2021-22 RealGM All-Season Awards - Discussion Thread

[dontcalltimeout]

Doc, I appreciate you coming at this from multiple sides. I had a lot of reactions to what you wrote, but I feel like they are ultimately differences of emphasis more than anything else. I do think getting a bit more granular on the on-court stuff can shed light on what level of Giannis we actually saw. Perhaps it's like when you have to make a decision and you flip a coin -- it's when the coin is flipping through the air that you realize what you really want -- and I ultimately lean toward being more impressed with the level Giannis played at, though he could never catch Tatum in "wins added."

But let me start here, because I don't think benefit of the doubt has to be an all-or-nothing proposition.

One more wrinkle I should bring up that possibly helps Giannis here:

The Bucks were missing Middleton.

Had Middleton been there, and that been enough for the Bucks to get past the Celtics, I'll readily acknowledge that I'd expect Giannis would move past Tatum on my board, and it bugs me that injuries to a 3rd party might swing my POY vote...but that is how it goes sometimes unless you specifically decide to give complete benefit of the doubt to those with injured teammates.

Additionally, it has to be noted, that the Bucks had Middleton for the bulk of the regular season and were not a better team than the Celtics then, so while it makes sense to argue that a healthy Bucks team beat the Celtics in the playoffs...when you do that, you could be said to be furthering the point of their regular season - that is the vast majority of the competitive basketball they actually played - was a bit lackluster.

We don't have to give everyone with an injured teammate the "complete benefit of the doubt," but we can decide what is realistic based on context and body of work. We have a significant playoff sample from Giannis. We saw him struggle against well-prepared defenses in '19 and '20, and we saw him look like a player more resistant to nullification in '21 and '22.

I think given the team strength and loss of Middleton, Boston was the toughest matchup that Antetokounmpo has faced and, though his efficiency suffered (though not as much as Jrue's), he found ways to be effective.

This, for example, shows growth:

Toronto (2019) - 22.1 per 75, -3.3% rTS, 1.08 at-rim assists
Miami (2020) - 26.6 per 75, -2.6% rTS, 2.04 at-rim assists
Boston (2022) - 31.6 per 75 , -1.7%, 2.85 at-rim assists

Personally, I find myself more uncomfortable fastening my analysis to a result determined by a teammate's injury, than to acknowledging the level to which I saw Giannis perform.

While the Bucks didn't pull any upsets in the playoffs, they performed well enough to be seen as in the conversation for being as good as the Celtics, and this doesn't fit with the regular season when you zoom in more closely than the record.

Relevant raw regular season +/- data:

I hear what you're saying about on-court effectiveness in the regular season, but the Bucks are not just any team. We have good reason to suspect that their regular season SRS in '19 and '20 overstate their actual level. We know that when they were "dominating the league" the Bucks were really really good at beating up on bad teams and that they had very particular priorities on offense and defense that worked well when you're playing three games a week with no prep but were proven to be vulnerable to strategic opponents two years in a row. So, if we have good reason to suspect that the '19 and '20 net ratings are overstated, then they're not a good standard for the evaluations that most matter.

(This is especially true if Coach Bud might have learned his lesson somewhat in 2020 and started to use the regular season as more of a ground for exploration and experimentation with more offensive-centric units (roster dictated this as well) and putting the ball more in the hands of Middleton and Holiday. He's obviously not Nurse or Spo in this regard, but does seem to have made some strides.)

But I think these on-court numbers have more to tell us if we break them out into relative offense and defense.



What I see in the last two years are offenses that are as strong or stronger than in '19 and '20, and it is the defense that has fallen off. In '21 and '22, the strongest offensive lineups are more correlated with Holiday than with Middleton, and the stronger defensive lineups are more correlated with Giannis. But why the defensive drop-off from 2020? Some of it looks like shooting and finishing variance to me, overstating the strength of 2020 and understating 2021, combined with lineups that increasingly feature one-way players. For example, in the non-Brook minutes in 2020 opponents shot 55% at the rim, and in the non-Brook minutes in 2021 opponents shot 65% at the rim. Guess which year his back up was Robin Lopez and which year his back up was Bobby Portis.

(I dove a little bit more into the defense but now it feels like a digression. I can post later if people are interested.)

Does it all have to be about the playoffs? I think it can be if it tells us what to trust from the regular season.

The following tables mirror the previous one, so we can see how the on-court relative efficiencies look for the three main Bucks in the playoffs and compare their performance to the regular season.



The trend looks like a team that consistently underperforms on offense relative to what you'd expect but has a consistently dominant defense. (Interestingly enough, the one time Milwaukee's defense did not improve in the post-season in the Giannis minutes was following their most dominant regular season, when Miami lit them up to a tune of 117.6 ORTG.) We also see that in 2021, Jrue and Giannis are almost tied in net, and that Jrue's advantage completely disappears in 2022.

This reinforces for me that with the Bucks we need to look at their playoff performance more than we look at the regular season -- their regular season defensive drop-off in 2021 and 2022 was not reflective of what they could do.

I think I ultimately feel more comfortable than you seeing the regular season as a proving ground where players and team test skills and strategies that may or may not be up to snuff in the playoffs. We don't have to imagine what his impact could be, because we saw it -- an average +12 relative to opponent strength over the last two playoffs.

