Just how many "random teams" do you think a player gets to be grouped with 1 and then 2 superstars who are extremely limited as scorers and passers/ball-handlers respectively. “Steph overlaps less with different players than others do with similar players. Portability god!” is not all that persuasive. Especially when Steph didn't always fit so well with superstar 2...
Realistically any theoretical(and this is entirely theoretical) value edge Curry may have over a Lebron or a Hakeem or a Magic or whatever "floor-raiser" you are assuming Steph is more valuable than on the 2017 Warriors...would apply to virtually no other "random team" in nba history. Just saying it's a big deal does not make it so.
You also seem to have your feet in two-places regarding how we should assess ceilings...
lessthanjake wrote:AEnigma wrote:Huh? I’m not using any “process.” I’m just reminding you what happened factually. I have no idea if the Warriors could’ve beaten the Raptors if Durant was out but Klay played the whole series. There’s reason to believe such a series would’ve been close and that the Warriors could’ve perhaps won, but really we’ll never know. What we *do* know is we shouldn’t use their loss of that series as an indication of exactly what they were capable of simply without Durant, since there was an additional huge injury that affected the series.
And what happened factually is that the original Warriors trio was outscored on court without Durant. Klay’s injury made the victory easier and effectively guaranteed, but the Raptors were winning those minutes regardless. If it was “2-2 with a lead,” that is because one quarter of Durant provided just enough to give them an edge in a close game (and in this framework where we need to throw out the Klay-less game, then the series goes to the Raptors as soon as they hit 3 wins).
Series’ aren’t won or lost based on the +/- of a specific lineup. It’s just a silly argument. The Warriors played the Raptors very close in games Klay played—indeed, if anything, having an advantage, given the “2-2 with a lead, in a set of games with 3 away games” thing. It doesn’t mean they’d have won the series if Durant was out but Klay had played the whole time. We have no idea what would’ve happened in that different reality. But it does make it facially silly to act like them losing to the Raptors was some natural experiment of what would’ve happened without Durant (and is even more silly when we realize that the counterfactual would actually presumably involve them using that Durant cap space on good player(s), so what they had against the Raptors without Durant was artificially weak compared to an actual non-Durant scenario).
But series also aren't won on the +/- of teams. And for all this emphasis on "cannabalizing" co-stars, Steph's teams are 1-3 against Lebron when both have stars to fit with and 1-1 in the finals despite all these matchups taking place during what should be "Steph's era".
Though the choice to focus on m.o.v or actual wins is rather academic because...
The manner in which Steph and LeBron won those titles was different though. By any measure you want to look at (regular season wins, SRS, playoff record, playoff SRS, number of game 7’s, etc.), the Warriors’ title teams were more dominant.
They were more dominant with Durant. Otherwise Lebron's best teams were statistically(at least by dray and san's method). as dominant with three teams crossing +13 and 1 team crossing +14. Perhaps showing how arbitrary this gatekeeping of "ceilings is", one of those +13 teams lost, while a +10 team Lebron led actually won facing(by dray's method) an all-time difficult finals opponent.
And this is despite Lebron's co-stars being more "ball-dominant" than Steph's, those teams being worse without Lebron. and his help having significantly worse health(they were probably healthiest in 2016 where Kevin Love missed a game and was concussed for a finals).
Unless your standard of ceiling raising is one which has no real application to virtually any random team ever(and thus is pointless for assessing CORP), Lebron is probably the better ceiling raiser as well.
Lebron's argument becomes stronger if we accept the earlier argument that Steph's offenses weren't as good because he was carrying defensively slanted talent. In that case Steph is floor-raising teams to sub-lebron offense. And Lebron is ceiling-raising teams to steph+offense(while simultaneously floor(rs) and cieling raising(pos) defenses to a degree Steph could never hope to).
Branching out historically, Lebron has led 6 teams with top 50-playoff ratings. If you are unironically saying Lebron is not a top-tier ceiling raisier, we may as well drop the pretense that "championships" are your leading light.
In fact I'd argue a run like 2012 is far more indicative of a player's ability to win championships(surviving injured co-stars, dealing with fully-healthy opposition, playing with similarly ball-dominant co-star, decent but not loaded help, dominating an all-time finals opponent), than something like 2017 where one of two of your potentially decent opponents were decimated by injury and you had a combination of talent and fit that cannot and has not been replicated at any other point in nba history.
There is no logical path to "greater likelihood of winning it all on a majority of random teams". It is simply aesthetics. When scrutinized with what's actually happened, the theory does not hold.
You also should be consistent with what you think is worthy of criticized. If game 7's are a concern, then being taken to 7 by the Rockets is a big failure for the Warriors. Especially when we acknowledge the circumstances(they were losing to the Rockets with Chris Paul).
Getting to basketball analysis, some of the assumptions here just don't track with what has happened in Steph's own team:
These are pretty much just all things that get easily coached to an NBA player with a remotely competent basketball IQ. It’s not something that has been hard for players to pick up on the Warriors, which isn’t a surprise since they’re professional basketball players. Needing guys to mentally understand basic basketball concepts is really not the high bar you think it is.
