Yes, their starters are really really good, and it's why the Cs can have a bench of just roleplayers with mostly shooting skills and have it work.
My point was that people expect "great starters, meh bench" to mean "the starters smash everyone, and then the mixed units tread water", when, in fact, it means that the starters make those other lineups much better.
To me too, especially because most teams have two or three stars, so there's lineups with 1 or 2 starters and bench players, vs Boston using 2 or 3 starters and bench players. Means the starters can crank up the minutes if they need to.
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.
Luka has ZERO interest in playing defense.
Luka Math: give up baskets quickly so I can get back on offense & score more POINTZ!
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.
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.
OK, since we all believe Luka doesn't offer much in the way of defense, do we have any metrics that show the impact of that? Like, how does his fantastic offense net out against his bad defense?
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.