Now while I understand that data like this never amounts to "proof", the question on my mind is this:

If coasting in the regular season has much to do with why Giannis isn't putting up numbers anywhere near in the ballpark what he did in his MVP years, so we really think a Giannis 4-7 points below his capacity is accomplishing more than Tatum was in this regular season?

I think what you're saying is this: if a team takes a strategy that makes them look worse in the regular season in order to be stronger in the playoffs, you don't want to reward them if the strategy fails. I think we all have to determine to what extent we have to be results-based, and I don't have a clear answer here. But I think we have enough evidence that the Bucks' true strength hasn't dropped off.

To get back to the question of regular season value versus playoff ability. If you're inclined to consider aggregate value over the course of a season, I think you can make the case for Tatum over everyone else in field.

But I just can't get there. I don't think it's projecting Giannis's impact if we saw it, even if his team didn't win in the end. To me, he showed himself to be a clearly better player than he was in his MVP years.

But there's always some give and take for this. I was about to say that the POY isn't always on a team that made it to the finals, but looking at the last 11 winners, maybe I'm wrong!

[HeartBreakKid]

Interesting to see that for all the talk about how close it'd be between Jokic and Curry it seems like Jokic is clearly running away with POY. 8-2 in 1st place votes and even some people who have Curry 3rd below Giannis as well. Even though I am one of the 2 with Curry 1st, I'm not too bothered since Jokic is my current favorite player. It's just that looking at the discourse happening right before the voting started you expect the Curry supporters to either be waiting till the last day or they have already been talked out of their selection by the overwhelming support for Jokic we've seen so far.

I was a pretty vocal Jokic supporter, but it's closer than I thought before, and I might lean Curry at #2 instead of #3.

There was a hole on my analysis - I unintentionally used team ORtg instead of on-court DRtg, which is what I usually use and SHOULD be used.

What did the on-court Drtg (Ortg?) say? I'd like to reevaluate my opinion on Curry as I have him quite low.

Which site do you use these days for that stat by the way?

[HeartBreakKid]

Doc, I appreciate you coming at this from multiple sides. I had a lot of reactions to what you wrote, but I feel like they are ultimately differences of emphasis more than anything else. I do think getting a bit more granular on the on-court stuff can shed light on what level of Giannis we actually saw. Perhaps it's like when you have to make a decision and you flip a coin -- it's when the coin is flipping through the air that you realize what you really want -- and I ultimately lean toward being more impressed with the level Giannis played at, though he could never catch Tatum in "wins added."

But let me start here, because I don't think benefit of the doubt has to be an all-or-nothing proposition.

One more wrinkle I should bring up that possibly helps Giannis here:

The Bucks were missing Middleton.

Had Middleton been there, and that been enough for the Bucks to get past the Celtics, I'll readily acknowledge that I'd expect Giannis would move past Tatum on my board, and it bugs me that injuries to a 3rd party might swing my POY vote...but that is how it goes sometimes unless you specifically decide to give complete benefit of the doubt to those with injured teammates.

Additionally, it has to be noted, that the Bucks had Middleton for the bulk of the regular season and were not a better team than the Celtics then, so while it makes sense to argue that a healthy Bucks team beat the Celtics in the playoffs...when you do that, you could be said to be furthering the point of their regular season - that is the vast majority of the competitive basketball they actually played - was a bit lackluster.

We don't have to give everyone with an injured teammate the "complete benefit of the doubt," but we can decide what is realistic based on context and body of work. We have a significant playoff sample from Giannis. We saw him struggle against well-prepared defenses in '19 and '20, and we saw him look like a player more resistant to nullification in '21 and '22.

I think given the team strength and loss of Middleton, Boston was the toughest matchup that Antetokounmpo has faced and, though his efficiency suffered (though not as much as Jrue's), he found ways to be effective.

This, for example, shows growth:

Toronto (2019) - 22.1 per 75, -3.3% rTS, 1.08 at-rim assists
Miami (2020) - 26.6 per 75, -2.6% rTS, 2.04 at-rim assists
Boston (2022) - 31.6 per 75 , -1.7%, 2.85 at-rim assists

Personally, I find myself more uncomfortable fastening my analysis to a result determined by a teammate's injury, than to acknowledging the level to which I saw Giannis perform.

While the Bucks didn't pull any upsets in the playoffs, they performed well enough to be seen as in the conversation for being as good as the Celtics, and this doesn't fit with the regular season when you zoom in more closely than the record.

Relevant raw regular season +/- data:

I hear what you're saying about on-court effectiveness in the regular season, but the Bucks are not just any team. We have good reason to suspect that their regular season SRS in '19 and '20 overstate their actual level. We know that when they were "dominating the league" the Bucks were really really good at beating up on bad teams and that they had very particular priorities on offense and defense that worked well when you're playing three games a week with no prep but were proven to be vulnerable to strategic opponents two years in a row. So, if we have good reason to suspect that the '19 and '20 net ratings are overstated, then they're not a good standard for the evaluations that most matter.

(This is especially true if Coach Bud might have learned his lesson somewhat in 2020 and started to use the regular season as more of a ground for exploration and experimentation with more offensive-centric units (roster dictated this as well) and putting the ball more in the hands of Middleton and Holiday. He's obviously not Nurse or Spo in this regard, but does seem to have made some strides.)

But I think these on-court numbers have more to tell us if we break them out into relative offense and defense.



