Odinn21 wrote:I think it's quite forgotten that the first several DPoY awards were rewarded to guards, and those results were not outliers leading in each year. Guards in general were more favoured.
If we separate as guards/wings vs. forwards/bigs; 1983; 26-22 guards led the vote. 1984; 46-30 guards led the vote. 1985; 44-34 guards led the vote. (Eaton was the only non-guard winner from '83 to '88) 1986; 35-22 guards led the vote. 1987; 55-23 guards led the vote. 1988; 58-22 guards led the vote.
Until Olajuwon and Ewing joined Eaton and Bol, guards were more favoured than bigs in DPoY votes.
Precisely.
All DPoYs from the guard era should not be taken seriously. The basketball world knew better for decades before that and the fact they didn’t give the award to big men from the start is astonishingly damning to the voters.
None of that means Michael Cooper (or MJ) wasn’t great at their job, but the votes were absurd.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Why stop there? Let's take away Giannis's DPOY too. He was basically a wing last year. Lopez bros were the bigs who guarded all those PnRs (heh) and defended all those shots. Brook was easily in more actions than Giannis.
19/20 Player tracking:
Brook - 16.5 DFGAs in 26mpg (5th in NBA) Giannis - 10.5 DFGAs in 30mpg
Odinn21 wrote:I think it's quite forgotten that the first several DPoY awards were rewarded to guards, and those results were not outliers leading in each year. Guards in general were more favoured.
If we separate as guards/wings vs. forwards/bigs; 1983; 26-22 guards led the vote. 1984; 46-30 guards led the vote. 1985; 44-34 guards led the vote. (Eaton was the only non-guard winner from '83 to '88) 1986; 35-22 guards led the vote. 1987; 55-23 guards led the vote. 1988; 58-22 guards led the vote.
Until Olajuwon and Ewing joined Eaton and Bol, guards were more favoured than bigs in DPoY votes.
Precisely.
All DPoYs from the guard era should not be taken seriously. The basketball world knew better for decades before that and the fact they didn’t give the award to big men from the start is astonishingly damning to the voters.
None of that means Michael Cooper (or MJ) wasn’t great at their job, but the votes were absurd.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Why stop there? Let's take away Giannis's DPOY too. He was basically a wing last year. Lopez bros were the bigs who guarded all those PnRs (heh) and defended all those shots. Brook was easily in more actions than Giannis.
19/20 Player tracking:
Brook - 16.5 DFGAs in 26mpg (5th in NBA) Giannis - 10.5 DFGAs in 30mpg
First, Giannis is a Power Forward and rim protector defensively with his roaming.
Second, shot-blocking and rim protecting wings have always had more value defensively than on-ball wings. There is a reason Andrei Kirilenko was one of the best wing defenders and his on-ball defense wasn't close to Ron Artest or Tony Allen yet his defensive impact eclipsed theirs.
I don't want to quote some of the massive posts and just flood the page so I'll share some thoughts
-Sansterres last post on this page is a Hall of Fame RealGM post IMHO, nice one
-VanWest82, I respect the passion. I just wanna comment on the part about people living in the moment about it just understanding the feelings of the time. I just think the flip side of that, which is the possibility for the people in that time to have allowed cognitive biases to tint their observations of the game, happens more often than the example you're giving thus influencing the zeitgeist too far in one direction overall.
Another point I wanna bring up in regard to your perspective that we're basically conducting a posthumous evaluation of his career devoid of soul and nuance, archetypes are infinite and they transcend all the eras. The game is still the game and each archetype has its own pros and cons. We have had multiple eras and decades now for these certain archetypes to emerge within the game and certain fundamental truths of basketball to crystallize. So don't think we're emotionlessly just looking at the 90s with a 2020 lens, we're looking at the 90s with the perspective of the entirety of the last 60-70 years of basketball.
And I can tell you as someone that dabbles recreationally player-coaching and watching FIBA coaching videos that literally teach you how to teach ball, the yellow light as a defender is always the favorable state to be in vs being a red light or green light. Whether it's on help or on man you always create more value on the court being in a position to prevent a play from happening than being in the reactionary position of having to stop a play which can potentially lead to giving up one. This is a known quantity now that the game has evolved to this point. Some people intuitively understood this more than others tho like Bill Russell.
We know from years of ball being around that the gambler style is sub-optimal in comparison to the deterrent, but the thing with MJ is he's the paragon of his archetype. The trappings of his big guard gambler typing still befall him but they effect him less. A modern example is Steph Curry. He's the paragon of the spread PNR deep range point guard, but the cons of his archetype (size necessary to impose his will on the game at times) still affect him which is why he's always due for one crappy game in a stretch or a series.
He plays a tactically suboptimal style oscillating from a red light that completely blows up a play to a green light that gives up a wide open basket, but being the best version of that archetype he still comes out as a plus. , And he can still have more impact than someone who plays the true most optimal style but is a weak example of it, such as Kyle Korver. Kyle Korver was once the posterboy for most underrated defensive player in the league as far as the opinions of team personnel with advanced tracking data vs us rank plebians and the casuals. Fans of the teams he played for grew to gradually understand this over time. Korver constantly made the right reads on defensive rotations every time and was in the right spots to slow down or prevent plays and his size was an underrated deterrent. But he still would never come close to what MJ could do even though he plays a tactically more optimized style due to the fact that MJ had more pure power and explosiveness, and quite frankly more pure brainpower/focus than Korver.
