Exp0sed wrote:Doctor MJ, I feel as if ur not seeing the circular element in your initial logic
your main claim was that Luka has never, across 6 season with different rosters, coaches etc has never produced an elite +- season in the way MVP caliber players do
the thing is, MVP is tied to wins and wins are innately tied with +- (for obvious reasons
)
that's def circular logic in my book
I don't see a circle there. The two lines you write amount to:
1. MVP players produce elite +/- seasons.
2. Elite +/- seasons get players MVP recognition.
Anyone who agrees with the premise of (1) would also agree with the correctness of (2), no?
Mind you, I've never said that Luka fundamentally couldn't be such a player, I've simply said he's not yet had such a season.
Exp0sed wrote:you're a Lakers fan, let's consider AD for a sec, AD is shooting slightly worse than last season but he's having a very similar statistical season to last season, while scoring slightly less he's also has more stocks, less TO's and less PF's. after the deadline trades last season AD was consdered a top 5 MVP candidate, right?
this season he has a measly +56 for the season
is he suddenly not an elite player? that's propestrous..
the truth is the Lakers have about the 16th best defense, which means that even with a DPOY level defender in AD - they are still below league average. that makes sense obviously, when LBJ is a huge liability on that end and so are guys like D-Lo, Reaves and most of the other guys playing rotation mins
last season AD had +205, has his impact plummeted so dramatically? despite playing virtually the same in terms of raw stats, the eye test or what have u? ofc not..
in reaility because the Lakers can't defend, they get scored on plenty despite AD - meaning: it's his teammates that are "responsible" for his sudden drop in +-, not AD himself. do u see why a stat so easily affected by team context can be very misleading at times?
I recognize you're trying to give me an example that I'll presumably understand better, but you should know that my psychology doesn't lend itself toward team homerdom.
To your specifics:
- No, AD was not considered a Top 5 MVP candidate last season. He didn't get a single 5th place vote for MVP. I think based on some of your other choice of words you're really focused on the buzz pertaining to AD late last season, and that's a real thing, but quite literally, AD was not close to a Top 5 MVP candidate last season.
- Lower +/- this year, is he no longer an elite player? A number of confusions here:
First, as I've said many times in this thread, I'm not using raw +/- alone when I refer to "+/- data". It's a family of stats that includes On/Off and RAPM. That's not me being quirky, that's me being using typical terminology among those who use analytics as its developed over the past 20 years. So dropping from +205 to +56 is by no means implying that I think his +/- data makes him look "4 times worse" or something like that. It's possible to look not very impactful with a +205, and very impactful with a +56, and I'll note that On/Off has AD higher than he's been on average in his Laker years, so that's actually a pretty plausible thing to argue for AD this year. (I'm not really looking to make any specific argument about AD to be clear.)
Second, as I've also said in this thread, impact is not goodness. Impact is the literal affect you're having on your team right now. Goodness is a statement of how good a player is in the abstract. And while it's understandable to think that goodness is the more important attribute, and folks have the right to try to use goodness in their hypothetical MVP vote, the choice of "most valuable player" as the name of the award as opposed to something like "most outstanding player" or "player of the year" speaks to impact rather than goodness. Hence, I would say a traditional approach to determining MVP is about evaluating a player's impact over the course of the season in lifting the team context regardless of whether you believe another player would be more impactful in a less unlucky context.
- Teammates responsible for AD's drop not AD. It's not an either/or thing. AD's part of the equation just like his teammates are. As I said, none of this means I necessarily find AD's season to be worse than the previous one, but to understand what's going on with the team, one certainly has to do more than say "The stars are the stars, so it must be everyone else getting worse."
- Do you see how team-based stat...? Listen, you're talking to me like you think you I'm one dude who doesn't understand basics of correlation and causation, and I'm trying to make clear to you that there's a field of analytics in basketball that's been around a very long time compared to how long you've been on RealGM and this field of people is full of folks who don't have basic gaps in their logic.
None of this means that I or anyone else must be right about any particular debate about good a player is, but you're just getting off on the wrong foot when you try to interpret what I'm saying as incoherent. I'd suggest you start with assumption that I know what I'm talking about and try to find places of legitimate difference in opinion.
And as I've said: One place that can happen is if you're focused on goodness while I'm focused on impact in a conversation about most valuable players.
Exp0sed wrote:like Bob pointed out the other day, the numbers post the tradedeadline paint Luka with a dramtically improved defensive impact, has Luka's defense improve dramatically in the last month? we all know it hasn't
SGA has like +550, Chet has +350 and J-Dub has +330. frigging Lu Dort has +320..
I still can't understand how you can tie Luka's pedestrian +- to anything other than team context and just ignore how unguardable he is.
Re: if Luka's defense didn't improve but team defense did, then it must be about better teammates. No, basketball is more complicated that that. I could talk about some other things here - health, mood, focus, noise, etc - but there's a really, really important point here that I've already mentioned many times in this thread: Fit.
Let's say a team has a bad defense that's generally chalked up to weakness on the interior. The starting center is just plain meh - mediocre at defending players his size, mediocre at blocking shots, etc. Now say the team trades that center away for the best shutdown defender of point guards in the league. All agree that this new player is a better overall basketball talent than the old center. Should we thus expect the team to improve with the shutdown point guard defender?
Well, if you're playing the shutdown point guard defender as your center and expecting him to protect the paint, probably not. You've probably just made your team worse despite increasing your talent.
When you're trying to refine a roster around a star that you hope to be a contender, you're thinking a lot about fit, and when you bring a guy in like Grant Williams or PJ Washington, the expectation is not that you're going to make your team way better by virtue of their amazing talent, but that they can be that piece of the puzzle you need to make your Luka-based team really synergize.
I hope we can agree on that, and my guess would be that we disagree on how to assess fit for purposes of MVP discussion.
I normalize for teammate talent but not teammate fit, because one member of a team's value is always going to be dependent on fit. This is true everywhere, not just in basketball or sports. If I try to build a company that makes products and then sells them, but I only ever hire salesmen, then those salesman won't be valuable because they have no products to sell.
If you think this is unfair to Luka, well frankly, I wouldn't care to disagree. Fairness is not my goal here. Evaluating the value added in context is.
