Kyrie Irving just posted a perfect half.... 21 points 8-8 FG, 3-3 3pointers

[mvp_status]

Breh the league wasn't going to do shyt.. The league gave Dray the shyt AFTER THE FACT.. The refs didn't give him the flagrant..

Bron said in the press conference "I think the league will take a look at it and make their decision"

Leagues rescind and award flagrant fouls after the fact all the time though.

What should Lebron have said then?

 

[Liquid]

Leagues rescind and award flagrant fouls after the fact all the time though.

What should Lebron have said then?

Nothing and allow Draymond to keep aiming low apparently.

 

[BigMoneyGrip]

@Mikey2Toes you still a bytch nikka

 

[BigMoneyGrip]

Leagues rescind and award flagrant fouls after the fact all the time though.

What should Lebron have said then?

Not during the playoffs and especially during critical games and important players.. It's bad optics because it shows the league using its power to affect outcome of the games

It's bad enough certain refs don't see crucial playoff games

 

[Professor Emeritus]

@The Dankster take this game for instance, going by Kyrie's +/- what does this game say to you?

In isolation, with no other information, it's hard to tell. Though if it happened often, it would be a good hint that something was up.

But I wasn't giving you single-player +/- in isolation. I was giving you ENTIRE five-man lineups. And I didn't just include games where both players played, but also games where Kyrie was out entirely or Lebron was out entirely. That gives you a LOT more to go on than a single game's +/-.

So let's break down this game.

You point out Kyrie's 32 and 4 on 10-19 shooting with 3 turnovers in 35 minutes. That's some good shooting. But note only 4 turnovers to 3 assists. We'll hold that for a moment.

Now, I'll point out that James Harden had 33 and 12 on 11-16 shooting with 0 turnovers in 29 minutes where Kyrie was in the game.

Harden has been good all year....but that's ridiculous. Harden was getting 2.1pps on 70% shooting with ZERO TURNOVERS. Well over a point a minute. He was absolutely abusing the Cavs as bad as he's abused anyone this year during those 29 minutes when he and Kyrie were in the game together.

Kyrie was good, but Harden was killing him.

In the 9 minutes that Harden played with Kyrie out, he was 2-4 for 8 points and 3 assists with 1 turnover. Still good numbers, but lower across the board, much closer to his season averages.


Another note - when Kyrie was in, the Cavs bench went 1-5 on threes (1 Shump). When Kyrie was out, the bench went 4-5 on threes (1 Shump, 2 Dunleavy, 1 Frye). Again, could be just random...but it's not a one-game trend. Remember that 4 assists to 3 turnovers?

So yeah, Kyrie made a lot of shots while he was in. But he wasn't setting his teammates up much at all, and the Cavs got absolutely killed by Harden the whole time he was in. So while it doesn't make Kyrie's shots "worthless", it does seriously degrade their value compared to what the box score tells you.



Let's look at it another way. How did that +/- disparity develop?

The Cleveland starters were basically even against the Houston starters. Love was +3, TT was -4, JR was +2. That's a good indication the starting lineups played each other fairly even - in fact, not just Kyrie but all the Cleveland starters were hitting their shots, while Harden was picking them apart on the other end.

When the Cavs starters were out, and either Kyrie or Lebron was leading the bench against mixed 1st/2nd units from the Rockets (including Harden), the Rockets tended to outscore the Cavs by a few points.

So how did the Cavs win by 8?

Because when Lebron led Shump, Dunleavy, Jefferson, and Frye for 4 minutes in the second quarter against the Rockets' starters minus Harden, the Cavs outscored the Rockets by +10.

You can say, "Oh, it was only because Harden was off." But later in the game Kyrie got 3 minutes leading almost that same group against the Rockets without Harden, and only broke even.

Then, Lebron led Shump, JR, Dunleavy, and Love against the Rockets' starters from 6:54 to 3:25 in the fourth quarter and outscored the Rockets by +6.

