Castle Black wrote:For the Nuggets to be 7-2 (should be 8-1 as they were jobbed by the officials vs. Portland) with these two overpaid bums in the starting lineup is really impressive. Murray and Gordon deserve a ton of credit for that as well, but the point remains.
MVP talk in November is largely pointless, but with Jokic putting up the numbers he is right now while having his team 7-2 against a tougher schedule than Giannis, Wemby, SGA, and Luka, he has to be at the top of the leaderboard right now imo. Giannis is right behind him though, with SGA, Wemby, and Luka battling for 3rd at the moment. Tons of basketball left to play though.
And he won't win it this year, but I'm going to show Cade Cunningham some love for his incredible start to the season while leading his Pistons team to an early 8-2 record, including the last 6 in a row.
How is Giannis the clear 2nd at a 6-4 win loss in the east? While Shai is closing out teams in the clutch at a 10-1 record, Giannis throws leads against the Rockets. I don't even know how you can make that statement so confidently, Spurs fans are something else.
I am deepdiving this because I am getting pissed off.
Giannis is a really decent offensive engine by himself, +11.6 better with him on the court, and -20.4 points worse. However, he plays his style, and his rim pounding 1v1 style is not going to translate to an elite offense like Jokic. He is like a hybrid of Shaq & Jokic, but he doesn't seem to be able to impact winning in the same way that they do through creating an elite offense. The Shaq led Lakers were 2nd, 5th, 2nd and 2nd in the league in offensive rating from 98 to 02, while the Bucks hover at 12th, 6th, 11th and now 8th this season in offensive rating.
He is not a positive defender anymore, the Bucks defense was +12 better with him on court per 100 possessions in 2020, now they are a -3 worse. He does a good job when he contests shots this season, but he contests only 11.2 fga, bottom 14th percentile for PF's, showing very low activity on the defensive end, saving it for offense. Wemby contests 17.3 fga for comparison, top 91th percentile for centers.
Last season for Giannis? Defense is +0.8 better with him on the court, and +0.4 when he sits, negligible difference. He was also in the bottom 14th percentile in number of shot contests last season. He is clearly saving energy for his offense, at the cost of defensive impact, which the Bucks are struggling with.
I think it's the wrong approach for him to play this way, but he can do what he wants. He is not going to win anything playing like he does, he needs to be more of a playmaker and use more of his energy on defense again. The Bucks are 23rd in the league in defensive rating and was bad to mediocre last year as well.
So now we can say that Giannis is not some DPOY god that is way above Shai, it's clearly not true.
So why are we putting him clearly above Shai? One guy is the top 1 seed, and one guy is the 6th seed. That matters a lot, and Shai is right there with Giannis in a lot of categories you guys use to measure:
BPM: Giannis 12.7, Shai 11.1
VORP: Shai 1.2, Giannis 1.1.
TS %: Giannis 66.3 %, Shai 64.3 %.
WS: Shai 2.6, Giannis 2.
WS/48: Giannis 33.1 %, Shai 33 %.
PER: Giannis 37.8, Shai 31.3.
Pts per 75: Giannis 37.3, Shai 34.5.
Ast per 75: Giannis 17, Shai 15.9.
Netrtg: Shai +11.9 (-0.2 on/off), Giannis +7.3 (+15.1 on/off) OKC bench has been playing well, Bucks stink, so the on/off will usually favor the star on the worse bench unit when he sits, offense still drops by 12.3 pts without Shai, but the defense increases by 12.4 due to crazy defenders and a still small sample size).
No doubt that Giannis is playing well, but he is not going to compete for wins unless he starts winning more games and playing better defense, and the difference vs Shai on a small sample size is small.
At best you could say Giannis at 2 slightly ahead of Shai and I would accept that, but you can't put Shai with the next group and just call it a day, Giannis is not that much better (if better at all when you look at how they perform in the clutch this season?) and will win less games and has won 4 less games already. And some of that is him being unable to impact as much as he used to on the defensive end in close games (just lost a lead against the Rockets, while Shai closed out the Grizzlies with two stepback threes) and that's going to lose them more games in the future. And the longer this goes on, the less the argument for Giannis becomes. 6 and 4 turns into 12 and 8, while 10 and 1 turns into 20 and 2 for Shai. Then the argument is gone, its up to Giannis to turn it, but I just don't think he can. And even if he somewhat did, Jokic is probably going to be the better offensive player than him and win more games in a tougher conference and impact basketball games better, while Shai is going to be right there in all stats and win 15+ more games than him if not more.
You better start playing some defense if you want to win Giannis, but I got a feeling that you like stats, so you can have those stats, I am just here to say I see through them. Defense wins championships.
