jalengreen wrote:DraymondGold wrote:jalengreen wrote:There are also series like the 2021 sweep against the Heat where he had something like a 49% TS% but a 57% TS% excluding three-pointers IIRC which doesn't worry me regarding his resilience as much. I do think the decision-making is a valid concern though, he has plenty of moments like you mentioned.
Re 2: Two of y'all mention a decline from 3 point shooting or Free throw shooting as if that makes it okay. If he declines from these areas, why should we not count it as a decline in scoring? If Giannis is a poor decision maker who continues to take bad 3s, shouldn't that be a negative?
Sure, that's why I brought up his decision making as a valid concern. But when we're talking about (a) a low sample prone to shooting variance, (b) a sweep that had exactly one close game, and (c) the fact that teams dare Giannis to shoot, I think it's worth wondering how much stock should be put on his 3PT shooting from a "goodness" perspective.
Here's a hypothetical: Imagine there was a series where Giannis was ineffective scoring inside the paint but had an abnormally hot hand from beyond the arc. The numbers ended up showing that Giannis had an efficient series overall. That may be the case, but in regards to his "goodness" I would actually come out the series having some concerns as it's unlikely that Giannis actually became an elite shooter - his dropoff in paint scoring, on the other hand, may be reason for legitimate concern regarding his ability to maintain his interior dominance against teams that key in on it.
Not sure I'm doing a great job getting my thoughts across, but I think I would personally be more concerned with Giannis' scoring inside the arc than his 3PT shooting in regards to his playoff resilience (not to suggest that his inside scoring doesn't drop in the playoffs - I'm sure it does).
And on the point of decision-making, I definitely think there's something there. It was very frustrating watching the Bucks-Nets series from the side of someone rooting for the Bucks. That team in general drove me crazy. I do think it's something that I might dock Giannis for. But I do think there's been also less competitive early round series where Giannis decides to chuck threes and it's not too problematic. For example, the aforementioned 2021 Heat series where Giannis shot 1/16 from 3. In Game 2, the Bucks were up 101-74 with a minute to go in the third quarter. Giannis proceeded to shoot (and miss) three 3-pointers in the next three minutes of gameplay.
Hi jalengreen!
Re: decision making, I knew you brought it up, but I was replying to a few people other people too who hadn't brought it up, so I thought it was worth reiterating. I agree with you that as someone rooting for the Bucks over the Nets in 21, it was so frustrating to watch their decision making at times!
Re: shooting, you mention that Giannis' worse shooting in the Heat may just be small sample. That could absolutely be true! Shooting numbers in a single sweep probably have noise. But here's something to ponder:
Giannis' free throw shooting percentage has gone down in literally every single playoff run he's had. All 7/7. His 3 point shooting percentage also went down when he was at his offensive peak in 21 and 22. Why is this?
There is a pattern with high-energy players who see their shooting numbers go down whenever they go all-out on offense, have to expend their motor on defense, and don't have time to calm down before a shot (e.g. if the defense is quicker recovering to the 3 point line or if they aren't allowed to spend 15 seconds on a free throw). Russell Westbrook's a prime example of this. Could this be limiting Giannis' shooting in the playoffs?
Re: "goodness" vs value, good point! I see what you're trying to get at. A decline in shooting from a small sample or lazy decision-making mistakes against greatly inferior teams might limit value, without changing how good a player is much. One thing I'd be careful of though: if we're sure a decline in value is not a decline in goodness (which I'm personally not convinced by for playoff Giannis), and if we only care about goodness, we should be sure to apply the same criteria when rating other players. I remember in our debate about 2017 regular season Curry, you seemed amenable to the idea that he was just as good but had less regular season value, and wanted to dock him for that value drop... are you planning to similarly dock Giannis for his drop in playoff value?
jalengreen wrote:DraymondGold wrote:iggymcfrack wrote:Against the Nets, Giannis averaged 32/13/4 on .592 TS%. That's an excellent series for anyone. The last 3 games, he averaged 35/14/4 on .654 TS%. He averaged 28/11/6 on .633 TS% in the regular season. I don't see any kind of decline there.
HI iggymcfrack! Thanks for the discussion. It sounds like you're high on the Nets series, since you listed it in your 3 biggest series for Giannis. It's not as good as the Suns series, and probably better than the Celtics series... so is it fair to call it his second best series (if we're considering opponents/context)?
