DCZards wrote:PIF, why must all of your responses to stats suggesting that KP had an outstanding season come down to "well the Zards are a bad team?" We know that. But that doesn't change the fact that KP played very well this season.
This is a fair question, Zards.
In an important way you are obviously correct: after all, if KP had been a lock to stay healthy & play well, he wouldn't have been available for next to nothing in a trade!
On top of which, not only did KP answer that single most significant question about him -- can he stay healthy for a full season? -- he also had the best year of his career.*
Although KP had always been a high usage player, he had never scored with volume & efficiency akin to this season. & it was the leap in scoring efficiency that made '22-23 his best year yet.
Plus, it's worth noting that KP is still only 27. & he doesn't have the miles on him that you would normally expect -- e.g. Karl-Anthony Towns, picked the same year as KP & the same age as him, has played 17,500 NBA minutes; KP has only played 12,500.
All that is good.
But, obviously, "answered the durability question" & "had his best year" are not the same as "KP had an outstanding season." I.e. both of those were outstanding things for him to do, but they don't amount to the same thing as "had an outstanding season," where we mean (b/c basketball is a competitive sport) "outstanding
in comparison with other Centers in the league."
Moreover, when we ask that kind of comparison question, e.g., "who had a better season, KP or Clint Capela?" we also aren't asking "did Clint Capela do the same things as KP?" & concluding -- since he didn't -- that KP had a more outstanding season than Capela. Or even that KP is outstanding while Capela is... say "a solid journeyman."
Rinse & repeat for e.g. Walker Kessler, Mitchell Robinson, Kevon Looney, Steven Adams, Nicolas Claxton, Jarrett Allen, Jacob Poeltl, Onyeka Okongwu, Jalen Duren....
To compare those guys -- either to KP or to one another -- we need a way to figure out how all their numbers have meaning in decide whether one of them was better than another or better than KP?
In fact, even just to say that KP just had his best year, -- we need ways to compare his numbers in different seasons. I compare him this year to him in other years & see that he at his best this year.
And when I compare his numbers this year to the numbers of every single guy on that list above, in exactly the same way I conclude that overall, compared to a bunch of other NBA Centers, KP wasn't outstanding in fact.
& that's where that business of "well, the Zards are a bad team" comes in. If your players have outstanding years compared to other players at their positions on other teams, you are a good team not a bad one. You win more games not fewer games.
In other words, if Clint Capela put up better numbers overall than KP, then we'd be a better team with Capela than with KP. & he did. & we would be.
https://stathead.com/basketball/pcm_finder.cgi?player_id2=capelca01&p1yrfrom=2023&player_id1=porzikr01&p2yrfrom=2023&sum=0&request=1&utm_campaign=2023_01_wdgt_player_comparison&utm_source=bbr&utm_medium=sr_xsite&utm_id=porzikr01* In fact, overall, he'd been just slightly better with us the previous year -- but that was a 17-game end of the year stretch. '22-23 was his best full season.
