hardenASG13 wrote:dhsilv2 wrote:hardenASG13 wrote:
Haha no. That's not how people discuss basketball most of the time. They talk about what they saw. I just saw 39 year old play almost as well as prime jokic. I've also seen prime Lebron, alot. I know he was much better than he is now. You must know this too. So if he was much better than how he played in this series (which he was, consistently, for a lot of years), that would pretty easily have made him the best player in this series. He almost was at this stage! He was much better than his current version, which kind of went toe to toe vs. Prime Jokic. That gives evidence to the fact that in his prime he was on another level as player, no matter what stats you want to throw out there. Some people prefer to think/talk about basketball rather than just comparing numbers from (widely acknowledged) flawed ranking systems whose formulas they may or may not know or understand.
I just saw 39 year old Lebron not look remotely close to being as good as Jokic. See how useless that is? Sure it's what I saw. But I can put numbers to it. I can show that Jokic had a 14+ BPM for the series while Lebron had a 10.
You've got "I feel"
Wow. 4 more BPM! Awesome!
Um, 4 BPM actually is quite a lot. That’s like the difference between Steph Curry’s career BPM and Mike Conley’s career BPM. Or LeBron’s career BPM and Dame’s. Or Michael Jordan’s and Clyde Drexler’s. It’s not a small difference.
Granted, I wouldn’t put a lot of stock in stats like this in such tiny samples. But that flaw goes more to the argument it seems like you’re making. This weird attenuated argument that current LeBron was purportedly close to peak Jokic in a series and peak LeBron was much better than current LeBron and therefore peak LeBron was much better than peak Jokic is just overly complicated nonsense. Even leaving aside that Jokic was a lot better than LeBron in this past series, a single series is a tiny sample size where there’s tons of variance in how well someone plays, and LeBron played a lot better than his average current level. So yeah, current LeBron is not as good as peak LeBron, but current LeBron playing well above his normal level (as he was in that series) may not be *that* much behind peak LeBron.
Like, for reference on this, LeBron’s Thinking Basketball BPM in these playoffs was 7.8. Meanwhile, he was rocking a 5.8 BPM during the regular season, and last year he had a 4.8 BPM in the regular season and a 5.22 BPM in the playoffs, while it was 5.1 in the 2022 regular season, and 5.6 in the 2021 regular season and 4.22 in the 2021 playoffs. So this performance was a clear outlier from what current LeBron generally is. Which isn’t super surprising to see, since 5 games is a tiny sample, so you’d expect a lot of variance—someone can play a lot better or worse than normal over 5 games. So how does this outlier performance compare to LeBron in his younger years? Well, a 7.8 BPM is above every regular season LeBron has had except 2009, 2010, and 2013! And, in terms of playoff BPM, it’s towards the bottom compared to the rest of his prime years, but it’s ahead of some of them (2007, 2008, 2011, and 2015) and clustered within 0.6 of 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2018. Only the 2009 and 2016 playoffs are more than 1.6 ahead. If we instead look at Basketball-Reference’s BPM, we see a very similar story. LeBron has a 7.0 BBREF BPM in the last 4 seasons (and 6.5 in this season specifically). But his BPM in the playoffs this year was 10.6. Compared to his prime regular seasons, that is only below the 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2013 regular seasons (and only below 2008 and 2012 by a tiny amount). And in terms of playoffs in his prime, it is only below 2009, 2010, 2016, and 2018 (and only 2009 is ahead by more than 2). So, basically, I think the better reading here is that old LeBron is generally pretty far off from prime LeBron, but that in the course of a tiny five-game sample, old LeBron managed to play pretty similar to (or at least not that far below) the level he did in his prime. And that makes the entire logic chain that you’re pushing break down.