RealGM 2023 Top 100 Project - General Thread

[AEnigma]

There is a substantial postseason gap (even outside the individual series between the two) which again was covered in thorough detail. I think top twenty is fair for a playoff faller who never led a Finals team or otherwise had any noteworthy postseason accomplishments before taking a backseat to a more reliable star. It is and should be a high bar at that level.

He was outplayed head-to-head three times by Karl Malone, played 60% as many minutes, won fewer MVPs, and led his team to two fewer Finals, yet finished two spots higher. I think he received more than enough credit.

[Special_Puppy]

There is a substantial postseason gap (even outside the individual series between the two) which again was covered in thorough detail. I think top twenty is fair for a playoff faller who never led a Finals team or otherwise had any noteworthy postseason accomplishments before taking a backseat to a more reliable star. It is and should be a high bar at that level.

He was outplayed head-to-head three times by Karl Malone, played 60% as many minutes, won fewer MVPs, and led his team to two fewer Finals, yet finished two spots higher. I think he received more than enough credit.

FWIW
Hakeem Regular Season Career RAPTOR +4.9
Hakeem Post Season Career RAPTOR +6.7

Robinson Regular Season Career RAPTOR +7.3
Robinson Post Season Career RAPTOR +6.1

Hakeem has ~30% more postseason possessions though.

[OhayoKD]

There is a substantial postseason gap (even outside the individual series between the two) which again was covered in thorough detail. I think top twenty is fair for a playoff faller who never led a Finals team or otherwise had any noteworthy postseason accomplishments before taking a backseat to a more reliable star. It is and should be a high bar at that level.

He was outplayed head-to-head three times by Karl Malone, played 60% as many minutes, won fewer MVPs, and led his team to two fewer Finals, yet finished two spots higher. I think he received more than enough credit.

FWIW
Hakeem Regular Season Career RAPTOR +4.9
Hakeem Post Season Career RAPTOR +6.7

Robinson Regular Season Career RAPTOR +7.3
Robinson Post Season Career RAPTOR +6.1

Hakeem has ~30% more postseason possessions though.

Raptor from this time period is no different from PER or whatever. It's just a box-stat. None of the player-tracking or plus-minus is there

[AEnigma]

As always, glad basketball is not played on a spreadsheet.

[Special_Puppy]

There is a substantial postseason gap (even outside the individual series between the two) which again was covered in thorough detail. I think top twenty is fair for a playoff faller who never led a Finals team or otherwise had any noteworthy postseason accomplishments before taking a backseat to a more reliable star. It is and should be a high bar at that level.

He was outplayed head-to-head three times by Karl Malone, played 60% as many minutes, won fewer MVPs, and led his team to two fewer Finals, yet finished two spots higher. I think he received more than enough credit.

FWIW
Hakeem Regular Season Career RAPTOR +4.9
Hakeem Post Season Career RAPTOR +6.7

Robinson Regular Season Career RAPTOR +7.3
Robinson Post Season Career RAPTOR +6.1

Hakeem has ~30% more postseason possessions though.

Raptor from this time period is no different from PER or whatever. It's just a box-stat. None of the player-tracking or plus-minus is there

Yeah evaluating post-season performance is very hard. Evaluating players before player tracking and plus-minus data was available is very hard. Evaluating post-season performance before 1998 is very very hard lol.

[Special_Puppy]

Also a decent argument that Robinson was every so slightly better than Duncan in the 1999 post-season. Much closer to an equal partnership than one player being a clear second banana either way that season

[OldSchoolNoBull]

There is a substantial postseason gap (even outside the individual series between the two) which again was covered in thorough detail. I think top twenty is fair for a playoff faller who never led a Finals team or otherwise had any noteworthy postseason accomplishments before taking a backseat to a more reliable star. It is and should be a high bar at that level.

He was outplayed head-to-head three times by Karl Malone, played 60% as many minutes, won fewer MVPs, and led his team to two fewer Finals, yet finished two spots higher. I think he received more than enough credit.

For the record, in bringing him up at all, I was not necessarily saying he should've gone any higher than he did, more that there were people at the time in my recollection who thought he should've gone lower than he did.

