OhayoKD wrote:Yeah, I don't think this is true. I was actually rewatching some 90/91 footage(mostly to see how the Pistons defended the triangle: how early/late defenses were reacting to Jordan or Pippen drives, how strongly or weakly shots were contested, ect) and there were various points(in 30 possessions of tracking) where attackers were able to exploit him via brute force...
https://youtu.be/8f55MC1UR7A?t=1836(this is one of three-times Jordan was just bodied, two of them resulted in points, and I didn't count the one that didn't)
Is this what you count as "hunting" Jordan? All I see is Jordan trying to draw a weak charge and not succeeding, nobody tried to exploit him here.
This is a broken play out of offensive rebound, Bulls wanted to double the ball-handler, but they didn't communicate and both attacked the same side. It is a mistake from Jordan, but it's not something you can cheat on.
If that's all you found, that's quite weak.
Ben said Magic "torched" Jordan in the finals.
That's true, but Magic torched all players for his whole career. If you want to use this logic, then I guess Luka "hunted" Kawhi because Leonard couldn't stop him either.
Blocked has dumars and hawkins doing damage man to man with speed, foul-baiting, or just turning in on over-extensions like this:
https://youtu.be/p5aNUS762wM?t=1094Don't think it's accurate to say you
couldn't exploit Jordan defensively. It's more that Jordan was able to off-set these weaknesses with stuff like:
https://youtu.be/8f55MC1UR7A?t=54
I mean, maybe I should have said "hunt successfully". You can hunt anyone you want, but Jordan isn't someone you can built your offense around to exploit his defense. He has weaknesses and I certainly find him overrated by many, but let's not exaggarate.
Jordan(at least during the first-three peat) being a matchup-impervious isn't really accurate(remember, he was at the top of the league in error-rate).
How can you know that he was at the top of the league in error-rate? We don't even have most of the games from the early 1990s.
The question is how much value is lost in the negative stuff vs the good stuff. Using Blocked's approach, for those 30-possessions(first 10, and then 20 from the 24 minuite mark to see what happened when grant went out) I counted 2 great plays, 6 good plays, 2 major breakdowns, and 6 minor breakdowns.
I don't know what "Blocked's approach" means. What I can say, based on my trakcing experience, is that affecting 16 out of 30 possessions is a lot, which suggests high activity.
You might note that while that block was counted as "great", a later block is simply counted as "good" because Jordan only makes it after Pippen(a wing, rather than a big) holds off someone too strong for jordan for several seconds. Jordan makes plays with positive, but alot of it is situationally tied to the supporting cast(as we would expect for any guard). When Jordan makes a behind the back steal on Karl Malone in ben's video above, cool! But rodman is doing most of the work.
That's irrelevant to my point, which is that Jordan wasn't easy to exploit on defense.
Is the combination of risk/reward "massively" more valuable than Magic being relatively sound but not being able to do big positive plays like the possession above?
Magic wasn't a "relatively sound" defender though, he was a big gambler himself - with worse results in general.
Well, maybe in a scale restricted to guards, but neither raw or(as enigma/hcl outlined) lineup-adjusted stuff seems to suggest that translates to a general scale(at least when his offense peaked). And it's interesting the defensive stuff seems to go up when Jordan was smarter despite being less capable. Eyes can totally capture/describe events, but they're not very good at being precise at how they weigh those occurrences, and nothing in the film(fair bit of breakdowns, fair bit of positive contributions, the occasional highlight you see more frequently with wings) makes me assume we should ignore the holistics entirely.
No, just because Jordan didn't have a very clear defensive impact on his extremely stacked defensive team doesn't mean he has no value. That's not how basketball works.
Overall, the gap is marginal, and there's relatively high uncertainity, so I'm fine giving Jordan an edge based on convention. But assuming a "massive" gap of any sort just doesn't seem justifiable,
I wonder, how many guards have you scouted defensively in your life? Have you ever did comparable thing to an average or weak defender? Focusing on the best of the best often gives us a very bad picture overall.
and I don't think "you can't matchup-hunt" Jordan really holds up.
Well, you have provided any example of Pistons doing that.
Maybe Jordan's value increases as he focuses in for the playoffs, or maybe defenses exploit his weaknesses better as they scheme up. My guess is it would be a bit of both but I don't think we should assume it goes all the way in one direction as your last sentence implies.
I don't imply anything, I say that it's much harder to exploit Jordan weaknesses on defense than Magic. Magic could be and was hunted on defense at various moments of his career. Not always with the best success, as he wasn't usually a bad defender, but it happened. That's just not the case with Jordan, at least outside of his first few seasons.