RealGM 2023 Top 100 Project - #23 (Moses Malone)

[Doctor MJ]

But the league boost and Ginobili's "boost" were not the same order of magnitude.

The NBA saw a 7.8% increase in FTA.
The #1 guard free throw getter (Iverson) saw a 6.9% in FTr.
The guard people tend to say benefitted most dramatically from this (Nash) saw his FTr go down.

And Ginobili saw his FTr go up by 54.7%.

Player / 2004 FTr/ 2005 FTr

Manu / .378 / .567
Lebron / .378 / .447
Wade / .391 / .578
Kobe / .452 / .502
Iverson / .404 / .432
Melo / .358 / .466
McGrady / .319 / .336
Arenas / .347 / .420
Ray Allen / .266 / .286
Michael Redd / .306 / .305
Marbury / .315 / .420
Vince Carter / .286 / .299
Maggette / .612 / .666

There are guys who didn't see any change, or much of change, and some guys who saw a lot. 05 and 06 were very specifically years where we saw a lot of reward for aggressive drivers. It's a trend which lines up with the rules changing and extends especially into 06 with someone like Wade in those Finals. How much you want to say this influenced Manu is one thing, but age is not the only reason he set his career-high FTr that specific season and then managed .450+ or better only once more, in 2006.

EDIT: I don't think the rule was ever going to change Nash's draw rate because he wasn't a contact-seeker. He liked to find space, rather, and loved pull-ups and floaters. It afforded him a little more dynamism in his dribble attack, but he wasn't really doing anything in 05 and later than he hadn't already showcased in Dallas, he just had more possessions to do it with and didn't have to share the ball with an iso-heavy primary star (not that I think Dirk held him back or whatever).

In any case, I don't think the league boost vs. Manu's boost matter much. Style of play matters much more so, and he went to the rack aggressively, and often. Dude took over a third of his shots inside 3 feet, so the chances of him drawing were always going to be higher. That's part of why he maintained a high rate throughout his career, even as he developed his J. That Eurostep was a thing of beauty.

So, I'm not saying that the thing you point to doesn't exist. I'm saying that that thing is something that when you look to quantify it league-wide is small potatoes compared to the scale of change we're talking about with Ginobili, and hence it really shouldn't be used as a go-to to try to explain what happened with him.

Conceivably you could argue that Pop & co were so ahead of the game that they totally changed how they used Ginobili to take advantage of the new rules...but that's really not how I've ever seen them talk about it. When I hear them talk about it, they talk of struggling to know what to do with a player who couldn't be treated as an automaton, and then eventually giving up because when he broke their offense, he made it work better.

Turnovers are often bad for rookies so you point in general makes sense, but I don't know if it was really that dramatic in Ginobili's case.

During Ginobili's rookie regular season he had a 17.5 TO%, which went down to 14.3% in the playoffs, and was 14.9% the following regular season. His career average was 14.9%. So to me this is a thing that's largely settled pretty quickly, and it's not even really that dramatic of a difference compared to what we sometimes get as rookies mature.

Yes, but it's still something that affects the idea of them ripping titles the entire time. Same same as the shooting concern below.

t, you said his turnovers were awful as a rookie, which certainly implies that there should be some huge statistic we can identify. I've shown there doesn't seem to be when I look for it.

Re: took him a while to find his jumper. It's certainly true that Ginobili became a better long distance shooter years into his career, but there we're talking about '07-08 rather than '04-05. Certainly you can argue that '07-08 represents something more like his true peak, but in terms of his total shooting efficiency, it's '04-05 where he truly arrives. Further I'd argue that when you're talking about a guy peaking as a long distance shooter at age 30 (which he was in '07-08), you're probably talking about a guy who is starting to need to rely more on shooting due to his age.

That would make more sense to discuss in terms of proportion of shots than just efficiency. You see him flirting with 80% from the line for his first few years, dipping into the high 70s, and then you see as a 29 year-old, he begins a stretch from 07-12 where he shoots 86.7%, peaking at 88.4%. Then a year just below 80%, and then back to 85.1%. There were some changes there, and in his jumper, and in his confidence in its usage. You can argue that necessity dictated that, but it's still a change in his skill set and player profile that is of relevance across the passage of his time in the league, which was my point.

My point is that it doesn't make sense to talk as if it took a half decade for Ginobili to prime as a scorer due to shooting when he quite clearly primed by efficiency much earlier than that.

Re: took while to grow consistent in finishing in close. I mean, his rookie season is arguably his best season on this front on a per minute basis. Very high % of his shots from 0-3 feet, and very FG% on those shots.

You can argue that. You can also look at 69 games and 5 starts and wonder how both of those things affected the defensive attention he saw as a rookie while trying to finish, of course. There is room for both of these things to be true, but you can also see a rising trend in his finishing ability over the years that isn't all era-related.

We can certainly have the discussion about how Ginobili being positioned as a 6th man affected his stats, but this doesn't change the fact that you're making bold qualitative statements that I can't seem to find any real statistical basis for. Not saying that definitively means it doesn't exist, only that it really should exist if the thing in question is having a large effect.

I would not say his February TS% is glaringly higher than all that came before. His March TS% is much higher...but then his April goes back down.

I'm not saying that it's not possible that moving Ginobili to the bench helped on this front, but I think the trends are coarse.

Rookie February, no, but the last 25 games of the season (March and April), he was north of 61% TS while not starting, which fits the general trend that year of his efficiency as a reserve versus as a starter. The trend repeats in 2004, though there is a smaller gap. Thereafter, of course, he became a starter playing controlled minutes.

We were talking about '03-04 here.

