Iwasawitness wrote:lessthanjake wrote:I don’t think the Nuggets had a very difficult slate of opponents in 2023. SRS definitely undersells their opponents—the Lakers were *way* better after the trades, the Suns hadn’t had Durant for the vast majority of the season, and the Heat always seem substantially better in the playoffs (likely in large part due to Spoelstra). But, of course, if we just looked at SRS, the 2023 slate of opponents look like complete jokes. That wasn’t the case in reality, and I think we all know that, if we’re being honest about it.
Sometimes SRS does undersell teams and sometimes they overrate them. In the case of 2023 I think they were spot on.
LA did get significantly better after the trades but it didn't solve all of their problems. They still lacked depth, especially bigs outside of AD. The Nuggets were able to exploit this, compared to 2020 where the two teams met in the playoffs and one of the big advantages LA had was that they had a multitude of bigs they could use on him.
Suns weren't a real threat regardless even with Durant. They just didn't have enough time to really develop as a team with him. Maybe if it was the full season, it'd be a different story, but I still wouldn't see them beating Denver. Regardless, the fact that the Suns were arguably the best team Denver faced that season says it all.
Miami was the eighth seed for a reason, and it wasn't due to injuries or some fluke circumstances. It's because top to bottom, they weren't all that great of a team. But they matched up incredibly well with the first seeded Bucks who were being coached by Bud who was obviously impacted greatly by the death of his brother. Their three point shooting as a team reached ridiculous levels against the Knicks, who they had no business beating but managed to pull it off anyways. And the Celtics... I mean I just don't know what else to say at this point. I actually have Celtics once again disappointing this year and not even making the Finals because I just don't think they have it in them to reach that next step. Yes, that's the only explanation I can come up with for the Celtics, no I don't care how weak it is. Regardless, the Heat just did not matchup well at all with the Nuggets on top of there being a clear and utter mismatch in terms of talent.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that the SRS was spot on with these opponents, when we have clear concrete reasons why they were better. For instance, you can say the Lakers still had weaknesses, but after the Westbrook trade, the Lakers had a 5.09 SRS, followed by having a 7.80 playoff SRS before facing the Nuggets. Across almost 40 regular season + playoff games after the Westbrook trade and before facing the Nuggets, the Lakers had about a 6 SRS. So are we really supposed to think that their 0.43 regular season SRS was “spot on”? Meanwhile, the Suns had had an 8.76 SRS in the RS+Playoff games Durant had played for them prior to facing Denver. Granted, that was a small sample size, so I don’t take it as seriously as the Lakers data points, but it’s certainly evidence that would tend to confirm the obvious idea that getting Durant made them better than their regular season 2.08 SRS. Finally, the Heat had had a 9.04 playoff SRS prior to facing Denver, and their status as having the best coach in the NBA along with their playoff success in prior years makes that seem like it probably wasn’t really a random mirage, and that they weren’t really a -0.13 SRS team. Granted, I wouldn’t say these higher SRS figures I’ve given are perfectly representative of these teams’ quality. But I think the truth is clearly at least somewhere in the middle and that saying their regular season SRS was spot on is just not right.
lessthanjake wrote:That said, LeBron’s Finals runs didn’t actually include “a lot of really great teams.” I think this is intuitively obvious to people who watched basketball at the time and don’t simply *want* to believe otherwise. But just for reference, I’d say that +1000 or better pre-playoff title odds is a pretty reasonable dividing line that marks whether a team was a real contender. Teams with worse odds than that essentially never win the title. Indeed, the only teams to have done so since 1976 (the first year we have data for this) are the 2011 Mavs and the 1995 Rockets (but multiple teams at +1000 exactly have won, so this is actually a natural dividing line). In all of his Finals runs combined, how many teams with +1000 or better pre-playoffs title odds did LeBron’s teams beat prior to the Finals? Well, only five. Those are the 2007 Pistons, the 2011 Celtics, the 2011 Bulls, the 2014 Pacers, and the 2015 Hawks (barely, at +1000 exactly). And the only one of those teams that was actually a top 3 team in pre-playoffs title odds that year was the 2011 Bulls. I do actually think that the East was not weak in 2011, and the Heat’s run to the Finals that year was actually on the difficult side. But the rest of it was *really* sparse. When we’re hanging our hats on teams like the 2015 Hawks and 2014 Pacers—ensemble-cast teams in a mold that almost always fails in the playoffs—as the banner teams for playing “really great” opponents, then I think it’s obvious that there just weren’t a lot of really good opponents.
