No one discussed Timmy's defense any more than "he plays defense". It's the 2005 Spurs and Pistons - half the individuals on both teams play defense. I'm not telling people that Kobe was secretly awesome in 2004 because he drew double teams or because his defense. Those kind of arguments can be made for every superstar to ever play. They all draw double teams. They're not Valid arguments for why Timmy was better that series than any Finals MVP's were for any other series in the last 30 years.
First off, nobody cares about guards' defense in the real world. It matters, but not all that much. And for the love of god, stop bringing Kobe into this, nobody gives a shit about Kobe.
Secondly, Timmy doesn't just "play defense." He's one of the best defensive forwards of all time. The null hypothesis here is that he
did play superior defense and the burden of proof is on you to show us that he didn't.
Unless you have evidence that he drew more double teams than Player A that won a Finals MVP in thr last 30 years, but you don't. So this is a moot point.
I wasn't using that as a specific argument for Duncan. I
was throwing out an additional example of how the box score doesn't show everything, since you seemed fixated on the idea that defense was everything.
Look I'm with you on PER (which I never ever use except maybe to troll) and I'm with you on there being more to the game than stats...but neither you, nor anyone else provided some sort of conclusive, or at least believable argument that Timmy was head and shoulders better defensively than Bowen, or Wallace, or that he drew more double teams or did more intangibles than any other Finaks MVP award winner.
And maybe he didn't. Again, I am totally willing to have this argument. While dRtg isn't great in small samples, I wouldn't say Duncan looks particularly good in this series. To really analyze it properly we need a lot more numbers than that, and we should really be analyzing rotations since tracking rotations tends to produce more useful results than tracking individual players in basketball (for obvious reasons). You see how much nicer the conversation is when we are actually having one?
His 2003 numbers were much better both offensively and presumably the things you discussed. He averaged a lot more assists (presumably off drawing double teams) and he more than doubled the number of blocks and steals combined (defense).
Blocks and steals are a really, really bad measure of defense, and I'm not sure why you keep bringing them up. They're not quite as bad as using, say, errors in baseball, but they're close. They are assigned undue weight because they happen to show up in the box score and are extremely prone to scorer bias (particularly home / away scoring). The fact that you keep bringing things like this up is why I keep explaining what you call "the basics" to you; it's not clear to me that you really understand them.
Actually, here's a very simple exercise for you: are blocks and steals "worth" the same amount of win probability (or points prevented, if you want to be more granular), or is one "worth" more than the other? Justify your response. If they aren't worth the same, how can you add them together?
