2023-24 NBA Season Discussion

[Doctor MJ]

Way too many people using this series as an excuse to dump on Jokic and not enough people appreciating what Ant Man is doing. This is 2001 Kobe/2007 Lebron stuff we're witnessing from him. Absolute all-time Age-22 playoff run in the making.

This is what I notice too. Whenever anything happens in a game where one side wins and the other loses, it's significant to notice whether people are more interested in talking about the winner or the loser. People will always talk about both, as they should, but which gets more energy? The answer tells us about the wolf they're feeding.

It might be naive to say that there's more focus on the negative than in the past, but the GB for a long time now has been a place where I expect to see threads of gleeful hate whenever a player performs poorly, and those folks look really small to me - especially when I see them ignore the player doing well later as they move on to project gleeful hate on the next guy.

Just something I think we all need to watch for. The Denver-Minny series seems like it should be a situation where people are giddy about Ant, but that's not the dominant note I'm detecting.

[AEnigma]

He said five-year sample. I agree there is no real point in filtering out 2019, but I also would not filter out “low leverage” possessions out of some idea that it is not an issue for Jokic to be attacked when there is a notable deficit.

I do not know at what point a large chunk of this forum became more interested in plus/minus variances than in watching the games, but it makes conversation difficult. I have never felt it requires a particularly advanced eye test to watch Jokic in the postseason and see how he has been a problem, and while there is a possibility I need to scale back my standards in general, “do postseason offences specifically target Jokic” should not be the reason why.

If everything in the postseason can be dismissed as sample noise, why even bother with them. Jokic’s postseason DRAPM is +1? Hm, we need at least ten more postseasons before we can confidently say whether he is an issue. Then retroactively we may be able to confirm that, oh yes, teams were in fact exploiting him. Good for future us.

You are dead on with the overreliance on +/-. But then you turn around and take the reality that teams are going to try and attack him defensively in the playoffs and imply he's just a regular season player. That's not accurate evaluation either.

It's almost like a player can be contributing so much overall that even if they get attacked(exploited if you prefer) defensively at times they can still be very much a net positive. Even if their +/- in individual games or series isn't outstanding because the overall team gets outplayed.

This forum champions KG as this +/- darling, but that's RS. In the playoffs in Minnesota(the vast majority of his prime), he's not a plus/minus darling but we are able to look at his level of play and still realize he was a great player in the playoffs. Oh his scoring didn't hold up as well as it did in the RS but we know he contributes far beyond that.

Same with Jokic and some PNR attacks. This doesn't make him just a RS guy because of on/off stuff.

The real on/off contradiction is the love of on/off and Steve Nash, who looks quite for on/off but nothing like his backers allege.

I am fine with treating Jokic as a centre version of Nash.

[tsherkin]

We have posters on this board calling into question his MVP's because of 2 games. I know that's not you, but this burying of Jokic isn't for me. Still the best player in the world.

There is an agenda against him, yes. It is clear, and it is heavily-rooted in aesthetic and nostalgia. As if past players, even the very best, never struggled at any point. Especially with weak production around them. Very frustrating, that double standard.

Jokic has had his struggles, but even if he were dropping 40 a night, the Nuggets would be in trouble the way everyone else is playing right now, for sure.

[parsnips33]

The haters just can't lose in this situation, imagine Gobert comes back and the Wolves lose the series

[Special_Puppy]

He said five-year sample. I agree there is no real point in filtering out 2019, but I also would not filter out “low leverage” possessions out of some idea that it is not an issue for Jokic to be attacked when there is a notable deficit.

I do not know at what point a large chunk of this forum became more interested in plus/minus variances than in watching the games, but it makes conversation difficult. I have never felt it requires a particularly advanced eye test to watch Jokic in the postseason and see how he has been a problem, and while there is a possibility I need to scale back my standards in general, “do postseason offences specifically target Jokic” should not be the reason why.

