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Originally Posted by Banzai-
The only reason there is no statistical evidence that they were the best team is because Durant only played 11 playoff games.
No we can look at their regular season as well as the entire playoff stats and you can also adjust for KD's absence. It's not like we don't have a good estimate of KD's impact. The statistical evidence generally points to this team being a championship-caliber team, but not an especially dominant one. You can't just dismiss the evidence because it disagrees with your preconceived notion.
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Thankfully, we don't NEED statistical evidence, we just need the ability to read a team sheet and a modicum of common sense.
And if you do this, you should be skeptical that the Warriors were substantially better. How is this team
KD
Curry
Klay
Draymond
Iguodala
Kevon Looney
Jerebko/etc
much better than
Kawhi
Lowry
Gasol
Siakam
Ibaka
FVV
Danny Green/etc
Just as the Warriors in 16 serves as evidence of how talented that group was with Durant, this year's Raptors (basically last year's Raptors minus Kawhi and Danny Green, but a year older) should serve as evidence of how talented this team was last year with Kawhi. It was a great team. Probably not on par with the Warriors in 17 or 18, but this team both looks comparable on paper with the 19 Warriors, and they match up fairly well statistically as well.
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but then later in the very same post use their net rtg from a different small sample to come to a conclusion as outlandish as you did. I'm sorry, but it takes more than an 11 game sample of being "merely championship level good" to convince me that the greatest collection of basketball talent ever assembled in the same team wasn't the best team in the league lol.
I didn't do this. I don't know if you're being dishonest or just careless in your reading comprehension, but I made it very clear why I was mentioning those splits - it's not to prove anything with it, but to demonstrate that there's nothing hidden in the splits that should challenge the conclusion that we should draw from the aggregate stats. In other words, I'm being so thorough that I'm going out of my way to help explore fidstar's side of argument, since he's unusually focused how the Warriors are without KD (quite clearly great in 2017, not so much in 2019). I don't understand your pedantic insistence that I'm doing something wrong here - if you're going to be pedantic, don't be this obviously wrong.