Doctor MJ wrote:Uh, because you came up with a trade which would result in a team with 3 of the Warriors' 4 players while swapping out Curry for Westbrook. If we're going to compare those two teams with a thought that they would be about as good, it'd be absurd not to deal with the loss of shooting that comes with the swap.
If you'd rather come up with a specific example that isn't tied with the Warriors at all I'm all for it, and if you do, depending on the details, we may not need to talk about Westbrook's shooting limitations that much.
Guess it's a good time to refresh this from earlier:
In the playoffs, Westbrook had a +13 on court offense and that number is +10.2 when we include 2012/14 for a larger 3 year sample. For comparison, Curry also had a +10.2 postseason offense in 2017/18/19 when Durant was in Golden State. How is that a low ceiling?
1. Do you agree that 16 Westbrook led a very good postseason offense despite having only 1 elite shooter?
2. Do you agree that any team trading Kanter/Ibaka for Dray/Klay will get more shooting and better offense?
If your answer to both of the above is yes, why try to frame the trade as a negative because Westbrook can't shoot like Curry? That's already factored into existing team results in the first point. OKC had an elite offense despite poor shooting and they will improve from the trade. End of story.
But if you still can't move on from the Curry comparison because of the Warriors players, let's change it to Kawhi and Danny Green instead. And since you won't address the benefit of the 24M cap spike, let's add Marc Gasol too. Is Westbrook, Green, Kawhi, Durant, Gasol an all time team now? You'll probably still say no, right? Because you have already decided Westbrook can't fit on a GOAT level team so any team with Westbrook on it is automatically disqualified. It's circular logic. Unless you change your underlying opinion of Westbrook first, this is a pointless exercise.
I would suggest that if you're not maximizing the synergy of the team, you're not producing an all-time good team. You achieve the latter by strategically building the former. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'll say flat out that if I were an owner and a GM candidate suggested synergy wasn't important, I wouldn't hire him, and if I were a GM and a coaching candidate suggested synergy wasn't important, I wouldn't hire him either.
Did the dream team maximize team synergy? Were they not an all time good team? It's a combination of talent and synergy, not just either one alone. You have this romanticized view where a team with suboptimal fit can't be great but the world isn't black and white like that. The 17 Warriors themselves don't have "perfect" synergy unless you think Zaza was the absolute best player in the league for that role. All else equal, more synergy is better but it's not the be all end all.
And while we can disagree on that, perhaps the more useful point is to ask: What does a team optimized for Westbrook look like? However good it is, what should we be trying for?
Same as an optimized team for basically every perimeter star. Broadly speaking, efficient finishers at the rim and from 3 (corner especially), secondary playmakers (ideally of different size for a more versatile attack), and great defenders all over the court.
Re: Dray/Curry fit can't be replicated. Okay, so who would Westbrook synergize with comparably well to the way those two synergize? What does "a Dray for Russ" look like?
Nobody knows. Before it actually happened, who knew Draymond would synergize with Curry the way they did? Have you ever asked yourself what a "Dray for Butler" looks like? How about a "Dray for Kawhi"? Let's say we somehow know for a fact the Dray for Westbrook is some player X he never played with. Okay, then what? We have no idea how good they would be together in reality. It's pure guesswork leading nowhere.
Re: Dray wouldn't be de facto point guard but it wouldn't matter because... I can't grant this premise. It would matter because him playing in the scheme he plays in where others provide the spacing is what allows him to be a starter-level offensive player. If you have Green play like a traditional big on offense, he's going to hurt your offense.
Re: Westbrook only 40%, plenty of touches to go around. Dude, we're not talking about slices of pizza here, we're talking about basketball schemes, and you're seeming to refuse to deal with the extreme difference between Dray's role in a read & react system and what it would need to be in a Westbrook helio system.
A heliocentric offense could still use secondary playmakers otherwise the defense will just double the entire game and the offense will be in trouble. Did you think the perfect fit around a helio star is to have 4 guys who can't dribble or pass at all so there is zero overlap in skills? Redundancy isn't poor synergy - it is a necessity for resilient team building. Also, assuming we're still talking about the upgraded 16 Thunder team, the existence of a second star in Durant already makes this a non-helio system.
