OhayoKD wrote:Would you look at that. Sore-winners. Delightful
I’m not a voter in this project, buddy. Obviously I’m not particularly concerned with the results, or I would be a voter. I’m not a “winner” or a “loser” in any thread of a project I’m not a voter in (nor do I think posters are really “winners” or “losers” in these votes regardless). I’m just making some commentary on how the votes are inconsistent with past PC board votes and giving an explanation for why I think that has occurred.
lessthanjake wrote:AEnigma wrote:As a voter who had Jordan ahead, and also as a project runner who would have been a bit concerned if Jordan had lost this vote, I think it would be more productive if instead of analysing post counts, there were a committed effort to address the arguments made by those who did not vote Jordan. Regardless of my disagreement, I appreciate that most of those who did not vote for Jordan took the time to explain why. It would be nice if people bothered by their votes would take the time to address them in turn, rather than defaulting to meta-commentary which makes no actual attempt to refute the stances expressed.
Discussion is the primary purpose of these projects. If this project were comprised of voters just posting some emptily reasoned ballots which perfectly mirrored your own, would that be more valuable than a spirited back-and-forth which occasionally produced unexpected deviations?
If we’re being honest, there’s not a lot to the reasoning of most of the Magic votes here. Some pretty bare-bones explanations for a lot of them that can’t really be meaningfully engaged with,
If
I'm being honest, I think you're conflating "can't really be meaningfully engaged with" with..."can't be meaningfully engaged with the level of effort I am willing or able to put forward":
Yes, I’m not willing to engage in a level of effort that you have not been willing to engage in either. Literally no one is sitting here tracking creation for a genuinely meaningful sample of games. Hard to see how you think it makes sense to criticize that.
But also, when I said stuff “can’t really be meaningfully engaged with,” I meant things like: “His guys have put the most effort here and that efforts convinced me that he might be the best player period. He looks like the most valuable.” There’s nothing in that to be actually engaged with.
Even when you
are able/willing to put the time and effort required to poison the well regarding evidence you are, by your own admission, unwilling/unable to actually show is deliberately biased:
This sentence is so vaguely written that I don’t even really know what you mean. As I’ve said many times, my issue with that tracking stuff you’ve done is *both* that it’s obviously a subjective exercise done by someone with a strong ideological agenda *and* it’s on a tiny sample size that is therefore meaningless to me even if we assumed there was no bias to it. The latter point obviously makes it not worth my time to painstakingly redo the analysis to prove your analysis was biased, because I’ll think it is basically meaningless analysis regardless. Meanwhile, the amount of tracking work it’d take to actually track meaningful sample sizes from people is an amount of work that, as I’m sure you’re well aware, is prohibitive. So yeah, as I’ve explained before, theoretically, the exercise you’ve engaged in could be meaningful if it was for a large sample and there were a bunch of people across the ideological spectrum who redid the analysis in order to allow us to control for bias/subjectivity. But since no one—yourself included—is willing to take the massive amount of time that’d entail, that’s really a moot point. Analysis that isn’t meaningful doesn’t have to be deemed meaningful just because it is unrealistic for its flaws to be fixed. Sometimes things just aren’t meaningful. I imagine you have had fun with the analysis, so I have no problem with you doing it, but I don’t have to think it is even remotely persuasive about anything.
Your "consistent theme" was barely mentioned.
Really? There were six voters for Magic. Two of them directly mentioned this 3-fewer-wins thing, and another one of them (you) explicitly quoted one of those other two as an explanation for why the poster’s vote went for Magic instead of Jordan. You then had another voter that didn’t specifically say “3 fewer wins” but basically said the same thing, since the explanation included saying that Magic “carries la to almost as many wins…” So that’s four out of six voters clearly referencing this as a significant part of their explanation. One of the other two voters did also reference Magic having a “weak” team (meaning my post directly related to that explanation too), though the 3-fewer-wins thing wasn’t referenced. Which means the only Magic vote with explanations not covered by my post was a vote that is a gimmick post and genuinely completely indecipherable to me.
What was however commented on, consistently, was the idea that Jordan's creation is oversold by his assists.
In contrast to the above, yours was the only voting post that actually directly mentioned this idea. So yeah, it’s definitely less of a consistent theme found in the votes for Magic. There’s a couple votes that vaguely talk about how the “Magic args just been too good” and “His guys have put the most effort here and that efforts convinced me.” You could try to claim that those statements refer to this creation stuff, but it’s entirely vague and completely unclear what it’s referring to—which is illustrative of why I mentioned that multiple votes had explanations that cannot be meaningfully engaged with. Similarly, konr0167’s vote does say “stats come from plays where MJ isn’t doing much,” which *could* be a reference to the creation argument, but it’s too vague to be sure. It seems clear that the theme I referred to in my prior post was much more consistently and explicitly found in the voting posts than this “creation” stuff was. Not sure why you’d think otherwise, except that you’re very focused on what your own personal voting post said. In any event, though, it’s all a bit of a moot point, because if I were to address that stuff too, I’d just refer back to posts I’ve made in other threads (and now above as well) about why that analysis isn’t meaningful. And I’d also note that no one thinks Jordan was as good a creator as Magic Johnson anyways, and he doesn’t in any way need to be in order to be the clear 1991 POY—I’d be very surprised if any one of the many people who have voted for 1991 Jordan as the greatest peak thought that he was as good a creator as Magic. So, beyond the flaws in the analysis itself, it’s not a persuasive point because it is largely straw manning anyways.
