Worst team that had the best player in the league?

[EmpireFalls]

2021 Warriors?

[eminence]

I still don't understand what the hell was going on with Crowder in Cleveland, should've worked out better than it did, but just completely forgot how to play for half a season there.

[Doctor MJ]

Weird how all that incredible lineup success without Lebron — a 920-minute regular season bench sample where they still were being outscored — was absolutely nowhere to be found in the playoffs or in surrounding seasons.

This way of attempting to talk about basketball was outdated twenty years ago.

What incredible lineup success? We're just talking about whether the Cavs dropping to a neutral SRS team in '17-18 can be blamed entirely on him having a much worse supporting cast than before when we know that the issue was defense, and LeBron is absolutely known to conserve defensive energy on defense in many of his later seasons.

[Doctor MJ]

Well at the end of the day this isn't about biggest carry job though. It's worst team for the best player. So even though we can definitely criticize LeBron's defensive effort I still think its a very weak roster. So that's more of where the discussion would be. A team where the 3rd best player was who? A 36 yr old Kyle Korver I guess.

Right but the thing is: In the minutes without LeBron, those Cavs didn't actually look godawful, they looked better than they did sans LeBron in their earlier years.

But then those same starters opened 2019 getting blasted by 15-points a game and everyone promptly agreed it was time to blow it up...

Also this interpretation essentially suggests kyrie was a nuetral/negative impact rs player in Cleveland which...I guess is consistent with what happened in Boston but I'm not all too comfortable with.

The same team? Dude, to start the year 4 of the 7 rotation players from the prior playoffs were gone or injured, and after only 4 games Love was injured and gone at which time they started ramping up the primacy of a rookie (Sexton) who everyone knew wasn't ready to lead a successful team.

But listen, it's not like I was ever bullish on what those Cavs could be offensively without LeBron even if I thought they could have done better than they did with better health and strategy. They were always a great offense with LeBron, and there was no reason to think they'd be anything like great without him.

The thing I'm emphasizing is that the '17-18 Cavs ranked 29th on defense and had a considerably worse DRtg with LeBron on the floor despite the fact LeBron was obviously still capable of playing great defense. As such I would say it is naive to think of '17-18 LeBron as going hard on defense for 82 games like he was in most of his earlier career, or he was during the Laker championship year.

Not even a knock on the guy - doesn't really matter so long as the team gets to the playoffs and LeBron can then lift the team to the finals - but we should pretend the carry job when Atlas in this case was definitely doing some shrugging.

[AEnigma]

Weird how all that incredible lineup success without Lebron — a 920-minute regular season bench sample where they still were being outscored — was absolutely nowhere to be found in the playoffs or in surrounding seasons.

This way of attempting to talk about basketball was outdated twenty years ago.

What incredible lineup success? We're just talking about whether the Cavs dropping to a neutral SRS team in '17-18 can be blamed entirely on him having a much worse supporting cast than before when we know that the issue was defense, and LeBron is absolutely known to conserve defensive energy on defense in many of his later seasons.

Does that roster strike you as one which could have been significantly mitigated by a late prime Lebron trying harder on defence for 82 games? If Lebron was already in the habit of conserving energy, what made this year stand out? Why bring up on/off if you are not trying to point to bench results? You like to follow plus/minus: what do you make of the fact Lebron that season was +11.5 in wins and -14.3 in losses, and that the team in turn had a +10 margin of victory in wins but a -13 margin of defeat in losses? Do you find it at all worth noting that the Cavaliers had a 39-0 record when leading after three quarters, but accordingly were 11-32 when they failed to lead after three quarters? Does a broad trend, such as that SRS is typically a truer indicator of a team’s quality than its win total, apply universally to every individual circumstance? Is the goal of each game to win, or is it to pad a score for the sake of SRS or plus/minus? What is the point of carrying a team to a more competitive loss? Can a player perform in such a way that the team suffers more blowout losses, but without actually suffering appreciably more losses overall?

Yes, their SRS was worse. They also decreased their win total by a single game after trading away their second best player for functionally nothing. To consolidate all those semi-rhetorical questions into something more pointed: On a roster which had gone 4-23 (-12.4 net rating) in the prior three seasons without Lebron (4-13 with Kyrie), and would proceed to go 19-63 (-9.4 SRS) after Lebron left, is your approach here really that for one magical season they actually qualified as a competent roster (perhaps because Kyle Korver was playing twenty minutes a game on the bench), and therefore Lebron was not actually elevating one of the worst teams in the league to 50 wins (and a neutral SRS)?

[OhayoKD]

Right but the thing is: In the minutes without LeBron, those Cavs didn't actually look godawful, they looked better than they did sans LeBron in their earlier years.

But then those same starters opened 2019 getting blasted by 15-points a game and everyone promptly agreed it was time to blow it up...

Also this interpretation essentially suggests kyrie was a nuetral/negative impact rs player in Cleveland which...I guess is consistent with what happened in Boston but I'm not all too comfortable with.

The same team? Dude, to start the year 4 of the 7 rotation players from the prior playoffs were gone or injured, and after only 4 games Love was injured and gone at which time they started ramping up the primacy of a rookie (Sexton) who everyone knew wasn't ready to lead a successful team.

The "outscored by 15" is specifically referring to those 4 games Love played at the start. Their season-wide SRS ended up higher (-9).

I think you've already seen what happens when we isolate for lineups or games with the 2018 starters. Fwiw, it doesn't look much better if we focus on Kyle Korver who I believe you consider the biggest difference between the two units

https://www.statmuse.com/nba/ask/2019-cavs-record-with-and-without-kyle-korver

I think "No one was ready to lead" makes more sense than "Sexton wasn't ready to lead". If someone gives me a list of missing players I can do the "what happens to their next team" I did with the 84 Bulls. I haven't thought much about the difference between benches

But listen, it's not like I was ever bullish on what those Cavs could be offensively without LeBron even if I thought they could have done better than they did with better health and strategy. They were always a great offense with LeBron, and there was no reason to think they'd be anything like great without him.

The thing I'm emphasizing is that the '17-18 Cavs ranked 29th on defense and had a considerably worse DRtg with LeBron on the floor despite the fact LeBron was obviously still capable of playing great defense. As such I would say it is naive to think of '17-18 LeBron as going hard on defense for 82 games like he was in most of his earlier career, or he was during the Laker championship year.

He probably wasn't but the Cavs were probably going to be a bad defense either way considering what transpired in 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2019 without him there. Granted getting rid of Kyrie probably helped on that front. Lebron wasn't carrying the defense like we saw the previous three years, but that's a separate matter from assessing where 2018 ranks on the "best player with worst support or best player on the worst team" where I'd still probably go with Kareem in 75 or 76 (maybe Moses in 82?).

Not even a knock on the guy - doesn't really matter so long as the team gets to the playoffs and LeBron can then lift the team to the finals - but we should pretend the carry job when Atlas in this case was definitely doing some shrugging.

Well it's not a RS carry-job like 09 or even 16/17 were, but that's also reflected in the results with Lebron being worse; I don't think we need to treat the Cavs like a solid defensive cast to get there. As is, Harden would have been my MVP pick either way.

Of course how you rate the carry job changes depending on whether you're more interested in wins or SRS (there's pros/cons for both)