I don't understand the logic behind dismissing the 2015 Hawks because... wait what did you even say again? They're an ensemble cast team that almost always falls in the playoffs? So that suddenly means they were never a great team? That means they were never a legitimate threat? I just don't buy into that logic at all. Same with the 2014 Pacers or any version of them really. They came close on multiple occasions to reaching that next step, they were just never able to get the job done. That doesn't mean they weren't legitimately great teams. They absolutely were.
How often do teams without a major superstar do really well in the playoffs? It happens, but it is very rare. More commonly, throughout NBA history, teams with that sort of team construction don’t do much. I personally never took that era’s Pacers or the 2015 Hawks seriously as playoff threats, for this reason. This has nothing to do with LeBron, as I didn’t think they were serious playoff threats well before they actually faced LeBron’s teams. What it has to do with IMO is that players just don’t really get up for regular season games against teams like this as much as they do against great teams with major superstars. This makes the regular season success of such teams a bit misleading, and they end up facing a higher difficulty spike in the playoffs than other teams. You’re free to disagree, but really if you are hanging your hat on those teams as the poster children for LeBron’s “really great” opponents, then I don’t think the vast majority of people will agree with you.
Anyways, IMO, the best team LeBron ever beat prior to the Finals was the 2011 Bulls. That was a legitimately really good team, and the Heat won rather easily even though Wade didn’t have a good series (though Bosh did have a great series). I rooted for LeBron in every single Eastern Conference series he ever had in his career, and that was easily the series his team won that I was most worried about beforehand.
lessthanjake wrote:Ultimately, LeBron benefited from an easy conference. It really shouldn’t be a debatable premise. He very obviously did and everyone recognized that at the time.
At what time? 2018? Because that wasn't the consensus at the time. The consensus was that LeBron overcame teams he had no business beating and once again dragged a team to the Finals when they had no business being there. No one was calling the East easy in 2016, or 2015. This wasn't a popular thought for the majority of his time in Miami... your theory isn't supported by anything substantial.
Before the playoffs started in 2018, the Cavaliers had easily the best title odds of any Eastern Conference team. They had a surprisingly fragile-seeming first round matchup, so the odds flipped after that, with the Raptors having better odds after the first round, but you’re really exaggerating here. Not only did the 2018 Cavaliers have easily the best pre-playoffs title odds of any Eastern Conference team, but the idea that LeBron overcame “teams” (plural) that he “had no business beating” is a bit odd when his team had substantially better title odds than their opponent in the first round and the conference finals, and, as mentioned, had had better title odds than the second-round opponent before the playoffs started. In any event, though, you’re subtly shifting the discussion away from the actual quality of the opponents to a comparison to the quality of LeBron’s team. Those opponents in 2018 were not “really great” teams, regardless of whether the Cavs weren’t great either. The whole point here is that, in a stronger conference, his teams would not have made the Finals as much, and this is one of the banner years for that!
And yes, people were calling the East easy in 2015 and 2016. The non-LeBron Eastern Conference team with the best pre-playoff title odds in 2016 had +4000 odds! As mentioned, in 2015, the best was +1000 odds. There was simply not really another serious contender in the East in LeBron’s entire second stint on the Cavaliers, and contemporaneous betting odds bear that out. If we go back to the Heat years, you had years like 2014, where 5 of the top 7 teams in terms of pre-playoff title odds were in the West (and one of the other two was, of course, the Heat). You had 2013, where the non-LeBron Eastern Conference team with the best pre-playoff odds had +1600 odds. On paper in 2012, the East had the team with the next best pre-playoff title odds behind the Heat, but it was the Bulls and Derrick Rose got injured immediately in the playoffs, so they were irrelevant. And besides them, the next three favorites were in the West, and the team with the next best pre-playoff odds in the East was at +2000. Finally, when we go back to 2011, the East actually was strong (and had 3 of the top 4 teams in title odds), and I think virtually anyone would admit that that run for the Heat in the East was not easy. Once Derrick Rose got hurt, the East was perpetually weak the entire time LeBron was there. It’s really just not a debatable concept. Again, I rooted for LeBron in the East that entire time. And, of course, there’s always some uncertainty in the playoffs, but from Derrick Rose’s 2012 injury onwards there was always a clear sense that his road to the Finals wouldn’t have to go through any top-tier contender.