If everything in the postseason can be dismissed as sample noise, why even bother with them. Jokic’s postseason DRAPM is +1? Hm, we need at least ten more postseasons before we can confidently say whether he is an issue. Then retroactively we may be able to confirm that, oh yes, teams were in fact exploiting him. Good for future us. Glad no one rushed to conclusions that there may be a disparity between scattered regular season approaches and a dedicated elimination series against a singular opponent.

The fact that the defensive “eye test” for Jokic tends so divorced from the advanced metrics when it’s used in the regular season (CW has always been that he’s a bad defender and yet the regular season metrics say that he’s a decent one) makes me question how accurate a typical person’s defensive “eye test” is when evaluating Jokic in the post season.

[AEnigma]

I strongly feel this should not need to be said in this forum, but teams do not approach regular season games the way they approach postseason games. Jokic has all these weakness in the regular season; it is how teams know what to make their focus in the postseason. The difference is that in the regular season, teams do not prepare anywhere near as rigorously and they may even be reluctant to overuse their best actions if they feel doing so would be unnecessary and even to their disadvantage long term.

The Nuggets themselves operate by this principle, by the way. Since you think watching film is functionally meaningless, I will highlight an easy one for you: look at the percentage of time Gordon spends as a backup centre. Now, that worked great last year; it is not working out as well this year, which is partly because teams are more prepared for it, partly because the matchups are worse, partly because most of the surrounding roster is player worse, and partly because Gordon himself was more effective (or otherwise on something of an individual hot streak) last year. Core point though is how it is immediate and obvious change in approach from the regular season which you do not even need to bother watching the games to see.

[Special_Puppy]

I'll defend Jokic but at the same time this "he's not an exploitable defender" stuff needs to stop. Anyone who's watched him every playoffs can see plain as day that it's still a consistent issue. Denver has done a great job of surrounding him with enough defensive supporting guys to where it's less of a liability, but you can't just keep ignoring his physical limitations and the postseason defensive impact signals. When your team is consistently -3 to -10 points per-100 worse defensively with you on the court over a continuous 5-year sample, sorry, you're an exploitable playoff defender. We don't need to push back every time someone correctly points this out. He's not a perfect basketball player with zero weaknesses.

I don't know where you are getting those numbers? Again you really need 200+ games to get a big enough on/off sample, but even in the smaller sample his team's defense doesn't budge when he's on the court and off in the small playoff sample.

https://www.pbpstats.com/wowy-combos/nba?TeamId=1610612743&Season=2023-24,2022-23,2021-22,2020-21,2019-20,2018-19&SeasonType=Playoffs&PlayerIds=203999&Leverage=Medium,High,VeryHigh

I mean, no? Playoffs is inherently small sample size, but you shouldn't need a "Lebron's career" sample of playoff games to gauge this.

2019: 108.8 ON, 126.0 OFF (+17.2)
2020: 119.0 ON, 107.9 OFF (-11.1)
2021: 124.7 ON, 121.4 OFF (-3.3)
2022: 125.4 ON, 120.3 OFF (-5.1)
2023: 112.0 ON, 106.3 OFF (-5.7)
2024: 115.0 ON, 105.0 OFF (-10.0)

I mean, you tell me what the outlier is here and how that would logically skew the data towards misleading conclusions. Because the numbers you're using also paint prime and post-prime Harden as a clear plus playoff defender (+1.9) from 2019 onwards. A claim that I would imagine most people find dubious.

Everyone knows that single season RAPM is incredibly noisy and mostly useless but then people feel like doing on/off analysis (more noisy than RAPM) on less than a single season’s worth of games is not going to produce incredibly noisy and mostly useless results

[Dutchball97]

Just based on watching the games, the issue I have with evaluating the defense of Jokic is that he is solid at most parts of defense but lacks the most critical thing for a big. He has active hands, doesn't get backed down easily 1v1, doesn't ever really get lost and rarely gets in foul trouble but his rim protection is pretty much nonexistent. I guess I'm kind of in the middle for now, I don't think Jokic is nearly as big of a defensive liability as someone like Haliburton and overall I don't even think it's outrageous to call him an average to even a slightly above average defender but his lack of rim protection does put a ceiling on how good the Denver defense can be, something which can especially hurt when they need stops in crunch time.