Further, I think the real question if he gets more efficient from the bench is "Why?". A natural hypothesis is that he benefitted from playing against weaker competition, but a change in role around teammates might be the bigger thing.

I'm of the opinion that both were relevant.

I'd agree, but the more I've looked into the former, the harder I've found it to try to use it to explain his +/- impact.

Fundamentally I think the big thing is this: If a guy's apparent impact is getting inflated because his coach is cherry-picking the competition he goes again, we should expect the bubble to deflate if the player plays bigger minutes deep into the playoffs.

This is something that absolutely can happen to some players, it's just a question of whether it's happening in any particular case. In the case of Ginobili, we seem to see the opposite.

Thing is, if it's about "load management and physical health" without evidence of fatigue, I think that often amounts to guesswork. It's different of course if there's a specific medical concern that's actively being monitored, but if you're just talking about limiting how much you use a guy to maximize the chance he'll be healthy in the playoffs, there's no way to know what the right answer for that is.

The fact that Pop was proactive on this and others have followed suit tells us that he understood something broadly that others did not, but that doesn't mean he was adept at evaluating this on a case-by-case basis. I also think the fact that the player he seemed to load manage the most is also the player he did not know what to do with is pretty suspicious.

Sure, you can look at it that way. To me, I always figured Pop saw him ping-ponging all over the place and picking up little injuries, so he thought to keep him healthy by shortening his minutes. We're speaking of a player who managed 80 games once in 16 seasons and played less than 70 games in 9 different seasons. Health was an issue for him over the years.

You're certainly right that health was an issue for Ginobili and I don't mean to imply otherwise.

Let me make 3 statements of caution that I believe wise:

1. We should not assume that a coach from that time period understood the potential in an offense that played Manu-style when he decided to relegate Manu to 6th man.
2. We should not assume that a 6th man's +/- is inflated, simply because it looks too good for a guy who is "just a 6th man".
3. We should not assume a 6th man couldn't play more minutes than he did.

Of the three points, (3) is the one I'm least focused on particularly here in this project. I'm focused on what he did rather than what he might have done.

But I'd argue that we all have a baked in bias to fall prey to all 3 of these assumption simply because we formed our initial impression either a) back in the day - in the case of you and me - before paradigms shifted, or b) on the backs of contemporary thought.

[tsherkin]

So, I'm not saying that the thing you point to doesn't exist. I'm saying that that thing is something that when you look to quantify it league-wide is small potatoes compared to the scale of change we're talking about with Ginobili, and hence it really shouldn't be used as a go-to to try to explain what happened with him.

Conceivably you could argue that Pop & co were so ahead of the game that they totally changed how they used Ginobili to take advantage of the new rules...but that's really not how I've ever seen them talk about it. When I hear them talk about it, they talk of struggling to know what to do with a player who couldn't be treated as an automaton, and then eventually giving up because when he broke their offense, he made it work better.

I don't think they changed anything. I think the rule changes suited him and he did very well with them for 2 years before the refs started to settle down with blowing the whistle on incidental contact. I don't think it's the only thing that was in-play there, but the amount of discussion we've now devoted to minimizing the impact is not something I agree with at all. It very much seemed to impact him in games I watched at the time, and statistically in retrospect. It would be fairly shocking to me if one could prove that it didn't have a meaningful impact on his draw rate, given that we're discussing the refs rewarding guys going to the hoop and over-calling hand checking and other physical contact for 2 years, as they did.

t, you said his turnovers were awful as a rookie, which certainly implies that there should be some huge statistic we can identify. I've shown there doesn't seem to be when I look for it.

They were, in the RS. TOV% captures it nicely enough. He's a career 14.9% TOV guy, which isn't amazing, and was at 17.5% as a rook. He's a 15.4% TOV guy in the playoffs, though as you noted, in 03, he improved from RS to PS in that regard. 2012 and later, of course, he worsened and had 3 postseasons at 19.4% or worse.

My point is that it doesn't make sense to talk as if it took a half decade for Ginobili to prime as a scorer due to shooting when he quite clearly primed by efficiency much earlier than that.

That's your injection, not my point. I was noting his development as a shooter later into his career as an example of a skill arc which unfolded over his time in the league, not suggesting he wasn't very good at scoring prior to that. It's a reasonably common development pathway as athleticism declines, as you've already noted yourself.

We can certainly have the discussion about how Ginobili being positioned as a 6th man affected his stats, but this doesn't change the fact that you're making bold qualitative statements that I can't seem to find any real statistical basis for. Not saying that definitively means it doesn't exist, only that it really should exist if the thing in question is having a large effect.

I don't think anything I've said about him is especially bold. I've pointed to material statistics for each of the things I've said.

We were talking about '03-04 here.

Again, in 04 he had a big March. He dipped after, of course, but you are correct: his February TS% when he wasn't starting was similar to his average as a starter prior to that. He hit a 3pt streak in March in particular, which is what I suspect drove that particular change. He was at 55.3% TS as a reserve that season, 52.1% as a starter, though, so the split difference is still there, favoring him in a reserve role.

Fundamentally I think the big thing is this: If a guy's apparent impact is getting inflated because his coach is cherry-picking the competition he goes again, we should expect the bubble to deflate if the player plays bigger minutes deep into the playoffs.

This is something that absolutely can happen to some players, it's just a question of whether it's happening in any particular case. In the case of Ginobili, we seem to see the opposite.4

I think the playoffs are a short enough sample that this isn't applicable in quite the same way as discussing an 82-game season (or, in his case, an average 66-game season.

1. We should not assume that a coach from that time period understood the potential in an offense that played Manu-style when he decided to relegate Manu to 6th man.

That's fair, yes.

2. We should not assume that a 6th man's +/- is inflated, simply because it looks too good for a guy who is "just a 6th man".

