2022-23 RealGM All-Season Awards - Discussion Thread

[Doctor MJ]

Sometimes we need to give credit to the team who wins instead of looking to justify our former positions on a player/team we don't love.

This, and it's also OK for a lone playoff series to not tell us much.

A playoff series will always be a flawed test of team quality, no matter how much meaning we assign to each one and especially to a string of several series wins or annual losses. This isn't meant to take away anything from the winners, who completed the task in front of them, but only to say that because of the nature of the competition, results will be prone to luck, flukes, streaks, upsets, and other surprises. We can be OK with that and not have to assign deeper meaning than may be justified, even when trends seem to be revealing themselves.

Put another way, to jump into Doctor MJ's Bucks critique, there are at least two ways to look at the Bucks' apparent unfitness for the playoff test: it's their fault, or it's the playoffs' fault. I think it takes a lot of evidence to confidently conclude they are at fault as a matter of characteristic flaw, and I just don't believe one or even several playoff series suffice, especially when we have another sample during which they did solve the test. And, when we're talking about just one season's achievements, I especially have a hard time weighing a few games of stupidly hot shooting over the remainder of the body of work.

I know that I'll always be lower on playoff results than basically everybody else here, and that this is a growing problem for my appreciation of the sport, since it is a strong consensus that the playoffs are what REALLY matter. But I can still hope for honesty about the pluses and minuses of the NBA's format for determining the best team and the drawbacks to forming conclusions about events, even recurring ones, that may not rise to the level of being a meaningful pattern.

So I wanted to emphasize here that it's really worth considering the inherently small sample size of the playoffs, and how problematic it becomes analytically that that small sample is what defines NBA legacy.

I respect a perspective that weighs the playoffs less when evaluating players because of this, but of course the thing is that it's the playoffs that the players actually put in maximum effort and the coaches actually try their best tactical moves, so I have a hard time counting the playoffs less than I do when considering season achievement.

I also think we need to reckon with the role that 7 game series play in all this. In any given game a team can just plain get lucky, but when we see a team just seem comfortable in the flow against a particular opponent over the course of the series and then that disappearing in the next series, only to re-emerge in another series and disappear again in the next, to me this shouldn't be hastily dismissed as "just how variance works".

[Tim Lehrbach]

Sometimes we need to give credit to the team who wins instead of looking to justify our former positions on a player/team we don't love.

This, and it's also OK for a lone playoff series to not tell us much.

A playoff series will always be a flawed test of team quality, no matter how much meaning we assign to each one and especially to a string of several series wins or annual losses. This isn't meant to take away anything from the winners, who completed the task in front of them, but only to say that because of the nature of the competition, results will be prone to luck, flukes, streaks, upsets, and other surprises. We can be OK with that and not have to assign deeper meaning than may be justified, even when trends seem to be revealing themselves.

Put another way, to jump into Doctor MJ's Bucks critique, there are at least two ways to look at the Bucks' apparent unfitness for the playoff test: it's their fault, or it's the playoffs' fault. I think it takes a lot of evidence to confidently conclude they are at fault as a matter of characteristic flaw, and I just don't believe one or even several playoff series suffice, especially when we have another sample during which they did solve the test. And, when we're talking about just one season's achievements, I especially have a hard time weighing a few games of stupidly hot shooting over the remainder of the body of work.

I know that I'll always be lower on playoff results than basically everybody else here, and that this is a growing problem for my appreciation of the sport, since it is a strong consensus that the playoffs are what REALLY matter. But I can still hope for honesty about the pluses and minuses of the NBA's format for determining the best team and the drawbacks to forming conclusions about events, even recurring ones, that may not rise to the level of being a meaningful pattern.

So I wanted to emphasize here that it's really worth considering the inherently small sample size of the playoffs, and how problematic it becomes analytically that that small sample is what defines NBA legacy.

I respect a perspective that weighs the playoffs less when evaluating players because of this, but of course the thing is that it's the playoffs that the players actually put in maximum effort and the coaches actually try their best tactical moves, so I have a hard time counting the playoffs less than I do when considering season achievement.

I also think we need to reckon with the role that 7 game series play in all this. In any given game a team can just plain get lucky, but when we see a team just seem comfortable in the flow against a particular opponent over the course of the series and then that disappearing in the next series, only to re-emerge in another series and disappear again in the next, to me this shouldn't be hastily dismissed as "just how variance works".