Now what happens when instead of Korver it's Scottie Pippen or Lebron doing that with a couple inches of height and length plus anywhere from 20-40 lbs on them. Now we're talking about the paragons of the deterrent archetype in bigger frames, or another one like Wade who had a comparable frame 2 inches less height 10-20 lbs more weight. Now the fact that these guys play the more optimal style means they're scrapping together more value at the margins over the aggregate AND they're the best the archetype has to offer with comparable measurables and processing power to Jordan. This is when the limitations of Jordan shows up on the all-time guard list because now as the top of the gambler archetype he's gonna fall somewhere below many of the elites in the yellow light/deterrent archetype.
So we can have a healthy argument about where Jordan falls within that spectrum, but I want you to understand that there truly is a spectrum there of wing defenders and we know how to delineate that spectrum better now. This isn't just us being emotionless film and stat nerds about it. This is us being legitimate historians of the game and contextualizing what we see by viewing across eras and observing the trends that emerge. When statistical evidence and quite simply inherited knowledge from the Titans of the game iterated on across generations by the greatest minds in the game acknowledge that deterring plays is more valuable than gambling on them, it's not really up to us to prove it anymore as a hypothesis; it's been organically peer-reviewed for decades and withstood the test of time.
Re: Guards winning early DPOY. Yea man once again we know their archetype doesn't mean as much to defenses as the size of the big man archetype. That was clearly anti-big man bias.
I do wanna say tho, I see the game homogenizing more in many regards and I wonder now with heralds of the new generation coming in where there's a bunch of ginormous guards (LaMelo is like one example), I think the lines will blur closer than ever as far as the value of guard defense where now the paragon big guard defenders can start to approach strong big man defensive impact like Ben Simmons kind of does. But I still don't see there being any tactical reason as for why guards on the aggregate could ever be more valuable than bigs in that. Which makes Jordans DPOY even more hilarious that he won it over Hakeem because Hakeem was a way more valuable archetype and easily one of the best examples all time of it.
LeBron's NBA Cup MVP is more valuable than either of KD's Finals MVPs. This is the word of the Lord
Odinn21 wrote:I think it's quite forgotten that the first several DPoY awards were rewarded to guards, and those results were not outliers leading in each year. Guards in general were more favoured.
If we separate as guards/wings vs. forwards/bigs; 1983; 26-22 guards led the vote. 1984; 46-30 guards led the vote. 1985; 44-34 guards led the vote. (Eaton was the only non-guard winner from '83 to '88) 1986; 35-22 guards led the vote. 1987; 55-23 guards led the vote. 1988; 58-22 guards led the vote.
Until Olajuwon and Ewing joined Eaton and Bol, guards were more favoured than bigs in DPoY votes.
Precisely.
All DPoYs from the guard era should not be taken seriously. The basketball world knew better for decades before that and the fact they didn’t give the award to big men from the start is astonishingly damning to the voters.
None of that means Michael Cooper (or MJ) wasn’t great at their job, but the votes were absurd.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Why stop there? Let's take away Giannis's DPOY too. He was basically a wing last year. Lopez bros were the bigs who guarded all those PnRs (heh) and defended all those shots. Brook was easily in more actions than Giannis.
19/20 Player tracking:
Brook - 16.5 DFGAs in 26mpg (5th in NBA) Giannis - 10.5 DFGAs in 30mpg
Why stop there? Dude, I'm not "going" anywhere, I'm just analyzing a bizarre event in NBA history. If seeing that the '80s DPOYs was dominated by guards doesn't strike you as strange, you're not thinking hard enough.
Also, Bill Russell played more like Giannis than a Lopez Bro, and I'm not just talking about proficiency. I mean that he played "horizontal game" big man defense emphasizing court coverage rather than camping out by the hoop.
Jordan Syndrome wrote:Second, shot-blocking and rim protecting wings have always had more value defensively than on-ball wings. There is a reason Andrei Kirilenko was one of the best wing defenders and his on-ball defense wasn't close to Ron Artest or Tony Allen yet his defensive impact eclipsed theirs.
There is no evidence of shot blocking wings always having more defensive value than on-ball wings. Artest's DRAPM was better than Kirilenko's pretty much every year of their overlapped prime and Tony Allen is #1 among non bigs in per possession defensive impact in the 15 year RAPM dataset. Wade was one of the best shot blocking guards but his defensive impact was far behind the best 3&D specialists (eg. Bowen, Christie) even though he had double the number of blocks.
Jordan Syndrome wrote:Second, shot-blocking and rim protecting wings have always had more value defensively than on-ball wings. There is a reason Andrei Kirilenko was one of the best wing defenders and his on-ball defense wasn't close to Ron Artest or Tony Allen yet his defensive impact eclipsed theirs.
