LukaTheGOAT wrote: The article contains the older version of AuPM and then therefore is not what I am referring to.
Also, I can't prove to you that his 2023 PS AuPM/G is lower because the playoffs numbers are screwed (like Jokic has a rTS% of 62.9%, lol). But considering Curry's scoring numbers were much worse, in the PS versus the RS, I don't see how it is crazy to argue his impact dropped.
Given that he was 12th in RS AuPM/g in the regular season and 3rd in AuPM/g in the playoffs, I do actually think it is a bit crazy to argue his impact dropped (at least as measured by AuPM/g), because in the entire history of AuPM/g there is not a single year where 12th in RS AuPM/g was as high a number as 3rd in playoff AuPM/g (nor is there a single year where 3rd in playoff AuPM/g wasn’t higher than Curry’s RS AuPM/g this past year).
The AuPM/G you are referring too I am quite confident is off. The numbers in general are greatly off. Before the numbers were screwed up, I am pretty confident Curry wasn't 3rd. However, since Backpicks does not want to work the way it is supposed to, I can't show you the real AuPM/G number.
It seems like they’re just scaled differently, but I guess your theory is that the numbers are just completely wrong/random and reflect nothing at all, rather than just being scaled wrong (not sure that makes sense to me, given that the leaderboard doesn’t look random and is mostly dominated by people with great playoff on/off). I don’t really know why we’d think Curry’s AuPM/g wouldn’t likely have been higher in the playoffs, given that he had a +8.0 regular season on-off and a +17.3 playoff on-off.
OhayoKD wrote:Lebron contributes more to all the phases of play than Messi does. And he is of course a defensive anchor unlike messi.
lessthanjake wrote: Given that he was 12th in RS AuPM/g in the regular season and 3rd in AuPM/g in the playoffs, I do actually think it is a bit crazy to argue his impact dropped (at least as measured by AuPM/g), because in the entire history of AuPM/g there is not a single year where 12th in RS AuPM/g was as high a number as 3rd in playoff AuPM/g (nor is there a single year where 3rd in playoff AuPM/g wasn’t higher than Curry’s RS AuPM/g this past year).
The AuPM/G you are referring too I am quite confident is off. The numbers in general are greatly off. Before the numbers were screwed up, I am pretty confident Curry wasn't 3rd. However, since Backpicks does not want to work the way it is supposed to, I can't show you the real AuPM/G number.
It seems like they’re just scaled differently, but I guess your theory is that the numbers are just completely wrong/random and reflect nothing at all, rather than just being scaled wrong (not sure that makes sense to me, given that the leaderboard doesn’t look random and is dominated by people with great playoff on/off). I don’t really know why we’d think Curry’s AuPM/g wouldn’t likely have been higher in the playoffs, given that he had a +8.0 regular season on-off and a +17.3 playoff on-off.
Well because AuPM incorporates the box-score as well, and Curry took a nosedive there.
LukaTheGOAT wrote: The AuPM/G you are referring too I am quite confident is off. The numbers in general are greatly off. Before the numbers were screwed up, I am pretty confident Curry wasn't 3rd. However, since Backpicks does not want to work the way it is supposed to, I can't show you the real AuPM/G number.
It seems like they’re just scaled differently, but I guess your theory is that the numbers are just completely wrong/random and reflect nothing at all, rather than just being scaled wrong (not sure that makes sense to me, given that the leaderboard doesn’t look random and is dominated by people with great playoff on/off). I don’t really know why we’d think Curry’s AuPM/g wouldn’t likely have been higher in the playoffs, given that he had a +8.0 regular season on-off and a +17.3 playoff on-off.
We because AuPM incorporates the box-score as well, and Curry took a nosedive there.
“Nosedive” is a pretty strong word here, I think (he was still ranked 7th in playoff BPM). The on-off is so much better in the playoffs that I find it pretty difficult to believe that the box component part of the equation would be enough to make the overall AuPM/g lower. Or at least I find it difficult to believe that when we see him ranked 3rd in playoff AuPM/g and 12th in RS AuPM/g—which basically means you have to believe that the playoff numbers on the website are completely fake (as opposed to just scaled differently—which seems much more likely) to think there’s any real chance his AuPM/g went down in the playoffs.
Also, you said no player has more than 2 PS higher in AuPM. Well yeah, but Curry has missed years. Lebron in 2016 and 2017 is higher, and if my memory serves correctly, he was higher in the 2023 PS as well (numbers are messed up and can't be checked sadly).
In years they both went to the playoffs in the last decade, Curry is higher than LeBron in playoff AuPM/g in 2014, 2015, 2018, and 2023. LeBron is higher than Curry in 2016 and 2017. Steph has appeared in the playoffs 8 times in the last decade, and no one has had a higher playoff AuPM/g than him more than twice.
OhayoKD wrote:Lebron contributes more to all the phases of play than Messi does. And he is of course a defensive anchor unlike messi.
One_and_Done wrote:Really? KD in 22 was 33, post achilles, without enough help, and being guarded by long, elite defensive wings. Yet he still put up 26-6-6 on 526 TS%.
Kobe had none of those excuses when he posted 22-3-4 on 456 TS% in the 04 finals, when on the highest stage he literally shot his team out of the series. A classic example of how if Kobe couldn't win his way, he'd rather lose. How about his 2011 spanking by the Mavs. He put up 22-3-2 on 519 TS%. I can keep going. The 08 Boston series saw him post worse stats too. The claim Kobe never had a series that bad is simply wrong. He had plenty that were worse.
There’s more to basketball than TS%. KD averaged over 5 turnovers per game against Boston and had an on/off of -52.9. The second worst on/off for any of their top 7 rotation guys was Bruce Brown at -10.0. KD broke the Nets’ offense and his turnovers were the best offense for Boston as well.
There's more to basketball than plus minus too.
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
rk2023 wrote:Durant’s strong MVP span for me is 2012 (maybe?), 13-14, 16-19 for me. Post achilles, I’m not as high due to load management in 2021 and a dip in production since then.
Robinson’s for me would be 1990-91, 93 (maybe?), 94-96, 98-99 (maybe). 92 is on the fringes, as I deduct for his time missed.
So as high as 7 for Durant and 8 for Robinson.
Post achilles Durant was still 95% as good as pre-Achilles KD probably. Certainly his stats still suggest as much, and blow Kobe out of the water.
You said you will look at some variations of RAPM correct? What do you think of Kobe grading out higher in:
Durant certainly doesn't seem to be in a different stratosphere as Kobe as a player.
