Doctor MJ wrote:Ambrose wrote:Advanced stats sure love Chris Paul. It's hard to take seriously when it puts him over guys like LeBron, who is simply on another level as a player.
I'll be interested to see discussion on what this stat says about LeBron in the time to come. It feels like a slap in the face that hasn't yet connected.
Now, peak LeBron does quite well in the metric, but over the past 6 years - the stuff with the data actually driving the algorithm - LeBron is not getting rated highly. Why?
My guess is that a lot of this amounts to LeBron and his teams tending to coast in the regular season in more recent years.
Consider '16-17, the year where I felt like LeBron was more unstoppable than in any year of his career. The Cavs only won 51 games that year and had an utterly mediocre SRS. And then they followed it up with their most dominant run through the Eastern playoffs and put up a better fight against the Warriors than anyone else.
This wasn't anything like a 2.87 SRS team, but according to regular season data, it was. Perhaps makes sense then that LeBron doesn't come across as the GOAT there.
That's one thing that's hard to model - but would be vitally important in trying to project playoff performance. The 'give a damn' metric. Most teams and players have a full standard level of ''give a damn' throughout a season.
LeBron clearly operated at less then full 'give a damn' during his last Cleveland run. IMO the rest of the team had a lower intensity because of it as well (following his lead).
Golden State operated at full 'give a damn' during the 2014-5 and 2015-6 seasons but then noticeably slacked off in intensity in 2016-7 and even further the last two years.
Kwahi operated at less then full 'give a damn' last year, though it didn't seem to effect the rest of the Raptors the way that LeBron did in Cleveland.
When players or full teams play at less then full intensity during the regular season it's easy for them to improve for the playoffs (while their regular season stats will be worse then their overall quality).