1. I recognize I represent an extreme on this, but I just felt compelled to get that perspective on the table given the direction of your exchange about the Bucks.
2. Your response to 70sFan linking the Miami shooting to repeated instances of such shooting against Milwaukee is a valuable point. I don't want to say that playoffs don't matter, I'd just prefer they be counted as the number of games they actually are and be placed in context with larger data sets. I appreciate that you did that in your reply there.

[70sFan]

Okay so bottom line, you're looking to chalk this up to shooting luck, and I'm reluctant to do that. We may not be able to come together on this, but I can understand why a knowledgeable basketball observer would conclude what - I believe - you have.

I'm curious how you see the fact that Miami did this in 2 of their 4 series in these 2023 playoffs though. If something like this truly seem like, oh I don't know, a "one in a thousand" situation, it would be easier for me to chalk it up to luck. Having 2 "one in a thousand" events in 4 tries though? That's tough.

I don't want to come off as if I'm saying there isn't any randomness in play here. Run the Boston-Miami series in 10 universes, maybe Boston wins in 9 of them. The better team doesn't always win, and quite literally if we re-ran these playoffs, I wouldn't favor Miami to get through the Eastern Conference.

But that's different from me treating what happened as a meaningless event. What happened didn't just happen, it's something teams knew could happen, and they plan accordingly, and look to build a team balancing the risks. If teams expected opponents could shoot like this all the time, well then they'd build their own teams looking to take 3-point defense all the more seriously. And this I think leads us to an important general question that's also central to what we're specifically talking about in our example:

Were the Bucks looking to take 3-point defense more seriously than they do, how do we think that would effect Brook's role in their grand scheme?

Perhaps the true answer is something that doesn't reflect negatively on Brook, but I think it's clear why I would be concerned.

The problem is that you can't really stop a team that shoots 45% from three point line on 35 attempts. Not when your offense disappoints. As I said - it wasn't the matter of Heat creating a lot of open threes - they had below average volume in that series and whole playoffs in that regard. No, it was the case of the Heat getting incredibly hot on tough shots and when it happens, you can't do much to stop such offense.

I get that it's tough to pick Brook after such an underwhelming team performance from statistical perspective, but I just don't have any impression that Brook disappointed in the series. I'd argue it was Bud who did the worst job from schematic perspective, but I think we can agree to disagree at this point.

Agree that we can agree to disagree, but I will say that that first line of yours I bolded gets to the heart of the matter.

When you say "can't really stop a team that shoots 45% from three...", I would say that by definition, if they're shooting 45% from three, then you failed to stop them, but that doesn't mean that they couldn't have been made more likely to be stopped.

The question then becomes whether it's complete luck as to whether something like this happens or not.

If I do a search based on your numbers - of the teams who have had the most games allowing 45% from 3 on 35+ 3PA from '18-19 to '22-23 (the Bucks' Bud years) across those regular seasons, here's the leaderboard:

1. Portland 33
(tie) Milwaukee 33
3. Charlotte 32
4. Orlando 31
(tie) New Orleans 31

(If I include the playoffs the Bucks grab the lead completely to themselves, but of course that's not really fair given that Portland, Charlotte, Orlando & New Orleans haven't been good enough to play all that much in the playoffs.)

It's been a known thing for forever that the Bucks' defensive strategy involved them prioritizing the interior over the perimeter, and yeah, there's data that shows the consequence of this. I'll acknowledge that the Bucks looked better on this front this season, and maybe you can argue that makes all of this no longer relevant, but all of this gets into why I'm reluctant to act as if this stuff was just luck in these playoffs.

Was there luck involved? Absolutely.
Do the Bucks beat the Heat more than half the time in normal circumstances? Quite possibly.

But I have issues with treating less-than-majority outcomes as meaningless when it's clear that some teams are more prone to those outcomes than others.

First of all, appreciate the numbers you bring up. I can always count on you

33 games across 5 regular seasons is only about 9% of total games (and that's the highest number in the league). Miami shot 48% on 31.5 attempts in the first 4 games. I understand that the Bucks uses the kind of defensive system that could lead to more wide open threes, but this can't be explained by that. I don't think any team in the league history ever had comparable 4 games stretch of three point shooting and Miami weren't even elite shooting team (neither in RS nor for the rest of the playoffs).

I really understand that the Bucks have defensive limitations and I never tried to say anything otherwise in 2020 when they got upset by the hot (but not ridiculously hot) shooting Miami Heat. This is just absurd though, I doubt the Heat would be able to replicate that against the worst offensive team in the league.