Owly wrote:lessthanjake wrote:Owly wrote:Criteria differ but that seems like an awful lot of weight to something pretty circumstantial.
If the Heat aren't in the East (or given being in the East aren't in the Central with Detroit and Cleveland) they don't get 2nd seed in a conference low on contenders.
I don’t think we can say that the Heat had an easy or fortunate road to the title at all. They had to face a 64-win Pistons team that had just won the title in 2004 and lost in Game 7 of the Finals the year before (in a series where they outscored their opponent).
Well a key here is the distinction between easy and fortunate.
There's a somewhat difficult team in their path in one round in the conference because ...
1) there's normally at least one good RS team in a conference
2) the Heat weren't that team. They were a 52-30 team. They were a 52-30 pythag team. They were a 3.59 SRS team.
So the Pistons weren't an easy opponent but they aren't an unexpectedly difficult one for a non-contender level RS team to need to go through to get out of the conference.
I’m not sure what point you’re aiming to make here. Is it “The Heat weren’t a great team, so they should expect to have to play a great team to make the Finals”? Like, okay, that’s true. But the fact that they did indeed have to play a great team to make the Finals undermines any argument that Wade and the Heat were beneficiaries of circumstances. Not to mention the fact that Wade playing so well that he dragged a team that wasn’t actually that good to a title is the main thrust of my point!
I don’t see anything fortunate here. At best, you’ve just made an argument as to why it wasn’t an *unfortunate* circumstance, or why it could’ve been even worse. Compared to other title-winning teams, the 2006 Heat did not have an easy slate of opponents. In fact, it was probably well on the harder side. The fact that it could’ve been *even harder* if that same Heat team was plopped into the Western Conference that year doesn’t seem very persuasive. Wade faced a playoff road that was probably harder than average for title winners and he got through it with a team that had no business winning a title. If I’m getting a guy for his whole career, I’m very keen on a guy who is capable of doing that. The fact that it’s possible he wouldn’t have done it if you made him have like the hardest ever playoff road for a title winner (which is what winning with the 2006 Heat out of the Western Conference basically would’ve been) seems pretty unpersuasive to me.
Also, more on this later, but your entire argument seems premised on the idea that Wade was lucky the Heat had the playoff road they had because they hadn’t had a good regular season. But the Heat’s second-best player had missed 23 regular season games, and they’d played at a 58-win, +5.64 net rating pace in the games he’d played! So if you’re saying their road was lucky given their regular season (a premise I reject, with explanations elsewhere in this post), then surely that’s counterbalanced by having been unlucky to have had that regular season in the first place. In which case, what are we doing here? Are you saying Wade had fortunate circumstances unless his second-best player is out a lot of the season and then the team has a particularly difficult road even for a team that only did as well as they did with an injury-riddled regular season?
(I will note that there’s potentially some tension between me pointing out they were actually a good regular-season team when Shaq played and saying they had no business winning the title, but that circle gets squared by the fact Shaq heavily declined before our very eyes in those playoffs).
lessthanjake wrote:That group had just had their best regular season and were healthy. The Pistons were the strong title favorite that year going into the playoffs, not a team in the West (and they were big enough favorites that I really don’t think it’s just a function of being in the East).
I'm not that up on the odds and I haven't done the implied math on that or tightly on whatever else with series odds but ... being in the East especially for Detroit ... is huge. SAS, PHX, DAL almost certainly each have to go through at least one of the others and two will likely meet up in the 2nd round and need to go through both the others and then likely Detroit. Detroit is looking at a route through one team of circa 5.5 SRS or better. SAS is looking at 2 such matchups. Phoenix and Dallas are looking at 3. And Detroit is looking at having HCA throughout. Being in the East is a substantial advantage for Detroit.
The Pistons had +100 pre-playoffs title odds. Which definitely means that they were considered favorites over any Western Conference team too, since the implied title odds there are 50%, and obviously the odds would’ve priced in some chance they lose before the Finals (note: there’s some “vig” there such that the implied odds are really very slightly below 50%, but it’s still quite clear they were favorites over the West). The 2006 Pistons were definitely the strong title favorites, and it is not because of the conference they were in. They just were considered the best team.
lessthanjake wrote:And the Heat had to face them.
