70sFan wrote:OhayoKD wrote:Yeah, I don't think this is true. I was actually rewatching some 90/91 footage(mostly to see how the Pistons defended the triangle: how early/late defenses were reacting to Jordan or Pippen drives, how strongly or weakly shots were contested, ect) and there were various points(in 30 possessions of tracking) where attackers were able to exploit him via brute force...
https://youtu.be/8f55MC1UR7A?t=1836(this is one of three-times Jordan was just bodied, two of them resulted in points, and I didn't count the one that didn't)
Is this what you count as "hunting" Jordan? All I see is Jordan trying to draw a weak charge and not succeeding, nobody tried to exploit him here.
Okay, then what do we count as "exploit?" Would Jordan getting shoved out of the way for a potential offensive rebound count? Blow by's? Successful foul-baiting? What are you looking for here.
This is a broken play out of offensive rebound, Bulls wanted to double the ball-handler, but they didn't communicate and both attacked the same side. It is a mistake from Jordan, but it's not something you can cheat on.
If that's all you found, that's quite weak.
It's not "all", those are the first examples that came up when i was rewatching the clips(skipped to the 24 min point). Probably the worst play was Jordan fouling a guy with three taller dudes swarming him(creating free points out of nothing basically) but that's more just a stupid mistake than "exploit" i guess. There's 1 blow-by(for reference Ben 1 per 100 was 33rd percentile, and 2.2 per 100 was 3rd percentile) but I'm not going to extrapolate off a 30 possession sample. Film-tracking has it at 2-3 per 100 for 1991. Unfortunately the full videos for game 1 and game 2 went down but there were 2 in game 2 from what I vetted.
Ben said Magic "torched" Jordan in the finals.
That's true, but Magic torched all players for his whole career. If you want to use this logic, then I guess Luka "hunted" Kawhi because Leonard couldn't stop him either.
You're right he did. Which is part of why I'd say 2020-2021 Kawhi is a
good defensive wing as opposed to an all-time one. And, notably, despite having two good or elite defensive wings, the Clippers have generally failed to be even
mediocre as a playoff defense. Kawhi's man defense was not able to compensate for a lack of strong paint/rim protection...
in a playoff setting. Luka and Magic are similar in that they are both oversized(for a guard)/strong and have excellent playmaking.
He was also potentially torched by Drexler in 92 if this is accurate...
capfan33 wrote:
If I remember correctly, Colts18 did some tracking of Jordan's defense during the 92 finals against Clyde Drexler, and Drexler shot better against MJ than he did against everyone else by a decent margin. He shot 41% overall, but against Jordan specifically shot 44% while he shot 38% against everyone else.
I also watched some of Drexler's highlights during the series and honestly wasn't especially impressed with MJ's defense. I would be curious to see a more in-depth dive into this if anyone wants to or has already done so.
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Getting in trouble against opposing offensive stars in b2b finals would be significant. And drexler isn't really all that similar to Magic. Maybe worth checking Falco's tracking and seeing how much of a factor Drexler played.
Blocked has dumars and hawkins doing damage man to man with speed, foul-baiting, or just turning in on over-extensions like this:
https://youtu.be/p5aNUS762wM?t=1094Don't think it's accurate to say you
couldn't exploit Jordan defensively. It's more that Jordan was able to off-set these weaknesses with stuff like:
https://youtu.be/8f55MC1UR7A?t=54
I mean, maybe I should have said "hunt successfully". You can hunt anyone you want, but Jordan isn't someone you can built your offense around to exploit his defense. He has weaknesses and I certainly find him overrated by many, but let's not exaggarate.
Depends what you mean by hunt. I assume we're talking a handful of possessions? No I don't think you can "build your entire offense" around that, but how often does that happen for anyone who isn't outright bad? Did teams build their offense around hunting Magic?
Jordan(at least during the first-three peat) being a matchup-impervious isn't really accurate(remember, he was at the top of the league in error-rate).
How can you know that he was at the top of the league in error-rate? We don't even have most of the games from the early 1990s.
I'm simply deferring to Ben's film-tracking:
But his style was still high-risk, high-reward, and his defensive error rates were on the high side, landing in the 17th percentile for the heart of his career.
Blocked has the break-downs increase during the first-three peat. I remember Falco also did some tracking for 1992 where Jordan looked fairly error-prone.
The question is how much value is lost in the negative stuff vs the good stuff. Using Blocked's approach, for those 30-possessions(first 10, and then 20 from the 24 minuite mark to see what happened when grant went out) I counted 2 great plays, 6 good plays, 2 major breakdowns, and 6 minor breakdowns.
I don't know what "Blocked's approach" means.
Quoting the source herself, here's what it means for defensive tracking(I was lazy so i just sorted everything into good or great):
Defensive plays are when you do something that helps the prevention of a score, even if they end up scoring anyway
GREAT DP: Rim contest, rim deterrence, (note: getting a block does not neccesarily mean you should get the most credit for a defensive stoppage), charge near rim, stealing during a 2 v1, denying an entry pass that leads to an easy score, a contested defensive rebound that prevents an uncontested score ect, ect, remembet ro adjust for teammates!!! If a bucnh of players are helping on a rim play its probably not a "great" play
GOOD DP: Being involved in a rim stop, shot contest, stonewalling a player in the perimiter, being the primary cause of a steal, winning a contested rebound ect
DECENT DP: Weaker contests, being in postion for a few secs, applying seocondary pressure, secondary help on a rebound ect, ect,
Defensive errors are when you do something that hurts your team defensively:
MAJOR BREAKDOWN: When you're primarily responsible for a really good scoring chance
MINOR BREAKDOWN: When everyone's to blame or it doesn't lead to a really good scorng chance, ect.
