Moderators: Doctor MJ, trex_8063, penbeast0, PaulieWal, Clyde Frazier
eminence wrote:I'm pretty confident the '16 Thunder were a better team than the '24 Thunder/Wolves/Mavs.
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
iggymcfrack wrote:
I guess it’s question of which is more valuable: a guy who’s an B on offense and an A+ on defense or a guy who’s an A- on offense and an F on defense. Personally I’m picking the first one. Luka was utterly hopeless on D in 2024. Once he ran into a smart team that knew got to attack him, the Mavs were hopeless.
Meanwhile, if you put say Manu and Dray together instead of Steph and Dray or Manu and Duncan, I think they still win several rings even though both guys were considered second fiddle next to bigger stars.
70sFan wrote:Djoker wrote:I feel like my remaining votes to round out the top 25 would be something like:
#17 Davis
#18 Embiid
#19 Luka
#20 T-Mac
#21 Kidd
#22 Westbrook
#23 Draymond
#24 Dwight
#25 Kidd
HM: Manu, Butler, George, Iverson
You have Kidd twice here.
One_and_Done wrote:iggymcfrack wrote:One_and_Done wrote:Draymond is a great player, but you can't build a team around him to go to the finals. With Luka you can. It's too early for discussion of non-superstar players like Draymond.
This is such an empty argument. The year Luka made the Finals he played like ****, had arguably the worst defensive playoffs by any player in history of the league, and got carried by hot teammate shooting despite getting smoked head-to-head by SGA.
When Draymond made the Finals in 2016, Steph was banged up and Dray was the Warriors’ best player in 3 out of 4 series. When Steph was hurt the first 8 games of the playoffs, they went 6-2 with Draymond as the top guy. Here’s how the team looked that postseason:
Draymond and Steph both: +5.1 over 1054 possessions
Draymond without Steph: +12.4 over 715 possessions
Steph without Draymond: -1.6 over 191 possessions
Both players on bench: -12.6 over 265 possessions
Draymond played so much better in the 2016 playoffs than Luka did in 2024 that it’s not even comparable. If you just look at that playoff run in isolation, Draymond was the #1 player on the Warriors just as much as Russell was for any of the Celtics’ runs.
If anything I’d say that Draymond’s shown he can be the best player on a championship team since all he needed was a little help from his teammates in Game 7 to be FMVP after single-handed carrying his team through the early rounds while Luka got absolutely eviscerated in the Finals and hasn’t shown he can take a team that far.
I just don't care about advanced/impact stats like plus minus. There are many reasons they can be wrong.
Draymond took the Warriors nowhere when Curry was hurt, and nobody would expect that Warriors team in 2016 to make the finals without Curry. Meanwhile Luka took a worse team to the finals, against tougher opposition, then was banged up in the finals themselves (which is why I'm taking 2022 Luka).
iggymcfrack wrote:One_and_Done wrote:iggymcfrack wrote:
This is such an empty argument. The year Luka made the Finals he played like ****, had arguably the worst defensive playoffs by any player in history of the league, and got carried by hot teammate shooting despite getting smoked head-to-head by SGA.
When Draymond made the Finals in 2016, Steph was banged up and Dray was the Warriors’ best player in 3 out of 4 series. When Steph was hurt the first 8 games of the playoffs, they went 6-2 with Draymond as the top guy. Here’s how the team looked that postseason:
Draymond and Steph both: +5.1 over 1054 possessions
Draymond without Steph: +12.4 over 715 possessions
Steph without Draymond: -1.6 over 191 possessions
Both players on bench: -12.6 over 265 possessions
Draymond played so much better in the 2016 playoffs than Luka did in 2024 that it’s not even comparable. If you just look at that playoff run in isolation, Draymond was the #1 player on the Warriors just as much as Russell was for any of the Celtics’ runs.
If anything I’d say that Draymond’s shown he can be the best player on a championship team since all he needed was a little help from his teammates in Game 7 to be FMVP after single-handed carrying his team through the early rounds while Luka got absolutely eviscerated in the Finals and hasn’t shown he can take a team that far.
I just don't care about advanced/impact stats like plus minus. There are many reasons they can be wrong.
