Post#83 » by lessthanjake » Wed Apr 17, 2024 12:39 am
Just for reference for everyone, if we look at Jordan’s playoff career and compare to LeBron’s playoff career just limited to the age range of Jordan’s years, and we actually apply the objective 3.0+ rDRTG opponent criteria rather than selectively not applying it to help LeBron (as the OP did), we get Jordan with 32.10 PPG on +4.20 rTS% and LeBron with 28.98 PPG on +4.78 rTS%. I didn’t do the inflation-adjusted or per-75-possession stuff on the points, since it was way quicker not to and I’m not sure it makes much of a difference here—I have no idea which way layering those things on would cut. To me, Jordan’s numbers are better there, since it’s a few more points per game on essentially the same efficiency.
The overall numbers don’t tell the exact story of the data, though. LeBron was really not a “resilient” playoff scorer in his younger years. I’d say it took him until 2012 (age 27) to actually become a resilient playoff scorer (2011 looks reasonably resilient in this data set, but we know what happened in the 2011 Finals—which doesn’t show up here since the Mavs weren’t a 3.0+ rDRTG defense). After that point, LeBron became a resilient playoff scorer. That said, I think the series in this data set in those years fall into one of a few buckets. The first bucket includes a couple series where I think his rTS% was through the roof in significant part simply because the opponent was scoring so much that they didn’t need to play so hard on defense (2014 Spurs and 2017 Warriors). The second bucket were teams that honestly just weren’t very good (2012 Knicks, 2013 & 2014 Pacers, 2016 Hawks, and 2018 Celtics were not very good teams), and those sorts of teams are typically worse in the playoffs against decent teams. The third bucket was teams that were good and didn’t just destroy LeBron’s team on the other end of the court, and LeBron did not score efficiently against those teams (2013 Spurs and 2015 Warriors). I do think that the “resilience” in the post-2012 data for LeBron is in significant part due to the composition of those buckets. But, at the same time, I also think he became a more resilient playoff scorer.
In contrast, for Jordan, he was a resilient playoff scorer immediately upon joining the league. Before his first retirement, he was putting up 33.3 PPG on +5.8 rTS% against the teams in this data set, and never had a negative rTS% series in those series. And these weren’t series against mediocre teams with good RS rDRTG—rather they were against amongst the era’s actual best teams. I suppose one could make a similar point about the 1986 Celtics series as about the 2014 Spurs and 2017 Warriors series, though obviously Jordan’s best game of the series was quite close. Overall, I think this time period is pretty unimpeachable in its resilience, with the minor caveat that Jordan was relatively inefficient against the best versions of those Knicks teams (still 30+ points on reasonably positive rTS%, but definitely his lowest rTS% of the era). Overall, I’m more convinced by Jordan’s resilience in this time period than LeBron’s post-2012, for reasons alluded to above. After he came back from his first retirement, Jordan’s playoff scoring resilience was not as good as before. He still scored a lot and he did have a couple high-efficiency series against really good defensive teams in those years, but it was more common for the efficiency to be mediocre (and it was actually bad efficiency against the 1997 Heat). I do think part of this was that the Bulls clamped some of these teams down so hard defensively that Jordan didn’t need to do as much offensively (or perhaps in a similar vein may have been focusing energies defensively and had that affect him offensively at the relatively late age he was in this era, I don’t know). But I think a lot of it was simply that Jordan was less explosive at that point in his career and the game was very slow at the time, so if you were a great defense, you could potentially limit him to taking a ton of highly contested jump shots (i.e. think of his post fadeaway), and he wasn’t always able to efficiently do that. Again, you still got lots of points from him in that era, but I do think it was easier to slow him down.
The ebbs and flows in their “resilience” can probably be largely explained by weaknesses in their game (in early years, LeBron’s weak shooting was exploitable by great defenses, while Jordan’s lack of explosiveness in his later years could leave him not being very efficient against great defenses). However, one other contributing factor here, I think, is the pace of the eras. Both of these guys were less “resilient” during the time period of their career where the league had slowed down a lot. When you have a slow era and are facing great defenses, the playoffs end up being a grind with a lot of glacial half-court offense, and that often means the team’s best player has to take a lot of bad shots at the end of the shot clock, and of course that’s never going to lead to a high rTS%. I do think that sort of thing probably contributed to Jordan’s lowered “resilience” near the end of his career and LeBron’s lowered “resilience” near the start of his career. I may be wrong about that though, as I’ve not really delved into anything to try to validate it, and I don’t think it fully explains things.
OhayoKD wrote:Lebron contributes more to all the phases of play than Messi does. And he is of course a defensive anchor unlike messi.