'17-'18 POY discussion

[Joey Wheeler]

Durant is just too good in the Finals. When the stakes are the highest and he goes all out he's just an unstoppable scorer. He has now played 13 Finals games in his career, never scored less than 25 points, almost always on insane efficiency. I think at this point the sample size is big enough for a Jordan vs Durant to be a legitimate debate for best scorer in Finals history (and NBA history by extension).

[ronnymac2]

Durant is just too good in the Finals. When the stakes are the highest and he goes all out he's just an unstoppable scorer. He has now played 13 Finals games in his career, never scored less than 25 points, almost always on insane efficiency. I think at this point the sample size is big enough for a Jordan vs Durant to be a legitimate debate for best scorer in Finals history (and NBA history by extension).

Dude, no. Durant vs. Jordan is not a debate when it comes to scoring. MJ's scoring is a level ahead. Skillset, TOV%, ORTG, actual volume...none of it in favor of KD. KD isn't even a better finals scorer than Shaq over Shaq's first 13 Finals games, and Shaq played 4 of those going up directly against Hakeem Olajuwon.

[Joey Wheeler]

Durant is just too good in the Finals. When the stakes are the highest and he goes all out he's just an unstoppable scorer. He has now played 13 Finals games in his career, never scored less than 25 points, almost always on insane efficiency. I think at this point the sample size is big enough for a Jordan vs Durant to be a legitimate debate for best scorer in Finals history (and NBA history by extension).

Dude, no. Durant vs. Jordan is not a debate when it comes to scoring. MJ's scoring is a level ahead. Skillset, TOV%, ORTG, actual volume...none of it in favor of KD. KD isn't even a better finals scorer than Shaq over Shaq's first 13 Finals games, and Shaq played 4 of those going up directly against Hakeem Olajuwon.

Come again?

2012 Finals - 30ppg on 65% TS
2017 Finals - 35ppg on 70% TS

Bar the worst game of his Finals career in game 4, 2018 will be more 30+ on 60%+

Shaq can't touch this kind of scoring prowess. Durant just has much more range, he can score from basically anywhere on the floor up to 35 feet, and is a much better free throw shooter. Shaq is the best scorer ever if you feed him the ball in the low post, but Durant is just so much more versatile, this isn't even a contest. Shaq was better than Durant through his first three Finals series pretty clearly, but he was not better when we're talking simply about scoring.

Regarding the comparison with Jordan, you're neglecting to mention efficiency. Durant is the most efficient high volume scorer ever, there's a clear gap in his favor there making up for Jordan's higher volume. I mean, Jordan is definitely the clearly better player overall, but when it comes to pure scoring ability Durant has a good case; never seen anyone score with such ease and efficiency.

[Dr Positivity]

Durant has been good in the Finals but the GSW defensive attention really plays in his favor. The Cavs already have no chance to stop GSW from getting open 3s and dunks, they can't start committing more to KD

[HeartBreakKid]

Durant is guarded by literally one person...so no, he's probably not as good of a scorer as Shaq or Jordan.

[therealbig3]

Trying to separate just scoring from how good an offensive player is overall is pointless imo. How good you are as a scorer is only important as far as it helps your team's offense, and that means being able to leverage your scoring ability into looks for your teammates as well (the gravity that people refer to). Durant just doesn't have that on the level of Jordan or Shaq or LeBron...or Nash.

I would take Nash as an offensive player over Durant. Who would I take as the better scorer? Who really cares? The important thing is offense as a whole, and who's contributing more to the team's offense.

[Jaivl]

Depends on your definition of "scorer". If speaking strictly about finishing, Durant is probably the/one of the GOAT.

[Ballerhogger]

Durant range separates him from jordan.

[WarriorGM]

I'm curious who was POY last year? Could someone give a link to the discussion?

[Peregrine01]

It's hard to deny Durant a spot after that game 3 performance, not gonna lie. I know I'm being prisoner of the moment, but very few players in the league can do what he did that game, and Oladipo isn't one of them.

The #5 spot is going to be really hard for me to decide.

I know one thing...Curry is absolutely not on my top 5. At this point, I feel like he doesn't ever want to be FMVP.

