rebirthoftheM wrote:As for the manager example, I respect that you approached it that way but it's hard for me to celeberate sefless acts by one person that adds most pronouncedly, to another persons coffers, particularly a wealthy other, unless that wealthy other would equally sacrifice themselves materially for you also. There has to be real reciprocity for me to celeberate such a relationship, and not mere symbolic gestures.
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I'm respecting your difference of opinion on whether or not to credit Duncan on taking less. I think your approach is valid despite me thinking it maybe misses some tangible impact on the court. But do you honestly think that Duncan/Holt haven't given both ways? And Duncan taking less was not symbolic. I don't understand how you are still saying that after I laid out concrete ways the Spurs benefited from him doing so.
It's like with Dallas and Dirk. Dirk signed 3/25 to give the team cap space to add talent. And it worked. They added Parsons and then Jordan(oh wait...). But then when the Mavs were clearly going nowhere last summer, Cuban paid Dirk $25M when Dirk is no longer remotely a $25M player. And Dirk will likely play for a similar salary this year.
I think these guys who have stayed for 2 decades often have a very special relationship with their team owner and I know that includes Duncan and Holt.
The symbolic gesture referred to the site manager who was quite wealthy collecting rubbish, so if we apply to the Duncan/Spurs situation, it would refer to symbolic gestures by the Spurs, not Duncan's decisions to lowball himself.
By the way I do appreciate now that Duncans salary reduction "allowed" the spurs directly and indirectly to sign more/better players. My questions did not relate to that specifically though...you implied that the Spurs might have been prevented from forking out extra $ due to what you called raw cap size issues if TD did not take less money. I was inquiring on that and specific examples on when this could have occured. I do not have strong knowledge on the way the cap works in the NBA, so this is a genuine inquiry.
Re the tony and manu situation...again I ask, were the spurs even willing to give them more $$ if the two so desired? Or was it a case of "if you want to win, we can only give you $ x"? Because if it was a latter, that would be a business made decision by the spurs (and again I cannot imagine Holt usually forgoes proper business practice for sentimental/emotional purposes that damage his material interests), and so I wouldnt celeberate the decision by tony/manu to accept less for what they perceive to be in their own interest (i.e. to win, or to stay in a familiar culture). I'd consider it a neutral transaction. Two parties doing what they perceive is best for them.
And I never said that TD/rest of the spurs players did not gain any benefit from the arrangement with the spurs. I was talking about who the ultimate beneficiary was looking at it from an outside perspective. TD won but so did the entire Spurs organisation... but Holt and the corporation's beneficieries specifically benefited from being able to cut costs (by signing players to smaller contracts) while consistently putting a winning product out there. So they received a double benefit here.
Again I need to stress that I can respect TD's decision to take less money for what he perceived to be a better path to winning chips. But it makes me uncomfortable that we should celeberate his decisions as somehow inherently good/great (which is the underlying theme behind a lot of these praises). He didnt cure cancer...he took less money, thereby saving costs for spurs ownership, who then were more than happy to allocate their saved mulla on other players. Win for him but double win for spurs. Neutral transaction IMO.
Now if the spurs were a org trying to cure cancer, and the "owner" (lets say holt here) redirected his own personal resources to hire additional staff to be more effective, and his key employee (Duncan) then reduced his own salary, I would celeberate such a circumstance. This would be the reciprocity i was speakin about.
But not basketball corporations...as you said the salary cap is real, and owners get nervous about spending too much. I respect that, but i cannot celeberate a players decision to let the owners of the hook like that. If Holt was legally and financially capable of paying Duncan more whilst putting a winning product out there, and the only negative he'd face was taking a financial hit, then I cant celeberate TD's approach. I can only respect it as he did what he believed was best for himself.
And yes, perhaps you're right and Holt/TD have this special relationship that we do not know the full details about. But for the reasons above, im still troubled by celeberating the spurs arrangement in this way and TD by extension vis-a-visa other GOAT candidates.
drza wrote: How does that influence a GOAT ranking? I'm not sure. Because portability and scalability aren't easily quanitified. Plus, as someone up-thread suggested, it isn't intuitive to essentially reward Duncan for having a style of play that isn't as "dominant" and thus perhaps fits better with other talent. But...I'd actually disagree with that. I DO think that having a game that fits on any team, and that any team can be maximized around, should be rewarded. I DO think those are things that are elements of greatness that are often overlooked or ignored. And, as of May of 2017, those things alone may just be enough for me to convince myself that I'd rather have Duncan over what we've seen so far from LeBron. Or...at the very least, it's an active enough question that I'm still working it through, I'm not convinced that the seemingly consensus answer is definitive, here.
Great great post. Really gets to the crux of the issue here, that the GOAT argument really comes down to more subjective arguments, as opposed to vomiting numbers out.
I generally agree with your assessment (not Duncan>Lebron, but Duncan't ability to adapt), but not because I've done great research on this matter. I think this can be gleaned by watching the two over their respective careers.
I would ask though... do you have some 'objective' data out there supports (not proves, as I know there's no data out there that can prove these things) this thesis?
Also, this line of contention involves a lot of hypotheticals and what ifs. Duncan might have been able to maintain his individual impact across a larger of variety of teams (I say might) than Lebron, but we do not know this for certain. I mean for all this talk, Duncan never played for another coach, and therefore you could say he was apart of a consistent system his entire career.
I would ask- how important is this anyways? Shouldn't your greatness be about what you achieved over your career, as opposed to what you could hypothetically achieve over many different contexts?
A few thoughts/responses:
Re: *Objective supporting data on portability and scalability. I'm not sure what, if anything, might be out there on this front. For portability, my first thought would be to look at the players' single-season RAPM under different circumstances. At the least, that could give us some ideas, though it'd still require some degree of subjectivity.
As far as scalability goes, that's a bit harder. The notion of how good a team could have been without the main guy is harder to quantify, unless there's an extended period without the player. Actually, I'm not sure that concept would be scaleability...I don't know if we have a catch-term for "allows team to be as good as they can be". But, whatever that term would be called, I guess we could look at some combo of the supporting cast's composite boxscore stats (like WS or BPM) as well as their +/- stats (e.g. RAPM) in the years immediately before/after they played with a player as well as in times when the player is off the court. Again, a lot more art than just being able to write down a number, but we might be able to get some better supported ideas with approaches like this.
