+100000000.
tsherkin wrote:Kobe does pretty well for himself if you look at his advanced numbers. There are some guys who've done better, some who haven't...
PER is not a useful tool for evaluating players specifically; it's more of a stratification tool, and it does a decent job of that with the right minutes cut-offs and everything. But like any stat, it tells you something specific and if you don't fully grasp what it's telling you, then you're trying to extrapolate based on information that isn't there.
This conversation shouldn't have gone on this long with PER as the focus. Kobe isn't as efficient a scorer as someone like Jordan, so naturally his PER trails. In his athletic prime, he didn't get quite the same opportunities to dominate while he had his speed, so his peak PER isn't the same. He isn't as good as MJ (to continue with just a single example), so that's no surprise.
David Robinson has monster PERs, but tails off a lot in the RS because he couldn't maintain his scoring volume or field goal efficiency... but because he blocked a lot of shots, stole the ball a bunch for a big, hit the glass well and drew a ton of FTAs, he does reasonably well even still.
Kobe's got a couple of RS PERs over 26 (26.1 in 06-07, 28.0 in 05-06) and has generally hovered between 22-24 otherwise. That's the sign of a very productive player. It tells you literally almost nothing more than that he's putting numbers into the box score, though, and that he wasn't doing it on abysmal efficiency. His ORTGs are seasonally right where you would expect a really good first-option scorer to settle... and at his peak, his RAPM numbers are all in-line with a pretty dominate offensive player, hovering around +6.0 from 06 through 09.
Something else you can add in his favor is his USG against his TOV, which is very much a positive reflection of Kobe's ability. His career 11.4% TOV is pretty good in isolation, but when you consider that against a career 31.8% USG, it grows in significance. If you consider that he has both the 9th, 14th and 1st single-season USG% in NBA history, you realize that he's a guy who has been on the ball a LOT.
In 05-06, he posted 38.7% USG and 9.0% TOV, which is remarkable. In 2010-2011, he posted 35.1% against 11.4%, which is still pretty good and, messed-up hand and all, he managed 35.7% / 11.7% this past season.
Food for thought when talking about Kobe's advanced stats. He doesn't give you those hyper-efficient 118-120+ ORTGs that you get from guys like Nash, Lebron, Dirk, Paul, etc, but that's OK.
What was Wade's ORTG when he won the title in 06? 115, same as peak Kobe. He was at 10.2 OWS. Kobe's been at 10+ OWS in 03 (11.0), 06 (11.6) and 07 (10.8). He's been at 9+ twice beyond that. Wade has two seasons at 10+, 06 and 09, at 10.2 and 10.3 OWS respectively. He's made up the difference by being a better defender than Kobe because of his length and power, plus Miami's coaching, but offensively, they've been relatively similar.
Another thing that does a favor to Kobe's reputation is to compare efficiency (TS%, in this case) relative to league average.
A marginal star offensive weapon like, say, Carmelo Anthony, hovers around 110 ORTG and +1 to +2 percent over league average. "Marginal" being a relative term, since he's still a very good offensive player, but we're talking about all-time greats here, so someone has to take the butt-end of the stick. So again, still a really good player, but only playing a little over league average by comparison.
Kobe, on the other hand, has looked a lot better. Shave off his first two "I'm just out of HS" seasons, and he's been averaging +2.4. Now, shave off the last three years of his career so that we can look at him more at his peak and he's at +3.0. He's been pretty consistent about playing at that level above league average, and that's pretty damned good. Little differences like that come out when you really look at what is happening with a player instead of just at linear box score production metrics like PER or Tendex or the NBA's Efficiency stat and all that junk.
No matter what you want to say about Kobe, it's all got to be grounded in the notion that he was perennially one of the 3-5 best players in the league for basically a decade (after his ramp-up as a HS player and before his age and injury caused obvious decline), and that in that time, he's been an extremely successful, productive and well-decorated player. His career is unquestionably one of the 10 or 12 best in the history of the league. He's an MVP who has led his team to repeat titles (and three straight appearances in the Finals). Right away, you can put him in contention, career-wise, with basically anyone in the bottom half of the top 10. Almost all of them. I don't think he's quite decorated well enough to be 6th or 7th, but he's got a lot of mobility in the bottom third of that kind of ranking because he HAS achieved a great deal in his career and he HAS been a dominant player. The stats DO support this. He hasn't been as fantastic as some of the truly remarkable greats and he hasn't been as likeable as some of the others, but even they had their stinkers, right?
Kobe's brain is like Young Jordan, but perpetually. He's still been able to put things aside in order to win titles, and we mostly only complain and moan when he's played on teams that have lacked the talent requisite for making a title run. You didn't hear a ton of complaints about Kobe's shot selection and such during the 08-10 run because it wasn't as big a deal. Problematic, but manageable within the context of their success. It's only been since they fell off in 2011 and after that we're hearing this stuff again and a lot. Like any player, he has flaws and relative positioning compared to greats considers such things, but to rip Kobe for "mediocre" advanced stats and then use the worst of them and none of the ones that benefit him?
That's not the right way to approach this conversation at all.
Bah spoilsport.
