One_and_Done wrote:Because Lebron wasn't even in his prime in 06, and got better in 08. Once we remove the bogus inclusion of 2006, the team was 3-1 without him in 07, which looks like a huge anomaly given they were 1-13 from 08 to 10 and then fell off a cliff after he left.
Why are you talking about how good LeBron was when the discussion is specifically about what the team did in games he didn’t play? It doesn’t make any sense. The question is about using games without LeBron to assess how good the supporting cast was in that era. LeBron’s individual quality year to year is wholly irrelevant to that.
There are some people on here who just lose credibility with me when their opening argument contains an obvious red herring. Your use of Danny Green being waived to argue the 2011 Cavs were tanking was one such example, and trying to include 06 in a discussion of Lebron's prime is the latest. Like, why would anyone objective bring this up? Were people on here arguing that Lebron was in his prime in 06? Did he get many votes in 06? No and no. It just fees like a distortion of the sample to produce a desired result. Iverson on the other hand was definitely in his prime in the years I cited.
Regarding Danny Green, you latched onto one sentence mentioning him in an extremely long post, and wouldn’t stop talking about it even when I very obviously backed down from it immediately. You then kept acting like me responding to you to back down from it was somehow me doubling down on it. And that’s all while you were trying to argue plainly false things like that Antawn Jamison came off the bench a bunch of games in 2011 because he had “killed them” as a starter even though he came off the bench from the beginning of the season, or that Mo Williams played fewer minutes because they were getting blown out in a time period where they were objectively not getting blown out. So, I’m sorry but I really wouldn’t get on your high horse about credibility based on that discussion—you argued several false things that were easily verifiable as false. It’s okay. It happens, because we all sometimes say things without fully thinking through and verifying everything we said. But I actually explicitly backed down from the Danny Green thing immediately, while you did not back down at all from multiple false arguments and simply moved on from them with no acknowledgment, so I really do find a lecture on credibility coming from that discussion to be curious. It’s not something I care to push or would’ve ever otherwise mentioned—I’m perfectly fine assessing you to have credibility more generally, even after that discussion—but I think you’re definitely way off base here.
In any event, while it is completely irrelevant to the discussion, I do actually think LeBron was in his prime in 2006, and that seems a very easy conclusion to come to given that LeBron was 2nd in MVP voting that year, led the league in BPM with the 6th best BPM of his entire career, posted a better on-off than several other prime seasons of his, etc. I’ll never understand why some LeBron fans here try to artificially narrow his prime. I get that it’s to try to handwave away early playoff struggles as being pre-prime, but it just seems so self-defeating given that the length of his prime is the biggest feather in his cap.
Lebron was a distant 5th in the RPOY project in 06. The team was also radically different to the 08 team, and also the 09 and 10 team. Like, in 06 the 3 wins were over three of the worst teams in the league, and were due to the team being led by a still healthy-ish Larry Hughes, and Eric Snow, both gone and washed by 08. They also had D.Marshall and R.Murray in those games, both also gone by 08. The rotation was completely different.
Saying the 2006 team was “radically different to the 08 team” and had a “completely different” rotation is actually on point, unlike the discussion of whether LeBron was in his prime. And teams are never the same a couple years apart, so there’s some validity to that. But out of the 10 non-LeBron guys on the 2008 Cavaliers who played the most minutes that year, 7 of them played in those three games LeBron missed in 2006 (and they did not play tons of people in those 2006 games, so that’s also 7 of the 11 players who got remotely meaningful minutes in those three games). So I’d say it’s definitely a real stretch to say the 2006 team was “radically different to the 08 team” or that “the rotation was completely different.” Different, yes. But definitely not “completely different.” There was quite a lot of overlap. And earlier in this post, you already tied in the 1-5 record without LeBron in 2010 (which is part of the 1-13 record you referred to), even though that 2010 team bore less resemblance to the 2008 team than the 2006 team did. I find that curious. Is the 2010 team not “radically different to the 08 team”? Furthermore, for reference, the percent of the non-LeBron guys with the top 10 minutes on the 2008 Cavaliers who played in the games LeBron missed in 2006 is the same as the percent of the non-LeBron guys with the top 10 minutes on the 2010 Cavaliers who played on the 2011 Cavaliers. So if the 2006 Cavs were “radically different to the 08 team” based on the idea that “the rotation was completely different,” then I’d think you’d say the same about the 2011 Cavs and 2010 Cavs. I suspect you may come to a very different conclusion about that somehow, though.
