MyUniBroDavis wrote:DraymondGold wrote:Do people have any resilience concerns for Giannis?
in 2019 playoffs: Massive drop in scoring (-2.2 pts/75 drop, -6.8% rTS efficiency drop)
in 2020 playoffs: Drop in scoring (-2.2 pts/75 drop, -1.4% rTS efficiency drop)
in 2021 playoffs: Drop in scoring (-0.5 pts/75 drop, -3.3% rTS efficiency drop)
in 2022 playoffs: Massive drop in scoring (-1.3 pts/75 drop, -6.8% rTS efficiency drop)
Now, this is of course an oversimplification that ignores context. Giannis did have injuries at the end of a few playoff series for example. But it still concerns me that Giannis' postseason scoring consistently declines after his best regular seasons in 2019 and 2020, even if we just look at playoff games where he was healthy. This persisted in the early 2021 playoffs, and even after he supposedly "figured it out" for the last two playoff series, he went right back to dropping in 2022 (and this decline persists even if we account for the opponent's defensive rating).
I worry we're overrating Giannis' offense solely because of a memorable Finals, while forgetting... most of his other playoff performances. He's often had extreme declines against "build a wall" defenses and league-leading defenses. The best counterargument might be something akin to Bird or Curry or LeBron's resilience argument, where we say his scoring declines but he makes up for it in creation / gravity / off-ball play. But I'm not sure the eye test supports that (at least mine doesn't -- though I might have a particular bias against some of the head-scratching decisions he made earlier on... those early shot-clock 3s make me want to pull my hair out
).
And I will say team performance does correlate with this poor (offensive) resilience. Take the 2019 and 2020 regular season: the Bucks had fantastic margin of victory numbers, but they over performed against bad teams and underperformed against good teams (relative to other all-time teams).
Compare this to Duncan, who might be starting from a lower point in regular season offensive value, but he's pretty perfect at least from a resilience standpoint. Thoughts? Perhaps Duncan's resilience advantage isn't enough to make up for the fact that Giannis is just starting from a higher regular season place to begin with?
So giannis’s decline in the 2019 and 2020 playoffs was partially due to a build a wall style defense, but at the same time it’s not necessarily his fault, when youre primarily a slasher most of the time if they’re stunting on drives in a 5 out system it’s it’s not too hard to contest the drive and get back to your man when you kick it out unless you do it really early or all your teammates have an incredibly quick trigger
Post 2020 playoffs they switched their offense to a 4 out 1 in system, to create larger gaps for him to drive and kick out so stunts wouldn’t be as effective, and because of his size they could put jrue as the inside man because a guard helping on a giannis drive doesn’t do anything
2021 as a whole was pretty great I think. He had a poor first round scoring wise against Miami in the sense that he had a bad game 1 and couldn’t make anything from three, But was pretty incredibly outside of that, it’s hard to say it’s indicative when the main reason his TS fell was lower percentages from three and from the line
And I’m 2022 I feel that, that celtics team was hilariously equipped to guard him, especially with Middleton out.
I think we fall into the trap of using a teams relative def rtg to determine how difficult it was for someone to score on them, but for example it was clear that a player like Curry at least in some aspects had much less trouble than giannis because of both matchups and tactical decisions (dropping to stop the Warriors passing game and allowing him to take deep pullup threes, which obviously in hindsight was kinda dumb).
With giannis they weren’t just building a wall but they had a full rotation of utter giannis stoppers, the Celtics genuinely might have more than half of the guys in the league that are capable of guarding him.
That being said while it wasn’t his most effecient series considering the load he carried and the team almost looking like it was built specifically to stop him, I wouldn’t say it was particularly indicative of anything other than a bad matchup, which exists for almost everyone
Of the 6 series they’ve played since, the only series where there is a sense of giannis is struggling to score is the Celtics series, which I feel is pretty fair considering how well equipped they were to stop him.
I think effeciency concerns would be warranted if it was like 2019, where there’s a sense that giannis is struggling to score, which is a bit valid in the 2022 series against the Celtics, this wasn’t really what happened in 2021, which basically is if his effeciency or volume inside the arc went down because that’s the majority of his game
If it’s just him shooting poorly from the ft line or from three, that’s something you can take into account for evaluating that run soecifically but I don’t think it matters in the context of evaluating his play. I don’t have concerns for giannis in the playoffs anymore really, unless He’s facing teams that are really well built to stop him, which the Celtics are probably unique in history in that regard
In other regards, I don’t really think giannis is limited as a playmaker anymore, maybe he doesn’t find the pass as early as lebron but that’s about it, and his off ball play is pretty darn good when they go to it, but it’s obviously not gonna be as effective since turning him into a damion Jones isn’t ideal
