MyUniBroDavis wrote:Djoker wrote:MyUniBroDavis wrote:
Awards for defense are largely meaningless, first team selections and all that. Smart wasn’t even the best defender on his team for example
Defensive valuations do have a large margin of error, and the available evidence we do have is limited.
This evidence points to him either being a great perimeter defender, based on the 91 rapm data, which for the bulls tracks about a bit less than half the season, or a negative defender if you consider the season he left and got replaced with unspectacular defenders taking the bulk of the remaining minutes the bulls got better on that end.
Otoh, we do have a good amount of evidence that lebrons defense as a whole through the 2016 season reached pretty near best defender in the nba levels, and seemingly did so completely in the playoffs
Since the argument is about playoff lebron, we have a situation where you could construct a reasonable argument playoff lebron was a best defender in the league type defender, in a world dray didn’t exist
I don’t understand why it’s baffling to rate Jordan’s defense on the top end of where the objective evidence rates him? If we argue about DPOY and all defensive teams we should bring Kobe’s peak up to top 10 as well.
It’s fair to say, of the objective evidence we have that rates Jordan from a -1 to a +1 on defense, the evidence for -1 can be explained, and the evidence for +1 isn’t fully definitive.
To follow up with, people said he was good in D so therefore he’s actually a +3 does not follow at all, if anything that’s far more baffling
Realistically the fact that their defense improved without Jordan despite pippen missing 10 games can’t be explained by “they tried harder”
If the opposite happened, their offensive performance remained mostly unchanged with Jordan’s departure, it would have been extremely damning to Jordan’s offensive impact.
I’m willing to say, okay they played on a chip on their shoulder so that explains why their defense didn’t get worse without Jordan. On the other hand, the fact that it got better, while not damning to the point of me saying “well Jordan is a negative defender” is pretty obviously a strong statement against Jordan is as good as a lebron in a 2016 playoff run that arguably had top tier defensice impact
To say, the best evidence we have in evaluating defense is limited evidence that suggests he was very good but unspectacular defensively, therefore he must have been absolutely incredible because people said he was great on defense is a far greater leap in logic than taking the evidence and only taking the data that calls him an elite defender while believing that the evidence that shows him as an arguable negative can be explained away but still is an important piece of evidence hat suggests he wasn’t close to a top tier of defensive impact that you are suggesting
Again, imagine if the bulls got better offensively without Jordan? Them trying harder would certainly not be a very viable explanation
In any case there’s a huge jump between we don’t have a lot of data on him and I think the data low on him can be explained away to an extent, to he was a best defender in the league type of player
Edit: squared2020 updated the rapm data, mjs defense has gone down from an elite perimeter defender to a decent one with a now 57/82 game sample, so I think it’s fair to say it’s fairly decent evidence now
Even more so now I have trouble believing MJ was reallly particularly close to playoff bron defensively, because the original point of we don’t have data suggesting he wasn’t a top tier defensive guy seems to be no longer valid, now we have a few data points saying so
(The standard dev has gone down a bit, but MJs defense has dropped from +1.5 to +0.6)
Is the combination of the fact that npi rapm seemingly has him as a more of a good defensive wing than an elite one, and the data of the team without him for a whole year paints him as a bad one enough to dispel that he was an elite defensive wing?
Probably not, I do think he was still an elite defender, but we are now in a situation where we do have more data on Jordan than others of that era in terms of their defensive impact, the combination of him dipping out without the roster changing too much + NPI RAPM data, and it isn’t particularly impressive
Ok a couple of points I want to raise or re-raise here:
1. First of all regarding the 1993 and 1994 Bulls... Defense is largely based on effort. Therefore trying to equate the Bulls getting better on defense with a hypothetical scenario in which they get better on offense is ridiculous. Simply by taking regular season games more seriously, a team can put up much better defensive numbers. Not the case on offense where losing a player of Jordan's caliber cannot be replaced.
2. And then of course there is a major fallacy in using 1993 Jordan to discredit 1991 Jordan's defense. It would be like me using 2018 Lebron's lack of defense to discredit his 2016 defense. How would you feel about that?
3. From Square2020's RAPM data, it includes 57 of the Bulls games in which they went 37-20. In the remaining 25 games their record is a shopping 24-1. It's safe to say that Jordan's RAPM for the entire season is a lot higher. Is it +8? +9? We don't know but the Bulls approximate margin of victory is +12.2 in the 24-1 stretch so Jordan's RAPM probably jumps a lot from what is a third of the season absolutely hammering opponents.
