lessthanjake wrote:ReggiesKnicks wrote:Djoker wrote:We don't have full career data for Magic yet but he's almost surely either 2/39 (5.1%) or 3/39 (7.7%) in terms of negative rORtg ON Court. That's elite consistency and noticeably better than Lebron's 13/55 (23.6%).
What if you focused on LeBron's real prime and a similar sample size as the other players, which is 2009-2020?
So a few things about this:
1. I’m not sure why it would make sense to artificially lower LeBron’s sample size just because the samples for the other players are smaller. A larger sample is better, even if you can’t get a larger sample for others. Equalizing sample sizes definitely isn’t a reason to consider less data for LeBron.
This is a good point, but it raises a question about whether we should compare players at similar ages, years of service, or a combination of both, or neither.
Context is ever-important when comparing players who played basketball 20+ years apart.
A larger sample size is important, but what if the larger sample includes seasons where a player wasn't near their best? Should that matter?
2. As I often do, I really want to push back on the idea that LeBron’s prime started in 2009. That is when his peak years started, but it’s pretty clear he was in his prime before that. I wrote a long post about that here:
https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=119544934#p119544934. Basically, if we survey various statistical data, LeBron looks as good or better in the few years prior to 2009 than he does in many of the years in that 2009-2020 span. There is nothing in the data that suggests those years weren’t part of his prime. He also was getting major MVP consideration in those years. The argument that his prime didn’t start until 2009 is basically solely that he struggled more in the playoffs earlier. But that amounts to a circular argument in this discussion, because it’s essentially saying “We shouldn’t care about his playoff struggles in those years because he wasn’t in his prime, and the reason we know he wasn’t in his prime is that he struggled in the playoffs.” Saying LeBron’s prime only started in 2009 because he sometimes struggled in the playoffs before that is basically cherry picking and then justifying the cherry picking based on the fact that the cherry-picked years look better. And, even if we thought there was some logic to that argument, it gets even more dubious when we realize he struggled at times in the playoffs in 2010 and 2011 but ignoring them as not being his prime yet would require defining 2009 as pre-prime, which would obviously be ridiculous. So obviously prime LeBron could struggle in the playoffs. And if the mere fact of struggling in the playoffs doesn’t make it not his prime and the data and accolades squarely indicate it was part of his prime, then the argument that it wasn’t part of his prime is extremely flimsy.
Typically, players improve to varying degrees in their 20s until they reach their highest level, which is a combination of athleticism/strength, game knowledge, and ability.
A player like Jason Kidd is an easy one to recognize in this regard. He didn't develop a consistent 3-point shot until his mid-to-late 30s, which didn't coincide with his athletic prime, which was in his late 20s.
LeBron James showed moments of greatness in his early 20s (pre-2009) in the postseason, but wasn't yet the player he eventually became in 2009, and then during each of his Miami/Cleveland stints, he was a clear level-up offensively from the previous iteration, until his athletic decline became apparent post his injury during the 2021 season.
What is the value of comparing LeBron, offensively, in 2007 or 2008 to Magic Johnson in 1982 or 1983? Well, they are the same age, so there should be some value in the comparison, right?
Well, we never saw young LeBron alongside Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and that, in and of itself, is a pretty significant contextual piece of information we probably need here when examining team Offensive Ratings, right? We have a Top 5 player of all time, probably a Top 10 offensive player ever, nearing the end of his prime but still very much in his prime years, as a teammate.
This doesn't make Magic Johnson a worse player, nor should we be proping up LeBron James and saying he wouldn't have struggled in 2007 or 2008 against the Boston Celtics. But we shouldn't sit here and say "LeBron showed he struggled in the 2008 post-season in a way Magic never did!" as some sort of feather in the cap for Magic Johnson when Lebron James had Zydrunas Ilgauskas and Magic Johnson had Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Regarding 2010 and 2011, I don't follow LeBron's career close enough to know what happened in 2010 or 2011, but what I do know is that LeBron laid an absolute goose egg in the 2011 Finals, but was clearly a 1A/1B best player in the world through the first 3 rounds of the post-season that year, along with Dirk. His 2011 Finals performance is inexcusable, though so was Magic's 1983 Finals and his future moniker
Tragic Johnson following 1984, which didn't last long given his level of dominance for the rest of the decade.
