yeah site is great but still raw - I searched by "kawhi leonard steal" got the list of his turnovers

Have a quick break and will elaborate but Gortat, Redick, RAnderson all made important developments under SVG. Dwight and Wade certainly did. Drummond and KCP both have as well, lol at saying otherwise.

I found THIS to be a fascinating article on why the Spurs defense has been worse with Kawhi on the floor. A lot of it makes sense despite thinking "he plays with Pau and Parker duh" prior to reading.

Is there a major injury in the cle/mem game? Why is Cleveland -16

Dwight for sure
Turkoglu?

He made JJ Reddick play defense

Has to be some sort of error I'm about to bet my net worth on this

Marc Gasol is getting rested.

So is Kyrie as of the last minute too though.

way underrating-- preinjury--dwight's post game imo. dwight wasn't hakeem by any means, but the 4 shooters thing worked b/c he was a viable post threat, and he certainly had to develop that

Yeah, that's the same guy that me and tarheels were talking about. I think he was a little dismissive about the team doing better without Kawhi, that's by far the most interesting question

I don't buy the argument in that article. Like sure, they completely ignore Kawhi's man.. so they just play 4v4 without their best offensive player. Surely he should still be having a positive effect on defence even if he literally just stands there, if he's causing his man to as well? It's possible it's working well now because it's taken Pop by surprise but it'll sort itself out.

To be clear I'm not saying going 4v4 isn't the right play, it likely dampens his affect. But it def shouldn't remove it, logically.

My vote is for SSS outlier, with the 4v4 strat meaning it's a slightly smaller outlier than we might think

Yeah, was looking forward to seeing how Cleveland played in this home/away b2b against Memphis, but two healthy scratches tonight. Be wary of tomorrow's early line as Lebron and/or Love is likely to be healthy scratch tomorrow. Cleveland has another one of these b2b home/away next Tuesday/Wed against Bucks.

How many top 10 drafted players decline in their 2nd year and go on to be good players? Even his numbers in summer league this season were down from his rookie year. Is their even one area hes improved on from last year? Now hes getting D-league stints.

To me he looks like a kid who got drafted because he was a bigger and better athlete then everybody else his age. He looks ok when hes the number 1 option playing with scrubs in dleague but when hes playing with good players as a 4th or 5th option like he needs to be he looks lost. Hes just a really clumsy kid which i was trying to overlook his rookie year but instead of growing out of it hes become more clumsy this season.

I know he has a great work ethic and maybe SVG works with him and he finds a spot as a good rotation player. Hes got alot of work to fix his terrible shooting mechanics and clumsy play if he wants to stick around the league though. Looking back we could of took D.Booker,M.Turner, or J.Winslow and would be in way better shape right now.

In a vacuum, 4v4 should be better for an offense than 5v5, particularly so when you trade your best offensive player for the option of isolating Tony Parker and Pau Gasol, although that is obviously not the case for some teams in the league.
The writer himself said that it might be something that the spurs fix in a week and then it'll just be a pointless piece, but the underlying point that a big percentage of the spurs starters are terrible defenders likely won't sort itself out.

Speaking of the Spurs, the last 2 days Duncan has been practicing with the team.

I just saw vid of him guarding Pau.

Do we have a comeback on our hands!?

That logically can't be true, or everyone would do it.

they don't do it because real basketball is not "in a vacuum"

to be clear, what I meant is that if the game of basketball was played 4v4 offenses would be better than they are right now, I don't think that's controversial.

Oh ok I thought you mean't in a vacuum as in "given generic teams/players". Sure if it was literally 4v4 the offense would be better (I guess?) but playing 4v4 while there are actually 5 a side on the court is clearly bad. A defender making a team do that, particularly when the missing player is their best player, is clearly good. The article was acting like they had come up with some genius way of making it 'not matter' that Kawhi was out there (at least that's how I read it). That is clearly just flat wrong.

why is it clearly bad? it very clearly isn't bad in many contexts, and vs the spurs so far it's been great.

I don't really get what you're arguing, 4v4 isn't better or worse in real life, it all depends on who are the 4 and 5 on each side, and for many teams it's much better to give up their best offensive player if it means the spurs give up their best defender. Basically if your offensive talent is a more evenly distributed than the spurs defensive talent is, it's a fine strategy.

Playing "4v4" is literally just not using one of your guys in the offense/not passing it to him. That is clearly in general a bad thing to be doing, or teams would just pass less. Ball movement = good.

I'm not knocking the strategy. I'm saying Kawhi is still having a large effect when they use that strategy, because they have forced them into an offence that would be suboptimal if he wasn't out there. It might be less of an effect than he would have normally, and therefore a good way of playing him, but they haven't nullified him.

Like, the Bulls could just as easily completely ignore Butler on the sidelines while Dame was guarding him, or Steph, or some other non-great defender. But they obv wouldn't because that would obv be far far worse that having the option of using him.

But the point of the article is not actually to analyse Kawhi's value, he's a terrific defender and the article says so. It's also not supposed to be a blueprint on how to beat great exterior defenders in the nba. It's basically an analysis of how other teams are exploiting Pau/TP/LMA.

edit: btw, teams very often go out of their way to not use some of their players on offense, the whole point of the pick and roll is to turn the game into a 2v2 as much as possible, you give the ball to guys in certain positions to play 1v1, etc. The point of ball movement is to create an advantage, it's not intrinsically good or bad.

I disagree with the assumption that the 4v4 offense within a 5v5 game is inherently suboptimal. Teams use the same principle-- reducing the # of offensive players in the play-- when they run iso clear outs. Triangle offense does it with the weakside two man game. As I said previously I am not sure I believe the corner exile is the primary cause for these results, but it is feasible. Optimal is relative and it is a question of the impact of a team removing its best offensive player vs removing the Spurs best defender. So if the next best offensive player is comparable but the next best defender is crap maybe you have counterintuitive, but legitimate advantage. Doesn't explain the defensive #s with him off the floor all together though. Anyone know what they looked like past years?

Maybe I'm not communicating what I mean clearly. Say that instead of Kawhi on Butler, it was an "average defender" (whatever that means, bear with me). We all agree that Chicago would actually use Butler in plays in this case, rather than just sit him off in the very corner out of the way with his man? And that it would be correct to? They wouldn't just leave him in the corner anyway because "4v4 is better than 5v5"

If that is case, then Kawhi just being out there and "forcing" them into this 4v4 is providing a bunch of defensive value, because it has changed Chicago off the offense they would normally want to use (assumedly to a worse one than if Kawhi wasn't there). That's all I'm saying.

And I assume this is true because you never see this sort of 'ignore player x' style when it's say, Shumpert guarding him (at least I don't think we do?). That's what I mean by it cant be correct in general because you just don't see teams just straight up ignore a player for a quarter (because the article isn't talking about isolated plays here, it's talking about never giving player Kawhi is guarded the ball so that he has no defensive impact, that's the way I read it anyway).

It's a kinda interesting thought if I'm wrong and Chicago WOULD actually prefer to just ignore Butler in the corner there with his man just because 4v4 > 5v5. I don't know why they wouldn't always do that in this case, but maybe for example Kawhi is a particularly tight defender so he lets it happen? If that's the case then I would argue that Kawhi IS actually defending poorly then and pure man-on-man is incorrect defending.

That's why offense =/= defense. Offense >>> defense. However, it's still no where near as >>> as the general public thinks.

O is probably like 2-3x as important as D or something