I know Durant's efficiency looks tantalizing. However, when we have measures such as these suggesting Durant isn't outright clear of Kobe, maybe it is worthwhile asking why. I think you could question if Kobe's passing is underrating by simple assist totals, despite Durant maybe seeming close to Kobe.
One_and_Done wrote:Really? KD in 22 was 33, post achilles, without enough help, and being guarded by long, elite defensive wings. Yet he still put up 26-6-6 on 526 TS%.
Kobe had none of those excuses when he posted 22-3-4 on 456 TS% in the 04 finals, when on the highest stage he literally shot his team out of the series. A classic example of how if Kobe couldn't win his way, he'd rather lose. How about his 2011 spanking by the Mavs. He put up 22-3-2 on 519 TS%. I can keep going. The 08 Boston series saw him post worse stats too. The claim Kobe never had a series that bad is simply wrong. He had plenty that were worse.
There’s more to basketball than TS%. KD averaged over 5 turnovers per game against Boston and had an on/off of -52.9. The second worst on/off for any of their top 7 rotation guys was Bruce Brown at -10.0. KD broke the Nets’ offense and his turnovers were the best offense for Boston as well.
There's more to basketball than plus minus too.
So you are arguing that it's fair to simply look at slashlines + TS%, because some people only look at +/-?
rk2023 wrote:Durant’s strong MVP span for me is 2012 (maybe?), 13-14, 16-19 for me. Post achilles, I’m not as high due to load management in 2021 and a dip in production since then.
Robinson’s for me would be 1990-91, 93 (maybe?), 94-96, 98-99 (maybe). 92 is on the fringes, as I deduct for his time missed.
So as high as 7 for Durant and 8 for Robinson.
Post achilles Durant was still 95% as good as pre-Achilles KD probably. Certainly his stats still suggest as much, and blow Kobe out of the water.
You said you will look at some variations of RAPM correct? What do you think of Kobe grading out higher in:
Durant certainly doesn't seem to be in a different stratosphere as Kobe as a player.
I know Durant's efficiency looks tantalizing. However, when we have measures such as these suggesting Durant isn't outright clear of Kobe, maybe it is worthwhile asking why. I think you could question if Kobe's passing is underrating by simple assist totals, despite Durant maybe seeming close to Kobe.
Kobe is 31 on that list. Do you have Kobe as the 31st best player of all-time? No? Then why are we giving it undue emphasis. I say that as someone who voted my top 2 identically to the top 2 on your first link. You can't just copy stats and use that as a substitute for an argument. Why even watch games? We can just ask a computer who was better with the latest catch all stat.
We shouldn't only use TS% either; but at least it is clear what it measures. It shows your efficiency. Plus minus might be showing alot if random variables.
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
One_and_Done wrote:Really? KD in 22 was 33, post achilles, without enough help, and being guarded by long, elite defensive wings. Yet he still put up 26-6-6 on 526 TS%.
Kobe had none of those excuses when he posted 22-3-4 on 456 TS% in the 04 finals, when on the highest stage he literally shot his team out of the series. A classic example of how if Kobe couldn't win his way, he'd rather lose. How about his 2011 spanking by the Mavs. He put up 22-3-2 on 519 TS%. I can keep going. The 08 Boston series saw him post worse stats too. The claim Kobe never had a series that bad is simply wrong. He had plenty that were worse.
There’s more to basketball than TS%. KD averaged over 5 turnovers per game against Boston and had an on/off of -52.9. The second worst on/off for any of their top 7 rotation guys was Bruce Brown at -10.0. KD broke the Nets’ offense and his turnovers were the best offense for Boston as well.
KD played 176 of a possible 192 minutes in that series. In the total 16 minutes where he wasn't on the floor, the Nets had a 137 offensive rating. I think that was a bit anomalous and it'd be a mistake to put too much thought into a 16 minute sample size despite how hilarious the on/off value is.
I see some people considering KD at this point and to be honest, I am quite surprised. Durant finished 22nd in 2020 project. Since that time, he added 2021-23 stretch for his career value, but is this really that valuable? In that period, Durant missed 42% of his RS games and he heavily underperformed in two of three postseason played.
I understand that people can be high on his 2020/21 season, he still played the majority of the RS and he was brilliant against Milwaukee in the playoffs, but one season around MVP level shouldn't put you 5-10 spots ahead this high on the list. The rest of the seasons added are just underwhelming, they are nothing special in top 20 standards.
70sFan wrote:I see some people considering KD at this point and to be honest, I am quite surprised. Durant finished 22nd in 2020 project. Since that time, he added 2021-23 stretch for his career value, but is this really that valuable? In that period, Durant missed 42% of his RS games and he heavily underperformed in two of three postseason played.
I understand that people can be high on his 2020/21 season, he still played the majority of the RS and he was brilliant against Milwaukee in the playoffs, but one season around MVP level shouldn't put you 5-10 spots ahead this high on the list. The rest of the seasons added are just underwhelming, they are nothing special in top 20 standards.
Can anybody explain me what happened?
I just wouldn't have agreed in the first place with the 2020 vote, on this and other matters.
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
so for all the people picking steph, i just want to go back to playoff resiliency again. i looked at the last project's Top 33 (just stopped at pippen due to time and less interest in the players below him) plus newer guys like jokic, giannis, embiid, and kawhi and then put in tatum and butler. i would've put in doncic but i only did ages 22-35 and doncic only had one season (though he would have led the list below).
all the data is from ages 22 to 35 and it looks at the BBRef stats PER, WS48, BPM, and TS% and compares each year to the regular season. the resilience at the end is just an average of the normalized increase/decrease for each value. +1 is a top 95% value and -1 is a bottom 6.5% value (couldn't use 5% because the lower values were so low that they were making the average season as slightly "resilient"). for playoff runs shorter than 10 games, the final value was multiplied by "Games/10" so a 5 game, 1 round playoffs would get weighed at 50%. the 2nd table is all 416 playoff runs for these guys. the 1st table is their career average (each playoff run weighed equally to essentially average your resiliency from year to year).