Re: hypotheticals/what ifs. Yes and no, at least in general. For Duncan, as you point out, he was in a very stable situation that makes it somewhat challenging to evaluate how much was him. On the other hand, he played almost 2 decade, completely swapping out line-ups and even coaching philosophies, so we do have some idea. We've seen Duncan as the primary offensive big next to a defensive anchor (Robinson years). We've seen Duncan as the 2-way anchor (peak years). We've seen him as more of a defensive anchor that's secondary on offense (later years). And we've got, for example, yearly box score and RAPM values in each of those situations. Obviously, he wasn't at his peak over the entirety of those so there will require interpretation, but we can inform those ideas based on real-world observation.
So, then, I'd argue that this is not entirely hypothetical...it's trying to use all of the data that we have access to, from the real world, to inform our decisions. You used the phrase "not know this for certain"...in this type of evaluation exercise, I don't know that there is any certainty. It's about analysis and interpretation, which will inherently have some degree of subjectivity, but I think it's supremely worthwhile to do as much as we can to support any subjective opinions with as much support as we can have.
rebirthoftheM wrote:As for the manager example, I respect that you approached it that way but it's hard for me to celeberate sefless acts by one person that adds most pronouncedly, to another persons coffers, particularly a wealthy other, unless that wealthy other would equally sacrifice themselves materially for you also. There has to be real reciprocity for me to celeberate such a relationship, and not mere symbolic gestures.
.
I'm respecting your difference of opinion on whether or not to credit Duncan on taking less. I think your approach is valid despite me thinking it maybe misses some tangible impact on the court. But do you honestly think that Duncan/Holt haven't given both ways? And Duncan taking less was not symbolic. I don't understand how you are still saying that after I laid out concrete ways the Spurs benefited from him doing so.
It's like with Dallas and Dirk. Dirk signed 3/25 to give the team cap space to add talent. And it worked. They added Parsons and then Jordan(oh wait...). But then when the Mavs were clearly going nowhere last summer, Cuban paid Dirk $25M when Dirk is no longer remotely a $25M player. And Dirk will likely play for a similar salary this year.
I think these guys who have stayed for 2 decades often have a very special relationship with their team owner and I know that includes Duncan and Holt.
The symbolic gesture referred to the site manager who was quite wealthy collecting rubbish, so if we apply to the Duncan/Spurs situation, it would refer to symbolic gestures by the Spurs, not Duncan's decisions to lowball himself.
By the way I do appreciate now that Duncans salary reduction "allowed" the spurs directly and indirectly to sign more/better players. My questions did not relate to that specifically though...you implied that the Spurs might have been prevented from forking out extra $ due to what you called raw cap size issues if TD did not take less money. I was inquiring on that and specific examples on when this could have occured. I do not have strong knowledge on the way the cap works in the NBA, so this is a genuine inquiry.
Re the tony and manu situation...again I ask, were the spurs even willing to give them more $$ if the two so desired? Or was it a case of "if you want to win, we can only give you $ x"? Because if it was a latter, that would be a business made decision by the spurs (and again I cannot imagine Holt usually forgoes proper business practice for sentimental/emotional purposes that damage his material interests), and so I wouldnt celeberate the decision by tony/manu to accept less for what they perceive to be in their own interest (i.e. to win, or to stay in a familiar culture). I'd consider it a neutral transaction. Two parties doing what they perceive is best for them.
And I never said that TD/rest of the spurs players did not gain any benefit from the arrangement with the spurs. I was talking about who the ultimate beneficiary was looking at it from an outside perspective. TD won but so did the entire Spurs organisation... but Holt and the corporation's beneficieries specifically benefited from being able to cut costs (by signing players to smaller contracts) while consistently putting a winning product out there. So they received a double benefit here.
Again I need to stress that I can respect TD's decision to take less money for what he perceived to be a better path to winning chips. But it makes me uncomfortable that we should celeberate his decisions as somehow inherently good/great (which is the underlying theme behind a lot of these praises). He didnt cure cancer...he took less money, thereby saving costs for spurs ownership, who then were more than happy to allocate their saved mulla on other players. Win for him but double win for spurs. Neutral transaction IMO.
Now if the spurs were a org trying to cure cancer, and the "owner" (lets say holt here) redirected his own personal resources to hire additional staff to be more effective, and his key employee (Duncan) then reduced his own salary, I would celeberate such a circumstance. This would be the reciprocity i was speakin about.
But not basketball corporations...as you said the salary cap is real, and owners get nervous about spending too much. I respect that, but i cannot celeberate a players decision to let the owners of the hook like that. If Holt was legally and financially capable of paying Duncan more whilst putting a winning product out there, and the only negative he'd face was taking a financial hit, then I cant celeberate TD's approach. I can only respect it as he did what he believed was best for himself.
And yes, perhaps you're right and Holt/TD have this special relationship that we do not know the full details about. But for the reasons above, im still troubled by celeberating the spurs arrangement in this way and TD by extension vis-a-visa other GOAT candidates.
I think you are correct in that we are assuming that all the key Spurs players have a good working relationship with each other and likely talked about the mutual benefits to reaching a deal where everyone can get paid but still have a manageable cap.
The point is that is a unique situation.
Money is a deal breaker for many great teams.
The Bulls broke up because of the poor relationship between the players/coach/Krause while also Pippen feeling he did not get paid in relation to Toni Kukoc.
Shaq and Kobe broke up over money as much as it was personality conflict.
The Heat trio did not take less money and it sapped their depth. I still can't get over Wade being in a Bulls uniform.
The current Cavaliers have salary cap issues and did not resign Dellavedova who was their primary backup PG. That forces the Cavs to have to find depth and go even further into the salary cap. With Lebron, he brings in so much money you can just justify the cost, but Lebron is the only player that could say that.
OKC had a dynasty with WB/Harden/Durant and Harden wouldn't stay over a few million and management wouldn't offer more. It has only gone downhill with Durant eventually leaving.
Which comes to the Warriors who so far have managed the cap beautifully; they maneuvered the cap to where they had the opportunity to grab Durant. But it would not have worked if the other players had not tried to max out their contracts. It remains to be seen what happens in the future but money could break up a potential dynasty.
It is not a little thing and should not be taken for granted when a player leaves money on the table and the team is able to turn that into a productive player/keep players it is a huge advantage and speaks to the team first attitude...I realize that mentality is not exactly popular anymore but I dig it.....
The Heat trio did take less money, it was the linchpin that made signing all three of them even possible. It's also what led to Wade and LeBron demanding every cent in future contracts.
LeBron is not the person to use this argument against, his contracts have never hurt his team. He took less money to build a team that went to 4 finals and win 2 titles and since then his team has been in the luxury tax so taking less would only do Dan Gilbert a favor.
Nor does blaming OKC's inability to keep Harden on Harden make a lick of sense given how history has played out and made OKC's management look like utter fools.
