Top 25 peaks of the 2001-25: #13-#14 Spots

[Djoker]

Looking at KD, CP3, Harden, Embiid, Nash, and Manu here. Despite narratives, you have players here (i.e., Harden and Embiid) who have been impactful in the playoffs and the regular season. While I tend to hesitate on Manu due to minutes, he certainly has to be looked at as does Draymond soon enough.



https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KiGykvmgXmDv5ibAtobHui-DfjjRhpBueHrJMD8v3vk/htmlview

I just noticed this post. Two questions/comments.

1) What is the source of this RAPM as in who created it?

2) The confidence intervals have to be absolutely huge here.

I believe this is Englemann, who I generally see as a pretty safe bet for doing RAPM pretty appropriately.

With that said, as I've noted before, I've got major concerns about making use of playoff RAPM in my analysis generally.

Can you link me to your prior posts on playoff RAPM? I'm interested to hear your reasoning.

I am hesitant myself and have never used it in any discussions because of quite simply very low prime samples for most players. Even all-time guys are lucky to have 100 playoff games in their primes.

[Cavsfansince84]

i'm digging through embiid's stats in a way i haven't before. in 2019, embiid had a +20.5 ON COURT playoff plus/minus. and didn't get out of the 2nd round! while playing 30 mpg. i mean lots of people have crazy on/offs when their team is minus a million with them off the court, but this is a +20 on court! the list of people with a +20 can't be that long and the list of those who didn't win a title must be incredible short. anyone have a way of looking that up?

edit: i haven't even posted this but i'm going to already add an edit. in the final 5 games against the raptors that year, embiid has a game where he was +17 on court, and lost! and in game 7, he was famously +10 in 45:12 of game time, but lost because philly was -12 in 2:48 with him off the court. and all of that pales in comparison to game 6, where embiid was +40 (!!) in 35 minutes and the sixers were -29 in 13 minutes!

in the finals 5 games, embiid was +82 on the court and his team lost 3 times! like literally, has that ever happened to anyone else? he's +82 in 35 mpg with him on, -93 in 13 mpg with him off. an incredible +22.5 per 48 on and -68.7 per 48 off, but a +91.2 on/off in the 5 most important playoff games of his career probably. he is snakebit beyond belief.

Ya, I don't think there's much debate that he was very effective in the rs from 21-24. He was like mvp+ level when he was on the court. He gets a deservedly bad rap for some of his playoff series but I think 2021 is overall strong enough despite the missed games to have him just below Nash and CP3 who are at 5-6 on my current ballot most likely. Which doesn't mean you just slot him in there but he's got a good argument along with a few others guys to be there.

[f4p]

that RAPM thing kind of makes you wonder why steph is considered better than durant in the playoffs. KD beats him in RAPM and easily clears him in box score type data. KD's 6th best PER is better than steph's 2nd. his 7th best WS48 is better than steph's 3rd. his 6th best BPM is basically tied with steph's 3rd. he has a 63 TS% in 5 playoffs with 4 different teams (so not just all the warriors) and i think on a TS+ basis his 5th would be ahead of steph's 2nd. he's ahead in RAPM. he beat out steph for 2 finals mvp's. his 2012 finals is better than any finals steph had until 2022 and even then it still seems better. if wade and bosh are injured in 2012 like kyrie/love in 2015, KD has a title. if harden/kyrie stay as healty as klay/draymond in 2022, KD has another title as he was excellent in the 2021 playoffs. but KD is kind of in the kobe/shaq outgroup i think.

Steph's strength is he won without KD twice while KD only comes close in 2012 and 2016(where he sort of chokes to Steph). That means more than what any metrics say about them.

lots of people have won more than other people, but i thought we were evaluating them individually, not their teams. KD was better in the 2012 finals than steph was in the 2015 finals. luckily for steph, lebron's 2 best teammates were hurt instead of playing like wade and bosh did. obviously 2015 steph's performance is not getting that 2012 finals win. and KD's performance against milwaukee after harden and kyrie got hurt was better than steph in the 2022 finals, with 2 of the greatest playoff games ever, but again one guy had healthy teammates and one guy didn't. giving steph credit for healthy teammates or less healthy opponents seems to be what the ringz argument ultimately comes down to here, correct? and ignoring that context is a choice, not required. because their actual individual performances don't seem to favor steph. nor does RAPM or the box score. nor the fact that you also get a few more healthy playoff runs out of durant's career than steph's (11 to 7 by my count). feels like he's got longevity and quality on his side, just not the requisite reputation.

[f4p]

I just noticed this post. Two questions/comments.