What I see in the last two years are offenses that are as strong or stronger than in '19 and '20, and it is the defense that has fallen off. In '21 and '22, the strongest offensive lineups are more correlated with Holiday than with Middleton, and the stronger defensive lineups are more correlated with Giannis. But why the defensive drop-off from 2020? Some of it looks like shooting and finishing variance to me, overstating the strength of 2020 and understating 2021, combined with lineups that increasingly feature one-way players. For example, in the non-Brook minutes in 2020 opponents shot 55% at the rim, and in the non-Brook minutes in 2021 opponents shot 65% at the rim. Guess which year his back up was Robin Lopez and which year his back up was Bobby Portis.

(I dove a little bit more into the defense but now it feels like a digression. I can post later if people are interested.)

Does it all have to be about the playoffs? I think it can be if it tells us what to trust from the regular season.

The following tables mirror the previous one, so we can see how the on-court relative efficiencies look for the three main Bucks in the playoffs and compare their performance to the regular season.



The trend looks like a team that consistently underperforms on offense relative to what you'd expect but has a consistently dominant defense. (Interestingly enough, the one time Milwaukee's defense did not improve in the post-season in the Giannis minutes was following their most dominant regular season, when Miami lit them up to a tune of 117.6 ORTG.) We also see that in 2021, Jrue and Giannis are almost tied in net, and that Jrue's advantage completely disappears in 2022.

This reinforces for me that with the Bucks we need to look at their playoff performance more than we look at the regular season -- their regular season defensive drop-off in 2021 and 2022 was not reflective of what they could do.

I think I ultimately feel more comfortable than you seeing the regular season as a proving ground where players and team test skills and strategies that may or may not be up to snuff in the playoffs. We don't have to imagine what his impact could be, because we saw it -- an average +12 relative to opponent strength over the last two playoffs.

Now while I understand that data like this never amounts to "proof", the question on my mind is this:

If coasting in the regular season has much to do with why Giannis isn't putting up numbers anywhere near in the ballpark what he did in his MVP years, so we really think a Giannis 4-7 points below his capacity is accomplishing more than Tatum was in this regular season?

I think what you're saying is this: if a team takes a strategy that makes them look worse in the regular season in order to be stronger in the playoffs, you don't want to reward them if the strategy fails. I think we all have to determine to what extent we have to be results-based, and I don't have a clear answer here. But I think we have enough evidence that the Bucks' true strength hasn't dropped off.

To get back to the question of regular season value versus playoff ability. If you're inclined to consider aggregate value over the course of a season, I think you can make the case for Tatum over everyone else in field.

But I just can't get there. I don't think it's projecting Giannis's impact if we saw it, even if his team didn't win in the end. To me, he showed himself to be a clearly better player than he was in his MVP years.

But there's always some give and take for this. I was about to say that the POY isn't always on a team that made it to the finals, but looking at the last 11 winners, maybe I'm wrong!

Haha, yup. You have to go back to the Retro Player of the Year before you find someone who didn't go to the finals that won it.

POY is done in "real time" so we are all very affected by the post season narrative much more than if we retroactively look at things.

Jokic will be the first guy to break the norm of not needing a championship to win POY (Lebron James so dominant and well featured in general that he only needs a finals appearance, though I think the teams that beat him either had 0 or 2 superstars helped Lebron take a POY).

Even more special is that Jokic lost in the first round badly and still wins, which I think is good that we can acknowledge that you can be player of the year and like...your team not be team of the year.

[Doctor MJ]

- If Giannis is top 3 in both offense and defense, that very likely means he's in the range of +6.75 in per game impact. Maybe we can be more conservative, say it's a down year for defense, and Giannis gets into the top with an impact closer to +2.25, and he's overall +6.50 or something.

- In terms of "pure" player evaluation, Jokic and Curry have to be pretty special to surpass that. Anything north of +6.0 usually means you're on the top of the mountain.

Grappling with stuff in this vein right now.

As I said during the regular season, I'm uncomfortable with people projecting impact for Giannis based on what we see him as capable of given that the Bucks seemed to be showing signs of underperforming in the regular season as champions and veteran teams often do.

While the Bucks didn't pull any upsets in the playoffs, they performed well enough to be seen as in the conversation for being as good as the Celtics, and this doesn't fit with the regular season when you zoom in more closely than the record.

Relevant raw regular season +/- data:

Giannis '18-19 +12.1 (per 100)
Giannis '19-20 +15.8
Jrue '20-21 +8.7
Giannis '20-21 +8.4
Tatum '21-22 +12.1
Brown '21-22 +10.1
Jrue '21-22 +9.4
Giannis '21-22 +8.0

To clarify why I show this data:

- Giannis every year since hitting prime. Notice the dramatic drop off compared to his MVP years.
- Top performer by this metric on the Bucks included each year, and that's Jrue the last two years.
- Tatum included because he's the main guy I'm thinking about in comparison to Giannis.
- Brown included as the 2nd best of the Celtics players, noting a major gap below Tatum.

Now while I understand that data like this never amounts to "proof", the question on my mind is this:

If coasting in the regular season has much to do with why Giannis isn't putting up numbers anywhere near in the ballpark what he did in his MVP years, so we really think a Giannis 4-7 points below his capacity is accomplishing more than Tatum was in this regular season?

Feel free to chime in with any perspective pertaining to that, but that question leads to another playoff-driven question:

If I believe that Giannis is better when he needs to be than Tatum, and that I saw this once again in the playoffs, but I don't think he was the more valuable player over the course of the season, what should it take for me to move Giannis past Tatum in my POY?