In regards to the argument about Duncan taking less equating only to saving owner money, luxury tax is a costly expense that only serves to finance the other teams. The Spurs ownership has reasons to be conscious about paying the tax. Duncan taking less means the team has an easier time to keep their own players. If Duncan decide to get greedy, then the Spurs may be more reluctant about keeping Manu and Parker depending on their asking price, they will probably let Green go, and with Kawhi's extension the Spurs would have little flexiblity. As for who they got from FA, Duncan taking less after 2012 allowed them to sign Diaw and finally get Splitter on board, and eventually Aldridge and Pau.
The paycut itself isn't what's incredible, it's that Duncan was producing more than what he was paid for up to his final year. Duncan didn't take a huge paycut relatively speaking, but the fact that his production is higher than what he's being paid for makes his deal a great bargain.
G35 wrote: It is not a little thing and should not be taken for granted when a player leaves money on the table and the team is able to turn that into a productive player/keep players it is a huge advantage and speaks to the team first attitude...I realize that mentality is not exactly popular anymore but I dig it.....
This is the crux of the issue I figure. Duncan's decisions to take less money that what he was worth, directly and indirectly facilitated the Spurs ability to sign other key players. We all agree on this point, but the disagreement lies in whether this decision should be celebrated as a characteristic of greatness. You're looking it from a perspective, where the Spurs/Holt going heavy into their pockets so as to ensure TD got his market-level due whilst not compromising their winning ability is a totally unreasonable outcome, and therefore should be relatively ignored in a discussion re Duncan's team first attitude.
I can't do this though, because all I can see is one party (Spurs/Holt) getting the most benefits in this situation, leading to a far more imbalanced situation than you see with the regular superstar/owner dynamic (The owners will always win out, because at the end of the day, they are owners). I respect it in terms of TD doing what he saw benefited himself the most. But I can't celebrate in these comparisons, because I don't find this particular 'team first attitude' worthy of praise, just as I don't find Shaq's demands in 04 particularly blameworthy. We can't ignore that NBA teams are corporations at the end of the day, and that ultimately, corporations gain more benefits from players than vice versa... they are not philanthropic organisations, and focusing on 'team first attitude' IMO masks this reality.
microfib4thewin wrote:In regards to the argument about Duncan taking less equating only to saving owner money, luxury tax is a costly expense that only serves to finance the other teams. The Spurs ownership has reasons to be conscious about paying the tax. Duncan taking less means the team has an easier time to keep their own players. If Duncan decide to get greedy, then the Spurs may be more reluctant about keeping Manu and Parker depending on their asking price, they will probably let Green go, and with Kawhi's extension the Spurs would have little flexiblity. As for who they got from FA, Duncan taking less after 2012 allowed them to sign Diaw and finally get Splitter on board, and eventually Aldridge and Pau.
The paycut itself isn't what's incredible, it's that Duncan was producing more than what he was paid for up to his final year. Duncan didn't take a huge paycut relatively speaking, but the fact that his production is higher than what he's being paid for makes his deal a great bargain.
This is what I don't get: We implicitly assume that the the Spurs would be reluctant to spend the extra $$ if Duncan were to be more "greedy" is an inevitable/natural/necessary outcome, kind of like the sun coming up every day. But it is not remotely in this category... The Spurs would be reluctant because it'd be in its interests to be reluctant, not because the forces of nature dictated so but because it (and by this mean its owners in reality) voluntarily decided so. They could easily turn around, and decide to take a financial hit, pay TD his due, and not compromise the talent required to win ring. But in all likelihood they would do no such thing...they would do what any rational corporation should do... try to minimize its costs whilst not compromising its ability to succeed in the best way they can given the financial "constraints". (Unless of course league ordinances would actually bar the Spurs from doing such things, in which case i would have to modify my position.)
Duncan likewise made decisions he thought was in his best interests... I can agree/disagree with it, but I have to respect his autonomy in this respect. But why celebrate it? Why is it considered a non-greedy act, whilst the Spurs reluctance to open up its checkbook heavily is not put under the same scrutiny? I find this type of approach normalizes the 'naturalness' of the behavior profit-for-companies.
At the end of the day, TD was an employee of the Spurs organisation, a basketball corporation, and I don't think his decisions that in effect minimized the Spurs's financial outlay should be celebrated in these GOAT comparisons. His decisions were neutral transactions and IMO should not factor in here. Doing so enters into the muddy waters of TD being a human being (more selfless, working for the common good, reduced ego etc.), which obviously misses the point and is misleading.
G35 wrote: I think you are correct in that we are assuming that all the key Spurs players have a good working relationship with each other and likely talked about the mutual benefits to reaching a deal where everyone can get paid but still have a manageable cap.
The point is that is a unique situation.
Money is a deal breaker for many great teams.
The Bulls broke up because of the poor relationship between the players/coach/Krause while also Pippen feeling he did not get paid in relation to Toni Kukoc.
The Bulls did not break up over salary issues. Period.
You are bringing up an issue from earlier in the Bulls history to support your claims.
“anyone involved in that meddling to justice”. NO COLLUSION
LA Bird wrote:The fact that the Spurs offense were at their best in the last few seasons with Duncan playing a diminished offensive role also puts to doubt the optimality of going to Duncan in the post as an offensive stategy
As I've pointed out to others before, the Showtime Lakers' offense was at its best when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar accepted a reduced role on offense and was no longer the lead scorer for the first time in his basketball life. So one would have to be careful because the same standard would then cause one to doubt the optimality of going to Kareem in the post as an offensive strategy.
To a certain degree, I agree the Showtime Lakers were running a suboptimal offense by under-utilizing Magic who was a better offensive player than Kareem. The difference here with Duncan is that Kareem was supplanted by one of the GOAT offensive players while Duncan was not.
G35 wrote: I think you are correct in that we are assuming that all the key Spurs players have a good working relationship with each other and likely talked about the mutual benefits to reaching a deal where everyone can get paid but still have a manageable cap.
The point is that is a unique situation.
Money is a deal breaker for many great teams.
The Bulls broke up because of the poor relationship between the players/coach/Krause while also Pippen feeling he did not get paid in relation to Toni Kukoc.
The Bulls did not break up over salary issues. Period.
You are bringing up an issue from earlier in the Bulls history to support your claims.
I think there is very little question that Pippen's contract was a piece to the puzzle that ended that run. It wasn't the only reason, but I think you are dismissing the idea a bit too quickly.
ThunderBolt wrote:I’m going to let some of you in on a little secret I learned on realgm. If you don’t like a thread, not only do you not have to comment but you don’t even have to open it and read it. You’re welcome.
