Doctor MJ wrote:
I think you're seeing a false analogy here, although I won't say it's completely dissimilar.
1. The Spurs "Big 4" you mention plays only 30 MPG on average even in the playoffs, while the average of the Boston Big 4 plays 37 MPG. That right there is the difference between a traditional star-based model (in Boston), and an ensemble (in San Antonio) on the level we've never seen before. The last "ensemble" champion we had was Detroit, and even they played their key men like stars.
I only glance at this argument later in this thread. In part because it is the one area where I agree with your post. SAS ensemble style play is historically unique and just as Pop figuring out the corner three he is ahead of the curve. Where I think you err is in misevaluating the talent on the roster. There is a minor disagreement that I touch on later
2. Re: key is talent evaluation. I think that's naive. Other than Kawhi, the Spurs have no player on their roster acquired after 2001 that even now people see as something special.
And yes, the GMing wing of the team deserves credit for Kawhi, but on what planet is a GM who drafts one star talent in 13 years of drafts an off-the-charts performance?
It is inaccurate to say the Spurs record of drafting players isn't off the charts succesful considering where they draft. I don't know what special means. I'm guessing the potential to be a top 15 guy but the specialness isn't critical in evaluating how good management is. You evaluate drafting based on the quality of the player in relationship to where they were picked.
One nice way to prove that it isn't Popovich's coaching that is making these role players look good is by looking at all the players they've traded away over the years either before signing them or to avoid paying them. SAS management is fairly cheap so a lot of players they draft end up quickly going elsewhere. The results of these players careers on other team strongly support the view that they actually have talent.
Dejuan Blair was a second round pick. He fell to the second round because the general feeling was his knees wouldn't hold up. SAS picking him is a sign of smart management. Most 1st round picks leave the team they were drafted by after a half decade so you really shouldn't care that much about 5 years down the road. For a similar reason, Portland was right to take Roy even though they knew he would likely fall apart. Blair was a very productive player in SAS in limited minuted. He left to Dallas and has played a similar level role. He has entirerly maintained his production level and been a similar player to what he was in SAS.
George Hill was an extremely productive player considering he was a late round pick. To give a rough idea of how good his career has gone he ranks 4th in win shares for his draft class. SAS traded him to Indiana to get Leonard. Hill has completely maintained his level of production in Indiana. Statistically on a per minute basis his best season actually came in Indiana despite the fact that his minutes had been upped from 28 to 35 mpg. This strongly supports the view that his success should be chalked up primarily to talent identification not coaching.
Gordon Dragic was a second round pick who never played in SAS because he was traded away for someone named Malik Harison. I don't even remember who that dude was. Dragic was a league average player by his second year and has now broken out to being a very strong guard. He's special by whatever definition Leonard is special. This is another piece of evidence that you can chalk up that SAS are very good at talent identification.
Beno Udrich was a late round pick whose best years occurred outside SAS. Despite being picked at the end of the 1st round he lasted over ten years in the NBA which supports the view that SAS has superior talent identification.
Barbosa was a end of the first round pick who never played in SAS for money reason. He ended up winning a 6MOY and having several excellent seasons in Phoenix before his speed left him. This is another piece of evidence in favor of strong talent identification.
Luis Scola was one of the last picks in the 2002 draft. He never played in SAS for money and signability reasons. When he finally came over to the NBA it was at 27 and he promptly turned in several strong seasons before he got old. Again as a rough idea of how succesful his career was, he ended up being 9th in his draft class in win shares despite spending several of his most productive seasons overseas. Again this is further evidence for talent identification being key.
That concludes the period from 2002-2014. I'll mention as an aside that SAS finding two HOF guards with late picks in 99-01 should be included in trying to determine if management ability to identify talent and that not doing so is both bizarre and self-serving for the argument being presented.
I'll now focus on some of the role players on the current squad to argue in favor of talent identification being more critical than coaching: Tiago Splitter, Danny Green, Patty Mills and Boris Diaw.
Tiago Splitter has been a very good player in SAS. He was only taken at the end of the first round. On the surface it would appear Popovich is coaching a player above his talent level. In actuality Splitter only fell to the bottom of the first round because of signability issue. Matt Yglesias had a nice write up on how SAS landed him:
When the Spurs drafted Splitter at position 28 he was already a known quantity in NBA circles, and few people doubted he'd be a successful player. He considered entering the 2006 NBA draft, but the problem was that no teams wanted to take him with a high pick. And the issue wasn't that they doubted his talents; it was that he was still under contract to play for a Spanish team. By the 2007 draft he was 22 and thus automatically eligible to be drafted, but again nobody wanted to take him with a high pick because it seemed he'd be unavailable to play NBA basketball for years. So the Spurs took the 28th overall pick and used it to make a long-term investment. They were confident that sooner or later Splitter would want to come to the NBA to test his skills against the best players in the world. And, indeed, he did. But not until the fall of 2010.
