Djoker wrote:.
Great post!
This goes to something that is a bit of a pet issue of mine—which is that I really do think there are teams that are clear playoff paper tigers, and that mechanically looking at relative playoff numbers against those sorts of teams can wrongly skew perceptions. I understand a compulsion to downplay this, since it’s a super subjective thing to evaluate and is not something that can really be meaningfully quantified. But I think the reality is that there are some teams (and players) that have a stature in the NBA that makes teams really get up for them in the regular season, and there are others that kind of just don’t. And if you’re a team in the latter bucket, the playoffs ends up being a much bigger difficulty spike than it is for teams that typically get more motivated opponents in the regular season. The upshot of this is that I don’t put a whole lot of credence in things like rORTG and rTS% in the playoffs against teams that didn’t have very high stature in the league—I think that that in large part amounts to farming paper tigers whose regular-season numbers are not an accurate representation of their playoff quality. Of course, trying to mechanically account for this just becomes an unhelpful line-drawing game, where people will try to include or exclude data points based on whether they like or dislike those data points. What I will say, though, is that my general feeling is that LeBron played a lot of weak playoff opponents that were not teams high in stature in the NBA, and I personally don’t put a lot of value in what happened in those series (and by the way, the same critique is true for players beyond LeBron—for instance, I think we could generally say this about the vast majority of Magic Johnson’s Western Conference playoff opponents). I put a lot more value on what happened against genuinely top-tier teams, and I think your post highlights how that is not an area where LeBron’s teams necessarily did super great in relative terms compared to other all-time great offensive players (though they still did do quite well, of course!).