G35 wrote: I think you are correct in that we are assuming that all the key Spurs players have a good working relationship with each other and likely talked about the mutual benefits to reaching a deal where everyone can get paid but still have a manageable cap.
The point is that is a unique situation.
Money is a deal breaker for many great teams.
The Bulls broke up because of the poor relationship between the players/coach/Krause while also Pippen feeling he did not get paid in relation to Toni Kukoc.
The Bulls did not break up over salary issues. Period.
You are bringing up an issue from earlier in the Bulls history to support your claims.
I think there is very little question that Pippen's contract was a piece to the puzzle that ended that run. It wasn't the only reason, but I think you are dismissing the idea a bit too quickly.
Krause wasn't bringing back Phil. MJ wasn't coming back without Phil. Bulls wouldn't bring Rodman back without Phil to keep them in line.
Contracts never even became an issue. You are just adding hypotheticals. Pippen had just played at a below market salary for one year in 1998.
Pippen played for below market rate for way more than one year. The impact that had on things we'll just have to agree to disagree I guess.
ThunderBolt wrote:I’m going to let some of you in on a little secret I learned on realgm. If you don’t like a thread, not only do you not have to comment but you don’t even have to open it and read it. You’re welcome.
LA Bird wrote:Great post drza but I will like to address a few points:
drza wrote:a) allow for Duncan's maximal impact on any reasonably designed supporting cast ... a) [LeBron] doesn't provide as much lift to those teams as he did on teams like the 09 - 10 Cavs
Even if Duncan can provide his maximal impact on a quality team and LeBron can't, that doesn't mean Duncan is more impactful since, as you pointed out, LeBron's maximal impact was higher than Duncan's. LeBron can't provide his 09/10 level of god-tier lift to a quality team but nobody can anyway. The question should not be on whether their impact is maximized with talented teammates but whose impact is higher on a good team regardless of their maximum potential lift on poor teams.
b) allow any reasonably designed supporting cast to be maximized by Duncan. ... b) [LeBron's] teams don't maintain their maximized levels when he's around.
Just wondering, what is the maximized level of performance you expect the Heat/Cavs to realistically have reached and what adjustments would LeBron have had to make in order for his team to reach that level?
Spoiler:
Similarly, a team built around (even a physically diminished) Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh...or one built around Kyrie and Kevin Love, would be better than the Heat or the Current Cavs when LeBron sits. It's kind of similar, IMO, to how the '17 Warriors struggled in the immediate aftermath of Kevin Durant's injury before they got used to life without him, then went on a 13-game winning streak. In both cases, the team had learned to exist when built around the star player providing certain things, which caused the other players capable of providing those things to somewhat atrophy.
But the Warriors were a proven ~70 win team so we know the Curry/Green/Thompson core is capable of playing at an elite level without Durant. The same could not be said for LeBron's teams since his fellow stars never played together before. Wade and Bosh had 2 years together after LeBron left and the Heat were only a 39-38 team with both playing and their -0.3 on-court net rating together is not too different from the +0.8 the Big 3 Heat had with Wade/Bosh but not LeBron. I think it is unrealistic to assume Wade and Bosh could have scaled up their impact even higher without LeBron since both returned to their pre-LeBron usage % and weren't anywhere as effective due to their physical declines. Jury is still out on Love and Irving since they have yet to play a long stretch of games without LeBron but considering defense is a major problem for them and what LeBron does for the team on that end, I don't see much improvement even after they adjust offensively without LeBron.
Again, this isn't a knock on LeBron...his talented teams, built around him, have been championship-caliber for almost the last decade with several wins. But, what it is, is an attempt to characterize why his teams scale up to champions but not to the type of historical dominance that we sometimes see in other champions.
I don't know about you but the only historically dominant champions in recent years for me are the 14 Spurs and 15 Warriors. Per SideshowBob, the 2016 Cavs have a better playoffs relative net rating than the 2014 Spurs:
2016 Cavaliers: +14.13 SRS, +12.4 Offense, -2.9 Defense, +15.3 Net 2014 Spurs: +13.40 SRS, +8.5 Offense, -6.1 Defense, +14.6 Net
and for the regular season, 2013 Heat with a 66-16 record was among the best in NBA history even if it falls just short of the Warriors. A LeBron-led team hasn't reached the pinnacle of greatness like the 96 Bulls but I feel he is unfairly held to a much higher standard in this comparison since Duncan in his prime wasn't leading all time dominant championship teams either. The fact that the Spurs offense were at their best in the last few seasons with Duncan playing a diminished offensive role also puts to doubt the optimality of going to Duncan in the post as an offensive stategy and whether his offense is really more portable than LeBron.
I understand where you are coming from regarding scalability on better teams but I don't see LeBron's ball dominance as a major issue since he is providing so much value across different areas elsewhere. FWIW, I think this is a close comparison either way and LeBron has only surpassed Duncan on my GOAT list this season.
Some responses, to the bolded: 1) Re: bolded 1 (on impact maximized vs impact higher): This was a good point, and what I was trying to point out with their single-year RAPM scores being similar on a yearly basis outside of the 09-10 LeBron mega-peak. The argument would be that, on the teams that truly contended, Duncan's impact on those teams was just as large as LeBron's and therefore that LeBron's "raw impact" advantage might not actually be much of an advantage in this particular comp. (Note: the normalized RAPM data I'm referring to came from Doc MJ's spreadsheet, which only went through 2012, had some issues in 1998, no 2001, partial 2002, etc. The point is, that spreadsheet needs to be updated with whatever the most recent state-of-art RAPM numbers. I did some quick eyeballing of LeBron's post-2012 numbers and feel like they are lower, but that should be confirmed before any real conclusions are made, here).
2) Re: maximum level achievable by teams like Heat or Cavs: This is a crucial point in my thought process, and ties a lot into my scaleability thoughts. I think that 2011 Wade/Bosh or current Irving/Love are the centerpieces of OUTLANDISHLY strong supporting casts. To fully evaluate a cast requires more than just looking at the names of 2 players, of course, but for the sake of some semblance of brevity here I'm not going to launch a full-on analysis. I'm going to take the lazy route, that in both cases at least one player has demonstrated 1st team All NBA production and the other 2nd/3rd team All NBA value at the time of the collaboration.
Now, how this relates to LeBron and Duncan. LeBron's greatness requires...nay,demands that he be the primary on-ball offensive decision-maker and a primary high-volume scorer because he is one of the offensive GOATs. That's as it should be. BUT, by doing so he necessarily diminishes the number of offensive opportunities available to the other main offensive threats on the team. There's just...no way to avoid that. It's not a knock on LeBron's game, it's a fact of offensive basketball. The trite "there's only one ball", thing. Now, LeBron can (and has) led this type of cast to championships and consistent contention, so there's no cause to harp on it as much negative from his POV. But instead, I argue that it's a dramatic POSITIVE for Duncan's scalability.
