lessthanjake wrote:ceiling raiser wrote:lessthanjake wrote:If this is the kind of argument you find yourself making, then I think you might want to take a step back and think about the extent to which you’re starting at your conclusion and just trying to find a way to get there (not to mention maybe consider whether you’d feel less of a need to be rude if you weren’t doing that, and also whether you should be confidently asserting what people who watched basketball thought in a time period that you did not watch basketball and other posters did).
Are you sure you've watched those games live? Speaking in broad generalities, and having priors completely grounded in CW seems a bit sus.
Look at the data, and either challenge its accuracy, or
present better data. Analysis like this has certainly contributed toward emjay dropping from #2 to 5-10 for many posters, in under a year, below guys who haven't played any additional games in that span.
This is honestly just completely off base. I think you’ll find that I was the one consistently presenting data in this thread, and not at all “speaking in broad generalities.” I was arguing against a bizarre and vague cross-year analogy, and provided a ton of information to refute it—including regarding the rTS% of the 1990 Bulls supporting cast in the conference finals compared to rTS% of supporting casts of other teams in history,
Bolding the better data part because no one really cares when you need to twist or misrepresent data to make a point.
This is what you said:
lessthanjake wrote:The bottom line is that teams don’t win series’s when the supporting cast shoots that badly.
Indeed, I just searched through every series in almost 20 years of the NBA surrounding that year and couldn’t find a single example in which a team won a series while its supporting cast shot that badly. And I searched through some other series I could think of off the top of my head that might apply, and the only one that sort of worked was the 2021 Bucks beating the Nets, with a supporting cast running a 49.4% TS%—which is higher than the 1990 Bulls’ supporting cast’s TS% against the Pistons (46.3%) but was actually as bad in league-relative terms (-7.5% rTS% vs. -7.8% rTS%, and worse by opponent-relative terms). Of course, that series is kind of the exception that proves the rule, since the Bucks were losing the series and only won due to multiple injuries to stars on the other team, which completely hobbled the other team’s offense. Even in that infamous 2004 ECF between the Pistons and Pacers, where the Pistons won while averaging only 75 points a game, the supporting cast (regardless of whether we count Billups or Ben Wallace as the star) still shot slightly better in league-relative terms than the 1990 Bulls did!
So yeah, when the supporting cast shot so badly that it’d be a pretty unique historical event for them to win anyways, I’d say it’s fair to say that the help was bad and that trying to draw some analogy based on an assertion that someone else’s help was similar or worse is just silly.
Much of this is untrue or otherwise manipulated.
Take that 2004 conference finals. Without Ben Wallace or Billups, they fail to meet the marks you have set.
Ben Wallace sets off some immediate warning bells. Why would we
possibly be looking at Ben Wallace’s scoring? Ben Wallace was probably the best player on the team, yes. He was the best player on the team solely because of his defence.
We commented on how the Bulls defence was great and gave Jordan excellent support on that end. Jordan’s role was not to be a Ben Wallace defender; his role was to score. We are looking at how teams fare without their lead scorer, the guy eating up the volume. Demonstrably
not Ben Wallace. Should be the obvious approach…
So who was the scorer for the Pistons? That postseason, it was very much Rip Hamilton. What happens when we take him out of the picture? Well, without Rip, the rest of the Pistons score at sub-42% efficiency. Their defence was so good that it did not matter that they only had one competent scorer.
Your other claim was that the
only exception (now other than the 2004 Pistons/Pacers series) was the 2021 Bucks/Nets. Also wrong: I found a couple (and probably could find a bunch from the 1960s), and they just so happen to come from the perimetre player ahead of Jordan on this forum’s player rankings.
2018 first round2018 Pacers defence: 55.78%
Cavaliers without Lebron: 49.93%
(Lebron himself scored at 65.5% efficiency.
)
2007 conference semifinals2007 Nets defence: 53.97%
Cavaliers without Lebron: 47.67%
Anyway, I am not really blaming Jordan for the loss to any particular degree, because even if the defence was good, there are scales here, and obviously he was not playing for the 2004 Pistons. While I am skeptical that playing to their usual standards changes the result of Game 7, they definitely let him down in that game specifically. However, the team also gave him chances to end the series before Game 7, and while in a literal sense that single game decided their season, perhaps other players could have made use of the support provided by the starters and closed it out before that point.
So I honestly really struggle to see how I’m the one being accused of “speaking in generalities” and being told to “Look at the data, and either challenge its accuracy, or present better data.” I’m the one that was presenting data! Please read through the entire thread and perhaps reconsider/delete your post.
How well-adjusted.