I don't consider anything about Manu "inflated," I just think there's influence playing with the bench unit. He filled his role very well. And then he showed us that he could dial it up with the starters in the playoffs. He was a very skillful player.

3. We should not assume a 6th man couldn't play more minutes than he did.

I don't think we should assume that he could either, though. Particularly since he had injury issues his whole career. I tend not to credit people with things they've not actually done, over which we seem to align.

But I'd argue that we all have a baked in bias to fall prey to all 3 of these assumption simply because we formed our initial impression either a) back in the day - in the case of you and me - before paradigms shifted, or b) on the backs of contemporary thought.

I don't believe Pops did anything with legendary foresight with Manu. I think he put him on the bench because that worked well, and because it probably made sense to him for health management and because maybe he wanted some spark when Duncan was out, a bridge for when the whole starter unit wasn't on.

2005 struck, Manu was a starter, he enjoyed (among other things) a boost from the refs. He was in his 3rd year in the NBA and had a great skill set, a great team to work with. Tim was starting to fade a little, Pops was managing his load. 05 was the first year Duncan played less than 36 mpg and the team offense in 01 and 02 with him as a 25 ppg scorer wasn't really there anymore. So Manu nicely filled a gap. They flirted with him in and out of the starting lineup for years after that.

2006, they had a team offense nearly as good as 05, and that was with Manu starting 56 games and only playing 65. And with Duncan scoring under 20 ppg for the first time in his career. There is also the rise of Tony Parker to consider. 06 was his first AS season, and the beginning of him scoring efficiently, which helped cover when Manu was out, made up for the drop in Tim's volume and so forth.

07 was their best team offense to date at 109.2 ORTG. Manu played 75 games and started 36. He was again more efficient as a reserve (63.2% TS) than as a starter (58.5%). Timmy's last gasp as a 20 ppg guy and the best FG% of his career. 08, back to that 107 ish range from 05 and 06. Manu started 23 games, played 74. 2009, Manu missed half the season, starting 7 out of the 44 games he played. I could go on, but it'll be easier to visualize in chart form.

A quick chart:

Manu GP, Manu Starts, Relative team ORTG

03: 69, 5, +2.0
04: 77, 38, -0.7
05: 74, 74, +1.4
06: 65, 56, +1.1
07: 75, 36, +2.7
08: 74, 23, -0.3
09: 44, 7, +0.2
10: 75, 21, +2.4
11: 80, 79, +4.5
12: 34, 7, +6.3
13: 60, 0, +2.4
14: 68, 3, +3.8
15: 70, 0, +2.9
16: 58, 0, +3.9
17: 69, 0, +2.3
18: 65, 0, -0.7

So 05 wasn't really a banner year for the Spurs' team offense. It was all right, of course, and Manu individually played well, but they'd do better later. Much better, in fact, in several seasons where he didn't start at all and played less. The big year for Manu, of course, is the lockout year of 2012, which was only 66 games long, and he still only played half. That was, by far, the best relative offensive performance for the team, though their raw ORTG had been higher the year before when Manu started the whole season and they also did quite well. Rookie Kawhi, they had Matt Bonner doing his Red Rocket routine, 41 games of Richard Jefferson, 58 from Duncan doing the 15/9 thing, Parker rocking out. Even Manu grades out pretty well in his limited time.

There was an article from 2014 which has Pops reflecting on this whole process, and on leaving Manu to be Manu.

"As time went along I learned to not speak as something was contested or a shot was contested or a defensive play he wanted to make to get a steal or whatever, because he does things that win games. It taught me to watch a little bit more and not be so micro-management-like."

Manu had this to say:

"I think it was a great accomplishment. Not only me, I think Tony also made him change or see things in a different way," Ginobili said. "The truth is that he thought that was the way to go to make us better. It's not that I talked him into it. He started to see that maybe we were going to be more successful and less predictable playing a different way."[/quote

Parker chimed in:

"Pop had a way of coaching and Manu came and he was a little bit like a free bird, a little bit like a good (kind of) crazy, just making stuff happen," Parker said. "Pop was smart enough to adjust and Manu understood what Pop wanted, and they found a happy middle."

This all very much neatly lines up with the idea that Pops didn't have a full grip on what to do with Manu early on and learned to let him play, for sure.

Ginobili had to compromise as well, accepting a role as a sixth man over the more glamorous spot in the starting lineup because Popovich preferred his aggressiveness and playmaking to help the second unit.

And that did seem to work out. Not having him as a starter, the Spurs developed their offense as they moved away from their defensive dynasty. We can see an intentional choice to have Manu on the bench. We can see some seasons where he started, and they still did pretty well, though he only played 30+ mpg on a season twice in his career, peaking at 31.1.

You can see the rising trend of Pops' trust in Manu illustrated in his USG% rate, I think. It rises steadily, peaks in 08, hovers for a few years, then slowly declines a bit as he aged. Same sort of deal in the playoffs.

With respect to what you're saying about 05, he didn't really replicate that in other years, most especially the postseason stuff. But he was amazing that year. He started about 2/3s of the postseason. 1/5 games versus the Nuggets, 2/6 games vs Seattle, all 5 games against the Suns (and logged 36.5 mpg against them, at that), and then all 7 against Detroit, and again logged 36 mpg. Absurdly on fire from 3 that whole postseason, too.



Just some food for thought. We agree that Manu was awesome. We agree that it took some time for Pops to trust him fully. We can see there's a trend of increasing usage, though the connection between San Antonio's best offenses and Manu's performance isn't as direct as it has been represented. Their roster changed a lot and the SAS offensive philosophy did alter over the years, and of course roster change, role alterations, etc, etc. But he was clearly a big part of it.