Because with either of those two casts, Duncan's ability to have huge impact without having to be an offensive focal point allows him to take the same Wade/Bosh or Irving/Love cast, and maximize them in a way that LeBron can't. Wade in '11 could have looked, in terms of usage and offensive impact, much like Wade in '10 did while playing next to Duncan, with more offensive responsibility given to Bosh as well, who had the ability to handle much more than he was given. Just by dint of skill sets, the 2011 Heat built around prime Duncan is much more formidable than the actual 2011 Heat.
Because if in point 1 above, we've established that Duncan's and LeBron's individual impact magnitudes are similar on contending teams with talent...and in this point we recognize that Duncan's mechanisms of impact are more additive with fewer diminishing returns than LeBron's, then the logical conclusion is that the team as a whole should be stronger built around Duncan.
3) I'll cut my point-by-point response short here, for the sake of time. But I think there's more to be said, as well, about the potential scarcity of true defensive anchor talent vs offensive talent. One of the quickly-becoming-trite overused statements on this board is "offense is more important than defense", or some variation. Not true overall, but I can see how an examination of the +/- numbers or even a more anecdotal approach (like the Lakers having high team ORatings even in years of sparse support around Kobe), for example, would argue that an individual can have more impact on team offense than they can on team defense. That's a defendable statement. However, the corollary to that statement is that, the same evidence argues that there are also a lot more offensive players that can have significant positive impacts than there are defensive players that can do anything similar on the other end.
Relating here, LeBron is a GOAT candidate because he is a GOAT offensive candidate that is also strong on defense. But his "strong on defense" is relative to other wings...in none of his iterations, even when playing next to other elite offensive talents, did LeBron's defensive impact extend beyond elite wing defenders like Shane Battier, let alone up into the range of the elite big defenders. Similarly, Duncan's GOAT candidacy is built upon him being a GOAT defensive candidate that is also strong on offense. But again, this is relative to his position, in that his offense was more on the level of Chris Bosh than Dirk Nowitzki among bigs, and nowhere near the offensive impact of best perimeter offensive players.
BUT. Because there are a lot more strong offensive players than defensive players...and teams with enough front-end talent to be considered contenders almost always earn that distinction based on having front-end offensive talent. So (sorry for the extended logic), I think this takes the examples given in (2) above and generalizes it...that in general, Duncan's skillset would be more valuable to MOST reasonably built contending teams, given the availability of talent and skill set types of the NBA. That the only way for LeBron to overall be more valuable than Duncan to building championship teams WOULD be if his magnitude of impact was THAT much higher that it could be larger even in the face of diminishing offensive returns.
Which, as I've argued above and in my previous posts in this thread...I'm not fully convinced that it does.
rebirthoftheM wrote:This is what I don't get: We implicitly assume that the the Spurs would be reluctant to spend the extra $$ if Duncan were to be more "greedy" is an inevitable/natural/necessary outcome, kind of like the sun coming up every day. But it is not remotely in this category... The Spurs would be reluctant because it'd be in its interests to be reluctant, not because the forces of nature dictated so but because it (and by this mean its owners in reality) voluntarily decided so. They could easily turn around, and decide to take a financial hit, pay TD his due, and not compromise the talent required to win ring. But in all likelihood they would do no such thing...they would do what any rational corporation should do... try to minimize its costs whilst not compromising its ability to succeed in the best way they can given the financial "constraints". (Unless of course league ordinances would actually bar the Spurs from doing such things, in which case i would have to modify my position.)
Duncan likewise made decisions he thought was in his best interests... I can agree/disagree with it, but I have to respect his autonomy in this respect. But why celebrate it? Why is it considered a non-greedy act, whilst the Spurs reluctance to open up its checkbook heavily is not put under the same scrutiny? I find this type of approach normalizes the 'naturalness' of the behavior profit-for-companies.
At the end of the day, TD was an employee of the Spurs organisation, a basketball corporation, and I don't think his decisions that in effect minimized the Spurs's financial outlay should be celebrated in these GOAT comparisons. His decisions were neutral transactions and IMO should not factor in here. Doing so enters into the muddy waters of TD being a human being (more selfless, working for the common good, reduced ego etc.), which obviously misses the point and is misleading.
NBA is a monopoly. There is no 'naturalness' to its business model. No other markets would have a business pay another business because they spend more than an arbitary amount to gain a competitive advantage, but that's what the luxury tax is. You can argue about the philosophy of how a NBA team should run, it doesn't change the fact that a star player taking less makes it easier for a team to retain their own players. It's also undeniable that if Duncan took up a chunk of the cap it would have been an impossibility to extend Kawhi and sign Aldridge at the same time.
You are free to stand by your own belief, but let's not act like your thinking is some stone cold fact. It's only one of the many perspectives on the business side of NBA just like mine is.
rebirthoftheM wrote:This is what I don't get: We implicitly assume that the the Spurs would be reluctant to spend the extra $$ if Duncan were to be more "greedy" is an inevitable/natural/necessary outcome, kind of like the sun coming up every day. But it is not remotely in this category... The Spurs would be reluctant because it'd be in its interests to be reluctant, not because the forces of nature dictated so but because it (and by this mean its owners in reality) voluntarily decided so. They could easily turn around, and decide to take a financial hit, pay TD his due, and not compromise the talent required to win ring. But in all likelihood they would do no such thing...they would do what any rational corporation should do... try to minimize its costs whilst not compromising its ability to succeed in the best way they can given the financial "constraints". (Unless of course league ordinances would actually bar the Spurs from doing such things, in which case i would have to modify my position.)
Duncan likewise made decisions he thought was in his best interests... I can agree/disagree with it, but I have to respect his autonomy in this respect. But why celebrate it? Why is it considered a non-greedy act, whilst the Spurs reluctance to open up its checkbook heavily is not put under the same scrutiny? I find this type of approach normalizes the 'naturalness' of the behavior profit-for-companies.
At the end of the day, TD was an employee of the Spurs organisation, a basketball corporation, and I don't think his decisions that in effect minimized the Spurs's financial outlay should be celebrated in these GOAT comparisons. His decisions were neutral transactions and IMO should not factor in here. Doing so enters into the muddy waters of TD being a human being (more selfless, working for the common good, reduced ego etc.), which obviously misses the point and is misleading.