Rank Player Name Career Avg 1 Kawhi Leonard 0.4561 2 Hakeem Olajuwon 0.3315 3 George Mikan 0.3246 4 Lebron James 0.2747 5 Bill Russell 0.2548 6 Walt Frazier 0.2318 7 Jerry West 0.2142 8 Michael Jordan 0.2081 9 Tim Duncan 0.166 10 Magic Johnson 0.0968 11 Scottie Pippen 0.0963 12 Oscar Robertson 0.0865 13 Kobe Bryant 0.0856 14 Charles Barkley 0.0779 15 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar 0.0554 16 Dirk Nowitzki 0.0534 17 Jayson Tatum 0.0247 18 Nikola Jokic 0.0205 19 Shaquille O'neal 0.0179 20 Moses Malone 0.0093 21 Dwyane Wade -0.0021 22 Chris Paul -0.0156 23 Julius Erving -0.0231 24 Jimmy Butler -0.0341 25 Wilt Chamberlain -0.0851 26 Kevin Garnett -0.1115 27 Larry Bird -0.1327 28 Kevin Durant -0.1435 29 Patrick Ewing -0.1446 30 David Robinson -0.1552 31 Steve Nash -0.1582 32 Stephen Curry -0.1613 33 Bob Pettit -0.1624 34 John Stockton -0.182 35 Giannis Antetokounmpo -0.1975 36 James Harden -0.1982 37 Karl Malone -0.2959 38 Joel Embiid -0.533
ignoring the gargantuan outlier that is joel embiid, and also karl malone, steph finds himself lumped in way down at the bottom. i feel like he's way more james harden than people want to admit. and to the thrust of some of my earlier points, here is how it looks at his 2015-2019 peak in the 4 seasons where there was actually some threat (warriors down in series/playing competitive series):
that's an average of -0.508. in other words, when it wasn't the easiest, most pressure-free playoff run ever, at his peak he basically showed the same anti-resilience as massive anti-resilience outlier joel embiid. and he somehow got 2 titles and a another finals where game 7 was tied with a minute to go. so much of his ring total seems to be based on having one of the largest margins of error ever and managing to win rings even when significantly underperforming his regular season play, either because the other team got injured at just the right time (2015 cleveland/2018 rockets) or he had the most talented roster ever at his side (2016 1 minute away from winning/2018). it's such a luxury so many others didn't get.
from 2014-2023, except for 2022: regular season: he never dipped below a PER of 24, with 3 seasons above 28 (and a 31.5). post season: dipped below a PER of 23 (5x) more than he was above 24 (3x), with no seasons above 28 and only 1 above 25 (27.1). the one of course in 2017.
regular season: 7 seasons of 0.200 WS48 (ok, one was 0.199) or above with 3 of at least 0.267 WS48 post season: only 3 seasons that even eclipsed 0.185 WS48 and one of those was right at 0.203 WS48 (to his credit, it was 2022). only 1 up there in the 0.267 range, and it was 2017 of course.
he does a little better in BPM but still, seasons of 8.7, 9.9, and 11.9 in the regular season, and then 8.8 and 9.7 in the playoffs, with the 9.7 of course being 2017.
this is steph compared to known playoff maestro james harden. see a difference in these numbers? i really don't (average rank is the average of the rank of the individual stats). even down to them being best over their whole careers and worst at their peaks.
to me, it's hard to see him over kobe. kobe already has the longevity. he has playoff resilience. he has more absolute titles, and let's not act like playing with shaq was way easier than being on the durant warriors.
where steph's average series victory is as a +4.2 SRS favorite and his average series loss is only as a -0.1 SRS underdog, kobe's average series victory is as a paltry +1.4 SRS favorite and his average series loss as a -2.6 SRS underdog.
this isn't strictly just a shaq thing. if you don't include anything with shaq, the numbers are still only +1.9 and -3.0 for kobe. from the 2009 finals to the 2010 finals, the lakers played 5 series as an average of a 0.6 SRS favorite and won them all. that's pretty impressive.
resultantly, kobe has the actual vs expected titles advantage, and is actually pretty amazing in that regard.
kobe has 5 titles with an amazing 1.4 expected titles. his +3.6 delta is behind only people from the 60's celtics and his +254% is behind only hakeem. steph isn't terrible, but +1.4 and +51% isn't as shiny of an accomplishment. and he has a little bit of an advantage from not racking up a lot of playoff appearances on good/not great teams, where you tend to collect at least a fraction of an expected championship but with no real chance of winning one. steph just either made the playoffs with a team that could go to the finals or just missed the playoffs.
throw together the longevity on top of the playoff resiliency, both team and individual and it seems like kobe should be above steph. what i'm less clear on, and what i've been dreading, is what to do with bird. i can't very well be the playoff resiliency guy and the "actual vs expected" guy and pimp for bird, who is about even with steph in resiliency and worse in "actual vs expected" and certainly doesn't have amazing longevity. 4 years of "meh" playoffs to start his career up to 1983 and then 1987 is basically his last dominant playoffs? it's hard to ignore him showing up as a rookie and the celtics just immediately becoming a +7 SRS, 60 win team and then staying there for about a decade. it's also hard to ignore 1991, well past his prime, where the celtics are 46-14 with him (63 win pace) and 10-12 without him (37 win pace), for a nice +26 WOWY at the age of 34. that's a lot of WOWY as a rookie and out to 12 years into his career. with 8 straight top 2 MVP finishes in there. but man, playoff underperformance after playoff underperformance.
i don't know if i've posted it here, but between the ages of 23-35, larry bird had 5 playoff series with a TS% below 46. all of them were at home and he lost 4 of them, and 4 of them were during his 1981-1988 prime and he lost 3 of them, with only the 1981 finals against a sub 0.500 team being the win.
playoff series below 46 TS% between the ages of 23-35 larry bird - 5 Jordan, Lebron, Hakeem, Shaq, Duncan, Magic, Wilt, Kobe, Durant, Curry, Harden, Kawhi, Dirk, Malone, Barkley combined - 5
and wilt's 1 series arguably shouldn't count given the era he was playing in.
I've noticed West grades out rather highly in your analyses / modeling that focus more on individual performance / PS translation. With underrated, good longevity (I'd say) - how high is he on your radar compared to the triad of Kobe, Curry, and Bird [unsure how you view Mikan] ?
tough to say. if i had done some of this stuff months ago and had time to marinate, i might have west 12th right now after kobe. as it is, while i obviously already knew he has a good playoff performer, i feel like getting myself to "west is above bird/curry" is a big shift as i'm looking at more of this data. as larry bird seems to fall lower in my rankings, i can't help but thinking i'm missing the secret sauce with him. he carried a decade of the nba with magic. his team is one of the great dynasties. dominant in the regular season. am i just looking at some numbers and missing the magic, no pun intended? but being true to my belief that playoff rising/falling seems to mean more than it might appear (hakeem and mikan being simultaneously at the very top of both individual and team outperformance doesn't seem like a coincidence), should i have west over bird? if it gets to that point, i think i'll vote west over bird (and then instantly regret it).
