Peregrine01 wrote:Texas Chuck wrote:Jokic is obviously great. But a reminder that just because your team is terrible without you, you aren't actually a better player because of that. It's why so many think KG > Duncan. They dismiss Duncan because his teammates are good and freak out over KG's +/- because his teammates weren't.
But what really matters is simply how their teams play with them on the court. Same with Jokic. Focus on them being the best offense with him on. That tells you he's great. How bad they are when he's off shows how poor a job the FO has done assembling a roster around him. He'd be just as good if the team had a strong bench. He wouldn't be a worse player if the team could hold their own without him.
Have to be careful putting so much stock into off numbers. But people always do.
We should evaluate players separately from team success as much as we can but it sucks to see an ATG player as unselfish as Jokic meandering on a bad team. I mentioned years ago that I feared that Jokic's closest analog in this respect is KG since I didn't held Murray or Porter in high regard even when healthy. Porter has been ok but Murray looks like he doesn't even belong in the league. That an old Russ is outplaying him is embarrassing.
So, I basically agree with you Peregrine, but Chuck also has some good points. We should be looking more at the On than the Off in general, and especially with small sample.
Further, when evaluate the very best, until I see a player with huge On success, I always remain cautious as there are players - the proverbial floor raisers - who are much more suited to helping a bad team get better than helping a team become elite. The nature of the NBA is that we care about champions, and so the ability for a player to be extreme impactful for a champion matters tremendously.
That said, while On-Off isn't necessarily that informative for a random player, when we're evaluating the best of the best, there's ample track record to tell us that these players should be giving huge On-Off over large sample, and if they can't, then that's telling us a limitation of the player in practice.
While On-Off isn't the end all be all for evaluating superstars, it always tells us something if a player who seems to be of superstar stature doesn't give On-Off that way. The classic example here is Kobe Bryant. The modern archetype of this is Luka Doncic. We can debate what it means for these guys, it doesn't means they are necessarily less great that others with more On-Off tendencies...but yeah, it tells us something.
Now, just touching on the KG thing without resurrecting the old holy war: My concerns about relatively low On numbers is why I was skeptical of KG prior to his time in Boston...but his On number in Boston that went along with big On-Off as well as more sophisticated stuff assuaged any real doubts I had about KG having major ceiling raising limitations. Doesn't mean he was necessarily better than Duncan or whatever Player X we want to compare him to, but I just don't have concerns about him.
But the thing is, with Jokic we've actually got a step further thing that has gone on. Last year he led the NBA in raw +/- while having +20 On-Off. While it's conceivable that a player could have such huge numbers and not be THAT impressive due to being in some kind of super-death lineup, and I think we all know that that's not what was happening.
Honestly this makes me want to look up who in history has done this (#1 +/1 with +20 On-Off). Pretty sure it won't be many players.