NBA is a monopoly. There is no 'naturalness' to its business model. No other markets would have a business pay another business because they spend more than an arbitary amount to gain a competitive advantage, but that's what the luxury tax is. You can argue about the philosophy of how a NBA team should run, it doesn't change the fact that a star player taking less makes it easier for a team to retain their own players. It's also undeniable that if Duncan took up a chunk of the cap it would have been an impossibility to extend Kawhi and sign Aldridge at the same time.
You are free to stand by your own belief, but let's not act like your thinking is some stone cold fact. It's only one of the many perspectives on the business side of NBA just like mine is.
You hit it on the nail here... IMO this all comes down to differing perspectives/entry points into this conversation. It is kind of like how different GOAT criteria lead to differing ranking results. I respect and appreciate that, and to each his own. I must stress though, the point of contention here was whether Duncan should be credited in GOAT debates for his decisions, not about the fact that his salary cutting made the Spurs job easier.
Think there's a case (though not an overwhelming one) for TD being the most VALUABLE player of all time, which includes on-court and off-court leadership, providing superstar impact with a lunchpail attitude and so on and so forth. (Which ThaReg paints quite well).
Even on a cuumulative sense, don't think you can argue his combined impact has it in any way over Jordan, Russell, Kareem or Lebron (though can probably argue him over most others in the top 10). So it comes down to intangibles, which I'm loath to go into (with previous, bruising discussions over Zeke being a motivator for that decision. ;-P )
So, it'd be a really cloudy case for Number 1, which I MIGHT make if I were a GM looking for a Franchise Centrepiece rather than as a coach looking for a standout player or (even less so) an analyst looking for a game-in/game-out dominator.
ElGee wrote:You, my friend, have shoved those words into my mouth, which is OK because I'm hungry.
accepting lesser contract, a spurs max is still higher them any team can offer....even if the spurs match the other teams offer, td is still banking the money due to lower state taxes...dunno how much that saves him, but accepting a price range of other teams max allowed - spurs highest allowed, his still banking good money...
drza wrote:Some responses, to the bolded: 1) Re: bolded 1 (on impact maximized vs impact higher): This was a good point, and what I was trying to point out with their single-year RAPM scores being similar on a yearly basis outside of the 09-10 LeBron mega-peak. The argument would be that, on the teams that truly contended, Duncan's impact on those teams was just as large as LeBron's and therefore that LeBron's "raw impact" advantage might not actually be much of an advantage in this particular comp. (Note: the normalized RAPM data I'm referring to came from Doc MJ's spreadsheet, which only went through 2012, had some issues in 1998, no 2001, partial 2002, etc. The point is, that spreadsheet needs to be updated with whatever the most recent state-of-art RAPM numbers. I did some quick eyeballing of LeBron's post-2012 numbers and feel like they are lower, but that should be confirmed before any real conclusions are made, here).
2) Re: maximum level achievable by teams like Heat or Cavs: This is a crucial point in my thought process, and ties a lot into my scaleability thoughts. I think that 2011 Wade/Bosh or current Irving/Love are the centerpieces of OUTLANDISHLY strong supporting casts.
That seems wildly unfair. If you want to completely disregard boxscore stats and argue Duncan>LeBron based on impact you can't turn around and completely ignore impact (not to mention 80% of the team + coaching) and call LeBron's casts outlandishly strong.
This year for instance your outlandishly strong centerpieces of Love/Irving are indeed LeBron's best teammates by RPM but they are ranked 14th and 57th so far. Meanwhile he is supposed to beat a Warriors team that has a 5 guys in the top30 and even if you take Durant off has a top40 guy at every single position.
And before you say LeBron maximizes Love/Irving: in 2014 Love was ranked roughly the same (12th) while having a career year, a PG was actually good at PGing, higher usage and a team built for him. If anything it's wildly impressive he has the same impact now as a third option on a team that has Irving. And Irving was ranked 231st in 2014 - so he is massively better now but still worse by impact stats than every single guy in the Warrior's starting lineup (+ 2 bench guys) by impact stats. But we are still talking about two first option, high-usage, meh for position/terrible defense guys who have better cumulative impact in new/lesser roles with LeBron who is still league-leading at 32. The Heat unfortunately had progressive age/injury/exhaustion working against them figuring things out. And before you say Duncan is maximizing everyone else: maybe those guys are maximized by the best organization/coach in sports who still won 61 games this year without Duncan and without even trying at all and then took out the 3rd best RS team without their best player. Pop leisurely wins 60+ games while resting guys all over the place and barely anyone topping 30 min per game - compare that to LeBron's teams after he left.
You say Duncan's defense is more additive but then say LeBron has an outlandishly strong supporting cast while he has a cast that is epically bad defensively and you actually bring up Irving as outlandishly good who has a case for worst defender in the league and overall is ranked in Patty Mills territory impact-wise. Meanwhile Duncan had some of the best defenders of their generation on his teams (Robinson, Kawhi, Bowen) and enjoyed their additive impact while LeBron had to integrate high usage players with meh to atrocious defense with terrible and/or old supporting players (most of them also atrocious defenders), all with the help of rookie coaches instead of a GOAT coach.
When Duncan beat LeBron in 2014 he had 8 teammates with a higher RPM than Wade (although Bosh and Anderson were higher than Wade as well). Sure 2011 Wade still had some cartilage but on the flipside basically all the other players outside Bosh were terrible or injured, Spo was terrible and everyone had to figure out new roles or even positions on a new team, including LeBron who almost ruined his back/career by gaining weight to play PF. But on a team where everything is new and different to everyone, where he and 2 other guys are adjusting to not being "the guy" and playing more off ball for the first time in their lives, with a rookie coach and cast with terrible synergy where he had to gain weight and play a position he has never played you expect him to have more impact than Duncan in a situation that has grown for a decade under GOAT coaching? That's not really a fair setup for comparing impact on good teams, is it?
So you say LeBron had lower impact on good teams but completely disregard that how those good teams were put together was really impact-minimizing. For instance even if LeBron were the best defender on the planet that has less impact if the opponent has the option to just swing the ball away and leisurely stroll past Irving and Frye. Or on offense, his impact is probably not maximized by spending 1/3rd of all possessions pointlessly trying to get position while Irving does some super-fancy dribbling into a cluster of defenders he can shoot a long 2 from. Same with coaching - LeBron had a succession of meh rookie coaches while Duncan had a GOAT coach who is one of the best of all time at maximizing his player's impact.
Who knows what impact LeBron could have if he ever played with a good center/PG combo that's not trash defensively and a great coach. Sadly we'll never know. It's hard to imagine a better setup than Duncan had though.
Just want to say good post. Interesting points made. Just to respond to a few of them:
drza wrote:I'm going to take the lazy route, that in both cases at least one player has demonstrated 1st team All NBA production and the other 2nd/3rd team All NBA value at the time of the collaboration.