if the playoffs were like the regular season with category leaders, west would have 4 playoff scoring titles ('65, '66, '68, '69) and 3 assist titles ('70, '72, '73). also, 3 PER titles ('68, '69, '73), and 3 WS48 titles ('66, '68, '69). notably, those occurs over a 9 year period from '65 to '73, when he was 34 years old so this isn't just 4 dominant runs. and all are double digit games so not just first round flukes. if i knew how to get the numbers easily from BBRef, it would be interesting who has the most category leads (using whatever game/minute minimums BBRef uses). anyway, that's dominance.
he lost the 1966 finals by 2 points in game 7 while averaging 34/6/5 on 59 TS% in a series where baylor shot 39.6 FG%. and obviously lost a super close 7 game finals in 1969 while averaging 38/5/7 on 56.6 TS% in a series where baylor shot 39.7 FG% (consistent, at least) and wilt was held to 11.7 ppg.
now, playing with wilt and baylor and only winning once is definitely a mark against him. especially since the one win was his worst playoffs ever. but i'm not that high on baylor and wilt is tough to figure out, with tons of playoff resiliency problems. it's definitely worth nothing that west does terribly by "actual vs expected" titles but in some ways he's just the mirror reflection of russell's outperformance, since he played him so much in the finals. and 1973 is a huge underperformance (0.515 expected titles), but he led the playoffs in PER and assists and it was basically his last playoffs ever. still, the negative delta has to be noted.
in the 7 straight finals west lost from 1962 to 1970, he played the greatest defensive dynasty ever in 6 of them and escaped with numbers of 32.7/5.4/5.3 on 55.1 TS%. that's pretty remarkable to do against the greatest relative defenses we've seen. it's possible his resiliency is understated given just how many series he played against the celtics.
similar to bird, curry is a tough one. i'm definitely in camp draymond in terms of thinking he is an impact god and a way bigger deal in the warriors dynasty than even a place like this might give him credit for. i think the synergy of draymond/curry is simply something we've maybe never seen in nba history, where 2 players seem like they were literally built in a lab to play together, with almost no overlap and every strength somehow accentuating the other's strengths. and i don't think either one "made" that happen, that's just who they were as players and they happened to end up on the same team.
but curry does have 4 titles, 2 as the best player. and west doesn't. in a vacuum, i think west is probably close to as much of an offensive outlier in his era but i'm not sure he could exploit it quite as much based on 1960's strategies and without a 3 point line. and while he is clearly a much better defender, it's at a position that it's tough to say if the impact can be that great overall. if i was just adding up offense+defense+resiliency in the playoffs, i feel like west is over curry and only "ringz" puts curry over west. is prime/peak west really falling off as much as curry in the 2018 playoffs and still getting a ring? clearly not. but if i'm thinking of dominance in an era and giving due credit to the 2022 title (even if i think the warriors were still the clear favorite, it wasn't a gimme title like the others), i might have to have steph over him. either way, since steph will probably win this round, i probably won't have to actually pick one or the other.
as for mikan, he's an oddball. i think i've decided he played close enough to west's/oscar's era and was so ultra dominant, that i'm probably going to vote mikan over west. plus, in the resiliency stuff, he literally is showing some of the greatest playoff outperformance ever, on both an individual and team level, and that's after dominating the regular season numbers about as much as anyone. that's a crazy combination. it feels weird ascribing the word "clutch" to guys who were playing in games that weren't televised and were barely covered (i.e. they weren't facing pressure like modern athletes), but he does seem to ramp up in the moments that count, which is how you win 7 titles in 8 years. i've never put him over west before and maybe i just have a soft spot for mikan and maybe in 3 years i'll wonder what i was doing, but for now i'm just going to vote him over west, without it actually meaning i've "demoted" west.
70sFan wrote:I see some people considering KD at this point and to be honest, I am quite surprised. Durant finished 22nd in 2020 project. Since that time, he added 2021-23 stretch for his career value, but is this really that valuable? In that period, Durant missed 42% of his RS games and he heavily underperformed in two of three postseason played.
I understand that people can be high on his 2020/21 season, he still played the majority of the RS and he was brilliant against Milwaukee in the playoffs, but one season around MVP level shouldn't put you 5-10 spots ahead this high on the list. The rest of the seasons added are just underwhelming, they are nothing special in top 20 standards.
Can anybody explain me what happened?
He’s getting a lot of discussion because One_And_Done keeps bringing him up every thread, but he’s not actually getting that much support. After the 10 people who have been voted in and the 5 who have been nominated, the next 3 players who are getting the most nominations are Oscar, David Robinson, and Dirk. So even if KD went next after those guys, that would still be 19th, only 3 spots ahead of his placing 3 years ago. At this point, I’d say it’s more likely he goes lower than 19th than it is that he goes higher.
f4p wrote:so for all the people picking steph, i just want to go back to playoff resiliency again. i looked at the last project's Top 33 (just stopped at pippen due to time and less interest in the players below him) plus newer guys like jokic, giannis, embiid, and kawhi and then put in tatum and butler. i would've put in doncic but i only did ages 22-35 and doncic only had one season (though he would have led the list below).
all the data is from ages 22 to 35 and it looks at the BBRef stats PER, WS48, BPM, and TS% and compares each year to the regular season. the resilience at the end is just an average of the normalized increase/decrease for each value. +1 is a top 95% value and -1 is a bottom 6.5% value (couldn't use 5% because the lower values were so low that they were making the average season as slightly "resilient"). for playoff runs shorter than 10 games, the final value was multiplied by "Games/10" so a 5 game, 1 round playoffs would get weighed at 50%. the 2nd table is all 416 playoff runs for these guys. the 1st table is their career average (each playoff run weighed equally to essentially average your resiliency from year to year).
So, I didn't respond to this before but I think I should.
While I totally understand why you'd term this concept "resiliency", I would object.
When an opponent commits to putting great pressure on you, it's generally the right thing to do to pass. While that pass will sometimes count for an assist, in general, when the defense commits like this, they're going to knock any holistic production assessment for an individual even though he may well be playing more valuably than if he had insisted on keeping the ball and shooting.
Resistance to adaptation which can result in decreased efficacy isn't resilience so much as stubbornness.
sure. but i also think i would be more sympathetic if steph's assists flew up and his volume went down but his TS% went up, indicating he was foregoing shot attempts in the face of tremendous defensive pressure. then i would just be penalizing him for giving up the ball. but i look at things like the first 3 games of the 2015 finals before the warriors lineup change where both the warriors and steph struggled, look at the struggle for both steph and the warriors against a non-elite defense in the 2016 cavs, look at the rockets switch-everything defense giving the warriors and steph trouble in 2018 (when healthy), look at the same defense giving steph one of his worst series ever in 2019 (with the warriors mostly surviving on KD going off individually). it feels like the warriors biggest struggles are around times when steph himself was limited, indicating to me that the two aren't unrelated and we didn't just see steph putting up lower numbers but his team still cruising.
