2010-11 Player of the Year thread

[BROWN]

I'd like to vote Dirk.

[mysticbb]

I never said otherwise. It's not about being replaceable though. Terry is superior to Mahinmi as a basketball player. Why can't everybody just leave it at that?

I have to admit that you lost me, because somehow I thought you want to give equal credit to Terry and Mahinmi. What is the point of arguing about different players, when we want to ignore their different level of impact on the game? We can just stop arguing about individual players at all.

That's my point though! Rose wouldn't be an inferior basketball player, even though his impact would decrease compared to this past season.

Lower impact makes him less valuable. Overlapping skills sets lead to less impact for the individual player, leads to marginalizing his actual value to the team. Nothing else is what I said about James and Wade. If you want to say that a certain player could, if he would ... or something like that, we can again stop arguing about what a player actually really did.
If the vote is about their hypothetical performance level in another situation, I would pick James first and Wade 3rd, because it is easier imho to find the fitting players for them. But when I put those two players together I know that the sum will be likely lower than the individuals. And that is due to their skill sets and in that case we can't seperate between James and Wade here, I just don't see it.

If your saying Chicago achieved a better result because of relatively better offense without the stars playing, then maybe I am wrong.

No, you are right. The offense got worse and the defensive got better.

Although...I do have a concern when it comes to plus/minus numbers in general (not even particularly relating to OUR Rose/Dirk comparison here). One is minutes. Just as an example, not relating it to Rose vs. Dirk...Rose played 37.4 mpg, so he impacts the game for that long. It shouldn't be that hard for a defensively-oriented lineup to hold down the fort for 10ish minutes by playing balls-out on defense, especially if defense is what the coaching staff and general culture of the team hinges its success on. If you take Rose away and he plays 0 minutes, the 10 minute brigade wouldn't be able to play that way, especially with the offense sputtering and the turnovers piling up, leading to easy baskets for the opposition. Because 10 minutes turns into 48 minutes.

And yet somehow the Mavericks aren't able to do it, the Suns without Nash weren't able to do it. Those are very valuable 10 minutes. If the Mavericks would have been able to outscore their opponents without Nowitzki at the same rate as the Bulls without Rose, we would talk about a 70+ wins team here. The Suns would have been ahead of the Thunder in such a case. Just to show you how much of a difference that makes.

Rose allows a certain style of play to happen on both sides of the ball for 48 minutes, despite playing around 75 percent of those minutes. All stars do to a certain extent. But that's so dependent on coaching philosophy as well as minutes (there might be a decent difference between holding down the fort for 11 minutes as opposed to 17 minutes), that I don't believe plus/minus can pick up on that.

Why shouldn't that show up in the results? Because that is basically what you want to say. The notion that we can't see that "impact" in the results is something I never understood.

I never said Rose is a superior basketball player to Nowitzki first of all. I said I thought on the whole, he was more valuable for Chicago in the regular season than anybody else was to their respective team, despite Rose himself being a borderline top five basketball player.

How can someone be more valuable to his team, when the team without him is playing better than the other team without their best player while the team with him is playing worse than the other team with their best player? I don't quite get your argumentation here. If you want to say that Rose was more valuable, because he played overall more minutes which offset the difference in overall impact on a per possession basis, I can understand that, but the way you are arguing seems to me that you don't care so much about the minutes, but rather the real impact of a certain player.

Regarding this last part...James shouldn't be passive against Dallas. Dallas is a very good defensive team, but nothing James hasn't seen before in other years/series/games. Wade didn't take James out of the series- James did that all on his own. He should get blame for that. Not saying Wade was superman or anything, and I agree his awesome PER should be taken with a grain of salt, but he shouldn't be getting blamed for LBJ's own poor decisions.

What does "shouldn't be passive" even mean? What is James supposed to do? Going to Wade and taking the ball out of his hands? Wade also needed touches to get something done. But Wade overall has less of an ability to make his teammates better. More easy opportunities for your teammates = more confidence for them = better results for the team. That was the way the Cavaliers ended up with 60+ wins the previous two seasons, not because they had so much incredible talent. The mere presence of Wade on the court took some of that away. It is easy to say that James took himself out of the series by being passive, when in reality him being passive was rather the result than the cause.

[ronnymac2]

Look, I don't really care about Rose vs. Dirk. To repeat a previous statement which you ignored, Nowitzki over Rose. I was just sorting out some thoughts on plus/minus.

I just want to respond to your point about James and your point about value.

RE: "Overlapping skills sets lead to less impact for the individual player, leads to marginalizing his actual value to the team."

Yes. Yes. I completely agree with this statement.

But that doesn't make an actual player worse!

Re: "James shouldn't be passive" isn't hard to decipher. I'm not being cryptic here.

James overpassed. He overdid it. There come a few points in a game- I'm not even exclusively talking about the fourth quarter either- when a superstar needs to force the issue, for better or worse. At times, James didn't even give himself a chance to fail in those situations, let alone succeed. He never took the game and said "My team's result will be because of me." He didn't do it for six straight games. That's inexcusable. I'd rather see you act like a struggling superstar than a peripheral player.

Nevermind LeBron's defense being bad. ElGee made a post on his blog about his poor defensive showing. Hell, you could see his defensive impact waned relative to the Chicago series. THAT has nothing to do with Dwyane Wade; you don't share touches on defense.

[mopper8]

The total differential for the series after 5 games was Dallas +4. Only mystic could try to spin that as a convincing Dallas victory with a straight face.

[mopper8]

And I don't need cherry picked stats to tell me that Miami was or was not getting easy looks. Did you watch the games? Miami stayed in game 5 by getting open layup after open layup at the rim. HoopData says they shot 17-19 at the rim in that game and 7-13 from inside 10 feet. That's better than Dallas got for any game, period.

FTs and FT% aren't a minor stat, they're the absolute one thing a player can do offensively that the defense can't impact. The fact that Dallas can't take credit for Miami missing FTs is precisely why its important, because it demonstrates just how close the two teams were. And the larger point is that the reason small changes at the margin could alter the outcome of the series was precisely because it was so close. You seem unable to come to terms with this, but its obvious to basically everyone else here.

[mysticbb]

The total differential for the series after 5 games was Dallas +4. Only mystic could try to spin that as a convincing Dallas victory with a straight face.

I'm not even sure what your point is, but let me ask you were I wrote that the series up to game 5 was not close?