The Stephen Curry Thread (2015-16 Pt. 2)

[JordansBulls]

Cleveland better not try to outgun the Warriors

[RSCD3_]

Cleveland better not try to outgun the Warriors

They would have less of a chance trying to win with the ground and pound style.

There offense has been GOAT level in these playoffs. This witha somewhat slow pace around 92. They can still theoretically outgun the warriors without playing up and down bball.

[The High Cyde]

Cleveland better not try to outgun the Warriors

They're not game-planning to.

[RSCD3_]

Cleveland better not try to outgun the Warriors

They're not game-planning to.

Well does Outgun refer to outscore or run and gun because Im pretty sure the Cavs are planning to win and theyve been pretty good Historic on offense, I dont think they can defend better than the warriors if it's a slogfest and if they want a chance they'll have to hope their offense is good enough to edge golden state's.

This doesnt mean they have to Go 7 seconds or less though

[ThreeMileAllan]

Most 3s ever in a playoff series all time ...

1. Steph 32 (2016 vs OKC)
2. Klay 30 (2016 vs OKC)

There are zero other examples of a guy hitting 30. By the time these two are done we won't even be able to conceive of a record regarding 3s that isn't owned by one of them

How they do it boggles the mind, it's absolutely insane and watching Klay destroy that 13pt deficit in the 2nd quarter with those deep 3 bombs was vicious.

Still I dislike it. Still I can't bring myself to accept it. I still feel like it's such a gimmick and it degrades a well-rounded game of basketball into chucking 3's and hoping you score. Yes, these guys have perfected shooting 3's to an art, but but but

Yeah I agree with you. The Warriors are influencing the game that is eliminating the power forward and post play altogether. Honestly anyone who is really good at beer pong or bags can just train for threes. What i want to see is footwork in the post. I want to see raw athleticism combined with skill. I want to be able to see players and be in awe that I could never be them. Curry and Klay? I just feel like they're the first to the top of the hill. If Ray Allen knew that coaches would be accepting of him launching 3s from 28 feet, he could have done the same. In 15 years what will rhe game look like? The halftime show where joe blow is launching half court shots while gymnasts are running trampline layups at the rim. I am sorry that is boring to me.

evvvvveeeryone!

[tsherkin]

Yeah I agree with you. The Warriors are influencing the game that is eliminating the power forward and post play altogether.

It would be really amazing if people stopped repeating this lie.

When there are players who are worth significant usage, an intelligent coach will take advantage of that, but it's been decades in the making that post play has been deprecated because it's generally a less-efficient, higher-turnover location which requires precious clock to set up and isn't as valuable as a perimeter-oriented attack.

We're flush with more post talent than we've seen in 20 years and people are still moping that post play is going away. Open your eyes, people...

[ThreeMileAllan]

Yeah I agree with you. The Warriors are influencing the game that is eliminating the power forward and post play altogether.

It would be really amazing if people stopped repeating this lie.

When there are players who are worth significant usage, an intelligent coach will take advantage of that, but it's been decades in the making that post play has been deprecated because it's generally a less-efficient, higher-turnover location which requires precious clock to set up and isn't as valuable as a perimeter-oriented attack.

We're flush with more post talent than we've seen in 20 years and people are still moping that post play is going away. Open your eyes, people...

Its definitely not a lie. Thats hyperbolic. Anyway, you kind of contradicted yourself that post play is NOT going away as much as we think, but at the same time its a less efficient shot. Well, which is it? Is it going away or is it less efficient?? Post play IS going away. Its way more valuable now to have your starting center be able to come out and guard the pnr than for them to have post moves. Post play is only less efficient today because rule changes have allowed players a straight line to the basket, moving screens allowed to create space for shooters, and hand checking removed to let the dribbler always be in balance. I love analytics in all sports but other than in baseball rarely does it capture the whole picture. Crediting analytics 100% with the shift in philosophy is not capturing the whole story.

Teams used to have 2 or 3 players who could work the post really efficiently on every roster. Thats definitely not the case anymore.

evvvvveeeryone!

[HeartBreakKid]

Yeah I agree with you. The Warriors are influencing the game that is eliminating the power forward and post play altogether.

It would be really amazing if people stopped repeating this lie.

When there are players who are worth significant usage, an intelligent coach will take advantage of that, but it's been decades in the making that post play has been deprecated because it's generally a less-efficient, higher-turnover location which requires precious clock to set up and isn't as valuable as a perimeter-oriented attack.