It's not so problematic if you talk about it one stat at a time "scoring volume resiliency" "TS% resiliency", in part because it reaches for less, but when you put it all under one umbrella and then use the term you literally penalized guys for making the right call at times.
And of course those who know me probably no where I'm going with this: I think Impact Resilience is more the thing to focus on here, both because Impact is in the end what matters, and it has no preferences as to whether a guy helps his team by volume scoring, playmaking, defense, or harder to see and quantify measures.
Now as I say this, in the context of a project like this, I'm also less interested in Resilience than I often would be. How Great you are is first and foremost about what you actually do when it matters, not by how that compares to how do other times.
so i know i brought up some of this a long time ago in maybe thread #3 or #4 and you responded with a really good post and i never got a chance to respond, but i'll bring up what i brought up then. when steph's impact seemingly always looks good, whether he plays well or not (i'll say more when i respond to DraymondGold), it makes me question the value of the numbers and whether we're not just getting some weird lineup/draymond effect in the numbers and not really impact, per se.
f4p wrote:so for all the people picking steph, i just want to go back to playoff resiliency again. i looked at the last project's Top 33 (just stopped at pippen due to time and less interest in the players below him) plus newer guys like jokic, giannis, embiid, and kawhi and then put in tatum and butler. i would've put in doncic but i only did ages 22-35 and doncic only had one season (though he would have led the list below).
all the data is from ages 22 to 35 and it looks at the BBRef stats PER, WS48, BPM, and TS% and compares each year to the regular season. the resilience at the end is just an average of the normalized increase/decrease for each value. +1 is a top 95% value and -1 is a bottom 6.5% value (couldn't use 5% because the lower values were so low that they were making the average season as slightly "resilient"). for playoff runs shorter than 10 games, the final value was multiplied by "Games/10" so a 5 game, 1 round playoffs would get weighed at 50%. the 2nd table is all 416 playoff runs for these guys. the 1st table is their career average (each playoff run weighed equally to essentially average your resiliency from year to year).
Rank Player Name Career Avg 1 Kawhi Leonard 0.4561 2 Hakeem Olajuwon 0.3315 3 George Mikan 0.3246 4 Lebron James 0.2747 5 Bill Russell 0.2548 6 Walt Frazier 0.2318 7 Jerry West 0.2142 8 Michael Jordan 0.2081 9 Tim Duncan 0.166 10 Magic Johnson 0.0968 11 Scottie Pippen 0.0963 12 Oscar Robertson 0.0865 13 Kobe Bryant 0.0856 14 Charles Barkley 0.0779 15 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar 0.0554 16 Dirk Nowitzki 0.0534 17 Jayson Tatum 0.0247 18 Nikola Jokic 0.0205 19 Shaquille O'neal 0.0179 20 Moses Malone 0.0093 21 Dwyane Wade -0.0021 22 Chris Paul -0.0156 23 Julius Erving -0.0231 24 Jimmy Butler -0.0341 25 Wilt Chamberlain -0.0851 26 Kevin Garnett -0.1115 27 Larry Bird -0.1327 28 Kevin Durant -0.1435 29 Patrick Ewing -0.1446 30 David Robinson -0.1552 31 Steve Nash -0.1582 32 Stephen Curry -0.1613 33 Bob Pettit -0.1624 34 John Stockton -0.182 35 Giannis Antetokounmpo -0.1975 36 James Harden -0.1982 37 Karl Malone -0.2959 38 Joel Embiid -0.533
ignoring the gargantuan outlier that is joel embiid, and also karl malone, steph finds himself lumped in way down at the bottom. i feel like he's way more james harden than people want to admit. and to the thrust of some of my earlier points, here is how it looks at his 2015-2019 peak in the 4 seasons where there was actually some threat (warriors down in series/playing competitive series):
that's an average of -0.508. in other words, when it wasn't the easiest, most pressure-free playoff run ever, at his peak he basically showed the same anti-resilience as massive anti-resilience outlier joel embiid. and he somehow got 2 titles and a another finals where game 7 was tied with a minute to go. so much of his ring total seems to be based on having one of the largest margins of error ever and managing to win rings even when significantly underperforming his regular season play, either because the other team got injured at just the right time (2015 cleveland/2018 rockets) or he had the most talented roster ever at his side (2016 1 minute away from winning/2018). it's such a luxury so many others didn't get.
from 2014-2023, except for 2022: regular season: he never dipped below a PER of 24, with 3 seasons above 28 (and a 31.5). post season: dipped below a PER of 23 (5x) more than he was above 24 (3x), with no seasons above 28 and only 1 above 25 (27.1). the one of course in 2017.
regular season: 7 seasons of 0.200 WS48 (ok, one was 0.199) or above with 3 of at least 0.267 WS48 post season: only 3 seasons that even eclipsed 0.185 WS48 and one of those was right at 0.203 WS48 (to his credit, it was 2022). only 1 up there in the 0.267 range, and it was 2017 of course.
he does a little better in BPM but still, seasons of 8.7, 9.9, and 11.9 in the regular season, and then 8.8 and 9.7 in the playoffs, with the 9.7 of course being 2017.
this is steph compared to known playoff maestro james harden. see a difference in these numbers? i really don't (average rank is the average of the rank of the individual stats). even down to them being best over their whole careers and worst at their peaks.
to me, it's hard to see him over kobe. kobe already has the longevity. he has playoff resilience. he has more absolute titles, and let's not act like playing with shaq was way easier than being on the durant warriors.
where steph's average series victory is as a +4.2 SRS favorite and his average series loss is only as a -0.1 SRS underdog, kobe's average series victory is as a paltry +1.4 SRS favorite and his average series loss as a -2.6 SRS underdog.
this isn't strictly just a shaq thing. if you don't include anything with shaq, the numbers are still only +1.9 and -3.0 for kobe. from the 2009 finals to the 2010 finals, the lakers played 5 series as an average of a 0.6 SRS favorite and won them all. that's pretty impressive.
resultantly, kobe has the actual vs expected titles advantage, and is actually pretty amazing in that regard.
kobe has 5 titles with an amazing 1.4 expected titles. his +3.6 delta is behind only people from the 60's celtics and his +254% is behind only hakeem. steph isn't terrible, but +1.4 and +51% isn't as shiny of an accomplishment. and he has a little bit of an advantage from not racking up a lot of playoff appearances on good/not great teams, where you tend to collect at least a fraction of an expected championship but with no real chance of winning one. steph just either made the playoffs with a team that could go to the finals or just missed the playoffs.