There is no evidence of shot blocking wings always having more defensive value than on-ball wings. Artest's DRAPM was better than Kirilenko's pretty much every year of their overlapped prime and Tony Allen is #1 among non bigs in per possession defensive impact in the 15 year RAPM dataset. Wade was one of the best shot blocking guards but his defensive impact was far behind the best 3&D specialists (eg. Bowen, Christie) even though he had double the number of blocks.
Odinn21 wrote:I think it's quite forgotten that the first several DPoY awards were rewarded to guards, and those results were not outliers leading in each year. Guards in general were more favoured.
If we separate as guards/wings vs. forwards/bigs; 1983; 26-22 guards led the vote. 1984; 46-30 guards led the vote. 1985; 44-34 guards led the vote. (Eaton was the only non-guard winner from '83 to '88) 1986; 35-22 guards led the vote. 1987; 55-23 guards led the vote. 1988; 58-22 guards led the vote.
Until Olajuwon and Ewing joined Eaton and Bol, guards were more favoured than bigs in DPoY votes.
Precisely.
All DPoYs from the guard era should not be taken seriously. The basketball world knew better for decades before that and the fact they didn’t give the award to big men from the start is astonishingly damning to the voters.
None of that means Michael Cooper (or MJ) wasn’t great at their job, but the votes were absurd.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Most egreious miss since thn has been what...kawhi winning dpoy over draymond?
Odinn21 wrote:I think it's quite forgotten that the first several DPoY awards were rewarded to guards, and those results were not outliers leading in each year. Guards in general were more favoured.
If we separate as guards/wings vs. forwards/bigs; 1983; 26-22 guards led the vote. 1984; 46-30 guards led the vote. 1985; 44-34 guards led the vote. (Eaton was the only non-guard winner from '83 to '88) 1986; 35-22 guards led the vote. 1987; 55-23 guards led the vote. 1988; 58-22 guards led the vote.
Until Olajuwon and Ewing joined Eaton and Bol, guards were more favoured than bigs in DPoY votes.
Precisely.
All DPoYs from the guard era should not be taken seriously. The basketball world knew better for decades before that and the fact they didn’t give the award to big men from the start is astonishingly damning to the voters.
None of that means Michael Cooper (or MJ) wasn’t great at their job, but the votes were absurd.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Why stop there? Let's take away Giannis's DPOY too. He was basically a wing last year. Lopez bros were the bigs who guarded all those PnRs (heh) and defended all those shots. Brook was easily in more actions than Giannis.
19/20 Player tracking:
Brook - 16.5 DFGAs in 26mpg (5th in NBA) Giannis - 10.5 DFGAs in 30mpg
The bucks without brook still were the best rim protecting team in the league holding teams --7 points-- below their average effiency at the rim.
DQuinn1575 wrote:Top defensive teams 1988: 1. Utah 2. Detroit 3. Chicago 4. Houston
Top 3 in DPOY voting: 1. Jordan 2. Eaton 3. Olajuwon
So it's not like all the voters were totally clueless here. At first glance I would think it should be Hakeem, but picking probably the best defensive player on the 3rd best defensive team in the league, with 3 average at best defenders in the starting lineup isn't totally unreasonable.
Picking a dpoy off drating is pretty dubious yeah.
LukaTheGOAT wrote:Since we are arguing about the value of perimter defense now, I think this is the ideal time to pose a question. Assume we consider Tim Duncan, Dikembe Mutombo, and other historic bigs to be worth 3.25 on D. What would a perimeter player without great rim protection, have to do to be worth a similar amount on D?
Like if a perimeter player had GOAT level man defense, and could hold a peak MJ to around 25 pts per gam on a rTS% 4-5 pts below league average, would that be worth similarly to a historic big? I am trying to think of shortcuts/possibilities that a wing might have to close the gap in comparison to all-time league average. I feel like making MJ's scoring a negative value might be an example (an even then there would only be certain scenarios when a perimeter offensive player is good enough for such man-level defense to matter so much).
Well, if we go off playoff drapm, for their careers, Lebron, Pippen and Kahwi were >2.5 irrc. I'm guessing their peak would be higher so that scale might be a little too compressed.
Duncan would probably be a +4-+5. For what its worth, dpipm puts duncan's best at +4.8 and dwight howards best at +4.1 and im pretty sure per rapm the best defensive seasons grade out at +5. The highest post russell mark I can find is Hakeem's +5.4 in 90.
Odinn21 wrote:I think it's quite forgotten that the first several DPoY awards were rewarded to guards, and those results were not outliers leading in each year. Guards in general were more favoured.
If we separate as guards/wings vs. forwards/bigs; 1983; 26-22 guards led the vote. 1984; 46-30 guards led the vote. 1985; 44-34 guards led the vote. (Eaton was the only non-guard winner from '83 to '88) 1986; 35-22 guards led the vote. 1987; 55-23 guards led the vote. 1988; 58-22 guards led the vote.
Until Olajuwon and Ewing joined Eaton and Bol, guards were more favoured than bigs in DPoY votes.
Precisely.
All DPoYs from the guard era should not be taken seriously. The basketball world knew better for decades before that and the fact they didn’t give the award to big men from the start is astonishingly damning to the voters.
