f4p wrote:AEnigma wrote:I mean if you want to say that box scores underrate Nash's impact, pretty much everyone would agree, but if you think Harden underwhelms in RAPM I'd like to know what you think he should've done differently because his production and team results stack up pretty well.
I kind-of went into it last thread, and philosophically when I discussed Moses earlier (I think also last thread? or maybe two threads ago), but my concern is not necessarily, “What more could you have done on your specific roster in the specific year in question.” I explicitly said I do not think Nash would do well in Harden’s place because — as Unibro more thoroughly explained — that team was built to put nearly the entire offensive load (scoring and creation) on Harden. That team would have more suited someone like Lillard or Iverson more naturally than Nash, even if there would eventually be enough of a drop-off from Harden to SCORING GUARD where Nash would be better.
ok but you're basically saying it's nice harden did well in his situation, but he should have done better in a hypothetical situation that he had no chance to perform in if he wanted to be ranked higher.
And that is true for everyone, otherwise you are basically just rating the quality of the accomplishments in a vacuum. Which you can do but not everyone finds meaningful.
However, my approach has repeatedly emphasised that I only care about context-specific results to the point that they confirm aspects about building a title roster around you. For example, I know Dirk can circumstantially win a title and consistently contend with good overall defensive support and offensive fit but no true secondary star, whereas I cannot exactly say the same for Durant. The question for me is not whether Harden could do better than anyone else in his position, but whether those results gave us a good degree of confidence that he could contend for titles in edited circumstances.
plays with talented and extremely young team, big part of getting them to the finals in the WCF.
Indeed, he fills the Manu role amazingly… but most of us will not vote for Manu so we look past into…
immediately takes on massive role with new team, gets to WCF with big man.
In large part because of a twenty-point comeback made entirely while he was on the bench.
gets new coach and system and wins surprise 55 games with ryan anderson and eric gordon (both of the mighty pelicans the year before).
I mean sure but what is the comparative value there.
gets 33 year old chris paul and wins 65 games and seems unbeatable. not sure why the performance should be credit to chris paul, who has also never gone near the +11 SRS he and harden had or had ever even gotten out of the 2nd round.
If you really want to play the healthy team SRS game then Harden is not peaking higher than Paul lol.
The 2017 Rockets are a 5-SRS team. They trade a few pieces for Chris Paul and are now “+11”. How is this different from 1983 Moses… apart from Chris Paul leading the team to a higher SRS.
And we see a similarly substantial leap in the Clippers and Suns when he joined those teams. Not hard to see the pattern.To be clear, I have my criticisms of Paul and might not vote him over Harden, but this is a weird approach. You are unintentionally just giving me opportunities to build Paul’s case, which is not something I really wanted to do.
seems like harden and chris paul meshing beautifully shows harden can fit with people.
Not sure they meshed “beautifully”; again, it was the ultimate staggering strategy. I would say better than Wade and Lebron, and that can be to their credit, but there were diminishing returns as would be expected, and I went into that.
and why then goes to the nets and immediately shows how uber-valuable his distributing is next KD/kyrie (while still scoring a bunch himself), producing off the charts offensive results with great offensive talent. with a team that looks like it might cruise to a title with any sort of health. why should we wonder about harden's fit in the nba?
Because of how the team played with any other combination than the three of them…
I talked last thread about why I do not attribute the outlier successes of 2018 primarily to Harden.
but why was chris paul the 2nd round failure who wanted to go to the rockets to play if really he was so much more valuable than harden?
Why did Lebron the finals failure want to go to the
Heat to play if really he was so much more valuable than Wade?
Why did Moses the 40-win failure want to go to the 76ers to play if really he was so much more valuable than Erving?
Why did Garnett the playoff failure want to go to the Celtics to play if really he was so much more valuable than Pierce?
