VDT wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:
To me you're looking to assert a notion of "slow it down, half court grind" being the better way to win in the playoffs, which was very much the classical thought on the subject.
No, the winner is the team that is the best at the style (at least on average as this can change from game to game and within the game) that the series is played. And a lot of the times it is the team that can force their own play style on their opponents.
Okay, fair enough.
VDT wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:But Hakeem won in a proto-pace & space offense that specifically looked to play faster than their playoff competition. From a perspective of ranking Hakeem's offense, that has everything to do with why I rank him so much higher than someone like Patrick Ewing who was much more of a dinosaur who would have been more impactful with a lesser offensive role. But in terms of "half court grind" supremacy, Hakeem's titles ain't that.
I think it was more space than pace. Sure any team can try and score transition baskets but the team's go to plan offensively in the title years was to get the ball to Hakeem in the post and take it from there, with either Hakeem trying to score or pass to the open man. I wouldnt call Ewing a dinosaur, he was just a worse player. You couldnt build the offense around him (and Robinson) because he was not as dominant of a scorer and 1v1 threat as Hakeem or Shaq.
There's truth in this, but specifically with the arrival of Drexler and into those '95 playoffs is when you see 1) more pace, 2) more space, and 3) actual elite playoff offense.
VDT wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:What is certainly the case is that Hakeem in that role is specifically winning with an effective half court offense rather than transition, and that's something you can bring up in a debate with Westbrook or, say, Jason Kidd. It has absolutely no teeth against Reggie Miller or Steve Nash though.
But why? I never said that the Hakeem lead offense is more efficient in vacuum. I said that it is a different style than the D'Antoni Suns for example.
I don't understand what you're asking. I get that you see ORtg as something that's less about pure quality and more about strategic choice, but you can't talk about Hakeem's team's half court superiority in comparisons with guys leading teams that were great in the half court. I mean, you can go into granular detail and try to say X > Y, but you can't talk categorically about these other guys being a problem in the half court when some of them didn't have half court problems.
VDT wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:In general I disagree with the idea of "but they can win with that offense" type thinking. The Spurs won titles with offenses built around Tim Duncan...but their best offenses came after they were forced to turn away from this as Duncan aged. No one expected the offense would get better with old man Duncan playing a smaller role, but it did, and it would have a hell of a lot earlier if Pop had just known to run the offense that way. (To be clear, I'm not saying this about 2003, but by 2005, absolutely.)
That's not wrong, but comparing 99 or 03 to 14 you are talking about a league with different rules and different trends. You are making a cross era comparison which is a risky proposition.
3s > 2s. Everyone before was just plain wrong not to use them. Period. If that's 'dangerous' of me to say, so be it.
I'm not going to call Pop a bad coach because he, like everyone else, didn't properly grasp the implications of this until recently, but I'm not going to pretend that 3's were actually a bad idea in Duncan's prime.
VDT wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:All this to say, the fact you had success doing A, B, C, D, and E, doesn't mean that all of those aspects of your strategy were optimal. Getting by with an inferior technique is not the same as having a competitive advantage based on it, and it's important not to conflate the two scenarios precisely because people have always tended to conflate the scenarios.
That's true. In principle one would expect that due to the acquired experience the tactics are becoming better with time and inefficiencies are eliminated, At the same time it is hard to know what is optimal when parameters like rules or players constantly change. What was optimal 20 years ago might not be now and what is optimal with a certain roster might not be with another. It is even more complicated because there is always an opponent. So the optimal might be different depending on the opponent. So yes you can win with sub optimal schemes but figuring out what is the optimal is often quite challenging. Certain aspects are obvious in our era (more three point shooting) but others are not. For example the Rockets are very analytically heavy team, would you say their schemes are optimal? Or maybe Warriors' schemes? Or maybe Lebron ball is optimal? How are you going to declare something as the optimal? Sure you can rank them based on something like Off rating but i think this is half the story as you cant separate the game into two non-overlapping areas (offense and defense).