None of that means Michael Cooper (or MJ) wasn’t great at their job, but the votes were absurd.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Most egreious miss since thn has been what...kawhi winning dpoy over draymond?
Camby
Other than that, it goes into way more reasonable "snubs" (if you can even call them that) like Wallace/Howard/Metta over Duncan/Garnett.
This place is a cesspool of mindless ineptitude, mental decrepitude, and intellectual lassitude. I refuse to be sucked any deeper into this whirlpool of groupthink sewage. My opinions have been expressed. I'm going to go take a shower.
LukaTheGOAT wrote:Since we are arguing about the value of perimter defense now, I think this is the ideal time to pose a question. Assume we consider Tim Duncan, Dikembe Mutombo, and other historic bigs to be worth 3.25 on D. What would a perimeter player without great rim protection, have to do to be worth a similar amount on D?
Like if a perimeter player had GOAT level man defense, and could hold a peak MJ to around 25 pts per gam on a rTS% 4-5 pts below league average, would that be worth similarly to a historic big? I am trying to think of shortcuts/possibilities that a wing might have to close the gap in comparison to all-time league average. I feel like making MJ's scoring a negative value might be an example (an even then there would only be certain scenarios when a perimeter offensive player is good enough for such man-level defense to matter so much).
Well, if we go off playoff drapm, for their careers, Lebron, Pippen and Kahwi were >2.5 irrc. I'm guessing their peak would be higher so that scale might be a little too compressed.
Duncan would probably be a +4-+5. For what its worth, dpipm puts duncan's best at +4.8 and dwight howards best at +4.1 and im pretty sure per rapm the best defensive seasons grade out at +5. The highest post russell mark I can find is Hakeem's +5.4 in 90.
Season DRAPM DPOY Actual DPOY 1997 Kevin Garnett Dikembe Mutombo 1998 Dikembe Mutombo Dikembe Mutombo 1999 Grant Long Alonzo Mourning 2000 Eddie Jones Alonzo Mourning 2001 Tim Duncan Dikembe Mutombo 2002 Eddie Jones Ben Wallace 2003 Kevin Garnett Ben Wallace 2004 Tim Duncan Ron Artest 2005 Jason Collins Ben Wallace 2006 Shane Battier Ben Wallace 2007 Bruce Bowen Marcus Camby 2008 Kevin Garnett Kevin Garnett 2009 LeBron James Dwight Howard 2010 Kevin Durant Dwight Howard 2011 Paul Pierce Dwight Howard 2012 Dwight Howard Tyson Chandler 2013 Mike Conley Marc Gasol 2014 Kemba Walker Joakim Noah 2015 Khris Middleton Kawhi Leonard 2016 Draymond Green Kawhi Leonard 2017 Rudy Gobert Draymond Green 2018 Robert Covington Rudy Gobert
So this gets Grant Long, Eddie Jones twice, Battier, Bowen Pierce Conly Walker Middleton -about 1/2 the time it's giving the DPOY to a non big man. Pretty sure it's giving me a worse list than Defensive Win Shares.
70sFan wrote:i just watched Hakeem's video - it's good and I agree with Ben's evaluation in most parts. I won't give much details until he shares the video on YT
By the way, he mentioned in the post for patrons that the series will be 16 episodes long - the last one will be about ranking. This means 7 peaks left and the next one is about Shaq.
I’m operating off the assumption that everyone in the intro is getting a video, so we know we’re seeing:
Shaq (the next vid) Duncan KG Kobe Lebron
Who do we think he last 2 will be?
I know he ranks Steph Curry really highly based on his other videos- I figure he’ll probably be there.
70sFan wrote:i just watched Hakeem's video - it's good and I agree with Ben's evaluation in most parts. I won't give much details until he shares the video on YT
By the way, he mentioned in the post for patrons that the series will be 16 episodes long - the last one will be about ranking. This means 7 peaks left and the next one is about Shaq.
I’m operating off the assumption that everyone in the intro is getting a video, so we know we’re seeing:
Shaq (the next vid) Duncan KG Kobe Lebron
Who do we think he last 2 will be?
I know he ranks Steph Curry really highly based on his other videos- I figure he’ll probably be there.
Durant? Dirk? Wade?
I imagine Nash and CP3 are contenders as well.
Hmm. Yeah, in my mind 15 is kind of a strange number to settle on. After the top 12 or so you've got a pretty good sized list of guys who are all near the same level IMO.
All DPoYs from the guard era should not be taken seriously. The basketball world knew better for decades before that and the fact they didn’t give the award to big men from the start is astonishingly damning to the voters.
None of that means Michael Cooper (or MJ) wasn’t great at their job, but the votes were absurd.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Most egreious miss since thn has been what...kawhi winning dpoy over draymond?
Camby
Other than that, it goes into way more reasonable "snubs" (if you can even call them that) like Wallace/Howard/Metta over Duncan/Garnett.
Camby getting a DPOY is one of the biggest head scratchers in DPOY history. Might be the biggest one because at least we know when guards were winning it it was a trend (albeit a really stupid one).
I legitimately dont know how he won DPOY that year because I also did not watch basketball in the 07 season, and if I can remember correctly it was not a very popular year for the NBA.
