liamliam1234 wrote:
Why do we need to do it by series.
Because I don't care about David Robinson running up his numbers against **** defenses? The criticism of him is that he can't perform against good teams in the playoffs, if statistics show he performs worse than Ewing against good teams, that's more relevant than the overall numbers.
Ewing only made it past the conference semi-finals twice during his prime, and Robinson only did it once. If Ewing was so uniquely disadvantaged in his average playoff opponent, then it should not be too hard to draw out the difference in average opponent quality relative to average performance. And that may be an annoying amount of work, but hey, that is the standard if you are going to die on this hill that the only reason Ewing is considered worse is because his level of competition was just so much higher. Weird position for someone who has had to defend the same type of argument being thrown against Julius Erving.
What? Are you serious right now? I didn't feel the need to go look through the numbers because outside of you wanting to dodge what my post says and proves no one would suggest David Robinson played anywhere near the same quality of defenses Ewing faced. Just go look at their basketball reference pages, you have the same tools I have and quite frankly having to go look that up to spoon feed you the numbers is equivalent to you making me go pull numbers to prove to you Curry is the best 3 point shooter ever or Jordan the scorer with the highest volume ever. I'm not taking this criticism in good faith right now, it's something extremely obvious that we all know is a fact and if you don't know can go be found in 2 minutes yourself.
That's the gap with Dr. J here, he played the Nuggets who were 2nd in SRS in the NBA in 77 on the 76 Finals. Proving he had good competition is just as easy as me mentioning that team at the very least. Now name me ONE great defense Robinson ever saw in the playoffs during his prime? You can't, there isn't one, and everyone here knows there isn't one.
I am saying when it is that marginal of a superficial advantage for Ewing, things like per minute/possession production matter and could explain the difference; and it might not, but the point is we have no idea because you went as basic as possible.
I also didn't make sure they had the same pregame meals, analyze how many homecourt games they had an how they played in them, I didn't provide quarter to quarter breakdowns of the numbers, and I didn't analyze what they did play by play. Thanks for letting me know.
And defence comes into play as soon as you said you would take Ewing’s peak over Robinson’s. If I misinterpreted and you only meant that in the context of their offensive peaks – which I would still dispute, but whatever – then we can drop it.
It does, but I'm not arguing for Ewing here, not do I want to. It's not relevant to this thread as no one is voting Ewing and he's not in my radar right now. I'm arguing against the statement that Robinson's offense is the level of regular season Ewing, which was something said to imply his offense was better than Ewing's in the postseason.
And again you can go punch these frivolous numbers yourself if you want, I'm not going to do a bunch of legwork so you can answer superfluous questions you have about pretty clear and comparable numbers.
Give me Robinson’s offensive performance against Hakeem over Ewing’s any day.
Hakeem compared to Ewing scored 7 more ppg, had 1.9 more apg, 0.4 more topg, and they had a 16.6 TS% gap.
Hakeem compared to Robinson scored 11.5 more ppg, had 2.3 more apg, 0.3 less topg, and they had a 3.7 TS% gap.
Sure Robinson is over Ewing's unthinkably terrible offensive production, but most of that was destroyed by him getting unthinkably demolished on defense.
Plus no one is calling Patrick Ewing at age 31 with the knees he had is his peak. Yeah I'd take Robinson's performance over Ewing's but I'd put 95 Robinson over 94 Ewing pretty easily. Overall though, from 90-97 their performances against defenses that were better than +2 (with negative being better) are about even offensively with an edge to Ewing.
I have basically stayed out of the Curry conversation apart from saying his peak should not be considered notably above Magic’s. I do not recall ever tying his peak performance to how he handled top defences.
You're right I was forgetting which poster you were in those conversations and your addition to them since they got kinda broad.
That said, you value players dominating bad defenses the same as them flopping against good defenses? If so of course you rate Robinson's offense highly, but for most of us when determining who's best we care about how they go against good defenses because chances are the deeper your team gets the better the defenses faced will be.
[Hence the “or whatever”. You can pretty much take your pick of the metric.