Yeah the thing is that Durant really has carried the heaviest load on the team this season and it's still true in the finals. How can you be a Top 3 level talent carrying the load for the NBA champs and not be a worthy candidate for a Top 5 slot?

Well, you could argue that Durant carrying the heaviest load on the team led to an underachieving RS AND PS that was objectively worse than last year, and that the team really only managed to play "great" when it went away from that and focused more on Steph. That's been the argument that I've pretty much been going with all year.

However, Steph is just not a consistently great playoff performer and so the argument that they NEED to go through Durant like this carries a lot of weight, because Steph isn't that reliable. Furthermore, that game 3 from Durant was the stuff of legends, and I'll be honest, I would never choose Oladipo over Durant for a PS game. However, that's not really the premise of POY, so it's a difficult choice for me.

I feel like the biggest hole (if you can call it one) in Steph’s game is his decision making. And I think part of that stems from his natural instincts as a scorer. You can see him pressing more when his shot isn’t falling and he often forces shots in an attempt to get into a rhythm.

But the interesting thing about Steph is that he doesn’t suffer from lack of court awareness or tunnel vision issues that a lot of scorers have. IMO, his ability to see the court and get teammates easy looks and his pass-making ability rivals that of Nash. The difference between Steph and Nash, though, is that Steph’s first instinct is to look for his shot while Nash’s is to find teammates. And sometimes when his shot is off, he continues to press instead of probing and exploiting easier opportunities, which Nash was just an absolute master at. And because the 3 is Steph’s main scoring weapon, he can go on cold spells. I think that this accounts for a lot of his inconsistency and that he still struggles with that scoring/passing dichotomy with Durant on the team.

[therealbig3]

Yeah the thing is that Durant really has carried the heaviest load on the team this season and it's still true in the finals. How can you be a Top 3 level talent carrying the load for the NBA champs and not be a worthy candidate for a Top 5 slot?

Well, you could argue that Durant carrying the heaviest load on the team led to an underachieving RS AND PS that was objectively worse than last year, and that the team really only managed to play "great" when it went away from that and focused more on Steph. That's been the argument that I've pretty much been going with all year.

However, Steph is just not a consistently great playoff performer and so the argument that they NEED to go through Durant like this carries a lot of weight, because Steph isn't that reliable. Furthermore, that game 3 from Durant was the stuff of legends, and I'll be honest, I would never choose Oladipo over Durant for a PS game. However, that's not really the premise of POY, so it's a difficult choice for me.

I feel like the biggest hole (if you can call it one) in Steph’s game is his decision making. And I think part of that stems from his natural instincts as a scorer. You can see him pressing more when his shot isn’t falling and he often forces shots in an attempt to get into a rhythm.

But the interesting thing about Steph is that he doesn’t suffer from lack of court awareness or tunnel vision issues that a lot of scorers have. IMO, his ability to see the court and get teammates easy looks and his pass-making ability rivals that of Nash. The difference between Steph and Nash, though, is that Steph’s first instinct is to look for his shot while Nash’s is to find teammates. And sometimes when his shot is off, he continues to press instead of probing and exploiting easier opportunities, which Nash was just an absolute master at. And because the 3 is Steph’s main scoring weapon, he can go on cold spells. I think that this accounts for a lot of his inconsistency and that he still struggles with that scoring/passing dichotomy with Durant on the team.

I would disagree with the Nash comparison. Really don't feel that Curry has the feel or vision or ability to manipulate defenses the way Nash did. He's just far more dangerous off the dribble with his shot, so his gravity is superior. Part of that is mentality, since Nash never looked for his own shot as aggressively as Curry does, as you mentioned.

It's true, I tend to agree that Curry isn't as bad as most volume scorers when it comes to pressing the issue when his shot is off, but he still tends to go on very ugly stretches where he forces his shots or commits careless turnovers when he's pressing too much. And he seems to be far more affected by injury than most other stars, because his rhythm gets completely thrown off, even if he is healthy. And of course, just being a smaller guard without elite athleticism, he can be physically bullied and that can take a definite toll on him and affect his shot-making.

IDK where I stand on Curry. On one hand, I see him opening up so many things for teammates in a way nobody else ever has. But on the other hand, with how inconsistent the Warriors offense has been and how much of that is linked to how inconsistent he's been, the results don't support him being on the level as the offensive GOATs throughout history. How much of that is variance, and how much of that is Curry simply being more susceptible to PS defense than other great offensive players?