We're flush with more post talent than we've seen in 20 years and people are still moping that post play is going away. Open your eyes, people...

Its definitely not a lie. Thats hyperbolic. Anyway, you kind of contradicted yourself that post play is NOT going away as much as we think, but at the same time its a less efficient shot. Well, which is it? Is it going away or is it less efficient?? Post play IS going away. Its way more valuable now to have your starting center be able to come out and guard the pnr than for them to have post moves. Post play is only less efficient today because rule changes have allowed players a straight line to the basket, moving screens allowed to create space for shooters, and hand checking removed to let the dribbler always be in balance. I love analytics in all sports but other than in baseball rarely does it capture the whole picture. Crediting analytics 100% with the shift in philosophy is not capturing the whole story.

Teams used to have 2 or 3 players who could work the post really efficiently on every roster. Thats definitely not the case anymore.

evvvvveeeryone!

Post play has been less efficient than perimeter play for decades. Point guards and shooting guards are considered bigger offensive threats than power forwards and centers, and that isn't a recent thing.

Center is a defensive position, not an offensive position. People draft centers because they want them to anchor their defense, there are very few centers in the history of the NBA that were drafted because of dominant scoring.

Post play is highly susceptible to turnovers...the fact is it takes a long time for the league to catch up to what is efficient and what is not, hence why people were taking 2 pointers when they were only 1 feet away from 3 point territory for decades. Upper management was blind by truly unique talents like Kareem and held on to the idea that a team has to have a huge post presence in order to win, when it is not a requirement. The Jordan Bulls started to wake people up when it was seen that big men who scored in the post were not needed to win titles, the Bulls were not a post handcheck era team or a 3 point era team.

Post play, in which I assume we're talking low post is less important, but it is not necessarily something that is hard to find (nor is it something that GSW destroyed). Fact is many players in the NBA have post games, and many star players also have post games...

[tsherkin]

Its definitely not a lie. Thats hyperbolic.

No, it's definitely flatly incorrect. We see more guard and wing post than we've seen since the 90s, and we have a wealth of guys in the league right now who are using it. We have an abundance of young and reasonably-young veteran talent in the league right now who use the post, and do so frequently. Anthony Davis, Blake Griffin, Demarcus Cousins, Kristaps Porzingis, Brook Lopez, Andre Drummond, Klay Thompson, Dwight Howard, Marc Gasol, Hassan Whiteside, Karl Anthony Towns, Jahlil Okafor, LaMarcus Aldridge, Jonas Valanciunas... And I'm missing guys, and did a limp job of looking at players like Demar Derozan and Kyle Lowry and other perimeter guys who take advantage of the post on a semi-regular basis. Kevin Durant, too, and even James Harden.

It's completely inaccurate to suggest that the post is going away. It's actually making a comeback, which is what makes your statement such egregious falsehood.

Anyway, you kind of contradicted yourself that post play is NOT going away as much as we think, but at the same time its a less efficient shot. Well, which is it?

This isn't a logical statement; these are not mutually exclusive statements.

For most players, the post isn't the best way to score points. That's not new. That's been the case historically as well, which is why there are only so many post players in NBA history who were able to score a lot for a long time. Particularly since player MPG have declined after the mid-70s, guys aren't getting the shooting volume necessary to loft these bigger scoring volumes we used to see from them, and since most of them were reasonably inefficient to begin with (hello, throwing possessions to Nate Thurmond was not a wise move), teams have intelligently begun to move away from that. Outlier post talent still gets touches, but even the greatest post scorers in league history like Wilt and Kareem and Shaq and so forth all regularly and liberally supplemented iso-post with off-ball movement, transition action and offensive rebounding in order to get easy buckets.

Post play IS going away. Its way more valuable now to have your starting center be able to come out and guard the pnr than for them to have post moves.

So again, no, the trend of quality players using the post is actually cycling back up, so you're incorrect. And then, you're also overrating how often we had significant post-scoring centers in league history. The nostalgia of the 90s escapes the truth that we had a bunch of exciting, outlier, superstar talent drafted between 84 and 93. It's that single stretch from which we draw Olajuwon, Malone (obviously a PF instead of a C, but a volume-scoring post player), Ewing, Robinson, Shaq and Zo. There hasn't actually been another point in the league where we drafted that many centers with that kind of scoring quality. There have been stretches before in the league where we had other talent lining up, like when Walton, Lanier and KAJ were in the league together with Dave Cowens (but even he was less of your traditional post center, and likewise Bill Walton and Alvan Adams and so forth), but in terms of post scoring talent? We had a wealth of it drafted in a given decade, and it indelibly imprinted on the minds of people who didn't actually pay attention to the reality of the game that we had post scoring centers all over the place.