Lebron, in a ridiculous lineup with Shump at the point, Dunleavy at the 3, and Love at the 5, outscored the Rockets 17-11 in just 3:30. And while the Rockets hit a few threes to stay within shouting distance of the Cav offensive onslaught, Harden was only 0-1 with 1 assist and 1 turnover. When Kyrie came back in with 3:26 left, Harden got restarted with 8 points and an assist in the last 3 minutes (would have been worse, but he only went 4-7 from the line). But Lebron scored 5 points and assisted JR on a three, and with 5 more from Kyrie it was enough to keep the lead.

Kyrie wasn't irrelevant in the game. But despite the flashy stats, he didn't win that game for them. Lebron's 19-13-8 doesn't look as "pretty" as Kyrie's 32-2-4. But Lebron was doing a better job than Kyrie of getting everyone else their shots, and lineups without Kyrie were doing a better job of keeping Harden in check than lineups with Kyrie, and that's the reason they won in the end.


That's the sort of thing +/- can be a shortcut to showing you. Kyrie had great scoring numbers, shooting 52% and hitting 4-6 threes, but the whole team was doing that against a crappy Houston defense, shooting 52% as a team while hitting 16-32 threes. Kyrie wasn't doing a great job on defense, and wasn't doing a great job getting other guys involved, and so it was two big runs by the Cav 2nd unit led by Lebron that got the Cavs the game....one against 3 Houston starters (but not Harden), and one against the full Rocket starting lineup.

You can't use +/- in a vacuum to state that x-player outperfomed y-player, because it simply doesn't work like that.

But it wasn't in a vacuum. We discussed game-by-game and full 5-man lineups.

I explained to you that the players in the lineups and their suitability with each other matter. You can go to the extreme here and put forth a squad which best fit Kyrie's style/skillset (long, defensive wings who can handle the ball + post up/long, defensive bigs who have predominantly paint games), players of which would make LeBron's skillset in general redundant. This then would be reflective in the +/-, for the simple fact that the team could survive without LeBron on the court: Kyrie would have defensive bigs/wings to anchor the defense and he'd have post-up bigs who he can dump the ball down to (he can then stretch the floor). Whereas they may struggle more often if Kyrie is off the court and LeBron is the one who needs to stretch the floor for the big(s) to go to work and/or provide perimeter scoring.

"Long, defensive wings who can handle the ball and post up" is a pretty narrow skill set - those are three different things that you don't necessarily get the luxury of getting to have together. And if Lebron can excel with Shump, Jefferson, and Dunleavy in the game, sometimes all three, I think he could certainly excel trading one of them out for the kind of player you're talking about.

As far as "long, defensive bigs who have predominantly paint games"...you mean like TT, or pre-injury Mozgov? Lebron excels with them on the court - Lebron/Mozgov is actually the top two-man +/- from the Cavs entire 2014-15 season, both regular season and playoffs. And it was even better when Shump was on the floor too.


Which is funny, because "Shump-Lebron-Mozgov" starts to sound a little bit close to exactly the kind of lineup you're suggesting that Kyrie would excel more than Lebron in. Oh, but we could make it even worse and add in TT and Delly, two more defensive-minded players who don't add a whole lot of outside scoring.


Hmmm....Delly-Shump-Lebron-TT-Mozgov was +15.5/48 in 98 minutes in the 2015 playoffs.
Same lineup was +45.1/48 in 40 minutes in the regular season.

Lebron was killing it with two long defensive bigs who work mostly in the paint and two primarily defensive guards who could handle the ball a little and aren't particularly stellar at the three-ball.

The next year Mozgov got hurt and fell off a cliff, but Delly-Shump-Lebron-Frye-TT and other similar lineups still killed. Lebron/TT replaced Lebron/Mozgov as the #1 two-man plus-minus for the Cavs in the playoffs (it was actually Lebron-Delly on top in the regular season).


So yes, maybe if Kyrie was surrounded by players make up for his deficiencies in defense and distributing the ball and inside scoring, he would have a better +/-.