When did Kyrie Irving or Kevin Love ever demonstrate 1st team All-NBA production? Neither has actually made 1st team All-NBA. That would mean Love was better than LBJ or KD. Kyrie never made any All-NBA teams until LeBron came back (still only has made one 3rd team). I don't think comparing teammates' All-NBA appearances (or All-Defense or DPOY or Finals MVPs) between LBJ and TD helps TDs case (DRob, Parker, Manu, Kawhi).
drza wrote:Now, how this relates to LeBron and Duncan. LeBron's greatness requires...nay,demands that he be the primary on-ball offensive decision-maker and a primary high-volume scorer because he is one of the offensive GOATs. That's as it should be. BUT, by doing so he necessarily diminishes the number of offensive opportunities available to the other main offensive threats on the team. There's just...no way to avoid that. It's not a knock on LeBron's game, it's a fact of offensive basketball. The trite "there's only one ball", thing. Now, LeBron can (and has) led this type of cast to championships and consistent contention, so there's no cause to harp on it as much negative from his POV. But instead, I argue that it's a dramatic POSITIVE for Duncan's scalability.
This is interesting. I generally somewhat agree, however I do think LeBron's ball-dominance is partly a result of the point guards he's played with (or hasn't played with as the case may be). Mo Williams, Mario Chalmers, and Kyrie are generally poor at initiating offense, whether it's PnR/PnP, finding cutters, etc. Seeing LeBron play off the ball with Deron Williams this year (and even Delly last 2 years to a lesser degree), I wonder what LeBron's usage would've looked like on a team like the Spurs with Parker or especially with a guy like CP3. He's been playing more off-ball than ever in these playoffs with DWill and he's been absurdly effective. Obviously he's too good with the ball not to make that your bread-and-butter, but I wonder if we would've seen just a little bit less Magic and a little more Malone in an alternate LeBron+true PG universe.
drza wrote:Because with either of those two casts, Duncan's ability to have huge impact without having to be an offensive focal point allows him to take the same Wade/Bosh or Irving/Love cast, and maximize them in a way that LeBron can't. Wade in '11 could have looked, in terms of usage and offensive impact, much like Wade in '10 did while playing next to Duncan, with more offensive responsibility given to Bosh as well, who had the ability to handle much more than he was given. Just by dint of skill sets, the 2011 Heat built around prime Duncan is much more formidable than the actual 2011 Heat.
Agree with this in the isolated case of the '11 Heat. After that year, LeBron developed his post game, the Heat figured out small-ball and Wade started declining each year. In '12 and beyond, I would prefer LeBron on the Heat to TD. You also have to look at the flip-side to this and ask how many of Duncan's teams would've been better with LBJ. I think there are several 1st and 2nd round exits that wouldn't have happened with LeBron and potentially championships won ('04 and '06 with 27/29yr old prime LBJ I think have a good chance). I also don't think any version of Duncan could've done what LeBron did last year against GSW.
drza wrote:But his "strong on defense" is relative to other wings...in none of his iterations, even when playing next to other elite offensive talents, did LeBron's defensive impact extend beyond elite wing defenders like Shane Battier, let alone up into the range of the elite big defenders.
I would put his defensive impact in last year's Finals against just about anyone short of Bill Russell. He was the best perimeter defender and the best rim protector on either team in that series. Agree that his defensive impact isn't consistently near the level Duncan's was though.
LA Bird wrote:Great post drza but I will like to address a few points:
drza wrote:a) allow for Duncan's maximal impact on any reasonably designed supporting cast ... a) [LeBron] doesn't provide as much lift to those teams as he did on teams like the 09 - 10 Cavs
Even if Duncan can provide his maximal impact on a quality team and LeBron can't, that doesn't mean Duncan is more impactful since, as you pointed out, LeBron's maximal impact was higher than Duncan's. LeBron can't provide his 09/10 level of god-tier lift to a quality team but nobody can anyway. The question should not be on whether their impact is maximized with talented teammates but whose impact is higher on a good team regardless of their maximum potential lift on poor teams.
b) allow any reasonably designed supporting cast to be maximized by Duncan. ... b) [LeBron's] teams don't maintain their maximized levels when he's around.
Just wondering, what is the maximized level of performance you expect the Heat/Cavs to realistically have reached and what adjustments would LeBron have had to make in order for his team to reach that level?
Spoiler:
Similarly, a team built around (even a physically diminished) Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh...or one built around Kyrie and Kevin Love, would be better than the Heat or the Current Cavs when LeBron sits. It's kind of similar, IMO, to how the '17 Warriors struggled in the immediate aftermath of Kevin Durant's injury before they got used to life without him, then went on a 13-game winning streak. In both cases, the team had learned to exist when built around the star player providing certain things, which caused the other players capable of providing those things to somewhat atrophy.
But the Warriors were a proven ~70 win team so we know the Curry/Green/Thompson core is capable of playing at an elite level without Durant. The same could not be said for LeBron's teams since his fellow stars never played together before. Wade and Bosh had 2 years together after LeBron left and the Heat were only a 39-38 team with both playing and their -0.3 on-court net rating together is not too different from the +0.8 the Big 3 Heat had with Wade/Bosh but not LeBron. I think it is unrealistic to assume Wade and Bosh could have scaled up their impact even higher without LeBron since both returned to their pre-LeBron usage % and weren't anywhere as effective due to their physical declines. Jury is still out on Love and Irving since they have yet to play a long stretch of games without LeBron but considering defense is a major problem for them and what LeBron does for the team on that end, I don't see much improvement even after they adjust offensively without LeBron.
Again, this isn't a knock on LeBron...his talented teams, built around him, have been championship-caliber for almost the last decade with several wins. But, what it is, is an attempt to characterize why his teams scale up to champions but not to the type of historical dominance that we sometimes see in other champions.
I don't know about you but the only historically dominant champions in recent years for me are the 14 Spurs and 15 Warriors. Per SideshowBob, the 2016 Cavs have a better playoffs relative net rating than the 2014 Spurs:
2016 Cavaliers: +14.13 SRS, +12.4 Offense, -2.9 Defense, +15.3 Net 2014 Spurs: +13.40 SRS, +8.5 Offense, -6.1 Defense, +14.6 Net
and for the regular season, 2013 Heat with a 66-16 record was among the best in NBA history even if it falls just short of the Warriors. A LeBron-led team hasn't reached the pinnacle of greatness like the 96 Bulls but I feel he is unfairly held to a much higher standard in this comparison since Duncan in his prime wasn't leading all time dominant championship teams either. The fact that the Spurs offense were at their best in the last few seasons with Duncan playing a diminished offensive role also puts to doubt the optimality of going to Duncan in the post as an offensive stategy and whether his offense is really more portable than LeBron.
