Colbinii wrote:lessthanjake wrote:Heej wrote:Breathe man. No one's saying he's having a bad series. I'm just pushing back on the idea that he's some giga brain Mastermind sacrificing battles to win the war by spending possessions solely to get Murray going. Sometimes even GOAT level players get flustered and need a teammate to bail them out during various possessions. And that's ok. Murray is just getting clamped by one of the most memorable defenses in years.
Actually, someone literally did just post in this thread that Jokic has “had a bad series.” I’m not really responding to what you’ve been saying. I think there’s surely *some* validity to what you’re saying, though it’s also surely true that Jokic is trying to get his #2 guy going and probably feels like that they can’t just give up on him if they want to actually get anywhere. And it’s also surely true that Jokic taking on more of the shooting load in this series (which he has done) is at least partially because Murray doesn’t have it. So I think they’ve adjusted to Murray being off by having Jokic focus on himself more while also not just abandoning Murray. But yeah, on a possession-by-possession level, I’m sure there are instances where Jokic has been flustered and simply looked to Murray to get him out of a tough situation—that’s always going to be true for anyone (and is part of the reason that having a great #2 guy is so important). Of course, that situation doesn’t work out to Denver’s advantage in a series where Murray is playing awfully. So yeah, I don’t really disagree with you I don’t think, unless your position is that Jokic is not at all trying to get Murray going—which I don’t think is right. Nor do I think trying to get Murray rolling is an objectively bad decision. We’d think it was a great decision if it worked! It hasn’t so we can say in retrospect that he should have focused on himself even more, but we have the benefit of hindsight.
Colbinii wrote:
But what about the pre-season championship odds?
Denver +450
Minnesota +6600
This is a straw man. I’ve never defined how strong a team is by pre-season title odds.
This you?
The Cavs were taken a lot more seriously as contenders than those Raptors.
The 1989 Cavs had +800 preseason odds to win the title. Going into the playoffs, their odds were down to +400. And they then were +600 in preseason odds going into the next season.
In stark contrast, the 2018 Raptors had +15000 preseason odds to win the title. Going into the playoffs, their odds were +1075. And they then had +1850 preseason odds going into the next season.
The Warriors’s greatness skewed title odds a bit, but the reality is that those 1989 Cavs were simply seen in much higher esteem than those 2018 Raptors, and it’s really not particularly close.
And, it’s worth noting that, unlike with the Cavs in 2018, the 1989 Bulls had way worse title odds in both preseason and going into the playoffs than the 1989 Cavs did. Meanwhile, the 2018 Cavs had better preseason and pre-playoffs odds than the 2018 Raptors. Of course, that doesn’t prove a lot by itself because one could theoretically try to argue that the Bulls’ worse odds merely reflected Jordan being less good than LeBron, but it does show that the situations were radically different. Jordan won as a major underdog against a team that was considered a serious title contender. LeBron won as the more favored team against a team that wasn’t really considered a particularly serious title contender. Not the same thing at all.
You are literally comparing two teams [1989 Cavaliers and 2018 Raptors] and the only data point you use it Title Odds. In fact, you just wrote about 4 paragraphs and the only sticking point here is title odds.
And is this you?
In his career, Jordan beat 15 teams that had +1000 or better pre-playoff title odds, while LeBron beat 9 such teams. If we use pre-playoff title odds and add up the implicit pre-playoff expected title chances of every single team LeBron beat in the playoffs and every team Jordan beat in the playoffs (so, for instance, beating a team with +300 pre-playoff title odds would add 0.25 to the cumulative total), Jordan’s defeated opponents had a cumulative pre-playoff expected titles of 2.86, compared to 2.62 for LeBron’s defeated opponents (despite LeBron having won 41 series to 30 for Jordan). And if we just did this analysis for teams before the Finals (i.e. to test out the relative weakness of their conference opponents specifically), we still have Jordan having defeated teams with a higher cumulative pre-playoff expected titles than LeBron—despite LeBron having won over 50% more non-Finals series than Jordan. The average pre-playoff expected title chances for LeBron’s defeated non-Finals opponents was 4.48%, while it was 6.93% for Jordan’s defeated non-Finals opponents (and with Finals in there, it’s 6.40% for LeBron’s opponents, and 9.55% for Jordan’s opponents). So yeah, even if you just look at the teams that each guy actually beat, Jordan’s conference opponents were stronger.
