Doctor MJ wrote:ronnymac2 wrote:No, I understand what you're saying. I'm not attacking your stance as much as I'm trying to defend my own.
You're saying that you can forgive a player if he misses time (RE: loses some value to his team) if his team wins a title anyway. Makes sense since, even if he had played those other games and added more to his team, the most that could happen is...a title. Same result.
But if that missed time does lead to less team success than a title- or worse, no playoffs- you must dock him for the missed time. His missed time directly cost his team, so the value of his season goes down.
That IS what you're saying, right?
That's my rubric alright. My thing is that I fully get flaws in it, I just don't see better alternatives. What I feel like I'm getting from you are solid arguments exposing those flaws, without dealing with what I don't like about the alternatives.
I can tell you how I've handled them:
A player's performance gives some theoretical boost to his team. Now, he has to play enough to get that team into the playoffs and then play in the postseason enough to help them win the title per the rules of the league.
Let's take this situation vs Shaq 02, and let's assume Shaq and Kareem are both +10 for a team. Now, if no one else is close to +10, then putting Shaq/Kareem on ANY NBA team for 60 games should, reasonably, make that a playoff team (It's stilly to assume they're on the 73 Sixers. Just like it's silly to assume they're on the 96 Bulls.) They might be a 20-win, -5 differential club without him, but in his 60 games they should, in theory, be able to play ~.600 ball in those 60 games and get to the playoffs. That's assuming he has a really bad team as well. You can shift the thought-experiment accordingly.
Now, the question is, at what point does a player who was healthy for the whole regular season get HCA for a team over Shaq/Kareem. Is it +9? +7? If he's +7, joins a -5 team, and plays 82 games, they are probably going to be better off, although if you play with the numbers you'll see that's right around the cutoff in theory. So that's JUST for RS contributions.
Once the playoffs start, if Kareem/Shaq's team would be at a disadvantage than if they had played that +9 player for 82 games, the question is does Kareem/Shaq's +10 throughout the playoffs -- where they ARE healthy -- make up for that disadvantage? Is it HCA for a round, 2 rounds, or 3 rounds? The worse it is, the tougher the competition. My answer? Yes if it's not close, no if it's close. That's why I shift players who are on comparable levels but not below clearly inferior players.
So, that's how I weigh RS injury time. At some point, if it's an issue, it's really only an issue with regards to comparable players. Then, at some point (35 missed games? 45 games?) it reaches a critical mass and that player falls behind a bunch of other healthy players when it becomes difficult to make the playoffs.
Implicit in my handling of this is to ignore whether that player actually won the title that year, because a lot of that is independent of how good my player is actually playing.
Hopefully that's not too confusing.
