Rubios wrote:I opened this thread in the context of the Shai vs Giannis topic.
Of course, data is useful and, when interpreted properly, offers knowledge.
Because there's more than meets the eye.
My TL;DR point is: do we need an in-depth analysis of advanced metrics in order to figure out Giannis is a level above Shai?
Since I think Giannis' impact in recent years has been well below Shai, I'm not sure how to answer that question. It's more like we need to NOT look at stuff to conclude Giannis' impact is a level above Shai, because closer inspection will contradict what we think we know.
I haven't responded to your early posts in this thread because frankly I wasn't looking to force a debate on this, but to try to give some context here that doesn't just rely on sophisticated stats:
Giannis doesn't get assists because he's a good facilitator, he gets them because the team plays with him on-ball because he's never learned how to be useful off-ball like bigs are supposed to do with rolls & runs to the rim and he also isn't a good shooter, which means that if you don't let him keep the ball, the defense doesn't have to prioritize stopping him.
From a scoring perspective what this means is that the team is letting Giannis constantly try to score, and so he racks up scoring volume.
Now, none of this is necessarily a mistake - as you've noted, Giannis scores that volume efficiently - but the metronome of consistency in his box score comes from a simplistic offensive scheme that largely does the same stuff over and over again, and how praise worthy this is thus really just about how effective it is on a team level.
And, to be clear, in general this applies to Shai or any other ball dominant player. These players generally can't be utterly incompetent at their job or they won't get/keep the primacy, and so they put up big box score numbers, but the real question is how effective they make their team's offense when they play like this, and there you need data.
Now, I say all of that with an offensive focus, but it's quite understandable to favor Giannis because of his defense over Shai. I certainly rank Giannis' peak defense ahead of Shai's.
But, Giannis' just really hasn't put in the same kind of defensive effort across the season since he won those MVPs and he hasn't won a playoff series since 2022. This to say, it's been quite a while since we've actually seen Giannis play outstanding defense consistently (by the data) for either a regular season or a successful playoff run.
I'll stop there in part because I don't expect agreement on this.
