lessthanjake wrote:f4p wrote:and of course, the next year, the biggest series was against the rockets. in the first 5 games when the rockets looked to be at parity, KD was at 31.2/5.6/2.0 on 59.9 TS% (+14 on court). steph was at 23.8/6.4/4.8 on 56.1 TS% (+10 on court). they are pretty even in the 2 games with no cp3 around for steph.
What was the +/- by the end of the series? The answer is that Steph had the best +/- of any player in the series. If the best criticism of a guy is to look at a portion of a difficult series and say he didn’t have the best +/- at that point, when he ultimately did have the best +/- by the end, then I think it’s pretty safe to say that there’s not much to criticize.
i wrote a lot of numbers to the left of the plus/minus. and yes, once cp3 was injured and the warriors could breathe a sigh of relief, steph did pile up the plus/minus in a blowout game 6.
and then, the next year, what was assumed to be the biggest series (before KD got hurt) was once again against the rockets and again, we get KD at 33.2/5/4.4 and 58.9 TS% (21.8 game score even missing part of a game) and steph having maybe his worst series ever (or the 2016 finals) with 23.8/5/4.7 on 53.9 TS% (14.6 game score). and steph's stats were even worse through the first 5 games, when KD kept the warriors afloat by going nuclear.
Again, this is another point based on a portion of a series. What happened after that? Durant went down and the Warriors won the series without dropping another game. If *that* series is the evidence that Steph was not as important to the Warriors as Durant, then there’s really no argument at all.
except it's not just a portion. it's 5 of the 6 games. the other one was 5 out of 7 when the talent was at least in the realm of being even. i think i said it somewhere else, but steph is like tom brady. no two players have seemingly survived bad performances better than those two (mostly due to defense and, in brady's case, coaching). except steph doesn't have the most championships ever and doesn't have about a 30% elite longevity advantage on everyone else in history.
steph can play badly for a sizable chunk of the 2015 finals, but a little lineup change and some suffocating defense from the warriors and steph gets a title. he can play his worst series ever in the 2016 finals, bad by any great player standard, and still be one minute away from a title. the one real series he has to play in 2018, after already missing 6 games to start the playoffs, he looks pretty mediocre through 5 games. and it wasn't like he was heroic in losses. his one really good game in those 5 was in the game 3 blowout. his play in the 3 losses was pretty bad at 22/7/5 on 50.4 TS%. arguably sub-2016 finals level. and yet he's only down 3-2 with the best defense in the playoffs behind him and KD playing better.
i've broken it down before. but in his next big series against the rockets in 2019, by the time we reached halftime of game 6, the series was 5.5 games old. in those 5.5 games, steph was averaging 20/4/4 on 48 TS%. that is absurdly bad. and he was up 3-2! and tied at halftime of game 6 with 0 points and 3 fouls! that is a staggeringly fortunate turn of events to play that badly, while the other team's best player is having his best series ever, and then just get to show up in the 2nd half of game 6 and have people say "see, it was all steph."
time and time again, in the warriors actual biggest series, KD outperforms steph but steph does enough in the other series that somehow it's "his team". even in the finals, the warriors lost 4 out of 5 games KD didn't play with KD popping in for 11 minutes in one game to score 11 points on 100% shooting and providing all of the margin of victory (+7 with KD, won by 6).
As an initial matter, Durant did not score 11 points on 100% shooting in that game. He shot 3 of 5. Anyways, more importantly, what happened in that Raptors series is clearly not some perfect experiment regarding Durant’s influence, since Klay Thompson also got injured. Klay played 4 games and then most of another that he got injured in. In those games, the Warriors went 2-2 and were ahead late in the third quarter when Klay went out in the 5th game Klay played. The Raptors objectively derived their advantage in the series from the portions of the series where the Warriors were without Durant *and* Klay (which unfortunately for the Warriors also happened to be in Warriors home games).
ahh, it was 100% on 3's. but back to the larger point, one i tried to make in the hakeem/duncan argument. getting to survive bad performances is so important. and something very few players get to do. it's not just that someone like hakeem won, it's that he barely got a chance to win and he took it. there was no finals to blow and then just come back for 4 more finals after you add KD and play with the best defensive player of your generation. there's not just 2 decades of good supporting casts and coaching like for duncan. there was basically 1994 with homecourt advantage after the sonics were knocked out. and hakeem killed it, and then did it again in 1995 in even more dire circumstances. at the exact moments that huge performances were needed, and in the only moments where huge performances could get him to the promised land, hakeem came through.
steph is like the anti-hakeem. he showed up to 5 finals without a finals mvp, even while winning 3 of them. it's difficult to find all of the really great moments in the big situations that aren't just like "he was scorching hot against 2019 portland".
- he plays badly enough in his first finals that his team needs a lineup change against an injured team to survive.
- he does have a very good moment in game 7 against OKC when his team really needed it, but...
- then he plays even worse in his next finals and loses a 3-1 lead as a 73 win team.
- he has his best statistical playoffs ever in 2017, but it's in the easiest playoffs of his career. he could have ranged anywhere from "all-time great" to "slightly above average" and the result would have still been a title. again, anti-hakeem.
- he puts up 22/7/5 on 50.4 TS% in 3 losses to the 2018 rockets, a team that had less talent and also 2 supposedly huge playoff chokers in harden and cp3 that should have made it easy for the warriors. then he gets saved by cp3's injury.
- he has maybe his worst series ever against the 2019 rockets when that looked like the biggest series of the year. but then has amazing stats against portland. he has a good finals but ultimately it's hard to look at KD as superfluous when they still ultimately lost 4 of the 5 non-KD games.
- 2022, he finally has a game that moves him up for me. game 4 against boston. down 2-1, possibly not playing due to injury. and drops 43 and saves the series. all-time moment in a high leverage situation.
but it took us like 10 years and 6 finals to get there. how many other players don't make the finals with some of steph's playoff performances? how many others just have their career end 0 for 5 on finals mvp chances if their team is not paying hundreds of millions in luxury tax to keep the band together for a decade?
and even in 2022, steph is hardly inspiring in the west playoffs and yet easily trounces teams with jokic and luka and beats memphis. steph had 3 games in 2022 playoffs with a TS% under 50%, including one under 40%. what was the result? win, win, and win. and you can't just say the word gravity. he also has gravity when his TS% is 70%. or 80%. or 90%. 60-70% with gravity is why steph is all-time great. 40% with gravity is worse. and yet, always surviving the bad performances.
**i was gonna say harden was the anti-hakeem but he seems more like a mini-wilt. gaudy regular season numbers that never quite translate to the playoffs. reputation for choking away title chances that doesn't really hold up when you see who they lost to and that they were basically supposed to lose all the series they did (harden even more than wilt). but also never really won series they weren't supposed to win with huge performances and also a couple of really uninspiring results.