[Special_Puppy]

I strongly feel this should not need to be said in this forum, but teams do not approach regular season games the way they approach postseason games. Jokic has all these weakness in the regular season; it is how teams know what to make their focus in the postseason. The difference is that in the regular season, teams do not prepare anywhere near as rigorously and they may even be reluctant to overuse their best actions if they feel doing so would be unnecessary and even to their disadvantage long term.

The Nuggets themselves operate by this principle, by the way. Since you think watching film is functionally meaningless, I will highlight an easy one for you: look at the percentage of time Gordon spends as a backup centre. Now, that worked great last year; it is not working out as well this year, which is partly because teams are more prepared for it, partly because the matchups are worse, partly because most of the surrounding roster is player worse, and partly because Gordon himself was more effective (or otherwise on something of an individual hot streak) last year. Core point though is how it is immediate and obvious change in approach from the regular season which you do not even need to bother watching the games to see.

People started out by saying that he was a bad defender in the context of regular season games (this started even before the Nuggets made the playoffs based on the "eye test", preconceived notions from before he was drafted, and Denver incredibly poor rDTG in 2017ish), the regular season advanced metrics said that wasn't actually true, then people pivoted their position to Jokic's defensive impact is significantly negative but only in the post season (largely based on the "eye test" and largely based on series like this one where the Nuggets didn't have a functional backcourt)

[Special_Puppy]

We have posters on this board calling into question his MVP's because of 2 games. I know that's not you, but this burying of Jokic isn't for me. Still the best player in the world.

There is an agenda against him, yes. It is clear, and it is heavily-rooted in aesthetic and nostalgia. As if past players, even the very best, never struggled at any point. Especially with weak production around them. Very frustrating, that double standard.

Jokic has had his struggles, but even if he were dropping 40 a night, the Nuggets would be in trouble the way everyone else is playing right now, for sure.

A couple of people have been saying that Jokic has a higher peak than LeBron James (IMO LeBron's peak is clearly a tier higher). People grew annoyed at the Jokic boosters and now some people are overcorrecting by essentially saying that Jokic doesn't have a top 10 peak (Which is a respectable opinion, but people wouldn't be pushing it without the dumb Jokic>LeBron takes)

[RCM88x]

Meh, Denver's struggles are almost entirely offensive in my eyes, and there's some feedback loop here that is impacting their defense.

Lakers held them to a 114 ORTG in this series compared to a 124 ORTG last year (compared to a 119 for the whole playoffs), while league averages are nearly identical in the playoffs so far compared to last year. So far they're at a 99 against Minnesota (massive credit to them).

Not saying that Jokic is some defensive beast, but that's far from their biggest issue currently. Even if he was some elite defensive rim protector I'm not really sure that would be making a difference right now. Defensively they have maybe preformed a little worse than last year, (thus far) but it's not some catastrophic collapse, or really anything I would be concerned about. Losing Green and Brown has hurt them a little on the perimeter maybe, but probably not that much. Really they're just playing an opponent who is much better equipped to beat them than they did at any point last year, and as a team they're just not playing as well as they did last year either. I don't think some fundamental re-evaluation of Jokic is necessary (unless you thought he is hands down the most dominant player in history I guess).

[Fundamentals21]

Denver has problems repeating... but that's a common problem IMO. Not easy to repeat. There's some fatigue in them, and Denver really needs to step it up if they want to beat Minny. Gobert's not about to let this one go, and ANT is young and dangerous. This is why offseason moves can be important, with changed roleplayers, etc.

[Special_Puppy]

[x][/x]

Meh, Denver's struggles are almost entirely offensive in my eyes, and there's some feedback loop here that is impacting their defense.