Well, while 592% TS% is great in most eras, in this era against the Nets' defense, it's actually shooting worse than Giannis' regular season numbers. You say you don't see a decline there: but there's literally a -2.87% decline from his regular season. While it looks like he bumped his scoring volume, his pts/75 improved less than 1 point... most people would have a -2.87% efficiency decline as a greater decline than a 0.9 pts.75 volume improvement.
If a star's 2nd best playoff series in 4 years (considering context) has him shooting almost 3% below his regular season numbers against a bad defense, is he really that much more resilient than the other peaks?
One thing I'd add that might not be a popular opinion is that I was actually fairly impressed with the Nets defense in 2021. They played better in the postseason than I had expected. That would lead me to be more impressed with Giannis' performance than someone who was lower on the Nets' defense. Just a theory on why there may be some variance in how these performances are evaluated.
Great point! Here’s a question: How would you know whether to be impressed by the Nets’ defense or disappointed by Giannis / the Bucks’ offense? If we’re not careful, we could be mistake the Nets for getting better on defense, while in truth the Bucks might just have been worse on offense.
One thing we might do is look at the first round of the playoffs. Well, in the first round, the Nets had a defensive rating of 118.3, which is… pretty terrible. That would be worst in the league in the regular season, and it’s not like the Celtics were some offensive superteam… they were supposedly over 3 points worse on offense than the Bucks.
Okay, so the Nets’ defense didn’t improve in round 1 of the playoffs. Let’s say it did in round 2… perhaps having Irving and Harden miss 6 games total in the series allowed them to play better defenders. Well, how much better could they be? They were 20th in DRTG in the regular season, and worse in the first round. Did they improve to league average? Barely over league average?
It’s hard to see any reasonable improvement making the Nets a good enough defensive team that Giannis’ poor efficiency looks good (for an all-time scorer. And remember, we’re cherry-picking this series because it’s supposedly one of Giannis’ 3 best series in 4 years).If losing 2 stars for multiple games makes the Nets’ defense better, it should also make the Nets’ offense far worse, which would make it easier for the Bucks overall (and for Giannis on the defensive end).
jalengreen wrote:Now yes, the following year the Celtics did reduce Giannis's efficiency quite a bit, but they also did that to a lot of teams. The Bucks as a team averaged .496 TS% for the series without Middleton. The Heat averaged a .519 TS% the next round. In that light, Giannis averaging 34/15/7 on .516 TS% outside of his peak season is pretty understandable, and much less alarming than Curry averaging 22/5/4 on .580 TS% in the 2016 Finals including an awful 17/5/2 on .437 TS% in Game 7. With Curry, you could even argue that the lack of pressure in 2017 with the Warriors dominating the competition was the reason that Curry was able to maintain his averages in the postseason when he dropped significantly in the 4 surrounding seasons.
In 2016, Curry was injured. If you compare a healthy player to an injured player, you'd expect the healthy player to come out on top, right?
Let's look at the top stars vs the Celtics:
Durant: 22.7 pts/75, -1.70% rTS% [-6.2 pts/75, -8.3 rTS% down from regular season] (post peak)
Giannis: 31.6 pts/75, -3.30% rTS% [-1.0 pts/76,
-10.2 rTS% down from regular season] (close to his peak)
Butler: 26.8 pts/75, +3.10% rTS% [+2.8 pts/75, +1.3 rTS% up from regular season] (post peak)
Curry: 31.3 pts/75, +7.00% rTS% [+4.4 pts/75, +3.4 rTS% up from regular season] (post peak)
You mention that the Celtics dent a lot of teams' numbers and that Curry had a lack of pressure in 2017. Well, in 2022, after his peak, facing the pressure of a finals defense that severely dented Giannis, without the superteam of 2017, Curry performed far better than Giannis, even though Giannis was supposedly near his offensive peak. Thoughts?
It's a reasonable point, and I understand why it'd feel appropriate to compare the different stars' performances against the Celtics defense. But I'd add that they weren't really defended the same way as Udoka talked about (IIRC he mentioned during the Finals that they weren't blitzing Curry like Durant). I think that's an unfortunate pitfall of the defensive comparisons in general - different primary defenders, very different playstyles, etc. A team's personnel may be better fit to defend one superstar than the other, let alone the variable of their different teammates.
I absolutely agree, different matchups and gameplans can be easier or harder for different players. But is a different game plan worth a difference in over 10 rTS%? That’s a huge gap! And that’s with Curry being far older after his scoring peak, while Giannis should be quite close to his peak.
