... don't you think that if the Cavs had kept Wiggins, they'd be winning a championship this week?
Personally, no. They might be in a better situation with Wiggins but he (a) has a lot to learn before he's likely to be a genuinely effective playoff performer and (b) would have played fewer minute and, most likely, developed less over the course of the season had he been playing on the Cavs.
That said, it's been a fascinating series. I haven't watched that much of the playoffs, for various reasons, but I have been watching most of the Finals games, and am I glad that I have.
... don't you think that if the Cavs had kept Wiggins, they'd be winning a championship this week?
No, even with our knowledge ex post, and certainly at the time the Wiggins trade made sense.
I don't actually think the Cavs have a reasonable shot (which isn't the same as no shot). BUT if they pull it off then LeBron will have achieved one of the great feats in sports history of all time, winning a NBA championship basically through sheer personal force of will, playing against one of the best teams in NBA history. His supporting cast now consists of an Australian, a bag of Skittles, and some day-laborers picked up outside of Home Depot.
Wiggins . . . has a lot to learn
I wrote that knowing that his advanced stats weren't great this season but I just checked the +/- numbers for the Wolves, and it's an impressive demonstration of the fact that it's a tough league for young guys.
Rubio +11 (in only 700 minutes)
Pekovic +7 (in 800 minutes)
Mo Williams +5.4 (in 1150 minutes)
Thaddeus Young +5 (in 1600 minutes)
Wiggins -2 (in almost 3000 minutes)
That doesn't tell me that he would have helped the Cavs to a championship this year.
Now I feel like I was ragging on Wiggins, which I didn't mean to. Great player. But not enough to change the dynamic here.
I think that people are underestimating just how dominant a team the Warriors were and are this year. LeBron and the Cavs just taking two games from them is already an incredible feat. Dude is close to averaging a triple double in the series.
I think that people are underestimating just how dominant a team the Warriors were and are this year. LeBron and the Cavs just taking two games from them is already an incredible feat.
True, and I think that fits the conventional wisdom fairly well (leading to all the discussion that LeBron could be the first player since Jerry West to win Finals MVP from the losing team). I do agree that the CW underestimates the strength of the Warriors, but I still think it gets the basic narrative correct.
In fact I might argue that the most interesting thing about the Finals is that there was a huge change in strategy half-way through (everybody over 6' 9" getting benched) and that doesn't affect the way in which people agree on a basic level about what's the story of the series is (Cavs don't have enough healthy players, LeBron has been amazing, but they get tired at the end of games).
LeBron has been incredible: take all the hype from the time he was a junior-high kid, live up to it, then do a little more than people expected.
I like the Cavs with Wiggins because he's an excellent perimeter defender and has young legs. I didn't watch any regular season games, but I figure the numbers don't tell us much about Wiggins in the playoffs because he was a focal point and and learning on the job. As a very athletic role player/defender playing along LeBron in the playoffs, I'd expect a different story.
Not an NBA guy, so I might be wrong, but it's plausible that they'd be closing out the finals tonight with even a half-mobile Kyrie Irving, right?
I need to stop traveling to other continents during the NBA finals.
The wisdom of the Love trade remains to be seen. Wiggins looks good but picture both Love and Thompson on the boards right now it would likewise be a different series, doubt GS could afford to go so small. Lebron is doing his thing, best of all time eh I've seen better but good to see him fully unleashed, quite a sight.
Is Wiggins this year actually better than Shumpert?
it's plausible that they'd be closing out the finals tonight with even a half-mobile Kyrie Irving, right?
No, probably not. Even if Kyrie was fully healthy there's some question about how much he would improve things (see the article linked in the OP) but with an injured Kyrie I would definitely expect the gains on offense to be counteracted by losses on the defensive end.
Beyond that, I do think it's important to emphasize just how amazing LeBron would be -- and that part of that is his complete focus and commitment, and I do wonder if he would be that locked in if he was sharing the offense with somebody else.
Is Wiggins this year actually better than Shumpert?
RPM (which is far from perfect) has Shumpert as the 11th best SG in the league with a +2.6 rating overall and Wiggins as -1.65 overall.
Shorter every Warriors fan on my facebook page: "Hey LeBron, there's no 'I' in 'team'. Suck it."
