Doctor MJ wrote:Heej wrote:In regards to LeBron and Jokic's passing it's a fascinating debate. I think Jokic is clearly one of those guys that inspires people to cut and he has incredible touch, timing, and accuracy with his passing. Personally, I think football terms are the best way for me to sum up my thoughts on the matter. And what I'm gonna go with is that LeBron has the GOAT arm talent in NBA history.
Arm talent in NFL terms being the power and accuracy a quarterback can get on their throws. It doesn't have anything to do with vision or progressing through your reads or whatever, just which guy can hit the bullseye and throw a ball thru sheetrock kinda deal. Jokic has exceptional arm talent, especially with his shorter range passes to cutters and his outlets; but the one thing no one in this league has managed to come close to LeBron in is the zip that he has on his passes to spot up shooters. Even watching a guy like Luka who can make the same skip passes, he throws lofty lobs over defenses that allow an extra split second for the closeout to get there and either force the player to burp up a contested miss or record scratch the offense. LeBron throws MFin darts to those guys man.
No one else creates that same extra half second that LeBron consistently buys you with his kickouts. And honestly, most of it is just his unusually explosive tendons and ligaments. Sometimes when you play ball with guys or even younger kids that are more explosive than you, there's times you can tell from the weight of the pass you catch that this person is able to put a different level of zip on that ball that you're not gonna be able to replicate. Some young guys I've seen that do have comparable zip to LeBron are Simmons and Lonzo coincidentally. Those 2 just have great pop to their passes, it's great to see.
So while Jokic has many things in his favor, from a mechanical efficiency standpoint you're just not gonna get a guy that can create wide open shots at the same rate because some of the exact same passes that a Luka, Harden (although his zip is comparable), or Jokic throw just doesn't create a look that's as open because the defender has an extra split second to recover due to the decreased velocity.
That's why Magic is the GOAT and will be for a while, because he had a comparable amount of arm talent to LeBron in terms of the speed at which some of his catchable passes zipped to teammates; but he also had a different energy and natural sense about his passing that's rarely seen. But that's how it goes ya know, if Ricky Rubio had even James Hardens arm talent he'd be the best passer in the league lol.
Great, great points. The think about Jokic is that he inspires proactivity in his teammates whereas most heliocentric guys - of which LeBron is the alpha and omega - tend to induce passivity. And part of why AD is so impressive here is that this isn't what's happening with him, but he's the exception to the rule.
This also hearkens back to the Walton Blazers where his teammates were just playing better because of the scheme the Blazers played under Ramsay, which was cut heavy.
I think it's worth noting that on a certain level there's nothing new or gimmicky about this. This is basically how the Original Celtics played back in the 20s, and I basically have zero doubt that it could still be basically the dominant form of offense in the modern game if it wasn't such a lost art. You don't need a Jokic level big man passer to implement it, it's simply that if you recognize what Jokic can do, you end up re-creating.
Any way, I would tend to say that I include the effect of a player's passing on his teammates on his passing ability. There's actually a phrase for this: He doesn't pass you the ball where you are, he passes it where you need to go. I first heard this about Meadowlark Lemon of the Harlem Globetrotters, and have heard anecdotes back down from Nash's college years that he would do this on the regular. I think that this cut system Denver runs basically ends up allowing Jokic to train his teammates to be more effective, and this is not how I see LeBronball.
I love LeBron but the inspiring passivity line for damn sure can happen occasionally, but let's not act like he doesn't also empower guys as well. Part of me thinks you're a liiittle harsh on Lebron due to having your own ideas about how basketball should be played, and I think you've alluded to as much in threads during previous years. From what I've seen, it's not that the dude necessarily wants to be heliocentric. It's just that he's just so damn good at it there's really no need to game system buckets a lot of the time in the eyes of coaching staffs that have limited resources to allocate to team development.
But there's been plenty of times over the years where he's happily ceded control to other ballhandlers. And we've clearly seen in Miami that with a high level offensive coach and roster in place LeBron can function very well within a systematic structure, esp when their identity crystallized in 2014 and he was leading the league in corner 3P% for a while. I'm assuming your part about throwing people open is more about the energy of the team as opposed to LeBron's actual ability to throw people open by leading them into open spaces (which we all know he does with regularity).
But from what I've seen he's only been under 1 gifted offensive coach and that's Spo. And while he was under Spo he fit in perfectly as the major cog in the machine as opposed to being the machine itself. Every other coach he's played with basically just hadn't implemented a great offensive system at any point in their career. Walton just kept the engine going on what Kerr built. Even Ty Lue talked a big game about finally having a system in place now that LeBron is gone and he got fired like 9 games into the season cuz the team was sputtering. Some coaches are just built different in terms of how quickly they can get their team up to speed with an offense while still giving the appropriate attention to installing their defense.
I'd be more inclined to blame LeBron's lack of system buckets throughout his career on his perceived toxicity as a teammate if it weren't for Spo kinda poking a hole in that idea. It just seems you need a really good offense to surpass what LeBron can generate and once you've proven you can't actually install that kind of offense in time for a playoff run LeBron just defauts back to his comfort zone. Cuz if Lebron is willing to screen and roll HARD for Matthew F***in Dellavedova while he handles the rock I don't think it's a case of unwillingness as much as LeBron not seeing many players as worthy of the responsibility or having learned the scripted read and react portions of playcalls well enough.
If anything the main issue is that LeBron requires his teammates to earn his trust in that regard, while perhaps someone like Jokic starts off with the baseline that he automatically trusts you to make plays the same way Mike D'Antoni appears to. Perhaps the former mindset is just a little irksome to you, especially if you've hooped a lot and seen the destructive effects of people playing with guys that don't trust them; but let's not go too overboard and paint LeBron as a guy who's a "my way or the highway" type when he's shown a lot of flexibility throughout his career. And sometimes the team culture being heliocentric isn't a case of LeBron outright rebelling as much as it is the offense being installed just isn't getting buckets at the rate that it needs to.
Like in the case of Luke Walton, like my dude ran his UCLA offense with 4 guys above the free throw line and hardly utilized any of the valuable real estate in the corner. Like wtf is anyone supposed to do with that lol. After a while when it gets to nut crunching time in the 4th quarter and this flawed offense isn't getting good looks, you're naturally gonna default to "everyone get the **** out the way and lemme bum hunt to close this game" and then you try again next game to get a little bit better. And you do that night in and night out and you find that teammates aren't flashing to spots early enough to get to the trigger points in your sets, or guys have to be directed where to go and now there's 15 seconds on the shot clock and you're trying to manufacture some busted set against a primed defense. And every night as the season goes on you find that the stuff just isn't being drilled into certain players' heads when all the coaching staff have for time to do it is during film sessions and shootaround since most teams don't practice much during the season unless they have like 3 days off. So every night you're just banging your head against the wall and barely making any progress and half the team doesn't believe in what the coaching staff is preaching and everyone just naturally drifts towards spacing out and letting you handle a spread PnR and you got guys calling you selfish and unable to fit in.
I understand that's a very convoluted example but like this is what these guys deal with when you have a low level coaching staff that's bad at teaching and a handful of guys on your team that aren't the sharpest tools in the shed and occasionally forget stuff while they're out there because they're nervous and their brain goes into autopilot cuz the game is starting to get too fast for them. It's up to coaching staffs to prepare these guys just as much as it's on LeBron to inspire them ya know.
LeBron's NBA Cup MVP is more valuable than either of KD's Finals MVPs. This is the word of the Lord
