OhayoKD wrote:First, the non-sequtir:
It found
individual steals to be the most correlative compared the individual examples of other stats which happen to happen alot more frequently(excluding blocks where there is high variance in it over/underrating players).
Jordan averaged a whopping .8 more steals than Lebron did(1.3 at their highest marks if we ignore 1988 being cooked) while also being on the high-side of "value given back" with breakdowns yielded from his gambling (incidentally if we go by d-rating correlation he generates less value off steals than a more conservative thief like Kawhi does).
The point is that it found individual steals to be correlated with a substantial amount of impact. This obviously runs contrary to your claim that steals have little to no correlation with team defensive performance, which you stated in response to someone pointing out Jordan has a significant steals advantage over LeBron. In fact, an individual getting more steals has repeatedly been found to correlate with superior team defensive performance, as we see from the information I’ve provided.
Meanwhile, the idea that he would be on the “high-side of ‘value given back’ with breakdowns yielded from his gambling” has no factual basis or evidence to it. Nor does that even conceptually account for the fact that someone who “gambles” more and is quite good at it is also likely to deter more high-value passes, so there’s reason to think that that style of play is really a huge positive (at least when you’re a massive outlier in how good you are it, like Jordan was—obviously someone who isn’t so good at it won’t deter much).
What you actually need to show is their being a team-level correlation. Atm your link to the source that allegedly says that doesn't work:
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We do have multiple studies(including one from 538) noting that at the team level there is little correlation with defensive goodness, and we can always just reference the top 5 or 10 steal-getting teams and their overall defensive standing to see they don't have a strong correlation.
I don’t know what to tell you, buddy. I went back to my post and clicked that link and it worked just fine. So it seems like a you problem.
I’d also note that team-level data is not the same as individual-level data for these purposes. The point is to assess how much impact an individual player’s steals have, so obviously data on the impact of an individual’s steals on team results is most relevant! I’ve not seen any of the info you’re referring to, and you don’t link to it here, while I linked to something that says otherwise. However, team steals very well may not correlate as well with impact as individual steals do, for a lot of team-level reasons. Team-level steals stats will depend a lot on how the team gets attacked. To give one example, steals are more common in transition, so if a team gets stuck defending in transition a lot (maybe they’re bad at getting back, just bad at offense, or perhaps they tend to force the game to a high pace), they’ll likely rack up steals but give up lots of points. Steals are also relatively common in pick and roll actions, so if a team is easy to just effectively attack with PnR, we’d expect teams to attack them that way more, in which case they’d likely give up more points but have more steals. Relatedly, at a team level, higher steals can also be caused by running certain types of lineups where the plus is more steals but there’s inherently a minus that comes along with it—for instance, a team that goes for small ball will likely get more steals but give back that impact in other ways (giving up mismatches, bad rebounding, etc.). It’s also the case that we wouldn’t even necessarily expect the really-high-impact steals guys to have teams with tons of steals overall, because the highest-impact steals guys will deter risky passes from being made in the first place. The value there will actually come from worse opponent FG%’s, fewer FTs, etc., as a result of high-value actions being deterred, rather than their team getting more steals. This can mean that the teams with the most steals aren’t actually always the teams with the most impactful guys in this regard—instead, they actually may include teams that opposing teams take tons of risky actions against because they’re not all that deterred. The result there might be relatively more steals than if those actions *were* deterred, but worse defense overall, since the high-value actions would be succeeding a lot (hence why opposing teams are trying them more). Looking at the impact of steals at an individual level will do a better job of picking up on this stuff, and avoiding being confused by team-level factors. It’s also just obviously more directly relevant to the question at hand.
The other thing I’d note is that this is all kind of dumb and unnecessarily academic, because we actually saw Jordan’s Bulls and anyone who watched them knows full well that for that team this was a huge factor in why their defense was so good. Even if you don’t think this is effective in general (a view that evidence doesn’t support), it just very obviously was effective for Jordan’s Bulls, and that’s the thing that matters here.
We also have the Bulls being one of the worst defenses in history in Jordan’s injured 1986 year, while being way better in the surrounding years with Jordan. We have the Bulls being way better defensively in the games in 1986 where Jordan played remotely normal minutes.
And still not matching a 13-year average for Lebron...
That’s factually inaccurate. The Bulls defense had a 5.9 better rDRTG in 1987 compared to 1986, and 3.5 better rDRTG in 1985 compared to 1986. If we average those out, that’s a 4.7 better rDRTG in the surrounding years with Jordan.