And when I said "credit", I meant for the 1998-2003 period, and in particular the 1999 championship, because there were arguments that he was somehow just along for the ride with Duncan.

As for Hakeem - for reasons having nothing to do with DRob, I feel that he did go a few spots too high.

[AEnigma]

All the explanations for why people voted how they did, especially for the first half of the project, are on record and available for review. I do not see much point in speculating what got people to vote in which way as if we cannot all go see for ourselves.

I have my opinions about some of the results, but there is nothing to re-litigate. People were convinced or were not, and maybe that reflects the quality of the arguments made, or maybe it reflects the degree to which people were simply not interested in arguments that did not correspond to their process, but either way, there is no mystery about which votes were factoring plus/minus and which were factoring accolades and which were factoring postseason production and which were factoring film and which were factoring longevity and which were factoring peak performance… It is all right there.

Trends are about changes in project processes. That can make for some interesting discussion even with the acknowledgment that much of any change year to year will be a matter of voter bases and voting mechanics. But if you “lost” a vote here, oh well, and if you “won” a vote, great; the hope is that future readers will see that project and agree with the arguments you made, not that they might glance at page 28 of the general project thread and see a few half-hearted grasps at restating a position.

[OhayoKD]

Great post. Thanks for putting this together

Will probably write thoughts later, but may as well share the screenshots now for others to use as material for commentary:

Top of the Teens

(Time will tell whether Garnett will hold onto his new #9 high-mark or be kicked back out by Magic or possibly Curry.)

KG is really scaling up due to re-assesment of his Minnesota years. I don't mean this as an attack BTW. But he didn't do much from 2011 on to keep climbing.

Bird is falling a bit due to longevity. The brevity of his career hurts him.

Don't think it's just longevity. Bird's longevity was already being factored in by 2020. I think what's pushing him below already retired players like KG is a reevaluation of him as a player. We'll see in the peaks project, but I'm pretty sure Steph and Magic are just considered better players in general and KG is at least considered similarly good. The argumentation for his thread(where he was a couple of votes from dropping to 13 and even potentially 14) was largely rooted in the true value of his playmaking, as well as his defense.

One thing I did take notice of throughout the project is a certain apathy towards volume scoring, even very efficient volume scoring

...

I recall, at #9, it came down to Magic and KG, it went to a runoff, and KG took the runoff pretty easily IIRC. That was something I disagreed with pretty strongly back then and still do now. Magic was not only a GOAT-tier playmaker, he also averaged a shade under 20ppg for his career on +7.3 rTS, breaking 200+ TS Add five times, and was very resilient in the playoffs for over a decade.

Not sure Magic really belongs with the others in "is volume scoring undervalued" discussion. If he is being hurt for player-related thing it's probably just offense in general being valued less and defense being valued more. As I remember, from the thread though, KG won due to a mix of playing longer and modernism, not because people figured his prime was more valuable. I'd say the general uplift of defensive anchors brought KG close enough to Magic as a player that the longevity/career value/better league was used as a tiebreaker. Frankly, i'm not sure KG going up was due to reevaluating KG as opposed to just being lifted by the coattails of Kareem and Hakeem.

I'd say 2020 project opened with "jordan clearly was better than kareem in his prime/peak so longetivity don't matter" while this one opened with "kareem's defense makes it at least arguable", doesn't take rocket science to see KG benefitting from that, not to mention the likes of Draymond, Gobert, and Walton skyrocketing afterwards.

This will become more clear in the peaks project, but I'm guessing playmaking has actually gained importance relative to scoring in the mind of pc regulars and Magic is actually viewed higher relative to other offensive superstars than they used to be.

The difference in support between KG and Stockton+CP3 is interesting. People seem way more willing to accept advanced stats-based historical revisionism when it comes to KG as opposed to CP3+Stockton.

