2023-24 Celtics
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At the All-Star break they were a couple games under .500 I beleive. They’ve covered a bunch in a row though.
The problem with Luka is that whoever he is guarding becomes Luka, so the other team gets to have its own Luka. It's like the "2 Spidermans pointing" meme, but for Dallas' defensive net rating.
Yes. In my opinion (& I'll get pushback) if you look at a combo of On-Off & +/- (over a few seasons)
If he's surrounded by crap teammates his On-Off should be extremely high
If he has great teammates his +/- should be extremely high
Overall Luka's On-Off +/- doesn't come close to the other top players he gets mentioned with Joker, Giannis, Tatum, Embiid, Bron, Curry, Kawhi...SGA this year
Luka basically adds more than he gives up when he's on the floor, but it's not as large as his reputation (1st Team All-NBA)
It's easy to see why, when you watch last night.
- Gives back a lot on D
- Doesn't add much on offense when he's not directly orchestrating the play
Obviously he adds a ton on offense when he is controlling the play--he has very real value, and it's high. I'm confident there's a way to build a title team around Luka, but it's much easier to do so around most of the top 10 players.
Hilarious & somewhat true. It's like Luka is everything, and everywhere all at once.
I'd say it's just a regular-season thing if I hadn't seen the same immature act in the playoffs. Maybe he will grow out of it & take his fitness seriously. His height, athletic ability, & instincts should make him a neutral defender with effort & 20 lbs less winter coat.
And they do it all very casually. Haven't seen a "flip the switch" team like this since peak Warriors. They cruise along, then up the intensity on both ends for 5 minutes. If you miss some 3s during that 5 minute stretch, the game is over. If you make them, they do it again in the 4th.
Mavs were SUPER aggressive throwing 2/3 guys at Tatum, which obviously led to a bunch of wide open shots, whether directly or on secondary passes.
The Celtics scored roughly 274 points despite the fact that they only cashed in on 3 of Tatum’s 10 potential assists.
Also, Jaylen has a 68% TS in the four games since the ASB.
The Celtics scored roughly 274 points despite the fact that they only cashed in on 3 of Tatum’s 10 potential assists.
Also, Jaylen has a 68% TS in the four games since the ASB.
I’m convinced they have another defensive gear to hit as well. (Please stay healthy).
Wasn't that Lively?
EDIT: nm, just rewatched the highlight and yes, matador is the perfect description of Luka's move as JB goes by him before doing his move on Lively.
Was stuck at the dealership with little to do this morning so ended up eventually listening to the Mavs pods in desperation.
One of them was quite reasonable. The other one (Locked on Mavs) started ok but then went down the checklist of why people shouldn't feel bad about the Mavs losing to the Cs. They started with something along the lines of "yes, understand that Luka and Kyrie are better than the tandem of Tatum and Brown, and Porzingis doesn't offer that much above what we have", at which point I burst out laughing and the whole showroom looked my way for a second.
BTW, checklist conclusion was that the gap between DWhite/Jrue and the two Mavs guards was the crux of the issue.
Man, would anyone in their right minds prefer the pairing of Luka and Kyrie over Tatum/Brown, regardless of surrounding cast and age considerations? Even if you have Luka above Tatum, the positional importance of Brown vs. Kyrie as well as the flexibility of Brown vs. Kyrie on offense and defense makes the Celtics tandem an easy choice for me.
Put another way, I think the Celtics would have a worse record if you slotted in those two for Tatum/Brown, and the Mavs would have a better record with JT/JB. Just look at all the hoops that the Mavs have to go through to get PJ Washington while the Celtics can pick up D White and Jrue at comparitively low prices - having those two guys be wings is so helpful w/r/t roster building.
Forget JB and Kyrie. I would argue the Celts would be a worse team if the Celts traded Tatum straight up for Luka.
This is exactly true. We're not playing hockey here, where the first line is replaced by the second line. There's plenty of overlap of starters and bench, and it can be matchup dependent or not.
