Special_Puppy wrote:AEnigma wrote:EmpireFalls wrote:To be honest just makes me appreciate what Jokic is doing even more. The 2024 Lakers weren’t great by SRS but I’ll be damned if they weren’t one of the toughest opponents to go out in the first round ever. To go 8-1 against them over 2 seasons is a huge feather in his cap.
This series has me even more impressed by the Nuggets and less impressed by Jokic, but maybe that will change against the Wolves.
I honestly had the opposite impression?
Jokic's average prior EPM in this series was +6.2 and his BPM is the highest of the playoffs so far.
I really do not care about BPM. His BPM in general is the highest all-time — and it was most recently changed as response to Westbrook performing inordinately well in it. Box score accumulation is not how I judge players, and that is essentially what those basketball-reference metrics measure.
EPM (and LEBRON and DARKO) is more comprehensive and accordingly something I am more willing to respect as an
indicator, but to whatever extent we want to say that EPM value reflects well on Jokic
generally, I do not think it reflects all too well
comparatively.
Lebron is the GOAT, and I think the degree of separation becomes more obvious with every year, but I would not say at age 39 he should be matching a top five peak, or even a top ten peak. I mean, if people want to say that, sure, go nuts, but the interpretation that corresponds better to my eyes and assessment of their games is that Jokic is not really performing at any sort of
overall unprecedented level and that his offensive game, while excellent, is not individually producing enough separation to make up for his still extremely exploitable defensive weaknesses.
Again, I am lower than most on Shaq — for many of the same reasons defensively — but Jokic is not bending defences the way Shaq did. We can say that is a product of an era where defences are frequently over-taxed, but then Jokic should be producing more potent results than he has been. In fact, he needs to do so if we are going to argue his offensive production makes up for the cavernous defensive advantage held by Hakeem and Wilt and Duncan (and to a substantial extent also Kareem).