Well KG is a big and stockton are guards and taking a broad-view of the project, the general statistical extrapolation was "bigs undervalued, guards overvalued" (especially on defense). Stockton would be an exception to that trend using his winning-based statistics(which is basically just a few years of rapm), but it's not shocking that was not enough to overcome both the prior of how he was perceived and the prior of bigs underrated, guards overrated when you consider

1. there is a lot less data available than what we have for KG (who looks like a gem by pretty much every possible impact approach)
2. Stockton by film doesn't aggressively leverage his ball-handling to take out defenders the way other offense-data darlings do(magic, lebron, nash)
3. Stockton does not a championship or a contender he was the clear lead of
4. It was contended whether the stats one would use to measure the success of his team were artificially inflating teams during that time period
5. studies were repeatedly cited calling into question the real value of the defensive contribution he is most lauded for (steals)

KG just had a big-head start before their personal statistical signals came into play and was also more inviolable statistically due to playing in data-ball and missing alot more games and seeing similar results in those absences.

I mostly exclude Chris Paul here because the main reason he isn't high is his reputation as someone who will get injured every postseason. That was a much bigger factor than his rapm or whatever.

[AEnigma]

One thing I did take notice of throughout the project is a certain apathy towards volume scoring, even very efficient volume scoring

...

I recall, at #9, it came down to Magic and KG, it went to a runoff, and KG took the runoff pretty easily IIRC. That was something I disagreed with pretty strongly back then and still do now. Magic was not only a GOAT-tier playmaker, he also averaged a shade under 20ppg for his career on +7.3 rTS, breaking 200+ TS Add five times, and was very resilient in the playoffs for over a decade.

Not sure Magic really belongs with the others in "is volume scoring undervalued" discussion. If he is being hurt for player-related thing it's probably just offense in general being valued less and defense being valued more. As I remember, from the thread though, KG won due to a mix of playing longer and modernism, not because people figured his prime was more valuable. I'd say the general uplift of defensive anchors brought KG close enough to Magic as a player that the longevity/career value/better league was used as a tiebreaker. Frankly, i'm not sure KG going up was due to reevaluating KG as opposed to just being lifted by the coattails of Kareem and Hakeem.

See here is another instance where we do in fact have the ability to go read what was said and why people voted the way they did.

KG over Magic has nothing to do with modernism. Much better defender giving great two-way impact and longevity are all you really need to make the case.

"Modernism" as justification is probably more applicable to Shaq

Might prevent people from forgetting what they wrote a year ago when attempting retroactive summaries.

[OhayoKD]

One thing I did take notice of throughout the project is a certain apathy towards volume scoring, even very efficient volume scoring

...

I recall, at #9, it came down to Magic and KG, it went to a runoff, and KG took the runoff pretty easily IIRC. That was something I disagreed with pretty strongly back then and still do now. Magic was not only a GOAT-tier playmaker, he also averaged a shade under 20ppg for his career on +7.3 rTS, breaking 200+ TS Add five times, and was very resilient in the playoffs for over a decade.

Not sure Magic really belongs with the others in "is volume scoring undervalued" discussion. If he is being hurt for player-related thing it's probably just offense in general being valued less and defense being valued more. As I remember, from the thread though, KG won due to a mix of playing longer and modernism, not because people figured his prime was more valuable. I'd say the general uplift of defensive anchors brought KG close enough to Magic as a player that the longevity/career value/better league was used as a tiebreaker. Frankly, i'm not sure KG going up was due to reevaluating KG as opposed to just being lifted by the coattails of Kareem and Hakeem.

See here is another instance where we do in fact have the ability to go read what was said and why people voted the way they did.

KG over Magic has nothing to do with modernism. Much better defender giving great two-way impact and longevity are all you really need to make the case.

"Modernism" as justification is probably more applicable to Shaq

Might prevent people from forgetting what they wrote a year ago when attempting retroactive summaries.

Yeah but rereading means i have to open another tab and realgm takes long to load, not to mention now I have minny denver stream on.

"And longetivity" still implies its not really a clean "kg better prime" argument. If you are arguing "kg better prime" than modernism probably comes into play since Magic is the arguable impact king of his era and has the #1 win percentage of rs and playoffs.

[Doctor MJ]

Hey y'all!

It occurs to me that I should say something upon completion of the project about completing the project.

First, thank you to all who took part, and especially those who were there from the start to the end. It's the ultimate marathon, and it's so, so easy to take a break and never come back.