throw together the longevity on top of the playoff resiliency, both team and individual and it seems like kobe should be above steph. what i'm less clear on, and what i've been dreading, is what to do with bird. i can't very well be the playoff resiliency guy and the "actual vs expected" guy and pimp for bird, who is about even with steph in resiliency and worse in "actual vs expected" and certainly doesn't have amazing longevity. 4 years of "meh" playoffs to start his career up to 1983 and then 1987 is basically his last dominant playoffs? it's hard to ignore him showing up as a rookie and the celtics just immediately becoming a +7 SRS, 60 win team and then staying there for about a decade. it's also hard to ignore 1991, well past his prime, where the celtics are 46-14 with him (63 win pace) and 10-12 without him (37 win pace), for a nice +26 WOWY at the age of 34. that's a lot of WOWY as a rookie and out to 12 years into his career. with 8 straight top 2 MVP finishes in there. but man, playoff underperformance after playoff underperformance.
i don't know if i've posted it here, but between the ages of 23-35, larry bird had 5 playoff series with a TS% below 46. all of them were at home and he lost 4 of them, and 4 of them were during his 1981-1988 prime and he lost 3 of them, with only the 1981 finals against a sub 0.500 team being the win.
playoff series below 46 TS% between the ages of 23-35 larry bird - 5 Jordan, Lebron, Hakeem, Shaq, Duncan, Magic, Wilt, Kobe, Durant, Curry, Harden, Kawhi, Dirk, Malone, Barkley combined - 5
and wilt's 1 series arguably shouldn't count given the era he was playing in.
Thanks for collecting the Box stats f4p!
There's an issue with the playoff resilience argument though: these stats don't really get at what the pro-Steph supporters are actually arguing. It's talking past their point a bit.
Which Stats do we use? Most of the crowd supporting Steph are incorporating some combination of actual impact stats. Not PER or WS48, but plus minus, or RAPM, or EPM, or WOWY, or WOWYR. And these stats are much more favorable to Curry in the playoffs.
yes, they are. but i, of course, have less faith in their efficacy than a lot of other people here, as i find them to be possibly too lineup-dependent and arguably more susceptible to wonky results, even if they might be wrong for "better" reasons than the box score is wrong (i.e. good process, impossible to truly suss out impact for the impact metrics vs "what is defense?" for the box score).
Why do we (the pro-Steph crowd) prefer these stats?
because they make him look good?
Well there's a few reasons, that you well know. -They measure actual value in a role. They don't overrate scoring or underrate playmaking, they're not blind to defensive value or offensive leadership or off-ball value. They measure actual value.
as best as they can. given the sample sizes, team strategies, lineups, etc.
-They do a better job in tests of stats. They correlate with wins in a game better, they correlate with good team performance better (i.e. they do a better job at 'describing' value in a game), they are better predictors of future games and future team performance (they are better at predicting value in future games)
they probably do. in some ways they are like if you broke a vase and then tried to put it back together. you kind of started with the final answer so you will probably end up with something like the final answer. hell, that's practically the whole point of "prior informed" stuff. "uhh, this answer looks weird". "oh well, just put in what you think the answer is first". "hey, it agrees with what i thought the answer was!". now, while you might have painted the overall picture somewhat well (predicting wins), whether you actually assigned all of the credit properly is harder for me to agree with.
the box score is more like walking into a room with a bunch of shards lying on the ground and trying to guess it was a vase. but i don't think that's what the box score is for. i don't think it's a random number generator. the guys putting up all of the big numbers tend to be the very best players. in fact, that's typically how they get all of those numbers. by being really good and no one being able to stop them from getting those numbers. a thousand years ago when people thought putting up 27/15 in 1965 meant you were better than every modern player because people didn't know what pace was or 15 years ago when people thought a 6th man scoring 15 moderately-efficient points per game meant he was amazing, those were what i consider huge problems with how the box score was used. now that we account for minutes and pace and efficiency, i don't think they are far off from the right answer. certainly all of the guys who have been voted in so far are dominant box score players (well, russell would be if we had blocks and steals and even without them he's not terrible).
Why does this matter for Steph? The pro-Steph crowd has argued it's specifically important to use these stats when evaluating Steph, because so much of Steph's value specifically comes from stuff that gets missed in the basic box stats. GOAT level Off ball motion, GOAT level stretching the floor, GOAT level gravity, all-time guard screening, GOAT-level volume at drawing double teams, being the driver of a GOAT level offensive system, being a strong offensive communicator, fitting well alongside other talented stars, playing sound positional defense, strong defensive communication ... every single one of these things are missed by PER and WS48. Entirely. Yet these are some of the key things that puts Steph in contention for this vote
so i think this is important because it is said a lot. this seems to imply a few things: a) other player don't have non-box score impact. which i don't think is true. how many hockey assists are missed for helio guys like lebron? how much defense is missed for hakeem/duncan? is steph an outlier in this respect? maybe you would say yes, but i'm not so sure. which flows into... b) it implies steph isn't good at the box score. this is a guy with two scoring titles. TS Add seasons that are legendary. a 4 year peak of 28.1 PER, 0.277 WS48, and 9.3 BPM and 65.0 TS%. that's better than a lot of guys voted in before him. tim duncan and hakeem olajuwon didn't hit a single one of those numbers in even a single season of their careers, much less over a 4 year period. and that's with steph's weird dip in 2017 when he clearly backed off in the regular season. the box score loves steph! i think this is important. steph is not bill russell, struggling to be recognized by the numbers. he's excellent by these measures, in the regular season.
Which do the more accurate stats portray Steph in the playoffs? Well, a lot more positively than you are. BPM is the most accurate box stat out of the ones you mentioned... it performs best on tests of how well it predicts team success and player value in the moment and in the future. And by your own admission, Steph gets betterin BPM.
sorry, by "better", i meant better than PER and WS48. he still declines, just not as much (again, kind of similar to harden, who looks best by BPM).
This trend continues if we look to other stats. In AuPM (i.e. RAPM but stabler in short samples), pre-2022, Steph does not decline in the playoffs. And in fact is more valuable than Kobe. If we add 2022 and 2023, Steph actually improves in the playoffs on average.
well, kobe and steph seem to be on opposite ends of the impact spectrum in terms of who i would think are most likely underrated/overrated. i'm not even a huge kobe fan, but he always seems strangely low by these measures. it seems hard to believe the lakers won 5 titles if he had so little impact.