I mean, we can say what we want about Durant, and I agree with most of the criticisms...but he was part of some truly fantastic offenses in OKC, doing what he did in tandem with Westbrook, and a couple of those offenses were very impressive in the PS as well. Feel like this isn't as clear-cut in terms of "Curry is the gold standard of offensive basketball and Durant is just the media darling that plays the outdated basketball they glorify" theme that I had been leaning towards in the past. Because at the end of the day, Curry just looks more stoppable than Durant in the PS, and I don't just mean in an individual sense. There's a certain resiliency that seems to be lacking from a Curry-led offense come playoff time, that a Durant or Kobe led offense seems to have. And LeBron is just a different beast altogether, who takes a good to great RS offense and just transforms them into something else entirely.

[iggymcfrack]

I'm curious who was POY last year? Could someone give a link to the discussion?

viewtopic.php?t=1587974&start=40

Here’s the voting thread. LeBron had 19/25 first place votes with 3 each for Westbrook and Curry.

[Joey Wheeler]

Trying to separate just scoring from how good an offensive player is overall is pointless imo. How good you are as a scorer is only important as far as it helps your team's offense, and that means being able to leverage your scoring ability into looks for your teammates as well (the gravity that people refer to). Durant just doesn't have that on the level of Jordan or Shaq or LeBron...or Nash.

I would take Nash as an offensive player over Durant. Who would I take as the better scorer? Who really cares? The important thing is offense as a whole, and who's contributing more to the team's offense.

I understand your perspective, but it's been shown many times that deep in the playoffs being a great individual scorer is super valuable, often even decisive. Even the best team offenses can break down in high leverage playoff situations; we could but don't have to look any further than this year's WCF, Rockets did a great job of containing the Warriors offense... except Durant, who just couldn't be contained. They tried almost everyone on him, even sent some doubles, but didn't really matter, he just shot over them.

Nash might generate better team offenses in general, but in a high stakes playoff series give me the 7-foot scoring machine whose 'spots' on the court are basically anywhere within 35 feet regardless of whether or not there's a defender in his face.

Larger point here being that separating the 'best scorers' is more than just a futile exercise/cherry picking one aspect of overall offense.

[MartinToVaught]

Durant is just too good in the Finals. When the stakes are the highest and he goes all out he's just an unstoppable scorer. He has now played 13 Finals games in his career, never scored less than 25 points, almost always on insane efficiency. I think at this point the sample size is big enough for a Jordan vs Durant to be a legitimate debate for best scorer in Finals history (and NBA history by extension).

The stakes are never high when you join a 73-win team. Sorry, but making easy shots while single-covered (thanks to the gravity created by the two greatest shooters in NBA history) against a bad defensive team is not impressive. Durant has shown throughout his career that when the stakes are actually high and there's real adversity, he's very stoppable.

[MartinToVaught]

I understand your perspective, but it's been shown many times that deep in the playoffs being a great individual scorer is super valuable, often even decisive. Even the best team offenses can break down in high leverage playoff situations; we could but don't have to look any further than this year's WCF, Rockets did a great job of containing the Warriors offense... except Durant, who just couldn't be contained. They tried almost everyone on him, even sent some doubles, but didn't really matter, he just shot over them.

The revisionist history based on one game is really something. Durant choked down the stretch of that Rockets series. He played too much isoball, made poor decisions, missed easy passes, took bad shots. Curry and Klay bailed him out. He finally had to face anything resembling adversity for the first time since leaving OKC, and he was shook.

[Doctor MJ]

Durant range separates him from jordan.

Jumping in here to a conversation I know started posts before. I think we need to be clear what we mean.

In this day and age, if Jordan couldn't get a lot better from 3, it would be a major handicap next to someone like Durant. It's not crazy to say that given what we now see as key to building the best player, Durant is better than Jordan.

At the same time though, a previous poster gave Durant's stats in the finals, and those require context - with the biggest caveat, as others pointed out, is that opponents are literally prioritizing the coverage against one of Durant's teammates. This is just clearly a massive advantage.