I hope that we will do this again in 2026. I also hope someone other than myself will run it. I'll be talking with the other mods as time gets closer to see if someone wants to run it. If there are other posters who feel passionate enough they'd want to potentially run it, feel free to PM me, but do keep in mind that we'll be unlikely to let a non-mod run it. People who are currently not mods may be mods at that time of course.

From this project my attention will turn to the All-Season awards we do.

After that, I'm hoping to do some WNBA projects on the WNBA board. If you're someone follows the WNBA, or someone who is experienced in our PC board projects who is becoming WNBA-curious, consider jumping on that bandwagon.

Cheers,
Doc

[Doctor MJ]

The difference in support between KG and Stockton+CP3 is interesting. People seem way more willing to accept advanced stats-based historical revisionism when it comes to KG as opposed to CP3+Stockton.

So I'll speak to this some, first from a perspective in what I've seen in the community, and second from how I've done my own analysis.

First, I think a natural starting point is the fact that KG is an MVP while Stockton & Paul are not. Now, MVP votes can be wrong and folks are free to say that that's what they believe to be the case here, but as a starting point, I'd say it makes sense to expect Garnett to have a higher stature here like he did in mainstream voting during his career.

Paul proponents will naturally point to him arguably deserving an MVP in '07-08 over Kobe...but this is a board - back in 2010 - that voted Garnett over either for RPOY, so while that can be disagreed with and debated, makes sense that this board would favor Garnett over Paul based on that.

Now, something 14 years ago doesn't necessarily relate to something now - major turnover in everyone involved - but I can say pretty objectively that it happened in part based on the extreme indicators of impact that were seen for Garnett in '07-08 which were unrivaled by anyone in the league in the estimate of those voting for him. I should say that I voted for Kobe - with Paul second - over Garnett at the time so I'm not part of that number...but eventually I agreed with their reasoning and now I have Garnett #1 for that year.

Over to Stockton and +/- data, the thing there has always been that we got access to the +/- in reverse chronological order and we still don't have it for his whole career. That's important because

a) Early +/- assessment of Stockton helped his standing based on what was going on in Utah post-prime years. At the time folks like myself noted that there was a clear possibility that with full data we'd end up concluding Stockton was generally the more impactful player than Malone...but it was also possible that earlier years wouldn't tell the same story. The latter not just because it's a logical possibility, but because guys age differently, and so does their impact, particularly when in differing roles with different primacy.

b) We know when Utah peaked it came with Stockton's role decreasing and Malone's increasing. That frankly made it hard to imagine ever concluding "No actually, Stockton was the Jazz MVP in Malone's NBA MVP" seasons.

c) Since we've gotten more data from that era, it's indeed been more valuable to Malone. Oh, you can make arguments that Stockton was more valuable per minute, but even that's not clear, and Malone was playing a lot more.

Now, while in theory it should be possible for the 2nd best Jazz candidate from the era to be up there with Garnett - Team A can have 2 guys better than Team B - I think it's understandably hard for people to get their mind around arguing for one team's 2nd best player over someone they see as a legit MVP.

Okay, now just speaking for myself in the context of this project. Leading up to the 2023 project I went back and did a personal Retro POY and I'm going to share the POY Shares I gave to these 3 guys in a second. I do want to emphasize a) POY Shares don't represent the entirety of my holistic assessment, but b) the process did hurt Garnett in my ranking this time. I'm more impressed with Garnett as a basketball player than Tim Duncan, but from a perspective of team sport achievement, I don't feel comfortable Garnett achieved more than Duncan and the POY Shares were part of that assessment.

Feel free to ask more details on that, but here's how the 3 players in question here stack up by my current historical POY Shares:

Garnett 3.7
Paul 1.3
Stockton 0.3

So yeah, obviously there's a pretty clear pecking order there. What explains this? Well I think first and foremost remember that these shares are done by year-by-year assessment on a 10-7-5-3-1 scale where ranking 6th in the entire league gets you nothing. As so yeah, Stockton's career is a hell of a lot more impressive than that number indicates to me filled a good number of Top 10 seasons, but it's just hard for me to put him up at the very top in any given year.

