(03-26-2021, 07:13 AM)Kammrath Wrote: A few things:
1) You make a GREAT point about the starting five. They continue to play amazing offense together and the best justification for the Mavs doing nothing at the TDL is their +12.5 net rating. Thanks for the reminder on that, we all need to be reminded of this data.
2) However your statement "the Mavs defense got unquestionable better with Jrich than without" is unequivocally false. The defense has been worse, MUCH worse with JR. The Mavs are 6.0 pts worse defensively this season in every minute he has played (1056 mins) versus when he has sat (965 mins). The offense has been better by 1.4 pts with JR, so if anything he has helped the offense.
3) The great starting lineup is playing better offense than anything the Mavs did last year, BUT they are also playing much worse defense, 5.8 pts worse in fact. So the net result of all the changes that happened this offseason have resulted in better offense and worse defense for what has become the starting core.
I don't agree with this interpretation at all. Team rating is a team rating, it is not an individual rating. Many different things affect the team rating, not just individual quality - quality of lineups you play with, quality of opponents lineups you play against and similar. If we take on off team ratings into account, Mavs defense is better when DFS sits and when JRich sits. So looks like what we think are our two best defenders actually suck at playing defense. On the other hand the defense improves with Burke while Powell and (check this!) Bobi are absolute defensive studs, according to this metric. Team index can only be used as a comparison between lineups imho, and evaluate defensive impact from here. Even this way, many factors are contributing. For example - KP was considerably better defensively last season than this one.
Best comparison to the Luka-JRich-DFS-Kleber-KP lineup can be line-ups with THJ or Curry from last season instead of JRich. The one with THJ in had a defensive rating of 122 in 90+ minutes. Considerably worse than JRich lineup rating of 115. The one with Curry had a defensive rating of 112 in 70 minutes. Looks like Curry is a defensive stud
