lessthanjake wrote:
I think 1.04 PPP is a lot better than that. The PPP calculation is more comparable to offensive efficiency, rather than TS%, since it is taking turnovers into account too and is basically subtracting out offensive rebounds that occurred on those possessions. So you might say, okay but a 104 ORTG isn’t good either. However, we can’t really compare it to general offensive ratings, because those are being dragged up a lot by situations that aren’t analogous to the situations in which isolations occur. In particular, offensive ratings are dragged up a lot by the fact that transition and second-chance shot attempts (particularly putbacks) are really efficient. But those aren’t the situations that isolations happen in.
What efficiency on isolations should be compared to is points per play in half-court offense. We have that from cleaningtheglass. See for instance, here: https://cleaningtheglass.com/stats/league/context?season=2017&seasontype=regseason&start=10/1/2017&end=10/15/2018#tab-offense_halfcourt_putbacks. At that link, you can see that the league average PPP in the half-court was 93.4 in the 2018 season. It was 94.2 in the 2018 playoffs. In 2019, it was 94.7 in the regular season and 93.9 in the playoffs. And, in 2020, it was 95.2 in the regular season and 98.3 in the playoffs. So yeah, peak Harden isolations were actually quite a lot more effective than average offense in half-court situations, including in the playoffs.
And, for reference, just perusing the regular-season numbers on this in the last several years, the league average is around 3-5 points higher in the last three seasons than it was before that, so that puts some context on Luka’s numbers that make it look less good.
I mean I'd imagine there aren't very many turnovers on iso possessions.
Plus both Luka and Harden are sort of methodical break you down kind of players. I've seen a stat (think NBArapm.com IIRC) that both guys are actually not good transition players. Maybe both guys' weakness is precisely not pushing the ball more and creating more transition opportunities rather than resorting to less efficient halfcourt offense. There's many angles to go dissecting this. Your analysis is quite good here and it's nice seeing the numbers all together.
I just favor Luka slightly over Harden. I feel like he's played better in key playoff games. Like I'd trust him more than Harden who just happened to have so many of his worst moments at bad times. It could just be noise given the small playoff samples of course so there is some uncertainty. I don't blame those who side with a more robust regular season resume of Harden.
