f4p wrote:OhayoKD wrote:LukaTheGOAT wrote:
being amazing in your own time would seem like a pretty good argument that you would figure it out in a new time. either way, i suspect the mid-range GOAT would turn himself into at least a respectable 35% three point shooter while still exploiting the mid-range as KD manages to do these days just fine, MJ would find himself in love with how open the court is and, while he may not be the most instinctive passer ever, would still create gobs of open shots for teammates (wasn't it favorite son ben taylor in one of his videos who pointed out how many creation opportunities jordan was responsible for, even without being a great passer?). you would have to be very low on MJ to think that a guy scoring like 32 efficient points per game with a bunch of assists is not going to be a good offense. there's only so many other possessions to go around for the rest of the guys to drag it down.
By the way, funny bit of that “never finished lower than top twelve” factoid: that includes 1986 and 1995! Tell me, what happens to the Warriors whenever Curry sits or happens to miss time? What would their offence look like with him missing 65 games?
Double quoted again! Though since we all seem to have given up on formatting, I'll be a bit loose with the attribution and chronology of quotes if you don't mind.
I'll start with this since I think it gets to both in-era impact and relativity. Let's first touch on their
impact in-era, even though this is largely tangential to the thread.
Ignoring that the bulls offensive rating wasn't better than the warriors when jordan himself was on the court is odd given you later say...
f4p wrote: i look at a team's roster, how much help a guy had (this board is not big on that, which is why you see people higher on guys like steph and duncan)
Frankly this segment strikes me as completely at odds with your general dismissal of holistic cast evaluation. So you look at "how much help they had" but you just repeat "the offensive ratings were better" while disregarding that they were "better" based on what was happening when jordan and curry were off the court?
yeah don't accuse me of disregarding things when i don't even have the data at hand. did someone post their respective on court offensive ratings in this thread and i missed it? because otherwise, i don't have michael jordan's 1997 on/off offensive rating memorized.
Enig
implied it though perhaps they should have been more direct lol:
Oh, and by the way: totally different story when looking at what happened when Jordan and Curry were on the court. You know, the relevant bit to this question? I know we love to praise Jordan for his team’s bench production, but there should be a limit…
IDK what specific numbers Enig is referencing though. Contrary to NMR's musings, we don't share minds(tho I'm sure I'd be smarter if we did
)
and are we sure it's more pertinent than the team ratings? team's use different lineup strategies.
And these strategies (as well as schemes) can include slanting lineups towards offense or defense, which is another reason to look at teams holistically rather than isolate one end of the floor. If we use that as our frame, this gap in "team rating" basically vanishes, and Jordan's teams
aren't operating at a lower level without him. The bulls posted a +11 O in the 94 playoffs without Jordan(and +8 vs the league best knicks), are we now going to pretend that the offense/defensive split flipping means jordan didn't carry their offense that much? At the end of the day, winning is winning.
Moreover, letting your priors inform your interpretation of the data can get you into trouble, especially in a cross-era comparison where box-stuff is depressed in one league and skyrocketing in another. Thus far your analysis hasn't really touched on curry's capacity as a creator, fairly relevant if you're basing your evaluations of offensive talent largely on scoring output:
IIRC, lineups with curry and dray + non-starters were close to lineups featuring all of kd, klay, dray, curry. and iggy from 17-19. Regardless, this is besides the point. If you're reaching 60-70 wins with 40-50(regularized plus-minus, unregularized, whatever) win help, does it really matter what the final o-rating is? The point is to help the team win, not to help the team win with a specific distribution of offensive and defensive rating.
i'd probably say the bulls are more offensively talented, but we're not talking about equal results.
But we are, you just find the offense to defense distribution weird.
From what I understand it's actually the other way around. Pure box aggregates like PER and the like still do the worst(predictivity and flexibility), however you split it, but box-heavy impact metrics are better able to account for role players due to stability while less box-based metrics like PIPM, AUPM, On/Off, and RAPM do better with stars because they can better account for defense.
seems very hard to believe. dudes like PJ tucker and shane battier with pitiful box numbers but big impact are being less well evaluated than extreme defensive guys like hakeem and duncan who still do very well by box numbers (because they just do so much stuff that it can't be ignored)?
