Texas Chuck wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:
By encouraging players to stand around as far away from the fulcrum of action as possible, you're basically treating them like them using their basketball brains to make basketball decisions will only hurt your team.
Not trying to convince you of anything obviously as your thoughts on this style of play are well-known and well-established and I respect that.
But I think this is a bit unfair. More what they are saying is that Lebron or Harden or Luka are going to make the best decisions of anyone on the team so we want them making the most of them. And we have seen this tends to be really good for the team.
Its great if you have an early 00's Kings roster with smart decision makers up and down the lineup and off the bench, but most teams don't have that. And so rather than letting Tim Hardaway make offensive decisions much better to just let him shoot the open 3 Luka gets him. Gafford just finishing the lob Luka gets him, etc...
Just like when you have Mahomes or Brady or Montana, you put the ball in their hands and they make the decisions. When you have a power play, The Great One or Matthews gets the puck. De Bruyne should have the ball as much as possible and so on.
Let your smartest players make the most decisions.
I appreciate you being respectful toward me on this and elsewhere, and I should emphasize that it's not any kind of obvious thing what the best approach is to making use of a team's set of decision making talent.
You draw comparisons to quarterbacks in gridiron football, and that is the perfect analogy. Modern gridiron football is designed to put as much of the on-field decision making on offense into the quarterback's brain as possible, and so calling a guy like LeBron a quarterback makes a ton of sense.
And if it's the right approach for gridiron football, why wouldn't it be for basketball? Eh, while it might be, the difference is in the continuous flow of basketball. In gridiron football, one possession is carved up into discrete plays, and each play gives you one bite at the apple. In a flow sport, the play is not so discrete and while a team can play by running a "play", they can also just improvise based on where weaknesses present in the defense.
The great flow sport is of course association football, aka soccer, and in that sport you don't have one guy just keeping control of the ball all the time. You make passes back & forth and you work hard to re-position yourself when you don't have the ball. There are many terminologies for the role a player can play in soccer, but if you're looking for ultimate flow, I'd say this is typified by Johan Cruijff, and if you're looking for the basketball equivalent of Cruijff, it's probably Jokic.
To the question of why it would ever make sense for someone other than your best decision maker to be making decisions, it's because there's absolutely no need for only one guy to be making decisions in basketball. It's not a zero sum game. Playing the way Denver does doesn't make them make less use of Jokic's brain. It less the team use Jokic's brain as much as possible, while also making more use of other player's brains, and I'd say in general that's a win as long as the players in question are simply making decisions that are better than neutral. You can't do that with all players in the NBA, but that's mostly because of who NBA scouts are used to scouting for. It was clear that Andre Drummond really was struggling to understand the game of basketball despite ample years of training before he got drafted, but he got drafted anyway because of his body.
Now as I say, that still doesn't mean that a Jokic has a higher offensive team ceiling than a LeBron as any kind of rule. If a defense has an easier time messing with the flow of Jokic's teammates in a hard playoff series than they do with other supporting casts that are asked to think less, then maybe the most robust approach will turn out to be close to gridiron than association football.
But I do think that a lot of what makes life hard for NBA defenses is making them think hard for the entire shot-clock all game long, and so in general I favor offenses that seek to do this, rather than those that give defense a chance to rest as the offensive star gets his bearings.
Re: "When you have a Power Play, the Great One gets the puck". I'm not a hockey expert and would love comments from others, but it wasn't my impression that Gretzky's signature was "give him the puck and get out of his way". I feel like he was more known for seeming to know where the puck would go when no one was controlling it, and then using the 360-nature of the hockey goal against goalies by working behind the net.
I would say that I think Nash definitely had some Gretzky in his approach when he was "nashing", and I'm not fundamentally opposed to grouping Nash in with the LeBrons, so I don't want to seem like I'm pushing back too hard here, but I would say that if you're looking to make a spectrum with guys from other sports, I think Gretzky is somewhere between Brady & Cruijff, just as Nash is somewhere between LeBron & Jokic.
