G35 wrote:The belief that I do not like stats/numbers/quantification. This is not entirely true.
That's not what I said. I actually wrote: "From my perspective your focus is way too much on the numbers which are in disagreement with your view and you try to hard to discredit the numbers rather than understanding the made argument."
That is something very, very different from what you perceived.
G35 wrote:The one topic I do not trust numbers is sports.
Somehow you put a lot of trust in the amount of individual and team accomplishments, which in fact are also presented as numbers ...
Btw, the game is decided by the scoring margin, which is a single number. You don't trust the results either? ;)
G35 wrote:Maybe I need it dumbed down even more but when I hear the term "impact" I equate that to achievement, accomplishment. When I read that Nash has more offensive impact than almost any other player, I want to see the results of that impact. Reading, "5.6" does nothing for me. Boiling it down to a number does nothing for me. Now I do comprehend that Nash (or KG) may be at the top of many of these lists over and over and over again. Yet, I don't see where that equates to impact. In my mind it shows that he excels at that particular metric but it does not mean it will result in a positive result for his team.
Yeah, that's what most people likely got from your posts; you don't understand the arguments made.
G35 wrote:I know that PPG means nothing, it's points per possession that matters, running an efficient offense. I understand that. I UNDERSTAND THAT. But I (and others) do not have to believe in that.
That makes actually zero sense. In a game where in almost all cases the teams involved have the same amount of possessions in a game, the team which uses a possession in average more efficient will win the game. That is not something you can or can not believe in, that is just a simple fact. The only situation where a possession more is generated is when a team starts a quarter by having the ball and also is having the ball at the end of the quarter. And even in such a case, given that each teams has about 94 possessions in a game (taking the average in this season) a team needs to be incredible close in terms of efficiency to the other team to win the game despite being worse in terms of points per possession. To illustrate that further, we can pick an even easier example in which a team has 100 possession and scores exactly 1 point per possession. Now we assume that the opponent scores 1.01 points per possession and has the maximum amount of 2 possessions less in that game (a team can have up to 2 possessions more in a game, because they only can start two quarters with the ball, the other team will have the ball at the start of the other two quarters). In that case the game ends 100 to 99, meaning, the team with the 2 more possession can win the game by 1 point despite being 0.01 points worse per possession than the opponent.
As you can see, that is not a point of belief or not, the ability to use the possession more efficient than the opponent is vital in order to win the game in almost all cases.
G35 wrote:The problem that I have in particular with Nash/Suns offense is that offense is NOT independent of defense.
Nobody is arguing against that; in fact I just wrote and you even cited it: The resulting scoring margin was the key statistical argument, not the offense alone.
The Suns with Nash outscored the opponents by a big margin, that's what happened.
G35 wrote:Amare Stoudemire is heavily criticized for his defense but his contributions to the offense is minimized.
We went through that before, seriously, we showed you exactly the effect Nash had on Stoudemire's scoring efficiency and turnover rate. We all saw how Stoudemire played without Nash. Yes, he had offensive impact, no doubt about that, but his high efficiency was enabled by Nash, and there is more than enough evidence to support that, you just have the odd behaviour to ignore the facts.
G35 wrote:I have not seen anyone who has disagreed with this but for all this advanced thinking why is this not considered in overall evaluation of Nash's production?
It is, and there were examples brought up of better defensive teams with Nash playing, somehow completely debunking your idea that a team can't play good defense with Nash. And the other part and I repeat myself: The resulting scoring margin was the key statistical argument, not the offense alone.
G35 wrote:I mean I bet the 2011 Mavericks would have been a more potent offense with this lineup all year:
PG Barea
SG Terry
SF Kidd
PF Marion
C Dirk
That team could have been in contention for the #1 offense but their defense would have been in shambles.