Why would you compare hakeem with pj tucker? The idea is that players who are racking up steals and blocks are going to be treated by box-metrics like dpoy-level defensive contributors, which is why your jordan's, kobe's and curry's look much better relative to other all-time greats when you focus on the box and less so when you focus on how the team defense correlates with their presence. One of the things bigger defensive players do is generate opportunities for smaller to rack up steals and blocks in the first place(
https://www.reddit.com/r/nbadiscussion/comments/ktyynk/oc_the_secular_lebron_james_the_case_for_the_king/):
We talk about gravity on offense, but what about defensive gravity? As I said before, Ben touches on the concept when he notes that Walton affected more possessions than Kareem despite Kareem getting alot more blocks, but this reaches a whole new level with players like Larry Bird or 6'6 shooting guard MJ, players who spent their defensve primes playng with one or multiple comparable-better rim deterrents.
This is what most jordan blocks look like:https://youtu.be/fFPi95UEpog?t=55 Jordan gets the block, but is he even the key to this possession? The difficult part of this, holding ewing still, isn't being done by Jordan. Jordan is making this play off his teamamte's, gravity defensively. If you rewatch the section where ben is fawning over Jordan's rim protection...
https://youtu.be/p5aNUS762wM?t=1212...you might notice that aside for --two-- clips, all these plays have jordan making plays on a defender whose preoccupied worrying about a larger guy at the rim.
Lets compare this to the following non-blocks:https://youtu.be/T-c1NradPN4?t=147Lebron's presence here blows up a potential dunk/layup, a shot even more dangerous than a curry three. Lebron isn't awarded a block here, but this play is more valuable than the majority of plays you'll see in a jordan defensive highlight reel.
https://youtu.be/T-c1NradPN4?t=17Lebron here basically prevents a open layup/dunk. These kinds of plays are both extremely valuable and require a combination of strength and size Jordan doesn't have.
https://youtu.be/T-c1NradPN4?t=176Here, Lebron isn't rewarded a block and even looks a bit silly, but his presence is what draws draymond's attention and allows for delly to get the block.
https://youtu.be/3oAAcEQ8t84?t=1529Lebron ends up getting a block later on the possessions, but the key of this possession is here, where Lebron's presence makes dwight opt for a post up, preventing what is the most dangerous play in basketball, an all time interior threat coming in at the rim.Per r/blockedbybam, Lebron blocked, diverted, or deterred a dwight inside atempt 18 times over the ECF..
https://youtu.be/MyWFllfRqaU?t=256.Grant gets the block, and pippen is made to look silly, but it's pippen who sets the play up for grant. Much like a shooter will feed of a slasher's interior gravity, grant makes this play off pippen's defense.
https://youtu.be/C7uxePXXfU8?t=63While the possession doesn't end up going chicago's way, what Pippen is doing here, essentially pre-emptively nuetralizing the threat of an Ewing drive is about as valuabe as a play you will get defensively. It doesn't show up in the scoresheet.
There is no granular statistic for the above that gets factored into PER, BPM, or RAPTOR(no plus minus data pre-1997). There is no granular statistic(at least one incoperated in these metrics) for when a player gets blown by and gives up a lay-up because they reached for a steal(recall Jordan was in the
17th percentile for defensive errors). When Rudy Gobert is able to prevent potential layups 3 times in one possession, if he isn't getting a hand to the ball, he isn't getting his credit. Plus-Minus can capture this(aritifical caps aside), WOWY can capture this(relevant when we're talking about outliers). Metrics which capture all this are going to tell you more about a player's defensive value(and whatever other non-scoring factors we consider like...off-ball creation) than box-stuff. Thus...
I think the big thing to consider here, is that the specific metrics you are choosing here[bpm/per/ws/48/gamescore(which is really just PER not adjusted for possessions)], consistently rate primary paint protectors low relative to their raw impact signals, or less offense-skewed data. Steph Curry and Jordan look as good as anyone in say PER(at least in the regular season), but Lebron and Duncan score higher in RAPM, on/off, and AUPM, and then when we go to raw impact, Hakeem, Russell, and Kareem all look as good or better. Considering that Jordan has the least discernable defensive imapct of anyone we've talked about in this thread, relying heavily on box-stuff and dismissing everything else seems questionable.
PER sees someone leading the league in steals and assumes they're the best defender in the league, plus-minus sees that there's not that much correlation between what that someone is doing, and what his team is doing, and adjusts accordingly.
The most predictive metrics are epm and rpm
is this espn's rpm or a different rpm? the one that says steph is the best player every year (well, except when it's kyle lowry)?
Same one I think:
EPM and RPM, which were the only metrics that used RAPM directly with a Bayesian prior, consistently performed the best among all metrics, with EPM taking the lead overall.