1) What is the source of this RAPM as in who created it?

2) The confidence intervals have to be absolutely huge here.

I believe this is Englemann, who I generally see as a pretty safe bet for doing RAPM pretty appropriately.

With that said, as I've noted before, I've got major concerns about making use of playoff RAPM in my analysis generally.

Can you link me to your prior posts on playoff RAPM? I'm interested to hear your reasoning.

I am hesitant myself and have never used it in any discussions because of quite simply very low prime samples for most players. Even all-time guys are lucky to have 100 playoff games in their primes.

as i've pointed out before, this board is probably more obsessed with impact numbers than anywhere else on the internet, and player evaluations often come down to the playoffs, but then we hear that we can't use impact numbers in the playoffs. kind of a grand canyon sized gap in player evaluations it feels like. or at least a very inconsistent "pick a stat when it's convenient" type approach.

[Cavsfansince84]

lots of people have won more than other people, but i thought we were evaluating them individually, not their teams. KD was better in the 2012 finals than steph was in the 2015 finals. luckily for steph, lebron's 2 best teammates were hurt instead of playing like wade and bosh did. obviously 2015 steph's performance is not getting that 2012 finals win. and KD's performance against milwaukee after harden and kyrie got hurt was better than steph in the 2022 finals, with 2 of the greatest playoff games ever, but again one guy had healthy teammates and one guy didn't. giving steph credit for healthy teammates or less healthy opponents seems to be what the ringz argument ultimately comes down to here, correct? and ignoring that context is a choice, not required. because their actual individual performances don't seem to favor steph. nor does RAPM or the box score. nor the fact that you also get a few more healthy playoff runs out of durant's career than steph's (10 to 7 by my count).

Well the thing here is we are conflating playoffs across 27 years or w/e it is and that's not really a great place to start in a single year comparison even if we fully trust this data as like some kind of fool proof form of comparison(which it isn't). So all of this has to be in the context of a single year peak though tbh Steph benefits much more from bending things around how we perceive them than KD seems to. That I would agree with. Some of the things we hold against KD aren't so much held against Steph. Having said all of that, I think from 10-18 things are really close. Whoever comes in at 17 will have a good argument for being much higher.

[Top10alltime]

Yeah, so I’d say Embiid was definitely far worse in the 2022 and 2023 playoffs than the best years for the players you mentioned. Like not even close. Voting for those years requires voting for a worse playoff performance than I’d vote for any other player.

The same isn’t actually true of 2024 IMO—Embiid actually performed pretty well in the playoffs that year despite health issues (I can’t even remember what was wrong with him that year, but I’m sure there was something). And that’s the year he was incredible when he played in the RS. But he also only played 39 regular season games and his team lost in the first round of the playoffs. I guess *maybe* it’s a viable year to vote for because he actually was genuinely great when he played that year, but not sure I think it makes sense to vote for for 39 regular season games and a first-round series, no matter how well the guy played in those games.

As I said, maybe 2021 is a potential year too. It’s his only prime year that doesn’t have a super glaring problem. But even then he missed a lot of regular season games and lost in the second round to a weak team. So it’s not exactly a banner year that I’d be voting for soon.

I think 2021 has to be the year for Embiid despite missing 21 games in the rs which is prob slightly more in a full 82 game season. It's another 2nd loss but he actually sort of played like his rs self in both series and then loses in 7 to a pretty pedestrian Hawks team. After looking at it more closely I'm now inclined to have him in my group next after the 6 who I think are most deserving. Which would have him at something like 19-22 most likely. I think you can definitely make a case for Embiid over Tatum given that he was actually sort of competing with Jokic and Giannis for bpitw status in the 21-23 years while Tatum was never really in that kind of convo, even after winning a ring and leading an atg team. Not that I'll have him over Tatum but there's an argument.

Someone sees a bit of the light here. Good job

[homecourtloss]

Looking at KD, CP3, Harden, Embiid, Nash, and Manu here. Despite narratives, you have players here (i.e., Harden and Embiid) who have been impactful in the playoffs and the regular season. While I tend to hesitate on Manu due to minutes, he certainly has to be looked at as does Draymond soon enough.



https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KiGykvmgXmDv5ibAtobHui-DfjjRhpBueHrJMD8v3vk/htmlview

I just noticed this post. Two questions/comments.

1) What is the source of this RAPM as in who created it?

2) The confidence intervals have to be absolutely huge here.

I believe this is Englemann, who I generally see as a pretty safe bet for doing RAPM pretty appropriately.

With that said, as I've noted before, I've got major concerns about making use of playoff RAPM in my analysis generally.