4. So we are just going to ignore defensive awards, opinions of contemporaries etc. when evaluating defense. Surely there was a conspiracy to give Jordan those awards. Everyone watching him at the time had no clue what they were seeing. Peeps on forums 30 years later know a lot better having seen a fraction of the games. I mean that's got to be it.
5. You mentioned in an earlier post that 2016 Lebron is a prime Pippen/Kawhi level defender. Ok. Jordan and Pippen played in the same era on the same team. Where is the evidence that Pippen is a whole tier better than Jordan defensively? Because that evidence would then show that Lebron >> Jordan.
Defensive RAPM
https://basketball-analytics.gitlab.io/rapm-data/1996-1997 Regular Season
Jordan: +1.0
Pippen: +1.0
Rodman: +1.2
1997 Playoffs
Jordan: +1.8
Pippen: +1.1
Rodman: +0.9
1997-1998 Regular Season
Jordan: +0.6
Pippen: -0.7
Rodman: -0.5
1998 Playoffs:
Jordan: +0.6
Pippen: +0.1
Rodman: +0.7
Defensive RPM
[url]
http://www.espn.com/nba/statistics/rpm/_/year/1997/sort/DRPM[/url]
1996-1997 Regular Season
Jordan: +2.47
Pippen: +0.90
Rodman: N/A
1997-1998 Regular Season
Jordan: +2.15
Pippen: N/A
Rodman: +0.86
Defensive PIPM
[url]
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c-vFm9T5aVltZ8btJX-5s_OSk2OYgcuzEYtN3XFruY0/edit#gid=90945325[/url]
1987-1988 Regular Season
Jordan: +2.2
Pippen: +0.9
Grant: +0.6
1988-1989 Regular Season
Jordan: +1.4
Pippen: +1.1
Grant: +0.4
1989-1990 Regular Season
Jordan: +0.5
Pippen: +1.4
Grant: +0.2
1990-1991 Regular Season
Jordan: +1.7
Pippen: +2.1
Grant: +0.5
1991-1992 Regular Season
Jordan: +1.4
Pippen: +1.6
Grant: +1.8
1992-1993 Regular Season
Jordan: +1.1
Pippen: +1.1
Grant: +0.9
1995-1996 Regular Season
Jordan: +1.3
Pippen: +1.7
Rodman: +1.4
1996-1997 Regular Season
Jordan: +1.5
Pippen: +1.3
Rodman: +1.8
1997-1998 Regular Season
Jordan: +0.0
Pippen: +0.9
Rodman: +1.1
Absolutely no evidence that Pippen is a tier ahead of Jordan defensively...
6. I never discounted the possibility that peak Lebron was a bit more impactful on defense than peak Jordan. That's a reasonable take. But a whole tier better is hard to accept. And again, the only thing that I can agree with your previous post is that there is no evidence to make this kind of claim.
1) while it’s true much of defense is based on effort, at the same time if Jordan was a comparable defender to 2016 playoff bron, who by most evidence appears DPOY level, it’s hard to believe that effort alone could make up for it
2) if you find evidence for Jordan specifically not trying in 1993 on defense then that’s fair, but I think that saying at the very least 1993 Jordan wasn’t very impactful in defense is 1991. I’m not saying this is automatically meaning he wasn’t good on defense, but I am saying that this was a prime year
3) I agree his overall RAPM probably looks far more impressive, but if you’re talking about the February to March stretch most of the difference was seen offensively iirc, so most of his improvement is likely gonna be offensive.
4) if we were ignoring that, the take would be that since the evidence seems to point that Jordan wasn’t a very impactful defender then he’s not an impactful defender, which isn’t what I’m saying.
5) hmm? I don’t recall saying pippen or Kawhi specifically, I think playoff bron was a step above while RS bron was a step below.
PIPM for pre 1997 doesn’t really make much sense, because it used luck adjusted RAPM as a measurement iirc, which we don’t have, so I don’t really know what that dataset is but it’s more likely a box score estimate of what it could be rather than anything else. RPM too.
The gitlab data is pretty bad, I think if you ask ceilingraiser or eminence they’d explain that better
Accross the court has numbers for 1997 and 1998 rapm, where they seen rather close in 1997 with MJ having a lead and pippen having a bit more of one in 1998. More importantly lebron is a tier ahead of those seasons based on data.