RAPTOR scores 3rd as it is has new film-tracking that makes it able to spot stuff more accurately(still "clearly behind" epm and epm due to less direct RAPM)
BUT it has no plus-minus(or tracking) data pre-1997(and even 1997/1998 are largely informed by the box-heavy prior of all the previous years) so it is effectively in the same boat as PER/ws48 when talking about players of jordan's era(including jordan):
The older metrics WS and PER had the highest prediction error, with PER struggling mightily (although not as bad when given an after-market team adjustment at the suggestion of Steve Ilardi, which I’ve labeled “aPER”; the adjustment formula was provided by Nathan Walker who adapted BPM's formula).
Ditto with
roster continuity where theoretically, your preferred metrics should be making up some ground?
As can be seen in the table above, EPM was the most predictive of team ratings after controlling for roster continuity (coefficient: 3.76); it was nearly half as dependent on rosters staying together than the second most predictive metric (continuity coefficient: 0.23). RPM was the clear second-place metric having gained separation over RAPTOR after controlling for roster continuity.
The older metric WS48 surprised a bit while PER struggled again.[suprised means being second to last instead of last]
RAW RAPM stayed ahead of the box-stuff in both continuity and predictivity despite being hella noisy for when you're trying to account for a full-ass nba roster. And direct RAPM beat out indirect rapm usage with beat out no-rapm usage. Even when the goal is to reduce noise, not properly assessing defense will hold ya back.
"help" also seems like an odd angle when you chide giannis for not beating good enough teams. Giannis, whether you go by accolades, name-value, or actually looking at how well the cast performs isolated from their superstar, has never had as much help as jordan(and to a lesser extent curry) has had when they experienced success.
and giannis hasn't accomplished anything near what jordan did when jordan had really good help. giannis won a hospital ring by the skin of his teeth against a ridiculously injured nets team and still needed overtime game 7 to barely win. and had embarrassing playoff losses on massive SRS/win% teams in 2019 and 2020. jordan has had a 15-2, 15-3, 15-4 and 15-4 playoff run.
He did in the regular season. And sure, nearly losing to the injured nets is rough, but the Bulls do something pretty similar in 92 and 93 vs the knicks and at least in 93, even from a box-perspective, Jordan slipped up.
Classifying 2019 as
embarrassing also seems off to me. The Raptors were basically a 60 win team + kawhi leonard + marc gasol(who was able to anchor a 60 win team and atg defense after kawhi's absence)+ nick nurse(best coach in the league?). I dont think Giannis had great help(<.500 without, I think regularized stuff had it at like 40 wins) in the regular season, and he certainly didn't when the bucks managed to get outshot in wide open 3's(the one redeeming quality about that supporting cast?). Yet, despite his offensive numbers collapsing, the bucks played the Raptors close to a tie(van vleet baby swings the series basically) with the raptors fg% dropping by
8 points when Giannis was on the court, the bucks posting a -9 playoff defense, and Kawhi(who had great numbers otherwise) seeing his numbers plummet to giannis's level when they shared the court. Arguably, the loss was a result of 3-point shooting variance that was far less likely to bite you in the 90's(though the bucks have maybe proven since its less so variance and more they suck at shooting
). Regardless it seems like a similar outcome to me as the 1990 bulls losing to the pistons. 2020 was a rough look(though again, bubble shooting variance nukes an atg defense because of coaching inflexibilty) which brought up questions of resiliency for The Freak, but arguably the second half of the 2021 and the entirely of the 2022 playoffs answered that? i would definitely take peak jordan relative to era due to playoff resiliency(and being able to stitch the post-season with the regular season stuff a couple of times), but the idea that Jordan is just this different calibre of player doesn't seem accurate to me, and I'm not seeing why the gap is so big that the various concerns various people brought up (and a more talented field), couldn't bridge the gap here. Let alone when you're taking
1997 Jordan who struggled in the playoffs anyway.
Yeah the Bulls won 69 games, but you are talking about a team that posted a 50 win srs without
their best and third best player coming off 4 legit title-pushes and an Olympic campaign. I'd rather compare players in like for like situations than presume incapability due to a lack of opportunity. We've seen prime Jordan with similar help. No 2020 equivalent, but similar lift to 2019 and 2020 Giannis, similar outcome in 1990. Maybe you're lower on the raptors? But to me 2019 Toronto was stacked. And in an absolute sense, I see the raptors as a much more formidable challenge than the bad boy pistons(unsure about ewing's knicks tbh). Hedging really makes a huge difference when you're dealing with not-great passers imo.