Draymond took the Warriors nowhere when Curry was hurt, and nobody would expect that Warriors team in 2016 to make the finals without Curry. Meanwhile Luka took a worse team to the finals, against tougher opposition, then was banged up in the finals themselves (which is why I'm taking 2022 Luka).
What do you mean he took them nowhere? They were up 2-1 in the 2nd round when Curry came back after outscoring their opponents by 141 points with Draymond on the floor in 8 games! They were basically playing like the best team of all-time with Steph waving towels on the sideline. They were easily rolling into the Western Conference Finals at a minimum. That's further than the Mavs would have got in 2024 if their role players didn't run hot as the sun from 3 or if Daigneault wasn't too set in his ways to adjust his offense to attack a human traffic cone.
When you say you don't care about plus/minus, what you really mean is that you don't care if the player you want to credit for a team's success is actually on the floor when it happens. Warriors made the Finals in 2016? Must have been Curry, he's the biggest name. Who cares that he was on the floor for less than half of the minutes and that they were better in the minutes he wasn't playing than the ones he was, it's still all Curry. "Don't bother me with facts, don't bother me with context, LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU." Ewing played a higher share of the Knicks' minutes in the Eastern conference playoffs in 1999 than Curry did in the Western playoffs in 2016. Should we give him all the credit for that Finals run too? Actually, if anything it's a bad comparison because Ewing actually was the clearcut best player on the team when he was actually playing while Steph still got outplayed by Draymond even when he was back.
I know this gets into numbers that you close your eyes too and absolutely refuse to look at so I won't look them up, but over several playoff runs we can get to a really, really large sample of Dray on the floor without Steph and the Warriors are still consistently playing at an all-time level. Why do we have to ignore all that time of seeing Draymond dominate in the playoffs as the best player on the floor just because he sometimes plays with a guy who's a little bit better? It's like seeing a guy take down 10,000 trees with a chainsaw and 5,000 trees with an ax and being like "well, I don't think he could do it with an ax." Just because the chainsaw is his preferred and most effective tool doesn't mean the 5,000 trees he took down with an ax didn't exist.
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
Cavsfansince84 wrote:iggymcfrack wrote:
I guess it’s question of which is more valuable: a guy who’s an B on offense and an A+ on defense or a guy who’s an A- on offense and an F on defense. Personally I’m picking the first one. Luka was utterly hopeless on D in 2024. Once he ran into a smart team that knew got to attack him, the Mavs were hopeless.
Meanwhile, if you put say Manu and Dray together instead of Steph and Dray or Manu and Duncan, I think they still win several rings even though both guys were considered second fiddle next to bigger stars.
I'm not against the idea of Dray & Manu making ballots. I'm just saying why I think Luka should also be on a ballot. It's also kind of silly I would say to compare Dray's playoff on/off without Steph against sub 1.0 srs teams to with him against Okc and the Cavs. That's very different competition. I was also talking about Dray making ballots in the previous thread. I just find it much more impressive to truly lead a team over top competition, while having a great series against both, and after having a great rs where he finishes 3rd in mvp vote. Not that I'm necessarily right but that's my view based on what I value in a peak season. It's also very hard to make a case against a guy based on 'hot teammate shooting' when the guy being argued against is a helio who creates a lot of shots and also uses his gravity in both the perimeter and in the paint. Luka has consistently shown that his mixture of size& skill is very hard for teams to deal with in the playoffs. Even teams which are top 5 in DRtg(as both Okc and Minny were in the rs). It almost feels like there's something of a bias against Luka tbh for w/e reason. To me results speak for themselves.
iggymcfrack wrote:
It's harder to parse individual series data, but if you wanna just look at the conference finals on, Draymond had a plus/minus of -5 and Curry had a plus/minus of -12. If you wanna spread the sample out, Draymond has a career RAPM that ranks ahead of Steph at #2 all-time so over the course of their careers, the Warriors generally missed Dray more when he was on the bench than they missed Steph. Here's how they looked in the playoffs over his peak years:
Warriors on the floor with Draymond and no Steph:
2015: +13.5
2016: +12.4
2017: +8.7 (+3.8 without Steph or KD)
2018: +6.7 (+18.6 without Steph or KD)
That's pretty undeniably a championship level team without Steph on the floor. Imagine Kyle Lowry in the Steph Curry role. Similar player type, shoots the 3 well, doesn't need to dominate the ball, but not a player anyone's going to consider better than Draymond Green. I think that's still a much better team than any team Luka's ever played for.