2019 is a better argument with a diminished Chris Paul (and I think Harden himself improved that year anyway), but then we end up back at fit issues: Paul and Harden that year were pretty much just as good as either was without the other (with the acknowledgments that the two of them faced tougher lineups than either did solo and that Harden faced tougher lineups solo than Paul did solo). For me that calls into question whether that team was really competing for a title, considering their Game 6 disappointment and clearly reduced quality relative to the Bucks, Raptors, and possibly even 76ers.
hmm, kind of seems like you just don't like harden.
Or maybe I just do not happen to be a literal fan of his. What is this? You are openly capping hard for your team’s stars, but anyone who disagrees is a hater?
you're not sure if the team that went 6 games with the version of the warriors where durant played 5 games and averaged 35 ppg and where every game was decided by 6 points or less, not sure if that was a contender?
… Yes. They could not beat the Durant-less Warriors when it mattered, and nothing to me says they match up well with those Eastern teams… especially in the sense that they were designed to match up with the Warriors.
not even over philadelphia, who still hasn't gotten out of the 2nd round in recent memory.
Yeah not keeping Butler was an all-time disastrous move. All because they wanted to build around Ben Simmons. Well, I guess they got Harden out of it anyway… but they could have pushed for a Butler/Harden/Embiid team.
the raptors didn't even get the appetizer version of kevin durant, much less the full course. more like the amuse bouche. and they still lost that game with durant providing all of the margin of victory (+7 to +6) in just 12 minutes.
Lol yes we know how much you love partial game samples.
oh the rockets lost a game without KD. those fortunate few, who only had to face durant for 5 games and got one whole game against the remainder of the 73 win team (i.e. the whole reason KD joining them seemed nuts). a team that still was a klay thompson ACL from possibly forcing a finals game 7. anyway, aren't you the sample size guy? harden and cp3 actually played well in game 6, it was just that you had klay and iggy go 12-21 on 3's. any team could lose a game like that. something tells me if you told vegas iggy would hit 5 3's, a lot of money would have been on the warriors.
Mm, fair enough. I am not committing myself to the idea that they had no chance in an extended series against the Durant-less Warriors. Or against the Bucks/Raptors. You read this as a condemnation, but it is not. They did their best, and it was a good effort all things considered, but that is true of a lot of teams and players. Like, the crux of your argument may as well be that matching up well with those Warriors should be inherently more impressive than any other non-title. I understand why you would make that argument… but I just do not really agree with that as a consistent mode of assessment. To me that is not particularly distinct from arguments like, “Bernard King single-handedly took the 1984 Celtics to seven games!” or “Barkley and Malone almost beat Jordan and Hakeem!”
In 2021 and 2022, Harden showed a commitment to being more of a true facilitator, taking a backseat to scoring teammates better than anyone Nash had in his prime but at least might suggest some proof of concept. In a very tiny sample, the Brooklyn trio together were monstrous… but then in any other combination Harden did not seem to stand out. Early returns on the Harden/Embiid combination were encouraging
i mean are you really going to bring 2022 into a peaks discussion? by a country mile this was the worst season of harden's prime, if he can even be said to be in his prime any more.
Seems relevant if you want to praise his facilitation and fit. Look at how Chris Paul has performed past his prime (why did you let me turn this into a Chris Paul post; now it is going to be so much more annoying to talk about how much his late game/series tendencies frustrate me
).I think Harden’s clearest limitation relative to Nash is adding value to the Tobias Harrises and the old Blake Griffins of the league, which I think is a better path to serious contention.
based on what? griffin looked pretty good on the nets last year. then terrible this year with a diminished/traded harden. harris started shooting 3's much better after harden got to philly and had a good playoffs.
Based on Harden never impacting players like Nash does lol. I went through the behind the arc numbers earlier; I will probably need to type out all the other numbers to be more thorough. But you can go through them yourself: Harden is good and helps his teammates… just not to the same extent as Nash.