For some, the answer is quite clear:

"If I think Player X is better than Player Y, and I saw him achieve this over the duration of the playoffs, then Player X is my choice regardless of the regular season."

But I really don't like dismissing the importance of the regular season. While I'm completely fine with siding with the playoffs over the regular season in a more classic debate - Player A was more valuable and led the better team in the regular season, but Player B was the more valuable player and led his team in victory over Player A's team, gimme Player B - if you coast in the regular season, and can't then pull off the "upset" in the playoffs, am I really supposed to ignore that the guy on the more successful team in all seasons was the more valuable player over the course of the entire run?

One more wrinkle I should bring up that possibly helps Giannis here:

The Bucks were missing Middleton.

Had Middleton been there, and that been enough for the Bucks to get past the Celtics, I'll readily acknowledge that I'd expect Giannis would move past Tatum on my board, and it bugs me that injuries to a 3rd party might swing my POY vote...but that is how it goes sometimes unless you specifically decide to give complete benefit of the doubt to those with injured teammates.

Additionally, it has to be noted, that the Bucks had Middleton for the bulk of the regular season and were not a better team than the Celtics then, so while it makes sense to argue that a healthy Bucks team beat the Celtics in the playoffs...when you do that, you could be said to be furthering the point of their regular season - that is the vast majority of the competitive basketball they actually played - was a bit lackluster.

I think that circles the issue at hand pretty well, so I'm going to leave the POY discussion where it lies, but I will note that I'm chewing on this from an OPOY/DPOY perspective too. While realistically neither is going to make my OPOY ballot, my instinct is to put Giannis ahead of Tatum for DPOY based on how Giannis (again) looked to me in the playoffs, but that implies that I rank Tatum as the stronger offensive players...which isn't really how I feel either.

Giannis was better in this last regular season than either of his MVP years. It's super weird how much you lean on +/- these days.

It would be more helpful if you explained in detail how he was better, why the team defense was so much worse than in earlier years, and why it went back to elite come playoff time.

Re: these days. I've been using +/- since before you were on RealGM.

[Doctor MJ]

I think what you're saying is this: if a team takes a strategy that makes them look worse in the regular season in order to be stronger in the playoffs, you don't want to reward them if the strategy fails. I think we all have to determine to what extent we have to be results-based, and I don't have a clear answer here. But I think we have enough evidence that the Bucks' true strength hasn't dropped off.

To get back to the question of regular season value versus playoff ability. If you're inclined to consider aggregate value over the course of a season, I think you can make the case for Tatum over everyone else in field.

But I just can't get there. I don't think it's projecting Giannis's impact if we saw it, even if his team didn't win in the end. To me, he showed himself to be a clearly better player than he was in his MVP years.

But there's always some give and take for this. I was about to say that the POY isn't always on a team that made it to the finals, but looking at the last 11 winners, maybe I'm wrong!

A good post in general with lots of food for thought. Feels like you zeroed in on the essence here at the end.

So here's the thing:

When we talk about a team switching to a more post-season oriented style of play, and it hurting their regular season performance, I think we really need to be serious about asking ourself how we think this superior post-season approach hurts the team in the regular season.

While I think we can all get behind the idea that optimizing around one approach tends to make a team less able to adapt in the playoffs, do we really think that in order for the Bucks to be a dominant defense in the playoffs these past two post-seasons, they had to drop from a 5-8 points better than the average NBA regular season defense, to 0.2 points better?

Do we really have any more reason to think reaching perfect regular season defensive mediocrity is any more of a necessity than this?



(For those who don't recall, this was how Giannis showed up after a blow out loss mid-season this year to illustrate how unconcerned with losing like that.)

Call me cynical if you'd like, but I've seen many, many teams across a variety of sports who coast during the regular season once they have a veteran team with a playoff focus, so the idea of just ignoring the fact that the Bucks couldn't even get the #1 seed in a conference without anything even close to a typical #1 seed by record as if that was just something impossible to achieve doesn't seem likely.

I think that if it had been important to the Bucks to get the #1 seed this year, they would have. It wasn't, so they didn't.

[HeartBreakKid]

erm...im not sure what you're getting at by showing giannis eating fried chicken? he doesn't care about getting blown out because he is eating?

[Doctor MJ]

Interesting to see that for all the talk about how close it'd be between Jokic and Curry it seems like Jokic is clearly running away with POY. 8-2 in 1st place votes and even some people who have Curry 3rd below Giannis as well. Even though I am one of the 2 with Curry 1st, I'm not too bothered since Jokic is my current favorite player. It's just that looking at the discourse happening right before the voting started you expect the Curry supporters to either be waiting till the last day or they have already been talked out of their selection by the overwhelming support for Jokic we've seen so far.

I was a pretty vocal Jokic supporter, but it's closer than I thought before, and I might lean Curry at #2 instead of #3.

There was a hole on my analysis - I unintentionally used team ORtg instead of on-court DRtg, which is what I usually use and SHOULD be used.

What did the on-court Drtg (Ortg?) say? I'd like to reevaluate my opinion on Curry as I have him quite low.

Which site do you use these days for that stat by the way?

If you just want those numbers for regular season and post-season, they're freely available on basketball-reference.