As I say facing a good team in your conference ... even if you are a good team isn't exactly wild. When you aren't it's almost a given.
Yep, and Wade winning a title with a team that isn’t good is…a really big deal, and definitely something I want a good chance of if I’m getting a guy for his career.
Also, I’d note that the annals of NBA title winners are filled with a lot of teams that actually didn’t face a really good team in their conference that was actually healthy. We can just think back through the last 10-15 years of playoffs and that’s arguably true for a lot of them. The 2006 Heat did not have that, so I think an argument that Wade winning a title with them was a product of fortunate circumstances for his team doesn’t make much sense. Again, you could theoretically construct an even more difficult circumstance and being not a very good team makes the chance of such a scenario a bit higher than if they were a great team (because of worse seeding), but Wade won a title with a team that wasn’t particularly good, with his team getting a road to the title that was actually harder than normal. Again, that weighs extremely highly to me.
lessthanjake wrote:And that’s before obviously facing a strong team from the West in the Finals.
A strong team in the finals when coming out of the weaker conference. Well yeah. Again is that not kind of a given. And as I'll touch on later, though the difference isn't huge, not the toughest SRS team in the other conference.
Not every title-winning team has to face a very difficult team in the Finals. And even fewer have to do so after they’ve dispatched the clear title favorite in the conference finals. Often, it’ll be one or the other. Both is not overly common. When you have to do both and your opponents were healthy, your team really wasn’t fortunate.
An argument could be made that it might’ve been even harder if the Spurs had gotten past the Mavs, but those two teams were essentially equally good in the regular season, and the Mavs won a series between them and outscored the Spurs by 4 points a game in that series, so I’m fairly comfortable with the conclusion that getting the Mavs instead of the Spurs wasn’t materially fortunate.
lessthanjake wrote:Even the Nets were not a weak second-round opponent.
I disagree.
For one this isn't a Miami team who were 60+ win 8+ SRS who can rightly expect a 4/5 seed caliber team.
And just in absolute terms 1.11 SRS, 45 pythag wins (flattered by 49 wins). And that's running their stars at 37mpg, circa 3000 total minutes.
Yep, the Nets season results weren’t super inspiring. But, again, they had the 6th best pre-playoffs title odds of any team in the league. That’s definitionally pretty much middle-of-the-road for what you’d expect to have to face in the second round. And while you might say that’s from being in the East, I would say two things: (1) the Nets +1500 title odds suggested people thought they actually had a real chance of winning the title (i.e. a real chance of actually beating the Western Conference champion). Those are implied odds of a 6.25% chance of winning the title. For reference, that’s very similar to the Warriors’ odds this past playoffs or the Thunder or Mavs odds in 2024; (2) I wouldn’t really say being in the East really helped a team’s odds much when the clear title favorite was looming in the conference.
So how do we square these things? The Nets didn’t have an amazing regular season, but they were seen as legitimate dark-horse contenders. Well, Jason Kidd had led the Nets to 2 straight Finals not long before, and given the Pistons a really tough series in 2004, and he was still at the tail end of his prime and they’d added Vince Carter. They were a serious team. Not an awful draw in the second-round. You expect to meet a serious team in the second round. But not a cupcake draw either. Again, the annals of NBA title winners is filled with plenty of teams that have had easier second-round opponents.
You might say that they would’ve gotten a harder team if they were in the Western Conference. But, again, I don’t think the 2006 Heat’s run has to be the hardest possible run for us to say they weren’t fortunate or that “circumstances” aren’t a real caveat here. And that’s not even getting into the fact that their second-round opponent genuinely might not have been more difficult in the Western Conference. The Western Conference team with the closest record to the Heat was the Suns, and they faced the Clippers in the second round, which was not really a better team than the Nets.
lessthanjake wrote:There’s plenty of teams in NBA history that have won the title but had a lot of fortunate breaks go their way during the playoffs—including upsets to other top teams, injuries to opponents, a conference without any other particularly good team, etc. But the 2006 Heat were not the beneficiary of any of that. It’s actually an example of a run that was really not the beneficiary of circumstance.