Lakers held them to a 114 ORTG in this series compared to a 124 ORTG last year (compared to a 119 for the whole playoffs), while league averages are nearly identical in the playoffs so far compared to last year. So far they're at a 99 against Minnesota (massive credit to them).

Not saying that Jokic is some defensive beast, but that's far from their biggest issue currently. Even if he was some elite defensive rim protector I'm not really sure that would be making a difference right now. Defensively they have maybe preformed a little worse than last year, (thus far) but it's not some catastrophic collapse, or really anything I would be concerned about. Losing Green and Brown has hurt them a little on the perimeter maybe, but probably not that much. Really they're just playing an opponent who is much better equipped to beat them than they did at any point last year, and as a team they're just not playing as well as they did last year either. I don't think some fundamental re-evaluation of Jokic is necessary (unless you thought he is hands down the most dominant player in history I guess).

Murray and KCP are either injured and or just playing awful right now. Nuggets effectively don’t a functional backcourt for the third time in 4 years. Lakers are a relatively weak opponent and Jokić was playing insanely well so the Nuggets were able to squeak by them. Timberwolves are a much better team than the Lakers though. Jokic would need to be playing at a literal GOAT+++ level to barely lose this series given the state of Murray+KCP but he’s playing medicorely either because of ability or because he doesn’t think the Nuggets can win so the Nuggets are getting absolutely smoked as of now

[Doctor MJ]

He said five-year sample. I agree there is no real point in filtering out 2019, but I also would not filter out “low leverage” possessions out of some idea that it is not an issue for Jokic to be attacked when there is a notable deficit.

I do not know at what point a large chunk of this forum became more interested in plus/minus variances than in watching the games, but it makes conversation difficult. I have never felt it requires a particularly advanced eye test to watch Jokic in the postseason and see how he has been a problem, and while there is a possibility I need to scale back my standards in general, “do postseason offences specifically target Jokic” should not be the reason why.

If everything in the postseason can be dismissed as sample noise, why even bother with them. Jokic’s postseason DRAPM is +1? Hm, we need at least ten more postseasons before we can confidently say whether he is an issue. Then retroactively we may be able to confirm that, oh yes, teams were in fact exploiting him. Good for future us.

You are dead on with the overreliance on +/-. But then you turn around and take the reality that teams are going to try and attack him defensively in the playoffs and imply he's just a regular season player. That's not accurate evaluation either.

It's almost like a player can be contributing so much overall that even if they get attacked(exploited if you prefer) defensively at times they can still be very much a net positive. Even if their +/- in individual games or series isn't outstanding because the overall team gets outplayed.

This forum champions KG as this +/- darling, but that's RS. In the playoffs in Minnesota(the vast majority of his prime), he's not a plus/minus darling but we are able to look at his level of play and still realize he was a great player in the playoffs. Oh his scoring didn't hold up as well as it did in the RS but we know he contributes far beyond that.

Same with Jokic and some PNR attacks. This doesn't make him just a RS guy because of on/off stuff.

The real on/off contradiction is the love of on/off and Steve Nash, who looks quite for on/off but nothing like his backers allege.

So with all of this I can't help but see myself in the group being discussed, and I can't help but chafe at allegations of inconsistency in my analysis being implied but not specifically specified. Maybe that's me making things too much about me and my personal posting history is irrelevant, but with all of this I'm just trying to evaluate things as best I can with incomplete data - which doesn't mean I can't be inconsistent, but I'm surely trying not to be.

Starting with Nash here, I'd like to think I've been pretty clear that from an overall perspective, I don't think there are indicators saying that Nash was ever the best player in the league. That's not quite the same thing as saying he shouldn't have won one (or both) MVPs, because not everyone is at their best all season every season. For the record, I would call Nash my '04-05 RS MVP due to Duncan's injury late in the season. For '05-06 I never had Nash as my MVP choice (I chose LeBron at the time), but it was a crazy year where all the candidates were flawed and I do think Nash had a case.

