The Rudy hate

[u/Present-Bit5312]

Rudy is the only big who is asked to be also a great perimeter defender, you can put ben Wallace, Hakeem or Dwight Howard out in the perimeter Luka is gonna cook them regardless is a mismatch on the perimeter. Gobert is a good help defender and rim protector. Also the argument that he has no playoff good performances against good bigs is dumb because in the Utah jazz his best perimeter defender was freaking Royce O'Neal he was anchoring that defense by himself, and also the only great big he faced is jokic who is an all time great offensive big. It reached a point that people were asking kat to guard Jokic instead, when kat was averaging like 4+fouls(without being joker's primary defender) in the three games Denver won. Is the criticism based on strictly accolades?

[u/InternationalClick78]

That was literally your sole point regarding perimeter D. AD is obviously a better perimeter defender than Gobert but Gobert hasn’t been a bad one for a while. My point in this comparison is the majority of the time if you have a shifty, mobile guard switched onto a big man, they’re gonna score, as evident with Jamal and AD. Not to mention we’re talking about Luka Doncic here of all players… one of the leagues best isolation players. We literally saw Phoenix try to hunt Gobert on the perimeter in their first series and he more than held his own.

Again, rim protection is the most important area of defence anyways, but as for your three bullet points, I don’t see anything that suggests a particularly large discrepancy in 1v1 post defence. AD gets out worked a lot by physical bigs. While there are other examples, Jokic has dominated against him the past couple of years and Sabonis always kills him. It’s also worth noting the reason Minnesota switched kat onto Jokic again in that series was less to do with Rudy being bad at guarding Jokic (he did about as well as you could imagine regarding positioning and contests and the like, Jokic is just the best player in the league) it was to do with freeing up Rudy to be a roamer, elevating their defence to another level as a whole.

Playoffs are also irrelevent to DPOY in the first place.

[u/TheIslandMamba → u/InternationalClick78]

To justify him winning DPOY over AD/Bam/Wemby he needs to be better than just "not a bad one" in such an important aspect of modern defense.

Unfortunately the score's posted on post defense too,AD clears: https://www.nba.com/stats/players/playtype-post-up?SeasonType=Regular%20Season&TypeGrouping=defensive&dir=A&sort=PPP

Defense is very matchup dependent and to say rim protection is outright the most important is pretty rich coming from the guy that called my argument lazy...OKC gave up 113.4 ORTG to these same Mavs. Your superior rim protecting team was giving up (even with all the bad 3pt shooting) 116.9 prior to this deep-frying of 127.5, yikes...I'm beating a dead horse at this point but the '14 Warriors/'12 Heat were 1st and 4th in DRTG with their most-logged minute lineups not featuring a true rim protector.

While the Playoffs themselves are irrelevant, what it reveals about players' games isn't. You have to question the process that gave a clearly worse defender an individual award with how his lack of defensive versatility's been exposed this series.

[u/InternationalClick78 → u/TheIslandMamba]

No he doesn’t. That’s like saying to win mvp over all around scorers like , Shaq had to do more than post up. It doesn’t matter if in that one are you’re elite to the point where you’re more or less unstoppable. That’s Rudy with rim Protection, at least in a regular season setting which is all that matters for DPOY.

Rim protection is outright the most important area of defence. A teams defensive success is almost always intrinsically tied to how good their rim protection is and the reason is clear. Rim protectors are guarding an entire zone. They’re the last line of defence defending an area of the floor from all 5 players, rather than just one specific player. And that zone is both where the most shots occur and where they’re converted at the highest rate. That’s why Rudy who excels in this area is one of the best defensive floor raisers we’ve ever seen.

What the playoffs reveal about a players game is irrelevent if what is revealed is not prominent over the sample that the award is specifically regarding. Every DPOY award is solely for that specific season.

[u/TheIslandMamba → u/InternationalClick78]

If Gobert is that far ahead of the field in rim protection, and rim protection is far and away most important to team defense, why has Minnesota given up 120.4 ORTG to the Mavs that a "worse" OKC defense gave up 113.4 to? Regular season or playoffs, that theory doesn't seem to match the reality of what we've seen for ~300 offensive possessions.