That the Lakers in 92 looked more like an average team than an outright bad one (28-26 and -1.6 with Worthy) would not of course refute the idea that Jordan with 50+ win help and healthy postseason support was significantly advantaged. Nor would a whopping .4 regular season on/off advantage that turned into a +24 disadvantage in the series three different voters decided swung Magic vs Jordan from a toss-up to a Jordan win.
The 1992 Lakers had a 4.27 SRS with an 8-3 record (60-win pace) in the games where they had Worthy and Divac. That’s actually a better SRS and better winning percentage than the Bulls had without Jordan in either 1994 or 1995 (and that’s leaving aside the Bulls supporting cast improving in subsequent years after 1991). A small sample, of course, but probably the best indication we have of how good the 1991 Lakers supporting cast was, given that those are the only games where the 1992 Lakers were healthy (while the 1991 Lakers didn’t really have any health issues). And I note that if we added the three games Magic didn’t play in 1991 onto this, you get a 4.60 SRS, with a 9-5 record (53-win pace). That’s actually a higher SRS than the 1994 Bulls had even just in games with Pippen and Grant (and the 1994 Bulls were almost certainly notably better than the 1991 Bulls supporting cast, for reasons that have been talked about many times before). So yeah, if anything, I’d say we have indication that Magic’s supporting cast was better than Jordan’s in 1991, perhaps by a substantial amount depending on how much we think the Bulls supporting cast grew over subsequent years. Magic’s team winning three fewer games and racking up a 1.84 lower SRS in that scenario definitely isn’t indicative of Magic having a better season.
As for the on-off stuff, pointing to on-off in a single series as a basis for an argument is silly because the “off” number is based on a completely tiny sample. Magic missed a grand total of 17 minutes in the 1991 Finals. And it is also a non-sequitur when the argument that was made was about the regular season. Given the injuries on the Lakers in the Finals, I think it’s fine to assert Magic had less help in the Finals, but it’s also the case that the Bulls decisively won the Finals, so that can hardly be an argument for Magic. Which is presumably why multiple voters focused on the two teams’ relative success in the regular season. And, on that front, you can say the difference between Jordan’s and Magic’s on-off isn’t big, but when the argument for Magic is premised on him purportedly having greater regular season impact, it’s obviously not sufficient for his on-off numbers to merely be slightly less good. (It’s also worth noting again that the sample of games we have for the Bulls in 1991 is genuinely very skewed, such that the unsampled games are virtually all Bulls wins, meaning the gap for the entire season was probably bigger, though that’s of course just an educated guess).
There was a wide variety of generally consistent argumentation that went towards Magic over Jordan. You ignored most of it because you were unwilling to engage with the tape. Ironic when you proceed to say the following:
It also seems wrong just by being aware of who these players were and having watched them.
Here I recall an age-old adage: He who must say they have an eyetest does not have one.
You are (poorly) meta-analyzing because you have almost nothing of substance to offer.
This is what "barebones" looks like:
This also happens to be the poster offering the most meta-analysis. I'm seeing a correlation here.
I didn’t say that every Jordan vote included exhaustive explanations. I don’t see these votes as a competition over who can write the most, and I think it’s fine for Magic votes (or votes for anyone else) to be fairly bare-bones. People have limited time to spend on posting. I only mention that some votes were bare-bones as a response to criticism that I should be focusing on refuting the arguments made by those voters. I assume if someone told you to focus on refuting the arguments in One_and_Done’s voting post in this thread, you’d react similarly, and it’d be a valid reaction.
Personally, if a player I wanted to win won despite nearly monopolizing the laziest and least coherent votes over nearly a decade worth of ballots, I'd be conflicted between disappointment and/or relief that lack of effort went unpunished.
Again, if I cared enough about how these votes go to have these kinds of emotions you’re describing, I’d be a voter in this project. I’m not. I also think it’s a very odd way to think about these votes to think about a “lack of effort” by posters being “punished.” These votes shouldn’t be based on some meta-judgment of how much effort people on various sides have made. This is another theme I’ve seen, with other Magic voters in this thread in part basing their votes on things like “His guys have put the most effort here” and “MJ fans been slacking.” I think that sort of thing obviously misses the point of what people are supposed to be voting based on.
10 posts. And yet their vote offered more opportunity for "meaningful engagement" than all the complaints on this page combined. Perhaps post-count should stop being used as a proxy for post-quality. It's the old guard that's faltered. The new have shined.
I think it should be obvious that I didn’t use post-count as a proxy for post-quality. I used it to show the obvious fact that the posters who voted for Magic are mostly new posters, and then I posited that that demonstrates that these votes being inconsistent with past PC board votes is very likely a result of an influx of new posters with like-minded views. It’s a fairly obvious point that does not relate in any way to the relative “post quality” of any posters. Indeed, I actually specifically said I hoped these new posters “at least become quality long-term posters (even if they are ones I’d probably usually disagree with), rather than just being temporary vote farmers or posters that are prone to personal attacks that drive other people away.” The idea that I linked post count with post quality is just straw manning.