Now with Paul by contrast I did see him as a guy who was a candidate to hit the top of those charts in general, and was surprised at repeatedly slotting him lower than I had in the past. What happened? Those playoff disappointments.

Now, I don't want to blow this phenomenon out of proportion: I think Paul's had an absolutely all-time great kind of career and I'm really not looking to call him "overrated!" in general, but the competition is fierce at the top and it doesn't take much to slide when using the scale I'm using.

But there's just a number of disappointments in the playoffs that end up dropping him a bit in my rankings in any given year. This is something we could get into in any given year, but the essence of it is that Paul's teams have tended to get upset in the playoffs, and they've been even more likely to lose from ahead with Paul finishing small - and yes, injury's a big part of that.

[One_and_Done]

As the project has concluded I will add my 2 cents also; it could have been worse. As a whole the list looks to be a significant upgrade from the previous ranking.

[eminence]

Here's my list of current guys on the back halves of their careers I could see making a push onto the list in the future:
Jrue
Conley
Kyrie
Klay
Middleton

Anyone see any other candidates? Not considering younger guys like Bam/Mitchell who have a lot of career left in front of them if things go well.

[trevorthyme]

followed along and might have to jump in next time around.

can't believe Dantley made it in vs Alex English. will have to go into the stats but from my memory English had higher longevity, a better distributor and defender being more of a plus player (thinking 1985 playoffs in particular). This is a tad small sample but you look at a modern player like DeRozan citing watching Alex English film and I'd be hard pressed to find someone watching Dantley film.

[Owly]

followed along and might have to jump in next time around.

can't believe Dantley made it in vs Alex English. will have to go into the stats but from my memory English had higher longevity, a better distributor and defender being more of a plus player (thinking 1985 playoffs in particular). This is a tad small sample but you look at a modern player like DeRozan citing watching Alex English film and I'd be hard pressed to find someone watching Dantley film.

I terms of "can't believe" ... Dantley finished ahead of English in each of the three previous lists (I believe before that the vision of the project and the criteria were quite different ... at least off the outcomes ... fwiw English was higher in the three before that) ... in that light, at least, this outcome shouldn't be surprising.

As some have discussed the vote format here (and most viable options, to some degree) will skew towards polarizing players which Dantley can be to an extent.

Dantley looks significantly better by the box. One obvious contributing area and one marginal one. Dantley was way more efficient. With his foul draw factored in, he's one of the highest (RS) efficiency added above average scorers of all time (see TS Add). English has a fairly nice peak in that regard in '82 and other solid years but isn't close to Dantley. English is also a little inflated (in terms of raw stats) by Denver's pace. Thus even if you trim some weaker years to get career minutes about even Dantley was a little more prolific 31.9 points per 100 (full RS career, 34151 minutes) to English's 31.0 (79-90 RS, 34115 minutes). These are contributors driving Dantley's advantage across all Reference box-composites in peak and a larger advantage in high value prime seasons by these measures.

Linked to the above, regarding longevity English certainly plays more RS minutes 38063 to 34151 ... the question is of longevity of quality and resultant value. After '83 (and maybe '82) depending somewhat on measure of choice, the Reference composites are in absolute terms positive but maybe not at the typical level of a big needle mover (e.g. 84-88 PER: 21.1 [the clear strongest of the bunch]; WS/48: .139; BPM: 2.6). As a result Dantley leads in VORP and Win Shares and that lead would grow quite a bit if one uses higher baselines and/or curves something like exponentially for the higher level years.

Now that doesn't mean there isn't any case for English. The box composites certainly aren't infallible. Fwiw, the published lists I've seen (trending older than these projects, generally loose criteria) trended towards a slight preference for English.

That's some possible reasoning though for an advantage for Dantley though see voters for their own perspective.

With the allusion to a playoff run English's career playoff averages hold up pretty well. That's without looking at distribution of playoff minutes (some players get their playoff minutes in their best years, some [say, DeMarcus Cousins] don't) or opponents/defenses faced (Denver played in the weaker conference and generally regarded as a low-defense conference though as Denver weren't a powerhouse, from a lower seed it's hard to say how those opponents would compare with those from other teams) so you'd want to do a closer look, but "holding up" would seem to be a strength for English.