lessthanjake wrote:You might want to watch what happened in last year’s playoffs, where Embiid was mercilessly hunted. It happens a lot. If you can’t see that, then that’s on you. And by the way, it works. Do you think Jokic would have taken so many threes in Game 7 if the Timberwolves left him alone more when they were on offense? Of course not. They purposely wore him down.
Were they just running simply pick and roll action or actually trying to isolate Embiid one on one for a mismatch?
You just have a hopelessly simplistic view of defense. If Jokic has a positive defensive impact (which he demonstrably does), then yes, his defensive positives do “make up for” his defensive negatives.
And you have a bias version of defense to lift Jokic up. What is he good at that makes him a positive for his team defense. Are we really giving participation trophy’s for being where your suppose to be on defense? He can’t guard in space, defend the post or protect the rim. But he can swipe the ball and rebound. And if he actually defended the rim he’d be a worse rebounder. It’s easy to rebound when you on your feet when the shot goes up.
Umm, defenses scheme to protect everyone’s negatives. There’s always mismatches of some sort on the floor, even if you created a roster of the best defenders in NBA history. And you always scheme to protect your team against those. These are silly criticisms, that sound like things we’d hear from people babbling on ESPN.
When Michael Porter Jr., a bad defender, is defending Big Kat so your 6”11 280 pound C can guard Jaden McDaniels, your team is scheming for
your defensive deficiencies. If Jokic couldn’t play drop coverage they had to scheme to keep him on the floor last series.
I promise you that LeBron would say the same thing. This isn’t some random theory I’ve come up with. It’s just conventional wisdom. It’s just bizarre to try to fight this concept. And this is even more important in “the final minutes,” because those are the times where the guy is most likely to become fatigued and when reducing the guy’s offensive potential is most important.
You’re wrong
James and Reddick had an entire episode on their podcast about the hardest actions to guard and almost the entire podcast was about pick and roll. James talked about how Lie loved hunting for the weakest defender, how James himself would pick on the worst defender. How the action created a two on one action or a mismatch. They talked about how Lebron would pick on Reddick. He wasn’t picking on Chris Paul or Blake Griffin. He never once mentioned that he does it to wear down the other teams best offensive player. This argument is complete conjecture on your part.
Who were the talented defenders on this team, you ask? Well, how about essentially all the guys on the court making the team a historically elite defense? If you play historically elite defense, then you are a talented defender, unless you’re just defining “talent” so narrowly that it becomes a meaningless concept (which I think is what you’re doing—just like you define “defense” so narrowly as to make it not include Jokic’s strengths).
No. Just no. A team buying into a defensive scheme doesn’t make the individual players talented. Again, a team of solid defenders can have a great defense with great coaching. This was a coaching staff that included Mike Malone by the way. Pierce’s Celtics that year had more talented defensive players. Talent actually translates from team to team.
If you want to call them role players instead, then that’s fine. Scrubs and role players are two very different things. These were role players who played their role quite well. Of course, I still would say LeBron did not “carry” them, since, as I’ve pointed out, they got to the Finals on the back of their greatness on a side of the ball that LeBron was just a cog in rather than the driving force (while they did badly in the playoffs on the side of the ball LeBron was the driving force behind). That said, do I think they’d have made the Finals without LeBron? No. So, if you define being a but-for cause of a team’s advancement as “carrying” the team, then sure. But essentially every finalist in NBA history wouldn’t have made the Finals without their biggest star, so that’s just defining “carry” in a meaninglessly broad way.
He bought a team that lacked talent to the NBA finals. One of if not the worst team, talent wise, to make it to the finals in modern NBA history. If you want to reduce this to another semantic argument and call the roll players that’s fine. I think those guys were scrubs. Bad. Basura.
As for Paul Pierce, I wouldn’t be so sure about that. They probably could’ve played essentially just as good of defense with Pierce. Meanwhile, there’s little reason to believe Paul Pierce was an inferior offensive player that year. Indeed, while the Celtics had an awful offense overall, the Celtics with Pierce on the floor that season scored more efficiently than the Cavaliers with LeBron on the floor! Which is perhaps why Paul Pierce that year had a better ORAPM than LeBron, similar O-EPM, etc. And Pierce wouldn’t even have had to make their offense good to make the Finals, since those Cavs made the Finals with a bad defense as it was. And they did so fairly easily, so they could’ve made the Finals with a decently worse defense. The only real question IMO is just if Pierce would’ve integrated as well into their defense, but of course we know he integrated very well into an all-time offense the next year, so I think he would’ve. But maybe carrying the load on offense would’ve limited him defensively. I tend to think those Cavs could’ve made the Finals with Paul Pierce though. And that really shouldn’t seem ridiculous to you, because the 2007 Cavs defense was simply that good, combined with the East being that weak.
The 07-08 Celtics were better and it took them 7 games to beat the Cavs. He also played on a team with a better defensive rating in 02 than Lebron’s 07 Cavs but lost in the conference finals to the nets. C’mon man!
*INGRAM*ALLSTARSEASON* Wemby is HIM
