Thinking Basketball says Jordan's 1st three-peat casts were 1st Round caliber

[ImKobe]

I say all this to say...if these teams were soooo much better than the Bulls, why didn't they fair better than the Bulls did? You guys are trying to make it seem as if the Celtics, Lakers, and Pistons were winning 50+ games with their best player missing, and it was the Bulls that struggled to win.

You're comparing the Celtics and the Lakers at the end of their run to the Bulls in the middle of theirs.. I already told you why the teams were barely .500 level. They were not coming off a title run and they had injuries. When MJ retired the Bulls just won 3 straight and kept everyone and were healthy and added 3 more pieces and still they had a massive fall-off on offense and in net rating, from elite to mediocre. They were barely a Playoff team in '95 before Jordan returned. He led them to 3 more rings with his #2 and #3 being below-average in efficiency on offense, and averaging less points combined than Jordan did by himself with no one else coming close to averaging 10+ a game for those 3 runs.

When the Bulls won the title in '97 no one else besides Jordan or Pippen even averaged 10 a game for the Playoffs, not even 8 lol. They won with their 3rd option averaging 7.9 ppg on 36% shooting for the Playoffs. They were a good 3PT shooting team in the RS, terrible in the POs. Jordan was 10 rebounds and 2 blocks away from leading that team in every single category for that run.

[97 bulls]

You're comparing the Celtics and the Lakers at the end of their run to the Bulls in the middle of theirs.. I already told you why the teams were barely .500 level. They were not coming off a title run and they had injuries. When MJ retired the Bulls just won 3 straight and kept everyone and were healthy and added 3 more pieces and still they had a massive fall-off on offense and in net rating, from elite to mediocre. They were barely a Playoff team in '95 before Jordan returned. He led them to 3 more rings with his #2 and #3 being below-average in efficiency on offense, and averaging less points combined than Jordan did by himself with no one else coming close to averaging 10+ a game for those 3 runs.

When the Bulls won the title in '97 no one else besides Jordan or Pippen even averaged 10 a game for the Playoffs, not even 8 lol. They won with their 3rd option averaging 7.9 ppg on 36% shooting for the Playoffs. They were a good 3PT shooting team in the RS, terrible in the POs. Jordan was 10 rebounds and 2 blocks away from leading that team in every single category for that run.

The Lakers had just lost in the NBA Finals in 91. The Celtics made it to the ECF in 88. All teams had their key pieces that helped them win their titles on these teams.

And lets not forget that you feel that these teams were better than the Bulls. They fell off a cliff without their best players. The Bulls didnt.

[3ba11]

Kukoc led the 94' Bulls in playoff BPM and was 2nd in WS/48 ahead of Pippen... So the new guy (not Jordan's cast) impacted the playoff differentials the most.. So the 94' season should not be considered Jordan's "cast".... Kukoc won 5 games by himself at the buzzer and was the only true scorer that the 90's Bulls had aside from Jordan, while the 94' Bulls also added rim protection and spacing that MJ never had... These guys weren't MJ's cast, so the numbers are meaningless.. It wasn't like 95' where we could look at the cast's performance before MJ returned and compare to the same cast's performance after he returned..

Btw, casts play better during title years, so title years should be compared to title years, not record losses or upsets where the casts invariably wet the bed... Thinking Basketball (TB) compared 5-year periods of Jordan winning titles to Shaq and Lebron's casts getting upset (03', 04', 21') or losing by record amount (17', 18')... This discrepancy discredits the analysis, along with the opponent-specific nature of the results (facing the KD Warriors)...

Rather than compare title casts to upsets or record losses, Jordan's title years should be compared to Lebron's most winning seasons from 09-13', but apparently Lebron's cast during this period out-performed Jordan's (otherwise TB would've shown this comparison)... Accordingly, we know that Jordan's casts from winning teams performed worse than Lebron's winning teams from 09-13', while Jordan's casts from losing years like 89' or 90' also underperform Lebron's losing years (especially 1990, where MJ's cast appears to set the record for futility).

Finally, the analysis is completely put to bed by the variance of the short playoff runs, which produces wild results as a standard - i.e. the casts of the Bulls' title teams were outplayed by their lottery cast in 88' - this type of stuff is completely standard, which buries the analysis, in addition to comparing winning casts to losing casts, or the opponent-dependent nature of playoff runs... And of course, it's fraudulent to claim that the reloaded team in 94' (that MJ never played with) was his "cast".. lol.. So there are many reasons to laugh at the simpleton and amateur analysis.

And do you believe that Thinking Basketball watched all the playoff games for every team from 91-93' to say that the Bulls' cast was 75th percentile compared to other casts??... Since there's no way that he did this, the entire analysis is fraud, even though it says the Bulls' title casts were 1st Round caliber (worse than all 2nd Round opponents or 25% of league, aka 75th percentile).