Now offensively, I always did see a ton of indicators that Nash was the most impactful guy and so if that's what's being debated, well, I suppose I'm your man.

Regarding +/- in RS & PS, some thoughts:

- I'm generally a big believer in the analytical value of +/- with sufficient sample, and I do think that one regular season is generally enough to give us meaningful information. That information doesn't necessarily tell us how capable a guy is at basketball generally, but it does give us indicators of average impact over the sample.

- With that said something I've tried to emphasize frequently is that there is a potential disconnect between +/- and true impact because the goal of the game is to outscore the opponent, not outscore the opponent as much as possible. In general as we've gotten NBA data this hasn't appeared to be much of an issue, but I've considered the possibility that it would be, and that's why I started making a stat like OnWin and it's variants.

The player with the most OnWins (games with a positive +/-) obvious isn't necessarily the most valuable player, but if you have a guy who seems a bit disappointing by +/- but does better by OnWins, it's possible that the latter is a better judge of the player's capacity for impact. Kobe was the one on my mind when I made this, and I do think Kobe looks a bit stronger by OnWin than by +/- (though the difference is not as stark as I thought it might be). In today's game, Luka has been the focus there, and again, I think he looks a bit better by OnWin, but not drastically so.

- Regardless of my pet stats, what I've always said about Luka is that it's possible his resilience in the playoffs makes him an entirely different animal by impact measures, and the on/off data from his early playoff seasons has looked promising there. But as things stand, with Luka having a young career without championship runs, this is one of those "time will tell" things for me still.

- What about the opposite? When a player goes from great on/off to meh on/off in the playoffs, When is that meaningful? and What precisely does it mean?

I think to start with here is the recognition that generally superstars play big enough minutes in the playoffs that it's hard for their team to lose the series while they themselves have a positive +/-. Those who are known for OnWins when their team loses in the playoffs are worth noting of course, but they're generally guys who play a bit less than those who play the absolute most, and so I think we need to recognize that when guys lose playoff series, the entire scoreboard family of stats is probably not going to look that great for them. Maybe On/Off will spare them because the team falls off an absolute cliff without them, but the sample of those Off minutes is almost definitionally too small to have that much confidence in.

For this reason, I'm actually considerably more cautious about the possibility of using playoff +/- to say a guy struggles in the playoff than I am about the possibility of using it to show he thrives, and I really don't see any logical contradiction about about that.

When looking to identify guys who struggle in the playoffs, I'm generally looking more at the guy's production data, along with the team as a whole regularly disappointing relative to regular season performance. Of course, those are still things that have myriad confounding factors in them - they are not free from noise - but I think they tend to tell us more than the more granular +/- in these situations.

[tsherkin]

We have posters on this board calling into question his MVP's because of 2 games. I know that's not you, but this burying of Jokic isn't for me. Still the best player in the world.

There is an agenda against him, yes. It is clear, and it is heavily-rooted in aesthetic and nostalgia. As if past players, even the very best, never struggled at any point. Especially with weak production around them. Very frustrating, that double standard.

Jokic has had his struggles, but even if he were dropping 40 a night, the Nuggets would be in trouble the way everyone else is playing right now, for sure.

A couple of people have been saying that Jokic has a higher peak than LeBron James (IMO LeBron's peak is clearly a tier higher). People grew annoyed at the Jokic boosters and now some people are overcorrecting by essentially saying that Jokic doesn't have a top 10 peak (Which is a respectable opinion, but people wouldn't be pushing it without the dumb Jokic>LeBron takes)

It is not a dumb take. It isnt an absolute truth, for certain, but is certainly an argument with substance. And if having offensive struggles ever ruled players out, Shaq, Jordan and Lebron all have stinkers on their resumes, and are not alone in such...

[Texas Chuck]

Jalen Brunson being Luka's backup seems super relevant when looking at his RS plus minus and its no coincidence that since Brunson left, Luka has looked a lot better by that stat.