Yeah, prior to that, we have guys like Joe Barry Carroll and Bill Cartwright and a bunch of other guys who were on weaker teams and had shots run into them.... but we also had guys like Rik Smits, who was a shooting center. We had fools like Jermaine O'neal, who was a dreadful choice as a volume scoring player. We had Moses Malone, for sure, but he didn't score the way you are discussing. We had Robert Parish... and he didn't score the way you're talking about either.

TL;DR and many examples later, you're completely wrong and laboring under a very common misconception. Post play as it is generally understood isn't an accurate depiction of how things went down in the reality of NBA history. There were a couple of guys early on who could do it, then a sudden burst of guys (several of whom didn't operate the way people remember and many with flaws that are less-discussed now), but realistically speaking, there are really only a handful of players in NBA history who made a living primarily operating with backdown post moves.... and most of them wielded a mid-range jumper and a lot of face-up action to supplement those possessions where they were backing down... and we still see a remarkable amount of those kinds of players today.

Post play is only less efficient today because rule changes have allowed players a straight line to the basket, moving screens allowed to create space for shooters, and hand checking removed to let the dribbler always be in balance.

No, no that isn't even REMOTELY correct. Post play is the same efficiency today as it ever was. You still have to have really good touch to shoot 45% from 3-10 feet, and you still have to have a lot of strong footwork and physical tools and off-ball movement to get the actual shots at the rim which are high-efficiency, and you still need to be good to draw fouls in close.

There's nothing about the rules which has prevented players from using possessions in the post. That's why we still see plenty of iso post from plenty of players. The mythos of the post player has outgrown the reality, though, so people don't realize that someone like Blake Griffin has a fairly classical post game compared to players from previous eras who aren't named Shaq, Wilt or Kareem.

Teams used to have 2 or 3 players who could work the post really efficiently on every roster. Thats definitely not the case anymore.

That is directly inaccurate for most teams, actually.

[RSCD3_]

Speaking of post-play do you think curry will add it to his repetoire as he gets older and he loses a little speed gains old man strength, sometimes he has a touch here and there but since his face up is so good would he have need for it?

[tsherkin]

Speaking of post-play do you think curry will add it to his repetoire as he gets older and he loses a little speed gains old man strength, sometimes he has a touch here and there but since his face up is so good would he have need for it?

Maybe? I wouldn't think so, though, because he doesn't really have a strong build or significant height relative to his position. With his shooting, I'd think he'll just keep doing what he does and playing fewer minutes. Stockton and Nash were able to do what they did for ages and ages, they just winnowed down their minutes as they aged, and they had maybe a little less giddyup when they turned the corner, but Curry's shooting and handles will help him age very well in dribble attack situations, as it did with Nash, and as we saw from Pierce and JJ, even (with lesser shots and more size).

I wouldn't really be looking to post Steph, personally. It worked out great for Billups, for example, but it's not something that I think Steph really needs, particularly since he can just hand off the ball to someone else and work around screens like Reggie or Ray, and keep getting shots until he's ready to pack it in and call it a career.

[ThreeMileAllan]

As much as I love being called completely flat out wrong and a "liar" for having what is ultimately an opinion based discussion neither of us have brought any stats into, I will trudge on. I would love to have this discussion but its a little all over the place. First off, You do make some great points about drafted talent. I can agree with you somewhat on that. But that doesnt tell the whole story. Listing off names of players who take some of their shots from the post doesnt mean post play is alive and well. SURE, it may be cycling back up but the overall trend is downwards over the last 30 years. I suspect that when people discuss the disappearance of post play, they mainly are talking about back to the basket, low post, 1v1 battles. Most of the players you listed prefer to work from the high post these days. I quite honestly dont have access tothe data necessary, but I suspect if we looked at the percentage of shots out of the post over the last 20 years , we would definitely see a decline. There is a reason many are complaining about a 3s or layups style of play now. Maybe many dont subscribe or have the time to parse the data on sportvu, but those observations dont come out of nowhere. In your first post, you state that post play is not as efficient and then in the 2nd post that it is as efficient as it ever was. What exactly are you trying to say? Perhaps that the low post was never as efficient as many believed it to be.

