Ability & Achievement: an "ars poetica" on basketball analysis Ability is what a player can do on the court, and achievement is what a player actually does. How to balance the two? Ability is something like goodness, a theoretical ideal that's impossible to pin down because reality never resembles a vacuum.(That doesn't mean it's not worth trying.) Achievement is all about context -- measured
against expectations and the conditions of play. In evaluating the two, it's difficult not to rig the weights in favor of the playoffs. After all, if what matters is helping your team win championships, isn't it most important how you are able to perform through that gauntlet? Even looking at the regular season, we might evaluate players with an eye toward how their role translates to the post-season. A lot goes into that: some of it sheer ability, how resilient your game is, how you can adapt, how your defense holds up, whether you maintain efficiency when the looks get worse because the defense is chasing harder and now there are hands where they didn't use to be. (Some of it, sadly, is also related to a third "A": availability.)
And yet, of course, as always: we must be wary of the noise in these sample sizes. A rebound bouncing the wrong way can end a season; role players miss shots they usually make -- or get hot in the right couple of games. I believe we should try our darndest not to base all of our judgments on how a player looks in his best situation or in his worst. This post-season, I saw several examples of players who look unplayable in some series and dominant in others. To name a few:
- Brandon Clarke was a god amongst men in the first round but a minus in the second round.
- De'Anthony Melton and Steven Adams were the opposite -- couldn't see the floor against Minnesota, but both effective against Golden State.
- Against Dallas, Looney played twice as much per game as he did against Denver and looked every bit the kind of guy GS wants to play a lot (instead of a placeholder so that Draymond doesn't have to play center 48 minutes a night).
In that sense, we might define role players as those whose values fluctuate the most according to matchup.
But these extreme examples are instructive. Stars aren't likely to get benched for a series, but they are affected by matchups too. Small guards get cooked by the right predators; shot creators get overplayed by defenses who don't trust their teammates to hit shots; another defense, against another shot creator, may stay home and take away playmaking. More concretely, Dallas's strong wing defenders swallow up Chris Paul and Devin Booker, but are less equipped to navigate Curry and Poole's flitting around screens. And then look at how Memphis's athleticism and physicality gave that same Warriors team trouble. Even though, by definition, stars have more ways of affecting the game, they still have weaknesses that make them vulnerable against the right opponents.
The way I see it, we're all trying to balance ability and achievement, whether explicitly or implicitly. We look at a player's performance and try to figure out how his teammates and opponents made it possible. We look at what a player did and try to adjust for variance by curving back to what we expect from that player. Did Jordan Poole elevate his game against Denver or just get hot at an opportune time? On paper Jimmy Butler looks like the best scorer in the playoffs, yet teams didn't guard him like the Celtics guarded KD. Butler was in more advantageous positions to score, but he usually made the most of them too. And so on.
My goal this week and next is to produce short evaluations of the top seasons, what the playoffs proved or disproved, and the questions I still have, which will shake out into my reasonings for the major awards. I will be working through how much weight the post-season versus the first 82 games and how to deal with health,
especially for guys who have chronic health concerns.
In 2022, I think there's a clear top 9 players. Here's how I see them at healthy levels:
Tier 1Giannis Antetokounmpo
Nikola Jokic
Tier 2Steph Curry
Joel Embiid
Tier 3Jayson Tatum
LeBron James
Luka Doncic
Kevin Durant
Jimmy Butler
[For those interested, below is roughly where I see them in +/- terms. I know this exposes me more than I'm comfortable with, but this helps me concretize my evaluations and alerts me to where I may be overrating / underrating a guy.]
Battling for the 10th through 20th spots are:
- Chris Paul (up there on a per minute basis)
- Draymond Green (offense looks slightly worse this year?)
- Jrue Holiday (efficiency drops off hard in the playoffs, but consistently moves the needle).
Then... the one-way stars — Rudy Gobert, Trae Young, Karl-Anthony Towns, James Harden, Ja Morant, Donovan Mitchell — and Devin Booker, Pascal Siakam, and Bam Adebayo. These guys are all roughly All-NBA level for me and many of them are contenders for OPOY and DPOY.
