lessthanjake wrote:AEnigma wrote:What you want is a stunning peak
I don’t want a stunning peak. I *got* a stunning peak. It happened. And you’re obviously just very invested in trying to handwave it away—likely because that stunning peak resulted in Steph being the clear impact king during his prime years, over a still-prime LeBron.
Except it did not, and everyone outside of your Bay Area bubble recognises it did not, and unfortunately for us all you have given every indication that you can never, ever, ever get over it.
Anyways, your insistence that Steph is not meaningfully less good than before is just the result of you not realizing that, absent sudden declines caused by catastrophic injury, declines are usually subtle and actually *typically* don’t look *super* different than before, because the differences are just an accumulation of little things that can be individually hard to catch.
… Read this back to yourself. I realise literally all of that. That is my exact stance. You are the one taking a position that he has experienced a significant drop-off based entirely on abstractions; I am saying that those “little things” are why on a better team his “impact” would only look like 90% of what he was a couple of years ago.
The data does catch it though,
Such that he is now barely a neutral player? No, of course not, we know that is absurd. So instead what we do is smush that together with poor team results and a mild individual drop and pretend now all that together means he may very well be just a run of the mill all-star because his team is not going anywhere regardless. As always, no real analysis. Just blind consumption of whatever spreadsheet suits you best.
and, as I’ve shown, it has caught it in both box and impact metrics in similar ways.
“Similar” here too meaning “all declines are similar by virtue of being declines”.
Again, though, there really weren’t “massive” drop-offs here.
Such an honest description of a marginally perceptible 30-40% decline over a matter of months.
The decline in impact data has been pretty steady year to year,
And yet the impact correlates more closely with the fluctuations of his team than of his own performance.
based with each recent year generally chipping away a bit more. And, indeed, impact metrics still indicate he’s a great player—just not as good as before (for instance, he still was 12th in EPM this season).
And 30th in LEBRON among those with 1000 minutes played, and then if we care to look at
per game “impact” (anathema to the Curry gospel, I know), even by EPM he is suddenly less valuable than players like Fred VanVleet. I would ask whether that matches your eye test, but by now I know there is no point, because there is none at play and your commitment to defending him from that type of implication left with Durant anyway.
As I said, none of this is surprising given his age,
Uh huh, he is older, therefore regardless of what he does, we cannot believe him to be this good still. We do not look, we just know that they are much worse now and must have been so much better before.
nor is any of his career trajectory surprising in terms of impact and box data. It’s all consistent with a very normal career trajectory (and particularly so for someone who struggled with injuries in his early years). He was a good player but not a superstar in his early 20s, then began his prime around age 25, had his peak years from ages 26-28, with the rest of his prime seasons before and after being similar to each other, and then has had a steady decline during his mid-30s. This is a really normal trajectory that is generally consistent with the data,
This would be correct if it were coming from someone who had any sense of his actual trajectory rather than the trajectory of some fictionalised program. But of course it is easy for an abstraction to look correct. Bit different when you specify to, “Overnight he became the greatest player ever for five years, then his team dropped off and he coincidentally became a run-of-the mill all-NBAer while playing pretty close to the same as usual.”
and yet you seem super invested in acting like, contrary to essentially every player in NBA history, he’s not meaningfully less good in his mid-30’s than he was in earlier years and that his impact metrics in the past looking better was an undeserved mirage,
Yay, more gestures at being old therefore by rule not good, please please please please do not actually check to see what how he is performing and next to whom.
and it’s his mid-30s impact data that is perhaps more indicative of his quality in his prime.
Also never said this.
What I am saying is that anyone bothering to watch him would not be seeing a mild decline between those eras. It is nothing to do with which is “more” indicative. Players are less than the product of their best environments, just as they are more than the product of bad environments. What is indicative is what the player does. But the more we focus on what the player actually does, the less you get to inflate him based on everything he does not control, and that is evidently more important to you than watching a player you will otherwise defend rabidly and seeing that he has been changing very gradually. Normal fanbase would celebrate, but normal fanbases are not this at odds with what everyone else can see.
Just absurd pretzel twisting.
Love this tradition. Excited to see what projection will be next.