This is why using it as a measure of goodness is flawed imo. Roster construction and rotations are so relevant.

[Doctor MJ]

Meh, Denver's struggles are almost entirely offensive in my eyes, and there's some feedback loop here that is impacting their defense.

Lakers held them to a 114 ORTG in this series compared to a 124 ORTG last year (compared to a 119 for the whole playoffs), while league averages are nearly identical in the playoffs so far compared to last year. So far they're at a 99 against Minnesota (massive credit to them).

Not saying that Jokic is some defensive beast, but that's far from their biggest issue currently. Even if he was some elite defensive rim protector I'm not really sure that would be making a difference right now. Defensively they have maybe preformed a little worse than last year, (thus far) but it's not some catastrophic collapse, or really anything I would be concerned about. Losing Green and Brown has hurt them a little on the perimeter maybe, but probably not that much. Really they're just playing an opponent who is much better equipped to beat them than they did at any point last year, and as a team they're just not playing as well as they did last year either. I don't think some fundamental re-evaluation of Jokic is necessary (unless you thought he is hands down the most dominant player in history I guess).

Agree with this assessment.

The shocking thing about this series so far is Denver's poor offense. Sure Denver would love to be better at defense, but that's not supposed to be their strength, and frankly, the theory of Denver's defense in this series included the corollary was physically able to handle Ant...and we may be seeing Ant emerge as a guy who just can't be marked in that way.

...but even with Jokic's injured teammates, I'm amazed that Denver's offense is so ineffective against Minny so far. I do think that Denver can do a lot better than they've shown so far on that front, and I think that if we end up in a scenario where Denver does this but it's still not enough to keep Minny from winning in 4 or 5 we should take care not to assume that the average series ORtg for the Nuggets represents what they were capable of.

This gets us back to Jokic's teammates, and Jamal Murray is the main guy on my mind here. I'd expect that the best chance for a healthy Nuggets to beat these Wolves is to hit all the greatest hits of the Jokic-Murray 2-man game...but if Murray really ain't right, then the Nuggets would probably be better off just relying more on Jokic to make things happen. Should the Nuggets do the latter right now then? Maybe...but if they do that in order to save a bit of face rather than to seriously try to win, I'm not sure if it serves a purpose.

Re: fundamental re-evaluation of Jokic necessary? Well, what I've always said is that I won't be ready to truly rank Jokic's peak until I see how things stack up over the next few years. The very best prove to be able to do their thing even once the target is on their back.

I tend to think about this in terms of baseball players. There's a phenomenon in baseball where a rookie hitter or pitcher has a great amount of success early on, and then all of a sudden they struggle as teams respond to them. So, if a young slugger his hitting the seams off the ball but then is seen to be struggling against a particular type of pitch, say a slider, the guy can go from looking like the next Babe Ruth to someone who needs to spend more time in the minors right quick.

In basketball things aren't quite so stark generally, but I'm generally cautious in elevating new guys regardless.

[OhayoKD]

Evsn if Jokic is kinda getting 95 Robinson'd.

The Jokic standards are approaching Lebron levels. Where you have to make every shot and win every game or you are trash. What are we even doing?

Jokic is not even being held to 2015 Lebron standards and never has at any point in his career lol.

[Doctor MJ]

Jalen Brunson being Luka's backup seems super relevant when looking at his RS plus minus and its no coincidence that since Brunson left, Luka has looked a lot better by that stat.

This is why using it as a measure of goodness is flawed imo. Roster construction and rotations are so relevant.

So biggest picture: No holistic stats measure goodness, and all we can really hope for are stats to measure production and impact. Since impact is close to value, and accumulated value is the closest thing we have to judging actual competitive accomplishment, stats that measure impact are about as useful as we can expect stats to generally be.

Re: Luka & Brunson. It's a great thing to bring up and we should use it from here on out as an example of how impact can diverge from goodness...but we shouldn't overstate how glaring the difference is.

