Talent Trap, Paragon Paradox

[Ainosterhaspie]

A thread on the general board about the Lakers defense remaining strong (maybe getting better) with the departure of Anthony Davis has me thinking that there's a trap, a paradox with high level talent that comes out sometimes.

Most agree Davis is a very high level defender, yet the Lakers defense didn't always live up to what it seemed it should with him. One thing I saw people talking about was players possibly overly relying on his excellence, expecting he can cover mistakes, which leads to complacency and worse defense than should otherwise be expected.

I wish I could find the post, and it might have been on another thread, but someone describes a typical sequence where peremiter player gets beat, partially because they know they have AD to clean up, AD manages to block or alter the shot, but the offense rebounds and scores before the defense can recover. AD is excellent, but the possession is a failure because the team effort isn't where it needs to be.

One poster mentions similar issues with Gobert.

I always thought those Gobert Jazz teams over relied on him to do everything on defense. Guys who had previously been average or better defenders (Conley, Mitchell, Bojan) were getting blown by constantly. When your whole defensive scheme is predicated on funneling ball handlers into your rim protecting center, that can sometimes turn into perimeter defenders getting complacent. 

I think the something similar was happening with AD.  He’s an incredible defensive player, go look at that 2023 series against the Grizzlies and Warriors.  He dominated those offenses in the halfcourt.  Swapping DLo for DFS, Vando coming back, and Knecht losing minutes to Goodwin have also really helped from a personnel standpoint.  The biggest thing, though, is that the team is playing with an energy and effort level I haven’t seen since right after the 2023 deadline when they got rid of Russ.  Belief and buy in goes a long way in the regular season.

A similar thing can be observed on Jordan's Bulls where scoring outside of Jordan was often very anemic. Did they rely on Jordan so much, that they underperformed their offensive potential simply because they relyed on his excellence there so much. Yes the triangle helped with this, but it didn't fix the problem entirely and their offense could bog down and fall into a trap of just expecting Jordan to do it all at times.

Guys like LeBron and Harden are offensive systems wholey unto themselves, but their teams often looked completely lost with them off the floor. How much of that is coaches and other players relying on the talents of these paragons so much that they simply failed to work to produce complimentary and supplemental systems to maintain production without the player?

Many like to frame this issue as a flaw in the player. They don't let their teammates get into a rhythm or want to hog stats or something like that, but I don't think that adequately explains the issue even if it is a component to varying degrees at times.

What causes teams to underperform in the very area their best talent excels? Is it as simple as the player being overrated, underperforming, or taking up all the oxygen, or is there something else there? A trap that players and coaches fall into of just expecting the star to perform, of being pulled into complacency by excellence, which springs at the worst time and ends a season.

Are there other examples of this I haven't mentioned?

What are some ways teams have solved or minimized this problem?

[parsnips33]

Not exactly the same thing, but there was definitely an effect on the Steph/KD/Klay Warriors where roleplayers would get a little too deferential. Guys like Omri Casspi would be so reluctant to shoot knowing that they could always just make one extra pass to get the ball to one of the GOAT shooters, even if it meant giving up a perfectly open shot for a more difficult one

[AEnigma]

First, I will say this is ultimately on coaching. It is one thing if players are encouraged to be a bit more aggressive to take advantage of the support behind them, or even to conserve energy for later in the game; it is another for a player to outright disregard their role in the scheme because they personally assume their centre will cover them.

Second, I am more willing to entertain this for on-court results than off-court:

1) Off-court results are not remotely consistent because of personnel; contrast Dwight being backed up by Gortat with Gobert being backed up by old Derrick Favors.

2) There is nothing to really support this idea of archetypal reliance dragging down bench players as a rule. You cite Harden, but his teams for much of his Rockets tenure did not suffer his absence the way we have seen with many other less ball-dominant point guards. Same for Luka.

