G35 wrote:Kyrie is not injured now.
This isn't salient. You were talking about his 15-16 regular season performance, which is averaged out over 53 games and the lack of full preparation and wind-up time afforded healthy players. He had to rehab, he missed a lot of practice and training camp and the preseason. He didn't play his first game until December 20th. If you don't acknowledge that this affected his early performance, then we have a problem in this discussion. Keeping consistent with what you were actually discussing, though, you started talking about his PER and his VORP (which is a cumulative stat) and so forth, you have to acknowledge how badly the injury affected him. He looked like ass in the regular season outside of February... which also happens to be the first month where he played at least 30 mpg. So in terms of averages, cumulative stats, advanced stats (February was the first month where he shot over 25.4% from 3), it's all there. Perfunctory effort made to investigate his season, let alone actually paying attention when it happened, would reveal these things.
It is just that against the Warriors, the matchups are not good. Everyone can see that.
This is very true. The Cavs get stuck on an island when the Warriors switch Klay or Steph onto him in a PnR scenario. Tristan is gone in that scenario, he's irrelevant. The Cavs have been continuously permitting that switch to happen and whether or not either of those guys is the one to score, they've been able to exploit that. It has been similarly true that Love hasn't been able to guard Draymond, or really exert any sort of defensive worth.
Lebron is not dominating his matchup.
This isn't uncomfortable to admit at all. He's shooting like crap and hasn't looked like he's had any sort of ability to elevate his scoring game. He's passing well but he's been sloppy protecting the ball on drives and he's been flubbing shots around the rim off of offensive rebounds because he's rushing. He looks hilariously gassed, and he has a broke-ass middle game and an inconsistent 3pt shot. He's struggling, and there is no way to look at the series any other way.
I'm not going through the Toronto series because it is more of the same. Kryie/Love played well, as did other members of CLE. The hype was this was the best team Lebron ever played on...according to the numbers, which we know are always an accurate representation.
All of that was true, though. They DID play well. The Cavs looked INTENSE on offense prior to the Finals. The Warriors are sucking the life out of them. Kyrie has been so bad, I don't even have words for it. Love has been rough, and was injured in game 2 besides. The bench has been hysterically worthless.
I can't remember when we talked about Karl Malone and we blamed Jeff Hornacek and Byron Russell for why the Jazz lost.
Right, but people are stupid, right? In 98, there's no question that Stockton and Hornacek and the lack of a legit wing scorer were the clear reasons for why they lost. Malone actually played quite well that series. Yes, Rodman shut him the hell down in the second half of Game 6, but he had absolutely no help. Hornacek was a dumpster fire in the 97 AND 98 Finals, completely worthless, and in 98, Stockton was coming back from MF surgery on his knee and was completely useless. They had no punch besides Malone and were going up against Jordan's Bulls. That was one series where Malone was not the problem. He had a history of being a poor playoff performer, so it's expedient to fall back on that excuse (it was true as recently as the 97 Finals), but that one wasn't his fault.
When Barkley lost in the finals, no one says a damn thing about how crappy Dan Majerle was on defense giving up record numbers to Michael Jordan.
Right, but you'd have to be daft to presume that Majerle was going to ever contain MJ. No individual defender could ever hope to and the Suns weren't set up to contain that kind of player at all. Barkley played quite well in that series; he gets the business more for never winning a ring than he does for failure in the 93 Finals specifically.
No one talks about how KJ was hurt and they had to put him on Jordan because they had no one else to guard him. We don't talk about John Starks and how he crapped the bed, no we talk about how Ewing did not get it done.
Right, but the New York example is awful. Ewing had one of the worst series performances I've ever seen from a star offensive player in the Finals. Dude shot 40% or better from the field in only 2 of 7 games. Had he not sucked a LOT of ass on offense, they'd have defeated the Rockets. Instead, he shot 36.3% from the field on 22.9 FGA/g and very much earned all of the criticism he's since received for failing on the big stage. He was incompetent on offense in that series. A wonderful defender, but if he hadn't been epic in his poor performance, New York would have titled in 94. So again, that's a poor choice of example. Starks was nearly the hero of that series. And then he also had a horrendous showing in the final elimination game in G7.
Meantime, back to the Suns, KJ was never going to do anything on Jordan defensively. Neither was Majerle. That was apex Jordan: the Suns were always going to lose that series. Healthy or not, they'd never have been able to contain Jordan, who assassinated them to an extent which went well beyond health. That's another example that doesn't really hold water.
Anyway, bringing this back to point. Lebron is not performing well in this series, and if and when the Cavs lose this series, he will and should take heat for a crappy Finals series as a negative mark on his legacy. SOME perspective is required, given age, games and minutes played in his career, of course, but he legit has problems with his jumper and isn't dominating at all. He looks gassed and old. He's struggling across almost every facet of the game. That's not good, and he's going to take a hit for that. But it does ALSO bear mention that he's getting absolutely no help whatsoever, such that even were he dominating like it was 2009, he still woudln't be winning this series. We saw that vs. the Magic in 09, and it's not a Lebron-unique scenario.
Again, Lebron is individually playing poorly, but he wouldn't be the first star to lose a series because his teammates flatly weren't good enough and will be far from the last. Now, do you want to penalize him for the roster moves, since he's the tacit GM? That's something else to consider. The Bulls had the balls to tell Jordan to shut up and did their own thing. That worked out pretty well, though obviously things work a little differently now. If I were Lebron, I wouldn't trust Cleveland either, because their management was a dumpster fire when he was there. Riles had the balls to do his own thing, and for a while, it worked. Now we're back in Cleveland, and Lebron is discovering that it's not as easy as all that. So maybe that's an angle to consider which doesn't work in his favor, sure.
I just find there's a lot of double-standard action going on where criticism of Lebron is concerned. It's not that he doesn't deserve his fair share of criticism so much as people focus on really odd things and ignore stuff which very clearly matters.
When Wilt lost to the Celtics its always because Wilt did not do something, not his teammates......
Right, but that doesn't necessarily mean that was an intelligible criticism of the player. People say a lot of stupid things about older periods of the game because they still believed in now-disproved myths and so forth, and were (and remain) subject to things like volume fetishism or rings-bias. People often espouse a sort of "man, if he was a REAL star, he'd have FOUND a way to win" argument, which is really ridiculous (not saying you're saying this, more of a general comment).