All DPoYs from the guard era should not be taken seriously. The basketball world knew better for decades before that and the fact they didn’t give the award to big men from the start is astonishingly damning to the voters.
None of that means Michael Cooper (or MJ) wasn’t great at their job, but the votes were absurd.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Why stop there? Let's take away Giannis's DPOY too. He was basically a wing last year. Lopez bros were the bigs who guarded all those PnRs (heh) and defended all those shots. Brook was easily in more actions than Giannis.
19/20 Player tracking:
Brook - 16.5 DFGAs in 26mpg (5th in NBA) Giannis - 10.5 DFGAs in 30mpg
The bucks without brook still were the best rim protecting team in the league holding teams --7 points-- below their average effiency at the rim.
Yeah because they had his twin brother in there.
Giannis does provide some level of rim protection from the wing. He just isn’t their main rim protector, and this idea that you have to be the main rim protector or have to play the 5 in order to be a DPOY candidate is misguided imo. We’d have to throw out the two best defenders in the league last year on that basis.
sansterre wrote:Thanks for taking the time to write this out; I'm sure it's an incredibly stressful situation when 1) most of the board appears to disagree with you and 2) you work really hard on a post and then lose the data that supports it.
1) isn't stressful. Keep in mind you guys are likely in the vast minority in this debate. It just may not seem like that to you as this place can be a bit of an echo chamber; Any place of discussion will eventually gain some echo-chamberish tendencies. This does not invalidate the conclusions of such discussions. Surely the "Jordan is the GOAT" crowd (which as you say, is quite populous) itself demonstrates such behavior (as the principal conclusion, that Jordan is the best is, to them, axiomatic). 2) definitely sucked. An entire game's worth of pbp tracking down the tube. I'm still mad about it. c'est la vie.
1) The problem with relying on any kind of box score driven defensive analysis is that most of what you're working with is steals and blocks.
Spoiler:
And the value of steals is built around a regression analysis of how valuable an average steal is. But for every steal attempt you see, there are steal misses you don't see. Clearly the net success rate on steals is high enough to give them considerable value; if going for steals meant whiffing all the time, steals would not show up in the regression as valuable (because getting one would be evidence of blowing your assignment often). But this means that box score-regressed defensive stats basically assume that every steal was bought with a league average failure rate on that steal. So if a player had higher or lower rates of failure (because they gambled too much or whatever), that would throw the values off. Basically, the argument is that if there was a player that got twice as many steals as normal, but blew assignments wildly more often (let's say 50% of steal attempts, instead of 12%, totally making numbers up here) DBPM would praise them as a great defender (because of high steals numbers) but they obviously wouldn't be. To be clear, none of this has anything to do with Jordan explicitly. It's just saying that DBPM loves Jordan because he racks up a ton of steals. But if there was evidence that he whiffed on steals more than average (which there seems to be some of) then his steals are less valuable, and the whole thing needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
I don't rely on box score defensive stats. It's why I keep going on and on about line up data, pbp, on/off, tracking, etc. Without that stuff we have essentially nothing from a statistical POV, or at least nothing we can trust on a stand alone basis. We have eye test. We have testimony from old guys like me who watched a ton of games back then and have re-watched a bunch of them, and we have people who covered or participated in the league. Maybe we can't really trust that either but it's still better info than the limited/flawed stats from that period in time.
2) I realize that it may seem like hubris for so many to discount the DPOY voting. It may be.
Spoiler:
But, and I speak only for myself, such votes are often realistic gauges on what people thought at the time, but that doesn't make them right. Bob Pettit, despite being great, probably wasn't more valuable than Russell in '59. Allen Iverson, despite being amazingly skilled and fun to watch, was definitely not the best player in '01 (though I suppose given certain definitions he may have been most valuable). Kobe Bryant was making All Defense teams well past the point where it made any sense. These votes are not magically correct; they are right more often than not but voters are prone to all kind of biases (which is why Jordan only won 5 MVPs despite being the best player in the league much more often than that, because voters don't like giving it to the same person every year). And voters love dramatic demonstrations of skill. Do you follow baseball at all? If not, bear with me. Derek Jeter is a shortstop. [spoiler]He habitually played really shallow (for whatever reason). And he was extremely good at making cross-body athletic throws. Because he played so shallow he could sprint to balls hit nearer the plate, grab them on the move, jump, throw across his body, and get the runner out. It was awesome to see. When you thought of "Who is an awesome defensive shortstop", Jeter came to mind, because he was always showing up on highlight reels of great plays. And he won a considerable number of gold gloves.
Here's the problem though. Jeter was actually an extremely bad fielder (or ineffective would be more accurate). Extremely comprehensive analysis that I won't go into here (though I can give you a source), found that balls that were hit to the near right/left of where a shortstop would normally be would be caught by an average shortstop, but Jeter would miss them most of the time (and he was playing so shallow that the naked eye would assume that he could never have gotten the ball). Basically, he was found to have poor side-side mobility and because of playing so shallow, he was only actually good at hits in the grass. The best shortstop according to the study that year? Adam Everett. But do you know how often Adam Everett made acrobatic jumping throws across his body? Never. He always planted his feet when he threw. Because that's proper technique. And voters never cared. Why? Presumably because every time Everett made a play he made it look easy (because he was doing it right). That someone actually tracking all this made it clear that Everett got to more balls than anyone didn't matter; watching Everett you thought "ah, another easy ball that Everett converted" but watching Jeter you thought "wow, what an amazing play". Point is, Jeter was wildly overrated as a fielder because he was good at really dramatic, ostentatious stuff and bad at all the boring but effective stuff.
