beanbag wrote:720 wrote:Marty_Budda wrote:
Curry didn’t play tonight and the warriors won. Embiid didn’t play yesterday and sixers won.Lowry hasn’t played in a month and the heat have won games. Kyrie has missed more games than he’s played in the past few years. I could go on. These aren’t some gimme games just cause 1 guy is missing.
It’s really not as simple as “fake win” every time a player doesn’t play against us.
Um what does that matter? At the end of the day we beat a bunch of teams missing star players. Are you suggesting it's harder to beat a Warriors team without Curry? or a Sixers team without Embiid? Gonna assume you'll say no. That's just weird logic. Can any team beat any team in any given night? Sure, but my point is we beat a bunch of teams missing star players. That matters, like it or not.
It really is as simple as calling them fake wins. lol
Do all wins count the same in the standings? yes. Do some wins matter more than others (for morale, for setting goals, for understanding place in the league?) absolutely.
But it only matters in the context of going through every team and every win and weighting it based on who that team beat on that given night.
Have you done this?
Lately 720 seems like a troll whose main priority is to get a rise out of fans who want to see us remain competitive while developing.
Milwaukee is 5-3 without Giannis not including the two games we beat them. Miami was 8-2 without Lowry this season before we beat them twice in the last week. Atlanta was 2-2 without Trae (and one win was against the healthy Sixers) before we beat them the other night. Brooklyn is 29-16 without Kyrie. Obviously there isn't a huge sample size for some (like Atlanta), but those still look like mostly very good teams to me.
The only players from that list that bring their team's results way up are Embiid (Sixers are 4-8 without him) and Jrue (Bucks are 4-9 without him), but it's important to know the whole story. When Embiid missed 9 straight games and 10 of 13 overall early in the season, the Sixers were without Harris for 5 while Curry and Green also missed a few games. Philly also sat multiple starters against the Grizzlies in a blowout loss in December. Early in the season when Jrue missed some time, the Bucks were also without Portis and Middleton for a few games and lately they've been missing Allen a lot. Giannis also missed a few games while Jrue was out. They're just 2-4 recently without Jrue, but one of those games was against us and the other losses were 3 road games against the Hornets and the Hawks (without Capela and Bogdanovic). The teams that Milwaukee lost to lately are teams we just beat in the last week. FWIW, Milwaukee is 19-9 at home with 2 of those 9 losses against us last month.
The games against the Warriors and Jazz where they rested all of their top players are definitely fair points. I'm not sure we would have 100% lost to the healthy Warriors in that scenario though. They were on a B2B and finishing a 5-game road trip while we were waiting around at home for a few days because of a postponement. The game against the Jazz very well could have been a loss. Our early-season meeting against Utah was without OG and on a night where our bench had arguably their worst game all season (20 points on 7/26 shooting) while Utah's bench dropped 57 points on us, so it's hard to say how we would have stacked up against them.
If we're going to point to every single game where our opponent was missing one of their best players, it should also be taken into consideration that FVV+GTJ+OG+Scottie+Siakam played together just 3 times before the new year-- meaning we were without at least one of our top players in 29 of our first 32 games -- and we were 15-17 at that point. A pretty sizeable chunk of those 17 losses came without multiple starters (all 5 missed the Cleveland game, no FVV+OG+GTJ against Philly and no OG+GTJ against Boston and Memphis) while we lost a few other close games without Siakam (1-point loss to Cleveland and 3-point loss to Chicago), FVV (6-point loss against Detroit) and OG (1-point loss to OKC).
Now that we have been healthy for the past month (or at least significantly more healthy than in the first 30+ games), we are starting to see what this team's true ceiling might be. Since January 1st, we are 11-6 overall and 8-1 with our entire starting lineup available. Our only loss at full strength this calendar year was the letdown game against the Blazers which was our first game back after a tough 5-game road trip. Of our other 5 losses, we had one brutal loss against the Pistons and 4 close losses -- all within one possession in the final 30 seconds -- to 4 of the best teams in the league. We are also top 10 in both offensive and defensive efficiency during this stretch despite playing mostly good teams.
This thread made some sense early in the year when there were numerous question marks (how good will Scottie be, did OG/GTJ improve, can Siakam regain his 2019/20 form after shoulder surgery, how will the fit of our top players look, etc.) and we were battling injuries, but we're just too good when we're healthy. Unless you're rooting for injures to key players, the lottery is looking less and less likely by the day.
