Why the hell do people compared a player because of these BS stats? Give me the best offensive guy that have 60 wins over a defensive guy with 50 wins anyday. Who give a dam about defense or offense, it's all about the wins. You can have the opposing team score 200 points and you score 201 then who's better? Obviously the team that wins. About anthony Davis...this dude has not won anything in his life and missed the playoffs every year and all they talk about is defense...ok? What does that do again? Missing the playoffs years after years. I am sick and tired of people using defense when talking about harden. That's the dumbest argument ones can make.
some people don’t realize that a player can be so transcendent offensively that his overall impact on the game will exceed that of most players even if his defense is subpar (which Harden’s isn’t anymore) that is one of the major reasons why the Harden vs. Klay debate was 1 of the dumbest debates of the past decade...people were saying wild things like “give me Klay, he plays on both ends”...I don’t give a damn if Klay is a 2-way player, Harden’s offense alone>>>>>Klay’s offense+defense
Offense is more important to winning games. If the 2 best defenses ever assembled played each other and held each other to 0-0 the entire game and someone makes a lucky basket to win it 2-0. Offense win the game. The deciding factor of who wins a game is who scores more points. That is an offensive metric. You need defense, absolutely, because it is a very important tool in order to outscore your opponent.
“Who scores more points” is not an offensive metric. Points scored is an offensive metric. “Who scores more points” is no more determined by a team’s offense as it is determined by a team’s defense.
Offense always trumps defense because points. Defenses make games winnable, but offense still wins games.
And the stats actually prove this. Harden's ORPM this year : 7.17 (Best in the league) Klay's RPM (ORPM + DRPM) : 2.08 Harden offense ALONE has 3.5 times the impact of Klay's offense + defense. Let that sink in.
I dont think people really understand or want to understand that Harden is THE GAME, he can do absolutely anything, he is so in control and always makes the defense in guessing mode, and because of that he can always do things differently, its like a game within a game, AD will never reach that level and his defense does NOT make up for that, honestly Harden is so above AD in skill level is not even fun. And this whole oh, but Harden is not the defender AD is. Have you watched Rockets and Pels standings for years? Have people watched Harden will that team to second seed with full team of nobodies with most of them out of the league or bench warmers? When AD will do that, holla at me. AD does make him team better, Harden make the team go, he is so unarguable and amazing at involving people that he can easily could make 20 assist games if he wanted, he can score 70 if he wants, and etc, and everything on amazing efficiency. I havent seen a player make a game seem so effortless, most of the time he dribbles around and defender has no idea what's next.
In a time when defenses packed the paint and could get away with it, defense ruled. After 2014, teams have learned that perimeter shooters spread out along the entire perimeter is almost indefensible. When multiple players stand 4 or 5 ft beyond 3-point land like the Rockets do; that’s an incredible amount of square footage that needs to be covered. The Ringer had a take on that very topic. Slower guys get weeded out. Or they better make it up on the offensive end in spades.
"Of the 69 NBA championships from 1947 to 2015, the league’s best defensive teams during the regular season have won ten titles – including the Warriors last year – while the best offensive teams have won seven. In the playoffs, the better defensive teams win 54.4 percent of the time, while the better offensive teams win 54.7 percent of the time – almost dead even. And among more than 55,000 regular season games, the better defensive teams win no more often than the better offensive teams." link The only thing that matters, regular season or playoffs: Somehow outscore your opponent.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive, A team can have both a better offense and a better defense.
I am amused that you took a defense vs offense thread and tried to turn it into a Harden over AD thread. You MVP fanboys are so insecure
That Detroit championship that took down shaqobe comes to mind. It's a different strategy that comes from the cards you're dealt. Mike Fratello coached some terrible teams to playoffs by slowing the pace down and upping the defense. They would've tanked and taken their chances on today's league Kinda felt like a cheaper option you could win with grit and hard work. With stacked offenses, you need both. Play harder and smarter.
You win with great "individual" offensive talents and "closers." These are rare. And the collective "team" defense.
Exactly Harden and Klay aren’t even in the same conversation. Harden is so much better. Might as well compare Curry to Pat Beverly. It’s ridiculous.
A nice CTG article (requires subscription) on Luc that touches on this subject of Offense vs Defense: https://cleaningtheglass.com/stat-of-the-week-lucs-d/ He looks at his stats over his career and shows how the boxscore numbers don't do sufficient justice to his impact via the defensive end, and to see that you need to look at his On/Off numbers over his career. Some of this difference is about fluky opponent three point shooting, but a lot seems real: opposing turnovers have been much higher, opponent free throws lower (as they have been for most of his career). Just like last season, opponents have shot far worse at the rim with Mbah a Moute on the court. Opponents have missed many more long midrange jumpers with Luc in the game, another trend in his time in the NBA. Lastly, Mbah a Moute’s transition defense remains fantastic: for the 4th straight season opponents are scoring much worse in transition when he plays than when he sits. (You can see all of these stats by scrolling through his on/off stats page.) He ends with this: Mbah a Moute has always stood out as a perfect example to demonstrate our collective bias toward offense. If you flipped the sides of the ball that Mbah a Moute excelled and struggled at, would he ever be making less than $2.5M per year, as he is now and has each of the last three seasons? There are plenty of examples of players who are great on offense but have major issues on defense that sign lucrative deals — few that linger and take below-market offers. As talent evaluators we need to ask ourselves: how many other players are like this? How many players over-perform their salaries because of undervalued skillsets?
Reminds me of MDA's quote: "Don't tell anybody," D'Antoni said. "We want to keep it a secret. We want to hide it. He's the best-kept secret in the NBA. I didn't know it. We game-planned (against him) he was kind of streaky. But he's as good as anybody. He's smart. He can play big minutes. He can shoot 3s. Whatever you want him to do he does it. He's got playmaking skills. He sees the floor. I don't know how we all missed it, but we all did." "Hey look, we got us a steal," D'Antoni said. "We got him at the minimum. That's ridiculous. He's not a good player, he's a great player. What he does for the team - runs the floor, he can handle, he can shoot, he can pass, he's smart, good guy, locker room guy." [Feigen] NBA's best-kept secret Luc Mbah a Moute under Rockets' wraps
