Owly wrote:70sFan wrote:Owly wrote:Would they not also play with bench lineups?
So lets for the time grant assuming they are going in platooned lineups. You could argue that their individual matchup who the have to outperform is likely to be of a lower standard. At a team level I don't see the logic for more than a marginal adjustment for the single specific player at a lower standard, no?
On playoff samples Stokes had effectively no sample too (1 game, after his initial head injury, before complications), whilst others might have less than huge samples in the windows in question. Olajuwon plays no more than a single opponent and no more than 4 games in the years in question and the years adjacent to the years in question. If one is big on playoffs conceptually it would seem to me hard to justify weighting these runs as a viable sample on which to assess a player.
Good point on Stokes, but with Hakeem we have a lot of playoff data from other seasons.
Hence there wasn't a claim that there wasn't. Just that it isn't there in the seasons chosen. I don't think it's impossible to thread the needle you're arguing just that it makes it awkward.
Playoff sample is important but player number 2 on the list has small unvaried sample in years chosen as peak and adjacent years. You could even take it to years adjacent to adjacent years and there's still only another two series though you would finally get to a 2nd round series (a pretty good offense, though hardly a powerhouse playoff team) and a series of over 4 games (2 total series in '87 none in '92). And this in an era (16 playoff teams of 23 for a couple of these years and then 25, 27 but the new teams still in expansion mode) and some of it in a decidedly lesser conference ('87, '88 at least).
It's not wrong per se ... it's just hard for me to square playoffs as any significant harm for Bol's case with accepting Olajuwon at two and doing so choosing years for Olajuwon with such small and unvaried playoff samples. Personally I wouldn't hold that against Olajuwon because it's something he can't control and I don't think players are that different in the playoffs (I think teams moreso can vulnerable to scheming) but then I wouldn't weight the playoffs that much. At the very margin I might note that unlike Robinson in his near 20 point on-off (19.9, 19.8, 16.8 per 48 minutes 94-96) years with his own weaker casts, Olajuwon at least isn't proving or clearly showing the level of impact that often gets you HCA and a better chance to advance and show a larger sample (though this is messier, two-way, is absence of clear evidence of very high impact rather than evidence of absence of huge impact and somewhat tangential).
When you can see Hakeem impacting the game at the highest level in different seasons, while acknowledging that he was even better in different seasons, I find it plasuable to assume that he would show us at very least similar defensive value in more favorable team situation.
You may disagree with my approach, but I don't think it's very controversial to use my way of deduction.