Well, with rule changes have had something to do with that. To say that it didnt is disregarding the game itself. Zone rules helped kill post play. Now instead of having two or three dribbles for moves/counter moves, its more difficult to get an entry pass and the post player has half the time to make a decision that he once did. Of course it is less efficient now, players can collapse with zero fear of illegal defense. Saying that those rule changes didnt affect the is like saying the 3 had no impact on scoring.

Again, I would love to hear your thoughts it is just not cohesive. The league IS taking more 3s and layups than ever before. Many, including you and I would agree with that. So logically, where are those shots being taken away from? Its not exclusively long 2s. You said yourself that post play was inefficient because it takes so long to setup. So that means coaches will trend away from that inefficient play if they can. Is it strictly due to lack of talent, maybe. Thats part of the story. But I argue the rule changes are forcing that style of play slowly out of the league. There are bigs whose stock has fallen despite a bevy of post moves, because they dont have a 3 in their arsenal, who a few years ago were much more valuable assets.



evvvvveeeryone!

[tsherkin]

As much as I love being called completely flat out wrong and a "liar" for having what is ultimately an opinion based discussion neither of us have brought any stats into, I will trudge on.

Well, no. You're attempting to make statements that sound like fact but which are rooted in complete falsehood. You're talking about efficiency but not understanding the level of efficiency from the positional players you're discussing, or how relatively small is the number of centers and post players who were actually efficient as volume options in NBA history. You're discussing rules changes that haven't actually affected the shooting efficiency or TS% of post options and attempting to say that post play has BECOME less efficient, when the efficiency of those possessions isn't what's actually changed.

These are all examples of your inaccuracies here. It's not about opinion-based commentary, it's that you are flatly incorrect.

Listing off names of players who take some of their shots from the post doesnt mean post play is alive and well.

It really does, though, because those players use a similar proportion of sets compared to the players of old. Most people here consider Olajuwon and Ewing and Robinson dominant post centers... but all of them shot regularly from 13 to 15 feet... Ewing and Olajuwon from 17 feet. All three of them were high-volume face-up players, and each of them worked very well away from the ball. The proportion of their sets where they isolated on the mid/low block and went to work in an isolation that way was comparatively small, and that set is more the province of guys like Shaq, Wilt and Kareem rather than the classic and common center of yore.

SURE, it may be cycling back up but the overall trend is downwards over the last 30 years.

No, no not really. You see less of the really, really LONG backdown possessions now that the 5-second rule is in place, but the guys who relied on that weren't mostly the really top-end guys anyway, older Barkley set aside. This is considerably more related to talent cycle than it is to anything else. When Olajuwon and Ewing and Robinson tailed off, it left us with Shaq and Duncan... and it took a while for us to get more post talent in the league, especially with injuries robbing us of Oden and Yao. Between that and the fact that high-end post talent is harder to find and comes along less regularly because of the physical requirements, it's been no surprise that it took a dozen years or so for post players to start filtering back into the league.

I suspect that when people discuss the disappearance of post play, they mainly are talking about back to the basket, low post, 1v1 battles. Most of the players you listed prefer to work from the high post these days.

Right, but focusing on this sort of proves that you don't really grasp how the older players actually operated, which was my point. Olajuwon, Robinson, Ewing, most of the centers from the 60s and 70s... these guys liberally mixed in jumpers and face-ups with off-ball and transition sets. They didn't back down on every possession, or even on a majority of their possessions. That was a PORTION of their game, not the whole thing, and the lengthy post isos were even less common than those sets where they moved off ball to get a seal in the paint for a quick move... and guys who play a similar style of basketball are very much still in the league... in volume, as star players.

There is a reason many are complaining about a 3s or layups style of play now.

Three-point shooting has come at the expense of perimeter two-point shooting by volume. Post play has returned as the talent to facilitate that style of play has come with it.

In your first post, you state that post play is not as efficient and then in the 2nd post that it is as efficient as it ever was. What exactly are you trying to say? Perhaps that the low post was never as efficient as many believed it to be.

The efficiency of shots from the post has not changed. Post isolation is not typically a very efficient set in general, so unless you find an outlier post player (some, for example, like Shaq), then there is no point forcing the ball to a guy who is going to produce less-efficient offense than a perimeter scorer. You need the talent to do it, and that kind of talent doesn't come along very often. That's the biggest part of why we haven't seen more post offense in the league during that dry period.

Well, with rule changes have had something to do with that. To say that it didnt is disregarding the game itself.

