Ah an EPM merchant. Enjoy your rankings list that has Payton Pritchard higher than Cade, this would surely make you a top tier NBA GM.
EPM is so heavily-influenced by teammates that it kinda makes my argument for me lol. Cade is doing this with one of the worse supporting casts in the league. There’s a reason there are so many Cleveland and Boston players high up on their list.
Also think EPM does a bad job of calculating individual defensive impact.
But yeah, we simply just disagree. You also probably have not watched much Pistons basketball if you think there are that many players that have more impact than Cade.
I’m not sure literally any statistical quantifier has argued their model removes the need for human judgement completely. It’s very obvious “it’s not the one thing I look at” given I didn’t just post their ranked list. What EPM says is that Pritchard is playing awesome in his role (he is). It doesn’t say he’s “better” than Cade. As I said, I think Cade could perform very well in Payton Pritchard’s role. This is why I’ve trimmed the list to on-ball primary creators. It has players on good teams higher than players on bad teams because making teams awesome is harder than making teams ok.
How many players in the NBA could you put on the Pistons in Cade’s role and have similar success? Be the number 1 option for a team that is making an enormous improvement from last season. He is 4th in the league in touches per game. EVERYTHING runs through Cade and relies on Cade. He’s been the primary defender on guys like Brunson and Jaylen Brown. He has gotten better every year despite being in what has been truly the worst situation in the entire NBA up until this past year.
All this just tells me you really don’t watch the Pistons. You didn’t see what they looked like last year and don’t see what they are doing this year.
I will not try to pretend I’m the smartest basketball mind. However I was listening to Game Theory today and Sam Vecenie was talking about how if Cade keeps this up he’s in All-NBA conversations so I feel my claims are justified regardless of how biased they are:joy:
They were way too slow defensively and the bench (aside from Holland) didn’t bring much scoring punch. Cade almost carried us across the finish line but the 18-point deficit was too large to overcome.