I just really hate this idea of 2024 as this big proof of concept for Luka when he had arguably the worst playoffs of his career, played some of the worst defense in the history of the NBA, and got completely handled head-to-head in Round 2 by a much better player. Luka having 1.4 more assists and 2.5 more turnovers per game than SGA isn't the reason the Mavs role players shot well and the Thunder role players didn't. Luka's "success" was all due to factors completely out of his control.
One_and_Done wrote:iggymcfrack wrote:One_and_Done wrote:I just don't care about advanced/impact stats like plus minus. There are many reasons they can be wrong.
Draymond took the Warriors nowhere when Curry was hurt, and nobody would expect that Warriors team in 2016 to make the finals without Curry. Meanwhile Luka took a worse team to the finals, against tougher opposition, then was banged up in the finals themselves (which is why I'm taking 2022 Luka).
What do you mean he took them nowhere? They were up 2-1 in the 2nd round when Curry came back after outscoring their opponents by 141 points with Draymond on the floor in 8 games! They were basically playing like the best team of all-time with Steph waving towels on the sideline. They were easily rolling into the Western Conference Finals at a minimum. That's further than the Mavs would have got in 2024 if their role players didn't run hot as the sun from 3 or if Daigneault wasn't too set in his ways to adjust his offense to attack a human traffic cone.
When you say you don't care about plus/minus, what you really mean is that you don't care if the player you want to credit for a team's success is actually on the floor when it happens. Warriors made the Finals in 2016? Must have been Curry, he's the biggest name. Who cares that he was on the floor for less than half of the minutes and that they were better in the minutes he wasn't playing than the ones he was, it's still all Curry. "Don't bother me with facts, don't bother me with context, LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU." Ewing played a higher share of the Knicks' minutes in the Eastern conference playoffs in 1999 than Curry did in the Western playoffs in 2016. Should we give him all the credit for that Finals run too? Actually, if anything it's a bad comparison because Ewing actually was the clearcut best player on the team when he was actually playing while Steph still got outplayed by Draymond even when he was back.
I know this gets into numbers that you close your eyes too and absolutely refuse to look at so I won't look them up, but over several playoff runs we can get to a really, really large sample of Dray on the floor without Steph and the Warriors are still consistently playing at an all-time level. Why do we have to ignore all that time of seeing Draymond dominate in the playoffs as the best player on the floor just because he sometimes plays with a guy who's a little bit better? It's like seeing a guy take down 10,000 trees with a chainsaw and 5,000 trees with an ax and being like "well, I don't think he could do it with an ax." Just because the chainsaw is his preferred and most effective tool doesn't mean the 5,000 trees he took down with an ax didn't exist.
A small game sample against a few 500 type teams, while Klay was also going berserk, does not in any way indicate they could win without Curry. I'm more interested in the full season sample in 2020, when Curry was hurt and Draymond looked bored and sluggish.
The Warriors needed a miracle Klay game to even beat the Thunder (and their zero 3pt shooting) in 7 games. It is fanciful to think they'd have made the finals in either 2016 or 2024 without Curry, or even have come close. Curry was the driver of that team, while Draymond was an elite role player. If he was a star, the Warriors wouldn't have missed the playoffs 3 out of the last 6 years.
OhayoKD wrote:Lebron contributes more to all the phases of play than Messi does. And he is of course a defensive anchor unlike messi.
lessthanjake wrote:One_and_Done wrote:iggymcfrack wrote:
What do you mean he took them nowhere? They were up 2-1 in the 2nd round when Curry came back after outscoring their opponents by 141 points with Draymond on the floor in 8 games! They were basically playing like the best team of all-time with Steph waving towels on the sideline. They were easily rolling into the Western Conference Finals at a minimum. That's further than the Mavs would have got in 2024 if their role players didn't run hot as the sun from 3 or if Daigneault wasn't too set in his ways to adjust his offense to attack a human traffic cone.
