Honestly, we are inconsistent with and without him. We got through scoring droughts with him and without him.
Very true. And in a sense we are 'consistent', in terms of winning/losing with or without Kyrie.
Since the end of the 16 game winning streak that started this roster era off, we have played 122 regular-season and playoff games. During that span we have been:
w/Kyrie: 46-32 (59%)
w/o Kyrie: 27-17 (61%)
Basically a wash. Since the hot streak we have played roughly ~60% ball with or without Kyrie.
Note: I would caution folks to be careful not to read too much into the on/off offensive & defensive rating numbers without examining them in detail. If one thing has become crystal clear is that several of our players' performance changes dramatically based on how they are used in the rotation. Thus when considering the 'Kyrie OFF' plus-minus numbers it is important to make a distinction between those for the bench in games Kyrie starts versus those for the team when Kyrie doesn't play in the game.
LOL
Selectively omitting data points to try to construct an argument that appears to substantiate your opinion is intellectually dishonest. Omitting the hot stretches a team goes through, but not omitting the cold stretches paints a very distorted view of a team that does not accurately reflect 'who' they are.
The true measure of a team includes both hot and cold stretches, which just about every team in the NBA goes through at some point. Also, its commonly understood larger sample sizes are more telling than smaller sample sizes. Which is why you have to include all of the data to get a true picture of a team's ability.
Nothing selective about it. The 16-2 start (which includes 1-0 w/o Kyrie) clearly sticks out as an anomaly and doesn't reflect the current performance characteristics of the team anymore than does a hot .500 hitting streak the first 2 weeks of a season for a .280 career hitter. If that player went on to hit .280 the rest of that season, entering the playoffs what kind of hitter would you say he was?
There is a sound and logical reason why outliers are called outliers. Further, when you are trying to ascertain the quality of a transient entity, recency IS more relevant than latency. The last 122 games simply and fundamentally ARE a more relevant statistical representation of who this team currently is than the earlier 18 games for outlier, recency and sample size reasons.
When you have a data set if you have one or two data points that are out of character with the rest, that is an outlier and should be dismissed. When you have 10% or more of the data set seeming to be out of character with the rest of the data points, that's not an outlier and absolutely need to be considered for inspection with the rest of the data to see what caused that outcome to happen 10+% of the time. You can not ignore that data.
Not ignoring it. Whether you include it in an average depends on whether it is relevant to the question you are asking. If I was asking the question, "What was the winning percentage for all of last season?", then it would be included.
But if I am asking the question, "What has the winning percentage been since the end of the anomalous hot-start?", then of course I don't include it.
And the reason I am asking that question is for the
three reasons I gave above. a) A 16-game win-streak is anomalous, b) it is the most latent (old) of all the data and c) the remaining, contiguous-to-the-present data set is reasonably large (season-and-a-half of games). If only one of those factors were true, then I would probably include it. But all three factors taken together reduce it to a misleading chunk of data that serves only to skew the result.
If you really and truly insist on including it, though, it doesn't change the core point all that much. If we include the 18 games then the numbers become:
w/Kyrie: 61-34 (64.2%)
w/o Kyrie: 28-17 (63.6%)
There, do folks feel better now? The core point remains that
the team's W-L percentage has been pretty much the same with or without Kyrie.