mischievous wrote:dhsilv2 wrote:mischievous wrote:Yeah, and some people actually believe that Dirk is basically a borderline elite defender or something in that ballpark. Seems like some want to give Dirk an edge on offense and defense, when you can't do that if you are putting faith in RAPM.
Devils advocate here, but is it that crazy to say post 04 or 05 kobe was a liability defensively for 3 quarters? I don't buy Dirk being elite defensively, but he was imo at his best lets say top 75% in terms of value add(big men of course get a huge edge here).
Kobe absolutely had some bad defensive years in there like 06, 07 etc, but that isn't the point. If someone is taking Dirk over Kobe it has to be from one end of the floor or the other. Neither box scores nor RAPM show Dirk as better on both ends.
Yeah, the whole Dirk defense thing has been overblown. I see it as a backlash to the false claim that he was through-out his career, a poor defender. Clearly Dirk improved his help defense as he inched closer to his prime. But the RAPM stuff have made people go wild on this, which is unfortunate really. Dirk was never a great or elite defender. I doubt even he would agree with such a statement.
With Kobe's defense, I find his defensive indicators to be for the most part unimportant. I don't need spreadsheets to tell me that his RS defense post Shaq was mostly low-impact and was about average overall in the RS on that end. However, I don't really believe in the orthodoxy that suggests that his DRAPM stuff spiked because he was playing relatively great defense in 08-10, peaking in 2010 supposedly
. I mean, I wouldn't contest he played better D in those later years, but not to level some folks believe based on DRAPM. As someone who keenly followed Kobe during this period, what I saw from Kobe post Shaq, was that there were far too many plays where he simply was not involved in the points being given up by the team. It's just some of his bad plays looked visually egregious, which made people overreact (and conversely, amazing plays, which made his fans overreact). When combined with his undeserved All first team D selections, and the polarisation that existed around him, you get an extreme counter reaction and folks closing themselves off to other possibilities.
There was a game v the Mavericks in 05 that I recently covered for the list thread, and in the 3rd quarter, a quarter a lakers were blitzed in, Kobe was un-involved in almost all of the defensive failures that were going on, because he was guarding players who were involved on offense. DRAPM just looks at shifting margins of line-ups when a player is in and out. It says nothing about what is actually happening on defense. And with a low-impact defender like Kobe, who tended to guard marginal players for most of the game, DRAPM tells me nothing important about his actual defense that I couldn't glean from watching him.
Will have to go back and watch/read up on 04/05 stuff to make concrete conclusions, but 06-07 was a defs a low point for Kobe's D. I find equivalencies between 05-06 and 06-07 as laughable, DRAPM be damned. I was very disappointed at the time about the D he was playing 06-07. He was physically compromised in 06-07 and did not even have the same capability of guarding marquee players in the league (redd, Arenas etc.). Tex Winter in March of 07 actually commented on how Kobe's defense had declined that season, which indicates to me that even they knew that 06-07 was a low-point. Yet the aggregate spreadsheet gazers will look at DRAPM and actually believe he was playing "less worse" D that season. Hell NPI RAPM pegs him as a positive defender in 07
Should note here that in 04-05, he missed 14 games in a row in Jan/Feb, and the Lakers D collapsed, which to me is strong indication that he was not the major cause of their poor D like some here allege based on aggregate based spreadsheet gazing. You don't lose a defensive liability for 14 games in a row, and become catastrophically worse on D. That makes no sense.