If you want it broken down more specifically than that, it's on the site behind the paywall. I have a subscription if there's a particular query you'd like me to run, let me know and I can see what I find.

[Doctor MJ]

erm...im not sure what you're getting at by showing giannis eating fried chicken? he doesn't care about getting blown out because he is eating?

Um, why do YOU think he brought a bucket of fried chicken with him into a press conference after a loss when, like most players, he typically eats somewhere other than a press conference?

Mind you, I'm not judging him as someone "who doesn't really care about winning". I'm saying that it was his intention when he brought the fried chicken to the press conference to communicate to the press how unworried he was about the state of the team.

[falcolombardi]

I think what you're saying is this: if a team takes a strategy that makes them look worse in the regular season in order to be stronger in the playoffs, you don't want to reward them if the strategy fails. I think we all have to determine to what extent we have to be results-based, and I don't have a clear answer here. But I think we have enough evidence that the Bucks' true strength hasn't dropped off.

To get back to the question of regular season value versus playoff ability. If you're inclined to consider aggregate value over the course of a season, I think you can make the case for Tatum over everyone else in field.

But I just can't get there. I don't think it's projecting Giannis's impact if we saw it, even if his team didn't win in the end. To me, he showed himself to be a clearly better player than he was in his MVP years.

But there's always some give and take for this. I was about to say that the POY isn't always on a team that made it to the finals, but looking at the last 11 winners, maybe I'm wrong!

A good post in general with lots of food for thought. Feels like you zeroed in on the essence here at the end.

So here's the thing:

When we talk about a team switching to a more post-season oriented style of play, and it hurting their regular season performance, I think we really need to be serious about asking ourself how we think this superior post-season approach hurts the team in the regular season.

While I think we can all get behind the idea that optimizing around one approach tends to make a team less able to adapt in the playoffs, do we really think that in order for the Bucks to be a dominant defense in the playoffs these past two post-seasons, they had to drop from a 5-8 points better than the average NBA regular season defense, to 0.2 points better?

Do we really have any more reason to think reaching perfect regular season defensive mediocrity is any more of a necessity than this?



(For those who don't recall, this was how Giannis showed up after a blow out loss mid-season this year to illustrate how unconcerned with losing like that.)

Call me cynical if you'd like, but I've seen many, many teams across a variety of sports who coast during the regular season once they have a veteran team with a playoff focus, so the idea of just ignoring the fact that the Bucks couldn't even get the #1 seed in a conference without anything even close to a typical #1 seed by record as if that was just something impossible to achieve doesn't seem likely.

I think that if it had been important to the Bucks to get the #1 seed this year, they would have. It wasn't, so they didn't.

Doc, there is a huge difference between not caring and telling to the press you dont care

When lebron loses in 2011 and goes on the speech about life going on i didnt took it as him not caring over the loss, i took it as a player getting defensive over criticism at the time

Same thingh with the giannis thingh, critizable or not, he deflecting criticisms over the bucks regular season by taking a "we dont care about regular season" stance to the press is VERY different to wether they cared or not

And in a more cynical sense giannis has a public persona/brand to maintain, not because he is fake personality, but tgingh like that help build his "brand" as a player (i say this as someone eho thinks giannis is probably a very good person so is not a criticism hrre)

[Doctor MJ]

I think what you're saying is this: if a team takes a strategy that makes them look worse in the regular season in order to be stronger in the playoffs, you don't want to reward them if the strategy fails. I think we all have to determine to what extent we have to be results-based, and I don't have a clear answer here. But I think we have enough evidence that the Bucks' true strength hasn't dropped off.

To get back to the question of regular season value versus playoff ability. If you're inclined to consider aggregate value over the course of a season, I think you can make the case for Tatum over everyone else in field.

But I just can't get there. I don't think it's projecting Giannis's impact if we saw it, even if his team didn't win in the end. To me, he showed himself to be a clearly better player than he was in his MVP years.

But there's always some give and take for this. I was about to say that the POY isn't always on a team that made it to the finals, but looking at the last 11 winners, maybe I'm wrong!

A good post in general with lots of food for thought. Feels like you zeroed in on the essence here at the end.

So here's the thing:

When we talk about a team switching to a more post-season oriented style of play, and it hurting their regular season performance, I think we really need to be serious about asking ourself how we think this superior post-season approach hurts the team in the regular season.

While I think we can all get behind the idea that optimizing around one approach tends to make a team less able to adapt in the playoffs, do we really think that in order for the Bucks to be a dominant defense in the playoffs these past two post-seasons, they had to drop from a 5-8 points better than the average NBA regular season defense, to 0.2 points better?

Do we really have any more reason to think reaching perfect regular season defensive mediocrity is any more of a necessity than this?



(For those who don't recall, this was how Giannis showed up after a blow out loss mid-season this year to illustrate how unconcerned with losing like that.)

Call me cynical if you'd like, but I've seen many, many teams across a variety of sports who coast during the regular season once they have a veteran team with a playoff focus, so the idea of just ignoring the fact that the Bucks couldn't even get the #1 seed in a conference without anything even close to a typical #1 seed by record as if that was just something impossible to achieve doesn't seem likely.

I think that if it had been important to the Bucks to get the #1 seed this year, they would have. It wasn't, so they didn't.

