Lockdown504090 wrote:dhsilv2 wrote:Lockdown504090 wrote:While this is all true, it doesnt take away from what he does overall in the RS. in 3/4 of the games hes not playing a top guy that doenst care about his length and he has a massive impact on those games defensively . I would rather have simmons AD bam giannis and draymond green in the playoffs on defense in the playoffs because they are more versitile and can guard with both feet above the 3 point line though. Dpoy is a RS award though, so I wouldnt call him overrated as a dpoy, hes just never going to be the best because there are guys who can do more.
This would be like saying James harden is a better scorer than mike and durant because he does a bunch of things that lend itself to RS success while having weaknesses that will prevent him from beating more well rounded and better scorers.
Gobert has been great in the playoffs....once his coach made adjustments to counter the rocket's schemes. The problem for the Jazz was how slow their coaching staff was to make adjustments. Great coaches can make adjustments in game. Good coaches need a game to adjust. The Jazz needed two full games before they were able to make meaningful adjustments. Defense today isn't like the 90's where good old man to man was good enough to hold down the fort. Today the teamwork on that end is critical and coaching plays a much bigger role on that side of the ball.
the second time he was good, yes. they also played a lot of zone, and I dont think the strategies they had to employ against them would be sucessful against other teams which is why they didnt go to a lot of those things against denver in the bubble. to your point about todays defense I agree, which is why goberts value has always been less than what it is in the playoffs. I do not think hes bad, I just dont think he is as good as the other people I mentioned, and there is a dropoff, which is a problem for someone who is also really a slight positive on offense because of the jazz's scheme which is also countered by those defenders i mentioned.
My issue with him, is that teams can run plays when rudy is on the court, switching defenses totally get teams out of their pnr sets and forces iso ball. The clippers did it to them. the heat do it, the lakers will do it at as well, and rudy cant do that back. So if he is playing traditional pnr defense and you have a star that can score against rudy, which some have shown they can( I dont think james harden is an elite finisher in the paint btw), rudy becomes something less than a dpoy.
If you have a guy like steph who can get kawhi on a switch(not saying kawhi is better than rudy) and cook him like he does everyone else, whats kawhi giving you on defense? he can still be switchable on other players, he can get in the passing lane at an all time great level, he can contest jumpers really well, and hes more mobile.
He wasnt great agains tthe warriors, he wasnt great against rockets the first time, and he had little effect on jokic or murray last year. He has been good against some teams, just not anyone great, unless you think he was good in any of the series i mentioned or i'm forgetting someone.
I would like to see him with better surrounding talent though, royce oneil is good, but a lot of his sucess on D is because rudy exists. Theyre playing him in many lineups with a bunch of guys with little defensive talent, what would he look like if he had ben simmons or paul george out there with him i wonder.
Again... i think hes good, just not as good as he is in the RS
If you look at Embiid he doesn't get put into these situations at nearly the same rate, in large part because he has better defenders around him. To be honest, I still am not sure Ben is a better defender than Embiid on that topic, but the reality is they both make each other LOOK better, even if the aren't better per say together. This is the same reason Bowen got more love than Duncan for years in DPOY voting.
As for playoffs, if a team has to adjust and change their offense to take a guy out of the game, that's generally a net possessive. The problem is if the rest of the team is weak defensively. So now you compound the issue of a coach who's slow to adjust with a player effectively being stretched too thin. It's kinda the same thing as a great slasher is better surrounded by 3 point shooters. An iso guy like Leonard benefited greatly from having 4 shooters on the floor on the raptors, but with George struggling and a worse shooting clippers team, he looked much more mortal. Same player, still a great playoff player, but it's a team game and the team's weaknesses end up reflecting poorly on the stars.
That isn't to say I am going to argue that Gobert is without flaws, if he was flawless, a lot of the coaching items would matter less. But we saw Giannis look bad against miami on defense (imo that was as big a reason as they lost as his offense). Giannis has the benefit of Lopez being a wall he can fall back on and it lets him be the best version of a "free safety" as he can be. But and I don't have that series etched in my brain as well as I'd like, it seemed the heat were able to take Giannis out of his element.
we still have people talking about Hakeem destroying Robinson in a series where Robinson was given the task to take on Hakeem while the rockets built a whole defense around Robinson (wasn't like he had shooters or other options).