I think this is a lot less complicated than you make it out to be. The realization that humans could hit 3's well enough they went from gimmick to gospel is the single biggest change in the history of the game since they made a rule about goaltending. We're not talking about 25 different minor coaching scheme variations, we're talking about one really big thing, and quite literally every coach from the '80s until the present needs to have his team's re-examined to analyze how much better they could have been had they been thinking properly.
Now as I say that: I don't actually think any of these guys were idiots. There's a really clear reason why there was so much delay in understanding the value of the 3, and it's unreasonable to have expected them to adopt it without this understanding. That it literally took decades to try stuff out is damning of the profession as a whole and speaks to groupthink and fear of trying anything too "out there", but it wasn't any kind of a given that the 3 would be able to be hit with this success rate early on.
I can forgive the coaches without pretending they were thinking optimally.
As far as "How do we know what's optimal?" now. While the 3>2 revolution is a one time thing that I think it unlikely to ever be followed with as big of a shift in the future, we're always finding a new optimal. And when we do, we go back and analyze what came before. I don't know why it would be any other way.
I feel like there's this urge to protect players who "were doing the thing they were told was right" at the time, and I think it's important to make clear where that makes sense and where it doesn't. It makes sense when defending the player's IQ (and related things), where a guy was literally doing what was thought to be the odds-on best play. It doesn't make sense when evaluating a guy's actual impact.
VDT wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:Again, none of this is really meant to knock Hakeem. In Hakeem you have a world class defensive player who proved that he could thrive in a more modern offensive scheme. I just object to the notion that there was something about that offensive scheme that was fundamentally in opposition to the schemes of Nash's Suns. They were literally pulling in the same direction, which has everything to do with why Hakeem won titles and his rivals did not. And hence the fact that Nash's teams had a better offense largely just is what it is.
Yes if you mean the 3 point shooting. But otherwise one was a post heavy offense and the other was a D'Antoni offense who hates post play and wanted to get a shot before the defense is set. Trying to answer which one is better in vacuum is often (not always) a bit meaningless in my opinion. You can compare offenses that are similar enough (e.g. a Hakeem vs Shaq led offense or to go back to my example you can compare two 400m runners). Comparing two completely different playstyles (with different strengths and weaknesses) based on only one part of the game (offense or defense) doesnt feel correct and it is not the way teams are operating. Teams are trying to score more points than their opponents, trying to limit the discussion only to how many points they score is only half of the discussion. For example the Rockets have traded Capella and are not playing with a traditional center. Assume that (i havent checked their stats and it is early anyway) their offense becomes better and their defense worse. Does it makes sense to say that their off schemes are better or that Harden is a better offensive player because of increased off efficiency or it makes more sense to view the situation as a set of losses and gains which makes sense viewed as whole? Or, to take it to the extreme (although the Rockets are not far away), assume a team plays without bigs, just wing players + guards. It is likely that their offensive rating will improve at the detriment of their defensive rating. Does it make sense to say that their offense is better than before or even more that the player leading the offense became a better offensive player? To me it doesnt because they are two completely different playstyles with different advantages and disadvantages.
I would object to the idea that D'Antoni is fundamentally opposed to post offense. To me the common thread in D'Antoni's schemes is hyper customization around his stars forcing other players into assembly line pieces. He tends to let one or two guys be the real brains of the operation (rather than himself) during a game, and everyone else is just supposed to be running their routes. He's known for playing fast, but the team was specifically slow with the Harden/Paul duo. I think frankly D'Antoni would love a guy like Hakeem.
Where D'Antoni is going to tend to favor perimeter guys is the same reason all sane offensive strategy should: You can begin the possession with the ball in the hands of the guy who needs the ball in his hands. Hakeem would be better than most bigs because he very agile and can operate in areas beyond simply the shadow of the rim.