Why does Steph show decline in certain playoffs? And what years do we focus on for our sample? Steph was majorly injured in 2016. Steph was (slightly) injured in 2018. We've been over this.
well, steph seemed perfectly fine in the 2016 playoffs until the finals started, when his numbers fell off a cliff. which is weird because irving/love should have been the perfect tonic for any injuries he had. if he had really struggled right after coming back or against better teams, this would seem to hold up better. and if we're counting 2018, then at some point "steph underperformed because he was injured" stops being any different from "steph underperformed" in the same way we look at cp3 and just say it's unfortunate he was injured. i mean if you can miss 6 games and then significantly underperform due to injury (382nd out of 416) and still win the title with a great team PSRS per Sans, then you must have a hell of a team around you. most people aren't getting a ring out of that situation.
When looking at his 4-year peak (while throwing out 2017 for... reasons...), you'll note that Steph shows his biggest decline in 2016 in your own stat (when he had a major playoff injury). People who have been arguing for Steph's resiliency have argued that you need to separate playoff decline due to injury (2016) compared to healthy years, that the majority of the perceived decline is exclusively from taking injured samples with his healthy samples, and that he basically maintains value (a higher value than Kobe) or even gets better in a variety of impact stats when looking at healthy years.
i disagree it was injuries (at least to a significant degree), but this project penalizes players for injuries all the time. if you can skate by while injured, it must say something about your team.
Meanwhile, you throw out 2017 because it was "the easiest, most pressure-free playoff run ever,"... while ignoring the fact that it was only so easy and pressure free when Steph as playing. Also conveniently throwing out his single best playoff run ever. I bet playoff Hakeem would look worse without 1994, or playoff Shaq would look worse without 2001, or playoff Wilt would look worse without 1967.
i mean i don't think you can underperform 4 out of 5 times, and then the one time you don't is when there is no pressure and say it was a coincidence. i suppose it could be random, but when it perfectly lines up with the thesis, i don't think it can just be random. KD, also with plenty of notable underperformances, and steph both made their lives easier for each other in those playoffs. the warriors were the biggest preseason favorites ever.
also, if you took away 1994 for hakeem, you would only be taking away his 5th most resilient (ugh, i'm tired of typing that word) playoffs, with 1986, 1987, 1988, and 1997 all coming out ahead. and he'd still have one of the craziest, most high-pressure titles ever in 1995. i mean presumably there's a reason we venerate the 1994 hakeems and 2003 duncans and 2011 dirks of the playoff world, isn't there? when the whole world was on their shoulders, they came through in spectacular, unimpeachable fashion. in the moments that have cracked lesser players, they stood tall. while creating an all-time team is nice and a feather in the cap, it doesn't say much about playoff resiliency, which was the main focus of my post. it's basically anti-resiliency.
It's interesting that you also don't include 2022 or 2023 in your later year by year focus, when Steph seemed to get better quite clearly in the playoffs. It also happened to be when he was healthy for the playoffs... but I'm sure that's just a coincidence
well, the point was steph's peak. the very best of steph was 2015-2019 and it was a struggle for him in the playoffs. also, just to be clear, the overall ranking includes everything from age 22-35 so it encompasses steph's entire playoff career. also, he did not improve in 2023. it grades out at 345th out of 416. and before 2015, we get 2013 at at the exact midpoint of 208th out of 416 and then 2014 back down at 335th out of 416. 2017 and 2022 are very notable outliers. in both cases, years where steph's regular season numbers took a huge dip from the previous year (especially 2017 when you consider how good his 2016 regular season was), and thus set the stage for him to outperform. and before we say what matters it the absolute, again steph's absolute numbers are not that spectacular.
3 sub-23 PER's in the playoffs in his 2016-2019 prime? in 3 years where he averaged 28 PER in the regular season? for an offensive player for whom scoring is a big part of what he does? that's really low by historical standards of the guys we are looking at, especially when steph was getting mentioned for the top 10.
Meanwhile, your team arguments (looking at championship delta) seem to also miss all the arguments pro-Steph people have been making (that Steph's teams near his peak were pretty universally better than Kobe's teams... by basically every team stat we have).
i agree, they were amazing. but i think AEnigma has posted draymond green impact stats that would indicate that some of the very things that make steph look so amazing also make draymond look arguably even better. he beats steph in on court plus/minus in the playoffs for several (all?) of their title runs, wins on/off quite a few years, is dominant, even league-leading, in some of those playoff impact metrics that say steph is great. if we are to believe these numbers, then we seemingly have to believe this was very much a two man show, and that's where we get back to the synergy, where it's hard to say if they are just so helpful to each other that we'll never know their true independent impact.
I don't know man. The box stats are certainly interesting stuff, and the championship deltas are at least interesting. But basically none of this actually addresses the actual points that the pro-Steph crowd is arguing, nor does it address the concerns other people have raised with using this criteria (championships vs expected championships have a lot of potential noise and biases that we've discussed already). It's okay to have different criteria than others! But I'm not sure this actually addresses any of the arguments in favor of Steph.
okay, i've now tried to address some of these things. and one thing i've always objected to is the "steph plays way worse, the impact numbers say he was still great" thing that seems to happen with him. where his impact is somehow performance-independent and he gets a bunch of credit when basically everything else, including the warriors losing/being pushed to the brink, would say he faltered. yes, he does lots of things that aren't in the box score, but he does those things when he plays well. they aren't just offsetting thing where he ramps them up when he is faltering by traditional metrics. it can't just be:
steph put up 33/8/7 on 65 TS% impact metrics: he's amazing! steph put up 28/6/6 on 62 TS% impact metrics: he's amazing! steph put up 24/4/4 on 58 TS% impact metrics: he's amazing! steph played so badly his fans said he was injured because even they think he played poorly: impact metrics: he's amazing!
now, there are probably some dips in there for some of those, but not enough to my eye.
70sFan wrote:I see some people considering KD at this point and to be honest, I am quite surprised. Durant finished 22nd in 2020 project. Since that time, he added 2021-23 stretch for his career value, but is this really that valuable? In that period, Durant missed 42% of his RS games and he heavily underperformed in two of three postseason played.
I understand that people can be high on his 2020/21 season, he still played the majority of the RS and he was brilliant against Milwaukee in the playoffs, but one season around MVP level shouldn't put you 5-10 spots ahead this high on the list. The rest of the seasons added are just underwhelming, they are nothing special in top 20 standards.
Can anybody explain me what happened?
He’s getting a lot of discussion because One_And_Done keeps bringing him up every thread, but he’s not actually getting that much support. After the 10 people who have been voted in and the 5 who have been nominated, the next 3 players who are getting the most nominations are Oscar, David Robinson, and Dirk. So even if KD went next after those guys, that would still be 19th, only 3 spots ahead of his placing 3 years ago. At this point, I’d say it’s more likely he goes lower than 19th than it is that he goes higher.