When you say you don't care about plus/minus, what you really mean is that you don't care if the player you want to credit for a team's success is actually on the floor when it happens. Warriors made the Finals in 2016? Must have been Curry, he's the biggest name. Who cares that he was on the floor for less than half of the minutes and that they were better in the minutes he wasn't playing than the ones he was, it's still all Curry. "Don't bother me with facts, don't bother me with context, LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU." Ewing played a higher share of the Knicks' minutes in the Eastern conference playoffs in 1999 than Curry did in the Western playoffs in 2016. Should we give him all the credit for that Finals run too? Actually, if anything it's a bad comparison because Ewing actually was the clearcut best player on the team when he was actually playing while Steph still got outplayed by Draymond even when he was back.
I know this gets into numbers that you close your eyes too and absolutely refuse to look at so I won't look them up, but over several playoff runs we can get to a really, really large sample of Dray on the floor without Steph and the Warriors are still consistently playing at an all-time level. Why do we have to ignore all that time of seeing Draymond dominate in the playoffs as the best player on the floor just because he sometimes plays with a guy who's a little bit better? It's like seeing a guy take down 10,000 trees with a chainsaw and 5,000 trees with an ax and being like "well, I don't think he could do it with an ax." Just because the chainsaw is his preferred and most effective tool doesn't mean the 5,000 trees he took down with an ax didn't exist.
A small game sample against a few 500 type teams, while Klay was also going berserk, does not in any way indicate they could win without Curry. I'm more interested in the full season sample in 2020, when Curry was hurt and Draymond looked bored and sluggish.
The Warriors needed a miracle Klay game to even beat the Thunder (and their zero 3pt shooting) in 7 games. It is fanciful to think they'd have made the finals in either 2016 or 2024 without Curry, or even have come close. Curry was the driver of that team, while Draymond was an elite role player. If he was a star, the Warriors wouldn't have missed the playoffs 3 out of the last 6 years.
So, while these sorts of hypotheticals don’t factor into my actual vote, they’re an interesting discussion and I think I fall somewhere in the middle on this.
To me, this is the most likely sequence of events if the 2016 Warriors didn’t have Steph:
Basically, we know that in 2015 + 2016, the Warriors had a +10 net rating with Draymond on and Steph off (across RS + Playoffs). They also had a -8 net rating with both Draymond and Steph off. If we weigh that by how many MPG Draymond generally played, we get to an estimate of somewhere around a +4.4 net rating for the Warriors without Steph (because 10*(33/48)-8*(15/48)=4.4). That calculation probably overestimates how well they’d do with Draymond on the court, since, as I’ve pointed out before, so much of the high net rating with Draymond on and Steph off is that those minutes were disproportionately against bench units, and Draymond’s net rating when against starter-heavy units without Steph is not inspiring. At the same time, the estimate probably also overestimates how bad the Warriors would be without Draymond in that situation, since a lot of those no Draymond + no Steph minutes were garbage time with the Warriors way ahead and the rubber-band effect heavily at play. So I just assume that those two things roughly cancel out (i.e. they’d be worse with Draymond than estimated but better without him, and the overall result for the team would be similar as estimated). That leaves us with the Warriors being a team that wins somewhere in the low 50’s regular season games. And that’s consistent with them having been better than roughly .500 opponents in games in the playoffs without Steph.
Okay, so where would that leave the Warriors? Well, they’d be looking at the 4th seed at best. Given how they did in playoff games without Steph, I think it’s plausible that they win a 4 vs. 5 seed matchup. That would’ve looked something like the 2016 Blazers or 2015 Grizzlies, in terms of first-round opponent. And yeah, I can see the Warriors getting past a team like that—especially when we do know they were up 2-1 against the Blazers (albeit with two home games out of those three games). It wouldn’t be guaranteed, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me, given what we saw in reality. But then the Steph-less Warriors would get a second-round matchup against a really good team. So like, in 2016, we’re looking at a second-round date with the Spurs. I don’t think it’s at all plausible that they win that. So I think we’re looking at a team that would be a second-round exit, but could also be a first-round exit.
Of course, I think the natural response to this would be to say that Draymond mostly won a first-round series without Steph, and was up 2-1 in the second round without Steph, so it seems likely he was capable of getting them to at least the conference finals without Steph. But the thing is that those early-round opponents were pretty easy, and the reason they were easy is because the Warriors had had Steph in the regular season and won a huge amount of games. With the seeding the team would get without Steph, I just don’t see them getting out of the second round.
