OhayoKD wrote:lessthanjake wrote:OhayoKD wrote:The cavs and celtics both had a better record without kyrie than with kyrie before and after Lebron beat a 73-win team with him.
"Look how team did without teammate" is one of many losing arguments for Jordan vs Lebron
This is a non-sequitur that has nothing to do with whether Dennis Rodman was the reason that the second-three-peat Bulls were an all-time great team. He was not.
Supported by reasoning and evidence that would suggest the 2010 Cavs were possibly the greatest team ever without Mo-Williams and that the Heatles could have went back to back without Dwyane Wade.
As far as the playoffs are concerned, the Bulls without Rodman lost to a soon to be swept finalist despite
-> being a 53-win srs, 45-win record team without him
-> performing significantly better vs a far more competitive finalist the year before with a rodman-esque player in Jordan's place.
That seems quite a big distance from "all-time great".
The 1995 Bulls were not the 1996-1998 Bulls. The 1995 Bulls were not an all-time great team, and the second-three-peat Bulls definitely were. One difference between the teams was Rodman, but the fact that Jordan had only been back playing basketball for a couple months in 1995 is obviously a massive difference. The fact that the second-three-peat Bulls played like a 66-win team in a whole lot of games without Rodman strongly suggests that Jordan being back to normal was the primary factor that made them turn into an all-time-great team. As does the fact that Rodman’s RAPM in 1996 and 1997 was nothing special, the fact that the Bulls had a +12 net rating in minutes without Rodman in 1996, and the fact that the Bulls won titles with Rodman being bad in the playoffs and being benched/washed in the playoffs. It’s not just one data point on its own (which is important, since individual data points can be misleading). It’s a whole lot of different data points all pointing in the same direction.
The idea that the 1995 Bulls not being an all-time-great team means Rodman must’ve made the difference is just silly. You can take one look at box score data and be able to see that Jordan was clearly not as good in 1995 as he was in any other year, and it is obvious why. Of course, you’d also be able to tell that if you’d actually watched basketball back then, which of course you did not.
Also, your comparison to the 2010 Cavs without Mo Williams is silly. The 2010 Cavs played a grant total of 13 games without Mo Williams. They had a +8.34 net rating in those games (which really isn’t “possibly the greatest team ever” territory, though their record in those games was 11-2). But, more importantly, 13 games is not a large sample. The second-three-peat Bulls played 47 games without Rodman. What is a convincing argument with one sample size can be complete nonsense with a much smaller sample size, and this is a good example of that.
In any event, it is worth noting that in 2015-2017, the Cavaliers had a +7.38 net rating in RS games with LeBron+Kyrie and a +4.63 net rating in RS games with LeBron and no Kyrie. And, once Kyrie left, the Cavaliers were only able to muster a 0.59 SRS in 2018, and were easily swept in the Finals.
They were "easily swept in the finals" with Lebron playing with a broken hand for 3 out of 4 games. Pre-hand break they were
tied. Fascinating at which points you feel injuries are relevant to consider.
What in the world are you talking about? The Cavaliers were swept in the 2018 Finals. Definitionally the series was never “tied.” What a bizarre assertion.
Speaking of...
But, of course, the best player on the 2016 Warriors had been injured earlier in the playoffs, and they’d almost lost in the conference finals (and were actually outscored in the series), so the Warriors were pretty obviously not playing at an all-time-great level themselves in those playoffs.
What an interesting way to describe the Golden State Warriors completing a 3-1 comeback against a side that had just thumped the 67-win Spurs with their best player
fresh off the injury you're using to dismiss what happened in the finals. Unfortunately though, even with Curry missing a large part of the playoffs and playing horribly (thanks to injury) to start a series against a juggernaut beater, that Warriors team entered the finals with a PSRS of
+11. A higher mark than any team Jordan beat in the postseason (during a period of non-expansion).
PSRS is not particularly useful as a measure of the quality of a team that just had their best player pick up an injury not long before, since the measure is still mostly keyed up on the team’s quality prior to that.
After Curry came back from injury but before the Finals, the Warriors’ SRS in the playoffs was +6.18. Which is, of course, still indicative of a very good team, but not all-time-great level. That’s more accurate to the level that the Warriors were at when the Cavs beat them (and even that might be overstating it a bit, given the Draymond suspension).
Furthermore, beating the 2016 Warriors, a team unambiguously better than any team Jordan beat, with far less help than Jordan has ever won with, hurt the Cavs statistically[i]. They posted a PSRS of 11 vs the Warriors. Their PSRS for the whole postseason? +14.55, good enough for [i]8th among all champions in the shot-clock era. They posted a top-15 PSRS the following season. But yes, Steph Curry's MCL is their only claim to being great.
Yep, congratulations, the 2016 Cavs dominated…checks notes…the Drummond Pistons, the Horford Hawks, and the DeRozan Raptors. Really shows us that they must’ve been an all-time-great team. Lol. Again, only the most committed LeBron partisans are going to buy that easily dispatching those teams makes the Cavs an all-time-great team.
Overall, the 2015-2017 Cavs put up a SRS’s of 4.08, 5.45, and 2.87. They never even won more than 57 regular season games.
Hmm, wonder if there might be a reason for this...
2015 Cavs WITH Lebron50-19 with, 59-win pace, +7.9 Net
(3-10 without)
2016 Cavs WITH Lebron56-20 with, 60-win pace, +7.6 Net
(1-3 without)
2017 Cavs WITH Lebron51-23 with, 56-win pace, +5.4 Net
(0-8 without)
Oh. right.
Lol. You list these numbers like they actually show the Cavs being an all-time-great team with LeBron. They don’t. One need only look at the numbers you posted on their face to see that. But I’ll also just collate those numbers together. In total, from 2015-2017, in games with LeBron, the Cavs won at just below a 59-win pace, with a net rating of +6.93. Sorry, but, while that’s very good, it doesn’t fit the bill of an all-time-great team.
You can deploy excuses for why you think LeBron didn’t have enough help to have an all-time-great team, but that’s a different discussion. The fact is that the Cavs were not an all-time-great team. So there’s just no parallel to be discussed here to the discussion of what made Jordan’s second-three-peat Bulls into an all-time-great team.
The only even remotely impressive thing they achieved without Kyrie was walloping the 2018 Raptors in the second round, but hanging your hat on a series against the DeRozan-led Raptors would just obviously be silly.
Yep, it's not like they blew out swept a 60-win team and took a 67-win team to 6. Perhaps not "all-time-great" but certainly much better than "get bounced in the second round by an about-to-be swept finalist"
.
LOL. Obviously, “took a team to 6 games” is really not indicative of an all-time-great team at all. The fact that you’d even bring that up as a positive point here really says it all about how much you’re desperately reaching. But I’ll just add even more color to this: The Cavs were outscored by 7 points a game in that series after Kyrie got injured. Which means they had a +3 SRS in those games. Obviously miles away from all-time great.
And lol at the idea that sweeping the Horford/Korver/Teague Hawks is indicative of an all-time great team. (And I won’t even mention that only two of those games were actually without Kyrie, and one of those two went to OT). If you can’t understand that teams like that are playoff paper tigers, then I really don’t know what to tell you.