Doc, there is a huge difference between not caring and telling to the press you dont care

When lebron loses in 2011 and goes on the speech about life going on i didnt took it as him not caring over the loss, i took it as a player getting defensive over criticism at the time

Same thingh with the giannis thingh, critizable or not, he deflecting criticisms over the bucks regular season by taking a "we dont care about regular season" stance to the press is VERY different to wether they cared or not

And in a more cynical sense giannis has a public persona/brand to maintain, not because he is fake personality, but tgingh like that help build his "brand" as a player (i say this as someone eho thinks giannis is probably a very good person so is not a criticism hrre)

You're absolutely right that this could be argued to be a kind of bravado on the part of Giannis that meant nothing else...but when Giannis is telling us that he's not taking the regular season as seriously, and there's plenty of data that tells us the same thing, why should we assume he's lying through his fried chicken consumption?

But look, the finger lickin' good fried chicken is not the point. The point is that the Bucks had a pretty meh regular season because their defense fell off a cliff, and while this was happening I was busy telling people "Watch how that defense looks amazing again come playoff time." And I wasn't wrong.

Further, as I said this to people, I got various comments that referred to me as a Giannis hater, when as I took pains to point out:

I'm literally the single highest ranker of Giannis for both POY and DPOY out of any of the voters we've had prior to this year. If you're talking about anyone else in this thread, they fall into one of two categories:

1. They've been more skeptical toward Giannis' achievement than myself prior to '21-22.

or

2. They haven't voted previously.

Of course as I say this: It's noteworthy if others are switching places with me on this, but it doesn't mean anybody is doing anything inconsistent. I had Giannis higher in '18-19 than most in part because I placed more import on the regular season than them, and I have him lower now for the same reason. There's more to it than that as always, but yeah, if makes sense I'd be lower on Giannis this year than most precisely because I was higher previously for reasons that had nothing to do with fandom or playing styles.

[dontcalltimeout]

I think what you're saying is this: if a team takes a strategy that makes them look worse in the regular season in order to be stronger in the playoffs, you don't want to reward them if the strategy fails. I think we all have to determine to what extent we have to be results-based, and I don't have a clear answer here. But I think we have enough evidence that the Bucks' true strength hasn't dropped off.

To get back to the question of regular season value versus playoff ability. If you're inclined to consider aggregate value over the course of a season, I think you can make the case for Tatum over everyone else in field.

But I just can't get there. I don't think it's projecting Giannis's impact if we saw it, even if his team didn't win in the end. To me, he showed himself to be a clearly better player than he was in his MVP years.

But there's always some give and take for this. I was about to say that the POY isn't always on a team that made it to the finals, but looking at the last 11 winners, maybe I'm wrong!

A good post in general with lots of food for thought. Feels like you zeroed in on the essence here at the end.

So here's the thing:

When we talk about a team switching to a more post-season oriented style of play, and it hurting their regular season performance, I think we really need to be serious about asking ourself how we think this superior post-season approach hurts the team in the regular season.

While I think we can all get behind the idea that optimizing around one approach tends to make a team less able to adapt in the playoffs, do we really think that in order for the Bucks to be a dominant defense in the playoffs these past two post-seasons, they had to drop from a 5-8 points better than the average NBA regular season defense, to 0.2 points better?

Do we really have any more reason to think reaching perfect regular season defensive mediocrity is any more of a necessity than this?



(For those who don't recall, this was how Giannis showed up after a blow out loss mid-season this year to illustrate how unconcerned with losing like that.)

Call me cynical if you'd like, but I've seen many, many teams across a variety of sports who coast during the regular season once they have a veteran team with a playoff focus, so the idea of just ignoring the fact that the Bucks couldn't even get the #1 seed in a conference without anything even close to a typical #1 seed by record as if that was just something impossible to achieve doesn't seem likely.

I think that if it had been important to the Bucks to get the #1 seed this year, they would have. It wasn't, so they didn't.

re: The defense. I don't think the difference in defensive efficiency is because of any single thing. This is what I think accounts for the drop:

- shooting variance from three (and also at the rim) that affected them positively in 2020 and negatively in 2021
- occasional integration of switching schemes which probably has some minor costs (I probably gave too much time to this as a reason, but look, it's easier to play defense if you're doing the same thing all the time versus having to implement different rules in different contexts)
- by choice, and then necessity, playing more Giannis as center lineups
- playing more offensively slanted lineups (including three guard lineups)
- roster changes (primarily losing Robin for Bobby Portis from 2020 to 2021, and losing Brook for all but 298 minutes in 2022, but also other additions such as Allen, Nwora, replacing Divinzenzo minutes for more Connaughton)

And then I think even accepting a drop in their defense since 2020, they have shown the ability to tune-in their defense in the playoffs to basically as good as you can ask for. They almost out-defensed Boston with Connaughton, Allen, and Portis each playing 29, 26, and 25.5 minutes per game, respectively.

Re: not putting in the effort to get the 1 seed. It's easy to imagine why they didn't go after it as hard as they could have. They had had 60-win seasons without the playoff payoff and knew how much those wins are worth in the end. That's not that important to me personally, especially when I remember that their playoff defenses have been really good.

I also think you end up playing the best teams at some point, whether it's in the second round or the third, and without Middleton, I'm not sure I'd expect a different result.

[Doctor MJ]

I think what you're saying is this: if a team takes a strategy that makes them look worse in the regular season in order to be stronger in the playoffs, you don't want to reward them if the strategy fails. I think we all have to determine to what extent we have to be results-based, and I don't have a clear answer here. But I think we have enough evidence that the Bucks' true strength hasn't dropped off.