I understand where you are coming from regarding scalability on better teams but I don't see LeBron's ball dominance as a major issue since he is providing so much value across different areas elsewhere. FWIW, I think this is a close comparison either way and LeBron has only surpassed Duncan on my GOAT list this season.
Some responses, to the bolded: 1) Re: bolded 1 (on impact maximized vs impact higher): This was a good point, and what I was trying to point out with their single-year RAPM scores being similar on a yearly basis outside of the 09-10 LeBron mega-peak. The argument would be that, on the teams that truly contended, Duncan's impact on those teams was just as large as LeBron's and therefore that LeBron's "raw impact" advantage might not actually be much of an advantage in this particular comp. (Note: the normalized RAPM data I'm referring to came from Doc MJ's spreadsheet, which only went through 2012, had some issues in 1998, no 2001, partial 2002, etc. The point is, that spreadsheet needs to be updated with whatever the most recent state-of-art RAPM numbers. I did some quick eyeballing of LeBron's post-2012 numbers and feel like they are lower, but that should be confirmed before any real conclusions are made, here).
2) Re: maximum level achievable by teams like Heat or Cavs: This is a crucial point in my thought process, and ties a lot into my scaleability thoughts. I think that 2011 Wade/Bosh or current Irving/Love are the centerpieces of OUTLANDISHLY strong supporting casts. To fully evaluate a cast requires more than just looking at the names of 2 players, of course, but for the sake of some semblance of brevity here I'm not going to launch a full-on analysis. I'm going to take the lazy route, that in both cases at least one player has demonstrated 1st team All NBA production and the other 2nd/3rd team All NBA value at the time of the collaboration.
Now, how this relates to LeBron and Duncan. LeBron's greatness requires...nay,demands that he be the primary on-ball offensive decision-maker and a primary high-volume scorer because he is one of the offensive GOATs. That's as it should be. BUT, by doing so he necessarily diminishes the number of offensive opportunities available to the other main offensive threats on the team. There's just...no way to avoid that. It's not a knock on LeBron's game, it's a fact of offensive basketball. The trite "there's only one ball", thing. Now, LeBron can (and has) led this type of cast to championships and consistent contention, so there's no cause to harp on it as much negative from his POV. But instead, I argue that it's a dramatic POSITIVE for Duncan's scalability.
Because with either of those two casts, Duncan's ability to have huge impact without having to be an offensive focal point allows him to take the same Wade/Bosh or Irving/Love cast, and maximize them in a way that LeBron can't. Wade in '11 could have looked, in terms of usage and offensive impact, much like Wade in '10 did while playing next to Duncan, with more offensive responsibility given to Bosh as well, who had the ability to handle much more than he was given. Just by dint of skill sets, the 2011 Heat built around prime Duncan is much more formidable than the actual 2011 Heat.
Because if in point 1 above, we've established that Duncan's and LeBron's individual impact magnitudes are similar on contending teams with talent...and in this point we recognize that Duncan's mechanisms of impact are more additive with fewer diminishing returns than LeBron's, then the logical conclusion is that the team as a whole should be stronger built around Duncan.
3) I'll cut my point-by-point response short here, for the sake of time. But I think there's more to be said, as well, about the potential scarcity of true defensive anchor talent vs offensive talent. One of the quickly-becoming-trite overused statements on this board is "offense is more important than defense", or some variation. Not true overall, but I can see how an examination of the +/- numbers or even a more anecdotal approach (like the Lakers having high team ORatings even in years of sparse support around Kobe), for example, would argue that an individual can have more impact on team offense than they can on team defense. That's a defendable statement. However, the corollary to that statement is that, the same evidence argues that there are also a lot more offensive players that can have significant positive impacts than there are defensive players that can do anything similar on the other end.
Relating here, LeBron is a GOAT candidate because he is a GOAT offensive candidate that is also strong on defense. But his "strong on defense" is relative to other wings...in none of his iterations, even when playing next to other elite offensive talents, did LeBron's defensive impact extend beyond elite wing defenders like Shane Battier, let alone up into the range of the elite big defenders. Similarly, Duncan's GOAT candidacy is built upon him being a GOAT defensive candidate that is also strong on offense. But again, this is relative to his position, in that his offense was more on the level of Chris Bosh than Dirk Nowitzki among bigs, and nowhere near the offensive impact of best perimeter offensive players.
BUT. Because there are a lot more strong offensive players than defensive players...and teams with enough front-end talent to be considered contenders almost always earn that distinction based on having front-end offensive talent. So (sorry for the extended logic), I think this takes the examples given in (2) above and generalizes it...that in general, Duncan's skillset would be more valuable to MOST reasonably built contending teams, given the availability of talent and skill set types of the NBA. That the only way for LeBron to overall be more valuable than Duncan to building championship teams WOULD be if his magnitude of impact was THAT much higher that it could be larger even in the face of diminishing offensive returns.
Which, as I've argued above and in my previous posts in this thread...I'm not fully convinced that it does.
What I find most shocking about these types of discussions on portability/scalability, particularly LeBron, are these two things:
1) The arguments don't discuss skillset enough - because portability/scalability is generally used to mean "impact across a ton of possible teams", it's PARAMOUNT that everyone acknowledges that there's an extremely limited sample size when talking about a star's supporting casts. Therefore it's very important to look at skillset - how the player has adapted through different circumstances, if at all, whether they've maintained their impact, etc. - to be able to judge portability/scalability.
Otherwise any purely empirical approach is flawed - what if they were only on teams with bad/good fit but with good/bad talent? What if the coaching system was able to cover up their portability flaws and it wouldn't happen on most other teams? There's a ton of circumstance that goes into this, which leads into sample bias being a very real thing. It's straightforward, though by no means simple - what skills maximize impact with other good players? Playmaking, off-ball movement (cutting/screening/spotting-up), shooting, and defense. Next: when in lineups or contexts where one of these or more were demanded, did the player demonstrate the ability to do these things consistently? Those are the questions we should always be asking when trying to interpret lift changes from one cast to another.
2) The inconsistency in criteria - aka "I will evaluate LeBron by on/off, but his cast [some of whom have NOTORIOUS weaknesses in the very selfsame skills that maximize impact with other good players, rendering them unplayable against good teams e.g., shooting (Wade) and defense (guess who)] by production/box-score and accolades" - I have zero explanation for this honestly. It's not about laziness either - those weaknesses are well documented for the fan who spends a fair amount of time watching/following basketball. I don't think it's intentional either, but it's still funny to see.
