Lou Fan wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:Lou Fan wrote:I haven't been active in a while but I always remember PC board being very pro Curry. I've noticed it's flipped almost to the point of what I would call an anti Curry agenda. It seems a lot of PC board preferences have changed over the years.
I'd very reluctant to call it an "agenda". I think people are coming to their conclusions through a process that's managing to differ from the process that people were using at the time despite using much of the same statistical techniques, and that's very interesting.
I do think that one difference is that the folks voting in '12-13 were thinking about '12-13 whereas those who are lower on Curry right now tend to be very focused on the '15-16 & '16-17 finals.
It's weird to me because I viewed this board as one of the few places where people actually gave Curry his due instead of degrading him and calling him KD's beta and such. Here the common opinion seemed to be Curry is in a tier with LeBron by themselves at the top. This also how I view him I think every year from 15-21 (20 excluded obviously) he was no worse than the 2nd best player in the league when healthy and on the court. Now it seems like people go out of their way to point out his flaws and it almost seems like people are trying to convince themselves of lower evaluations of him and it seems to me to be bias. I think in general this is the best place on the internet to come to when it comes to learning how to evaluate basketball players but it seems that process gets warped for a lot of people here with respect to certain players Curry being one of them.
So, I do think a big part of what's going on with Curry can be thought of in terms of 2 things:
1. How you look, relative to basketball norms, matters. If you don't look like a top tier prospect, then you won't get recruited by top colleges even if your dad was a pro, and people will have a tendency to zoom in in general on what they think you can't do because you don't look like a basketball player is supposed to look.
2. How you play, relative to basketball norms, matters. If you don't dominate the game like we expect a star to dominate the game, we're going to tend toward skepticism, once again focusing on the ways in which you come up short, and not focusing on what you bring to the table to that others don't.
And of course, if you look different (1), then you probably have to play different (2), in order to be able to achieve greatness.
I'm sure I come across sanctimonious as hell as I belabor this point, but part of what I'm trying to say here is that what I see is something we should be expecting to see...even if I didn't personally foresee it myself. We are in the midst of a time with major paradigm shifts occurring in the game in a way that resembles a much earlier era of basketball. Basketball had seemed to have reached a final form, and then the 21st century came along with the data and the internet, and we're all scrambling to get our head around what it all means in ways coarse and fine.
The folks we see on the PC Board, along with much of the intellectual basketball community, grasp the big stuff that many other people are still in complete denial about...but there are still subtle things that I think we should just expect all of us to be likely to miss.
I've been thinking about why the 3-point shot didn't come to dominate the game for so long, and I think that the reasons are quite related to why Curry gets underrated now.
When you rely on 3's, you miss more of your shots. Analytically we know that 3>2, but if you're a coach watching your team play, what you see is your team succeeding less often even in the best case scenario (and it was worse before shooters were so skilled). I think it's easy for a coach to see that greater tendency toward possession failure and conclude that the technique itself is failing when it's actually not.
Then consider what it's like for serious basketball fans who grew up in the wake of Jordan, and who have come to see the ultimate individual performance being someone who can reliably get their shot as often as possible and then can reliably hit it. If you instead play in a way where you're off-ball, and your teammates aren't going to pass it to you unless the defense fails to do what it's attempting to do, that feels like you're not dominating, and thus don't belong on the same tier as the ultimates.
Had Curry and the Warriors been able to pull off Russellian levels of winning every year, perhaps that would have prevented people from focusing on the negatives. But they lost in 2016, and then made a move that felt like an admission that Curry's way just didn't work against the best competition, and I think that largely ever since, people have been writing a narrative about Curry and the Warriors that makes them seem not nearly as remarkable as they actually are.
In the end, if your healthy core can get to the finals 6 straight times, then your way works really, really well, and assessments of accomplishment need to adapt if they can't allocate credit appropriately for success that comes a different way.
And while we're focused on Curry here, to me this really does apply to the team. I think people have a tendency to underrate Curry, and Kerr, and Green, and Thompson. I think they have a tendency to allocate credit for things that are intangible either toward the individual they are assessing or away from the individual (toward his supporting context), and when it comes to the Warriors, I perpetually feel like whoever is being discussed, people have a tendency to allocate credit away from him...because when you do things differently, you don't fit the rubric people are used to using for evaluate you.