[Doctor MJ]

I don't think they changed anything. I think the rule changes suited him and he did very well with them for 2 years before the refs started to settle down with blowing the whistle on incidental contact. I don't think it's the only thing that was in-play there, but the amount of discussion we've now devoted to minimizing the impact is not something I agree with at all. It very much seemed to impact him in games I watched at the time, and statistically in retrospect. It would be fairly shocking to me if one could prove that it didn't have a meaningful impact on his draw rate, given that we're discussing the refs rewarding guys going to the hoop and over-calling hand checking and other physical contact for 2 years, as they did.

Simply put: A league-wide shift measurable to be a relatively small number can't be expected to be the explanation for why a particular player some a drastically higher shift unless you can something specific for why that player benefitted from the general shift drastically more than other players.

I can agree with you that the league-wide trend was something real, but in a comparison between players within the same league, that's something we normalize for and the outliers who remain require a different explanation.

t, you said his turnovers were awful as a rookie, which certainly implies that there should be some huge statistic we can identify. I've shown there doesn't seem to be when I look for it.

They were, in the RS. TOV% captures it nicely enough. He's a career 14.9% TOV guy, which isn't amazing, and was at 17.5% as a rook. He's a 15.4% TOV guy in the playoffs, though as you noted, in 03, he improved from RS to PS in that regard. 2012 and later, of course, he worsened and had 3 postseasons at 19.4% or worse.

Okay, I'm going to say it's best if we agree to disagree on the significance of that stat to some degree, because I'm losing the thread as to why I was focusing on this particular point.

My bold statement was about the possibility of the Spurs potentially winning 5 titles in a row instead of 3 if they gave Ginobili more run, and since they won in his rookie season, it's a bit moot to dwell on that season. I think it's reasonable to argue that if they made Ginobili the fulcrum of the offense from the jump that they'd have been worse in '02-03, that that may have kept them from winning a title, and I'm inclined to agree that the '02-03 season as it was isn't something the Spurs would look back and wonder what went wrong...because come June it all went right.

My statement was more focused on considering the subsequent years, particularly when their offense failed them.

Let's consider that the in the 2004 playoffs, the Spurs had an ORtg of 96.2 while the Timberwolves would next hit 104.8. Can we agree that the Spur offense was a problem in that series? Even if we can't agree that Ginobili was a ready-made solution, the Spur offense built around post-up was ineffective against that Laker team.

Given that we now know that such post-up offenses are basically doomed to be ineffective compared to pace & space teams, is it not reasonable to wonder how the Spurs would have done had they embraced such an approach instead?

My point is that it doesn't make sense to talk as if it took a half decade for Ginobili to prime as a scorer due to shooting when he quite clearly primed by efficiency much earlier than that.

That's your injection, not my point. I was noting his development as a shooter later into his career as an example of a skill arc which unfolded over his time in the league, not suggesting he wasn't very good at scoring prior to that. It's a reasonably common development pathway as athleticism declines, as you've already noted yourself.

Sure, but I set the original context focusing on earlier years and you pushed back bringing up later years. If you're not trying to say he was better at scoring in his later years when you bring up skills from those later years, what's the relevance?

We can certainly have the discussion about how Ginobili being positioned as a 6th man affected his stats, but this doesn't change the fact that you're making bold qualitative statements that I can't seem to find any real statistical basis for. Not saying that definitively means it doesn't exist, only that it really should exist if the thing in question is having a large effect.

I don't think anything I've said about him is especially bold. I've pointed to material statistics for each of the things I've said.

One of those points was the turnovers which I'm looking to agree-to-disagree on their significance, so I'm not going to push that any further. I'll just say that I may be misjudging their significance.

The other one on my mind pertained to the idea that Ginobili's massive increase in FTr was caused by officiating.

We were talking about '03-04 here.

Again, in 04 he had a big March. He dipped after, of course, but you are correct: his February TS% when he wasn't starting was similar to his average as a starter prior to that. He hit a 3pt streak in March in particular, which is what I suspect drove that particular change. He was at 55.3% TS as a reserve that season, 52.1% as a starter, though, so the split difference is still there, favoring him in a reserve role.

Hmm, alright.

Fundamentally I think the big thing is this: If a guy's apparent impact is getting inflated because his coach is cherry-picking the competition he goes again, we should expect the bubble to deflate if the player plays bigger minutes deep into the playoffs.

This is something that absolutely can happen to some players, it's just a question of whether it's happening in any particular case. In the case of Ginobili, we seem to see the opposite.4

I think the playoffs are a short enough sample that this isn't applicable in quite the same way as discussing an 82-game season (or, in his case, an average 66-game season.

We're not talking about a single year trend here. This is a career-long pattern.

1. We should not assume that a coach from that time period understood the potential in an offense that played Manu-style when he decided to relegate Manu to 6th man.

That's fair, yes.

Awesome!

2. We should not assume that a 6th man's +/- is inflated, simply because it looks too good for a guy who is "just a 6th man".

I don't consider anything about Manu "inflated," I just think there's influence playing with the bench unit. He filled his role very well. And then he showed us that he could dial it up with the starters in the playoffs. He was a very skillful player.

Hmm, if you wouldn't characterize it as "inflated", how would you describe the influence?

3. We should not assume a 6th man couldn't play more minutes than he did.

I don't think we should assume that he could either, though. Particularly since he had injury issues his whole career. I tend not to credit people with things they've not actually done, over which we seem to align.

Not saying assumption should be made in the positive direction here. I what I say because people have long talked as if Ginobili's limited minutes were an inevitable thing, and I think were at least partially due Pop choosing to put Ginobili in a 6th man role, which was more about how he wanted to structure his team's minutes so that most of them would run a post-up volume scoring scheme than it was about how many minutes he thought Ginobili could handle playing.