Is Draymond being able to be the most impactful player on a team I think would lose in the second round at best enough to get voted in at this point (sidenote: while he’d have been the most impactful player, he wouldn’t have been *popularly* considered the best player on the team, even without Steph—Klay would have)? Well, I wouldn’t really say so. But I’ll be voting him in on the basis of what he did in reality—which is being the second-best player on a team that won 73 games and lost a close Game 7 in the Finals.
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
Cavsfansince84 wrote:iggymcfrack wrote:
It's harder to parse individual series data, but if you wanna just look at the conference finals on, Draymond had a plus/minus of -5 and Curry had a plus/minus of -12. If you wanna spread the sample out, Draymond has a career RAPM that ranks ahead of Steph at #2 all-time so over the course of their careers, the Warriors generally missed Dray more when he was on the bench than they missed Steph. Here's how they looked in the playoffs over his peak years:
Warriors on the floor with Draymond and no Steph:
2015: +13.5
2016: +12.4
2017: +8.7 (+3.8 without Steph or KD)
2018: +6.7 (+18.6 without Steph or KD)
That's pretty undeniably a championship level team without Steph on the floor. Imagine Kyle Lowry in the Steph Curry role. Similar player type, shoots the 3 well, doesn't need to dominate the ball, but not a player anyone's going to consider better than Draymond Green. I think that's still a much better team than any team Luka's ever played for.
I just really hate this idea of 2024 as this big proof of concept for Luka when he had arguably the worst playoffs of his career, played some of the worst defense in the history of the NBA, and got completely handled head-to-head in Round 2 by a much better player. Luka having 1.4 more assists and 2.5 more turnovers per game than SGA isn't the reason the Mavs role players shot well and the Thunder role players didn't. Luka's "success" was all due to factors completely out of his control.
Luka had 1 bad series in the 2024 playoffs(in the finals) and even then you could argue he was the best player in the finals though his defense was obviously not good(especially being hampered by a foot injury throughout the playoffs). If anything it was Kyrie who played bad vs Okc by his standards. Steph also didn't play that well in the 2016 finals but keep in mind, that there was a lot more to that team than just Steph&Dray which I shouldn't need to go into. Not all of that can be chalked up to Draymond's greatness. Same as with Manu. I find it a bit strange though how we are using +/- for some guys while Luka's teammates are getting all the credit for his team winning series. You can't conflate and then unconflate teammate play while doing player comparisons. Luka is beyond any shadow of a doubt the driving force of the Mavs on offense and.. he was also shooting the ball great up until the finals when we went up against an atg perimeter def team on one foot.
eminence wrote:No Steph '16 Warriors I'd have as the 3 or 4 seed and a 2nd round out. Not good enough to beat SAS/OKC without Steph. To give them a bit more love, that's still a loaded conference even without Steph, so plenty of seasons that'd be a conference finalist and even a real finalist in some (early 00s East).
Which would be a pretty impressive result of that 2-6 cast imo. Klay/Barnes/Iguodala/Livingston/Bogut is not a cast that should be winning any titles and is a clear step below the '24 Mavs cast.
One_and_Done wrote:lessthanjake wrote:One_and_Done wrote:A small game sample against a few 500 type teams, while Klay was also going berserk, does not in any way indicate they could win without Curry. I'm more interested in the full season sample in 2020, when Curry was hurt and Draymond looked bored and sluggish.
The Warriors needed a miracle Klay game to even beat the Thunder (and their zero 3pt shooting) in 7 games. It is fanciful to think they'd have made the finals in either 2016 or 2024 without Curry, or even have come close. Curry was the driver of that team, while Draymond was an elite role player. If he was a star, the Warriors wouldn't have missed the playoffs 3 out of the last 6 years.
So, while these sorts of hypotheticals don’t factor into my actual vote, they’re an interesting discussion and I think I fall somewhere in the middle on this.
