iggymcfrack wrote:Patsfan1081 wrote:slothrop8 wrote:
It's not arrogance - it's simply understanding which metrics better reflect a player's actual impact and evaluating them through then lens rather than using the tools of the past that have largely been mathematically proven not to be accurate reflections of value. I and people like me are far from the only ones holding that opinion - lots of analysts feel the same.
A quick baseball example - whether you follow the sport or not, you'll get it - for decades it was conventional wisdom that a team should bat a fast guy as their lead off hitter - whether that guy was much good at getting on base or not was often irrelevant - and if he did get on, you'd often use your #2 hitter to bunt him to 2nd base. Teams did it for decades - a huge majority of players, coaches, analysts, and fans would have sworn to you up and down that this was good baseball strategy for years and years, and many, many baseball games opened in exactly this fashion for years and years. Eventually the analytics guys proved mathematically that this was not only not good strategy, it was terrible strategy- pretty close to straight up baseball idiocy. It took a while - but nobody does this anymore ever at the major league level - because it's absolutely wrong. It was accepted conventional wisdom for a long time, but it was straight up incorrect.
This history of sports is littered with countless examples of the ways even professionals think about the game being later shown to be obviously wrong. This analysis of DeRozan is really no different. The tools by which we used to evaluate players like him in the past suggested that what he does is "good" for your team and that opinion is shared by many fans, coaches, analysts etc. But we now have a ton of analytical evidence that the conventional wisdom is wrong - his teams are always, always better without him, often way better - his impact on your overall defense is straight up catastrophic, he's generally an overall detriment. How big a detriment remains open for debate - but things like him making All-NBA teams or making the US Olympic team will pretty obviously be viewed as laughable in the pretty near future - even though it was highly respected people inside the game conveying him that status in the present.
This is just a terrible analogy, what does speed represent in DD's case? Besides the fact that it isn't true, some of the best leadoff hitters off all time (Boggs, Rose, Brock, ect..) weren't the fastest but the guys who got on base the most. You also put two all stars together for a good amount of time and it's not common for one player to suffer in on/off as when he's off the court the other all star will be on in a different unit, this is especially true when the other all star is the main ball handler. It was the same with Lebron and Irving, Chris Paul's on/off sig drop when playing with Harden.
Kyrie’s on/off playing with LeBron: +9.2, -0.2, +7.2
LeBron on/off playing with Kyrie: +16.7, +16.5, +17.1
CP3’s on/off playing with Harden: +8.1
How is that in any way comparable to Derozan having a negative +/- every single year on great teams and then continually getting worse in the playoffs each year too?
There is a correlation between multiple star players playing together and on/off, especially on good teams. CP3 for example was in the high teens his last few years in LA than it split more than half playing alongside Harden. Almost always do they have one or the other on the court at once so Harden's play does effect the on/off #rs of Paul along with Houston's depth. The same can be said with Toronto, who also had one of the best benches in the league. They however are more so subseptable if Lowry is out of the game because of not only his talent but the role he plays. Having a bad on/off doesn't mean you don't contribute to wins, there are variables that heavily effect. My guess is DeRozan's on/off stat will climb with the Spurs.