Luka's on/off didn't look much better last year compared to the year before, and it didn't look great this year until the midseason trades. Absolutely fine to zoom in on how nice Luka's on/off data looked after those trades, and to say that if this continues Luka's +/- based candidacy for future MVPs may basically write itself, but getting from "What's wrong with Luka's on/off?" to "Luka's on/off looks great!" wasn't as simple as getting rid of Brunson...despite the fact that I was kind of expecting it to before last season began.

Now also, part of the reason for that is that Brunson wasn't Luka's backup. They played a lot of time together, and the reason why Luka's On/Off didn't look that great in that time period is that his On never looked that amazing with Brunson. This gets into the concept of "fit", and that's a conversation I've been having a lot with Luka supporters this year who are a lot less even-handed than yourself.

While there's luck in getting great fit on the team around you as a player, I don't believe that fit is something that should be normalized for when trying to evaluate MVP candidates. Value is a contextually dependent thing and when we give awards for it, the expectation is that great value was achieved in the context of that season.

Incidentally, I first started thinking about this with Dirk in those years around his chip. Dirk's RAPM really took off in that time period despite the fact that I think we all agree he was already amazing in earlier years. Hence, someone following RAPM and ranking Dirk's MVP candidacy highly can look like someone with "winning bias", but really what was going on was improvements to the fit around Dirk, and while it's understandable if someone rates Dirk as the same level of player before and during that time, I do also believe that Dirk's improvement to RAPM in that time period is something quite relevant to what he helped the Mavs achieve.

It would be my hope and expectation that the Mavs gradually refine the fit around Luka in an analogous way.

[Texas Chuck]

[

Luka's on/off didn't look much better last year compared to the year before, and it didn't look great this year until the midseason trades. Absolutely fine to zoom in on how nice Luka's on/off data looked after those trades, and to say that if this continues Luka's +/- based candidacy for future MVPs may basically write itself, but getting from "What's wrong with Luka's on/off?" to "Luka's on/off looks great!" wasn't as simple as getting rid of Brunson...despite the fact that I was kind of expecting it to before last season began.

Look if the question is Luka Doncic as good of a player as the video game numbers imply I'm right there with you as a skeptic. I think those numbers absolutely overstate how good he is.

but then we have some more interesting data points that are pretty compelling. Quality of shots created for teammates is a stat Luka has led the league in for 3 straight years leading into this one and of course he's at the top in quantity too. This tells me as an offensive engine you could do a lot worse than Luka.

You cited this team since the trades and how much better they have been. But its about defense. The Mavs 3-pt shooting has cratered and is probably going to be the achilles heel that gets them eliminated--even more than Luka's injury. It's not that Luka stopped creating wide open shots, its that the guys shooting them aren't as proficient as when it was Curry and Bertans and THJ shooting better etc...

And we saw Luka against the Clippers defend really well (As did Kyrie). But was he doing this in the regular season when Dallas had the best defense the last 1/4 of the season? Not consistently.

So the improvement in his plus minus comes because the defense got way better even as the offense wasn't as good. Yet this is supposed to be a boon to Luka? No that doesn't pass any kind of logic test. It's dangerous to play these games.

So if we rely too much on this data its telling us mixed things about Luka. So as you say we have to work harder. And not just count up how many individual games he's a plus in. I mean we had a Clippers game in the first round when Luka sat a bit over 3 minutes and Dallas lost those 15-0. How many times is that going to happen? Dallas does struggle to score without him and badly. But with Kyrie it in theory should be better.

I personally think we have been too quick to elevate Luka to MVP level. I don't think he's been that yet over a season. Not even this year. But not because his plus/minus data isn't shiny. I've seen how we've abused plus/minus and on/off too many times to prop up or dismiss players.

The NHL used this stat for a long time. And there is a reason its taken on less importance. Because they now know they have better ways to measure an individual's impact in a multiplayer game. When you used to have guys getting paid off of it when in reality their teams would have been better with someone else in their stead.