Some people are considering him for nomination vote though.
I don't know, I just fail to see what separates him from Charles Barkley for example - other than playing with the best supporting cast ever for three years of course.
70sFan wrote:I see some people considering KD at this point and to be honest, I am quite surprised. Durant finished 22nd in 2020 project. Since that time, he added 2021-23 stretch for his career value, but is this really that valuable? In that period, Durant missed 42% of his RS games and he heavily underperformed in two of three postseason played.
I understand that people can be high on his 2020/21 season, he still played the majority of the RS and he was brilliant against Milwaukee in the playoffs, but one season around MVP level shouldn't put you 5-10 spots ahead this high on the list. The rest of the seasons added are just underwhelming, they are nothing special in top 20 standards.
Can anybody explain me what happened?
He’s getting a lot of discussion because One_And_Done keeps bringing him up every thread, but he’s not actually getting that much support. After the 10 people who have been voted in and the 5 who have been nominated, the next 3 players who are getting the most nominations are Oscar, David Robinson, and Dirk. So even if KD went next after those guys, that would still be 19th, only 3 spots ahead of his placing 3 years ago. At this point, I’d say it’s more likely he goes lower than 19th than it is that he goes higher.
Some people are considering him for nomination vote though.
I don't know, I just fail to see what separates him from Charles Barkley for example - other than playing with the best supporting cast ever for three years of course.
I struggle to see what separates him from James Harden who played him to a draw in 2019 with a diminished version of the not as talented team he had beating the Warriors(and matching by point differential without garbage time) before his co-star got hurt. By box, outside of Warrior years, Harden has a massive playmaking edge. Impact generally seems to favor Harden too with impact-only(Cheema's playoff weighted RAPM notably), or hybrids(RPM, RAPTOR, Darko ect). Harden has several series against great defenses that are more impressive than any of KD's performances offensively if you account for creation and I think at his peak(going with 2020) hei just cleanly better than anything from durant as an rs+playoffs. Especially if you account for the questionable spacing and his co-star being hurt.
Harden's scoring is probably less teammate dependent than KD's and he's just a better creator and ball-handler. I think Harden is probably more worthy of a nomination.
What if I told you Durant has a higher Wowzy score. His PiMpp numbers are 0.2 higher as well, that's gotta mean something right?
If people want to argue against KD I'd prefer an argument, not a recitation of obscure numbers. This isn't a video game.
Harden has a habit of dropping off in the playoffs. KDs game is more resilient there. If it wasn't I'd be considering Harden soon, and I'm still going to consider him before long. Barkley is worthy of condideration also. Both Harden & Barkley peaked higher than the majority of nominees currently available. If Barkley had played in the 60s he'd be remembered as the GOAT no doubt.
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
iggymcfrack wrote: He’s getting a lot of discussion because One_And_Done keeps bringing him up every thread, but he’s not actually getting that much support. After the 10 people who have been voted in and the 5 who have been nominated, the next 3 players who are getting the most nominations are Oscar, David Robinson, and Dirk. So even if KD went next after those guys, that would still be 19th, only 3 spots ahead of his placing 3 years ago. At this point, I’d say it’s more likely he goes lower than 19th than it is that he goes higher.
Some people are considering him for nomination vote though.
I don't know, I just fail to see what separates him from Charles Barkley for example - other than playing with the best supporting cast ever for three years of course.
I struggle to see what separates him from James Harden who played him to a draw in 2019 with a diminished version of the not as talented team he had beating the Warriors(and matching by point differential without garbage time) before his co-star got hurt. By box, outside of Warrior years, Harden has a massive playmaking edge. Impact generally seems to favor Harden too with impact-only(Cheema's playoff weighted RAPM notably), or hybrids(RPM, RAPTOR, Darko ect). Harden has several series against great defenses that are more impressive than any of KD's performances offensively if you account for creation and I think at his peak(going with 2020) hei just cleanly better than anything from durant as an rs+playoffs. Especially if you account for the questionable spacing and his co-star being hurt.
Harden's scoring is probably less teammate dependent than KD's and he's just a better creator and ball-handler. I think Harden is probably more worthy of a nomination.
I think the only reason why I struggle to put Harden in the same tier as Durant is that his defense is a real concern for the majority of his career (well and he has weaker longevity as well). I don't think you can really create a consistent argument that Durant is a better offensive player, unless you are extremely high on him fitting well with other ball-dominant stars (but past prime Harden did extremely well with Embiid).
Still though, I do have Durant higher mostly because of these two things. I don't think he peaked higher or anything like that though.
One_and_Done wrote:If people want to argue against KD I'd prefer an argument, not a recitation of obscure numbers. This isn't a video game.
People already gave you arguments without citing numbers:
- Durant is the weakest creator among considered perimeter players, - Durant's scoring ability is reliant on playmakers he played with, - Durant isn't resilient postseason performer, despite what his 2017-19 numbers show you, - Durant's defense doesn't move the needle at this point of discussion. - Durant's longevity isn't anything special and it's hurt by the fact how many games he missed throughout his career.
Basically, Durant isn't the creator top perimeter players are, he's not defender top bigs are and his scoring is wildly inconsistent in the playoffs.
Harden has a habit of dropping off in the playoffs. KDs game is more resilient there.
You see, I don't think that's even true. Durant has his playoff peak in GSW that inflates his total career numbers, but even then I don't think he peaked clearly higher than 2018-20 Harden.
If Barkley had played in the 60s he'd be remembered as the GOAT no doubt.
Given the fact how important defense was in that era and how people back then looked way beyond boxscore numbers, I really doubt it would help his case at all.
1) KD has been the offensive hub of teams. Even if we granted he was a worse playmaker (and assists per 100 are close, depending on the sample used), so what? Shaq was a worse playmaker than Kobe too. He was the better offensive player nonetheless. How great of a playmaker do you need to be? It depends on what sort of game you have. What matters isn't playmaking, or skill xyz, it's impact. KD's Ortg tells us he was producing better offenses than Kobe. 2) I noted some of the OKC samples when Westbrook was out, e.g. in 2014. KD still led the team to success without him. In the Bucks series in 2 Harden and Kyrie got hurt; no problems, still killing it on offence. The idea he is "reliant" on his playmakers is silly. Like, obviously he needs a point guard, so do most stars, but KDs offense has been fine without one too. Now that he's 34 turning 35 he can't exert quite the same impact anymore, but that's hardly a fair point of comparison (certainly not with Kobe; what was Kobe doing at 34-35?) 3) KDs D, while note always at the same level, certainly helps him; especially when he is being compared to guys like Kobe who couldn't contribute in the way peak Durant could.
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