And that's a perfect example of you making a claim out of thin air, but having a strong belief that you are right. The Mavericks played Barea-Terry-Kidd for 205 minutes in 2011, they had in average a 107.5 ORtg. No, such lineup was not a good idea offensively. And on the other hand: The Mavericks were actually killing the opponents offensively with their lineup of Terry-Kidd-Marion-Nowitzki-Chandler. The Mavericks had 112.9 ORtg and 106.3 DRtg, they didn't won the title, because they played incredible defensively, but because they played incredible offensively. And no, they didn't create a lot of turnovers for fastbreak opportunities, they killed the other teams in halfcourt with p&r/p action as well as ball movement. Exactly what Nash and the Suns did.
G35 wrote:Instead they compromised by having Terry/Barea come off the bench and they had Deshawn Stevenson/Chandler in the starting lineup, two players that clearly hurt their offense.
Chandler did not hurt the offense at all, in fact, he had a profound positive impact on offense due to his ability to catch and convert underneath the basket.
Stevenson was used as a starter, because the Mavericks had the strategy to bring instant offense from the bench, using Terry as the 6th man instead of having him in as a starter. If they would have had a better player than Stevenson overall, they would have used that player instead, but they hadn't.
G35 wrote:Now from my perspective and what I have seen offense, especially very potent offenses, do not necessarily guarantee success in the playoff's.
Teams with really good defense, but rather below average offense don't have success in playoffs either. In average the championship team is as good offensively as it is defensively. But we have seen both other cases winning as well. It is about the scoring margin in the end, not about being good or not good offensively/defensively.
G35 wrote:- the Mavericks traded Nash
A perfect example of you making up some stuff in order to fit your narrative. The Mavericks didn't trade Nash, Nash signed as a FA with the Suns, because the Suns offered more guaranteed salary. The Mavericks didn't have a concern about Nash's quality as a player and made basically the same offer as the Suns in terms of yearly salary, just that they didn't want to guarantee the whole salary for the last season, because they felt that Nash could break down anytime soon. That was based on the fact that Nash in the previous seasons always was ran out of gas in the playoffs and couldn't handle the minutes.
The defensive issues of the Mavericks came from the fact that they had no center in 2004; instead had 3 PF with Nowitzki, Walker and Jamison. Thus, they played an offensive minded PF as center basically all the time.
The decision to trade Jamison came completely independent from Nash, and the plan was all along to bring in another defensive center (Dampier in that case) to play the minutes not covered by Bradley. They also wanted to trade Walker anyway, that had also nothing to do with Nash.
G35 wrote:However, I still think using .44 is still too arbitrary a number and gives too much weight to FT's.
Honestly, that is either stupidity or intellectual dishonesty, no idea how to express that in another way, but claiming you understood where the 0.44 is coming from and then going forward by proclaiming that number is supposed to be "arbitrary" can only be either of that. To explain it again: the 0.44 is in there, because one FTA is equivalent to 0.44 FGA. That is based on the facts, that is not a "arbitrary number" at all. If you think that this approximation is not correct for all players, you can actually count the true shooting attempts via pbp. Doing that for a couple of players will make you realize that using the formula instead is much easier and awfully close to the reality.
I better stop here, because it should be sufficient evidence that this is going nowhere ...
). It's to the point that I actually felt bad about being so harsh with the way I phrased my last reply, concerning Wilt's place on all-time lists (I'm not saying 'the' all-time list, because you're right that there are many, depending on criteria). I was a longtime regular on this board as a reader, before I started posting here, and I know that you're one of the guys who are pretty low on Wilt, and you have him outside of your top 10 (in the 13-16 range, IIRC), and you have KG over him, and I can easily grasp the argumentation for that. Wilt basically never proved that he could be an all-time great first option in the postseason, and his defensive impact was inconsistent, as were the other parts of his game and his attitude and approach ot the game. His scoring efficiency also differed a lot, depending on his role on a team. His teams' record against Russell's Celtics isn't as good as it should be, considering that Wilt actually had a lot of good teams around him. These are the argument against WIlt that I know, and it's hard to disagree with any of those. Any other, perhaps?
You know, I'm just trying to find some common ground here, so we could continue this conversation. 
Which means that the so-called 'popular consensus' still affects my perception to a certain degree. I guess it depends who I'm discussing with - when you put something grey next to something white, it seems to be black, and if you put it next to something black, it looks white...You know the story.