But I'd argue that we all have a baked in bias to fall prey to all 3 of these assumption simply because we formed our initial impression either a) back in the day - in the case of you and me - before paradigms shifted, or b) on the backs of contemporary thought.

I don't believe Pops did anything with legendary foresight with Manu. I think he put him on the bench because that worked well, and because it probably made sense to him for health management and because maybe he wanted some spark when Duncan was out, a bridge for when the whole starter unit wasn't on.

2005 struck, Manu was a starter, he enjoyed (among other things) a boost from the refs. He was in his 3rd year in the NBA and had a great skill set, a great team to work with. Tim was starting to fade a little, Pops was managing his load. 05 was the first year Duncan played less than 36 mpg and the team offense in 01 and 02 with him as a 25 ppg scorer wasn't really there anymore. So Manu nicely filled a gap. They flirted with him in and out of the starting lineup for years after that.

2006, they had a team offense nearly as good as 05, and that was with Manu starting 56 games and only playing 65. And with Duncan scoring under 20 ppg for the first time in his career. There is also the rise of Tony Parker to consider. 06 was his first AS season, and the beginning of him scoring efficiently, which helped cover when Manu was out, made up for the drop in Tim's volume and so forth.

07 was their best team offense to date at 109.2 ORTG. Manu played 75 games and started 36. He was again more efficient as a reserve (63.2% TS) than as a starter (58.5%). Timmy's last gasp as a 20 ppg guy and the best FG% of his career. 08, back to that 107 ish range from 05 and 06. Manu started 23 games, played 74. 2009, Manu missed half the season, starting 7 out of the 44 games he played. I could go on, but it'll be easier to visualize in chart form.

A quick chart:

Manu GP, Manu Starts, Relative team ORTG

03: 69, 5, +2.0
04: 77, 38, -0.7
05: 74, 74, +1.4
06: 65, 56, +1.1
07: 75, 36, +2.7
08: 74, 23, -0.3
09: 44, 7, +0.2
10: 75, 21, +2.4
11: 80, 79, +4.5
12: 34, 7, +6.3
13: 60, 0, +2.4
14: 68, 3, +3.8
15: 70, 0, +2.9
16: 58, 0, +3.9
17: 69, 0, +2.3
18: 65, 0, -0.7

So 05 wasn't really a banner year for the Spurs' team offense. It was all right, of course, and Manu individually played well, but they'd do better later. Much better, in fact, in several seasons where he didn't start at all and played less. The big year for Manu, of course, is the lockout year of 2012, which was only 66 games long, and he still only played half. That was, by far, the best relative offensive performance for the team, though their raw ORTG had been higher the year before when Manu started the whole season and they also did quite well. Rookie Kawhi, they had Matt Bonner doing his Red Rocket routine, 41 games of Richard Jefferson, 58 from Duncan doing the 15/9 thing, Parker rocking out. Even Manu grades out pretty well in his limited time.

There was an article from 2014 which has Pops reflecting on this whole process, and on leaving Manu to be Manu.

"As time went along I learned to not speak as something was contested or a shot was contested or a defensive play he wanted to make to get a steal or whatever, because he does things that win games. It taught me to watch a little bit more and not be so micro-management-like."

Manu had this to say:

"I think it was a great accomplishment. Not only me, I think Tony also made him change or see things in a different way," Ginobili said. "The truth is that he thought that was the way to go to make us better. It's not that I talked him into it. He started to see that maybe we were going to be more successful and less predictable playing a different way."[/quote

Parker chimed in:

"Pop had a way of coaching and Manu came and he was a little bit like a free bird, a little bit like a good (kind of) crazy, just making stuff happen," Parker said. "Pop was smart enough to adjust and Manu understood what Pop wanted, and they found a happy middle."

This all very much neatly lines up with the idea that Pops didn't have a full grip on what to do with Manu early on and learned to let him play, for sure.

Ginobili had to compromise as well, accepting a role as a sixth man over the more glamorous spot in the starting lineup because Popovich preferred his aggressiveness and playmaking to help the second unit.

And that did seem to work out. Not having him as a starter, the Spurs developed their offense as they moved away from their defensive dynasty. We can see an intentional choice to have Manu on the bench. We can see some seasons where he started, and they still did pretty well, though he only played 30+ mpg on a season twice in his career, peaking at 31.1.

You can see the rising trend of Pops' trust in Manu illustrated in his USG% rate, I think. It rises steadily, peaks in 08, hovers for a few years, then slowly declines a bit as he aged. Same sort of deal in the playoffs.

A ton there about I struggled to find an intermediate place to respond.

One key point you make is that the Spurs worked better with Ginobili coming off the bench. I'm not necessarily opposed to that as a premise...but of course, in '04-05 Ginobili which you allude below, Ginobili was mostly a starter. I'm willing to accept the premise, but I'm not comfortable drawing a definitive distinction.

I would also note that if what we're talking about has more to do with Ginobili's role when he's out there than the quality of his competition, then what that would mean is that Ginobilii's more effective as a free lancer than he is a cog to fit around a post-scorer...which I already think is true.

Re: '05 not a banner year for Spur offense, '12 best relative year. Well first let's be clear that this pertains to something that's a big deal to me:

Back when Duncan was an MVP candidate, I think most everyone expected the Spur offense to get worse as he aged with the same core in place. An intrepid few might have thought that may have thought that if Parker or Ginobili emerged as classic perimeter superstars the offense might be able to surpass the ORtg of the halcyon Duncan era.