The other thing though is the ultra-efficiency of players today. I often say that Jordan's skills wouldn't translate as well today as they did in the paradigm of his era and people respond by pointing out the incredible luxury of facing a spaced-out defense. And they aren't wrong. Jordan would probably be more efficient today from a raw TS%. He wouldn't be the outlier he was back in his day, and i don't think he'd match the kind of efficiency top stars get today unless he really improved his 3, but he could raise his TS. And thus what that means is raw TS comparison here between eras has some real issues.

[Joey Wheeler]

I understand your perspective, but it's been shown many times that deep in the playoffs being a great individual scorer is super valuable, often even decisive. Even the best team offenses can break down in high leverage playoff situations; we could but don't have to look any further than this year's WCF, Rockets did a great job of containing the Warriors offense... except Durant, who just couldn't be contained. They tried almost everyone on him, even sent some doubles, but didn't really matter, he just shot over them.

The revisionist history based on one game is really something. Durant choked down the stretch of that Rockets series. He played too much isoball, made poor decisions, missed easy passes, took bad shots. Curry and Klay bailed him out. He finally had to face anything resembling adversity for the first time since leaving OKC, and he was shook.

Define 'down the stretch'. It is true that Durant kind of 'choked' at the end of game 4, he should have taken the shot himself instead of passing to Klay, but he also averaged 30 on 60% TS for the series and his isolation buckets basically clinched both games that GSW won in Houston, especially game 2.

Also, even in series where Durant wasn't that great overall, be it in GSW or OKC, scoring the ball was never actually his problem. Not once in his career has Durant fail to average at least 25 in a series, unless you count last year's R1 series vs Portland where he only played 56 minutes all series (and actually scored 32 in the one game he fully played). A prime Durant putting up a lot of points is basically the safest bet you can make in the NBA, no matter who the opponent is. I know it's just one series, but I honestly can't imagine a prime Durant ever having a series where he scores 18 on 54% TS like Lebron did vs the Mavs in 2011, a bad series for Durant scoring-wise looks like ~25ppg on merely moderate efficiency.

[Joey Wheeler]

Durant range separates him from jordan.

Jumping in here to a conversation I know started posts before. I think we need to be clear what we mean.

In this day and age, if Jordan couldn't get a lot better from 3, it would be a major handicap next to someone like Durant. It's not crazy to say that given what we now see as key to building the best player, Durant is better than Jordan.

At the same time though, a previous poster gave Durant's stats in the finals, and those require context - with the biggest caveat, as others pointed out, is that opponents are literally prioritizing the coverage against one of Durant's teammates. This is just clearly a massive advantage.

The other thing though is the ultra-efficiency of players today. I often say that Jordan's skills wouldn't translate as well today as they did in the paradigm of his era and people respond by pointing out the incredible luxury of facing a spaced-out defense. And they aren't wrong. Jordan would probably be more efficient today from a raw TS%. He wouldn't be the outlier he was back in his day, and i don't think he'd match the kind of efficiency top stars get today unless he really improved his 3, but he could raise his TS. And thus what that means is raw TS comparison here between eras has some real issues.

Jordan would be an incredible scorer today even without a 3-ball.

But I think people undersell just how crazy a scorer Durant is. Though he shoots more 3s than Jordan, he also takes a huge amount of contested midrange 2s, it's not like his shot profile is what analytics believe to be the most efficient. Those shots just are efficient because he's the one taking them.

Durant's 'sweet spots' basically means anywhere inside of 35 feet and it's almost impossible to bother or contest his shot since his 7 foot. He also doesn't need screens or picks, what he does is almost independent of the offense and the defense. We had never really seen a player like this. I still have Jordan because of his incredible motor and superior aggression, but it's hard to defend that Durant doesn't have a case; he's more efficient while having a similar shot profile (shoots more 3s, way less at the time though), has much more range...

[pelifan]

they need to rename this the hottake board.

I compare KD to Dirk. Obviously KD is more offensively veratile, but I think they use the same spots on the floor and have a similarly unstoppable jumper out of post ups which is the bread and butter of both player's offenses. The difference is Dirk has much much higher basketball IQ which helps him make teammates better.

GS can ride Durant for buckets because when he chokes and takes the team out of the offense they can just rely on their actual best player or championship level defense while they play a team with a lot less talent.

[Peregrine01]

Draymond's defense...Christ. He's everywhere.