Whilst it would be reasonable to say Jordan was older and not as good on defense (although elgee I recall disagrees based on his tracking), that doesn’t equal Jordan is close to lebron on defense (keep in mind brons defensive peak came at 31, and then 35)
6) I feel there’s reasonable evidence lebron was a DPOY caliber player in the playoffs and as a whole had a defensive season as impactful as you’d expect from the best bigs of a year. I don’t see a reason to say Jordan was at that level.
It’s like saying we don’t have evidence Jordan was bull Russell but he might have been.
Here’s what I will say.
On the 1993 vs 1994 data. This does at the very least prove 1993 Jordan wasn’t as impactful defensively as you suggest. I agree defense is more about effort than offense is, but losing an ATG perimeter defender isn’t gonna typically improve your defense if you try harder, that’s a lot. More than that, he appeared in the defensive first team that year, so if we go by the route of believing contemporaries than him having a 2018 lebron season where everyone knew he wasn’t trying in that end isn’t valid. Their playoff defense didn’t stand out much either it seems, off of a cursory look
Had those teams lost lebron, and they were relatively cruising in the regular season, they would clearly be a bottom tier team defensively, I don’t think that’s very debatable. We’ve seen what happens when lebron went from his RS cruising on defense to cruising even more and becoming more of a neutral on defense even.
Implying that trying harder would be enough to mitigate Jordan’s impact basically supports my point, as lebrons that year impact couldn’t be mitigated by the team putting in 110%
I also think the argument here doesn’t make sense. I don’t have any reason to have X player at level X, I have lebron at this level, the onus is on you to prove that Jordan was at that level, since I’ve already made my post on bron. Showing that’s that shows pippen wasn’t all that as well isn’t going to prove that point, which is what that data suggest rather than Jordan being close to bron
As a whole we’ve assumeed something along the lines that lebron was a +1.5-2 on defense while Jordan was a +1.25-1.75.
I’ve made an argument that he’s more of a +3, +4 on defense, if you disagree with that sure, make an argument for that, but boosting up Jordan because I boosted bron on defense doesn’t make sense
As for the data you posted, let me give a rundown
The gitlab data is just known to be wonky as hell, you could ask others for more details but there’s a reason no one really ever posts RAPM from there.
Pre 1997 PIPM data isn’t really
While to me RPM is essentially worthless, it is a bit more interesting since at the very least it isn’t a completely different measurement like PIPM or invalid like gitlab, but you would need the standard deviations to compare accross seasons. The 2016 dataset looks as if it has a decently lower standard deviation than the 1997 one off a cursory glance, so a cross season comparison would favor bron a bit more than it already does. Rpm includes playoffs despite the game count btw, as far as I know.
So we have three datasets. What was brons pipm? That would be interesting, but I don’t think people that didn’t access the Google doc before he probated have access. I know his playoff PIPM led the league iirc
The RPM one seems to favor bron at a glance, esp considering the range and just distribution of values implies a different standard deviation, with the two caveats that we don’t have one for peak Jordan, and RPM changed its formula and privated it and it’s no longer really used here since that happened.
No where did I say there is definitive evidence Jordan wasn’t that impactful, if you believe he was that’s fine, there is limited evidence that suggests otherwise that is I think fair to mention
To say however that it’s ludicrous to claim lebron being a tier higher defensively, when my original thing was saying lebron was a tier higher defensively where he is normally rated on that end for this season, implies that because lebron was underrated Jordan must have been as well
Where do we stop? If someone that’s lebron with Kevin Garnett’s defense comes along so we say that person isn’t better than Jordan on defense either?
Here’s the crux of my issue.
I can agree that the evidence for defense pre 1997 is generally quite limited. While the evidence we do have for the 91-93 suggests he’s decent rather than elite, there are caveats that one applies to the 1993 season, the other data set isn’t complete yet
I don’t think that equals throwing them away, but it’s enough for me personally to say that 91 Jordan was probably an elite perimeter defensive season
However, the idea that, because I’m high on lebrons 2016 defense I must also be high on Jordan’s makes no sense which is the implication here. So far the argument doesn’t seem to be “why bron wasn’t that impactful” but more so “Bron shouldn’t have been more impactful than Jordan” as if there needs to be a certain distance between them.
If you want to make the claim that they’re roughly equal, I think either start by explaining why Jordan should rank that high outside of contemporary opinion, or why lebron shouldn’t rank where I rank him despite my post.
As it stands the same arguments could be made for Marcus smart being a better defender now than peak lebron which obviously isn’t true
I've really enjoyed looking at your RAPM stats.
