ScrantonBulls wrote:lessthanjake wrote:IG2 wrote::lol: @ Kevin Love being a superstar pre-Cleveland. Superstar should be a borderline Top 5 player in the league. Love was never close to that. Minnesota never had a winning record in 6 seasons with him and never made the playoffs either. He made 3 All Star teams, 2 as a reserve. That's not a superstar. He was just a run-of-the-mill all star. Was honestly the poster boy for "empty stats" back then.
Love averaged 17 ppg on 56% TS from 2015-2017. That's about the best you can expect from a 3rd option on a Top 2 team in the league. I don't know why simpletons think he should've been replicating his Minnesota numbers while playing next to 2 far superior offensive players in LeBron/Kyrie. Cleveland was running GOAT playoff offenses while not giving Love the ball much. And they were right to do that. Love simply wasn't good enough to be a high-volume guy on a great team. Of course, this didn't stop LeBron haters from constantly proclaiming LeBron was holding him back. Yeah, Love sure proved that in 2019
From the ages of 18-33, LeBron played 1 season with a superstar and that was 2011 Wade. He got AD at 35, somehow led his team to another ring at that advanced age. Got Luka at 40. Who cares.
Once again, the year before joining LeBron, Kevin Love was 2nd in the NBA in BPM, 3rd in the NBA in PER, 4th in WS/48, 5th in EPM, 5th in RAPTOR, and 6th in LEBRON (note: the latter three involve impact data, so these aren’t just box metrics—the “empty stats” excuse doesn’t really follow here). He was also 8th in all-NBA voting. Those were almost as good his last healthy year before that, and he was at an age that is generally the beginning of a player’s peak few years. There is no way to reasonably look at that and conclude that the player was not “a borderline Top 5 player in the league.” He was a superstar. Just because LeBron cannot maximize his own impact without forcing superstars to play like role players does not mean that those guys aren’t superstars. Kevin Love was very clearly a superstar. LeBron just is a bad ceiling raiser because he needs other stars to sacrifice their impact at the altar of his. That doesn’t mean he didn’t team up with superstars. You’re effectively pointing to the biggest flaw in LeBron’s GOAT argument and acting like it’s a positive.
And, to be clear, it’s not about Kevin Love’s numbers needing to be the same as before. That obviously was never going to happen. There’s plenty of other great players who have been really impactful alongside all-time greats, without needing to have massive numbers—for instance, Ginobili, Pippen, Draymond, McHale, etc. It’s about Love needing to change his entire style, role, and even his body, to basically become a role player in order to accommodate LeBron.
And Kevin Love is not the only instance. LeBron has never been a good fit with any of the many superstars he has played with. Sure, the Heat powered through with sheer talent, but they weren’t nearly as dominant as expected given their talent. And sure, AD played amazingly alongside LeBron in the 2020 playoffs, but that’s basically the only time they actually meshed well. The story of LeBron’s career is defined by teaming up with superstars and having those teams be less than the sum of their parts. The talent he assembled on his teams has been big enough that he’s still managed to win titles despite his team being less than the sum of their parts. But when we are in the most rarified discussions (i.e. the GOAT discussion), having your really talented teams basically always be less than the sum of their parts is a really big problem.
Vucevic was 6th in VORP, 9th in BPM in 2018-19, and in 2020-21 when playing for Orlando and the last 1/3 of the season with the Bulls, he was 6th in VORP, 13th in BPM (he looked a whole lot better before joining the Bulls). So did the Bulls acquire a top tier star, possibly a superstar?
Vucevic isn’t even close in terms of what the data tells us.
As an initial matter, 9th in BPM and 2nd in BPM are very different things.
For another thing, you’ll notice I listed a lot of metrics, while you listed only one (VORP is just a cumulative version of BPM—they’re the same stat). That’s for good reason—a player can look much better in one stat than others, and vice versa. It’s better to take a holistic approach and look across multiple metrics, in order to get the best picture of reality. I did that with Kevin Love and it was very consistent that he was a superstar. And notice that, on the flip side, I didn’t just say Chris Bosh was 4th in PER in 2010 and therefore a superstar, but rather included that measure along with the measures Bosh did worse in and came to a conclusion that data indicated he was a borderline all-NBA player rather than superstar.
So what does all the data I listed say about Vucevic? Well, in 2019, Vucevic was 9th in BPM, 9th in PER, 19th in WS/48, 14th in EPM, 21st in RAPTOR, 12th in LEBRON, and 22nd in all-NBA voting. In 2021, Vucevic was 13th in BPM, 18th in PER, 59th in WS/48, 39th in EPM, 95th in RAPTOR, 80th in LEBRON, and 27th in all-NBA voting.
To compare again, in 2014, Kevin Love was 2nd in BPM, 3rd in PER, 4th in WS/48, 5th in EPM, 5th in RAPTOR, 6th in LEBRON, and 8th in all-NBA voting.
So yeah, these aren’t even remotely similar. Vucevic does not look like a superstar in the data (more like an all-star and borderline all-NBA guy one year, and not even that the other year you mentioned, which is when he actually went to Chicago). Kevin Love does look like a superstar in the data. And that’s becase Kevin Love was a superstar, and Vucevic was not.