To get back to the question of regular season value versus playoff ability. If you're inclined to consider aggregate value over the course of a season, I think you can make the case for Tatum over everyone else in field.

But I just can't get there. I don't think it's projecting Giannis's impact if we saw it, even if his team didn't win in the end. To me, he showed himself to be a clearly better player than he was in his MVP years.

But there's always some give and take for this. I was about to say that the POY isn't always on a team that made it to the finals, but looking at the last 11 winners, maybe I'm wrong!

A good post in general with lots of food for thought. Feels like you zeroed in on the essence here at the end.

So here's the thing:

When we talk about a team switching to a more post-season oriented style of play, and it hurting their regular season performance, I think we really need to be serious about asking ourself how we think this superior post-season approach hurts the team in the regular season.

While I think we can all get behind the idea that optimizing around one approach tends to make a team less able to adapt in the playoffs, do we really think that in order for the Bucks to be a dominant defense in the playoffs these past two post-seasons, they had to drop from a 5-8 points better than the average NBA regular season defense, to 0.2 points better?

Do we really have any more reason to think reaching perfect regular season defensive mediocrity is any more of a necessity than this?



(For those who don't recall, this was how Giannis showed up after a blow out loss mid-season this year to illustrate how unconcerned with losing like that.)

Call me cynical if you'd like, but I've seen many, many teams across a variety of sports who coast during the regular season once they have a veteran team with a playoff focus, so the idea of just ignoring the fact that the Bucks couldn't even get the #1 seed in a conference without anything even close to a typical #1 seed by record as if that was just something impossible to achieve doesn't seem likely.

I think that if it had been important to the Bucks to get the #1 seed this year, they would have. It wasn't, so they didn't.

re: The defense. I don't think the difference in defensive efficiency is because of any single thing. This is what I think accounts for the drop:

- shooting variance from three (and also at the rim) that affected them positively in 2020 and negatively in 2021
- occasional integration of switching schemes which probably has some minor costs (I probably gave too much time to this as a reason, but look, it's easier to play defense if you're doing the same thing all the time versus having to implement different rules in different contexts)
- by choice, and then necessity, playing more Giannis as center lineups
- playing more offensively slanted lineups (including three guard lineups)
- roster changes (primarily losing Robin for Bobby Portis from 2020 to 2021, and losing Brook for all but 298 minutes in 2022, but also other additions such as Allen, Nwora, replacing Divinzenzo minutes for more Connaughton)

And then I think even accepting a drop in their defense since 2020, they have shown the ability to tune-in their defense in the playoffs to basically as good as you can ask for. They almost out-defensed Boston with Connaughton, Allen, and Portis each playing 29, 26, and 25.5 minutes per game, respectively.

Re: not putting in the effort to get the 1 seed. It's easy to imagine why they didn't go after it as hard as they could have. They had had 60-win seasons without the playoff payoff and knew how much those wins are worth in the end. That's not that important to me personally, especially when I remember that their playoff defenses have been really good.

I also think you end up playing the best teams at some point, whether it's in the second round or the third, and without Middleton, I'm not sure I'd expect a different result.

More good thoughts. Bolded the part where it seems like we have a philosophical difference.

I don't blame players or teams for de-prioritizing the regular season in favor of the playoffs, but nor do I feel comfortable essentially carrying over regular season performances from previous seasons in the name of "they're still that good, they're just prioritizing things differently".

If you don't prioritize the regular season, it hurts you in my regular season awards (as it should in everyone's frankly).

From there, for me, it's a matter of whether you can do enough in the playoffs to surpass those who had the regular season lead over you. I've talked about why it ended up not being enough for me in this case, but others are free to consider things differently.

Re: does it matter if you play the best team in the second or third round? Great question. Really the key thing here for me is that the guy Giannis needed to pass up was on the "best team" in question. Whatever round the Bucks played the Celtics, it was going to be very tough for me to elevate Giannis ahead of Tatum based on a series that went like that one did, with Tatum playing as big as he did. (It would have been tough as well to elevate Tatum over Giannis based on that series, but that's moot for my purposes, because I had Tatum ahead of Giannis after the regular season.)

[AussieBuck]

It would be more helpful if you explained in detail how he was better, why the team defense was so much worse than in earlier years, and why it went back to elite come playoff time.

Re: these days. I've been using +/- since before you were on RealGM.

The team outside of the top guys was lowkey crappy this past season. The primary reasons for this were a lack of playmaking and rim protection. A third reason was that we had decent role players not giving the value they should have because they were forced to play out of position. If you want to ding anyone for not taking the regular season seriously enough that's on the front office/owners who didn't want to spend money or assets on improving either thing during the season trusting in veterans getting healthy and shorter rotations in the playoffs solving the issue.

It shouldn't surprise that the defense was worse than in previous seasons given that for almost the entire season we had Giannis as the sole rim defender with Bobby Portis as the only other big guy. After those two guys Pat Connaughton was the main third big at 6'5 followed by a series of young guys, washouts and team mascot Thanasis. On a team where the defensive philosophy is to defend the rim as first, second and third priority it's clearly not an ideal bunch. As a result of the above we had to have everyone crowd the paint and we simply gave up defending any threes outside of the corner. We were a terrible three point defense team. Rebounding was obviously a challenge too.