But Lebron, when surrounded by those guys, still looks even better than Kyrie does.


It's why Lebron is so valuable. You don't go searching around for players to make up for Lebron's deficiencies. He molds himself into what needs to be done. Even if you take "outside shooting" as his deficiency, you then remember that he's shooting 37% from three this year, 34% for his career, and won Finals Games 6-7 in 2013 and Finals Games 5-7 in 2016 in large part due to strong outside shooting. Some deficiency.

This is why you can't use +/- like this, as if somehow Kyrie was a detriment to the team''s success during these games, when you're completely disregarding all activity when he's on court and how the rest of the nine players affect each other's play. Then disregarding all activity when he's not on court and how the 10 players affect each other's play. It's not as simple as "they're not winning those games without the ability to outscore the other team when Kyrie was off the floor.", especially in two of those three negative +/- games against Houston - he finished with a team-high 32 points, and Charlotte - he finished with a starter-high 19 points, both on respectable shooting percentages. Simply because they wouldn't win those games if they didn't have Kyrie's production, play and presence..

I'm not calling Kyrie a detriment to his team's success, though you can't be certain that they wouldn't have won without his production. A lesser team than this one beat the Bulls and Hawks and took two games from the Warriors without Kyrie's production. A lesser team than this one went 20-8 last year without Kyrie's production.

I think that this team needs Kyrie, because otherwise they'd be very thin at the point and they also need another scorer to take pressure off Lebron. The main reasons that Cleveland lost the 2015 Finals were because Lebron got exhausted and Delly got exhausted, and Kyrie prevents both of those things from happening while also stretching the floor.

But the Cavs don't need them as much as his ppg shows, as much as those ridiculous people putting him in the same category as Lebron try to indicate. Replace Kyrie with any number of other PG's in the league, and the Cavs are just as good.

Not only are you basically saying that his production/overall play could've easily been replaced, but they would've been better off with him not playing at all or having his minutes significantly reduced and playing the players who had a better +/- more minutes. When we know if Kyrie didn't play or had his minutes significantly reduced in those games, the team would've be worse off and those players who did have better +/-s initially would generally end up having worse on/off court box score ratings. The common theme in these games is that LeBron and the bench were making the runs against the opposition bench, whereas the starters (Love, Kyrie, JR/Dunleavy, Thompson) with LeBron against the starters were basically at a stand; where they most definitely needed Kyrie's production to help them stay afloat.

I didn't say that they're better off with him not playing at all. The Cavs simply don't have the personnel to do that. But I think they could trade him for a lot of other point guards in the league and be as good or better. Whereas Lebron is clearly irreplaceable.

And as I broke down in the Rockets game, it's not just Lebron and the bench making runs against the other team's bench. Lebron is also making runs against the other teams' starters, while Kyrie is standing still against the other team's bench.

I agree they need "some" starting point guard to stay afloat. It just doesn't necessarily need to be Kyrie. If you replaced Kyrie with someone who distributed better than him and played defense better than him, but didn't score as many ppg, it would be easy for Lebron/Love/JR to take the extra shots and keep up the point production to a reasonable degree.

Those two games you mention Toronto/Cavs +2 without Kyrie and Boston/Cavs +5 without Kyrie you can't put in the same lane because i) the team is still in the positive with him on the court ii) Cavs were a +3 without LeBron against Toronto.

I wonder if all the folks dappin you actually understand how +/- works.

I am getting a lot of daps there, aren't I. Some rep too, to offset your neg.

Toronto/Boston aren't in the "same lane", but they're worth mentioning. I already put Toronto in Lebron's category too, along with the other two games where he was barely positive but the Cavs won anyway. But Boston is clearly meaningful - 11-4 run to end the 1st with Kyrie out, 12-7 run to end the 3rd with Kyrie out (against Boston's starters), 8-8 three-minute stretch late in the 4th with Kyrie out (against Boston's starters). They beat Boston in large part because of what they did when Kyrie was on the bench.