To me, this is the most likely sequence of events if the 2016 Warriors didn’t have Steph:
Basically, we know that in 2015 + 2016, the Warriors had a +10 net rating with Draymond on and Steph off (across RS + Playoffs). They also had a -8 net rating with both Draymond and Steph off. If we weigh that by how many MPG Draymond generally played, we get to an estimate of somewhere around a +4.4 net rating for the Warriors without Steph (because 10*(33/48)-8*(15/48)=4.4). That calculation probably overestimates how well they’d do with Draymond on the court, since, as I’ve pointed out before, so much of the high net rating with Draymond on and Steph off is that those minutes were disproportionately against bench units, and Draymond’s net rating when against starter-heavy units without Steph is not inspiring. At the same time, the estimate probably also overestimates how bad the Warriors would be without Draymond in that situation, since a lot of those no Draymond + no Steph minutes were garbage time with the Warriors way ahead and the rubber-band effect heavily at play. So I just assume that those two things roughly cancel out (i.e. they’d be worse with Draymond than estimated but better without him, and the overall result for the team would be similar as estimated). That leaves us with the Warriors being a team that wins somewhere in the low 50’s regular season games. And that’s consistent with them having been better than roughly .500 opponents in games in the playoffs without Steph.
Okay, so where would that leave the Warriors? Well, they’d be looking at the 4th seed at best. Given how they did in playoff games without Steph, I think it’s plausible that they win a 4 vs. 5 seed matchup. That would’ve looked something like the 2016 Blazers or 2015 Grizzlies, in terms of first-round opponent. And yeah, I can see the Warriors getting past a team like that—especially when we do know they were up 2-1 against the Blazers (albeit with two home games out of those three games). It wouldn’t be guaranteed, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me, given what we saw in reality. But then the Steph-less Warriors would get a second-round matchup against a really good team. So like, in 2016, we’re looking at a second-round date with the Spurs. I don’t think it’s at all plausible that they win that. So I think we’re looking at a team that would be a second-round exit, but could also be a first-round exit.
Of course, I think the natural response to this would be to say that Draymond mostly won a first-round series without Steph, and was up 2-1 in the second round without Steph, so it seems likely he was capable of getting them to at least the conference finals without Steph. But the thing is that those early-round opponents were pretty easy, and the reason they were easy is because the Warriors had had Steph in the regular season and won a huge amount of games. With the seeding the team would get without Steph, I just don’t see them getting out of the second round.
Is Draymond being able to be the most impactful player on a team I think would lose in the second round at best enough to get voted in at this point (sidenote: while he’d have been the most impactful player, he wouldn’t have been *popularly* considered the best player on the team, even without Steph—Klay would have)? Well, I wouldn’t really say so. But I’ll be voting him in on the basis of what he did in reality—which is being the second-best player on a team that won 73 games and lost a close Game 7 in the Finals.
In reality Mo Williams was the 2nd best player on a 66 win team, but I won't be voting him in the top 200. I don't think much of this line of argument. Those Cavs didn't have a 3rd best player like Klay either.
OhayoKD wrote:Lebron contributes more to all the phases of play than Messi does. And he is of course a defensive anchor unlike messi.
Cavsfansince84 wrote:I think way too much is being made out of some very small samples of games where the Warriors whole mindset was 'let's just try to win a few games against .500 teams until Steph is back then we win a title'. That type of mentality doesn't usually hold up over the course of a full season trying to replace the gravity and scoring of a +454 ts add player. Draymond was not going to avg 22/11/7 on 43% 3 pt shooting over the course of a full season just as Klay was not going to put up 31ppg on 65% ts over a full season either(which is what they did against the Blazers in the 2nd rd). We gotta take a bit more of a measured approach on these hypotheticals people are throwing out imo. I'd say the Warriors without Steph in 2017 (had he torn an acl or something and they not picked up KD) would have been good but the grind of the season would have gotten to them eventually. I don't think they'd have been anywhere close to real contenders.
iggymcfrack wrote:
OK, and then the 2024 Mavs wouldn’t have been anywhere close to real contenders without trading for PJ Washington. So what? It takes a lot to get to that level. The test shouldn’t be could Draymond win a championship without his best teammate. That level of player isn’t available any more.
The point is that Draymond showed massive impact whether Steph was on the floor or not and whether he was in the lineup or not. Outscoring the opposition by 137 points in 6 games isn’t just “scraping by”. It’s eviscerating the opposition at an all-time level. On average, just in the minutes Dray played the Warriors outscored the opposition by 23 points per game. Not per 48 minutes. Just in the 3 quarters of total minutes he played each game.
