Bob8 wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:Bob8 wrote:
Or maybe it matters with which rosters teams actually play. I would say that starting lineup Luka/Kyrie/DJJ/Washington/Gafford and Exum/Josh/THJ/Kleber/ Lively/on the bench is light years better than what Mavs normally had in RS. You know, the most used Mavs lineup still played only 99 minutes together.
Yes, I know, excuses again. Fortunately enough, playoffs is the time, when we actually see, who's and who isn't impactful, when it matters the most. Hopefully all teams will be healthy and we will see head to head, who's really better.
Well, I don't want to get too much in the weeks of what we've already talked about, but I'll just emphasize 2 things:
1. I'm literally saying stuff that helps a pro-Luka argument.
2. I'm talking about a player's actual basketball rather than just saying "it's because teammates". Teammates matter without question, but when they prove to make a difference, there are always basketball specifics to consider. Not saying you neve look at such specifics, but I do think you've had a tendency to want to find simple reasons to dismiss the significance of +/- rather than looking at things like lineup fit in great detail.
I'm not saying it's just teammates, I'm saying that you need critical mass of roster quality to compete with the best players, who also have the best rosters. MJ couldn't win anything before he got the right team. He needed 4 seasons to even come out of the first round. Basketball is team sport and +/- is measuring impact of lineups not single players. That's why multiple players of the best teams have very good and very similar +/-.
If you're right and +/- is really measuring impact of a single player, then things should be very similar in playoffs too. All OKC's players in the starting lineup has light years better +/- than Mavs' starting lineup. It should be 4:0 easily. +/- is saying there isn't any chance for Mavs. OKC is just dominant in every position.
Or maybe we should look at 2022. The whole Suns' starting lineup had around + 10 +/- in RS, Luka + 3.6. And all that incredible impact numbers didn't matter much. Suns were destroyed in games 6 and 7. Booker with - 60 in those 2 games, Luka with + 52. I wonder where all that impact disappeared?
Re: if +/- is measuring impact of a single player then should be similar in the playoffs. You're still looking to treat "impact" like it's something glued to the player in all settings while I've been clear I see it as an emergent property influenced by other factors.
If I'm doing my regular season thing by grifting foul calls like crazy, and in the playoffs the refs swallow the whistle, my impact in the playoffs will go down.
If I'm doing my regular season thing where I can stand up to 90% of the bigs in the league well enough that I can focus on help defense, but in the playoffs I'm more likely to go up against that other 10%, my impact in the playoffs will go down.
If I set a casual regular season tone that leads to bad defense, but then I put the fear of god in my teammates come playoff time and we become a good defense, my impact in the playoffs will go up.
None of this means that the playoff impact is totally disconnected from regular season impact, but no, it's not a one number badge that a guy carries around with him. It varies with context.
Look, when the playoffs roll around, just pay a lot of attention to what the great analysts end up talking about in each series. When they talk about the stars they'll be focused less on how good a player is overall, and more on what he's doing that's working, what's not working, how he's being exploited, how a coach is making a move to help him no longer being exploited, etc. That's the stuff that really matters more than the holistic overall goodness to a coach, and it changes depending on the context of the series.
Re: why multiple players on teams have similar +/-. As I've said many, many times in this thread: We have stats that normalize for stuff like this with On/Off, RAPM, etc. If you literally don't understand how these stats work, just ask. But at this point your focus on raw +/- simply because that's what I use to try to communicate the basics amounts to a straw man whether you realize it or not.
Re: Phx-Dal, where all that impact disappear? Dude, Phoenix had the far better regular season and then Dallas won the series in a really important upset. Literally everything we'd point to in the regular season pointed in the same direction...so why wouldn't +/-? Makes no sense to talk as if +/- was the thing that was wrong here. It was all wrong, and the question is: What changed? It's a great conversation to have, and the NBA world has had plenty to say on it since it happened. Among the things discussed is the playoff resilience of Luka's game which I've been mentioning repeatedly here as well. (Another factor is the Chris Paul disappearing act, which is an incredibly important thing in its own right with the big question being whether it's simply about his body tending to break down over the course of the season or not.)