And it’s also not like Curry never faced teams that hyper-focused on stopping him. In my 2017 Finals Game 5 film study (linked earlier in this thread), Curry was doubled and blitzed and faced multiple defenders in 62% of possessions where he was involved (34/55), and his teammates' points were made easier by this 89% of the time (34/38 points benefited from the attention Curry drew). And like I said above, Curry’s stats in the 2017 WCF/Finals when he faced so much defensive attention look better than Giannis’ stats in his 2 best series… these would be far better than the stats Giannis had against the Celtics, even after adjusting for the relative defensive rating Giannis faced.
But if that’s not convincing, how did Giannis and Curry perform the other time they both faced the same playoff team? How do they look vs the 2019 Raptors, who also had an all-decade level defense?
Curry vs 2019 Raptors:
27.2 pts.75, 5.5% rTS%, 2.1 ScoreVal. 5.4 ast/75, 8.7 Box Creation, 1.5 ScoreVal. 5.8 AuPM,
5.2 BPM.Giannis vs 2019 Raptors: 22.1 pts/75, -3.3% rTS%, -0.7 ScoreVal. 5.4 ast.75, 6.2 Box Creation, 0.8 ScoreVal. 5.5 AuPM,
4.7 BPM
Full disclosure: Giannis was banged up at the end of Game 5/6. But just like Curry performed better than Giannis against the 22 Celtics, Curry performed better against the 19 Raptors. Against the tougher defense, despite having multiple team members injured in the series (KD missed almost 6 games, Klay missed games, Looney missed games, Iguodala was injured, Cousins was injured), Curry still comes out on top in practically every stat.
jalengreen wrote:jalengreen wrote: I'm not terribly high on Giannis' offense, but I do think that he has high postseason gravity against teams that stifle his scoring efficiency. Generates a high number of open three-pointers (and his playmaking ability has improved a ton IMO, especially his passing accuracy) but it feels that the Bucks' three-point shooting suffers in the playoffs (example: Jrue) which lets teams get away with playing a defense focused on Giannis.
This is the argument I'm most convinced by. His rim gravity definitely has value!
But just to play devil's advocate: while he has strong gravity, much more of it is from on-ball during his drives, so we'd expect this increased playoff gravity (which you're saying makes up for the scoring decline) to show up in his various playmaking stats. Does Giannis show evidence of increasing his passing in the playoffs? Not really... his assists/100 go down by -1.6 in the 2021 playoffs, his average assists/100 still go down if we add the 2022 playoffs, and his PlayVal goes down in both 2021 and 2022. (though they go down less in 22, so he still might show evidence for improving... just not enough).
His off ball gravity should definitely have some value, but it does concern me that his team's 3 point shooting goes down in both the 21 and 22 playoffs. We could blame teammates, but it could also be Giannis' slower decision making (relative to other all time greats) making it easier for defenses to recover after the kickout, while the ball swings around the perimeter to find the open man. If I were being favorable to Giannis, I'd say some of it definitely comes from his teammates' decline, but Giannis doesn't show enough gravity improvements / playmaking improvements (I'd argue he doesn't show any in 21) to make up for his immense scoring decline.
On three-pointers categorized as "wide open," non-Giannis Bucks players had a 42.5% success rate in the regular season versus 35.8% in the postseason (-6.7%). On three-pointers categorized as "open," non-Giannis Bucks players had a 37.2% success rate in the regular season versus 31.6% in the postseason (-5.6%). (The league average change in wide open and open 3PT% was miniscule, +0.2% for wide open shots and -0.3% for open shots)
The percentage of Bucks three-pointers that were classified as "wide open" dropped from 48.6% in the regular season to 41.8% in the postseason (-6.8%). The league-wide change was -4.9%, so about 2% less for the Bucks, so essentially a -1.9% relative change in the frequency of wide open threes.
Not everyone is a huge fan of the NBA shot tracking data which is fair, but I do find these numbers somewhat interesting - it corroborates a significant drop in open three-point shooting from non-Giannis Bucks. There is a drop in the frequency in which the Bucks get wide open threes, but I don't think it's too significant to explain the decline as a whole.
