2023-24 NBA Season Discussion

[bigboi]

Unfortunate how Tatum never took the next step. I’m a Cs fan but he’s been bad these playoffs. Celtics should be sweeping the East tbh

[bigboi]

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?

Has he played the best two games of his career? No. Has he been terrible like everyone wants to hot take? Not even close. Sometimes the other team is just really good and plays really well too.

Much like Robinson actually got the best of Dream over their careers but this board used to insist otherwise based on one series before I actually did the research and it showed how clear the advantage was to Robinson. But narratives take hold and very few people are willing to change their mind.

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.

He has been terrible. Just because you don’t factor in defense doesn’t mean others don’t. He’s been getting thoroughly outplayed by KAT. Has nothing do with Lebron standards. Dude simply hasn’t been good

[bigboi]

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?

Are we describing what has been happening as Jokic merely failing to win and failing to make every shot? Or is the observation more to do with bad and exploitable defence and a potential tendency to offensive passivity, both of which have been discussed long before this exact moment?

Has he played the best two games of his career? No. Has he been terrible like everyone wants to hot take? Not even close. Sometimes the other team is just really good and plays really well too.

Much like Robinson actually got the best of Dream over their careers but this board used to insist otherwise based on one series before I actually did the research and it showed how clear the advantage was to Robinson. But narratives take hold and very few people are willing to change their mind.

So back to gesturing at a perceived regular season advantage being more meaningful than what happens in the postseason?

Jokic’s regular season impact has rarely translated to the postseason. That gets hidden behind small samples and extenuating circumstances, but the more that sample increases, and the more people want to argue that the strong performance of support players like Jamal Murray actually do not matter, then the more valid it becomes for us to look at a player who had been an on-court negative (in a literal plus/minus sense) for nearly half of his career series (6-8).

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.

He might be, but in the playoffs it is a substantially smaller gap than has been portrayed, and much of the advantage is built around Jokic being a durable player — which is good, to be clear, but is the same sort of approach that will get people to grumble when you call Tatum a better postseason player than Kawhi because the latter can almost never hold up through two rounds.

First off, the bad and exploitable defense is not true. The Long and medium term RAPM data pretty conclusively rules that out. Second off I don’t why everyone know that single season RAPM is extremely noisy and essentially useless, but then goes around citing playoff on/off data that might not even the size of a full season (and in which the time a player sits is way smaller than a typical season).

Long Term RAPM: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WMfP-GVHXCjPfp2sMnBjWB301OtO3LO7n-EKoBSl-iQ/edit

Medium Term RAPM: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mhwOLqPu2F9026EQiVxFPIN1t9RGafGpl-dokaIsm9c/edit

How about you watch the games instead of using bs made up stats? Anybody with eyes can see that Jokic is bbq chicken on defense. They are targeting him like he’s Steve nash

[bigboi]

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.

Giannis was blasted as not being top 5 in 2019 after a narrow conference finals loss to the eventual champs with a team that is .500 without him with cold shooting and a much worse coach.

Jokic is having a worse series than any from Giannis's prime and the majority of posters here are rallying to his defense about how unfair it is to use anything but 2023 to evaluate him and how he's the bitw.

If this is too much criticism, Jokic isn't good enough for people to talk about him the way they do. 3 x MVP without a single 60-win season, called the clear best in the league/goat candidate with 2 deep playoff runs, the first of which had his own teammate outplay him.

What Jokic is, is an overrated player. His ball-handling is proving to be a major weakness with the right matchups and we knew as early as 2020 his defense was a crippling weakness against the right matchups, but 'advanced stats' loved him, and apparently real impact data is just variance, and we should give him extra points for holding the ball less, and his brain makes his defense a non-isssue.

His defenders here are more interested in saying "jokic is being treated unfairly" than actually defending him and it's obvious why.

Jokic is not better than healthy Giannis if we’re being real and Jokic wasn’t better than Embiid either this season prior to the injury.

[rk2023]

Good response by the Mavs tonight, I thought their defense and ability to shrink the floor looked a lot better tonight. I thought Luka was going to falter given his health, but he gutted it out to make sure Dallas would take homecourt spanning from G3-7.

