inherently a tiny sample
Committing to on/off in a season someone misses no games in the same posts you excuse any unfavorable disparity as variance is what I'd call, as you put it, an "obviously bad argument". If you want to argue Kyrie was a negative(15-17) and role-player minute swaps explains the 40-win cavs becoming 25-win cavs in an artificially inflated sample(2019)...you can, but repeating the word "invalid" so you can throw out everything that isn't the worst looking data point is not going to be convincing to people who aren't already gunning for jordan here.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here (in part because there was a bit of a quotation fail here, it seems), but I think it should be obvious that talking about single-season+playoffs-wide data is based on a larger sample size than relying heavily on what happened in 4 and 5 game playoff series. These are not remotely comparable.
Not to mention that in my second post in this thread, I raised the sample-size of single-season data completely unprompted, discussing it at pretty considerable length (see spoiler below). So what you’re saying here seems to rely on a completely false premise that I’ve been inconsistent in addressing sample sizes. Of course, when one point relates to single-season+playoffs data while the other relies on single-playoff-series data, then it is certainly quite valid to consider the latter argument to have a bigger sample-size issue.
Finally, referring to the 2019 Cavs as “role player minute swaps” is an interesting (and pretty misleading) way of describing a situation where the team’s remaining best player played virtually zero minutes all season with the 7 other players that had played the most minutes the prior season (as I showed).
