NBA 2024-25 Season Thread

Well let me explain then. Reducing what Kerr did with the Warriors offense to this:

is like saying Curry is just another decent 3-point shooter. It's not like Curry's talents were not known prior to this. No one was suggesting that the best way to take advantage of his talent is to take the ball out of his hands and let him around screens off-ball to create an advantage. Giving him the ball and letting him cook would've been the standard approach.

You're misunderstanding what is meant by a system player. The statistical case for Curry as a top-10 player rests on his stellar on/off (adjusted or otherwise) numbers as well team success (relative to talent) that backs up the measured impact. The point is that not much about his career (including on/off) stands out as a top-5 type of player until Kerr's arrival, which was his age-26 season. So pointing to his impact stats with Kerr doesn't prove anything, like that's the question we're wondering about, can he demonstrate that level of impact in other systems. It's generally understood that impact stats are extremely sensitive to context.

Also Kerr doesn't stagger his top players as much as other coaches do and we don't have a large enough sample size to differentiate between Draymond and Curry's impact. Generally speaking, if you don't blend in box stats, you end up with Curry around Harden, but Draymond looks like an all-time great (top-50 ish), but if you blend that in, Curry has a reasonable argument for a top-10 player, whereas Draymond looks like more like a borderline all-star. The point here is that the case for Curry attribute the minimum possible impact from Draymond and Kerr. In other words, we have to sort of thread the needle where, you go, those box stats don't capture Curry's true impact so we need to look at impact stats when we compare him other superstars, but, wait Curry's box stats are so much better than Draymond's, so we should allocate most of the impact to Curry, even though statistically we can't really tell.

Sure, but we're taking all of that into account. Curry after the 13-14 season wasn't just off-pace for the borderline top-10 career that he has now, he was significantly behind the pace required to match Harden's career. Also Curry's effectiveness being much higher under Kerr than Jackson isn't about taking up an absurd number of 3s or difficult long-range 3s. To be clear, it's also not about simply being off-ball more, Curry played off-ball a ton with Monta Ellis around, his effectiveness improved when he became more ball-dominant with Monta Ellis gone.

I'm not sure where this is coming from. Harden has now played with pretty much every type of great player under all sorts of systems and has looked great each time. Curry is significantly less proven in this regard simply due to better team continuity.

No one is denying that Harden was an exceptional iso player in his prime. I am speculating that playing alongside Harden wasn't that attractive a proposition for guys like Devin Booker, Bradley Beal, Kyrie, Kemba, Durant, Kawhi, etc. I have no way of proving the point, but if you played alongside Harden in his prime, you essentially were relegated to being a rim runner or a floor spacer, which isn't that attractive a proposition for an elite offensive talent.

I don't necessarily disagree with any of this, but Harden never played in a complex system that required players and the coaches to buy in, they just let him do his thing with Iso/PnR spam. Harden is just a historically great player on-ball (arguably the best ever) doing what other ball-dominant guards do just at a super-high level. If not for Kerr, Curry would've played out most of his career as a ball-dominant guard, whereas Harden pretty much had to be traded to the Warriors for Curry to play that role.

Btw, I think if you swapped Harden and Curry at the beginning of 14-15, Harden would've had a better career than Curry, though not as good of a career as Curry did in real life. In other words Curry > Harden with Curry's circumstances > Harden > Curry with Harden's circumstances.

There were two quantum leaps in Curry's career. One occurred under Mark Jackson and was highly correlated with increased volume of three point attempts. The second was under Kerr and was highly correlated with an increase in three point attempts, especially attempts off the dribble.

Yes, everyone knew the Curry was a great shooter. But people didn't recognize in 2012 that Curry could come very close to holding his efficiency if he shot 11 threes a game rather than 5, even though it is impossible to increase volume that much without increasing difficulty by a fair amount.

I don't think the bolded is correct at all. Curry was always an exceptional off ball player. Coming out of college, everyone knew that Curry was elite off the ball. In fact, he played off ball more often than not during his most successful season in college. The concern coming out of college was that he was too small to play off the ball in the NBA, and not enough of an on ball shot creator or distributor to play the point. (There of course were concerns about his defense as well.)

This.

Also, Curry fits every system. He's one of the unique players that will make any offense better by being out there, even if he's just sitting in the corner keeping guys out of the paint.

He would kill a pick and roll system. Warriors offense ends up that way in big moments a lot anyway.

Who are the great players that Harden played alongside during his prime in Houston? Clint Capela? Dwight Howard? Russ?

In any case, you are missing my point. Harden was bound to put up the same stats in his prime no matter who he played with because, as you say, Houston was committed to just spamming Harden isos and PnRs.

This is definitely correct. And Curry was so effective running high PnRs with Draymond that one of the criticisms of Kerr (and the Warriors) was that they didn't do that enough.

