bastillon wrote:I don't think those steals are enough to compensate for that loss in DRtg. looking at team DWS they lost over 10; went from 29.3 to 18.4. average DWS is 20.5. that can't have been due to steal per game less. I mean I understand your hypothesis, it's certainly valid; I just don't think there's enough evidence to support it and you'd have to look for more to have a decent proof.
the more telling story actually is total mins. Jones playing 2800 in '76, 2400 in '77 and '78. what that means basically is that they improved when he played less, and then he played the same amount of minutes and they regressed. there's hardly any correlation between Jones presence on the court and defensive efficiency. even moreso when you consider how dramatic their downfall was on the defensive end.
I would definitely favor mins over blk/stl numbers here. the reason why KG etc were great defenders was not their boxscore stats but their intimidating presence on the court and ability to cover a wide variety of players on mismatches and rotations. I don't really see how there wouldn't be a vast improvement in team's defense with Garnett playing more minutes. it only makes sense when you consider his history. same with Russell, Dream etc. basically, if you're playing more and you're a great defender, your team should be playing better defense. if that's not the case like here, I don't think you can force the theory it was Jones who anchored that defense.
also if you're implying Denver regressed because of Bobby Jones downfall then we have to assume his 'downfall level' was there for the rest of his career, as he was actually posting even worse numbers later on.
and of course Denver's SRS wasn't anything to brag about. that's barely better than 2003 Nets and we all know they weren't nearly as good as some of their competition. 5 SRS isn't surprising either, considering they had both Issel (proven impact player in the ABA) and of course David Thompson whom I respect more than Bobby Jones.
Hey bast, btw, good to have you back. So apologize up front if I have a snarky tone. I'm in the middle of stuff.
It would've been kind of nice for you to do more research before you said "steals aren't enough to compensate!". I didn't say steals were everything. I said turnovers were the big thing.
ftr, their defensive eFG% went down by .005 relative to league average (10th to 13th), their DRB went up .003 (12th to 9th), their FT/FGA went up .008 (8th to 8th). Those are all small differences
Their turnovers? Went down by .022. Which is totally massive. Enough to go from 2nd to 14th in the league. That has to be what we concentrate on.
I realize that steals are not the only way to cause a turnover, but they are the stat we have that let's us get to something more precise than simply talking about "turnovers". When we see a turnover change, it absolutely makes sense to ask as an initial question: Did their ability to cause steals change? Because steals cause turnovers, and so does the pressure active defenders cause. If steals go down by a lot when the amount of turnovers go down by a lot, and the total DRtg falls off by a lot when none of the other 4 factors change, it's a pretty reasonable guess that all of that is related.
So we look at the team's steals: They were at 953, they went to 824, in a league where the average steals actually went up from 768 to 787. So instead of being 185 above league average, they were only 37 above league average.
I can't imagine anyone considers it a stretch to then say that the Nuggets fall off on defense had to do with an inability to pressure the opposing offense in a steal-aggressive manner. It's really only a question of whether, there was a more fundamental issue that forced the team to be less aggressive such as a new inability to afford gambling.
If someone wants to explore that possibility I'm open to it. What I think is crucial to understand though is that Bobby Jones was the big thief and the big shotblocker on the team in those years and his numbers went down by large amounts. It would seem then at the very least that the defensive fall off had everything to do with Jones being unable to do his thing to the same degree as he did before.
The minutes issue is a good one to bring up. How can Jones have such a huge impact in limited minutes? Worth contemplating whether you think it's believable. What is indisputable though is that the team thrived on defense by putting a ton of turnover pressure on the opponent through steals, and that Bobby Jones was the one racking up the big numbers there regardless of how many minutes he played.
Okay now BIG WAIT A MINUTE to something you said. You said the team improved defensively in '76-77. It's crucial to understand the ABA to NBA transition. Y'know how people say the ABA played no defense? That's justifyiable in modern stats because of the high ORtg's in the league. However, when those same defenses that were getting torched in the ABA came over to the NBA, they pwn'ed the NBA teams.
Consider this. Here are the top defenses of '76-77:
1. Denver (ABA team)
2. Chicago (acquired Artis Gilmore from ABA)
3. Phoenix
4. Philly (acquired Erving & McGinnis from ABA)
5. Portland (acquired Lucas from ABA, also obviously Walton becomes unreal)
Now look at the top defenses of the ABA in '75-76:
1. Nets (Erving forced to leave the following year, the horrendous Nets are STILL above average defensively without him)
2. Kentucky (folded, had Gilmore & Lucas)
3. Denver
There was really no reason to say there was something wrong with Denver's defense in '75-76. They weren't as good as a couple other ABA teams, but those teams got split up and turned into other strong NBA defenses.
It is also worth noting though that while Jones did play less in that first year in the NBA, his per minute numbers went up considerably and he was 2nd in the league in defensive WS and 2nd in the league in WS/48. Dude was feasting on NBA offenses who hadn't seen anything like him before.
The team then regresses the next year on defense when Jones regresses in his stats. I simply don't know why you'd trust minutes more than the actual productive numbers here. Again: Regardless of the minutes played, dude was averaging 2 steals and 2 blocks per game. Very few players in history have done that. Not saying that that necessarily means huge impact, but when you have a rare statistical feat achieved, and the stats in question correlate loudly with that particular team's success, it's just silly to assume there's not a major relationship. The precise causality can be analyzed and debated in further detail, but clearly the success was either due to the stuff Jones was their star at, or something more fundamental which allowed that stuff to take place.
Re: KG. Not saying Jones is the same as KG. More than one way to skin a cat. What I am saying though when I make the connection is that Jones is the rare bird who can rapidly cover a lot of ground horizontally and vertically, and who plays with fantastic motor. You take that, the praise of contemporaries, the correlation between his production and the team's defensive success, I don't see how this can possibly be dismissed lightly.
Re: Jones playing at downfall level for the rest of his career. This is a good point and something I spoke to earlier. If you knock Jones for having only a short peak because of this, I understand. It is the case though that his teams continued to love the heck out of him for the good he did when he was on the court for quite a long time afterward.
Re: SRS nothing to brag about and they had Issel and Thompson. I'd say it's important to look at SRS relative to the league in question. There were only two teams with SRS north of 4 in '76-77 (champion Portland, and Denver. There was in other words far less separation between teams then there is now. Does this mean that all players involved are somehow less valuable? I've never felt comfortable saying that.
And so in a league where 4 SRS means the difference between average an elite, Denver fell from elite to average between '77 & '78, despite still having prime Issel and Thompson. What happened? Well, pretty much nothing except their defense fell apart. Again, despite having Issel and Thompson not really changing their games at all.
So it begs the question: Why do you respect Issel and Thompson so much more than Jones when Denver's rise to prominence came before they arrived, and left while they were still doing their top level thing?
