Sedale Threatt wrote:drza wrote:Kobe was great, but to whoever said that Kobe's cast wasn't 10 games better than the Wolves...I don't know. To me Kobe's cast when Odom was hurt was pretty similar to KG's cast for the season, but Kobe got to play with Odom for 50 games...I'm not sure there's not 10 games difference there. Plus, you've got to factor in that the Wolves front office literally needed for them to lose down the stretch so that they could keep their 1st round pick (it was owed to the Clippers if the team finished better than 10th from the bottom of the league). That's why KG sat out most of the last weeks of the season, all of which were Wolves losses.
Lamar had like a 16 PER that year, just a hair above average. A good, solid player, but prone to disappearing. If he'd gotten to play with playoff Lamar all year, then yeah, that's a huge difference. But otherwise, not a massive difference maker.
Silver Bullet wrote:Re: Kobe
Some people have Garnett on thier list - that to me makes no sense. Even if his SC was historically bad, he still only won 32 games ? And he's a big, he's suppossed to have a bigger impact on offense and defense.
Kobe's supporting cast: Odom, Luke Walton, Smush Parker, Kwame Brown, Brian Cook ? How is that any better than KG's cast... and even if it is better - Kobe's a wing, KG's a big - That's at most a 32 win team, even with Kobe on it. That's his MVP case. Taking a group of nobodies to the playoffs in the toughest conference of all time.
I'm going to give my explanation for the horror that was the '07 Wolves. What I'm weighing out is, what is the best way to go about it? I could point out facts like the 4 non-KG starters went on to become either short-term rotation level players on a 15-win team or 11th men on poor teams (I did that in the '08 thread) while KG went on to become the best player on a champion the next year. But that doesn't tell the whole story.
I could point out that the front office for the Wolves was so screwed up that in both 2006 and 2007 the team was actively TRYING to lose by the start of April so that they could keep their draft pick (which they'd have lost if they finished better than 10th from the bottom), and both years they sat KG for the last weeks of the year to that end. But that's not enough.
I could point out that the Wolves were 20 - 20 through the first half of the year when their coach (young Dwyane Casey) was fired in order to bring in Randy Wittman, who IIRC has one of the five worst win percentages in NBA history among coaches that have coached at least 100 games (something like a .31 win percentage). After Wittman's arrival, the team finished 12 - 30. But that's not enough.
In order to convey how bad that team was from top to bottom and to illustrate why I think Kobe's cast was solidly better, I need to take your into what that team was really like at both ends of the floor. I could attempt to do that with numbers, like for instance Dave Berri's calculation that the other Wolves besides KG were good for fewer than 11 wins that season (
http://www.wagesofwins.com/GarnettDuncan.html ) while Kobe's was good for almost 26 wins (
http://www.wagesofwins.com/Lakers0507.html ) . But then it can become a war of stats where each side pulls out their stat of choice, and between throwing PER and Win Shares and APM around we lose track of the meaning behind those numbers.
So instead, I'm going to describe exactly what Mark Blount, Ricky Davis, Trenton Hassell and Mike James brought to the table and only use stats sparingly to support my descriptions. This will be the interpretation of an admitted Garnett fan so you'll have to judge the bias. But this will also be the interpretation of someone that watched more than 90% of those Wolves games and also at least 15 or 20 Lakers games, so you'll be getting more than just numbers.
2007 Wolves defense: Mark Blount, Ricky Davis and Mike James were all really, really bad defensive players in Minnesota. Blount was an extremely soft defensive big man, unwilling or unable to deny easy post position nor stop his man once the ball was received. Neither Davis nor James were able to prevent consistent dribble penetration from their position. Hassell had earned a reputation as a "defensive stopper" in 2004 when what he really was was an energy defender, someone that would work hard and annoy his opponent without having the actual athletic ability to truly shut someone down, but with a great interior defense behind him he was able to be more aggressive. But in 2005 Hassell lost his starting job to Wally Szczerbiak, and from then on seemed to form the opinion that he needed to spend more energy on his fledgling offense if he wanted to play. By 2007 he was no longer the energy defender that he once was, but he also wasn't as awful as the other 3 starters. Also, all four of those players were poor rebounders for their positions. The end result was that the Wolves' defense couldn't hope to stop anyone, unless Garnett was able to get there in time to help (possible with Hassell, less likely with the others who simply got beaten too quickly for help defense). Moreover, the Wolves couldn't hope to get a reasonable level of defensive rebounds unless Garnett was the one to do it. I've seen posters like ElGee point out that offense is more important than defense because one man can't defend five, but for those Wolves Garnett was asked to come awfully close. (This was a common theme in Minnesota during the 2000s, but 2007 may have been the most glaring year for it.)