Any "other" particularly good team ... is an interesting framing. If you're the '86 Bucks you might feel it's tough that you're in with the '86 Celtics. But if you're sub 4 SRS team is 3rd best SRS in conference is 2.17 - and they're the other side of the bracket because they're in the same division as the best team - your opponents are 0.51 and 1.11 ... a 3.59 SRS team would be really happy with that I think.
The Grizzlies posted a similar (slightly better) SRS in the opposite conference and would have been looking at Dallas, Phoenix, San Antonio, Detroit as their most likely gauntlet (substitute Miami in if you want as the "actual" team who made it through).
My gut is you might be lucky to not face a team with a higher SRS than the 0.51 an 1.11 combined in the first round and looking at typically a significantly higher total with a sterner second round test.
Quick and dirty look at teams with an SRS within .25 of Miami's in the 27+ team era (through 2019 ... because that's what I have easy access to and Covid started to janky things up in terms of non 82 game seasons, covid absences etc) ...
Atlanta 1998 - face 2.45 Charlotte Hornets - would then have faced 7.24 Chicago Bulls.
Atlanta 2016 - face 2.83 Boston Celtics - face 5.45 Cleveland Cavaliers
Boston 1992 - face 1.85 Indiana Pacers - face 5.34 Cleveland Cavaliers
Boston 2010 - face 1.99 Miami Heat - face 6.17 Cleveland Cavaliers
New Jersey 2002 - face -0.07 Indiana Pacers - face 0.57 Charlotte Hornets
Cleveland 1994 - face 2.87 Chicago Bulls - would have faced 6.48 New York Knicks
Dallas 2015 - face 3.82 Houston Rockets - would have faced 6.80 LA Clippers
Denver 2008 - face 7.34 LA Lakers - would have faced 6.86 Utah Jazz
...
apart from one outlier at the nadir of the "Leastern"-era East I'd suggest we're seeing a pattern here.
Okay, so a couple things:
1. Seeding is determined by wins not SRS. Only one of those teams you listed won as many games as the 2006 Heat did. And it was the “outlier” that had an easier second-round opponent.
2. As I noted above, I think it’s a bit odd to act like the Heat were lucky in their playoff opponents based on how they did in the regular season, when them having a relatively weak regular season was heavily influenced by their second-best player missing 23 games. It seems like in order for you not to deem Wade to have had fortunate circumstances, his team must have their regular-season record heavily affected by injury *and* have a second-round opponent that is difficult for a team that only does as well as they did in their injury-affected season. And it seems you think that the fact that that did not happen is not mitigated by the fact that they faced a great team in the Finals, and the title favorite in the conference finals, and their opponents were healthy. To me, this seems like you’re saying Wade had fortunate circumstances unless every single possible roadblock was put in his way.
3. SRS is a good measure, but it’s not a perfect determinant of team quality. The Nets were considered a significantly better team than their SRS, which is why they had the 6th best pre-playoffs title odds despite having the 13th best SRS (including being above several higher-SRS teams in the same conference). Undoubtedly this is influenced by the fact that Kidd and Jefferson had gotten them to two Finals already (and they’d actually put up a good fight in one of them). You’d generally much rather face your garden-variety mediocre-SRS team than a mediocre-SRS team led by a couple guys who have made two Finals.
It's marginal but regarding the framing on "upsets" - it's not so much what one might typically think of as a "upset" but - and this relates to having 3 of the 4 strong SRS teams in one conference - the Heat's route didn't go through (marginally) the toughest RS team (the Spurs).
By upsets materially affecting the difficulty of a playoff run, I’m talking about something like the 2023 Heat beating the Celtics or the 2021 Hawks beating the 76ers, not the 2006 Mavs beating the 2006 Spurs. Like, something that results in facing a genuinely weaker team than you’d have otherwise have faced. That did not happen for the 2006 Heat. Nor did they face teams that weren’t healthy. Nor were they in a conference that did not have another really strong team. Again, if you go through the annals of NBA champions, I think you’ll find that at least one of those three things occurred for quite a lot of them. I really don’t see how a playoff road was fortunate if none of those things were present.