So you are comparing LeBron James and Michael Jordan opponents in the playoffs and the only data point you are using are...title odds.
It seems like you have, in fact, used only title odds to compare teams.
This is a tangent about something completely different, but I’ll note that you are conflating pre-playoff odds and preseason odds. In the first post of line you quote, I did mention preseason odds but the most important thing there was the *pre-playoff* title odds. Pre-playoff title odds are obviously more telling about who is considered a contender in the playoffs than preseason title odds, which I simply mentioned there because my post was setting forth *all possible* relevant information on contemporaneous perception of the two teams. And I note that our subsequent discussion after that post focused on pre-playoff title odds and during-playoff odds, not preseason odds—presumably because we both recognized that pre-playoff odds were the most important thing there. You’ll find that in talking about contemporaneous perception of playoff teams, my posts *overwhelmingly* focus on pre-playoff title odds, since they’re obviously the more telling piece of information than pre-season odds (I also note that preseason odds the *next* year are *also* probably a better indicator of how a team was seen by the end of the prior year than that prior season’s preseason odds are—and whatever happens in this series I imagine the Timberwolves preseason odds next year will be good). Indeed, the second past post of mine you quote focuses on pre-playoff odds, and doesn’t talk about preseason odds at all! So your attempt at a “gotcha” post is in large part based on you not seeing a very important distinction (i.e. pre-playoff odds vs. preseason odds). Granted, the Timberwolves’ pre-playoffs title odds actually weren’t all that great this year either. But I’d also probably say that the 1989 Cavs were held in higher esteem at the time than the 2024 Timberwolves!
What is your position here? Is it that the Timberwolves aren’t a contender-level team? I doubt you think that. Is it that you think it’s inconsistent of me to think the 2024 Timberwolves are a contender-level team but to not think that the 2018 Raptors were? That seems like the point you’re making. Leaving aside you seemingly not understanding the difference between pre-playoff and preseason odds, there’s actually a valid point there, in the sense that pre-playoff title odds don’t look better for the 2024 Timberwolves than for the 2018 Raptors. But another thing I’ve very often talked about in terms of identifying true contending teams is whether they have a major superstar—which matters a ton for playoff purposes IMO. The 2018 Raptors did not have one. The 2024 Timberwolves do. That makes a very big difference in my assessment. It also matters that the 2024 Timberwolves dominated their first round series, in a way that the pre-Kawhi Raptors never came even remotely close to doing in a single series. The pre-Kawhi Raptors were never impressive in a single playoff series. Their playoff SRS in the series they *won* were +2.53, +0.15, -0.08, and +4.0 (and a -13.83 SRS in the one series they lost to a non-Cavs team). The Wolves’ SRS from the Suns series was +18.08. Even those Daugherty Cavs—for whom playoff success is obviously the main knock, and who also didn’t have a major superstar—had playoff SRS of +4.40, +6.66, and +6.41 in the series they won (and a +6.63 SRS in the one series they lost to a non-Bulls team). So yeah, if we looked strictly at pre-playoff title odds as our only indicator, then my views on the 2018 Raptors and 2024 Timberwolves would be inconsistent, but that’s not the only indicator we have (nor is it the only indicator I’ve focused on in my many assessments of teams on these forums), and so I don’t think my views are actually inconsistent at all. And I’d wager that most people would agree that the 2024 Timberwolves are better than the 2018 Raptors.