Jordan was really good at the defensive stuff that is dramatic, eye-catching and highlight reel-worthy. Like, really, really good. But to do that he sacrificed performance on the boring stuff that nobody cares about, the stuff that makes you a reliable man/team defender (and to be clear, I'm not arguing that Jordan was bad at this, only that he was worse at it than he would have been if he'd gambled less). The simple eye-test is almost always going to overrate a player like that. That's just a thing. And the voters (especially back then) were definitely not doing quantitative analysis to evaluate these players; they were going on public perception (which is driven disproportionately by dramatic stuff, which Jordan excelled at). Was Jordan a great defender? Most everybody thinks so. Was he the best wing defender in the game that year? The voters clearly thought so. But saying that Jordan was more valuable on defense than Olajuwon, arguably the best paint protector in the modern era (who averaged about 75% the steals that Jordan did, in addition to being 4th in blocks that year)? That's a tough sell. I can't honestly say one way or another. But for me (and I'm not speaking for others on this board) it's extremely easy to look at an unusual award to a player with a flashy skillset and go "Ah, the flashy skill set bias, duly noted". I'm not saying that Jordan didn't deserve it, but I *am* saying that I take the award about as seriously as I take Barkley winning the MVP in '93. I understand why he got it, but it's still plenty suspect. For better or for worse, the "Do I dare contradict the conscientious voters of the time who watched every game while all I have is stats 30 years later?" is not a question that bothers me. Maybe it should, but it doesn't. The voters get 35% of votes obviously right, 55% of votes reasonably right (like you may disagree, but you get it), and 10% of the votes are simply wrong, because awards voters are capable of myopic, biased groupthink as much as any group, and sometimes it really shows.
1. We have enough good information to discredit Jeter's GGs in the mid 00s. Baseball, due to its style of play, is much easier to evaluate from a statistical standpoint. We don't, however, have enough good information to discredit Jordan's DPOY. The "MJ was serial gambler which hurt his team" theory is just an hypothesis. There is no good actual evidence to back that up outside of a few posters on the PC board making grand declarative statements which I (and most people I'd reckon) disagree with, and Ben Taylor - who apparently also comes from this board - giving his opinion on a youtube video. I don't think that anyone is saying that Jordan's defense was a net negative ("Jordan was a serial gambler which hurt his team"). Everyone involved with this discussion believes that Jordan was a really good defender. That his whiffing on steals *which he did* hurt his team is not a matter for debate. 2. Barkley did deserve to win MVP that year. He was awesome and his team won more games, and Jordan certainly deserved some portion of the blame for the "jordan rules" fallout given it was about him and the drama caused his most high profile teammates to basically mail in the regular season. Barkley may have deserved it in terms of narrative, but the numbers are pretty overwhelming that Jordan was the best player in the league that year. 3. Kobe getting gratuitously reputation voted into all defense or all star at the tail end of his career isn't the same as an MVP or DPOY vote. The latter gets taken way more seriously and always has. I thought this was common knowledge. 4. It's a slippery slope to be full on writing off NBA awards. If MJ's DPOY is just a big joke like some posters have suggested, then it's all a big joke. None of the DPOY winners are true winners. Throw out all the All NBA teams. Throw out all the MVP winners. If there's no integrity year-to-year then how can any of it matter? I just think this is such an extreme overreaction to an imperfect system that gets it VERY close in the vast majority of cases. If you're going to discredit an official award winner, the onus is on you to overcome a high level of scrutiny in doing so. We haven't even come close to approaching that threshold with MJ. Isn't this a little disingenuous? You seem to be arguing that if one award can be flawed, then they are all worthless. Why do we need to conclude that the awards voters are always perfect? Jordan winning the DPOY certainly adds to his case more than it would if he hadn't won it, but surely there's a level of healthy scrutiny that all such decisions should be subjected to? 5. This is going to be a little personal and I don't mean to single you out as that's not my intent...but having now interacted with more posters on here recently, I'm getting the impression that a lot perhaps scale on the younger side (maybe teens-late 20s?). The reason I say that is there seems to be a strong distrust of old and/or generally accepted information, especially from a historical context, which is a trait typically most prominent in youth. I have a teenage daughter and I recognize that same quality in her as I do in my younger self from decades ago. As you get older one of the things you realize is that your parents and older people who you perhaps once thought knew very little actually probably knew a heck of a lot more than you ever gave them credit for. I don't really know how to handle the insinuation that I'm 15 years younger than I actually am. Thank you? I guess? Kidding aside, I feel like the primary purpose of this board is to learn. That's why every damned year there's that Top 100 players thread, and at every single slot you get dozens of people throwing research and argument to try and nail down how good certain players were. There is conflict, and it's not always pleasant, but it does strongly encourage everyone to face the weaknesses in their own position, and to appreciate the strengths in the positions of others. In short, it encourages people to learn. And the pursuit of learning means that everything comes under scrutiny. "Kevin Garnett is garbage because his teams