Re: best served by "someone else", who exactly? Well, in your example you just traded Serge Ibaka for Draymond Green. Ibaka is the better shot blocker, the better shooter, doesn't need decision making primacy on offense, doesn't need teammates to follow his commands on defense, and was absolutely considered the superior prospect and player relative to Green until Green came out of nowhere on Kerr's Warriors.
I think it's worth really not forgetting why it is that Green wasn't drafted in the First Round beyond just saying "he was underrated". Why was he underrated?
In a nutshell my answer would be: It wasn't because they underrated him in the traditional areas that define great defense, nor because they didn't see his BBIQ was high, but because they had no concept of how it could emerge as the best NBA defender of his generation within a scheme that emphasize improvisation and communication.
The fact that none of them - and none of us I expect - saw it coming, makes it all the more interesting and certainly doesn't take away from what Green has achieved, but it does mean that simply slotting Green in as a vastly superior player to Ibaka as if this wasn't scheme dependent contradicts what scouts would have said until Kerr unleashed Green in a shockingly different defense from what was even possible in the past.
Or maybe Draymond just got dropped in the draft because he was a tweener.
“I had 21 workouts; I had great workouts, absolutely great workouts. Dominated the workouts, I shot the ball well, two-on-two, three-on-three, and four-on-four, and dominated them. So it’s really baffling to me that I fell in the draft like that. I fell in the draft because they said what position would I guard? They were like, he’s not a three, he’s not a four, he’s too slow and short to be a four, he’s too slow to be a three, so what position is he going to guard? I fell in the draft for that reason.”
Teams aren't prefect and misjudge draft picks. You are trying very hard to find a logical justification for Draymond's unexpected success as a second round draft pick when there doesn't have to be one. Ben Wallace went undrafted - did he also only get unleashed because of "shockingly different" defensive schemes? Or did scouts just missed him because they thought he was too short like Draymond?
Green is a better player than Ibaka because of his brain, despite being less physically talented, so if you acquire him and make less use of his brain, you shouldn't be assuming he's going to improve your team, or even stay as good as it was before.
Who said anything about using less of his brain? Draymond isn't forgetting how to guard 1 through 5 just because he switched teams. And he certainly will never stop talking on defense. You are so determined on proving a Westbrook team will fail you're adding in these additional barriers.
Doesn't mean I'm not blinded by emotion now, but I can assure everyone that my frustrations with Westbrook began while watching him at OKC because I saw him miss open shooters, saw him look to iso the whole possession with KD right next to him, and I saw him focus on going after the ball on defense in a risky way.
If you didn't see this stuff, I'm not sure what to say. It was there.
Westbrook misses so many open shooters and isos so much that his team ends up with ... an elite offense? This is the crux of our disagreement. Westbrook has his flaws but there is still plenty of evidence of how good the Thunder offense was with him and how much impact he provided. But you're just throwing all this out the window in favor of what you believe already.
"I saw him miss open shooters"
Okay, at what rate? What's the league average for point guards and how do Westbrook's numbers compare? Without the comparison, this statement by itself isn't saying much. "I saw LeBron miss layups". "I saw Ewing get posterized". Everyone misses passes to open teammates from time to time. You have neither established peak Westbrook commits these errors at a higher rate than others or that it resulted in worse team offenses.
"saw him look to iso the whole possession with KD right next to him"
Per synergy stats, we know 16 Westbrook was only 37th in the league in iso frequency rate and third on his own team. Maybe you're referring to the playoffs instead when Westbrook overtook Durant in iso possessions but OKC offense was far more efficient (+18 ORtg) on Westbrook isos than Durant isos during that run. So was Westbrook actually the problem or is it just your mind seeing what it chooses to see?
This discussion has been good but I think it's run its course. Every time I bring up how Westbrook led very good offenses (RS+PO) in OKC, it's just not getting through to you. And unless you have some numbers to present for your case against Westbrook, there isn't much more for me to say than what I have said already.
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Did you really?