When Splitter finally joined the team, the Spurs had a guy who'd been MVP and Finals MVP of the Spanish league, an all-Euroleague first team player, and a multi-time champion on various levels of basketball. And from Day 1 in the NBA he was an efficient scorer and solid rebounder, he just took a year or two to master the Spurs' defensive rotations.
But his success wouldn't have come as a surprise to any of the scouts working on the 2006 and 2007 drafts, all of whom thought he was a good player. The reason he fell to the Spurs is that most general managers feel they have to manage for the short-term. If the team does badly next year you might get fired. So he can't draft a guy who'll be completely useless for the next three years in the hopes that it'll get you high-quality cheap talent five or six years down the road. GMs implement drafting strategies that are the equivalent of a CEO who focuses on quarterly earnings estimates rather than on developing the next generation of products. A good player on a rookie contract is an extremely valuable commodity in a sport with a salary cap, and displaying a modicum of patience to get one should be a no-brainer. But few teams have the discipline to do it.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/201 ... ience.htmlAn MVP and Finals MVP of the Spanish league, an all-Euroleague first team player isn't someone whose success in the NBA should be chalked up to coaching. All the evidence points in favor of the idea the dude can flat out play and is another piece of evidence in favor of SAS having superior talent identification abilities.
Accrossthecourt wrote a nice post on Danny Green's scouting evaluations coming out of college.
acrossthecourt wrote:While I think Popovich is one of the best coaches ever, I don't agree that he mines gold from backyards.
For instance, Danny Green seems like a diamond in the rough, but look at Hollinger's draft rater from 2009:
Top 12-Rated Collegians For 2009
Player School Draft Rater
1. Ty Lawson North Carolina 16.34
2. Blake Griffin Oklahoma 16.21
3. Tyreke Evans Memphis 15.02
4. Austin Daye Gonzaga 14.24
5. Stephen Curry Davidson 14.18
6. Nick Calathes Florida 13.66
7. DeJuan Blair Pittsburgh 13.56
8. Danny Green North Carolina 13.28
Danny Green is the other surprise on this list. He's rated highly every year I've done this, so seeing him doesn't shock me anymore, but he's received little attention nationally. Still, he's a great shooter who can defend and he rates as the third-best wing after Daye and Tyreke Evans.
http://insider.espn.go.com/nba/draft200 ... ter-090618
Many people though Green could play. His level of play in college strongly supported the view he was NBA caliber. It was mental issues that held him back. He was cut from SAS multiple times for being a pain. As with many people he grew up in his mid-20s and the natural talent that was already there came through.
Patty Mills on the surface seems to be a product of coaching. He was a scrub in Portland and cut. Yet a look at his international record strongly supports the view the guy always had talent. At the 2012 Olympics he led the tournament in scoring. Much with Splitter his record overseas indicated ability not circumstances.
Boris Diaw was a failure with Atlanta and Charlotte but was a big success in Phoenix and San Antonio. In this case you could argue that his success is a product of coaching but I would argue that it indicates strong talent identification. SAS recognized that Diaw can be a very valuable player on a team with ball movement but that if you put him on a team were you expect isolation scoring you aren't going to get much.
Is there any other franchise that comes close to this record with late picks? I don't think so. The evidence on careful examination supports the view that SAS kick butt at figuring out who can play the game of basketball,
Where the Spurs have succeeded is in acquiring role players, and everything we know about role players tells us that their actual efficacy depends drastically on the coaching.
3. Boston was a team winning with defense who still had the best per minute defender in the league at this point.
The Spurs are more impressive in general, . . . and they literally have no one on their roster who can be called an offensive superstar. That's what's crazy.
By best defender in the league you are citing RAPM as conclusive evidence. I'll mention for those that didn't read the Duncan/KG RAPM thread on the statistical analysis board that I strongly reject the strong RAPM hypothesis but I'll accept it here for purpose of discussion.
Respectfully, You can't have it both ways and yet that is what you are attempting to do here.
If you're going to cite KG's per minute impact you are implicitly arguing that KG only playing 75% of the minutes of the other members of Boston's Big 4 isn't important. If that is the case you have to recognize that Manu, who is the 7th best offensive player in the NBA, played 75% of the minutes of KG. It has never made sense to me because it isn't logical that the difference between a player playing 2000 and 2600 minutes isn't important but the gap between a 1500 minute player and 2000 minute is. Either the difference matters for both or neither.
Since you think it doesn't matter for KG it doesn't matter for Manu, that means by your chosen metric SAS do have a offensive superstar Manu Ginobili who has been as good as Curry this year on the offensive end.
but the most noteworthy thing about them right now is their offense
That isn't the case. They are actually an extremely balanced club between offense and defense. Their offense was 3.8 points better than league average and their defense was 4.3 points better than league average.
It is important to recognize in the post-season that match-ups play a huge role. They have faced the 2, 3, 5 and 7 best offense by ortg this post-season and the 6th, 11th, 17th and 22nd best defense. Given that reality it isn't surprising that over the course of the post-season their offense has looked better and their defense worse.
This is especially the case when you remember Miami's defense has completely collapsed since the ECSF.