It's good data to have especially for the heavy minutes players. These type of career numbers look pretty good when you then talk about single your peaks.

Additionally, I see people using single year playoffs EPM without anybody saying "I've got major concerns..."

[lessthanjake]

I believe this is Englemann, who I generally see as a pretty safe bet for doing RAPM pretty appropriately.

With that said, as I've noted before, I've got major concerns about making use of playoff RAPM in my analysis generally.

Can you link me to your prior posts on playoff RAPM? I'm interested to hear your reasoning.

I am hesitant myself and have never used it in any discussions because of quite simply very low prime samples for most players. Even all-time guys are lucky to have 100 playoff games in their primes.

as i've pointed out before, this board is probably more obsessed with impact numbers than anywhere else on the internet, and player evaluations often come down to the playoffs, but then we hear that we can't use impact numbers in the playoffs. kind of a grand canyon sized gap in player evaluations it feels like. or at least a very inconsistent "pick a stat when it's convenient" type approach.

I don’t think this should be super difficult to understand, to be honest. Impact data is better than box data in large samples, but is worse in small samples, because it gets really noisy. This is especially true of pure impact data, like RAPM (as opposed to hybrid data that uses box data to stabilize things in smaller samples). The playoffs are the most important games, but they’re also inherently a small sample. In an ideal world, we’d have the best kind of data for the most important games. But we simply don’t have that. And we shouldn’t just act like impact data is good in small samples simply because we wish we had high-quality impact data for the playoffs. Nor is it even remotely inconsistent to treat impact data in large samples (i.e. several-year regular-season data) far differently than impact data in small samples. That’s just the obvious conclusion from having an understanding of the issues presented by noise in that kind of data.

Of course, this leads to a bit of a conundrum that I’ve spoken about many times on these forums: We have the lowest-quality data for the most important games. That’s unfortunate, but it’s not something we can just wish away. I understand that you’d really like Engelmann’s playoff RAPM to be relied on more—I’m assuming because James Harden looks much better by that particular measure than he does in other forms of playoff data. But that doesn’t make it a good measure, nor does the fact that larger-sample RAPM is a good measure make playoff RAPM a good measure.

Ultimately, I think if someone just mindlessly relies on one particular type of data regardless of the context and regardless of whether that form of data is actually plausibly reliable in that context, then that’s the approach that is bad, not an approach that assesses when a form of data is most reliable and gives it far more weight in those circumstances.

[homecourtloss]

I believe this is Englemann, who I generally see as a pretty safe bet for doing RAPM pretty appropriately.

With that said, as I've noted before, I've got major concerns about making use of playoff RAPM in my analysis generally.

Can you link me to your prior posts on playoff RAPM? I'm interested to hear your reasoning.

I am hesitant myself and have never used it in any discussions because of quite simply very low prime samples for most players. Even all-time guys are lucky to have 100 playoff games in their primes.

as i've pointed out before, this board is probably more obsessed with impact numbers than anywhere else on the internet, and player evaluations often come down to the playoffs, but then we hear that we can't use impact numbers in the playoffs. kind of a grand canyon sized gap in player evaluations it feels like. or at least a very inconsistent "pick a stat when it's convenient" type approach.

Indeed.

Single year playoffs EPM: good!

Single year playoffs plus/minus on/off: no complaints, no cautions, no I hesitate to use this, it's useless

Career playoff RAPM: take with a grain of salt, caution, I hesitate to use this, it's useless, etc.

[lessthanjake]

I just noticed this post. Two questions/comments.

1) What is the source of this RAPM as in who created it?

2) The confidence intervals have to be absolutely huge here.

I believe this is Englemann, who I generally see as a pretty safe bet for doing RAPM pretty appropriately.

With that said, as I've noted before, I've got major concerns about making use of playoff RAPM in my analysis generally.

It's good data to have especially for the heavy minutes players. These type of career numbers look pretty good when you then talk about single your peaks.

Additionally, I see people using single year playoffs EPM without anybody saying "I've got major concerns..."

Single-playoff EPM is definitely more reliable than single-playoff RAPM (or single-playoff on-off), since the whole point of the measure is to use box and tracking data to make the measure much more stable in small samples. That said, playoff EPM is definitely not as reliable as regular-season EPM (or multi-season RAPM or other similar measures), because the sample-size issues are still more of a problem. I’m not even sure that playoff EPM is better than pure box data like playoff BPM. If it is, it’d probably be more because it incorporates tracking data than because the impact component improves accuracy in that small a sample. If there were somehow a much more reliable form of single-playoff data than what we have, then I’d definitely use that instead. But there’s not, because the playoffs are just a small sample and there’s not any way around that. I do think that measures incorporating box data are better for the playoffs than raw impact data, because box data stabilizes things a lot. And I’ll note that this is not unique to the playoffs. The same is true if we wanted to compare these sorts of hybrid measures in a single season compared to one-year RAPM. One-year RAPM is a worse measure than that.