Wolves offense: In theory this is the side of the ball with more talent, as Davis was a 17 and 5 guy on reasonable efficiency from a wing while Blount was a 12 ppg center that shot over 50%. What actually played out on offense, though, was that it was being run by James, who was not really a PG (3.6 apg) and was really more of a low-efficiency chucker. Earlier in the decade in situations like this the Wolves ran their offense more through Garnett, letting him be the main decision maker so guys like James could just shoot (leading to a slew of high-efficiency offenses even with guys like Troy Hudson playing "PG"). But Coach Casey and later Coach Wittman wanted Garnett more off the ball, so after James the offense ran through Ricky Davis (team-high 4.8 apg). The problem with that, was, Davis was a graduate of the Iverson/Marbury "I'm going to try my best to get my shot, and if I can't then I'll kick it to someone and you better shoot" school of getting assists. Blount was purely a shooter, and Hassell wanted to be a shooter but just wasn't that talented. The end result was a unit where the only player that could consistently get his own offense was Garnett, the only player that was setting up teammates for easier shots was Garnett, and when the Wolves needed offense late the opponents would absolutely swarm/deny Garnett and nobody else could score.
I give you those descriptions as a back-drop so that the on-court/off-court +/- numbers from 82games make more intuitive sense (
http://www.82games.com/0607/0607MIN.HTM ). Garnett tied with Duncan for the NBA lead in on-court/off-court net +/- in 2007 with a mark of +15 per 48 minutes. But if you follow that link, you'll see that each of the other four starters (who played the majority of their minutes with Garnett) all had net +/- marks of 0 or less. If you look closer, you see that Garnett's +15 came from the team playing their opponents to a standstill with Garnett on the court...but they were -15 when he went to the bench. Now, put that in context with what I wrote above. The Wolves talent and scheme were so bad, such a net negative, that only the presence of KG could make them competitive at either end. If he was off the court for any reason everything disintegrated...rapidly. He was really the only thing that stood against the Wolves challenging the Sixers' record of 9 wins.
Now, to the Lakers. Lamar Odom, Smush Parker, Luke Walton and young Andrew Bynum is a poor cast. There's nothing to write home about, there. But defensively they were not the individual sieves that the Wolves players were, and they could at least rebound their position. Offensively there wasn't much there, though Odom could contribute at that end at least marginally and on the whole just tends to be underrated overall. And Phil Jackson's system put the players in position to compete. Now again, don't get me wrong, on the whole that Laker's cast was a net zero. It was Bryant's brilliance that got them anywhere near .500, let alone to the playoffs. The difference to me is that while the Lakers cast was a net zero, the Wolves' cast and coach were actually a net negative.
You know what that Lakers cast reminded me of? They were like a pro-proven, more experienced version of the Minnesota Kids. The only glimmer of a ray of hope for a Wolves fan to hang onto in 2007 was what we called the "KG and the Kids line-up", that consisted of KG, rookie Randy Foye, rookie Craig Smith, 2nd year Rashad McCants and Marko Jaric. That line-up got limited run, way too little for convincing statistical analysis, but just watching them you could visibly see the difference. Now mind you, that crew wasn't just young, they were also pretty grossly undertalented. Foye was the prize rookie at the time, but he just proved even as a 4th year player unable to hold a job for the Wizards. Smith is a 6-6 center that is playing back-up for the Clippers, and both McCants (at age 26) and Jaric are currently out of the NBA. But when they played next to Garnett, they worked. They made their man work to get past them, long enough that Garnett could actually get there to help. They relied solely upon KG to facillitate the offense, with only Foye and sometimes Smith acting as secondary scorers. And in their short time together as a unit, they were by-far the most successful that the '07 Wolves had and both posters like me and professional bloggers like Brit Robson screamed for that line-up to play together more often, but to no avail. But when they did play, essentially the Kids played as about a net zero that allowed Garnett's brilliance to make the unit a success.
That's what I think the '07 Lakers did for Kobe, and the actual starters on the '07 Wolves failed spectacularly to do for Garnett. That Wolves team was like a science experiment...what would happen if you took the best player in the league and surrounded him with the absolute worst of every possible member of an organization from the front office on down. Well, the result of that experiment will likely keep Garnett out of the top 5 in this year. And again, I can understand it. But as I relived that year in my mind while re-writing this post, I'm struck again by just how unfair it was to Garnett's legacy (and just how great that championship run the following year felt in contrast).
Re-reading that makes me sound like a wacko apologist, but it 
