One of the more frustrating aspects of Warriors dialogue last season and this off season has been the constant pointing to do and so’s net rating was incredible/horrendous and so that means they’re one of the best/worst players on the team and it’s all so off base given there was no consistency whatsoever with lineup iterations and so all of those team-based impact metrics that get referenced are meaningless on a player-specific level.
It’s been really hard to get this across, for whatever reason, so shoutout to this Nuggets beat reporter for this accidental spot on example that proves this point so well. Absolutely no one could or would say with a straight face that the Warriors were or are better with Steph off the court and yet, on/off net ratings from last season that so many love to use to establish arguments for player performance would suggest that they are. See how silly/ludicrous that sounds?
So, moral of the story: player impact metrics without context and void of nuance should never be used to make cases for or against how good a player is or how they make their team better/worse.
by taygads
5 Comments
> Absolutely no one could or would say with a straight face that the Warriors were or are better with Steph off the court and yet, on/off net ratings from last season that so many love to use to establish arguments for player performance would suggest that they are. See how silly/ludicrous that sounds?
I’ve actually seen a lot of people use that as an example to say that Steph is too washed to carry a team and that we should go all in on youth as a result. It’s like people don’t seem to understand that we went from the hardest schedule in the league to start off and we went from that to the easiest schedule in the league when we starting stringing together a bunch of wins.
That made it so dudes who played heavy minutes during the road intensive, nonstop contenders part of the schedule have bad net ratings. Especially when most of them played those minutes without Dray. That affected dudes like Steph, Saric, Looney, and Wiggins the most although Wigs was terrible for the first month, shooting 18% from 3.
CP3 effect
This is not on-off, and “the Warriors are better without Steph” is not really the interpretation. Not even a simplified version.
Without Steph just means “off,” which can only be interpreted as “the Warriors outscored the other team during the non-Steph minutes.” To a mild extent, of +2.3.
I would point to CP3 being a good leader of the bench unit. And Podziemski providing a spark. And yeah, there’s other context to it. Especially that the opponent’s star players are more likely to be off the court while Steph is off. But I interpret it as a good thing. Better without Steph? Nope. Handled their business while he sat? Yup.
However, CP3 will not be here this season.
Goes to show how bad Wiggins and Looney were last season. Hopefully they bounce back.
Edit: Ha. I went to look at the 2 man lineup data, and it’s true that both were only marginally positive with Steph. But, the player who cratered everyone’s stats last season was Klay.
I mean, isn’t this just basically that nearly every guy we thought was a starter heading into the season besides Steph either sucked or got suspended and then the bench unit was led by Chris Paul?