f4p wrote:lessthanjake wrote:Heej wrote:SRS is kinda just a function of the teams you played no? If the league was weak or had worse parity (which one night expect in an Expansion scenario) then is it fair to say SRS itself isn't a good measure of "opponent goodness" outside of comparing teams within the same timeframes?
A "great" team in the 90s isn't necessarily a "great" team in 2020
if someone wants to argue the current nba is the most talented ever, i would say they are correct. we've had one expansion team since 1996 plus a bunch of international talent added, along with the background population growth and an expansion of the talent pool due to all the extra money in sports. but obviously the 03/05/07 spurs weren't playing now and weren't in some massively different league than the 1990's bulls. maybe the 2013/14 spurs were, but that's 2 out of 6 finals. and obviously the 1999 spurs were playing in a flaming ****heap of a year and got the 1999 knicks in the finals.
Foreign nba talent doubled between 1998 and 2003. The talent pool expanding didn't start in the 2020's.
[/quote]Heej wrote:lessthanjake wrote:
Regarding SRS, one could argue that league expansion increases SRS of non-expansion teams by a bit. But it wouldn’t be a hugely drastic effect (expansion teams’ SRS is typically bad for the first few years but it mathematically can’t redistribute *that* much SRS to the rest of the league). This is more a factor on the margins. It’s not making a 4 SRS team into a 7 SRS team. And it’s counteracted in significant part by substantially increased tanking these days.
But let’s say wanted to try to adjust for parity (not sure we should want to do that since part of a lack of parity is the existence of such “great” teams, but let’s just go with it for argument’s purposes). We could instead look at the number of standard deviations above the mean a team was in SRS. The Bulls’ Finals opponents averaged being 1.384 standard deviations above the mean in SRS. You mentioned 2020, so I’ll choose to use that as a reference point. 1.384 standard deviations above the mean in SRS in the 2020 season would correspond to a 6.63 SRS—which is quite high and not meaningfully different from the actual SRS average of the Bulls’ Finals opponents (which was 6.84). (We can infer from this that the effect of tanking and expansion on parity essentially canceled out). Even in this past NBA season, which had a level of parity rarely seen before (in large part due to increased load management of stars IMO), 1.384 standard deviations above the mean in SRS would correspond to 5.27 SRS, which would’ve been higher than any team except the Celtics. Basically, we can adjust for parity differences, and the Bulls’ Finals opponents still look great.
In any event, I also discussed other indicators that have nothing to do with SRS. For instance, the fact that the pre-playoffs title odds for the Bulls’s Finals opponents were typically the best of any non-Bulls team (and always at least the 2nd best).
Overall, it’s pretty clear that the Bulls faced opponents in the Finals that were great in the context of their era. I don’t really see any valid argument against that. Their SRS was high, their SRS was still high when we adjust for league parity, they all had consistently high SRS across several seasons in that time period, their title odds were typically the best of any non-Bulls team (and always at least the 2nd best), and they had star power that often is so important in the playoffs. Sure, at a certain level, we could just say that the talent level in the NBA is higher these days and so no team in the past was “great” by today’s standards. But, while there’s logic to that, it’s ultimately just an example of a type of dogmatic modernist argument that I think most people reject, and in any event I don’t think it’s the type of thing that was being referred to when it was suggested that those Finals opponents weren’t great.
I appreciate the work you put in with the standard deviations which I can see why you would go that route but I don't think it really makes sense if the point I'm making is that the talent pool itself was diluted from top to bottom relative to other eras. There's no real method you could use to determine 90s teams were x% as good as modern teams or even as stacked as the 60s and 80s teams that had enormous concentrations of talent.
Yeah, as has been brought up(and ignored) repeatedly, lessthanjake's adjustment only works if you assume equal talent distribution. In reality, SRS for a top 60's team is being generated against "weak teams" that are much higher up the totem pole relative to the general talent pool than a "weak team" from a much bigger league.
raw srs comparisons just don't work there. A team posting comparable SRS during Russell's time would be much much stronger than their 90's equivalent. Russell is also certainly not the player you should be trying to target in terms of finals competition:
He closed his career by serving as a player-coach and was consequently one of the few players to be the best player on title teams with distinct rosters and head coaches. In that role, he:
- came back 3-1 on the road against an 8-SRS defending champion 76ers team;
- won the title over a Lakers team that had generated an even higher MoV when West played than the MoV of those 76ers;
- and then repeated as champions by winning three road series (only matched by the 1995 Rockets), including series against the Wilt/West/Baylor super-team and against a Knicks team that with DeBusschere had been even better than those 1968 76ers and Lakers teams.
Ironically the modernist argument is not yours (heej) but f4p and lessthanjake's.
As for expansion, the effects are reflected when we look at the PSRS of Chicago's opponents rather than their RSRS:
For example, The 1997 Jazz go from 27th to 68th despite their PSRS getting boosted by their performance vs Chicago. And in case you were wondering, the 1997 Jazz posted the highest playoff-rating of any MJ finals opponent.
SRS is ultimately useful as a proxy for predicting championships/playoff success. That is the reason why we care about M.O.V. When it fails to predict that(as it often does for 90's teams irregardless of their performance vs Jordan's Bulls), the original prediction is besides the point.
? Modernity and modernist aren't synonymous adjectives, if anything they're actually antonymous because postmodernism is modern and modernism is antiquated. Expansion era grammar talent levels up in here 
The "90's expansion era grammar 
malapropisms is my word of the year.
My sense for irony is on life support.