gmoney411 wrote:PCProductions wrote:gmoney411 wrote:It's not the same. There is a huge difference between being able to lose 18-22 games and only being able to lose 2. Once you hit a certain point the difficultly greatly increases. The NBA has 60 win teams most years so I don't think 60 is where it gets incredibly difficult.
And yes I think the Warriors are just as good of a team with Harden subbed in for Curry.
His point still stands. There are diminishing returns for team improvement the closer you get to the maximum wins. Improving a 10 win team to 20 wins is a hell of a lot easier than improving a 50 win team to 60. That's just basic statistics more than anything.
You are using extremes in your example too. When you get as low as 10 wins there is much more room for improvement. But when you are talking 30 to 50 and 40 to 60 you are comparing middling teams to high seeded teams. The numbers get a lot closer in the middle. I'm not sure it is a "hell of a lot" harder to go from 40 to 60 compared to 30 to 50. It could actually be harder to get those 20 wins for the 30 win team in certain situations if they are further away from victories than the 40 win team. The 40 win team could be right on the edge and only needs a slight addition to start racking up wins while the 30 win team is much further away. But yes in a vacuum stats would lead us to believe that it's harder to get from 40 to 60 but we would still want to know how much harder that is because it could be a small difference.
They are using extremes to simplify a general principle for you, but you also have a point.
What I"d say is that what is generally true is that the better the team already is, the harder it is to improve it. But that doesn't mean it's a given every time.
In the case of Curry the other factor is that its a huge SRS difference we're talking about here. GSW isn't a team lucking into 60 wins, their SRS is absolutely massive. The gap between GSW and Houston with this is as big as the gap between Houston and Boston. And so what I'd say is this: Realistically I seriously doubt anyone talking like yourself actually views Houston as halfway between Golden State and Boston. As such when people say thing s like "yeah but Curry has help", they are imagining Curry's team being a smidge better than Houston, and they chafe at the notion of defaulting to giving the nod to the guy on the better team. And so what I'd want to emphasize is that there has to be a threshold where Curry's team success is big enough to move past the supporting-cast based arguments, and if you don't think GS is ne