I just don’t see how you can make an argument that Draymond’s all-time numbers don’t count because he was so dependent on Steph when the team was as dominant as any team in the history of basketball when he played without him. It doesn’t make logical sense.
lessthanjake wrote:eminence wrote:No Steph '16 Warriors I'd have as the 3 or 4 seed and a 2nd round out. Not good enough to beat SAS/OKC without Steph. To give them a bit more love, that's still a loaded conference even without Steph, so plenty of seasons that'd be a conference finalist and even a real finalist in some (early 00s East).
Which would be a pretty impressive result of that 2-6 cast imo. Klay/Barnes/Iguodala/Livingston/Bogut is not a cast that should be winning any titles and is a clear step below the '24 Mavs cast.
Yeah, I don’t disagree with any of that. All bets are definitely off in terms of how far any hypothetical team could get in some of the bad Eastern Conference years. But that says more about how weak the East was than about any such hypothetical team actually being good.One_and_Done wrote:lessthanjake wrote:
So, while these sorts of hypotheticals don’t factor into my actual vote, they’re an interesting discussion and I think I fall somewhere in the middle on this.
To me, this is the most likely sequence of events if the 2016 Warriors didn’t have Steph:
Basically, we know that in 2015 + 2016, the Warriors had a +10 net rating with Draymond on and Steph off (across RS + Playoffs). They also had a -8 net rating with both Draymond and Steph off. If we weigh that by how many MPG Draymond generally played, we get to an estimate of somewhere around a +4.4 net rating for the Warriors without Steph (because 10*(33/48)-8*(15/48)=4.4). That calculation probably overestimates how well they’d do with Draymond on the court, since, as I’ve pointed out before, so much of the high net rating with Draymond on and Steph off is that those minutes were disproportionately against bench units, and Draymond’s net rating when against starter-heavy units without Steph is not inspiring. At the same time, the estimate probably also overestimates how bad the Warriors would be without Draymond in that situation, since a lot of those no Draymond + no Steph minutes were garbage time with the Warriors way ahead and the rubber-band effect heavily at play. So I just assume that those two things roughly cancel out (i.e. they’d be worse with Draymond than estimated but better without him, and the overall result for the team would be similar as estimated). That leaves us with the Warriors being a team that wins somewhere in the low 50’s regular season games. And that’s consistent with them having been better than roughly .500 opponents in games in the playoffs without Steph.
Okay, so where would that leave the Warriors? Well, they’d be looking at the 4th seed at best. Given how they did in playoff games without Steph, I think it’s plausible that they win a 4 vs. 5 seed matchup. That would’ve looked something like the 2016 Blazers or 2015 Grizzlies, in terms of first-round opponent. And yeah, I can see the Warriors getting past a team like that—especially when we do know they were up 2-1 against the Blazers (albeit with two home games out of those three games). It wouldn’t be guaranteed, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me, given what we saw in reality. But then the Steph-less Warriors would get a second-round matchup against a really good team. So like, in 2016, we’re looking at a second-round date with the Spurs. I don’t think it’s at all plausible that they win that. So I think we’re looking at a team that would be a second-round exit, but could also be a first-round exit.
Of course, I think the natural response to this would be to say that Draymond mostly won a first-round series without Steph, and was up 2-1 in the second round without Steph, so it seems likely he was capable of getting them to at least the conference finals without Steph. But the thing is that those early-round opponents were pretty easy, and the reason they were easy is because the Warriors had had Steph in the regular season and won a huge amount of games. With the seeding the team would get without Steph, I just don’t see them getting out of the second round.
Is Draymond being able to be the most impactful player on a team I think would lose in the second round at best enough to get voted in at this point (sidenote: while he’d have been the most impactful player, he wouldn’t have been *popularly* considered the best player on the team, even without Steph—Klay would have)? Well, I wouldn’t really say so. But I’ll be voting him in on the basis of what he did in reality—which is being the second-best player on a team that won 73 games and lost a close Game 7 in the Finals.
In reality Mo Williams was the 2nd best player on a 66 win team, but I won't be voting him in the top 200. I don't think much of this line of argument. Those Cavs didn't have a 3rd best player like Klay either.
