Tier 2 becomes the area of the league where we can see a shift from the players you can build with to the players you build around.
do those things even matter if they don’t have a player of Butler’s calibre to rely upon? Not a chance.. I’ve been sitting with it for months, but it still feels slightly blasphemous to have him outside the top tier. As I’ve noted before, I first started looking for signs of age-related decline from James inLeBron James blocks Andre Iguodala in Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals.
He still has the “any given night” ability to be transcendent, but any given night is in contrast with “every” or even “most” given nights, a capacity he used to have and the players in Tier 1 still do. The biggest declines have come, very visibly, on defense, where his level of concentration and intensity frequently waver during the long season. In the right matchup, he can still use his strength to dial up the defensive effort, but his lateral quickness isn’t what it was.
And I still feel weird writing this about him, but … he will turn 39 this coming season, with nearly 66,000 combined regular season and playoff minutes on his odometer. That he’s even this high, still, tells you everything you need to know about how good he was at his peak and how long he stayed there.
Substitute concerns about age with those about injuries, and much of the analysis of LeBron applies with equal force to. In terms of “still got it:” from Jan. 8 until the end of the regular season, Leonard played 35 of the Clippers’ 40 games, in which he put aon 27.8 percent usage, while falling just under the 4.0 percent “STOCK” rate that is usually a strong indicator of excellent wing defense. He then followed that up with a two-game stretch ofon 30.
At this point, you need to ask if you can count on him to be able to finish a lengthy playoff run on the court. That question is enough to move him down to Tier 2, even if the output when he is available might warrant a higher spot.
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