And as far as the eye test goes, it really did feel like the Bucks just missed good shots a lot of the time. I do want to go back and review footage of the 2021 playoff run, though... I know that Giannis' passing impressed me in the 2022 postseason but I can't trust my memory enough to confidently make a claim on the intricacies of his playmaking in the 2021 run. It is definitely possible that he wasn't helping his shooters as much as he could've.
CharityStripe34 wrote:His off ball gravity should definitely have some value, but it does concern me that his team's 3 point shooting goes down in both the 21 and 22 playoffs. We could blame teammates, but it could also be Giannis' slower decision making (relative to other all time greats) making it easier for defenses to recover after the kickout, while the ball swings around the perimeter to find the open man. If I were being favorable to Giannis, I'd say some of it definitely comes from his teammates' decline, but Giannis doesn't show enough gravity improvements / playmaking improvements (I'd argue he doesn't show any in 21) to make up for his immense scoring decline.
This is a bit disingenuous. His playmaking abilities in the last two years has improved tremendously as far as his passing accuracy and timing, and we don't have to study a spreadsheet to see that. His on-ball and off-ball gravity are tremendous (think he creates the second most open threes for teammates?) so while he doesn't have the most polished offensive game, his play even in the half-court have shown great strides. Obviously great playoff defenses are going to have better success at close-outs and at least partial contests, but Gianni has repeatedly found teammates open beyond the arc and their 3pt shooting falls apart for whatever reason. I mean, is he going to be Jokic/Curry/Lebron level of playmaking? Of course not, but he's become a very good passer, as he always was an unselfish player. Especially after he morphed into a score-first PF post-Jason Kidd.
I don't have issue with someone ranking his peak seasons (or other contemporary stars) lower considering he's just entering his basketball prime. I'm of the opinion that with him (and Jokic) we are seeing perennial/generational superstar seasons that will stack up nicely with other prior greats.
Either way, these are fascinating threads and case-studies for literally the greatest players and seasons ever so we're going to be splitting hairs a lot of the time.
Yep CharityStripe34, I agree I was being a bit disingenuous. But that’s why I said I was playing devil’s advocate
To reiterate: this is the argument I’m most swayed by.
But just to push back on this a little bit against CharityStripe34… isn’t it strange that all of Giannis’ teams get worse in 3 point shooting every playoffs? Why is this?
I agree this is nitpicking, but we’re voting for the 10th GOAT peak! Some nitpicking might be required. And I’d be dubious to just hand-wave away this decline by saying “Giannis looked like he improved in passing from memory, so I’m going to assume it’s all just his teammates' poor resilience and not related to Giannis.” People aren’t willing to give Curry or Magic this benefit of the doubt, so why should Giannis get a pass? We should be doing an actual in-depth study, with questions like:
-Did Giannis actually improve as a passer in 21, or was it really in 22?
-If Giannis did improve as passer in 21 (/ as an off-ball gravity threat), is it enough to set up his teammates for good 3 point shots, or can we find fault in his passes’ timing/placement, etc
-How does Giannis’ playmaking compare to other creators we’re considering right now
jalengreen's tracking data and 2022 eye test are definitely points in favor of Giannis for the first two questions, but I'd still love to see someone go back to the 21 playoffs (say the Nets series) and see how his 3 point passing is. Of course, even if Giannis did improve as a passer in 21 vs 22, the question is how much does the creation gap shrink for Giannis vs Magic or Curry compared to the defense gap. And that question's far from given, at least to me
jalengreen wrote:Also, not sure if I accidentally suggested or said so, but I don't mean to claim that his increased playoff gravity makes up for a scoring decline. I'm not actually sure his postseason gravity is noticeably higher than the regular season. Rather, I feel that he still has a strong offensive impact in the postseason by maintaining his regular season gravity even if the team offensive numbers don't always suggest as much. That's just my feeling from watching the Bucks. At the end of the day, the bulk of his value is coming from the defensive side of the ball.
Sure, that sounds fair, sorry to misinterpret what you were saying! To me, Giannis' offense has severe resilience concerns given his almost ever-present scoring decline, and his poor decision making limits his ability to shift scoring value to creation value. Add that to the fact that Giannis isn't quite the level of defender that the other defensive peaks we've considered (Russell, Hakeem, Duncan, KG, Robinson), and you get a very good peak, absolutely deserving of top 20/30, but a clear step down from 10th GOAT peak, at least to me. Let me know if you disagree!
Reddit. That’s even before the 95 possessions pace vs 83-84 possession in 2007. 
Let's take 2017 Curry's WCF and Finals. 