Okay, but surely you can see the difference between Draymond Green and Mo Williams in terms of impact on the court? Like, even if you have decided to disbelieve all plus-minus data, I’m assuming your own eye test is capable of seeing it, right?
Not to mention that the 2016 Warriors had a noticeably better regular season than the 2009 Cavaliers—like, the difference between the SRS and net ratings don’t even really do it justice, because of how much rubber-band-effect garbage time the Warriors had that year. I’ve talked about this before. See, for instance, the following, which indicates that the 2016 Warriors were like 5 SRS better than the 2009 Cavaliers when games were actually close: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=114143761#p114143761. Being the second-best player on that 2016 Warriors team is definitely a bigger deal.
Also, I don’t even think Mo Williams was the second-best player on that Cavaliers team. People often default to thinking the second-best player on a team was guy who was the second-highest scorer. But that’s often not actually the case. Draymond being better than Klay is one example of this. People assuming Mo Williams was the second-best player on those Cavaliers teams is another. Varejao was the second-best player on that team. Not a flashy player or good as a scorer, and was an energy player who couldn’t play super high minutes, but he was a genuinely highly impactful player. Just for reference, from 2005-2010, the Cavaliers had a +2.97 net rating in 2240 minutes with Varejao on the court and LeBron off. Which was only slightly lower than the +3.89 net rating the team had with LeBron on and Varejao off. And the positive number for Varejao isn’t due to some outlier year—the Cavaliers had a positive net rating with Varejao on and LeBron off every single one of those years. Nor is it due to just facing bench units—the 2005-2010 Cavaliers had a positive net rating with Varejao on, LeBron off, and facing 4 or 5 opposing starters. Which isn’t to say that Varejao deserves consideration in this project. But I think it goes to the point that defense-focused utility guys can be very impactful players, and they’re often a very significant thing driving a team’s success, without getting as much credit for it as they deserve.
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
Cavsfansince84 wrote:iggymcfrack wrote:
I guess it’s question of which is more valuable: a guy who’s an B on offense and an A+ on defense or a guy who’s an A- on offense and an F on defense. Personally I’m picking the first one. Luka was utterly hopeless on D in 2024. Once he ran into a smart team that knew got to attack him, the Mavs were hopeless.
Meanwhile, if you put say Manu and Dray together instead of Steph and Dray or Manu and Duncan, I think they still win several rings even though both guys were considered second fiddle next to bigger stars.
I'm not against the idea of Dray & Manu making ballots. I'm just saying why I think Luka should also be on a ballot. It's also kind of silly I would say to compare Dray's playoff on/off without Steph against sub 1.0 srs teams to with him against Okc and the Cavs. That's very different competition. I was also talking about Dray making ballots in the previous thread(in a good way). I just find it much more impressive to truly lead a team over top competition, while having a great series against both, and after having a great rs where he finishes 3rd in mvp vote.
Not that I'm necessarily right but that's my view based on what I value in a peak season. It's also very hard to make a case against a guy based on 'hot teammate shooting' when the guy being argued against is a helio who creates a lot of shots and also uses his gravity in both the perimeter and in the paint. Luka has consistently shown that his mixture of size& skill is very hard for teams to deal with in the playoffs. Even teams which are top 5 in DRtg(as both Okc and Minny were in the rs). It almost feels like there's something of a bias against Luka tbh for w/e reason. To me results usually speak for themselves.
f4p wrote:
Yeah I would have actually put Luka over harden. He's just been so unstoppable in the playoffs and made a surprise WCF and surprise finals doing it. I'd also have him over Nash and SGA.
Cavsfansince84 wrote:f4p wrote:
Yeah I would have actually put Luka over harden. He's just been so unstoppable in the playoffs and made a surprise WCF and surprise finals doing it. I'd also have him over Nash and SGA.
Ya, it's like we're seriously throwing out hypotheticals of Draymond leading a Curry-less Warriors team into the ecf 10-15 years earlier as an argument over what Luka actually already did(beating 3.4, 7.4 & 6.4 srs teams consecutively)? These samples of Draymond leading teams in bits of minutes are also meant to carry way more weight than what actually happened in 2020. Which I get 2020 isn't a perfect picture but neither is what Dray&Klay were doing in those first two rds without Steph.