Dat2U wrote:payitforward wrote:Well, first off I'm the one who introduced Gibson, so it's not fair of me to take advantage of what you said -- but... I will anyway!!
If you are restricting your point to saying that Taj Gibson -- at age 29, with 3 years of college ball and 5 years in the league -- would defend LMA better than Terrence Jones did -- at age 22 with 2 years of college and 2 years in the league -- then it wouldn't be worth debating the point. I'm sure he would!
If you are saying that Taj Gibson at 29, signed for the next 3 years at a total of $25.5m, and given his overall productivity is someone you'd like to have -- that is your call.
If you are saying that players who put up his numbers commonly command those kind of $$, that's an empirical question. Doesn't matter what either of us opine. A little research proves you mistaken.
If you'd go further -- and I think in effect you have -- to say that Gibson at those $$ is more worth having than Jones -- a big, young, gifted prospect who for 3 years total will cost less than Gibson does this year alone...? I think you'd be in a minority of one, tbh.
Finally, re: how Gibson was "a man among boys" against us, keep in mind that a) Taj Gibson said the best player in the series was Trevor Booker (your favorite! 
) and b) Chicago *lost* that series!!
Not to say Taj didn't play well -- he did. Not nearly as well as Booker, but he played well all the same.
Were obviously not going to agree here. Because I think there’s a large disconnect between the stat you rely on heavily and what I view as winning basketball.
The fact you can actually say with confidence that Taj was outplayed by Booker in the Bulls playoff series says everything. You could only come to that conclusion by utilizing something other than actually watching the game. Taj really played a high level and it certainly wasn’t his fault that Chicago lost the series. I think you could point the finger at half the Chicago roster… but definitely not Taj.
If had Taj, at his contract, instead of a re-signed Trevor Booker or whatever MLE free agent PF we could find this offseason, I’d argue we’d be legit Finals contenders in the East. I’d probably even support an all-in strategy and resigning Ariza in that case. Taj is really really good player and IMO, he’s one of the best defensive power forwards in the league and top 10 at his position. Offensively he may not be as efficient as Booker, but unlike Booker, defenses respect his mid-range game which opens up space for his teammates.
You're right, we're not going to agree. I don't rely on any one "stat" heavily. I do rely on measurable productivity "heavily" -- as in 100%. And of course measurable productivity comes in the form of a variety of statistics.
Plus, "measurable productivity" is not different from "winning basketball" -- how could it be? The final score of a game is 100% a product of measurable productivity and zero percent a product of anything else. And that overall measurable productivity is nothing but the individual players' productivity added up (no multiplication, no extra anything -- just add up the columns).
You could argue that the mistakes get made when you figure out how to compare the meaning/value of particular good things or bad things players do, with the goal of discriminating who is or is not responsible for how many wins (and what you think I "rely on heavily" is not a stat but a formula for such comparison, but in fact I don't rely on it heavily -- I just think it's the best tool of its kind: i.e. compared to PER or EFF or Win Shares).
But that would be an empirical claim, to be decided based on data, not at all a matter of what you "view as winning basketball." And, the data is in -- of the myriad ways to do such roll-ups of player productivity, WP48 correlates most closely (by a fair amount) with win-loss records.
As to Book and Taj in the Chicago series... ok, I cannot tell a lie; I didn't go back and actually compare the numbers. As to watching the games -- you're kidding, of course, to think I didn't watch them! But I don't remember them minute by minute in detail, and I just don't use the eye test. How often does it need to be proven, as it has been over and over, that people see what they want to see and what they expect to see.
Maybe you think you're the exception to that rule, and if so that too makes you like everybody else! But they're not, and you're not. Sorry, and repeating the claim doesn't improve its claim on truth.
About you thinking that with Taj we'd be in the hunt for the Eastern title, what to say? Taj played almost exactly the same # of minutes as Nene, Seraphin and Singleton combined. Had he played those minutes for us instead of those 3 guys, we might easily have won an extra 4 games, something like that. Leaving that aside, had he merely played Booker's minutes we'd likely have won something more like 41 games rather than 44.