On-court, yeah, for offence you can get guys who are accustomed to a certain role and need to take on a different role because of the roster structure. I see the bigger issue for defence though, because while there can be similar role changes on that end, what you describe is really more about whether effort is put into the role. And to bring it back to coaching, it is not a coincidence that coaches who consistently orchestrated elite defences — Brown, Jackson, Riley, Popovich, Hannum, Vogel, the Van Gundys, Thibodeau (until this year haha), etc. — rarely had this issue. Instead, they all fostered a culture of committed defence from their roleplayers, regardless of whether Duncan, Ben, Robinson, Garnett, Ewing, Mourning, Pippen, Wilt, Dwight, etc. were available to clean up errors.

[Doctor MJ]

A thread on the general board about the Lakers defense remaining strong (maybe getting better) with the departure of Anthony Davis has me thinking that there's a trap, a paradox with high level talent that comes out sometimes.

Most agree Davis is a very high level defender, yet the Lakers defense didn't always live up to what it seemed it should with him. One thing I saw people talking about was players possibly overly relying on his excellence, expecting he can cover mistakes, which leads to complacency and worse defense than should otherwise be expected.

I wish I could find the post, and it might have been on another thread, but someone describes a typical sequence where peremiter player gets beat, partially because they know they have AD to clean up, AD manages to block or alter the shot, but the offense rebounds and scores before the defense can recover. AD is excellent, but the possession is a failure because the team effort isn't where it needs to be.

One poster mentions similar issues with Gobert.

I always thought those Gobert Jazz teams over relied on him to do everything on defense. Guys who had previously been average or better defenders (Conley, Mitchell, Bojan) were getting blown by constantly. When your whole defensive scheme is predicated on funneling ball handlers into your rim protecting center, that can sometimes turn into perimeter defenders getting complacent. 

I think the something similar was happening with AD.  He’s an incredible defensive player, go look at that 2023 series against the Grizzlies and Warriors.  He dominated those offenses in the halfcourt.  Swapping DLo for DFS, Vando coming back, and Knecht losing minutes to Goodwin have also really helped from a personnel standpoint.  The biggest thing, though, is that the team is playing with an energy and effort level I haven’t seen since right after the 2023 deadline when they got rid of Russ.  Belief and buy in goes a long way in the regular season.

A similar thing can be observed on Jordan's Bulls where scoring outside of Jordan was often very anemic. Did they rely on Jordan so much, that they underperformed their offensive potential simply because they relyed on his excellence there so much. Yes the triangle helped with this, but it didn't fix the problem entirely and their offense could bog down and fall into a trap of just expecting Jordan to do it all at times.

Guys like LeBron and Harden are offensive systems wholey unto themselves, but their teams often looked completely lost with them off the floor. How much of that is coaches and other players relying on the talents of these paragons so much that they simply failed to work to produce complimentary and supplemental systems to maintain production without the player?

Many like to frame this issue as a flaw in the player. They don't let their teammates get into a rhythm or want to hog stats or something like that, but I don't think that adequately explains the issue even if it is a component to varying degrees at times.

What causes teams to underperform in the very area their best talent excels? Is it as simple as the player being overrated, underperforming, or taking up all the oxygen, or is there something else there? A trap that players and coaches fall into of just expecting the star to perform, of being pulled into complacency by excellence, which springs at the worst time and ends a season.

Are there other examples of this I haven't mentioned?

What are some ways teams have solved or minimized this problem?

Important thoughts generally.

I've long called this the 600 Pound Gorilla problem, and my experience with it is more in the business space. Sometimes having one uber-talent leads to the rest of the people on the team learning to just defer always to that uber-talent. In a business, this can result in an inability to scale the business because the lieutenants get trapped as middle managers when they need to be developing into true executives.

How do you combat this? For offense I think it's actually pretty simple: Don't hog the ball, and don't be overreact to mistakes.

For defense it's trickier. What we may be talking about here is just a) the defensive star not being 100% engaged all the time, and b) defensive role players going up to 110% to try to make up for the star's missing presence. The former you can theoretically do something about, but if the role players just go to unsustainable level to make up for a star in the short term, it can be a dangerous thing to try to chase.

On AD specifically, how I tend to see him as a defender is a guy who tends to live for particular defensive matchups like what you get in a playoff series more so than someone who is actually trying to be a regular season DPOY. If he didn't have so much offensive talent he'd probably have dedicated himself more to regular season defense and won some DPOYs while being considered a mere fringe all-star like Gobert.