So what 2 boxscore aggregates? I think you missed the main point, which is that boxscore aggregates are useless unless you're comparing 2 similar players that impact the game in similar ways and play similar roles. Even then many of them (win shares) are entirely useless in every way.
And coincidentally 1990 was also almost certainly Ewing’s worst defensive performance from 1988-97.
Sure... If you judge defense of all things off boxscore aggregates. If you actually care about the quality of defense he played? Not so much.
To someone that doesn't use boxscore aggregates they'll see his block and steal totals, the fact that with similar rosters the 89 and 91 Knicks performed about the same, Ewing's amazing defensive impact shown before the 89-91 period and after the 89-91 period, and come to the conclusion his defense between 89-91 was pretty consistent, whatever level you feel it's at. DBPM is not going to show you that because DBPM cares more about the fact he didn't have either strong steal or rebounding numbers because everyone knows DBPM loves high steal and rebounding numbers which is why Russell Westbrook was 2nd in DBPM in 2017.
But even then, his offence that year was a massive outlier for his career. So he has one freak season where he starts to outproduce Robinson solely at the weaker facet of both of their games, and suddenly he is a better peak player? Come on.
Yep.
"The player who's comparable to this other player overall had an outlier year where he vastly outperformed the usual level of play for both guys and now that outlier year is better than the best year either of those two have had outside of that?"
Weird to see a second option lead his team in points.
Not really? I mean there's plenty of teams with inefficient first options and efficient second options.
Cummings took more shots and had a higher usage percentage in both the regular and postseason, and he had more playmaking duties. How is he not the first option?
Congratulations to Cumming outproducing him marginally in ten games of the playoffs, on worse efficiency, but that hardly supersedes the regular season sample. This is what I am talking about in terms of disingenuousness.
The regular season sample where Cummings took more shots, and used more total possessions than Robinson? Yeah that's a great sample size to determine who the first option was.
But I can use 1991 if you prefer. I can use most years of Robinson’s prime, in fact, because unlike Ewing he had more than one good offensive season – and somehow he managed to have those seasons without sacrificing his defensive aptitude to do it.
Or we can do what I did and use his aggregate numbers in the playoffs against good defenses through his whole prime instead of keying in on 91 which is a year no one thinks is his peak, and a year where his offense got locked up in the playoffs by a bottom 5 defense. You're getting into "winning an argument" mode, I'm not here for arguing I'm here for discussion. Stay on topic and stop mentioning random **** in an attempt to get me in a gotcha situation, I'm not expanding the scope of my original statements to include your little random tidbits.
Does any of this disprove my numbers that showed he has worse production in the playoffs against defenses better than a +2 through their primes? No? Then what exactly are we discussing here?
It was not at the level of Ewing. Ewing had all of one year where he could offensively claim to be on par with Robinson; in every other year, he is offensively blown out of the water.
Explain those numbers I posted then? They were numbers that represented their whole primes, so apparently every other year he wasn't better. Unless, of course, you care about how he does against bad defenses, in which case we have different criteria and different ideas on how broad a player's weakness can be before it's an issue. In my opinion if your weakness is "good defenses" that's a pretty big deal and worth analyzing in itself. Apparently you don't care about that, which is cool but a bit intellectually lazy because you have to know certain things only work offensively against lower levels of competition.
And that offensive production was accompanied by a defensive dip, so he still falls below on aggregate. This reads like you came up with a hot take but do not want to be bothered to fully commit to backing it up.
It sounds like you legitimately only judge players (defensively too, which is absurd) based on boxscore aggregates, in which case why is Westbrook not who you're voting for right now? #1 offensive player, and #2 defensive player in 2017.
Personally, I don't give a **** about WS, BPM, or PER. Go look at any case I've made for a player in this project so far and search for a mention of BPM, WS, or PER. You won't see it outside of maybe once when I used it to illustrate how much Kareem's boxscore lapped the competition. My eyes do a better job compiling boxscores into an idea of how good a player played statistically than any of those numbers which are only useful is very specific contexts to portray very specific things.
