falcolombardi wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:falcolombardi wrote:
"When curry an the warriors beat the cavaliers in '14-15, they did so with a big led defense, and they beat a terribly injured 2-seed, that at best was going to be able to make the finals"
You can make anythingh look unimpressive if you present their rivals in the worst way possible and not in how good they still were or how much less "help" duncan had compared to shaq (or kobe)
I never said what Duncan did was unimpressive. I consider Duncan in general to be considerably more impressive than Dirk, I'm just speaking to the prompt in this thread.
The issue is that your post put the 2003 lakers in the worst framing possible without considering the same can be done to the 2011 heat
Is like if i diminished the 2011 mavs win over miami by saying "they were just a disfunctional (fit rather than player chemistry) team with no depth or shooting that was not what they would be in their title runs"
And i could frame the 2003 lakers as a dinasty team led by 2 all time great players with two top 10~ ever players in their primes fresh off a title run
Suddendly duncan win sounds way more impressive than dirk win. That duncan 2003 didnt have as much "narrative" legacy as dirk 2011 is not caused by differences in the strenght of their rivals or a difference between duncan and dirk own play
Is caused by lebron free agency decision in 2010 making him one of the most cheered against athlete of all time whereas spurs dinasty was historically understated by media.the difference was an outside the court one
If kobe and shaq were as hated as lebron was in 2011 or it happened in the finals vs conference you can be sure duncan win would be given way more historical relevance than it is given now
So listen, I think people are getting triggered by the tone of my statement in my initial post in the thread, and I have to admit I understand that the chain of negatively-charged statements is something I should be more careful if I want to enjoy my time here...and so I should have known better than to phrase it as pithily as I did.
I apologize for that slip. I'll try to be better.
But, I have to say I object to the idea that, in the process of a player comparison, if I point out something of a negative about one, I have to point out something negative about the other. Just fundamentally, I don't understand why you would expect someone to do this on every point. The nature of debate is that there are always gaps in the conclusion/explanation presented, and that one finds a gap in the other person's presentation, and uses it to create a presentation that makes the best conclusion/explanation - which is now something other than one was presented before.
What you're doing instead here is framing the discussion about me - as if I've done something that is somewhere in the spectrum of "structurally wrong" to "latent bias" to "pre-meditated manipulation" that must be addressed publicly in a thread where people are trying to talk about basketball. (You're also doing it in the same thread where someone is actively harassing me, which given the order of the posting, feels like you literally taking the side of the harasser, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt you didn't realize this.)
But aside of the anti-social vibe of such a framing, there's the very real threat that you're just resisting dealing with correct information if you think it smacks of "bias", and you starting to see "bias" everywhere.
To finish with my basketball thought here:
You're not factoring in the magnitude differential here in the analogies you're drawing. The '02-03 Lakers were an utter train wreck, and while everyone thought they might still win the title, everyone knew that the Shaq-Kobe strife was coming to a head again, and this time it seemed like they were struggling to hit the proverbial switch.
And this was seen as a really big deal because everyone was 100% convinced that the Shaq-Kobe Lakers had already proven to be one of the dominant, great championship runs in NBA history. The consensus thought was that it couldn't hold together, and the consensus thought was correct.
Had this instead been a situation where the Shaq-Kobe Lakers still looked like dominant champs, and then here comes Prime-Duncan and elevates his team to a level even beyond the Lakers...Duncan would have been seen very differently than he was.
And here's the thing: I think the fact that newer people are starting to call me Duncan-hater is tied to the fact that people coming along later, learning the information of the past differently than those who learned it in the slow-boiling stew that is life-in-real-time, is causing a difference in vantage point which is leading to different ranking tendencies.
The fact that this exists is no tragedy - it's how the present becomes the past always. It is what it is.
While I would suggest that there is ontological value in trying to understand how people drew the conclusions they did at the time, I think the more socially tangible point is the toxicity of assuming malevolent motivations for all who came before rather than asking what they were missing at the time than you in the here and now are able to see?
I think folks are starting to overrate Duncan. I might be wrong, and it could be that my discussions with the people I think overrate Duncan might drive me toward emotional clouds...but just remember that I was watching Duncan for years before I started having this sort of interaction pertaining to Duncan. It's really something that came about in the wake of the 2014 champs...which was one of the most enjoyable team seasons ever, and something that certainly has helped everyone major player involved (Duncan, Ginobili, Parker, Kawhi, Pop, Green, Diaw, etc) on any player comparison evaluations I've done since.
But I think it probably hits a bit differently to those who consumed the entirety of the Spurs run largely at once. Here's a telicity - a completed arc - to his career that creates an anchor of meaning. I think we all feel it, but perhaps those of us who can see how it could have been otherwise, as opposed to something inevitable, aren't quite hit with it with the same force.
Okay, to complete the basketball thought by addressing the Heatle example:
It's completely fine to bring up the context of the defeat of the Heat, but I didn't mention it because I didn't feel a need to address it beyond what had already been mentioned. Why? Well, to the extent it relates to the Shaq-Kobe statement, it's because I think the '10-11 Heat were considerably stronger than the '02-03 Lakers, and that Peak Heatle was nowhere near as strong as Peak Shaq-Kobe Lakers.
Had the fact that the Heatles had not yet peaked had the same magnitude as the post-peak Lakers, then I expect I'd have either mentioned both or neither (or it slipped my mind and I'd agree I should have mentioned it).
But that's not how I see things, and I'm literally trying to communicate how I see things when I post.