While Dallas won the 3P battle, I believe in OKC’s shooting more throughout the series still. We’ll see. I feel good about OKC in 7 if they get one of the next two games in Dallas. Easier said than done though. MN the only team that hasn’t faced any adversity this playoffs yet, but it’s worth noting the CTEltics have gotten in their way moreso than push coming to shove.

[Colbinii]

Giddey continuing to be an unplayable Drake is a surprise to absolutely nobody.

[Slava]

Mavs changed their trajectory at the trade deadline with Gafford and PJ. I was jealous of their moves then and it looks even better now.

[ardee]

Jokic is not better than healthy Giannis if we’re being real and Jokic wasn’t better than Embiid either this season prior to the injury.

Hmm, is that why Embiid has never come close to matching his RS impact in the Playoffs while Jokic has destroyed every team he's faced in the Playoffs upon hitting his prime (with the exception of the Wolves but it's only 2 games in, so let's reserve judgment)?

[Doctor MJ]

[

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.

Interesting. So yeah, I'll just say, Luka's big on/off after the trades was something brought up like crazy by Luka supporters in the GB's MVP thread and I've been mentioning there and here as something of a peace offering. As I've been saying for years: I'm not making any statement against what Luka is capable of and as new things come to light I want to be open to changing any assessments I've previously made.

Re: improvement comes because of defense, supposed to be a boon to Luka? Well, if it's achieved by acquiring players that aren't that good in a vacuum, and it works because of the extreme primacy Luka can carry on offense, then it has the capacity to be a boon to Luka. Doesn't make Luka a better player than he was before, but it would mean better fit around him which allowed Luka to be more impactful.

[Doctor MJ]

on/off tends to inflate the actual effect of 'fit" issues. Bad fit and all, Luka has basically averaged jordan/magic/hakeem game-level lift over a bunch of >10 game season samples for his first 5 years, and we know his ratings are basically unaffected with bench players and without starters.

Clearly you're talking WOWY-type stats yes? Those are worth looking at certainly, but using them to dismiss more granular +/- stat is not something I'd do lightly.

If you want to elaborate on this, that might help give me more confidence.

The NHL used this stat for a long time..

NHL's +/- is a completely different stat from basketball +/-. NHL +/- is just tallying up chosen positive and negative actions and subtracting the latter from the former. It's basically a less discriminatory PER, not an impact stat.

There's truth in this statement traditionally, but once basketball people made RAPM-type stats, the hockey people followed suit, so that data certainly exists now.

Having done some hockey +/- analysis, I'll note a couple things:

1. The low scoring of hockey makes +/- a noisier stat, and this is something that got a lot worse in the modern game when they let goalies where enough pads to basically cover the entire net.

2. Note that this also makes hockey a noisier game and one more like baseball where the playoffs don't even necessarily say that much about who the best team would be if you held all the same series again. With baseball, the main focus of analytics has been from a production/player tracking perspective rather than impact metrics for reasons not unrelated to this. Hockey is a challenge because it has similar noise issues to baseball, but as a flowing field sport it's a lot harder to measure production/player tracking beyond the absolute basics.

3. One wrinkle I didn't really grapple with until I started looking at the data was the fact that defensemen just play significantly more than the center and wings. I knew that +/- was a stat associated with defensemen and figured it was just because goals and assists tended to be dominated by the more offensive positions, but it's also because of them playing greater minutes, and thus having a tendency to have the bigger raw +/- numbers.

[Special_Puppy]

I don't think the on/off stuff is very hard to understand. The raw box stats significantly overrate Luka. That's confirmed by Long-term and medium-term RAPM. That's not to say that he's not a top 5 player in the league (he is). That just means that he's a relatively empty-calorie player.

Long Term RAPM: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WMfP-GVHXCjPfp2sMnBjWB301OtO3LO7n-EKoBSl-iQ/edit

Medium Term RAPM: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mhwOLqPu2F9026EQiVxFPIN1t9RGafGpl-dokaIsm9c/edit

[Dr Positivity]

The level of play in New York-Indiana just seems higher to me than Boston-Cleveland and I would have said the winner can make the finals, except I don't know if NY can make it through 3 rounds without breaking down. Thibs is wildin playing Hart Wilt minutes.

[Dr Positivity]

NHL's +/- is a completely different stat from basketball +/-. NHL +/- is just tallying up chosen positive and negative actions and subtracting the latter from the former. It's basically a less discriminatory PER, not an impact stat.

