VanWest82 wrote:levon wrote:VanWest82 wrote:Again, not the point. Lakers were good with Lebron on the court because Lebron is a great player. Lakers were not good with Lebron off the court and with Russ on because they traded away all their depth to acquire him in the first place.
Not the point? This poster directly refuted your claim that Westbrook was better with LeBron off, did they not? In fact, the LeBron two-man combo was better than any other two-man combo, over twice as effective as with Kawhi. Now you're just shifting goalposts. You tried the driveby on LeBron and crashed into the fire hydrant.
You have it backwards.
Poster Homer38 tried the driveby with his facetious "blame Lebron" comment regarding Russ's individual #s. Poster Heej joined in to suggest it would be erroneous to ascribe any blame to Lebron for Lakers acquiring Westbrook. These comments were both incorrect as I've already explained (i.e. Russ's better #s before and after Lakers, and better without than with Lebron; Shams article detailing Lebron's heavy involvement in Russ deal).
Poster Homer38 then shifted goalposts to it being about line up data with Russ which wasn't the orginal claim. Surely, we're not making Russ have to clear the bar of being compared to Lebron lifitng line ups. The original inferred claim was that Lebron was not to blame in any way for the dip in Russ's individual play while with Lakers - you posted about TS% and TOV rate. The wowy doesn't agree with you, and all providing line up data does is say Lebron is great (we already knew that) and that Russ wasn't good enough to carry crappy Lakers line ups that didn't have enough size or talent after the trading for Russ which Lebron and AD (and Russ) orchestrated.
Make sense?
Yeah, it makes total sense. You're using an argument that Russ' individual counting/arbitrary efficiency stats were better before and after the Lakers. If you torture the data enough, it'll give you anything you want.
The reality is the last time Westbrook delivered star-level impact was 2017-2018. The last time he was a positive starter was 18-19. Since then, he's been a net negative and in precipitous decline.
You're trying to make the argument that LeBron made the mistake to acquire Westbrook at the cost of all the team's depth, which in turn made Russ look worse then he actually is. If you want to spill all this ink spraying cologne on a turd, you're welcome to. All I'll say is you were apt in saying that lineup combinations with LeBron will be great because LeBron is a great player. Westbrook's impact numbers are consistently in the negatives. Ergo ... you figure out the rest.
I'm tired of Westbrook being some teambuilding enigma like, oh if you figure out the
exact permutation of players and lineups and salaries then Westbrook is actually productive! Yeah, I'm sure if you took Bojan Bogdanovic and tailored your entire team around him, his impact stats would be higher too. Westbrook's consistently played with all-time talent his entire career and here we are still trying to squint and find 10 game stretches where his RAPTOR is actually 0.4 instead of -2.2.