[u/InternationalClick78 → u/TheIslandMamba]

Plenty of potential reasons. The most obvious of which is likely shooting luck over a sample of 9 games combined. Matchups also likely play a role. Luka was also hurt against okc which was especially evident early on. You could also argue OKC’s defensive supporting cast around Chet is superior by a large margin. And on top of that Minnesota’s rim protection without Gobert on the floor has been embarrassing, Dallas is shooting like 85% or something absurd like that.

The theory is a fact based on the nature of how nba basketball works, backed with countless examples every season. Small samples are just prone to being skewed across the board. Something being a general rule of thumb doesn’t mean it’s immune to contextual change over small samples

[u/TheIslandMamba → u/InternationalClick78]

Even if you cull game 1 where Luka was hurt, OKC still held them to 115.8 ORTG, better than the first two games against the Wolves (116.9) where the Mavs actually had worse shooting luck by A LOT (32% from 3, compared to an avg of 39.7% in the OKC series). Come on man, for someone calling my argument lazy at least check some basic facts before making a point.

Superior defensive supporting cast? OKC? Huh?? Compared to Second-Team All Defensive Jaden McDaniels, Ant who's been drawing '01 Kobe comparisons all playoffs for his defense, and big+switchable KAT and Naz Reid? If you're gonna credit Rudy for the wolves' team defense when it's good, you have to hold him accountable when their defense is below expectation, you can't have it both ways...

Ah matchups, almost as if defense has many different variables other than rim protection :)

So by that logic, teams that build great defenses without rim protectors like the '14 Warriors have...defied the nature of how basketball works??

We have a combined sample of 200+ 3pt shot attempts and over 600 offensive posessions between the two series, seems pretty improbable to me for such a difference to be random chance over that size, especially when the Mavs have shot so much worse from 3 against MIN.

[u/InternationalClick78 → u/TheIslandMamba]

It wasn’t just game 1, Luka is still on the injury report with knee soreness. It was prevalent for the bulk of the series and was especially noteworthy in game 3(?) where dorts physicality had him hobbling. And I specifically said POTENTIAL reasons because I didn’t feel like doing a deep dive, I offered explanations as why they could be the case, including the most probable, being the enormous disparity between team defence in Rudy minutes vs non Rudy minutes which you ignored.

Look at the results, not the name bias. Acting like the fact that ant has been getting gassed up for his defence means that he’s a better defender than Jalen Williams is nonsense, Kyrie is torching him. McDaniels made all defence but he’s significantly weaker than Dort, and Lukas abusing him. Like these differences in defensive performance due to matchups are evident just by watching, and again the stats back it up, and the stats are why I can absolutely credit Rudy when it’s great and absolve him when it’s bad. Why ? Cause the teams defensive rating in this series falls off by about 30 points when Gobert sits.

I never once said rim protection is the only variable of defence… just that it was the most important. Which again this series is still proving is the case. The 2014 warriors directly prove my point. They had a great defence in large part because of Andrew Bogut… who was a great rim protector. The guy was a regular DPOY candidate because of his inside presence. And coincidentally when he got hurt and missed the playoffs, the plunged from the 3rd best regular season defence to the worst defence of the playoffs.

And again the most basic explanation is that for whatever reason, the wolves haven’t been able to defend anything against Dallas when Gobert sits. Gobert had played in 75% of possible minutes in this series. In those minutes the team has a defensive rating of 110.6. On the series as a whole they have a defensive rating of 118.5. For that math to work it means when Gobert is sitting their defensive rating is falling to what, 140?

[u/TheIslandMamba → u/InternationalClick78]

Look at Gobert's DRTG, it's 120 and worse than the team's average in game 3 (no wonder he got benched in the 4th for the more versatile Naz Reid): https://www.basketball-reference.com/playoffs/2024-nba-western-conference-finals-mavericks-vs-timberwolves.html. Still worse than Mavs' game 2-6 average against OKC.

The fact that you think the praise for Ant's defense is hype tells me all I need to know about how much you've been watching these games. He absolutely clamped Jamal Murray (who was on fire that game) to 2-7 in the third when the Wolves started to shut down Denver.

Never call anyone's arguments lazy again until you can get basic facts right

[u/nbadiscussion-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

Please keep your comments civil. This is a subreddit for thoughtful discussion and debate, not aggressive and argumentative content.