Instead what we saw is the Spur offense getting stronger and stronger with Duncan taking a backseat despite neither Parker nor Ginobili emerging in this way. In a nutshell, I'd say it boils down to the earlier strategy just be sub-optimal to the new one. And if we can acknowledge the entire model in Pop's head built around post-scoring at volume was sub-optimal, it stands to reason the team could have been even better with a more optimal approach.

I think many would agree with the general premise but would insist that the Spurs needed players better than young Ginobili/Parker in order to make that actually a better approach than what they did. And there I'd say that they may be right...but I think many underestimate how much drastically better modern offensive strategy is compared to the grindhouse era of the late '90s-00s.

With respect to what you're saying about 05, he didn't really replicate that in other years, most especially the postseason stuff. But he was amazing that year. He started about 2/3s of the postseason. 1/5 games versus the Nuggets, 2/6 games vs Seattle, all 5 games against the Suns (and logged 36.5 mpg against them, at that), and then all 7 against Detroit, and again logged 36 mpg. Absurdly on fire from 3 that whole postseason, too.

Just some food for thought. We agree that Manu was awesome. We agree that it took some time for Pops to trust him fully. We can see there's a trend of increasing usage, though the connection between San Antonio's best offenses and Manu's performance isn't as direct as it has been represented. Their roster changed a lot and the SAS offensive philosophy did alter over the years, and of course roster change, role alterations, etc, etc. But he was clearly a big part of it.

Ah, yes, it definitely makes sense to note that Ginobili's expectations were at their highest after the 2005 playoffs...and he didn't meet those reputations afterward. If you had told people at that moment that Ginobili would emerge as a perennial MVP candidate in the years to come, they'd have believed you.

That's the watershed. From that point onward there was a general feeling of disappointment with Ginobili not becoming "more" like the true greats do.

And what I'm looking to put forward at this time is not that people were entirely unfounded in their conclusions, but that the baseline we had for how good we thought Ginobili was, was dramatically off, when I say "we", I mean basically everyone involved in basketball...including Pop and rest of the Spurs.

My favorite quote on the matter comes from Robert Horry:

Let me just say this: You got yours because, if Manu Ginobili would have did the things he was supposed to do, I would have had like 10 championships

I don't think Horry literally believes his statement...but I do believe that he got frustrated with Ginobili's improvisation and believed it hurt the team. And while we now know that he was as wrong as wrong could possibly be about this, I believe that that feeling held Pop back.

I'll end by going more broadly on the relationships between improvisation and teammate perception. I think that it's natural for teammates to resent teammates who go against the coach's scheme. I think they generally take it best when that player is the Franchise and in such cases they often will swallow that resentment like a submissive dog tucks its tail, but there's resentment there whenever they feel like there's an actual double standard.

I think many guys who are improvisation-oriented struggle to obtain the kind of primacy their talent warrants and requires to reach ceiling. I think many coaches would prefer to have zero of these guys, and what NBA coaches are used to is making it work with the expectation that the Stars can do what they want, because that's the job.

This then gets into the study of players who don't begin as proto-star prospects but are eventually allowed to become the fulcrum of the offense, on teams that have great offensive and/or overall success. I believe every single one is an amazing story worth telling.

[tsherkin]

Simply put: A league-wide shift measurable to be a relatively small number can't be expected to be the explanation for why a particular player some a drastically higher shift unless you can something specific for why that player benefitted from the general shift drastically more than other players.

I can agree with you that the league-wide trend was something real, but in a comparison between players within the same league, that's something we normalize for and the outliers who remain require a different explanation.

We can agree to disagree on that. The two years where he had his highest FTr by far are the two years where that was a notable thing in officiating for the league after some changes. You can dismiss it as you like, and I don't think it is the entire explanation, but I hold that it was as prominent element.

Okay, I'm going to say it's best if we agree to disagree on the significance of that stat to some degree, because I'm losing the thread as to why I was focusing on this particular point.

That's fine. He was a wild player adjusting to a new league. It isn't surprising that he had some turnover issues. He continued to have turnover issues his whole career, they simply became tempered enough that he was able to be a winning player.

My bold statement was about the possibility of the Spurs potentially winning 5 titles in a row instead of 3 if they gave Ginobili more run, and since they won in his rookie season, it's a bit moot to dwell on that season. I think it's reasonable to argue that if they made Ginobili the fulcrum of the offense from the jump that they'd have been worse in '02-03, that that may have kept them from winning a title, and I'm inclined to agree that the '02-03 season as it was isn't something the Spurs would look back and wonder what went wrong...because come June it all went right.

With you there. That was something of a transition period for them. They'd been leaning on Timmy and post offense for so long that making the move to a more perimeter-oriented game didn't come easy. And Pops didn't immediately have trust in Manu, and Parker took a while to get going as well.

My statement was more focused on considering the subsequent years, particularly when their offense failed them.

Let's consider that the in the 2004 playoffs, the Spurs had an ORtg of 96.2 while the Timberwolves would next hit 104.8. Can we agree that the Spur offense was a problem in that series? Even if we can't agree that Ginobili was a ready-made solution, the Spur offense built around post-up was ineffective against that Laker team.

Mmmm, 96.2? They had the second-highest ORTG in the 2004 playoffs, at 102.4. The Wolves were 3rd at 101.9.

They smashed the Grizz at 113.5 ORTG and Duncan walked right through them like they were a joke.

Oh, I see. You mean they had 96.2 versus the Lakers specifically. Yes, Duncan was considerably less effective against LA. Malone did a pretty good job on him, as he was wont to do if you let him be a straight-up post defender against a guy who didn't have elite athleticism. The Lakers also back-end swept the Spurs.

Given that we now know that such post-up offenses are basically doomed to be ineffective compared to pace & space teams, is it not reasonable to wonder how the Spurs would have done had they embraced such an approach instead?