I decided to go a bit lenient on "great breakdowns" since I feel your average "great" defensive breakdown is less valuable than your average "great" defensive play. I think 3 of the plays I counted for Jordan as "good" would be sorted into decent.
What I can say, based on my trakcing experience, is that affecting 16 out of 30 possessions is a lot, which suggests high activity.
Eh...that's assuming all the negative plays are a result of activity, and we're talking about 8 out of 30 possessions by a standard where switching between guys for a few seconds is considered a highlight(that is one of the plays I counted). I think an all-time wing sees a higher frequency of "great plays", "good plays", and "decent plays" on a smaller amount of breakdowns(Wasn't carefully tracking but I saw 1 major breakdown for Pippen over the same time-span and it seemed he was more involved even when it came to stuff like full-court presses. Other film-tracking has Pippen completing more perimeter plays, way more rim plays, and suffering less breakdowns though I don't have the exact numbers on hand). With an all-time big it skyrockets to them affecting virtually every possession(IIRC Blocked had KG having like 5 great plays in the 4th quarter of the 04 WCF g3).
You might note that while that block was counted as "great", a later block is simply counted as "good" because Jordan only makes it after Pippen(a wing, rather than a big) holds off someone too strong for jordan for several seconds. Jordan makes plays with positive, but alot of it is situationally tied to the supporting cast(as we would expect for any guard). When Jordan makes a behind the back steal on Karl Malone in ben's video above, cool! But rodman is doing most of the work.
That's irrelevant to my point, which is that Jordan wasn't easy to exploit on defense.
Is the combination of risk/reward "massively" more valuable than Magic being relatively sound but not being able to do big positive plays like the possession above?
Magic wasn't a "relatively sound" defender though, he was a big gambler himself - with worse results in general.
Am deferring to ben there. He said per his film-tracking Magic's error rate was merely "moderate" and he said he was positionally sound. Feel free to dispute that.
Well, maybe in a scale restricted to guards, but neither raw or(as enigma/hcl outlined) lineup-adjusted stuff seems to suggest that translates to a general scale(at least when his offense peaked). And it's interesting the defensive stuff seems to go up when Jordan was smarter despite being less capable. Eyes can totally capture/describe events, but they're not very good at being precise at how they weigh those occurrences, and nothing in the film(fair bit of breakdowns, fair bit of positive contributions, the occasional highlight you see more frequently with wings) makes me assume we should ignore the holistics entirely.
No, just because Jordan didn't have a very clear defensive impact on his extremely stacked defensive team doesn't mean he has no value. That's not how basketball works.
Well...one of the lineup-adjusted years is 1988 and we have the Bulls collapsing to average in the 88 playoffs and the 1987 regular season once Oakley departs. Keep in mind, the Bulls were average defensively before they even drafted Jordan and then just fluctuated between bad good and average regardless of what was Jordan doing. If a guard is making a "massive" difference, why were the Bulls average in 89?
As it is, Jordan's defensive/holistic impact stuff from the second-three peat(on a similarly "stacked" defense) looks better than what we see during the first-three peat when he traded quickness and activity for strength/solidity. I think this is kind of what people do with like 2013 and 1994 and 2008 where they try to put the best defensive stuff and the best offensive stuff(or at least what they
think is the best offensive stuff) together, but I don't think that's actually what happened.
Overall, the gap is marginal, and there's relatively high uncertainity, so I'm fine giving Jordan an edge based on convention. But assuming a "massive" gap of any sort just doesn't seem justifiable,
I wonder, how many guards have you scouted defensively in your life? Have you ever did comparable thing to an average or weak defender? Focusing on the best of the best often gives us a very bad picture overall.
But the question here is how much of a difference having a "average" vs a "elite" defensive guard makes when we apply it to a general scale. Not where does Jordan rank in a guard scale.
I don't do much hard-tracking due to time-constraints(i generally defer to others there), but I have watched games for different guys keying into defensive stuff and I do track how defenses have generally shifted. An average defender like Curry seems to make less mistakes but obviously is doing less positive stuff(and the rockets/cavs made it a strategy to hunt him but I don't think that actually helped them offensively). Maybe more pertinently I've seen pre-championship and first-three peat film a bunch and three-peat jordan looks like a clear downgrade to me(Though I rarely do hard-tracking myself.) I've saw the second-three peat playoffs but I didn't watch it close enough to have a strong defensive impression beyond him doing less(good and bad) and seeming harder to back-down.
Well, you have provided any example of Pistons doing that.
What would you count as an example? Would blow-by's suffice?
Maybe Jordan's value increases as he focuses in for the playoffs, or maybe defenses exploit his weaknesses better as they scheme up. My guess is it would be a bit of both but I don't think we should assume it goes all the way in one direction as your last sentence implies.
I don't imply anything, I say that it's much harder to exploit Jordan weaknesses on defense than Magic. Magic could be and was hunted on defense at various moments of his career. Not always with the best success, as he wasn't usually a bad defender, but it happened. That's just not the case with Jordan, at least outside of his first few seasons.
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Well you specifically said it offers a unique advantage in a playoff setting that wouldn't show up in rs defense fluctuations. But sure. That still gets us back to how much of a difference it makes. It doesn't seem to make a big difference in the regular season, but you seem to see it as especially valuable in a playoff-setting. Don't have a strong opinion but I'm guessing(largely based on what happened to the clippers with strong poa and man defense, what happened to the lakers in 2000 when shaq's limitations as a paint protector were exploited, and maaaybe a little based on what happened defensively to the bulls in the 88 playoffs) that gaps there only make a significant difference if you have a good enough defensive cast(Jrue on the Bucks).