No, this is directly false. Guys aren't considerably more or less efficient at making jump hooks in the paint compared to 25 years ago. Zone rules and other changes haven't altered that. Rules changes have hamstrung big man defense more than big man offense. We see too many clear-out isolations from the Kings or the Rockets or really whomever against single coverage to believe this is any kind of true. We see too many instances of Big Al getting post isolations, he's just incompetent at drawing fouls because he evades contact to go for the hook and doesn't get all the way to the rim, instead settling for 7-foot hooks and the like. If you pay attention, then it's really, really, really clear that post play is just as possible now compared to in earlier eras. We've discovered that team offense often suffers if the guy isn't a strong passer (which we saw well enough from young Olajuwon and Ewing pretty much always), though, and that dynamic perimeter attack is generally superior for team offense.


The big deal here is that worthy, worthwhile volume options in the post don't come around very often... and that there really have only been 3 or 4 guys in the history of the league who got away with MOSTLY spamming post isolations. There are still as many post isolations as we've really generally seen, we just don't have someone who is an iso-post goliath like Shaq, Kareem or Wilt. Other than that, we've got a pile of PFs and Cs who are quite capable of operating with a style similar to older centers. Davis, Blake Griffin, Brook Lopez, we've seen years of Dirk operating out of the post even as an older player (even this past season), Dwight, I mean we've gone over the list already. These guys operate in the same fashion as the older players. Some of them are roughly as good (at least in the regular season) as the average season from those players, or otherwise have weaknesses which limit them. Dwight can't dribble or shoot worth a damn, even at the line, and he has horrible courtvision and passing skills, which limits him. He wants to do nothing BUT post isolations, because he's an idiot with a pride and personal image/reputation problem and doesn't understand that even the bigs of yore used a whole slew of possession types to do their business. He clearly didn't listen to what Olajuwon was saying to him when they were training, and as a result, he's far less effective than Dream or Shaq and so forth. But Ewing and Robinson were significantly less effective in the playoffs than in the regular season, and there were reasons for that.

Again, it's basically not true that the post is dead or dying, and it's really not the rules changes which have caused this so much by withering post efficacy. There are still plenty of guys who operate in a fashion sufficiently similar to older players... and with similar results. Some of them just aren't as good as the ridiculously high-end talent we saw between 84 and, say, 99... from the guys who were drafted between 84 and 93. Dwight's a Zo-level player, basically, but he doesn't have Zo's J or FT shooting ability, and he trades off with higher FG% closer to the basket. We have only ever seen two guys ever like Shaq: Diesel himself, and Wilt, and the closest other example is a 7'2 monster with an unblockable finesse shot named Kareem. Pretty much everyone else in the history of the game has had to face up and use jumpers and everything else to round out their game.

Post sets, now as then, are time-consuming to set up if you're looking for a clear-out iso on the block. That's exactly why post players have traditionally attacked the offensive glass, run in transition, participated in PnR, authored late cuts to get quick seals deep in the paint, learned to attack from the face-up position in the mid-post, operated out of the high post/elbow areas and all of the other things. Diversity of offensive attack has been critical to all of the major, relevant post scorers.

[RSCD3_]

With the way the cavs are defending curry, it's likely he'll miss out on another nba finals MVP, probably to iguodala If I had to bet. Cavs arent letting him get anything

[deezerweeze]

8 pts on 3-13 with 4 turnovers and his team is up 20. absolutely incredible how amazing his supporting cast is.

[ppedro123]

With the way the cavs are defending curry, it's likely he'll miss out on another nba finals MVP, probably to iguodala If I had to bet. Cavs arent letting him get anything

this excuse again?

[2klegend]

When was the last time Jordan played like crap and his team still blew out a contender? This is why Curry is a great player but nowhere near Jordan level.

[therealbig3]

It's funny how the same people show up every time Curry has a bad game, but then they're silent whenever he dominates.

[bigboi]

It's funny how the same people show up every time Curry has a bad game, but then they're silent whenever he dominates.

He hasn't dominated many games, but I guess. people tried saying his team isn't stacked as well, no matter how you slice it. You can't compare Curry to a player like Jordan

[ppedro123]

It's funny how the same people show up every time Curry has a bad game, but then they're silent whenever he dominates.

its not aboud having a bad game or a good game. everybody knows hes the best shooter of all time and can go nuts any game.

Hes an unbelievable player


its just that his team is crazy good, they won 73 games for a reason


he just aint peak lebron/jordan level like some people want to claim. his team can survive without him