Miller was genuinely a great playoff performer. I am actually very high on him. However, I just don’t see him as someone who could take a team like the 2006 Heat to a title. I don’t think that that team was very good at all. I was absolutely shocked that they won the title at the time, and I still am now. It took Wade just completely taking over against some incredible opponents. Reggie Miller has actually put up some fantastic numbers against good teams in the playoffs too. So I guess I could see someone thinking Miller could’ve potentially done something approximately similar, but I just don’t think so. He could’ve potentially approximated the efficiency. After all, he was often an efficiency monster in the playoffs. It’s potentially possible he even could’ve approximated the volume Wade put up against the Pistons while being really efficient. He did do that in a few playoffs series in his career—though never in a best-of-7 series, so it’s not super likely. But I really don’t think he could’ve scaled up to the volume Wade had to get to in the Finals, nor do I think he could’ve created for others as well as Wade did in those playoffs (even keeping gravity stuff in mind). And the volume thing is really important here, because a big part of the reason it’s so amazing that the 2006 Heat won the title is that Shaq was massively declining before our eyes, and the team’s next biggest scorer was one of the worst and most inefficient starting players I’ve ever seen (Antoine Walker). Any amount of volume decrease from what Wade was doing was going to largely go in the trash heap of increased Antoine Walker volume, which would’ve absolutely lost the series. And then we also get to Wade being a better defender.
I just don’t see Miller as being the level of player who could carry a team like that to a title. Which is pretty important here, because if I’m going to take a player for his whole career, I’d put a massive premium on a guy who I know has the ability to carry a relatively mediocre team to a title. It gives me so much more leeway in terms of not needing to strike gold with the rest of my roster. That’s mitigated by the guy who can carry his team having less longevity and therefore you’d get less bites at the apple with him. But, basically, I think the chances of winning a title go up exponentially as your star player gets better and better, and so I’d value fewer years of a guy like Wade significantly more highly than more years of a guy like Miller. And, again, I’m actually pretty high on Miller (he’s probably in my top 50 all time, though I’ve not sat down and made a list, so I’m not certain).
93-96 playoff Miller 36.9 points per 100 possessions
2006 Wade 36.3 points per 100 possessions.
RS League Ortgs were
93: 108.0
94: 106.3
95: 108.3
96: 107.6
06: 106.2
maybe you want to tweak the numbers at the margins though eyeballing it league circumstances look similar enough.
Either run might be fluky though Miller's is a larger sample. Miller's per above has a large chunk against the Knicks. Other than the prior Miller's playoffs might be luck angle (which ... isn't necessarily unreasonable in and of itself but I think would be strange in someone elevating a single run above an entire career) I'm not sure where the questioning of Miller on volume is coming from.
I don't want to get too into versus one particular opponent, in a particular team context because ... that's not really what I'm arguing. If you want to hypothesize about a coach giving additional shots to Antoine Walker ... in one particular scenario ... whatever ... giving him shots is a bad idea.
On the "don't see Miller as being the level of player" ... if the point were just peak-ish Wade seems better with big RS samples ... sure (and there's other stuff I don't necessarily disagree on - I've acknowledged defense too. Wade is the better passer whilst as you note Miller has the gravity - and something along the lines of exponential makes sense in terms of teams typically needing to be great to win a title). But where there's a focus on playoff runs it comes back to all the original points and those expanded on here. Other Heat players aren't great. But for such a team Wade typically won't drive a title because you'll face a tougher road. And whilst Wade has a very strong finals, overall that run is very good but ... mileage may differ, different metrics will differ ... not a wild, pantheon level of production.
You’re quoting per-100-possession stats, but Miller played over 4 fewer minutes per game in that span than Wade did in the 2006 playoffs. If Wade played the same as he did but played 4 fewer minutes a game, the Heat are pretty unlikely to have won the title.