Yep. Insert jimbo's dead horse reminder that it's not Trae Young--everyone else--DPOY continuum. There are many ladders in the "how much does this guy help/hurt" and every step matters as much as the corresponding step on the offensive continuum. Points against is like defensive runs saved in baseball or whatever. Luka is on the suck end of that continuum. He doesn't project that poorly on DARKO, but honestly to me that's a sign that despite being a mindblowingly efficient and productive offensive player he still is a net negative on offense somehow. Even with the opponent taking the ball out of the basket more often than not when he's on the floor, they're still scoring at will. Not. Good.
RM's numbers here speak for themselves. Fucking boggling numbers.
I was going to say that Kyrie, despite some playoff-level effort on D last night as noted above--was still often a turnstile too. And poor Exum looked like he just signed his deal that morning. But the numbers are what they are. Luka's cover is more spiderman than he is.
Per DARKO, Luka is the second-best offensive player in the league (projection not ranking caveat). Among the top-12 DPM players, he's the only one with a negative D-DPM. And that negative D-DPM drops him to 8th overall player by DPM. I'm honestly surprised that his D-DPM isn't lower, but again, when your offense is that freaking good, the defender isn't running out on very many 3-on-1 fast breaks.
White and Holiday would be rolling their eyes to no end if they were on a team with Luka and KI. Get us the fuck out of here.
What you saw from Luka defensively last night is fucking impossible to scheme around. It was pretty much the same thing in Dallas a couple of months ago, too.
with a +10.9 net diff., that's pretty amazing work by the House. Just goes to show how hard it is
That’s all baked into the number. It’s not easy to find pieces of the puzzle that are undervalued by the market. Tomorrow line will be a good example as it should be at least -9.5 or 10.
Wow, that is some next-level delusion/cope. I'm not sure what it is about Tatum that makes everyone knee-jerk underrate him. I think it's that he's putting up amazing impact stats but not video-game offensive stats.
Something similar with Jaylen: his impact on winning has gotten quite high, but his TS% is low, so people just stop there. "Inefficient offensive player in an efficient offensive age."
Feels a lot like the old sabermetric hate of Brad Ausmus.
He comes back to us now, at the turn of the tide:
View: https://twitter.com/isjanosnba/status/1764098207477645745?s=46&t=11SXTvIYT-tl8b6e7iEUVQ
View: https://twitter.com/isjanosnba/status/1764098207477645745?s=46&t=11SXTvIYT-tl8b6e7iEUVQ
tbf, he upped his effort and they found ways to work around it in the 2022 WCF run.
There's a playable guy living in his body, but that guy hasn't shown up this year.
Doncic definitely has defensive gears. When the Mavs are down double digits on the road in a hopeless situation is when Luka Oncic shows up.
I remember that joke going back at least as far as Luka's coach, Ason Kidd.
No-D Luka showed up last night long before the deficit was double digits. He was awful the whole game.
Further than that. I believe it was a young Ian Eagle doing NJ Net games on the AM radio from the old Brendan Byrne Arena….they had a young gunner who later became, and still is today, an NBA official, that he would affectionately call “Leon Woo”
Wow - that's really funny!
Am I reading this right, when I think "hey, take out guys who allowed one basket, and (by opponents' true shooting %) 9 of the top 10 D players on the floor were Celts, while 9 of the ten worst were Mavs?
This team is finally peaking…..I was hoping it didn’t happen this soon though. Pretty awesome to see anyway.
I love and expect the spin here. The fact remains that the Warriors or some subset of their lineup decided to leave an All NBA player (asterisk or not) wide open to start a national broadcast game. I doubt that strategy will be reused if these two teams meet again.
I’ve been confused about this, when people quote these they’re only talking about the magic number to clinch over the Cavs and Thunder right?
Sure, it just seems an odd usage of magic number. I’ve only seen it used in the context of any combination of team X wins and team Y losses clinches the division/conference, regardless of what other teams do
If the Celts win 17 more games, it doesn’t matter what any of the other teams do. I don’t understand your point. If the Sox had an 8 game lead on the Yankees and a 10 game lead on Tampa, why would we care about the magic number needed to beat Tampa?
It’s literally the point of the magic number. How else would you use it?
I think the Celts had this game circled after they blew the big lead in SF and Steph showed out with his goodnight gesture.