You bring up Kerr as a factor in curry's success, but seem to ignore that we see a big, big schematic improvement with phil jackson's entrance. And unlike curry, whose own individual metrics skyrocketed, jordan's dipped during the period where the bulls skyrocketed via the triangle.
good point about jackson. jordan certainly did not lack for a good situation after a pitiful first few years. but jordan also made the most of it, would be my main argument. he ripped off 67/69/72 win regular seasons (with 61 and 62 thrown in) and 15-2, 15-3, 15-4 and 15-4 playoffs. he got a good situation and could hardly have made more out of it. no blown winnable series. no blown series leads. dominant overall W/L runs. no bad performances where his team carried him instead of the other way around. just...inevitability.
Okay now this seems pretty rose-tinted. Setting aside that your analysis thus far has basically just been offense-only, off the top of my head 93 and 96 both count imo. I think 1996 in paticular is a very big dodge. What's the difference between 96 and 2016 besides Curry having an injury and Pippen not getting suspended for game 6? Jordan is a more consistent playoff performer than curry or giannis. But while neither Giannis or Curry have done enough to really dispute this consistency claim, it does become an exercise in rewarding Jordan for playing less when you use this as some cudgel against say, Kareem or Lebron.
Honestly your comments about klay, a player who the warriors had the best record in the league without(before curry got injured) showcase the limitations of whatever approach you seem to be taking to "help". It's not like the lift curry shows here(average without 60 win with) is some fluky outlier. You bring up 72 wins and 69 wins, but the warriors got 67 and 73 with, at least based on what we saw from both teams when their superstars help, less support.
a nice 18-2 start doesn't really seem representative of the warriors season last year. klay missed 2 years and the warriors didn't even make the playoffs (2020 looked worse than 2021 before steph got hurt so at best they are scraping for a low seed). he seems valuable. it's hard to really compare jordan's WOWY because he basically either plays 82 games or 0 real games. the '94 bulls are probably the biggest argument against jordan. worth noting that the '86 bulls were 9-4 when jordan played more than 16 minutes and 21-48 without (+39 win%) and 1995 were 13-4 vs 34-31 (+24%). and those were coming-back-from-injury/baseball games for the "on" stats.
You're working of a 4 game sample for 2020 and even if we take that sample and combine it with 2021, Curry's WOWY looks great(20 without, 45 with). This also comes off 2019 where Curry finishes with an offensive performance anyone in history would be happy to have imo. 82 game samples are really the best possible samples IMO. Team gets chance to respond schematically for superstar depature, full season of data. you can directly look at roster additions/subtractions/context to adjust. (I really wish we had something like it for Duncan
). But you're forgetting about 1984 where the Bulls were a 27 win team. If I take an optimistic outlook(let's just say they didn't improve whatsoever between 1984 and 1988 despite Oakley(check defense before and after), pippen/grant minuite increase, ect.), then 1988 Jordan, the version with the best RAPM(partial tbf), playoff on/off, PIPM, DPIPM, ect, ect, ect gets to 23 win lift. Now Jordan,
unlike Curry, is a playoff elevator and the Bulls give the Pistons some trouble. But its not a big value difference regardless.
Taking your smaller(and probably noisier) 95 sample, that goes to 22 wins(assuming we take the off as record). Note though, by srs(more predictive) the 95 Bulls posted a 50 win pace srs.
For what its worth, taking your 86 sample, you get the most impressive looking lift at
32 win
lift. But when we consider that is easier to lift worse teams than better ones, even taking that pretty small sample(which srs disagrees with), I'm not sure I'm more impressed with 86 Jordan(pre-prime) over prime curry stuff(40 to 60, or 50 to 70). Jordan playing in the other games also distorts things and srs disagrees pretty strongly:
with an overall improvement of nearly 4 points per game. In his second season, he missed a significant chunk of time after breaking his foot, then logged fewer than 20 minutes in each of his first six games back. Excluding those sub-20 minute games, the Bulls played 15 contests with Jordan at a 40-win pace (-0.3 SRS) that year.
Note tho, the off is boosted by half a game Jordan so i'd probably hedge at like 30 wins(86 srs completely without puts him there I think)? Or we can just defer to 84(82 game sample goes brr).
We do have some "in-between data" wowy for rodman and pippen and it honestly makes their cast look even better with 45 games of Rodman in 96 and 97 generating similar stuff lift to kd on the warriors(67-72 vs 67-73) and Pippen elevating the Bulls from fringe contenders to ATG.(important to remember that its harder to lift better teams than worse teams, 40 to 60 > 20 to 40). Again though, I'd rather just refer to the larger 120 game sample we get in 94-95. Worth noting Bulls add some pieces, but grant and pippen play less minuites in the rs, and then grant falls off hard in the yoffs(paint protection vs knicks was horrible!) and you then have 95 where their srs mantains with the third best player missing but their record doesn't matchup(fatigue?).