3. I think the same argument as above is arguably true of 2021 as well. You’d be very hard-pressed to draw a meaningful statistical distinction between 2021 LeBron and many of those 2009-2020 years, and he was actually an MVP frontrunner before missing time. That said, the fact that he got injured and missed time makes it pretty plausible to me to argue that even if he was actually in his prime in 2021 pre-injury (which was where the vast majority of the regular-season data for that year derives from), he wasn’t in his prime anymore by the time the playoffs rolled around. And he also was just pretty old by that point. Which is to say that I’m much more comfortable downplaying the significance of post-2020 playoffs for LeBron than I am the few years before 2009. I think the former is reasonable, while the latter is basically just cherry-picking to avoid bad data points for him.
I'm not sure about cherry-picking, but this brings me back to context.
What if LeBron was truly injured in 2010?
What if Kyrie and Love don't get injured for the 2015 Finals?
What if LeBron never gets injured in 2021 and they win the Finals over Giannis?
To put it another way, context is incredibly important! Even a sample of a few series without proper context control is important.
So yes, let's use 2007 and 2008 to draw some conclusions, but I hope you, Djoker, and I all have a firm understanding of how important teammates play in a team's offensive rating
4. In this discussion, it’s particularly silly to refuse to consider LeBron’s data points prior to 2009 because almost all the playoff rORTG data we have for Magic Johnson is from years where he was actually younger than LeBron was in 2009.
Who was Magic's sidekick, and who was his teammate for his data? Is it Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? This is a pretty important piece YOU are leaving off here, a big part of context you seem to avoid mentioning, yet want to clamor about age.
We have four series from 1980-1983, where Kareem has a rating of over 30 for Offensive On/Off for the series, while Magic has two. Which I am sure you have seen, Djoker has a spreadsheet available which covers most of 1980-1984 post-season, and it is quite useful in this particular comparison.
This leads me to a previous discussion regarding Wade vs. Miller.
lessthanjake wrote:The fact that Wade dragged his team to a title they had little business winning is of such immense value to me that I think it probably puts his career above Reggie Miller’s all on its own. I think you’d just rather have the guy who can do that for you, rather than a guy who just isn’t really good enough for that. The fact that Wade had at least two other strong MVP-level seasons that were unequivocally better than any years Reggie Miller ever had (2009 and 2010), as well as being the second-star on a team that won two titles and made two other finals, and having several other strong seasons beyond any of those years where he was roughly at or above Reggie-Miller-level (2005, 2007, 2016), and I think it’s a pretty easy decision.
What if instead of this, we focus on their post-season rORTG!
Now, unfortunately, I am just pulling this up on a whim and don't have on-court offensive ratings, but instead of team offensive ratings, which still should provide some insight (context and transparency is king
)
I made these in about 5 minutes, so they may not be as nice as Djoker, who appears to do this as a full-time hobby or job.
https://ibb.co/bYS3CX5
https://ibb.co/DHcJWq9XNow, if we took this type of data at face value, no context, Miller seems to be a far more impressive post-season performer, and maybe he is compared to Dwyane Wade
But, as you and I know, context is important here. Wade had some
incredibly lowsy teams, but so did Miller! Miller never had LeBron or late-prime Shaq, but he did have some deeper roster constructs. It could also be true Miller had less primacy over the offense than Wade, again, context Context CONTEXT
CONTEXT!
It's fascinating, really, analyzing basketball. We can never know for sure who is better, but we can try our best. The more resources and tools we have, combined with our ability to spend time understanding them, is ever-important.