The Cavs were really really good the second half of the season. The Love trade obviously doesn't look great when Love isn't playing, but that Cavs team with everyone healthy would have a great chance at a championship (especially if it was a normal year with no teams as good as the Warriors are).
Lebron's display has been impressive, but . . . he's shooting a tick under 40% . I know he's taking harder shots because of the lack of options, but I feel he'd need to be in the 45-50% range to justify awarding him the series MVP as a loser.
Is Wiggins this year actually better than Shumpert?
Shumpert is a role player on a team with a superstar; he does a couple of things and does them pretty well. Wiggins was a featured rookie, so of course his numbers are going to be "worse" in lots of ways, but he's way more talented and could have provided perimeter defense and another guy who can create a shot every now and again.
Wiggins was a featured rookie, so of course his numbers are going to be "worse" in lots of ways, but he's way more talented and could have provided perimeter defense and another guy who can create a shot every now and again.
That's a logical theory, and it might even be right. But I also want to push back on the (very logical) thought that, "by the end of the game half the guys on CLE look like they're too tired to do anything, surely having another guy on the roster who could do something would be an improvement."
Because the people playing for CLE are doing a lot of things correctly right now (specifically defense), and so you still have to ask, "what would they lose taking some of the players off the court?" I mean, Mozgov has more than proved that he's capable of doing "something" on a basketball court and even so Blatt didn't think he was worth playing in game 5. So it isn't quite true that anything would be an improvement.
I really haven't watched Wiggins much this season, and I don't have a great sense of how well he's played on defense. But, personally, I wouldn't trust a rookie in that situation. Here are a couple of references:
(1) Zach Lowe on the way in which weaknesses are exposed in the playoffs
But in a broader sense, everyone is just more prepared. Teams throw all their scouting resources in the coaching staff and front office into charting the tendencies of one opponent. They kick around every way to attack an opponent, and coaches make adjustments they'd never make in the doldrums of the regular season.
In that hothouse atmosphere, it becomes much harder to hide one player's glaring weakness, and that is where the "pretty good" veterans renew their value -- where the extra 20 percent shows up. Let's bounce around some examples from the current postseason:
2) Henry Abbott writing about Kevin Durant's poor plus minus in his first two years (and, I concede, Kevin Durant's reputation as a defender was worse than Wiggens' has been this year).
The first line of analysis, of any player, are real experts: People who assess talent for a living.
Three out of three I talked to shrug. If you are trying to tell me that Kevin Durant is somehow a terrible player, they say, go ahead. But don't expect me to listen to you.
...
Those three experts all had different theories to to dismiss the +/- numbers:
Theory #1: Any player playing long minutes on a bad team would have a bad +/-.
Theory #2: Any player with those teammates would have a bad +/-.
Theory #3: It's hard to play with a superstar.
(Worth reading the article all the way to the end, there are a number of observations which are amusing in hindsight)
(3) The follow-up a couple of months later
Kevin Durant may have the greatest plus/minus improvement in NBA history.
One way to interpret that is to say the scouts were right and that Kevin Durant was a great player even when his stats were poor. The other way, which I prefer, is to take that as an example of how steep the learning curve is in the NBA. Even for a great player like Kevin Durant, I honestly believe he wasn't helping the team win for his first two years, and then he improved -- that after proving he belonged in the league his ability to do "the little things" started to catch up to his talent level.
Contra redfox, I found the documentary about LeBron's high school team endearing.
Have probably been following NE Ohio sports for longer than anyone here and I assure you that it will end in tears.
Bill Barnwell tweet:
Kinda feel like Dellavedova is on the downswing of a Flowers for Algernon situation.
yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay warriors
Downtown is not nearly as on fire as panicky/racist Twitter might have had me expect.
This is a much more interesting thread if you imagine that the Wiggins referred to is Ender.
Oh god, this whole thing. Between not watching Games of Thrones and not watching basketball I have spent the week feeling more like a space alien than usual. Oh well, at least Bay Areans have another meaningless thing to feel smug about.
North Beach folks were rooting for the Boltons?
White Walkers have taken Briones?
For the LeBron haters: "LeBron's handling of Blatt unbecoming"