And yet Wiggins did not learn the offense immediately. Dlo never clicked with it. On a base level, the Warriors system demands a a committed approach to screening you tend not to see and that not many players do. Their defensive scheme requires pretty high awareness, and even Draymond’s on-court communication cannot make a player like Poole play smartly.
Tatum was struggling to grasp 2 for 1's until his 3rd season. Is he not good?
You are creating a baseless standard where “player fits scheme well = normal, expected” and “player does not fit scheme well = uniquely dumb and bad”. It's pretty similar to what we do with the triangle where ignore that Pippen becomes the on-court captain and highly intelligent supporting pieces like Ron Harper or Horace Grant are disregarded and treated as replaceable in the service of mythmaking.
The Triangle seems so intuitive, and anyone could do it… yet Jackson kept pursuing the same players across teams (Harper and Fisher and Grant) to run it and fit into it, while an established veteran like Gary Payton struggled to pick it up.
Kerr's motion offense is an even bigger ask, and even if a player picks it up, that does not grantee they will stick to it.
Kevin Durant is a guy who specifically gets weaker when he is asked to handle or playmaker more. Before he came to Golden State he would see efficiency plummet with increased responsibilities without an increase in volume. He also answered two big relative weaknesses(size, 1 v1 scoring). Yet, even though he picked up the system, he would end up clashing with it, as understanding=/willingness. He would also question the ceiling of that offense, and it's hard to say he was all wrong. After all, the Warriors, without KD, were not historically remarkable in the playoffs offensively. Even with they were not historically peerless.
As Sans pointed out, with a "small" 14-team sample, "unselfish" offenses do not hold up well in the playoffs. Historical analog Larry Bird did not achieve the same offensive highs as his best contemporaries(or come paticularly close). This also lines up with what we see over larger samples:
https://fansided.com/2021/02/26/nylon-calculus-passing-offense-winning/
Motion offense actually has a slight negative correlation with offensive rating.
And no, not it is not "easily coached". Thibs is "good" but you are not reaching those same highs if he joins in 15.
You've repeatedly touted your eye-test, but I really am not sure what stock I can put on your eye-ball evals when you say things like "the warriors offense is easy" or "Lebron plays a do-everything style". Steph is the system, but the system's floor or ceiling depends on various factors beyond "talent". Steph did not become a different player between 14 and 15. His context changed.
Moreover, "Ball-dominant" and "do-everything" are not styles. Lebron, unlike Steph, has played in a variety of styles and "systems" and has scaled up/down what he has done or hasn't done accordingly. Steph's value is tied to a specific system in a way Lebron's simply is not.
To be clear, this is not only a negative. You can reasonably say that Steph could have hit 2015-level highs even earlier. But you cannot have it both ways. Steph also could have just put together a bunch of 2014's with the impact-crowd struggling to pitch a case for him against Durant never mind Lebron.
Speaking of...
It was an off-handed comment
But it wasn't. You specifically deployed this standard back in the #5 thread when you made the case that Steph's prime was actually potentially the best, for the entirety of data-ball on data that did not actually cover the whole time period. You then maintained it while arguing Curry was the best "over the last 9 years" right until it became apparent such a standard would favor Jokic by metrics you brought up(and 30+ Lebron by most-everything).
If you wish to argue something like "it is clear Steph has generated the most accumulative value over the last 10 years", that may be defensible. But it is a change of course from what you have been arguing, and somehow I do not think "Longevity" is a particularly winning case for Steph with KG on the board.
Strong language is not going to make it being "inarguable" that Steph is the "impact king" any less ridiculous.
Your argument just amounts to saying I’m wrong because Steph hasn’t met a completely unrealistic bar.
An unrealistic bar for Steph perhaps. But Lebron clears it. Magic and Russell meet it. While Kareem is not unchallenged with one-offs, in general, he also has a strong claim to dominion over the 70's in terms of "prime", "peak" "average" and accumulated value. But Steph? No. Steph only really meets the bar of "best on average during a time-frame where a better-looking guy is receding and another better-looking guy has recently been drafted". Steph is not an "impact king" unless you lower the bar. His portfolio is not dominant. He is not near or at the top everywhere.
If we are using the bar that was set with other holders of that mantle, Steph is not an "impact king", and that's the bottom line.
ignoring the fact that these are noisy metrics and players’ form ebb
Demonstrably less noisy then the PER's which you like to throw around...
but no, I did not ignore it. I have openly acknowledged uncertainty and shaped how I use that sort of data accordingly.
You were posting unsourced sets less than a week ago and we only have to look a thread back to you chucking 1-year APM to equate a guy who plays way more minutes than his "co-stars' to one who sometimes plays less than his.
Don't explain what you don't understand.
). However, I am with Doc that sweeps can indicate a lack of response and that Shaq did not give his team many new opportunities to adjust as a series progressed.* A large part of me feels that 2000 Shaq was quite fortunate to encounter neither the Jazz nor the Duncan Spurs in the postseason run. Not that the Blazers were some pushovers of course, but those two teams would have forced him to grow in a way he often did not. I posted Duncan’s and Shaq’s head-to-head numbers a few threads ago, but since the discussion about “blame” has come up, I figured it may be interesting to do the same for Malone and Shaq.
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