And that’s not even getting into the league context being a little higher-scoring in those Miller years, or the other things Wade did better than Miller.
lessthanjake wrote:Yeah, I mean, if other players played differently then it’s possible the Heat wouldn’t have won. That’s always the case, though. And we should remember that the 2006 Heat were never even taken to 7 games in any series. No team was actually *that* close to beating them. So I don’t think it’s a particularly great example of the “this guy was just lucky that a few bounces went his way” line of thinking. A lot of things would’ve had to go differently for the Heat to actually lose. And, to the extent you might note that they may not have been taken to 7 games, but they won some very close games, I’d note that Wade played completely out of his mind in the later stages of close games in those playoffs. See here:
https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=119602168#p119602168. In the last three rounds of the playoffs in 4th Q + OT with the game within 10 points, Wade scored just below 50 points per 100 possessions on 67.05% TS%. So yeah, I think the close games going the Heat’s way was a lot more about Wade being unstoppable than the Heat being lucky.
I just drive back to the quote. No the series didn't go 7. Miami win one in overtime by 1 point, one by two points which are the games cited as easily flippable and then further the 6th game by 3 points. If you want to say 4-2 so not that close ... fine I guess, if that's your preferred measure. Saying "a lot of things would have had to go differently for the Heat to actually lose" that seems objectively wrong. 1 point change in regulation net gain for Dallas in G5, 3pt net gain for Dallas in G3. I'm not sure how "Wade played well in close games" changes any of this. It's already baked in. It's in the stats, it's in the points margins. Unless the case being made "Wade could have just added even more good late game play to flip the margin back in Miami's favor as required" ... and that will sound flippant but ... I don't know how this is supposed counter the point being made. If you think Wade playing well in a particular part of the game and the influence of luck in close games are mutually exclusive then maybe, but I don't see why they would be.
Wade playing well in the most important moments isn’t truly baked into the stats. He played really well throughout the playoffs, but he played *particularly well* in the most important moments. The overall stats don’t reflect that. Utterly dominating the highest-leverage moments is really important and is simply not accounted for in the stats.
As for generally saying the Heat won games by a small amount and so the result could’ve been flipped by small things if we leave Wade’s performance constant, I suppose that’s true, but one can always say that, and the opposite is just as true (i.e. the opponents could’ve played worse and those games wouldn’t have been as close, or they could’ve won Game 1 that was a two-point game going into the 4th Quarter). Indeed, considering how badly Shaq played, I think there’s a good argument Wade was *unlucky* in terms of how things out of his control in the series played out.
You mention that there’s some close games they won. And, again, I’d reiterate that Wade was easily the biggest reason for this, and that things could’ve gone even better for the Heat just as easily as they could’ve gone worse. Someone isn’t lucky just because things didn’t go worse than they did in reality. What happened in reality isn’t some baseline that we assume is fortunate/lucky. Wade would be lucky if his teammates played out of their minds, such that you’d expect the teammates to generally do worse than that. But the opposite was probably true here, given that the Heat had Shaq collapsing as a player.
Anyways, even if you say they could’ve easily lost a game they won, that’s where we get to the fact that they won the series in 6 games. The results of two games would’ve had to flip, or one game and then the Mavs would’ve had to win a Game 7 that never happened. It’s all very speculative, and requires changing multiple things to go against the Heat. This isn’t “If Chris Bosh didn’t get that rebound or Ray Allen didn’t make that shot, then the Heat don’t win the 2013 title.” It requires a lot more than just one little thing changing. And there’s no reason to deem it lucky that a slew of things didn’t happen to change the outcome.
My intent at this point is to leave it here. Go to go now and per initial post don't feel strongly on the general subject. I've said what I have to on luck with regard to opponents, Miller's playoff scoring apex, flip-able games and indexing on titles. Wade had a great finals and better regular seasons. I just can't see that run being something to take him over a career of Miller when he himself plays so well in the playoffs. It feels circumstantial. But I've said all this so I don't think this is going anywhere.
Lol, well I read this part of your post after already writing all of the above. I’m going to press “Submit” anyways, but am perfectly happy for us to leave it here. A lot of what I said above is admittedly redundant anyways.