Harden is an impressive volume scorer and lead playmaker, but I am not sure he is so impressive at either that it actually is easier to put together that type of true contender around him than it would be for Nash. That might sound harsh, because he is probably top ten-ish at both skills, but a lot of volume scorers do not generate the offence you may expect to see (examples here should be obvious…), and as a playmaker Harden is not making full use of varied teammates to the extent as the truly top of the line ones like Nash or Magic.
again, based on what? he's played on 5 Top 2 offenses and 5 more Top 7 offenses in his career, which is 5 more Top 7 offenses than steph curry, who supposedly can create amazing offenses out of nothing (actually doesn't even have another top 10 offense). and this is with harden having seasons where dwight howard and omer asik played huge minutes. and corey brewer and josh smith played big minutes. or he got post linsanity Lin and chandler parsons as his best teammates. or even had 2020 russell westbrook as a teammate.
Yeah you realise we can see how these teams perform without Harden/Curry/Nash, right? Good on Harden for “leading” more top seven offences — I guess that matters to you now in a way that never did with Nash. But the team’s performance without their star is part of how those team rankings work, and weirdly, once you start looking at that — either by themselves or via the impact metrics you hate so much — Harden looks a lot less impressive, even when we filter out Durant for Curry.
and corey brewer and josh smith played big minutes.
Oh yes, we know about Corey Brewer and Josh Smith. Sure is sad how badly they weighed Harden down…
he hasn't been rolling with prime Dirk Nowitzki for years and years. the one time he got close with CP3 they were amazing. shouldn't steve nash have been able to build a title contender with Dirk? shouldn't steve nash not even being his team's best player get you a title, or at least better than a 2-1 deficit to the 2003 spurs (before dirk got hurt)? if the answer is that he was way more valuable in phoenix, then it would certainly seem to make his value every bit as situation-specific as you said of harden, because it would seem hard to argue he just became way better at age 30 and it had nothing to do with his new team and environment.
Yeah if you have absolutely zero idea about what Nash changed with his health and mentality and lifestyle and approach, and also pretended that the Don Nelson Mavericks were somehow a significantly worse fit for Nash then the Suns were, then that might not be a bad conclusion. You have been here a while, and even if you had not, we just had a recent enough thread here with pages of discussion on Nash, so forgive me if it seems odd that any of this comes as news to you.
If the Suns randomly traded Nash back to the Mavericks after 2005, without too grievously gutting the team, yeah they probably win at least a couple of titles. It was not the same Nash. Nor Dirk, really; a healthy 2006 Dirk on that 2003 team might actually take the advantage over the Spurs too.
You act like harden's not volume scoring with tremendous efficiency, which is the usual reasons why guys like iverson and melo don't seem as good as the scoring indicates.
That efficiency does dip in the playoffs, but yes I would not have either of those two in my top… … … eighty peaks at least, and Harden is in discussion for top thirty, so not sure what point you think you are making there. He is a great scorer and passer, and together those make him one of the best offensive engines in league history. Just not as good of one as Nash.
You said I was looking at the box score because I said the Rockets schematically keep Harden away from tougher perimetre assignments (and not because he is a Lebron-tier help defender lol). Make an argument to the contrary if you want to, but people know what that defence was designed to do, and it has nothing to do with the box score.
the rockets had a very good defense in 2018 and very good in the 2nd half of 2019 when people got healthy. i mean i wouldn't look at our personnel and say i was just expecting a world class defense so i'm not sure why being 6th in 2018 means harden was really holding us back and we just schemed around him (presumably if the scheme was suboptimal just to hide harden, the results should be more suboptimal).
It would have been a better defence with Harden replaced with someone better on that end (and in fact often was), how is this a hot take? The scheme is probably limiting in the sense that I doubt it could ever be an all-time defence like that, but for the purposes of playing to Harden’s strengths and looking to counter the Warriors, yeah it did a great job.
if nash is going to get credit for playing on higher ranked offenses, then harden has certainly played on higher ranked average defenses, as nash has played on numerous defenses ranked 23/24 and below. it would seem either harden is causing the good defenses or he has defensive teammates who he has to really carry to get good offenses.
...