Re: tilting scheme toward offense doesn't change the players, just their offensive effectiveness. Absolutely true, and I'm not fundamentally opposed to someone making the case that a team could have a more impressive offense performance with a lesser ORtg when you consider how much of the team's resources are marshaled on behalf of the defense. But as I say, there are specific issues to associate with big man based offenses. These issues don't make it a given that basing your offense around your big will be a mistake, but they do mean that we shouldn't be assuming that X's big man volume scoring would have led to a 120 ORtg if only his teammates were better on offense.
When you decide to initiate your offense from the interior you're always adding an unnecessary weak link in your offense because the opponent can disrupt your attempt to get the ball to your initiator.
When you decide to focus your offense on someone who can't shoot 3's and can't shoot free throws all that well, you're adding in more things that lower your ceiling.
When your lead scorer had a mediocre efficiency compared to what we know is possible, that's lowering your ceiling further.
There are reasons why it makes sense that trends have gone as they have, and applying reasoning based on these trends back to evaluate guys from the past just makes too much sense not to do. If burgers some sacred cows along the way, well, that's food for thought.
VDT wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:Also, to be clear, I do understand that Nash's team can be said to have sacrificed defense for offense specifically with Amar'e at the 5. But pace & space is certainly not dependent on having a 5 who isn't great on defense and also can't shoot 3's. Amar'e was better than most at his position, but he wasn't actually ideal, which is why in more modern offenses you don't actually see 5's that look like Amar'e.
Yes sacrificing, as a team, offense for defense doesnt make the leading player a better offensive player. This is not only true with players though but also with playstyles. A team playing a pace and space style against an equal team with the same style will score more and get scored more than if they were both playing a slow half court style. Does it make sense to say that the same players become worse offensive players in the second case or to say that it is the style that changed. Which style is then better depends on which style gives them the best chance to win not necessarily the one that allows them to score more points.
Pace and space doesn't mean "don't play defense". Part of what it tends to means is getting back on defense rather than crashing the boards. The "space" means prioritizing players who can shoot from range rather than crash said board, and that represents a choice of specific skillsets within offense rather than a choice between offense over defense.
And big picture, this is the thing:
What is definitively the case is that role players have more scoring value now than they did before because they are primed to take and make 3's. More scoring value compared to who? Compared to stars. Stars have to be all the more efficient today to be worth the volume when they have good shooters around them, and if they can't, then you don't build your offense around them.
Again, while this doesn't mean "Never build your offense around a Big", the strategic shift is clear, as are the reasons why big men in general aren't scaling as well in the new strategy. I feel like you're saying essentially "Well how do you know that Big Man X couldn't have done as well?" while I'm looking around at a landscape wherein big men have lost their lead scorer's job almost everywhere. Seems like proof in the pudding to me.
VDT wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:Optimal offense comes generally from having a floor general who cam make the right decisions rapidly all over the court, or a team that is super-in-sync with each other and can improvise together. Hakeem's Rockets, with Hakeem in the role he had, isn't quite that. Surrounding him with 3-pointers to give him space is a great idea, but it doesn't change the fact he's not as devastatingly efficient as other half-court scoring threats, he's not able to run the transition game like others, etc.
I never argued that Hakeem is the best offensive player ever. What i said is that simply comparing Off ratings doesnt tell the whole story in how good of an offensive player someone is. It was a more general point, not simply about Hakeem
I don't disagree with that. There's always more to the story.
VDT wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:In general, if you want the best offense, you build around someone who can keep his dribble anywhere on the court. Hakeem isn't quite that, and this is why it's not really a serious conversation whether Hakeem could be the best player in the game today - he could not. But you could build a great overall team around him no doubt, and frankly it would be wise to consider building the defense around him while considering different approaches to offense depending on the talent on your roster. Imagine Hakeem in a more Amar'e-type role for example.
That is an assumption that is quite hard to prove imo.
I think you ought to speak on what you think it says that we've seen a drastic shift away from offenses built around big men at the same time as we've seen an offensive revolution based around perimeter-based sckills. To me the causality seems pretty clear cut, but you clearly see things differently.
