My Response to Monta Hate

Iggy and Afflalo I thought were SFs
James Harden, really? What a joke. He’s lucky he has KD and Westbrook to absorb the defense.
Tyreke Evans is a PG.

What on earth are you talking about. That’s a crazy misread of the situation.

Steals are a lousy indicator of overall defense when you’re talking about a player who gambles for them.

And monta gambles for them all the time.

Monta’s defense is not great, but he’s done a pretty decent job when he’s needed to.

No, he really hasn’t. He’s had a few good games here and there, and that’s it.

Unortunately, he’s spent most of his career on offensive minded teams where defense hasn’t been a priority, and he’s never had the luxury of a dominant big man behind him who can protect the rim in case someone gets by him

And yet many of his teammates haven’t been torched with the same regularity. Yes, Monta hasn’t been protected, true. But Monta needs to be protected more than most players because he lacks size and lateral quickness. He’s overpowered by stronger players and vulnerable to change-of-direction moves from smaller ones.

Having a great big man behind him would mitigate the damage those flaws caused, but they wouldn’t eliminate the flaws.

What dominant defensive big has Iguodala played with?
The reason Iguodala is the best man to man defender in the NBA is because he’s really good at defense and not because of Spencer Hawes or Elton Brand, neither of whom are really threatening defensive bigs. Last year was probably Iguodala’s best individual defensive season and those are the guys who played behind him. Elton Brand is a reasonable man defender, but isn’t much of a help defender. Spencer Hawes sucks at everything.
Kobe is probably an overrated defender, but he’s still far out of Monta’s league. When he was young, he was really quick, but more importantly really really long (6’6" with 7’+ wingspan) and now that he’s old he’s really strong instead of quick. More of an SF, really.

You’ll find, in fact, that most of us stat-heads don’t make that sort of argument very often, except in arguing, say, that Reggie should have gotten more minutes.

But nobody’s doing that with Monta. We’re merely pointing out that his per-game totals make him look better than he really is because he plays more minutes than most of the other volume scorers in the league.

Ironically, your fear about rate stats is that people will use them to compare players who play vastly different numbers of minutes … which is EXACTLY what you’re doing when you use per-game stats to discuss Monta.

Whereas looking at rate stats allows us to see that the claim, for example, that Monta was “carrying” the offensive load is rather untrue. He took one more shot every 12 minutes than Curry. That’s not a lot … and yet people seem eager to use it to excuse the huge efficiency differential between them.

Every game tells a different story so examine it a player through watching and understanding his/her game.

The problem is that people who “just watch the game” are in fact, often relying on stats, first of all – just bad ones like PPG.

The second problem is that people who “just watch the game” consistently miss certain aspects of it, unless they look for them specifically. They over-value aesthetics (which explains why people think Monta is better than Kevin Martin) and under-value missed shots.

We’ve had lots of discussions of the game which had nothing to do with stats which talked about the kind of stuff Monta does wrong. We’ve even had threads were people have posted video clips demonstrating the problems. So the notion that there’s some cadre of people who are evaluating the game based on numbers and calculations is rather absurd.

It’s straw man arugment. I mean, look at its use in this thread: you’ll see very little “Advanced stat” discussion in this thread. And yet advanced stats are being attacked? Why?

Simple. It’s easier to make vague accusations against advanced stats than it is to defend Monta’s abysmal play.

Unless Nellie has a personal beef with a player (see Chris Webber or Anthony Randolph) he will play the players that give him the best chance to win. Why do you think Reggie Williams even got an opportunity? On most teams he wouldn’t have sniffed minutes, but Nellie saw something in him that others didn’t. It is a relevant fact that the coaches ran Monta out there time and again.

Monta has never had the benefit of having someone behind him that can help cleanup his mistakes so his defense looks worse because of it.

Neither have Dorell or Curry, and yet the stats don’t suggest they’re nearly as bad on defense.

If “not having help behind you” meant that much, you would expect to see a similar effect on all wing players on the Warriors. But you don’t. You see that other players had much better numbers in that area than Monta.

Every blows assignments sometimes, and if all it was was a few blown assignment, nobody would be making a big deal about it.

The truth is that it’s a consistent lack of effort. It’s a frequent reliance on gambling or even just simply standing there and not trying to stay in front of his man.

If you watched the games and paid attention, you saw this happen often. I suspect, therefore, that you weren’t paying that much attention on defense, or you were willing to write off the times when you saw it happen as anomalies – like you do in this post, by the way. You say that it happens to everyone.

But it doesn’t happen to everyone with the frequency that it happened to Monta. And that’s the problem.

I watch nearly every Dubs game…have since the We Believe run. Record them and watch em later if I have to. Literally have missed only one or two Dubs games per year for at least the last three or four years

and as far as the ratios, I totally made them up, so will readily admit to them being wrong if someone shows actual numbers. Just trying to make the point that although we may remember certain plays more than others, stats treat all minutes equally.

You see the offense come to a standstill when Monta comes out. But what do I see when Monta comes off the floor? I see a team that plays more like a team. I would rather see 3 extra passes around the perimeter than one dude put his head down and drive into a set defense

Plus/minus LITERALLY misses none of the action. It’s an account of every single basketball play expressed in very simple to read terms.

And yes, I definitely have played with people like that. But I have always thought of them as net positives.

Not really called for and it doesn’t matter anyways. I’ll amend it to GSOM members being generally prejudiced against the physically gifted, worse decision-maker Monta.

that someone saying “Monta has never moved his feet to stay in front of an opponent on defense” would be categorized as hate, lol

it’s like saying Biedrins has never made a free throw. there’s no other reason to say either of those things unless you’re just trying to make the player look bad. what other motive could there be other than hate? i think this thread is a bit out of place, and that for the most part, the main proponents aren’t making good arguments, but there’s stupid on both sides of the argument

LOL@Blind hate. We’re looking at and analyzing stats. Stats and discussion and reason are partly what convinced me that Monta is not helping us win. Of course, the fact that we kept losing, the fact that ball movement tended to become dead with him on the floor and the fact that when he got injured, we started to win also convinced me. Of course, his lack of lateral movement is self-evident. If you can’t see that, YOU are the blind one. The dude couldn’t stop me from driving to the basket, and I’m not even fast.