freethedevil wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:freethedevil wrote:
Well let's be fair here, scalability aisde, he's been the offensive foundation for this team. The defensive foundation has been draymond green whose ranked as top 25 in each of the last 5 playoffs and a one of a kind defender. I don't know that you could afford to run things small as much as kerr does offensively if you didn't have a draymond green defensively.
These last 3 seasons, the hamptons 5 outscores has outscored opponents by 23 points per 100 poss. Just Curry+Green with smals has outscored opponent by 22 points per 100 possesion. Conceding that portability isn't a thing defensively, the warriors ability to run the small ball lineups curry excels in offensively is heavily dependent on green's defensive presence. And that doesn't even take into account green is one of the best passers in the league.
We rave about how good curry is without offensive weapons like durant and klay, but what happens if you take out draymond green?
All good things to bring up. Green regularly makes my Top 10 POY list. I think very highly of him. I do think Curry is more special though.
freethedevil wrote:I recall that el mcgee wasn't that impressed with 2017 lebron carrying an offence that had a higher o rating than the warriors, largely because he thought that was only possible due to the team's defensive failings.
Noted, but it's not really clear to me why you included this as a segue between Curry & Giannis. The Warriors have been able to be great on defense with Curry so you certainly can't argue that Curry necessitates his team play poor defense.
freethedevil wrote:And this I think, aside from his metrics, might be giannis's strongest qualitative argument as poy. For all of his holes offensively, Giannis is the bucks primary playmaker, scorer and is their defensive anchor, And in 2019 the bucks have been elite offensively historically great defensively, and posted an all time top 30 srs in the regular season. In the playoffs, while giannis's limitations as a playmaker were exposed, he still was the focal point, the engine and the anchor for a team that had a, per el mcgee, "razor thin series" vs the champs.
I don't think there's really anyone else in the league who does so much for his team. And, given how dominant the bucks looked untill nurse's adjustments in game 3 pioneering a new scheme with a defence el mcgee ranked #5 all time among playoff teams, I'm not convinced the warriors could have handled them, even at full strength.
I don't think there's any doubt that Giannis' defense counts for a lot.
Speaking in the other direction though - while noting that Giannis is #1 on my list - the thing about being an alpha is that when abruptly you are less effective, you can quickly go from highly positive to actually negative impact. So while you can still look at Giannis and say "He's still scoring X points", if the reality is that the offense isn't working playing this way, it's quite likely that there's another approach that would work better which reduced Giannis to a smaller role.
I'm not going so far, obviously, to have a quantized penalty for Giannis due to this, but it's something that can absolutely happen, and when I watched Giannis later in that series, it really struck me all that he could not do that the Bucks were essentially relying on him to do by virtue of giving him this level of primacy.