The other major deficiency in the team was the lack of point guards, I won't get into how that effected the offense because it's not the focus here but not having competent point of attack defense was a huge sink on the team D. Jrue obviously is an excellent defender but he played 56% of team minutes, Hill is close to washed up but had a massive positive impact when healthy but sadly he wasn't playing for most of the season.

Tying into the lack of guards on the team is how Giannis is used by the coach to hold lineups together. We play two types of non-starter linueps, the non-Giannis lineup typically features the 4 other starters and the 6th man/backup big. The other lineup is Giannis and bench guys. This season we had to ration playmaking minutes so Giannis typically had to do without a PG in non-starter minutes because the other lineup needs a setup guy, this means that not only did we not have a big playing with Giannis, we also didn't have anyone to defend the point of attack.

Re defense being better in the playoffs, we knocked off a ton of terrible small ball minutes, played our 4 best defenders Giannis, Jrue, Wes and Lopez a ton more and banished awful defenders like Nwora altogether The team minutes are entirely different:

Regular season
Giannis 56%
Jrue 56%
Khris 54%
Bobby 51%
Grayson 46%
Pat 43%
Hill 32%
Nwora 30%
Wes 25%
(various scrubs omitted)
Lopez 8%

Playoffs
Jrue 80%
Giannis 78%
Wes 60%
Brook 58%
Pat 55%
Grayson 53%
Carter 22%
Hill 13%
Khris 12%

In short the team was thin on minutes to competent players, guys played out of position and we were both small and slow in the regular season. Probably would have won 5 more games if the team didn't cheap out and cut Cousins even.

[jalengreen]

And then there's the defense where I just can't emphasize enough that in the modern NBA, there is no hiding a bad defender. If your playoff opponent decides to attack Player X, then there's a direct linkage between that player's effectiveness and your DRtg. If they aren't able to kill you with that approach, then that defender is fundamentally a solid defender. And that's how Curry held up the entire time despite teams over-attacking him to tire him out so that his offense might not kill them (Ha!).

great writeup all around, i enjoyed reading it. one thing i wanted to inquire on was the assessment of gobert, specifically due to this quote. which i think is a super reasonable take and perspective of defense.

but my impression was that such a perspective would be more positive towards gobert due to ... well, the bad defenders in the jazz rotation who opposing offenses have a rather easy time attacking.

or would the argument be more on the lines of not blaming gobert for the team's shortcomings but instead giving him less credit because it's a system that works at hiding the bad defenders in the regular season but can't in the postseason?

[HeartBreakKid]

erm...im not sure what you're getting at by showing giannis eating fried chicken? he doesn't care about getting blown out because he is eating?

Um, why do YOU think he brought a bucket of fried chicken with him into a press conference after a loss when, like most players, he typically eats somewhere other than a press conference?

Mind you, I'm not judging him as someone "who doesn't really care about winning". I'm saying that it was his intention when he brought the fried chicken to the press conference to communicate to the press how unworried he was about the state of the team.

Ah, I misread. My apologies. I agree with that point.

[HeartBreakKid]

erm...im not sure what you're getting at by showing giannis eating fried chicken? he doesn't care about getting blown out because he is eating?

Um, why do YOU think he brought a bucket of fried chicken with him into a press conference after a loss when, like most players, he typically eats somewhere other than a press conference?

Mind you, I'm not judging him as someone "who doesn't really care about winning". I'm saying that it was his intention when he brought the fried chicken to the press conference to communicate to the press how unworried he was about the state of the team.

Ah, I misread. My apologies. I agree with that point.

I take back my apology after I saw you give Andrew Wiggins an honorable mention

[The-Power]

So Dallas must have been Memphis minus Ja incredible on defense when he sat then? Because a top 6 defense if Dallas is mediocre in all Luka minutes is really impressive.

The gap is not quite as big but comparable.

Luka ON: 111.9 DRTG (would be 14th in the NBA)
Luka OFF: 107.6 DRTG (4th)
Luka on/off: +4.3

Morant ON: 112.6 DRTG (17th)
Morant OFF: 107.1 DRTG (3rd)
Morant on/off: +5.5

That's for the RS. In the smaller PS sample, Luka has a much better on/off but the Mavs defense was considerably worse. But obviously that is a small sample and dependent on match-ups, so I'm not going to put much stock in those numbers.

Note: I used bbref numbers here because they are easier to navigate. I know they can be a bit off but the relative proportions should be roughly accurate.

[Texas Chuck]

oops wrong thread

[ShotCreator]

Luka wasn’t a bad defender this year at all.

He’s huge and knows ho to play. Good hands and rebounds the hell out of it. Luka is duly a decent defender.

I think his offense is really good but clearly creates diminishing returns on his teammates games though and has his entire career. I specifically remember noting 2020 Luka is harder to play with than 2020 Harden.

[Doctor MJ]

Um, why do YOU think he brought a bucket of fried chicken with him into a press conference after a loss when, like most players, he typically eats somewhere other than a press conference?

Mind you, I'm not judging him as someone "who doesn't really care about winning". I'm saying that it was his intention when he brought the fried chicken to the press conference to communicate to the press how unworried he was about the state of the team.

Ah, I misread. My apologies. I agree with that point.

I take back my apology after I saw you give Andrew Wiggins an honorable mention

Jeez, why do you feel so strongly about it?