There’s a certain sample size at which RAPM becomes better than box or hybrid data. I’m not sure exactly where that line is, but I don’t think playoff data really gets us over that hump. It certainly doesn’t in single-year or even several-year samples. But I’ll note that unfortunately this is probably true even for career playoff RAPM of players that have high playoff minutes, because the adjustments the measure is making for everyone else are based on overly small samples for most of those other players. If most of the adjustments are just driven by a ton of noise, then playoff RAPM isn’t even particularly better than playoff on-off. After all, the value of RAPM over on-off is the fact that it accounts for everyone else on the court. So if it has only very small samples with which to do that for those players, then any delta between playoff RAPM and playoff on-off is probably going to be largely consumed by noise.

Of course, one might try to say that career playoff RAPM is at least as reliable as something like single-playoff EPM. As an initial matter, I’m actually not sure if that’s true. It would depend on whether the larger sample for career playoffs stabilizes the measure better than the addition of box and tracking data does for EPM. I’m not sure on that. But it’s plausible to me that it could be as reliable or more reliable. The problem for these purposes is that we’re assessing single-year peaks, so career playoff RAPM is not specific to the issue while playoff EPM at least is. A measure that isn’t all that reliable but actually does go to the precise question at hand is certainly more useful than a measure that isn’t all that reliable and doesn’t even go to the precise question at hand.

[Doctor MJ]

2) The confidence intervals have to be absolutely huge here.

only when the wrong people are ahead of the right people do the confidence intervals tend to expand. otherwise they tend to be ironclad proof of everything.

This is more of this type of thing where folks are just impugning the integrity of others without adding anything themselves.

All of us are biased, but that doesn't mean that we're doing all we're doing to purposefully try to distort conclusions.

It's fine to ask folks about apparent contradictions in their reasoning, but cynically alleging dishonesty just doesn't get us anywhere.

[lessthanjake]

Can you link me to your prior posts on playoff RAPM? I'm interested to hear your reasoning.

I am hesitant myself and have never used it in any discussions because of quite simply very low prime samples for most players. Even all-time guys are lucky to have 100 playoff games in their primes.

as i've pointed out before, this board is probably more obsessed with impact numbers than anywhere else on the internet, and player evaluations often come down to the playoffs, but then we hear that we can't use impact numbers in the playoffs. kind of a grand canyon sized gap in player evaluations it feels like. or at least a very inconsistent "pick a stat when it's convenient" type approach.

Indeed.

Single year playoffs EPM: good!

Single year playoffs plus/minus on/off: no complaints, no cautions, no I hesitate to use this, it's useless

Career playoff RAPM: take with a grain of salt, caution, I hesitate to use this, it's useless, etc.

Yeah, to the extent that this is yet another post of yours dripping with sarcasm and directed at me (you couldn’t last long without doing it yet again!), I think you’ll find that the idea that I do not provide cautions about the use of single-playoff on-off is just demonstrably false, since I actually frequently do that. The rest of this was addressed in my prior post. Playoff EPM isn’t all that reliable either. But if the question is how a player performed in a particular playoffs (which is certainly the most relevant question in a peaks project), then it’s one of the best measures we have for that, despite not being all that great. It’s certainly better for those purposes than career playoff RAPM is, since that’s a measure that is not reliable *and* isn’t even directed at the most relevant question here.

[Cavsfansince84]

I think we should get back more to actually comparing players than overly worrying about the methodology others are using. I think most of the posters involved in this right now are open minded enough to consider any argument for a player made if its made well. So making good arguments based on w/e data or line of reasoning is the best way to get people to consider a player for a ballot.

[homecourtloss]

I believe this is Englemann, who I generally see as a pretty safe bet for doing RAPM pretty appropriately.

With that said, as I've noted before, I've got major concerns about making use of playoff RAPM in my analysis generally.

It's good data to have especially for the heavy minutes players. These type of career numbers look pretty good when you then talk about single your peaks.

Additionally, I see people using single year playoffs EPM without anybody saying "I've got major concerns..."