Generally though, all these signals(with support from the aupm/on-off/rapm stuff) sends me towards to a similar estimation, 20ish win regular season lift on a random team which elevates to 25-30ish win lift in his best playoffs. Very good, but not an outlier for top 10 candidates in the rs(consistency/playoff elevation is special tho), and not anything to make me think he blows away a Giannis or Curry even if he rightly ranks higher for consistency, replication, and resiliency. I think playoff elevation brings him to top 5 but I can't see him bridging the defensive advantage lebron and kareem sport at their best, nor do I think anyone has any business being compared to Russell(and by extension wilt? in an era-relative frame). Also think Duncan and Hakeem have legitimate peak cases(hakeem has a legit prime/accum., duncan legit accum./peak) but i'd lean jordan over duncan due to a longer prime and over hakeem due to resume.
Box stuff sees it differently, but I hope I've made a decent case for not putting too much stock in that above
.
...we need to ask ourselves if we expect him to not get worse against defenses which now can freely hedge thus putting a premium on skill and size by narrowing the angles. Sure jordan can use a spaced floor to create looks, but so can everyone else, and now teams don't have to wait till he has a head of steam. This should better equip them to exploit the fact he lacks the size and power of transcendent rim threats like giannis or prime lebron, and force him to rely on his, relatively speaking, limited passing and vision. He created a shitton with limited passing, in his era. If he is no longer able to create as much as anyone else in the league, he's gotten worse, regardless of whether his apg goes up or down.
yeah, but where is this idea that everyone today is just a genius who can read every passing angle and everyone is relatively catching up to jordan? there were good passers in MJ's day. i don't see why the zone creating some more difficult reads than illegal defense and the more spread court creating easier reads than the non-3 point era is going to be much different than whatever existed back then. there were harder and easier passes back then, otherwise we wouldn't say things like magic johnson and larry bird are amazing passers and michael jordan is somewhere in the middle. there are harder and easier passes today. jordan will load up on the easy and medium ones like in his day and will probably miss the difficult lebron-level passes today. in a ridiculous 113 ORtg league, that's still going to result in tons of good looks he creates. if bradley beal can have a 30/6 season, i'm going to say even 34 year old jordan will have no problem matching that. lebron and giannis create looks by forcing you to build a wall against a non-shooting physical freak. jordan creates looks by forcing you to get up close to a very fast shooter and then getting past you.
Again though, Bradley beal is not a top 5 player. Why does it matter if Jordan can out-box him? I'm not even against seeing him as one of the best players, but what are you hoping to prove by bringing up that Bradley beal, who no one has ever considered an mvp candidate like ever puts up nice numbers? It's all
relativeYeah, he might get more apg and better numbers, but everything is relative. If
everyone has better numbers then you yourself getting better numbers is just keeping pace. And I don't know if I buy the eras being equally hard in terms of reads. I think something like what the Raptors did to Giannis is way harder to pass through than anything from draymond's clip. Just look at the time and space the lakers were giving Jordan there.
ty has covered(and many posters have brought up) the league is more talented, developed, and sophisticated,
and yet anyone who can walk and chew gum can average like 27 ppg.
[/quote]
Okay, but are all these bubble-gum chewers the best player in the league?
You can time-machine Russell if you want(and let's be real, you're not making a jordan over russell case if you don't), but he who time-machines must be prepared to get time-machined. If Russell is not the undisputed GOAT(or at least best prime), then all of this is fair game.
I'm open to hearing any and all rationale for why jordan would defy my expectations, but i dont really think "jordan scales over fringe all-nba player x" gets you there.
smart, still very athletic, best player in his day, not exploitable defensively, no bad playoff series when it mattered possibly ever and definitely not in the 90's.
I really don't know about "not exploitable defensively" for a high-risk/reward guard in an era of space and "when it mattered" is pretty disingenuous way to frame things.
Regardless, I don't understand why you keep brining up players who aren't in the top 10 and how they have good numbers. Like, that's the point. Good numbers does not make you a top 10 player. The numbers MJ get doesn't determine how good he'll be.
), Falco did a much better job addressing the film stuff than I could. I'll just add that I think disregarding the amount of time and space a player is being given in these possessions(which falco commented on as well) is going to seriously undercut any sort of passing analysis you're doing on anyone when "era-translation" is the frame.
