EmpireFalls wrote:It is not obvious to me that either 2016 Curry or 2009 LeBron is the “obvious pick” here. Instead of making passive aggressive comments why can’t both of you just lay out a cohesive argument for why you believe your stance?
This is my issue with the PC board, it seems to devolve into petty beefs before the real quality discussion.
I’m happy to elaborate further, but I don’t think me saying that my #1 pick seems pretty obvious to me is a “passive aggressive comment.” Maybe the responses to what I’d said were, but not my initial post. Something doesn’t become passive aggressive simply by virtue of expressing an opinion that others disagree with and not immediately substantiating that opinion with an in-depth explanation. I simply made a quick post expressing my views on the subject matter of this thread (including on more than just the #1 pick). If several others choose to respond to what I said in a sarcastic and/or unfriendly manner, it doesn’t retroactively make my post passive aggressive. Maybe you weren’t suggesting my post had been passive aggressive, but just wanted to make that note in case you were.
Anyways, I’ll provide some additional thoughts regarding why I think Curry 2016 is the #1 pick here. The most obvious one is that the 2016 Warriors won more games than any team in history. That’s not dispositive, but I think it should weigh in our minds very heavily when comparing players’ regular seasons, since it is 2016 Curry that led the team with the most successful regular season ever. And he did not do that with the most talented team ever either (it’s not even the most talented team Steph himself had, let alone other players). This stuff is not dispositive (someone can potentially have had a better regular season individually on a team that didn’t do as well), but I think it essentially should create a bit of a rebuttable presumption in Steph’s favor here, since his regular season performances did lead to the most remarkable team regular season we’ve ever seen.
Okay, so then let’s look beyond the 73 wins. The OP called out impact specifically. What do we see when we look at impact data? At first glance, we’ll note that 2016 Steph had both a higher ON and higher on/off than 2009 LeBron. But those are fairly crude measures, so let’s look at a few more complex impact metrics, which actually go back through both of these relevant seasons:
- EPM has Steph’s 2016 as the highest EPM since 2014 (note: Embiid this past regular season is tied, but obviously he didn’t play much). The rankings on the site don’t go back further than 2014 (so I can’t easily substantiate if it’s the highest ever for years before that), but the actual EPM scores are there if you go to individual player pages, and we see that it is higher than LeBron’s 2009 (albeit close: 10.5 vs. 10.3).
- RPM has Steph’s 2016 as the highest season in the play-by-play era, including being above LeBron’s 2009 (11.37 vs. 10.05).
- RAPTOR has Steph’s 2016 regular season as the highest besides a couple Jokic seasons that it is close behind. RAPTOR only truly goes back through 2014, but they do have their historic RAPTOR as well, and it is essentially certain that LeBron’s 2009 RS is lower than Steph’s 2016 RS, since 2016 Steph’s RS RAPTOR is notably above 2009 LeBron’s RS+Playoff RAPTOR (13.9 vs. 12.6), and it is highly unlikely that the playoffs made 2009 LeBron’s RAPTOR go down. This is a bit apples and oranges since historical RAPTOR isn’t exactly the same, but still.
Of course, one can potentially object to the box priors in these, but they’re the best measures we’ve got for single-season impact data going back through 2009, and they’ve got 2016 Steph above 2009 LeBron. (I note that LEBRON is another similar impact metric, and it isn’t as hot on Steph’s 2016 and actually has Giannis 2020 as the #1 season, but it doesn’t go back through 2009 so we can’t directly compare these two seasons in that).
So what we are left with is Steph having led the most successful regular season of all time, and doing so with impact data that is top of the line. To me, that’s pretty obvious for #1. And then my analysis gets to squishier eye-test and perception stuff. Unsurprisingly, LeBron’s 2009 and Steph’s 2016 both stuck out to me a lot at the time. But, to me, Steph’s 2016 looked and felt different. It felt like he was breaking the game in a way I didn’t feel like for LeBron. And ultimately I think that’s a valid view, since the way the game was played rapidly changed in significant part (though not entirely, of course) due to what Steph did that year. More generally, it just felt like what Steph was doing was more remarkable and historic. That’s definitely squishy and subjective, but I doubt I’m alone in this feeling. And that sentiment backs the above stuff for me, and makes me more sure of the conclusion.
Anyways, there’s arguments against this, and they’d mostly center around building up Steph’s teammates and downplaying LeBron’s teammates, and then building a case that the 2016 Warriors didn’t do enough better than the 2009 Cavaliers for Steph to have actually been better individually. I addressed that in significant part in an earlier post—with the upshot being that I think we know that the rubber band effect came into play a lot with the 2016 Warriors in the regular season, and I’m comfortable viewing the 2016 Warriors as having been a lot better in the regular season than the 2009 Cavaliers. I also think that to some degree this teammate stuff is already priced into the impact data mentioned above.