Single-playoff EPM is definitely more reliable than single-playoff RAPM (or single-playoff on-off), since the whole point of the measure is to use box and tracking data to make the measure much more stable in small samples. That said, playoff EPM is definitely not as reliable as regular-season EPM (or multi-season RAPM or other similar measures), because the sample-size issues are still more of a problem. I’m not even sure that playoff EPM is better than pure box data like playoff BPM. If it is, it’d probably be more because it incorporates tracking data than because the impact component improves accuracy in that small a sample. If there were somehow a much more reliable form of single-playoff data than what we have, then I’d definitely use that instead. But there’s not, because the playoffs are just a small sample and there’s not any way around that. I do think that measures incorporating box data are better for the playoffs than raw impact data, because box data stabilizes things a lot. And I’ll note that this is not unique to the playoffs. The same is true if we wanted to compare these sorts of hybrid measures in a single season compared to one-year RAPM. One-year RAPM is a worse measure than that.

There’s a certain sample size at which RAPM becomes better than box or hybrid data. I’m not sure exactly where that line is, but I don’t think playoff data really gets us over that hump. It certainly doesn’t in single-year or even several-year samples. But I’ll note that unfortunately this is probably true even for career playoff RAPM of players that have high playoff minutes, because the adjustments the measure is making for everyone else are based on overly small samples for most of those other players. If most of the adjustments are just driven by a ton of noise, then playoff RAPM isn’t even particularly better than playoff on-off. After all, the value of RAPM over on-off is the fact that it accounts for everyone else on the court. So if it has only very small samples with which to do that for those players, then any delta between playoff RAPM and playoff on-off is probably going to be largely consumed by noise.

Of course, one might try to say that career playoff RAPM is at least as reliable as something like single-playoff EPM. As an initial matter, I’m actually not sure if that’s true. It would depend on whether the larger sample for career playoffs stabilizes the measure better than the addition of box and tracking data does for EPM. I’m not sure on that. But it’s plausible to me that it could be as reliable or more reliable. The problem for these purposes is that we’re assessing single-year peaks, so career playoff RAPM is not specific to the issue while playoff EPM at least is. A measure that isn’t all that reliable but actually does go to the precise question at hand is certainly more useful than a measure that isn’t all that reliable and doesn’t even go to the precise question at hand.

You’re rejecting multi-year playoff RAPM because of “small samples,” but you’re fine using single-playoff EPM, which literally relies on RAPM-derived priors and even smaller data windows.

What makes this even more inconsistent is that you also accept single playoff season plus/minus data, and even single-series on/off splits — both of which are far noisier than a multi-year RAPM sample, wihtout the usual caveats of "worthless," etc. If single-series or single-season on/off are acceptable in evaluating, then multi-year RAPM which reduces that same small-sample variance through aggregation — should be more reliable, not less. Multi-year RAPM exists to address the small-sample problem you’re citing. Regularization already accounts for low-minute players, and aggregating across seasons reduces variance dramatically.

The idea that EPM or on/off data stays reliable while multi-year RAPM doesn’t is self-contradictory; they all rely on the same underlying regression logic, but only RAPM actually benefits from multi-season stabilization.

This is just hand-waving and selective hand-waving at that.

as i've pointed out before, this board is probably more obsessed with impact numbers than anywhere else on the internet, and player evaluations often come down to the playoffs, but then we hear that we can't use impact numbers in the playoffs. kind of a grand canyon sized gap in player evaluations it feels like. or at least a very inconsistent "pick a stat when it's convenient" type approach.

Indeed.

Single year playoffs EPM: good!

Single year playoffs plus/minus on/off: no complaints, no cautions, no I hesitate to use this, it's useless

Career playoff RAPM: take with a grain of salt, caution, I hesitate to use this, it's useless, etc.

Yeah, to the extent that this is yet another post of yours dripping with sarcasm and directed at me (you couldn’t last long without doing it yet again!), I think you’ll find that the idea that I do not provide cautions about the use of single-playoff on-off is just demonstrably false, since I actually frequently do that. The rest of this was addressed in my prior post. [b]Playoff EPM isn’t all that reliable either. [/b]But if the question is how a player performed in a particular playoffs (which is certainly the most relevant question in a peaks project), then it’s one of the best measures we have for that, despite not being all that great. It’s certainly better for those purposes than career playoff RAPM is, since that’s a measure that is not reliable *and* isn’t even directed at the most relevant question here.

You've cited single playoff EPM numerous times in this project without any of the cautionary "this is basically useless" warnings but you have the most reservations for the multi-year playoffs RAPM. That's called inconsistency to push agendas.

[f4p]

Spoiler:

I believe this is Englemann, who I generally see as a pretty safe bet for doing RAPM pretty appropriately.

With that said, as I've noted before, I've got major concerns about making use of playoff RAPM in my analysis generally.