lost." Is that a valid line of reasoning? Who were his teammates? "Kevin Garnett is one of the Top 5 ever because his AuBPMs are off the chart." Is that a valid line of reasoning? Is AuBPM such a persuasive tool that it would let us put such a player so high? Nobody really knows. We just argue a lot and research a lot and finish the day, hopefully, smarter than we started it. A permutation of this is that very little gets said without scrutiny, whenever the position was taken. Many of Kobe's competitors think that he's the clutchest clutch that ever clutched . . . but anyone willing to actually count his clutch shots can determine that he actually missed a ton of them, and so that position perhaps cannot be taken at face value. In 1955 it was *obvious* to everyone in the game that big men were scorers first, and that jumping to block shots was a defensive liability. It turned out that that position was fairly garbage (although without a three point line scoring near the basket was far more important and scoring then did favor bigs some). It was once held that Russell was clearly the best player of the 60s because he was the best player on the team that won 11 of 13 teams. Then that came under fire because his metrics didn't support that case very well. Then, with the introduction of WOWYR and things of that sort, Russell's impact became clear, and his value swung back toward the initial position. Questioning things is how we get better. The alternative is discussions that reduce down to "Jordan is the best." "Ayup." Which doesn't help anyone learn anything, even if it may be true. That's something we all go through. 30 years is a long time but from an evolutionary sense, not really. All of which is to say, maybe the people covering the league back in the 80s and 90s weren't really as dumb and uninformed as some here like to suggest. Perhaps they knew more about what they were experiencing, living, breathing at the time than we do looking back with limited information after the fact. They may not have had the publicly available stats we count on today, but they had much better access to NBA coaches and front office personnel whom they relied on to help form their opinions of players. They also had two eyes and a human brain which doesn't always do the best job differentiating within one standard deviation but almost always can pick out the outliers. If MJ was out there gambling and whiffing and failing like a madman, isn't it weird that no one really made a big deal about it until now, and that it's really only being discussed in this one small corner of the internet? There were a lot of NBA players from that time who weren't exactly fans of MJ. Why aren't they calling him a reckless defender? In my experience salty people who've lost tend to speak those truths. Food for thought. I'll get off my soap box now.
(edit: maybe a better way of saying all this is we have to have a higher threshold for new evidence before arbitrarily throwing the baby out with bath water on existing widely held and agreed upon beliefs.)
3) Your point about the point of Ben's content is well-made. I haven't obviously done a counting breakdown, but I wouldn't be surprised if his Jordan content (specifically defensive) was at least half negative. And if you're saying "Jordan was one of the best wing defenders ever, any breakdown that spends half its length on his defensive weaknesses is clearly compromised" . . . I think that's a very understandable position.
But please remember, none of his basketball statements were false, and his conclusion was that Jordan was at least a Defensive Team level if not much better. Both of which are unimpeachable.
To summarize this massive, unwieldy wall of text . . .
I don't think you can disagree with anything he said, because it was all pretty factual.
I disagree it was all pretty factual. I think a lot of it was his educated opinion, and in the case of Jordan's defensive play making, one I happen to disagree with. When Ben Taylor sees MJ taking a calculated risk to go for a rotation steal he thinks about the theoretical gamble that's taking place - one which could really compromise the defense. It would seem this is how you look at it too. I look at it and say "that's Michael Jordan - he hits a heck of a lot more than he whiffs on those, and that level of help defense puts an added amount of pressure on the opposing team that makes it harder to score against weaker teammates." But once again, you seem to be saying "He hits more than he misses on steals, therefor to suggest that his missing on steals hurt his team is disrespectful and bad analysis". I don't get this position at all. Ben isn't using this to say that he's bad; he's using it to say that he missed sometimes, and when he did it was bad, which it was.
Imagine if the topic was Jordan's clutch shooting. And instead of the usual montage of Jordan's made buzzer beaters (of which there are many), Ben alternated between buzzer-beaters that Jordan made and buzzer-beaters that Jordan missed. And Ben said something like, "Jordan made clutch shots at the end of games with some of the most success of any player ever. But there were times when he simply could not pull it off." Is this disrespectful to Jordan? If it is, then reality is disrespectful to Jordan. Jordan didn't make every clutch shot, but if all you were shown is the made shots, you'd instinctively assume that he was some magic clutch shot genie, granting game-winning wishes. A more accurate summary of his clutch shooting would involve both the makes and misses, and the conclusion, that he was really good at it. I don't understand the idea that to say that Jordan missed has no place in an evaluation of the player; he did. But that's just my opinion, and given neither you, I, nor Ben Taylor actually went to the trouble of tracking his "gambles" and their results and compared that with gambles and results from other players, opinions is all we really have on the matter. I also think that Mike toned it down a lot in the 90s when he had much better defensive teammates and there was less of a need for that kind of pressure style. Coincidence? Probably not.