I think it would have been better than leaning on Parker in that series, yes, because he played like dogcrap against the Lakers. I don't know that it would have made a difference in the series outcome, though, and I don't know if they'd have been able to beat the T-Wolves that year either, even if you replicate the Cassell injury in a theoretical San Antonio series.

Remember, the Spurs struggled because they weren't able to get to the line and because Parker was a 42% TS scorer as their second-leading scorer. Duncan's efficiency was down, and they were facing a team with a lot of weapons. Mismatched as the Payton/Malone/Kobe/Shaq Lakers were, they were still formidable. Kobe scored at efficiency comparable to Duncan in that series. Shaq drove them, while Malone and Payton struggled badly on offense. They'd have needed a fair bit from Manu for him to make a big difference, more than he generally provided in the postseason for the Spurs even later on when Pops took the clamps off.

Sure, but I set the original context focusing on earlier years and you pushed back bringing up later years. If you're not trying to say he was better at scoring in his later years when you bring up skills from those later years, what's the relevance?

You were trying to describe him as ready to go from the early stages. I was showing that he did change and grow over time, particularly by the time he was exerting his greatest impact on San Antonio's offense.

The other one on my mind pertained to the idea that Ginobili's massive increase in FTr was caused by officiating.

That isn't a bold statement. And the turnover thing isn't a main feature of this discussion, just a sidebar.

We're not talking about a single year trend here. This is a career-long pattern.

The trend of him being more efficient as a reserve than a starter? Yes. The trend of the team's offense clicking at its highest levels with him on the bench? Also yeah.

Hmm, if you wouldn't characterize it as "inflated", how would you describe the influence?

"Inflated" has a negative connotation, which is why I don't like that word for Manu. He was a skilled guy. It makes sense that he'd be more efficient in that role. Minutes-limited, maximizing energy, often facing non-starting rotations, etc.

Not saying assumption should be made in the positive direction here. I what I say because people have long talked as if Ginobili's limited minutes were an inevitable thing, and I think were at least partially due Pop choosing to put Ginobili in a 6th man role, which was more about how he wanted to structure his team's minutes so that most of them would run a post-up volume scoring scheme than it was about how many minutes he thought Ginobili could handle playing.

Sure. I don't think it's relevant because he didn't play bigger minutes, so that's a what-if which never happened and it shouldn't really impact his evaluation as a player. It's pretty well-documented that Pops preferred Manu off the bench, and that's also fine. It is also clear that San Antonio's offense evolved and improved once they got Parker going and they moved away from volume scoring from Tim on the block, for obvious reasons.

One key point you make is that the Spurs worked better with Ginobili coming off the bench. I'm not necessarily opposed to that as a premise...but of course, in '04-05 Ginobili which you allude below, Ginobili was mostly a starter. I'm willing to accept the premise, but I'm not comfortable drawing a definitive distinction.

Key distinction. I said that they had their best team ORTGs and relative ORTGS in seasons with him coming off the bench, but that they also did quite well when he started. I think they'd have done well regardless because they had good talent to work with.

I would also note that if what we're talking about has more to do with Ginobili's role when he's out there than the quality of his competition, then what that would mean is that Ginobilii's more effective as a free lancer than he is a cog to fit around a post-scorer...which I already think is true.

Yes, we agree with Pops that letting Manu be Manu is best for the team, heh. It's clear that it took a while for Pops to be comfortable doing that, but when he got there, it worked out well for the team. I agree with you that it's likely that the Spurs would have been better offensively if they'd done that earlier. I just don't think it would have led to as many titles as you described, that's all.

Re: '05 not a banner year for Spur offense, '12 best relative year. Well first let's be clear that this pertains to something that's a big deal to me:

...

Instead what we saw is the Spur offense getting stronger and stronger with Duncan taking a backseat despite neither Parker nor Ginobili emerging in this way. In a nutshell, I'd say it boils down to the earlier strategy just be sub-optimal to the new one. And if we can acknowledge the entire model in Pop's head built around post-scoring at volume was sub-optimal, it stands to reason the team could have been even better with a more optimal approach.

Yes, it was a surprise that the Spurs offense got stronger as they used Duncan less. We didn't have a lot of amazing access to PPP data by possession type and all that sort of thing, so it wasn't immediately clear at the time why not going to the efficient volume guy who could pass well enough wasn't the right move.

I think many would agree with the general premise but would insist that the Spurs needed players better than young Ginobili/Parker in order to make that actually a better approach than what they did. And there I'd say that they may be right...but I think many underestimate how much drastically better modern offensive strategy is compared to the grindhouse era of the late '90s-00s.

I'm with you. I don't see the salience to my specific remarks, but it was a counterintuitive strategy that paid off quite well, I agree. I think it is very visible how much more advanced modern offense is compared to that era and before, though. The PnR usage alone showcases that. In the 90s and early 2000s, Utah's approach to the game was still relatively new and not predominant, after all. Oooh, Pick and Rolls. Oooh, big men shooting Js. Horace Grant was a spacing big in the 90s. Robert Horry was some wild stuff, opening up the interior for Hakeem and for Shaq. Dirk was something else entirely. KG, mmmm, what's he doing? Why doesn't he post more? Lots of that kind of talk going around. Flipping a decades-old paradigm on its head and going outside in was definitely not the first thought at the time for most teams.

Ah, yes, it definitely makes sense to note that Ginobili's expectations were at their highest after the 2005 playoffs...and he didn't meet those reputations afterward. If you had told people at that moment that Ginobili would emerge as a perennial MVP candidate in the years to come, they'd have believed you.