It's good data to have especially for the heavy minutes players. These type of career numbers look pretty good when you then talk about single your peaks.

Additionally, I see people using single year playoffs EPM without anybody saying "I've got major concerns..."

Single-playoff EPM is definitely more reliable than single-playoff RAPM (or single-playoff on-off), since the whole point of the measure is to use box and tracking data to make the measure much more stable in small samples. That said, playoff EPM is definitely not as reliable as regular-season EPM (or multi-season RAPM or other similar measures), because the sample-size issues are still more of a problem. I’m not even sure that playoff EPM is better than pure box data like playoff BPM. If it is, it’d probably be more because it incorporates tracking data than because the impact component improves accuracy in that small a sample. If there were somehow a much more reliable form of single-playoff data than what we have, then I’d definitely use that instead. But there’s not, because the playoffs are just a small sample and there’s not any way around that. I do think that measures incorporating box data are better for the playoffs than raw impact data, because box data stabilizes things a lot. And I’ll note that this is not unique to the playoffs. The same is true if we wanted to compare these sorts of hybrid measures in a single season compared to one-year RAPM. One-year RAPM is a worse measure than that.

There’s a certain sample size at which RAPM becomes better than box or hybrid data. I’m not sure exactly where that line is, but I don’t think playoff data really gets us over that hump. It certainly doesn’t in single-year or even several-year samples. But I’ll note that unfortunately this is probably true even for career playoff RAPM of players that have high playoff minutes, because the adjustments the measure is making for everyone else are based on overly small samples for most of those other players. If most of the adjustments are just driven by a ton of noise, then playoff RAPM isn’t even particularly better than playoff on-off. After all, the value of RAPM over on-off is the fact that it accounts for everyone else on the court. So if it has only very small samples with which to do that for those players, then any delta between playoff RAPM and playoff on-off is probably going to be largely consumed by noise.

Of course, one might try to say that career playoff RAPM is at least as reliable as something like single-playoff EPM.

Spoiler:

As an initial matter, I’m actually not sure if that’s true. It would depend on whether the larger sample for career playoffs stabilizes the measure better than the addition of box and tracking data does for EPM. I’m not sure on that. But it’s plausible to me that it could be as reliable or more reliable. The problem for these purposes is that we’re assessing single-year peaks, so career playoff RAPM is not specific to the issue while playoff EPM at least is. A measure that isn’t all that reliable but actually does go to the precise question at hand is certainly more useful than a measure that isn’t all that reliable and doesn’t even go to the precise question at hand

EPM's the thing that said 2018 eric gordon plus clint capela were as good as 2018 kevin durant plus draymond green, right? and that was like the whole season, not just the small sample of the playoffs.


sorry man, but it's too noisy after 150-200 career playoff games is a crazy take. especially when we're just making up how noisy it may or may not be with no actual error bars that i've seen so far. like every time i try to use a box score stat on this board, i'm treated like a caveman who doesn't understand fire, but then i try to come over to the other side and suddenly the impact stuff is also useless, even on geological time scales. but of course, in this particular conversation, kevin durant also beats steph in the box score. so it's curious how the guy winning both the stable and noisy parts of the equation is still apparently behind (and don't say this is a peaks project, because we know the same results have and will hold in the Top 100). it's funny, because i'm the one who stays consistent and heavily uses the box score to say someone like harden is a playoff faller even when i'm trying to generally prop him up. when on/off, RAPM, and team net rating all say he's a riser, but then you guys somehow also arrive at the same conclusion about harden while using the data that supposedly would make harder a riser.

or a favorite like nash looks like harden just worse across the board but the best stat BPM is secretly against him. even though there's literally no mathematical reason given why it's so. just the creator of the stat loves nash and says it underrates him. how that's any different than me or you declaring someone to be underrated by a stat is beyond me.

[f4p]

I think we should get back more to actually comparing players than overly worrying about the methodology others are using. I think most of the posters involved in this right now are open minded enough to consider any argument for a player made if its made well. So making good arguments based on w/e data or line of reasoning is the best way to get people to consider a player for a ballot.

the methodology is a huge part of it, though. if we're just going by who won a title, that's going to give different results than who played better. if we're throwing out playoff impact data, that's going to give a different result than using playoff impact data.

what i'm not open minded to is arguments that eric gordon and clint capela are each better than draymond green.

[f4p]

I’m not even sure that playoff EPM is better than pure box data like playoff BPM. If it is, it’d probably be more because it incorporates tracking data than because the impact component improves accuracy in that small a sample.

what exactly is the tracking data that EPM uses?