Also a reminder that Curry was 24ppg on stupid efficiency while being +15pp 100 possession in Jackson's last season and finished 6th in the MVP. Projection to MVP caliber player was there.

You're talking about irrelevant stuff that's all priced in. I think you're fundamentally confusing the argument - no one is trying to say Curry's numbers need to discounted in some way to due to his circumstances. The point is that Curry's numbers (i.e. box stats) aren't objectively that good (they are statistcally pretty similar to or slightly worse than Harden's) and you need to infer impact elsewhere. But it's not clear that the impact would've been the same in a different system.

Again, you're talking about things that don't matter. If we give Curry full credit for all of this, he still doesn't look like a top-10 player. The point isn't whether Curry's scoring efficiency and all the box stats add up to a top-10 player, they don't.

Also Curry's efficiency has not held up as he upped his volume. Curry shot .440 from 3, 09-15 on 6.5 attempts per game. Curry shot .421 on 11.3 attempts per game since the 15-16 season. Just eye-balling, that's around .400 on additional attempts. This doesn't move the needle.

Were Chris Paul and Kevin Durant relegated to floor-spacing or rim-running? Also, why did Chris Paul force a trade to the Rockets and why did Kevin Durant recruit Harden to the Nets? You're also attributing what's effectively a coaching decision to James Harden. If you go back to Curry before Kerr arrived, his time of possession was significantly higher than James Harden:

https://www.nba.com/stats/players/touche...

Again, it's not just about being off-ball - Curry spent a fair amount of time off-ball in the NBA and didn't look anything remotely like an MVP-caliber player. He started looking like a top-10 player when he became a ball-dominant guard. If Curry just played off-ball without a proper system designed to maximize his impact, that would've been even worse.

You could say this about every top-30 player, the point is whether he's a top-10 player or a top-20 player from an actual impact perspective and regardless of that answer, whether his impact would've been more like top-30 or top-40 had he played in a more conventional offense.

Chris Paul?

What are you even arguing against? Harden won an MVP and finished 2nd three times. The same season Curry finished 6th in MVP, Harden finished 5th, selected to All-NBA ahead of Curry, while a year and half younger.

yeah i'm with you but i don't think we can rule out that's what happened because morey just decided to build around harden entirely rather than try the traditional 2-3 superstars + scrubs formula that is commonly seen

looking at what morey put alongside him:

2012 - terrible team, chandler parsons and jeremy lin got the most mpg after harden, still somehow went 45-37
2013 - bring in dwight howard and improve to 54-28, rest of roster just role players
2014 - improve to 56-26 with few changes other than bringing in ariza
2015 - regress to 41-41
2016 - return to 55-27 without dwight howard - classic addition by subtraction, harden far and away the only star on the team now
2017 - improve to 65-17 with chris paul on the squad, basically a team of paul and harden and a bunch of role players who would struggle for starting roles on other teams
2018 - regress to 53-29, chris paul missing 24 games likely had a lot to do with that
2019 - goodbye paul, hello 44-28 - despite the lack of support and now being 30, harden doesn't miss a beat and still post .543 eFG%, his best as a rocket - he had 57 games from westbrook, 22 from covington, 39 from capela, 36 from gordon, the only guy to consistently see the floor with him was pj tucker (gross) and harden himself missed a bunch, only playing in 68 games (but i suspect a bunch were load managed spots where it was a tough game they didn't expect to win anyway)

dwight howard 2013-15 - already washed by the time he was a member of the rockets and they still got to the conference finals - his production steadily declined each season as he aged and he missed nearly a full season of games in his 3 year tenure - his time with the rockets was very much so just another center, a good one, but he was no longer a star who would bring in a championship - for comparison, he had left a team of kobe/pau/nash that also had solid contributions from veterans metta world peace, steve blake, & antawn jamison

chris paul 2017-19 - already past his prime and had a 3-2 lead on gsw, the one that was arguably the best team ever assembled, until paul got hurt and then they lost, - if paul didn't get hurt and/or they won either game 6 or 7 they would have been massive favorites to win it all in the finals

that's it, all he's had for other star power during his prime

after that we have covid and he hasn't spent more than 58 games with the same team in a single season since, with zero time to develop as a unit and now at 34 his prime is long past and he's a very different player now as a result - however, he's still an elite scorer and actually putting up the highest eFG% of his career in this new role with LAC where he's putting up .571 eFG% which is the highest of his career

so it seems like the experiment in LAC is working, which is pretty incredible given those guys are 34/32/33/35

meh, nobody wants to play with a guy who requires the ball 99% of the time. but tbf all you need in those spots are big dudes who finish at the rim and other dudes who can hit 3s (and being able to defend helps, especially since beard doesn't), so i guess it works. turns out it's hard to win a lot of big games like that though, go figure. i'm with rococo, even if you gave him a prime beal/booker he'd piss his pants if the guy tried to be anything other than a spot up shooter, so what's the point? cheaper and easier to get a guy who's happy with that role

The bar here isn't would Curry be effective, but would he be so good that he'd literally be better than one of the best on-ball players ever in Harden? Harden has an edge in defense (including rebounding) as well.

