Does Lebron 41 playoff series wins give him the best goat argument?

[Texas Chuck]

You can't dock him for playing in the East if he advances out of the East literally every year though. You are penalizing him unfairly. All he can do is play who is in front of him. He's not responsible for the quality of his opponents. Same thing was done to discredit Kidd when he carried the Nets to b2b Finals. It's lazy and just flat wrong.

It's fine if you want to talk about Kobe or Duncan having to face a tougher road in the West. But even then we only had 3 franchises make the Finals out of the West for like 15 years (shout out to Dirk and the little Mavs for being the only other team to break through). The West had better records, but it was mostly about the dominance of 2.5 teams. The earlier rounds not nearly as different as is being made out to be here.

And again if Lebron's teams were losing to those lessor teams, its a criticism. But they didn't.

Let me put it this way:

Getting to the Finals is generally a statement about being a Top 2 team.

So if you weren't leading Top 2 teams - aka Jason Kidd on the Nets - then this is an overstatement of how successful your team actually was.

Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that the star in question accomplished less than another star leading superior teams in the West, but if we're just looking to give tallies, while I absolutely want to give the raw count first and foremost, I don't think AUF is unreasonable to argue that another count better captures what was accomplished even if each of us see the specifics differently from each other.

If someone wants to examine every opponent (and not just w/l or SRS, but actual matchups) and determine which player faced the tougher opponents, knock yourself out. I take zero issue with that.

However, we do not know if the Lebron Cavs or Heat would have lost to tougher opponents, all we know for sure is the teams they faced, they beat. Every year for a really long time.

So going back and deducting theoretical series wins from Lebron is unfair. There is zero way around that. He won those series and he has no control over the quality of his opponents.

We need to be fair or what's the point of any of this?

[Doctor MJ]

You can't dock him for playing in the East if he advances out of the East literally every year though. You are penalizing him unfairly. All he can do is play who is in front of him. He's not responsible for the quality of his opponents. Same thing was done to discredit Kidd when he carried the Nets to b2b Finals. It's lazy and just flat wrong.

It's fine if you want to talk about Kobe or Duncan having to face a tougher road in the West. But even then we only had 3 franchises make the Finals out of the West for like 15 years (shout out to Dirk and the little Mavs for being the only other team to break through). The West had better records, but it was mostly about the dominance of 2.5 teams. The earlier rounds not nearly as different as is being made out to be here.

And again if Lebron's teams were losing to those lessor teams, its a criticism. But they didn't.

Let me put it this way:

Getting to the Finals is generally a statement about being a Top 2 team.

So if you weren't leading Top 2 teams - aka Jason Kidd on the Nets - then this is an overstatement of how successful your team actually was.

Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that the star in question accomplished less than another star leading superior teams in the West, but if we're just looking to give tallies, while I absolutely want to give the raw count first and foremost, I don't think AUF is unreasonable to argue that another count better captures what was accomplished even if each of us see the specifics differently from each other.

If someone wants to examine every opponent (and not just w/l or SRS, but actual matchups) and determine which player faced the tougher opponents, knock yourself out. I take zero issue with that.

However, we do not know if the Lebron Cavs or Heat would have lost to tougher opponents, all we know for sure is the teams they faced, they beat. Every year for a really long time.

So going back and deducting theoretical series wins from Lebron is unfair. There is zero way around that. He won those series and he has no control over the quality of his opponents.

We need to be fair or what's the point of any of this?

Hmm.

If you want to take issue with someone applying this only to LeBron as unfair, I'm with you.
If you want to say something is unfair simply because of the fact that someone is looking to make adjustments based on their own assessment of the degree of difficulty involved, I'm not.

The person doing this can be wrong in their assessment, but I wouldn't call it fundamentally unfair any more than any other adjustment based on degree of difficulty is.

[penbeast0]

Not a particularly strong argument, the Eastern Conference for most of the 00s/10s was subpar in team quality. Most of the teams Lebron's Cavs beat would not have made the playoffs if they were in the Western Conference.

2006 Wizards: 12th in SRS

2007 Wizards: 15th in SRS

2007 Nets: 16th in SRS

2008 Wizards: 17th in SRS

2009 Pistons: 17th in SRS

2010 Bulls: 18th in SRS

Lebron's accumulative playoff series wins are more a result of being in a weak conference; the same thing is true for Magic Johnson.

Hey, those the Wiz best seasons since the 70s that you be dissing.

[Texas Chuck]

Hmm.

If you want to take issue with someone applying this only to LeBron as unfair, I'm with you.
If you want to say something is unfair simply because of the fact that someone is looking to make adjustments based on their own assessment of the degree of difficulty involved, I'm not.

The person doing this can be wrong in their assessment, but I wouldn't call it fundamentally unfair any more than any other adjustment based on degree of difficulty is.

Yeah we just fundamentally disagree. Again, I'm fine with trying to adjust for degree of difficulty though what's been done itt so far is far too simplistic to be reaching some of the conclusions being reached. I think if we looked at every playoff series ever played by championship level teams, we'd find the difference between them beating a 43 win team and a 49 win team is very little.

But the historical record remains the historical record. And beating what some are terming inferior teams, does not preclude that team from beating a better team. All we know is every Eastern opponent was beaten, nothing more.

So deducting real series that Lebron (or any other player) won is wrong.

Again, if the goal here(and I know it is) is to try and say Kobe's series wins are more impressive than Lebron's than go for it. But that requires a lot more work than somewhat arbitrarily deducting series wins from Lebron when we have absolutely no idea who would have won a theoretical series that was never played.

That's the issue. The number of series won cannot be changed. What can be disputed is how much more difficult the road really faced by a Kobe(or Duncan, or Dirk) actually was. And my guess is if one of you really smart stat guys crunched the numbers we'd see that the difference is negligible and that by any measure one takes, Kobe can't catch Lebron here.

And of course any "analysis" motivated by trying to create a specific result is already tainted by a bias. This approach is not fundamentally sound.

[scrabbarista]

It's obviously not nothing, but a ton of those wins were gimmes in a feeble Eastern Conference. I don't think it really moves anything in any greatest convo's.

EDIT: Sorry if the whole thread has been about this. I didn't read before commenting.