We have the Bulls being substantially better defensively in the second-three peat years than they’d been without Jordan—including being *massively* better in the playoffs, to the point of being arguably the best playoff defense in NBA history.
And still not matching a 13 year average for Lebron...
That’s absolutely not true of the playoffs, where they had a 7.0 better rDRTG during the second-three-peat years than they did without Jordan in the 1994 playoffs. And even if we measure as against what they did without Jordan in the 1994 regular season instead of just the small sample of that one playoff, the second-three-peat Bulls had a playoff rDRTG that was 4.7 better than what the 1994 Bulls put up.
And, again, this is important because Jordan’s Bulls consistently ramped up defensively in the playoffs. Meanwhile, in the regular season, there was real diminishing marginal returns at play for Jordan’s Bulls, because the team was so good with Jordan that they were frequently just blowing teams out, and teams ends up letting up when they get big leads. This analysis of “swing” doesn’t take into account this pretty obvious concept, and therefore is quite biased against Jordan. Playoff data is at least a bit less biased in this regard (since you can rack up higher relative ratings before diminishing returns kick in), and that’s unsurprisingly where we see an enormous signal that outdoes the signal you’re talking about for LeBron.
Meanwhile, we have the Bulls having easily their worst playoff defensively in the entire 1988-1998 span in the one year they played in the playoffs without Jordan.
They also had easily their best playoff offense in the entire 1988-1998 span
This is blatantly false, and you know full well it is false because I’ve already pointed this out to you recently. They had just had a higher rORTG in the 1993 playoffs just before that, not to mention having a much higher rORTG in the 1991 playoffs.
We have the Bulls regular season defense in 1995 quickly getting to second-three-peat levels with Jordan once he had a few games under his belt back from retirement.
Which still would not match the 13-year average for Lebron...
This is technically correct, but it’s again missing the obvious fact of diminishing marginal returns. The Bulls had a -5.2 rDRTG in those games with Jordan, and had a +10.61 net rating in those games, so we’re again talking about incredible defense combined with a net rating that is really high. Diminishing returns obviously come into play here, making the increase substantially more impressive than the overly simplistic “swing” analysis would suggest. This should be pretty obvious stuff, to be honest.
It’s not surprising that wasn’t included, since if we took a weighted average of the Bulls’ playoff rDRTG from 1988-1998 with Jordan, it comes out to -5.4, compared to -1.3 without Jordan in the 1994 playoffs, for a large 4.1 difference with Jordan.
And I'm not surprised you neglected to mention this turning Jordan into a negative offensive player, but you know...motivated reasoning
No, it’s just that this thread is about defense, not offense, so that point is just whataboutism. As I’ve said to you before, if we were talking about offense, you’d be free to try to swim up a waterfall and attempt to use the 1994 Bulls playoffs rORTG to argue that Jordan’s offense wasn’t actually that good. Good luck with trying to make that case in the context of the full data picture though. Meanwhile, I’m quite comfortable with the argument I’m making here about Jordan’s defense in the context of the full data picture, as I’ve explained here and also otherwise exhaustively dismantled your talking points repeatedly across many other threads now. And that’s what’s relevant to the subject of this thread.
That’s also not even mentioning that that analysis misses the massive signal from 1986 compared to surrounding years, where the Bulls had one of the worst defenses in the history of the NBA in the year Jordan missed the vast majority of games, while they were much better in surrounding years with him.
And that signal, attributed to Jordan, instead of Oakley, for whatever reason would also not get you anywhere close to a plethora of much cleaner ones for Lebron.
This thing about Oakley is a really bizarre thing that you constantly try to pass off, despite it obviously being silly. You suggest that there’s no reason to attribute the Bulls’ massive improvement in defensive rating between 1986 and 1987 to Jordan instead of Oakley, when Jordan only played 16 games in 1986 and played all 82 games in 1987, while Oakley played 77 games in 1986 and 82 games in 1987. On its face that is just obviously a bizarre thing for you to suggest. To the extent you’ve ever tried to justify this idea, it’s been to say that Oakley played more minutes per game in 1987 than in 1986, but of course you completely ignore that Jordan’s MPG increased more between 1986 and 1987 than Oakley’s did. There’s just no reasonable basis for the narrative you have crafted about this. You clearly just desperately want to have some sort of reason to explain away an obviously massive signal from Jordan and this is the best you could come up with. It’s hard to really take what you say as having any credibility when you’re willing to say things like this again and again.