Yeah, LeBron rarely faced teams that were actually superior to the ones he played for. But we need to understand the difference between actual easy teams and legitimately good ones that simply weren't on his level, all while acknowledging the ones that he managed to win against who were clearly better. The Pacers teams, for the most part, were elite defensive units with a superstar caliber first option and a good cast of characters. The 2015 Hawks were a 60 win team with four all stars. The 2011 Bulls had the MVP, best defense and also 60 wins, and they were usually always very good teams even when Rose unfortunately went down (and they were a very good team in 2015 when they managed to be able to keep Rose around for said playoffs). And as I've always preached, the 2018 playoffs featured multiple teams superior to what LeBron had going for him in Cleveland. Regardless of whether or not they fit the category of an elite team (I think the Celtics definitely were elite, as were the Raptors), the fact of the matter remains that they were clearly superior to the Cavs but still faltered in the end.
“Superstar caliber first option” is quite a stretch for anyone on those Pacers teams. I assume you’re referring to Paul George, and I’m not sure Paul George *ever* deserved that description, but he definitely didn’t at age 22 and 23.
And yes, the venerable four-all-star cast of Jeff Teague, Al Horford, Kyle Korver, and Paul Millsap. Please. They made the all-star team because people think teams with a lot of wins should get multiple all stars and no one had any idea who deserved to make it on their team since they didn’t actually have any star, so they all somehow ended up in. None of those players were actual stars, and we both know that. They ran it back the next year with those same guys all perfectly healthy and they won 48 games (not to mention having won 38 games in 2014). It was the quintessential team that did well in the regular season in significant part because players and coaches didn’t take them that seriously. And, bearing that out, while they made the conference finals, their playoff SRS was only a pretty mediocre 2.70 before facing the Cavs (and they had a negative playoff SRS after that!). They weren’t a bad team, but they certainly weren’t “really great.”
The 2011 Bulls were actually good. Probably the best team LeBron ever beat in the first three rounds of the playoffs.
At what point do we stop pulling the "the teams obviously weren't good" card and start actually acknowledging that a good part of it was due to the greatness of LeBron? At what point do we decide that we want to be objective about this and not do everything in our power to downplay ones achievements because of an obviously flawed and wrong narrative?
My views on these teams are not “due to the greatness of LeBron” when I know that I didn’t think these teams were good *before* they played LeBron in the playoffs, and I obviously wasn’t alone since pre-playoff title odds virtually always agreed with that assessment. And I really can’t emphasize enough that this was obvious to me even when I was rooting for LeBron to make the Finals in all of these years. Respectfully, I think it’s you that is not being objective and attaching yourself to an “obviously flawed and wrong narrative.” The Eastern Conference was very weak for a large portion of LeBron’s time there. And that’s okay! He also took care of business in the East quite often! As I said, the weakness of the East contextualizes his team achievements, and it’s pretty clear he wouldn’t have made nearly as many Finals in a tough conference, but he’d probably have won just as many titles and put up similarly great individual performances. So the only way this discussion matters is to the extent there’s people who hyper-focus on either (1) making so many Finals or making Finals with relatively weak rosters a couple times; or (2) having a bad record in the Finals. Both of those are largely a product of being in a weak conference. In a stronger conference, he’d have made fewer Finals (and definitely not have made it in the years his team was weakest) and have had a better record in the Finals. So I think this point is reason to largely dismiss certain arguments both sides of people make about LeBron. Otherwise, though, it just is what it is.
