Duke4life831 wrote:Novocaine wrote:bulliedog8 wrote:So Isaiah Thomas can be the best player for a ecfs team but Kyrie cant is what people are saying? People are looking at his first 2-3 years as an example that he cant lead a team? Yet everyone claims Wiggins/Towns, AD, etc are leaders when they are looked at as franchise changing players yet cant get their teams to the playoffs while in their first 2-3 years? hmmmmm. Once again, lebron wins. It is never his fault.
There's a huge difference between scoring 42.4 points every 100 possessions with a0.625TS% and scoring 35.9 per 100 with a 0.58TS%. When guys score that much and have that difference in efficiency, it really makes a difference - close to being an ECF team and a fringe playoff one. It seems people aren't really capable of appreciating it - they just see two guys scoring a lot and both are "efficient" so they might be equivalent as scorers. But that's not how it works - it's always relative, players are efficient only relatively to one another, there's no objective standard. People who think Thomas and Irving are equivalent as scorers should also think Irving and Wiggins, or Irving and Carmelo, were similar level scorers last season, because that's as large as the difference was.
Really the only difference in efficiency between Kyrie and IT is IT got superstar calls and had a FTR of .441 last season while Kyrie got calls worse than he got as a rookie and had a FTR of .231. That basically means IT went to the line twice as much as Kyrie did. Kyrie's FTR is horrific for someone who attacks the rim as much as he does. If Kyrie had the same FTR as IT, their efficiency would almost be identical, Kyrie would actually have a slightly better efficiency than IT.
Yeah, perhaps dozens of NBA referees conspired to make a #1 pick and NBA champion look bad while gifting fouls to the #60 pick.
In the real world, Irving FTr has hovered in the 200s his entire career while IT's has been in the high 300s/400s. Probably because Irving is an expert on avoiding contact at the rim with all his trick shots while IT has a much more aggressive mentality; also the fact that Thomas takes a larger percentage of his shots within 3ft of the rim, .331 vs .264 - and for restricted area shots, Thomas attempted 7.4 shots per 36 while Irving stays at 5.7 per 36 - once again, this is the difference between being very good and historical excellence. Thomas is much more efficient because he takes 77% of his shots either within 3ft of the rim or out of the 3pt line - a stunningly high number. For Irving that number is 57% - good, but again, this is all relative, a 20% difference between 77 and 57 isn't smaller than the 20 difference between 57 and 37.
Irving could play 200 years in the NBA and he wouldn't achieve Thomas' combination of volume+efficiency last season (then again, nobody in the history of the NBA did except Curry). His game will always lead to too many unnecessarily difficult shots and pull-up 2s.