Yep, Harden is better on defence, good job. I could note that their respective impact to their team defences was often comparable, but that is admittedly an unfair comparison. I could also note that when Nash played with the esteemed and legendary defender Kurt Thomas, they had an excellent defensive rating (-4 relative) and an offensive rating that in the raw was close to what Harden’s is in the modern era and relative to their league was +7.
But you know, that damn Nash, just so lucky to have Amar’e as his teammate…
Well then tell me what you're saying. To me it just seems to be one side(or mainly one poster rather) bringing up all of Harden's stats and team success, and the responses are waving it away be saying things like "Oh so are you taking Harden over Magic too?" It's these hyperbole comparisons I'm talking about. Harden doesn't even have a playoff box score edge over Magic.
2019-21 Harden has a higher playoff PER and BPM than 1986-88 Magic. He has a higher PER, BPM, and WS/48 than 2008-10 Kobe. He has a higher PER and WS/48 than 1984-86 Bird, and an equal BPM. If someone wants to trumpet those measures and use them to dump on a player whose game is not as reflected in the stat-sheet, they deserve to have that thrown back in their face.
why is it that the people who use impact numbers are citizens of the world with a wide range of views but people who dare post PER's and BPM's only have PER and BPM spreadsheets they read off of and have never watched a basketball game? the box score isn't terrible. the raw box score, where people used to compare 1961 Oscar to some guy playing in the depths of the lockout season, was bad. but the stats that have sanded off the rough edges of minutes, pace, and league averages? these are pretty damn good stats. perfect? no. but neither are the impact metrics, which arguably spit out even crazier stuff even more often. as soon as you point out that APM says kevin willis was the 2nd best player in 1994, you get a bunch of "it's not a ranking" and "i use other stuff" but people seem to think that using the production stats means you use nothing else? you've certainly made a strong case that you find steve nash's box score/production numbers to be irrelevant. so i have to assume you are going off impact stats and ignoring production completely. when they produce just as wonky results.
They produce “wonky” results that can be engaged with. Kevin Willis’s APM was massive because the Hawks ran a platoon system where their starting lineup was collectively very good and their bench lineups were pretty bad. This also happened with the Hawks in 1997, and the 2014 Warriors saw a similar effect with that Steph/Klay/Iguodala trio. I already went over how many towering values can be a partial product of improper replacement — David Robinson’s “impact” dropping with Will Purdue, or John Stockton seeing a massive spike in 2001 when they were basically using a third string point guard to replace him (and generally never having a good replacement for how well he ran Sloan’s system). We have talked about minutes; is it more impressive to be +5 in thirty minutes a game or +4 in forty minutes a game? We have talked at length about collinearity and specificity of role. And we have talked about how many of these variances can at least to some extent be smoothed out over larger samples — samples in which Nash still fares exceptionally well.
None of this interests you, fine, but your refusal to engage with it will just continue to leave you baffled why people roll their eyes at PER.
production seemed good enough for jordan and lebron.
Box score production undersold Lebron anyway and plenty of arguments have been made as to why, but you probably prefer Jordan and see no problem with it.
and hakeem and duncan.
Box score production definitely undersells Duncan; Hakeem, eh, he gets steals and blocks so bit better captured, but I would still be reluctant to say it does everything.
bird and magic, 2 guys certainly thought of as doing all the intangible things nash is said to have done.
I mean box score production captures their impact if you think their primes were about as good as Harden.
as for harden being ahead of those guys, just like all these APM's and PIPM's are supposed to be general tools to make us think of stuff in a new light, why would harden's massive numbers in those stats not make you reconsider him in a new light.
Because I do not think Jokic, Giannis, Westbrook, and Harden all had top ten peaks. What “light” is there to reconsider? He puts up big numbers in a league where plenty of players put up big numbers, good for him. That is not impact.
Yeah even if you don't have harden over those guys (i don't), then at the very least it very well might mean he's better than the consensus view and not exactly showing up and playing as terribly as people think. it's not as if kobe bryant was playing a style of game that was avoiding box score production.
We actually had a lot of discussion on how his efficiency and assist numbers were essentially suppressed schematically and by his era, but I guess you ignored that too.
