E-Balla wrote:cecilthesheep wrote:Part of this is my skepticism about advanced individual-year defensive metrics. There's just way too much random variance for me to take them as anything but secondary inputs to actual game footage, and I watched a *lot* of Spurs games that year. Kawhi was worse in 2017 than he was in 2016, sure, but saying Jonathan Simmons was a better defender just tells me that, at best, you haven't looked at Jonathan Simmons very carefully. That guy did not know what he was doing half the time, and despite his athleticism he couldn't stay in front of anyone. Had some good moments in man defense against Harden in the playoffs, I'll give him that. Dedmon was good with nice size and instincts but flawed - very foul-prone, jumped at every fake, couldn't be on the floor in important moments because of it. Green and LMA you could make better cases for, but i'm still skeptical.
In the case of Dedmon and Simmons their defensive value was mostly as bench players and you're right that they couldn't be relied on in bigger roles, but the fact they were above average defenders means they were better than Kawhi.
It's funny you're mentioning watching the games when the whole reason I started saying his defense fell off at first was because of the eye test (because I was saying it early season before the numbers were even reliable enough to read). He wasn't locking people down at all and that's where his primary defensive value comes from, then off ball they were taking him out of plays completely by putting his man in the corner.
Really that whole year the only time Kawhi was in the play was when he was doing a way worse than usual job at guarding ball handlers. Both eye test and numbers showed that.Kawhi that year was used quite a bit as a plug to prop up lineups with old guys like Pau Gasol, Tony Parker, etc.
If true Kawhi would have a better DRTG than those guys. He doesn't. He was the worst on the team by far.He played a lot of help defense and was used less as a shutdown corner type than in previous years (not least because the opposing team's response was often to simply remove that player from the play entirely). This all hurts surface-level assessments of him and +/- based metrics. And on top of that he didn't get over screens quite as well and got blown by a little more. None of this made him a "terrible" defender.
We saw the same thing this year. The gap in analysis here is what effect did it have on the team?
Kawhi without shutting people down loses his value on ball above the average decent defender. Kawhi without being in the play while he's off ball loses his value off ball and basically becomes neutral overall (above average or average defensively IMO). Kawhi trying to get in the play and leaving his man is giving the offense an open shot which made him a negative whenever he did that. Overall their defense with Kawhi on the floor was still good but not great like it was without him, mainly because without him being shutdown and with offenses gameplanning to force him to stick to shooters in the corner they knew he wasn't going to stick to, they were able to get easy buckets compared to what they got without Kawhi. The Spurs were an ATG defense, and offenses schemed Kawhi into being their weakness by relying on the fact he wasn't going to just sit in the corner and watch plays. Along with his bad lockdown defense due to a lack of caring and giving energy to that end it made him a hole in an otherwise untouchable defense.
meh, I think we're seeing roughly the same thing watching the games and taking way different stuff away from it. I think he's doing things that advanced numbers don't pick up on as accurately, you think he's doing things that don't make as much of a difference. If Parker can't get over a screen so Gasol has to switch onto a guard who then blows by to the rim, and Kawhi helps out of the corner to prevent the guaranteed layup, but the guard makes the right pass and Parker who's now switched onto the big is slow rotating to the corner so Kawhi has to sprint back out but can't get there in time - Kawhi takes the fall for that play, but in reality he's the only guy doing his job and he stopped a layup.
Or maybe because all the other offensive anchors on the team were retired or aging and the bench was full of a bunch of newer guys who didn't know the system like the previous iteration of the team did. The Spurs system from around 2013-15 wasn't special because nobody ever iso'd - there were always Duncan post-ups, ball-pounding possessions from Parker, etc. What the offense really depended on to be something more than that was how the team had a bunch of players who had been together forever, knew all of each other's tendencies and what to do in any given moment, could communicate instantly and at a high level. When you change personnel, you lose that.
They only lost Duncan between 2016 and 2017. Everyone aging wasn't why they did worse. Everybody aging isn't why now with Demar and Jakob replacing Kawhi and Danny their offense is better than it was in 2017. No way in hell should Kawhi with that supporting cast look that bad defensively.
Yeah, I completely disagree on the bolded. I think it was absolutely why they did worse and I think you're way underrating the Duncan communication effect on both ends. Kawhi didn't suddenly become a more iso-focused ball hog between '16 and '17 - if anything he became a more advanced passer who knew how to make more reads. The reason you saw the system break down was because Duncan had been the ace communicator on both ends for as long as Kawhi had been playing basketball. When you lose a guy like that, the system is not going to run as smoothly.
