f4p wrote:i know this isn't to me but:
AEnigma wrote:Did you think Curry last year was no longer the league’s best shooter? Good lord. No, random variance should not be this significant on your assessments of players.
if you are actually comparing who was better, then of course how they actually shot matters. lebron shot a lot better in 2013 than 2016. whether it was random variance or not, that is a good thing for 2013 lebron and bad for 2016 lebron. how would we even determine what was random variance versus and increase/decrease in shooting skills?
… By analysing real context? Lebron took different types of threes in 2016 from what he took in Miami. If you want to argue overall that was less effective, I disagree on the basis that I would pretty much always prefer Lebron have the ball in his hands deciding what to do rather than waiting on the perimetre, and I would think as a Harden fan you would understand that, but at least we can have that discussion. If you think his shooting form became meaningfully worse, we can have that discussion too, but again only to the extent that it actually makes him a comparatively worse player. However, none of that starts with just glancing at his shooting splits and immediately making a broad declaration about his impact or quality as a player.
steph curry in the 2022 regular season clearly did not shoot as well last year as in other years and it clearly made 2022 a subpar regular season for curry, whether or not he might have still somehow really been the best shooter in the league.
Okay, it was not one of his best regular seasons. Was he a worse player? Would you rather have 2022 Curry in your quest to win a title, or a year with better shooting splits (say, 2014 to avoid contention).
You're bringing up a season where Lebron missed 13 games and was bothered by injuries so much that he had to take a break in the middle of the season and take a "special trip" to Miami to get treatment. Let's not even talk about how he looked like Allen Iverson shooting jumpers in the playoffs.
Yep! And despite all that, he was again at the top of the league in impact and was more essential to that team’s defence than he was to the 2013 Heat. Because pure athletic force is not the sole means by which he can exert his will on the court.
almost like the impact metrics are noisy and trying to apportion "impact" based on thousands of lineups might occasionally result in a swing and a miss. if we were comparing lebron to someone else and saying his amazing IQ was allowing him to have more impact than that other player, maybe that would be a real good argument. but we're comparing lebron to himself 2 years later. i see little reason to think he made some huge "IQ/impact" leap in 2 years, especially from an oft-cited peak year (hell, wasn't it chosen as his peak year in the peaks project?) where he shot 40% on 3's and won 66 games.
Because of the majority of people just prefer to go with what looks like the aesthetically more complete season. Plenty of strong arguments were made on behalf of 2016 Lebron; they just went mostly disregarded.
It just shows who actually followed what went on in some of these seasons, and who just reads off impact stats and calls a player better.
Wow that would be a sick burn if your entire argument were not based on you gesticulating wildly at the 2013 Miami Heat (and tbh 1991 Bulls) Basketball-Reference page and going, “SEEEEEEEEE?????”
those pesky things recording what people and teams actually did. y'all've gone from "the box score isn't everything" to "the box score is irrelevant" (or to be even more elitist, "superficial").
Basketball exists outside of the box score. We go over this again and again.
Straight up, no, I do not care about box scores to any extent more than making me interested whether some of the gaudier ones match a more holistic assessment. They are a primarily offensive shorthand based on educated but ultimately arbitrary weighings of value, but because they are easily accessible, we see them excessively relied upon.
he "only" averaged 27/5/4 and shot 41.5% from the field… but his team still had a +9 rORtg
maybe shooting 40.0% against the 1993 knicks? still 32/6/7 in a 86 pace series, +12.7 rORtg and won a road series.
29.7/5.5/6.5 in an 87 pace series as a 6th seed against the #1 seed pistons, giving them their only 2 losses of the playoffs? did have a negative rOrtg in this one, but still seems like a pretty good series.
27.4/8.8/4.6 in a 91 pace series with a -9.5 rORtg against the 1988 pistons when only a -1.7 SRS underdog seems like about as bad as it gets. which is just not that bad.
A few things going on here:
1. Bit of an odd balancing act here where Jordan underperforming but seeing his team win or post strong offensive ratings anyway is a feather in his cap, and then series where he performs but loses and has a poor offensive rating are not a big deal. And it kind-of speaks to the broader point about how Jordan is treated as infallible in large part because he had the support system to never let him fail and the style to put up attractive numbers even when he did.
2. The contention was never that Jordan was a poor or inconsistent playoff performer. The contention was that he was hardly some bastion of perfect play.
3. Those lesser series were brought up specifically as a response to those claiming Lebron compares negatively. I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you would be similarly generous to some of Lebron’s lesser series, but for the 2011 Finals. Which is yes a black mark that Jordan does not have, but surely (again, perhaps as a Harden supporter…) you can see why there would be pushback against a single series early in a career defining all assessments of a player’s peak, prime, and postseason value. As has been argued, one could easily just take the approach that Lebron’s true postseason prime began in 2012, and that run from 2012-20 or even to 2021 too would still match up with any similar stretch from Jordan.
f4p wrote:also, this thread is like the first time in history i've heard anyone suggest cavs v2 lebron didn't downshift in the regular season or put less defensive effort in (this is literally the year after the LeBattical) compared to earlier in his career.
Not sure anyone is arguing whether he was physically exerting himself less. The continued question has been to what extent that ultimately mattered.
the idea that lebron's IQ and intangibles not only increased so much in 3 years that it offset that decrease in production, but actually increased so much it even more than offset the downshift doesn't seem that believable just based on some impact metric that is presumably like all the others and has huge error bars and needs seasons worth of data to be "accurate".
You are welcome to use longer samples as well.
How do you feel about Lebron’s defence in 2020 and 2021, even further removed from his athletic prime?
Or to use a player you are always eager to praise, how do you feel about Jordan’s defence in the second threepeat compared to say 1993? 1992? Compared to 1987, one year
before his defensive peak? Do you feel confident that box score formulas like DBPM and DWS tell you all you need to know about defence, or are you willing to be open to the possibility that there might be value not captured or properly weighed?