That's the watershed. From that point onward there was a general feeling of disappointment with Ginobili not becoming "more" like the true greats do.

I guess? That wasn't really where my head was at on Manu as I watched him in my early 20s, but I can see how others might have reached there, hoping for him to explode into a big-minutes volume star or somesuch. But I suspect by that point, Pops had a better handle on how he wanted to use Manu and it worked out very well for the Spurs.

I don't think Horry literally believes his statement...but I do believe that he got frustrated with Ginobili's improvisation and believed it hurt the team. And while we now know that he was as wrong as wrong could possibly be about this, I believe that that feeling held Pop back.

I think it is clear from his own statements and from those of the other guys on the roster that it took a while for Pops to get comfortable with Manu's risk-taking and improvisation, for sure. That is basically beyond contest at this stage, given quotes from all involved.

I'll end by going more broadly on the relationships between improvisation and teammate perception. I think that it's natural for teammates to resent teammates who go against the coach's scheme. I think they generally take it best when that player is the Franchise and in such cases they often will swallow that resentment like a submissive dog tucks its tail, but there's resentment there whenever they feel like there's an actual double standard.

I think many guys who are improvisation-oriented struggle to obtain the kind of primacy their talent warrants and requires to reach ceiling. I think many coaches would prefer to have zero of these guys, and what NBA coaches are used to is making it work with the expectation that the Stars can do what they want, because that's the job.

This then gets into the study of players who don't begin as proto-star prospects but are eventually allowed to become the fulcrum of the offense, on teams that have great offensive and/or overall success. I believe every single one is an amazing story worth telling.

This could read as easily about Nash as about Manu, for sure.

[OhayoKD]

Not sure what '"box" isn't really real" means ... "isn't directly tied to scoreboard influence"? "isn't something I value?" "is made of fuzzy components"? "Is missing a lot?" I think there are valid criticisms ... "isn't really real" ... isn't precise and so I'm not sure of its usefulness or meaning.

To elaborate, what i mean is that there are various things you can count or not count and weigh differently to produce completely different "box-score lists". That's why I've been tossing soccer box-scores(which themselves are varied) to illustrate the concept. If we were to just count possessions someone spent nearest the rim you might get something that correlates better with defensive impact than blocks or steals. Let's say for the sake of argument that 40-possession sample i tracked is reflective and the bulls distribution was

"14/14 pippen/grant"
"7 purdue
4 cartwright
1 jordan/armstrong"

imagine the ramifications if a box-component used something akin to --that-- as it's primary factor when it computes the defensive component. is there a reason to assume it would be less accurate?

Regardless ... I would stick to "a lot stronger" is, as I think you seem to allow, not really justified.

Sure. I do think Draymond has an advantage with a prime-focused lense though

Re: snipping ... I may be wrong I don't see the virtue of WoWY when we have a decent RAPM. Ditto ad hoc "on-arrival"/"on primacy" (which some could argue as needing Kerr ... if that's just read as "Jackson bad" ... okay), "won more" which as far as is meaningful is factored into the RAPM (depending on meaning ... some RAPM might exclude playoffs) etc.

Well I'll just cite what i've already said on that:

Spoiler:

Okay, but WOWY is not(and shot not be) an approximation of RAPM. Adjustments and all, the premise of APM is ultimately still that “winning on the court is good, as is seeing your team become worse without you on the court”

The main advantage of WOWY is that you can see what truly happens when a player is removed from a team. RAPM is "stable", but it is also artificial. Outliers are curved down and it is still susceptible to wonky-lineups and rotations. It's a potentially great tool, but it is not a substitute for what actually happens. Using RAPM in-place of actual signals is missing the point.

The point of WOWYR is to approximate RAPM but how well it achieves that...

Prime WOWYR can match a 17-year adjusted plus-minus (RAPM) study for predicting lineup results at the game level. WOWYR correlates well with players from that 17-year RAPM set (from 1997-2014, by Jerry Engelmann), with a correlation coefficient of 0.67 (for scaled results) and an average error (MAE) of 1.1 points.

In order to accurately solve for “what’s the most likely impact for Larry Bird on all of his lineups?” we need to know about the value of his teammates, like Reggie Lewis. And since Lewis only played a few years, his estimate is a bit fuzzy, and that in turn effects Bird’s estimate

A regression is only as good as its data inputs.

WOWYR regresses RAPM using score differential by game, which is... at least 200 times worse than per-possession data in terms of granularity? (much worse than that actually)

It's an extremely ambitious and fun concept but its value is very limited, as shown by Ben himself... well, not really using it that much. I would just not use WOWYR unless it's for extremely rough classifications (i.e. "good" vs "bad").

Not responding to the other things atm but while yes WOWYR and GPM Tries to adjust for other teammates missing iirc the bulk of the calculation is based on that players WOWY sample so still the WOWYl sample being small still matters (there’s a reason why John Stockton is 2nd all time in WOWYR and it’s not because he has a goat argument)

Second, like any RAPM study that’s too long, it smoothes over differences between peak years, ignoring aging and injury. There are some ways around this — one of which is to use smaller time periods

...is up for discussion.

WOWY is a weakness in manu's case in a way it isn't for draymond and i don't think that should just be dismissed. Especially given the minute distributions

The different versions of duncan is fair though

Are you confident that Draymond is creating more (and/or more value from) chances that Manu btw? I would think Manu is creating a lot more (and of better quality outcomes) for himself and his playmaking was on average towards the high leverage, high value end. And some of Draymond's assists would come with an advantage already created, which is not to diminish his own passing ability or the value in securing that advantage. I don't know, I suppose it depends what one means but suspect there isn't an actual number accurately representing this sort of thing.

Nope. i just forgot scoring-gravity was a thing(oops)