In the second round they faced a mediocre Brooklyn squad that ranked league average in ORTG. Against Miami they put up an ortg that would have been the best in the NBA over the RS. The Brooklyn Nets in the ECSF scored at the rate of the best offense in the NBA. That is a damning indictment of Miami's defense.
Miami's defense against Indiana is even more alarming. It isn't easy to calculate Indiana's ortg post all-star break. If you assume their pace was constant throughout the season their ortg post all-star break would have been tied for 2nd to last only beating out the 76ers who were intentionally trying to lose. Through the first rounds they performed similarly. Against Miami their offense was as good as the Thunder and Spurs over the RS. That is a massive indictment of Miami's defense.
A large part of SAS offensive success in the finals has to be chalked up to an awful Miami defense given that a horrendous Indiana offense and mediocre Brooklyn offense lit up Miami.
Accordingly, one is left to wonder how Miami very easily made the finals playing such bad defense. Part of it is the EC is a joke but partly it is due to the fact their offense was playing god-like. Against a monster Indiana defense that is historically great, Miami tossed up a 118 ortg. That would be by far the best mark in league history.
Against SAS their ortg is 106.6 which is league average. A Miami offense that was playing at the level of the best offense of all-time through the playoffs has been reduced to a league average offense. That is a massive accomplishment for SAS defense and goes against your view that SAS success is mostly about offense.
4: Re: '10-11. That wasn't a different era though. That was when we started realizing that something very strange was happening in the Spurs. They were back on the upswing after we had assumed they were dying. The principles at plays there are the very ones were raving about now.
The period from 09-11 really is a different era. In 2009, Manu missed half the season and the post-season. PER is a far from perfect metric but this will give you an idea of how bad the roster was going into the 1st round with Dallas.
Outside of Duncan and Parker, this is the PER of SAS playoff rotation:
Hill: 9.8
Finley: 9.7
Udoka: 8.0
Roger Mason: 7.9
Gooden: 7.7
Bowen: 7.4
Kurt Thomas: 6.9
Bonner: 3.3
Looking at this roster, it seems very clear the main problem in SAS wasn't a decline of the Big 3 but rather the supporting cast was utterly putrid. Duncan had declined but he was still by any reasonable metric a top 10 player in the league. Parker turned in the 2nd best season of his career. The problem was they went into the post-season with only two NBA level players.
In 2010, they rebounded and posted a 5 SRS as the development of Hill and Bonner along with the arrival McDyess, Blair and Jefferson made their supporting cast adequate. In the first round they beat a better version of the Dallas club they lost to the year before.
Now as I'm sure you will point out the series ended in a sweep but that is deceptive. This was the average defecit SAS entered into the 4th quarter against Phoenix: -10, -2, 1, -1. With the exception of G1 SAS had a chance to win every game. The second major factor was that Manu got hurt entering the WCSF and was completely ineffective. Third, Duncan was very poor in this series.
In 2011, their SRS was 5.86 which while not at the level of the mid-00s is reasonably strong. They were eliminated in the 1st round which happened for several reasons.
First, Memphis was not at all a typical 8th seed. Their average SRS from 11-14 is 2.87 and have posted an SRS of roughly 4.9 in the post-season during that period. To put it another way you could argue Memphis was better than any team Miami has faced in the EC playoffs since 2012 save the 13 Pacers.
Second, again a key injury to Manu hurt them. The only game they lost at home was the one he missed.
Third, Duncan was utterly horrendous in this series. HE was a 12-10 player who turned the ball over as if a sleeve and scored below average.
It should be noted that after 2011 Duncan has been a very strong playoff performer. While not at the mid 00's level he is still giving them 17-10-2 at good efficiency in the post-season. He has also had some massive series during that span. The Memphis series also highlights the importance of Splitter's arrival. With Splitter being an option, Popovich now has a second big man to turn to on the night's Duncan has old man legs. With the emergence of other guards, SAS nearly won the finally last year despite getting basically nothing from a banged up MAnu.
Looking at their playoff performances from 2009-11 it appears the decline in SAS was more about the decay of the supporting cast in 2009. During that season, SAS tried to roll with a 3 man roster and had only 2 men in the post seaon. The emergence of the role players has insulated SAS from the vulnerabilities they faced during that period to injuries to Manu and the impact of age on Duncan.
And while I certainly see some similarity with Thibs accomplishment in Chicago, the issue in Chicago in part seems to be that the Bulls intensity edge decreases in the playoffs as other teams get more hyped. The Spurs on the other hand rest their players like crazy.
I also find it just weird that you'd essentially be looking at the Spurs timeline and saying "Sure they were capable of winning 60 plus 3 years ago, but what really makes this team special is the talent they've added since then.", as if the Spurs were still basically a nothing team back then and now they've transformed. Hell, he second most important new piece they have is Boris Diaw who had been bouncing around from team to team and whose stats even now make him look like an utterly run of the mill player.
I think I did a pretty good job showing the roster really did improve dramatically from the hell it had fallen into during 2009. I'll also repeat that Boris looked great in Phoenix,
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