Djoker wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:
1) Positive impact? I mean, in 2012 when they did their finals run they had a playoff rotation with 8 guys playing >.25 minutes, and I'd say all of them were positive impact. That list for reference:
Durant, Westbrook, Harden, Ibaka, Perkins, Fisher, Sefolosha, Collison.
For anyone thinking any of these weren't "that good", I think it's critical to get a sense of what "that good" actually means. None of those guys were all-star level players for the Thunder, but they were all positive value against NBA level competition of the time. Well and good to look at the limitations of Perkins and think you wouldn't want him to play big minutes in today's league, but practically speaking, he was a valuable player for contenders in his prime.
Further, the thing we tend to point to with the Thunder supporting cast as being weak is generally their outside shooting, but the Thunder were actually an above average 3-point shooting team until '14-15, and the main thing shifting wasn't so much that the Thunder lost their shooting, but that the rest NBA was doubling down.
This then to say that while the Thunder absolutely should have been prioritizing outside shooting more than they did, it's wrong to say that Durant-Westbrook just generally were playing on teams with no shooting around them.
2) Pieces fit poorly because neither Westbrook nor Durant are good at team play. You can slot Durant in in a way where you have good fit if you have others on the court who can do the team-thinking for him, but he's not going to solve those issues for you. Meanwhile, Westbrook just doesn't fit well without other talent period when he's doing his volume scoring triple double thing.
They absolutely could have won a chip anyway, but the fit issues with those guys were basically always clear, and that was central to why many of us thought they were misguided when they looked to build with Westbrook as the floor general instead of Harden.
As mentioned, the supporting cast was not perfect, but it tends to be overstated how flawed they were relative to contemporaries. Take basically any team from the era, they weren't focused enough on role player perimeter shooting and while some were more ahead of the curve than the Thunder, the lack of role player shooting isn't why the Thunder offense looked so sub-optimized, and why it was common to see Durant getting frustrated on the floor after another possession where Westbrook never seemed to even look his way.
3) Did they underachieve? Well yeah, because they had Harden and they didn't recognize what they had in him. Harden running that offense was their ticket to reaching another level, and they threw that ticket away.
Did the post-Harden Thunder underachieve given their decision to let Westbrook run the offense? Not really. I'd say they got basically to their ceiling and it could have led to a chip. The disappointment was massive given that they could taste those rings, but they were doomed to play much dumber basketball than the Heat, Spurs & Warriors in those years because of the two knuckleheads they opted to build around.
Thanks for a detailed reply. A little harsh towards the superstar duo!
1) I actually disagree and don't see all those guys as positives at all. Harden in 2012 yes. Ibaka yes. Others not so sure. Perkins was nothing special by the time he got to OKC. Maybe a replacement level C... That's as much credit as I'm comfortable giving him. Fisher was older and dealing with personal tragedy in his Thunder days, Sefolosha was a defensive specialist and a liability on O and Collision just a fringe player.
You might be right about the shooting aspect being overemphasized.
2) I think this is a harsh take on your end. Westbrook yea.. he was tough to fit around but KD?!? He might be the most "fittable" player ever. You can plug him into almost any system and he as well as the team will do well. He doesn't handle the ball much and can play well off of other stars. We saw it in GS, in Brooklyn even in Phoenix that first year. Now can he orchestrate things for role players at an elite level? Maybe not but he also wasn't asked to. They had Westbrook. KD is not a point guard or point forward. That's not his role.
3) Agree 100% that allowing themselves to lose Harden was the biggest gaffe. I remember saying it in 2012 and I was eventually proven right.
Well, I'll just admit to being harsh about the duo, but will emphasize again that it's not because I don't think they could have won a title together post-Harden. That team, led by the duo, was really, really good.
This then to say that the judgy-ness in my tone, while I don't take it back, and I don't want it to imply I thought they weren't really, really good. I'm judging them against tippy top tier all-time greats and that tends to skew the sentiment of the post to the negative...but of course these are MVPs who strut like they are MVPs and everyone else needs to adapt around them, so we're not talking about some obscure issue here but the primary intangible issue that led to them being career journeymen despite master-level talent.
Re: not positives, maybe replacement level. Welp, using my RAPM VORP for these guys careers, here's how they come out:
Kevin Durant 4276
James Harden 3860
Russell Westbrook 2328
Derek Fisher 2078
Serve Ibaka 1320
Thabo Sefolosha 1020
Nick Collison 958
Kendrick Perkins 420
Now there are a ton of caveats here, maybe the biggest of which is that these are career numbers not specifically OKC numbers, but I do think they emphasize that none of these guys at their best were guys with actually terrible impact numbers.
To be clear: To me the idea of a replacement level player is that this is the sort of player you could expect to just pick up and give a minimum contract to at any time, and those sort of players generally don't make generational money the way that guys with long careers in the NBA do. So while it's reasonable to ask whether a given player getting major run isn't actually above a replacement level player, we're talking about a pretty major, on-going scouting failure whenever anything like that happens.