I think on court net rating would be the equivalent

Anyways it's not like Doncic's +/- (+9.5) is bad. It's not like he's Raptors Derozan.

[Texas Chuck]

I don't think the on/off stuff is very hard to understand. The raw box stats significantly overrate Luka. That's confirmed by Long-term and medium-term RAPM. That's not to say that he's not a top 5 player in the league (he is). That just means that he's a relatively empty-calorie player.

Long Term RAPM: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WMfP-GVHXCjPfp2sMnBjWB301OtO3LO7n-EKoBSl-iQ/edit

Medium Term RAPM: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mhwOLqPu2F9026EQiVxFPIN1t9RGafGpl-dokaIsm9c/edit

He's definitely not empty calorie. I mean I already pointed out his top of the world creation stats. It's just that accumulation of counting stats isn't particularly telling to us of how effective a player is or isn't. Luka has the ball an absolute ton, is a good scorer, elite playmaker, and very good guard rebounder. So him averaging a near 35 point triple double is a result of that. But he's not a great player because he has those averages. If he is a great player(I think he is, just not Jokic/Giannis/Embiid levels) we have to look elsewhere.

Just as we shouldn't look at just plus/minus and on/off and suggest he's nothing special.

[Special_Puppy]

I don't think the on/off stuff is very hard to understand. The raw box stats significantly overrate Luka. That's confirmed by Long-term and medium-term RAPM. That's not to say that he's not a top 5 player in the league (he is). That just means that he's a relatively empty-calorie player.

Long Term RAPM: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WMfP-GVHXCjPfp2sMnBjWB301OtO3LO7n-EKoBSl-iQ/edit

Medium Term RAPM: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mhwOLqPu2F9026EQiVxFPIN1t9RGafGpl-dokaIsm9c/edit

He's definitely not empty calorie. I mean I already pointed out his top of the world creation stats. It's just that accumulation of counting stats isn't particularly telling to us of how effective a player is or isn't. Luka has the ball an absolute ton, is a good scorer, elite playmaker, and very good guard rebounder. So him averaging a near 35 point triple double is a result of that. But he's not a great player because he has those averages. If he is a great player(I think he is, just not Jokic/Giannis/Embiid levels) we have to look elsewhere.

Just as we shouldn't look at just plus/minus and on/off and suggest he's nothing special.

I didn't say he was empty calories. I said he was *relatively* empty calories and that box score stats just overstate his impact. His box score stats are so good that he is still a top 5 players even if they significantly overstate how good he is

[The High Cyde]

Luka is a phenomenal talent, but I just flat out do not like the way he plays. The same way people do not for example enjoy the way LeBron plays or how Giannis plays. To me his game is slow and lumbering and he’s constantly whining to the refs after damn near every play, looking at them like why aren’t you doing your job letting me play how I want to play, can’t you see how they’re all fouling me. It’s just grating. Get the **** back on defense please. He’s fun to watch when he’s spamming and hitting step back threes like prime Harden, but even that gets old and isn’t really sustainable. Yesterdays game 2 against OKC the most fun I had watching the Mavs was when he went to the bench and the team was playing at a frenetic pace keeping OKC on their heels, led by the defense of Kyrie freaking Irving, who’s having an amazing playoffs just plugging in where needed. /rant lol

[bigboi]

Jokic is not better than healthy Giannis if we’re being real and Jokic wasn’t better than Embiid either this season prior to the injury.

Hmm, is that why Embiid has never come close to matching his RS impact in the Playoffs while Jokic has destroyed every team he's faced in the Playoffs upon hitting his prime (with the exception of the Wolves but it's only 2 games in, so let's reserve judgment)?

“Destroyed”

[Doctor MJ]

I think on court net rating would be the equivalent

Anyways it's not like Doncic's +/- (+9.5) is bad. It's not like he's Raptors Derozan.

Fixed that for ya.

[OhayoKD]

The Nuggets winning this game of a great murray performance would be sad. Bush league he's playing right now.

[Colbinii]

Minnesota is going to lose every game for the rest of the playoffs if the refs call the game like this.

Minnesota needs to drive to the hoop every time. Denver does it and it's a foul yet Minnesota is settling for jump shots when the refs are calling every point of marginal contact.

Probably too late to comeback but the team needed to realize this earlier and start driving.