Because the tone of his video has come into question, I sat down and broke down the defensive section of the video into sections, to try and objectively assess his tone. Obviously this is approximate but it should work for our purposes:
15:45 - 16:00: Jordan's defense was fairly boom or bust (Neutral - given that Jordan gambled a lot this is a factual statement) 16:00 - 16:25: Jordan generated a ton of steals (Clearly Good) 16:25 - 16:40: Jordan whiffed a lot (not proportionally, but overall) because he gambled a lot (Bad) 16:40 - 16:50: He succeeded more often than not, but his misses still hurt (Neutral - objectively true) 16:50 - 17:45: Jordan was incredibly quick and used it to good effect (Good - went for 55 seconds) 17:45 - 18:20: Jordan often swiped as he stayed in front of dribblers, which sometimes worked and sometimes created openings for shots, he lunged for steals often (Neutral) 18:25 - 18:40: Examples of Jordan creating shots for opposition by missing steals and missing swipes in the Finals against Magic (Bad) 18:40 - 18:55: Jordan liked swiping in the post too, but Ben thinks he should have played more straight up on account of his strength and athleticism (Neutral? This isn't really a bad thing and involves praise, so I wasn't sure how to grade it. But it's clearly opinion, not objective truth. But not negative either.) 18:55 - 19:15: Magic torching Jordan in the Finals (clearly bad) 19:20 - 19:30: Jordan loved surprising double-teaming (Neutral - this isn't a good or bad thing, and is objectively fairly accurate) 19:30 - 19:40: Jordan did a ton of damage with these when it worked (Good) 19:40 - 20:10: But it did leave his man open, which did lead to undefended shots, and at times Jordan strayed into the paint and abandoned his man (Bad) 20:10 - 21:15: Jordan was an extremely good blocking guard, did a strong job protecting the paint, and his straying into the lane was often valuable because of this (Good, and it went for 65 seconds) 21:15 - 21:20: Ben feels like Jordan's defense is hard to evaluate accurately (Neutral - he's basically admitting that he thinks his margin of error with evaluating Jordan is higher than it is with most players) 22:20 - 22:25: Jordan often rotated very quickly (Good) 22:25 - 22:40: Jordan wasn't always a good help defender and at times misread plays (Bad) 22:40 - 22:50: Jordan was a really good defensive rebounder (Good) 22:50 - 23:00: Ben views Jordan as an all-league defender, if not an all-time great wing defender (Not sure how to rate this)
That seems pretty reasonable to me, frankly. He spends 50% of his time praising Jordan's strengths (because he had a lot of them). He spends 25% of the time making factual (or at least, neutral-toned) statements about Jordan's play style. And he spends 25% of the time talking about things flaws in Jordan's game. Which may seem high, but because Jordan gambled a lot, plays where he hurt his team are in much greater supply than they'd be for a more conservative defender (the counter, that the plays where his defense definitely helped his team were in greater number because of his aggressive play style is also true). This amount of time devoted to the downsides of the player in question is pretty normal for Thinking Basketball content. He'll spend a while talking about LeBron being a savant about reading offenses, being in position and jumping passing lanes, but then he'll go on to say, "That said, sometimes he could get caught ball-watching (insert clip) and sometimes he would make calculated reads of where the play was going that were simply wrong (insert clip)." No malice, pretty standard stuff.
Ben point blank says "I think Jordan's defense is hard to evaluate accurately". Then he ballparks his value at the all-league level. Might he be wrong? Yes! Which he admits.
But to my reading, he gave a pretty comprehensive review of Jordan's defensive strengths, tendencies and weaknesses, said that he wasn't confident in his assessment and then gave one to the best of his abilities.
Frankly, the above is *exactly* what I think is appropriate in a player evaluation video of this sort. If you think he's too low on Jordan's defense, that's fine, he admitted that he could be wrong. But it seems to offend you for Ben to say that Jordan had tendencies that, at times, hurt his team. And I can't really say anything to help with that. If your standard for a good Jordan video is that it glosses over Jordan's flaws . . . more power to you I guess.
"If you wish to see the truth, hold no opinions."
"Trust one who seeks the truth. Doubt one who claims to have found the truth."
VanWest82 wrote: Why stop there? Let's take away Giannis's DPOY too. He was basically a wing last year. Lopez bros were the bigs who guarded all those PnRs (heh) and defended all those shots. Brook was easily in more actions than Giannis.
19/20 Player tracking:
Brook - 16.5 DFGAs in 26mpg (5th in NBA) Giannis - 10.5 DFGAs in 30mpg
The bucks without brook still were the best rim protecting team in the league holding teams --7 points-- below their average effiency at the rim.
Yeah because they had his twin brother in there.
Giannis does provide some level of rim protection from the wing. He just isn’t their main rim protector, and this idea that you have to be the main rim protector or have to play the 5 in order to be a DPOY candidate is misguided imo. We’d have to throw out the two best defenders in the league last year on that basis.
Giannis spent all of his minutes last year at the 4 and 5. Gobert spent all his minutes at the 5. Davis spent 40% of his minutes at the 5 in the regular season and even more in the post-season.
