12-10-2024, 11:34 AM
(12-10-2024, 11:18 AM)RoyTarpleysGhost Wrote: I think we all agree Lively is better than Gafford defensively.
But that "stat" seems dumb considering Gafford was in the starting unit early in the year when Luka was a disaster and the Mavs were struggling because of it. Now Lively is in the starting unit with an in shape Luka.
There is definitely a lot of noise in single player net/defensive rating. That's why I like looking at stuff like EPM that takes more context into account (which has Gafford at -.3 and Lively at +1.8 defensively). I will say that when Gafford was starting those games, Lively was generally finishing them, so I don't know that Gafford was playing that much more with Luka than Lively in the early games.