I'm not sure if you guys understand the overall bar here - at Curry's size (and its implied limitations in terms of defense), he could be the best offensive player of all time and still be well outside top-10 overall. Harden has an outside argument as the best offensive player of all time as well and he's probably outside the top-20.

But multiple top players literally wanted to play with him. Like are we just going to ignore the fact that Chris Paul joined the Rockets (despite him also being a ball-dominant guard) and KD almost certainly recruited Harden to join the Nets?

https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2926...

Also, as of the 13-14 season, Curry had much higher time of possession than Harden. When Kerr came on, Curry's time of possession dropped significantly, whereas Harden's time of possession didn't exceed Curry's 13-14 season level until D'Antoni arrived in Houston. So why do we think Harden's ball dominance is some fixed attribute of his, when we have plenty of evidence to the contrary? Do we really think if D'Antoni coached Curry and Kerr coached Harden, this wouldn't be the exact opposite? Obviously Curry would've been ball-dominant under D'Antoni and Harden would've shared the ball more in Kerr's system.

What in the world? If any player in the NBA could add 3 pt attempts and shoot 40% on those additional attempts, the number of attempts that the coach would want him to add would literally be "as many as possible."

Adding a large number of 3 point attempts if you can make the additional attempts at a 40% clip is very valuable.

I obviously can't know exactly what Morey was trying to accomplish. I agree that Harden never had a great supporting cast in Houston.

It might seem to you that way, but I did the math and it's worth about 0.6 points per game, using average eFG (for 2015+). In other words, if Curry from 15-16 on simply averaged the same volume and efficiency on 3s that he had from his age 21-26 seasons, he would've been worth 0.6 points per game less.

Now, the actual gap between these two time periods is even less, since league-wide efficiency was worse during the earlier years. If you adjust for that, Curry added about 2.13 points per game with his 3-point shooting above average eFG his age-21 through age-26 seasons, and 2.32 points per game with his 3-point shooting above average eFG since his age-27 season.

So no, this has literally nothing to do with Curry's ascension to superstardom in terms of actual on-court impact.

I'm providing this mainly because most people simply don't realize how little even transcendent shooting with high volume directly impacts net efficiency.

Nets are turrible(had their preferred starting 5, too, Cam Johnson off the bench), or Minny was ballin outta control on the defensive end.

Bridges 1-11 from 3

how does this relate to harden bruh?

lol

Are you not familiar with D'Antoni's career? There are differences, but all of his offenses have been highly guard / ball-handler centric. He made it work the likes of Raymond Felton and Jeremy Lin and some others on the Lakers that I can't quite remember so it's not like he's needed all-time greats. Curry, from a skill perspective, is close to an ideal ball-handler in a typical D'Antoni system, why wouldn't an offense revolve around him as the primary ball-handler? Again, taking the ball out of a 6-3 superstar point guard who just averaged 8+ assists a game would've been seen as completely crazy. I mean Nash was an insanely great shooter for his time, why wouldn't D'Antoni see Curry as Nash 2.0?

Likewise, as of 13-14, Harden was more of an off-ball player than Curry (PG Harden didn't emerge until a few years later) and Kerr didn't envision Curry being this successful off-ball in the first place (in part because Draymond hasn't emerged as a passing hub yet). And my understanding is that Kerr's offense was something that he envisioned before he even got the Warriors job, it wasn't something that was specifically designed with Curry in mind and the premise behind the system is ball movement and minimizing ball-dominance. So if Harden was on the Warriors, why wouldn't Kerr have put Harden in a similar hybrid role?

Also, this isn't just Kerr- a lot of coaches at every level simply believe that ball dominance by one player is simply the wrong way to play the game, even if it happens to work. We've already seen Kerr trying to stick to the system even when he doesn't have the personnel to make it work, so I'm not sure why you think Harden, who, just like Curry, is good enough to make anything work, would've made Kerr go, you know what, forget about this whole hybrid triangle/motion offense and ball movement, let's just spam Harden isos.

There are lots of coaches that have tried completely different things at different times, but D'Antoni and Kerr are literally the two that have been very stubborn about certain aspects and Curry and Harden are really not that different in terms of their skill sets even if they've been utilized very differently.

You could argue that Mark Jackson taught Steph mental toughness and is responsible for a good part of his success.

Kerr is about as mentally tough as a wet paper bag.

Did Kerr **** your mom or something? You're like the TWOG of Kerr.

Curry is the GOAT