And there are guys with those kind of long careers that actually have a negative VORP by this metric, and it's worth noting that the guy the Thunder traded to get Perkins - Jeff Green - is the poster boy for it. There are many players in the past 30 years that are worse at basketball than Green of course, but he's the only guy I have with a 30K minutes Of PBP data that looks below replacement.
I will say, I'm not totally sold that Green actually was than worse than replacement level either as there isn't a clear cut consensus on where that level is analytically. I'm just confident that Green was generally less valuable than any of these guys, and trading away Green was a really good move for the Thunder.
One note about Collison being a "fringe player". This is another term that's not agreed upon with consensus, but to me a fringe player is a guy is a guy who is below rotation level. If you're playing basically every game, and playing more than a full quarter of time, you're a rotation guy.
During the 2012 playoff run, the Thunder played the 8 guys I listed every single game, and each of them was playing more than a quarter of the time. They were just quite clearly guys the coach intended to play every single game.
I'll also note this, if we go by total minutes played in that run, here's how Durant (top of rotation) and Collison (last guy in the rotation), compare with the guys below:
Durant 837
Collison 332
Cook 109
Mohammed 83
Aldrich 25
What you can see there is that geometrically the gap between the last guy on the rotation (Collison) and the first guy in the fringe (Cook) is bigger than the geometric gap between the first & last guy in the rotation. I would suggest that this absolutely has to do with the rotation guys being in a fundamentally different category in the coach's mind than those below.
Now, there's long been a question about why Collison didn't play more if he was really good, and there's some interesting conversation to get into there, but a key thing we need to remember:
Ibaka & Collison were largely staggered in their minutes, and if you add their playoff minutes, you get a total larger than Durant's. So in the mind of the coach, Collison's minutes were being determined to some degree on the choice of whether to have Ibaka in or Collison in. The fact Ibaka played more certainly makes us inclined to give him the nod over Collison...but of course the entire idea of "rotation" is that you're going to rely on more than 5 guys. OKC relied on 8 guys that year, and Collison was one of them.
Re: Sefolosha defensive specialist. That's certainly true, but doesn't make him a replacement level player generally, and it's not like Durant & Westbrook didn't need defenders next to them doing more valuable defensive work than they were.
This then to say: Perfectly fine to wish that that OKC team had players better than Perk & Thabo, it's just that this wasn't the massive disadvantage at the time as it is now, and it doesn't explain why OKC would go through their possessions with Westbrook dribbling down the clock while not trying to get Durant the ball.
Re: Durant most fittable player. Let's really make clear what we're talking about here:
Because what Durant does well is be really tall & shoot, he can do that on any team anywhere, and thus you can "plug & play" him and expect him to get his...but that's not the same thing as fitting in with your teammates. To do that, you have to fully buy into schemes on both sides of the ball, and really think hard about how best to make use of your teammates.
It's not just that Durant doesn't excel at these things, it's that he actually gets really unhappy when a coach tells him to do these things, which led to him acting out against Steve Kerr, and led Steve Nash to simply accept that Brooklyn wouldn't be able to play using a modern defensive scheme "with everyone on a string". As Durant has said, he just wants to go out there and "hoop", and this dream is about him being guarded one-on-one and him guarding someone on the other team one-on-one.
So then, Durant was fantastic for Golden State in a way that Westbrook could not have been, but Durant worked in Golden State because the entire rest of the team played so smart and the opposing defense was focused on Curry, which gave Durant more space to shoot...which wouldn't have helped Westbrook much because he's a bad shooter.
I would suggest that the NBA world overrated what it meant for Durant to plug & play in Golden State, and that frankly, the NBA mostly knows this now after Durant hasn't been able to win chips since. (I'll note, it was possible for Brooklyn to win a title and I don't mean to pretend otherwise...but had KD & Kyrie actually bought in like you want your players to do, they probably do win the title. A Brooklyn team with KD, Kyrie, Harden & Jarrett Allen doing what Atkinson/Nash/whoever wanted them to do should have won it all.)
Re: KD not a point, not his role. I would suggest that when we're talking about being a team connector, that's supposed to be everyone's role. Simply because you're not the primary ballhandler doesn't mean we don't want you to demonstrate high BBIQ awareness to make good passes, but Durant never figured out those parts of the game...in no small part I think, because he didn't see it as his job. He thinks of himself as a scorer, and as a result, he failed to become more than that, which is why his career ended up nowhere near the same league as his chosen rival (LeBron), as well as considerably behind a chosen teammate that he expected would get relegated to sidekick stature when KD joined the team (Steph).
Re: Harden, yup. Yup. This was absolutely a thing many of us saw as a huge mistake when it happened. Presti's biggest blunder.