[Cavsfansince84]

EPM's the thing that said 2018 eric gordon plus clint capela were as good as 2018 kevin durant plus draymond green, right? and that was like the whole season, not just the small sample of the playoffs.


sorry man, but it's too noisy after 150-200 career playoff games is a crazy take. especially when we're just making up how noisy it may or may not be with no actual error bars that i've seen so far. like every time i try to use a box score stat on this board, i'm treated like a caveman who doesn't understand fire, but then i try to come over to the other side and suddenly the impact stuff is also useless, even on geological time scales. but of course, in this particular conversation, kevin durant also beats steph in the box score. so it's curious how the guy winning both the stable and noisy parts of the equation is still apparently behind (and don't say this is a peaks project, because we know the same results have and will hold in the Top 100). it's funny, because i'm the one who stays consistent and heavily uses the box score to say someone like harden is a playoff faller even when i'm trying to generally prop him up. when on/off, RAPM, and team net rating all say he's a riser, but then you guys somehow also arrive at the same conclusion about harden while using the data that supposedly would make harder a riser.

or a favorite like nash looks like harden just worse across the board but the best stat BPM is secretly against him. even though there's literally no mathematical reason given why it's so. just the creator of the stat loves nash and says it underrates him. how that's any different than me or you declaring someone to be underrated by a stat is beyond me.

I think you make some somewhat fair points but also are leaving out things like team based ORtg/DRtg and other stuff that can be applied. I don't think individual box score or impact data or both is the complete picture. At some point we have to arrive at our conclusions and use those for better or worse which includes games watched and w/e else we want to add in. Which isn't to say who's right or wrong but that each person is doing their best to get to what they think are the best conclusions. Out of that we get this project and whoever ends up where based on the votes. It's not perfect but its just a reflection of the views of people who post here.

[lessthanjake]

It's good data to have especially for the heavy minutes players. These type of career numbers look pretty good when you then talk about single your peaks.

Additionally, I see people using single year playoffs EPM without anybody saying "I've got major concerns..."

Single-playoff EPM is definitely more reliable than single-playoff RAPM (or single-playoff on-off), since the whole point of the measure is to use box and tracking data to make the measure much more stable in small samples. That said, playoff EPM is definitely not as reliable as regular-season EPM (or multi-season RAPM or other similar measures), because the sample-size issues are still more of a problem. I’m not even sure that playoff EPM is better than pure box data like playoff BPM. If it is, it’d probably be more because it incorporates tracking data than because the impact component improves accuracy in that small a sample. If there were somehow a much more reliable form of single-playoff data than what we have, then I’d definitely use that instead. But there’s not, because the playoffs are just a small sample and there’s not any way around that. I do think that measures incorporating box data are better for the playoffs than raw impact data, because box data stabilizes things a lot. And I’ll note that this is not unique to the playoffs. The same is true if we wanted to compare these sorts of hybrid measures in a single season compared to one-year RAPM. One-year RAPM is a worse measure than that.

There’s a certain sample size at which RAPM becomes better than box or hybrid data. I’m not sure exactly where that line is, but I don’t think playoff data really gets us over that hump. It certainly doesn’t in single-year or even several-year samples. But I’ll note that unfortunately this is probably true even for career playoff RAPM of players that have high playoff minutes, because the adjustments the measure is making for everyone else are based on overly small samples for most of those other players. If most of the adjustments are just driven by a ton of noise, then playoff RAPM isn’t even particularly better than playoff on-off. After all, the value of RAPM over on-off is the fact that it accounts for everyone else on the court. So if it has only very small samples with which to do that for those players, then any delta between playoff RAPM and playoff on-off is probably going to be largely consumed by noise.

Of course, one might try to say that career playoff RAPM is at least as reliable as something like single-playoff EPM. As an initial matter, I’m actually not sure if that’s true. It would depend on whether the larger sample for career playoffs stabilizes the measure better than the addition of box and tracking data does for EPM. I’m not sure on that. But it’s plausible to me that it could be as reliable or more reliable. The problem for these purposes is that we’re assessing single-year peaks, so career playoff RAPM is not specific to the issue while playoff EPM at least is. A measure that isn’t all that reliable but actually does go to the precise question at hand is certainly more useful than a measure that isn’t all that reliable and doesn’t even go to the precise question at hand.

You’re rejecting multi-year playoff RAPM because of “small samples,” but you’re fine using single-playoff EPM, which literally relies on RAPM-derived priors and even smaller data windows.

You’re ignoring the fact that EPM is stabilized by the use of box and tracking data. Using other data to stabilize small-sample impact data is the whole point of the measure!

But yeah, as I’ve already said, playoff EPM isn’t super reliable either. But this is a single-year peaks project and so naturally people will look at single-playoff data. And, despite not being a very reliable measure, playoff EPM is one of the best measures we have for that purpose. Career playoff RAPM is not only not a very reliable measure but also is not even directed to the relevant question at hand.

What makes this even more inconsistent is that you also accept single playoff season plus/minus data, and even single-series on/off splits — both of which are far noisier than a multi-year RAPM sample, wihtout the usual caveats of "worthless," etc.

I can’t even count how often I’ve cautioned people here about relying on single-playoff on-off data. The idea that I do not provide similar caveats about that sort of data is just complete nonsense. I’ve done it many times! As I’ve said before, if you’re going to criticize me for purportedly being inconsistent, you really should at least familiarize yourself with my posting history, so that you aren’t just beating on a straw man.

If single-series or single-season on/off are acceptable in evaluating, then multi-year RAPM which reduces that same small-sample variance through aggregation — should be more reliable, not less. Multi-year RAPM exists to address the small-sample problem you’re citing. Regularization already accounts for low-minute players, and aggregating across seasons reduces variance dramatically.

So I’ll leave aside the fact that I do not think single-series or single-playoff on-off are measures we should put virtually any weight on and that I’ve said as much many times on these forums, so this is largely just straw manning.

Regarding the rest of what you say here, I don’t disagree with it. But you’re really handwaving when you say “regularization already accounts for low-minute players.” With career playoff RAPM, the issue I’m talking about isn’t really the treatment of low-minute bench players. It’s that the vast majority of players haven’t actually played very many playoff games. Which makes the measure much noisier even for players who have played a lot of playoff games, because the measure doesn’t have a large enough sample to accurately control for the other people on the court. To draw an analogy, multi-season RAPM is much more reliable than single-season RAPM not just because the individual player in question has played a lot of games over the course of multiple seasons, but also because virtually everyone that the measure is adjusting for has also played a lot of games over that timespan. What you have with career playoff RAPM is basically a measure that has an okay sized sample for a small number of players (but not a great-sized sample, since we’re generally still talking about only like ~2 season’s worth of games for guys with lots of playoff experience) and a very small sample for everyone else (often less than 1 season’s worth of games). The result is something that is definitely going to be even less reliable than something like 2-year RS RAPM. Given all that, I’m inclined to think it’s probably roughly akin to pure single-season RAPM in reliability, even for guys at the high end in playoff experience. Maybe it’s slightly better than that, but it’s roughly in the same ballpark IMO. And yeah, I don’t really put much value on single-year RAPM, and have certainly caveated/cautioned about the sample-size issue there.

[lessthanjake]

You've cited single playoff EPM numerous times in this project without any of the cautionary "this is basically useless" warnings but you have the most reservations for the multi-year playoffs RAPM. That's called inconsistency to push agendas.

Yeah, instead of proving once again that I was right that you are unable to stop yourself from making rude comments directed at me, you might want to familiarize yourself with my posting history and stop making baseless straw-man attacks. The reality is that I have actually caveated playoff EPM with similar caution, even when it supported my conclusion.

Let’s look at the following, for example, which is a post in which I cited playoff EPM to support my conclusion that Jokic was 2024 POY, but in doing so specifically called out that playoff EPM is reliant on small samples:

https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=113775517#p113775517

Here’s the relevant quote from me: “Playoff EPM bears out Jokic being the best (by a clear margin, though it has Luka slightly above SGA), though obviously that’s reliant on low-sample-size data.”

Here’s another example of me doing a similar thing:

https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=117687856#p117687856

In that post, I provided playoff EPM data but caveated it as follows: “FWIW, while playoff impact data is low-sample-size data that shouldn’t be taken all that seriously even when using box/tracking data to help stabilize it, here’s their playoff EPM in those years.”

It took me all of about 2 minutes to find those posts. You might’ve tried to do the same before you posted rude posts directed at me that were clearly baseless. But you didn’t. And to the extent your criticism is that, even though I have cautioned about playoff EPM when citing to it in the past on these forums, you are upset that I have not specifically done that when I’ve mentioned it in this project, I’d say that that is pretty clearly just a silly criticism. And I’d also say that this is a single-year peaks project, so to some degree it just goes without saying that data relating to a specific playoff run is not super reliable, because that’s just the nature of the beast with single-playoff data but we can’t avoid single-playoff data in this project. The same isn’t really true of career playoff RAPM which I don’t think is very reliable but is also something we can easily avoid using because it is not specific to a given peak year.