Quotatious wrote:I'm not really that impressed with pre-1984 Bird (at least when I compare him to other top 10 players), because while his all-around game was already there (and he was likely better at D in the early 80s when he played PF), but his scoring was very inconsistent. Bird averaged just 20.5 PPG on 50.5% TS, and had 19.9 PER/16.6 WS/48 over his first 44 playoff games between 1979-80 and 1982-83, and many people still have some doubts about pre-1993 Olajuwon...He averaged 26.5 PPG on 58.0% TS, had 26.0 PER and 22.3 WS/48 in 50 playoff games before the 1992-93 season (so a pretty similar sample size) - that's a HUGE difference, and I think that Olajuwon's poor passing pre-93 is a way, way smaller problem than Bird's relatively poor scoring, considering that both of these guys were #1 options on their teams.
I'm not even sure if pre-84 Bird was a better RS performer than pre-93 Olajuwon, to be honest.
(snip)
Obviously numbers don't tell the whole story with Bird, as his insane basketball IQ allowed him to make CRITICAL plays in the most important moments of a game, but they don't tell the whole story about Olajuwon, either, because of what he brought to the table defensively. RAPM would tell us much more about that. Yeah, I can dream...
I'm using this post as a way to get back into the conversation, piggybacking on my other post from this thread. Because I really think there is something to this "help offense" notion that I mentioned, and that Bird and Olajuwon might be the ideal players to catalyze a discussion on it.
As you allude to in the later part of your quote, RAPM is good for teasing out/quantifying value that isn't well measured in the box scores. Very often, this is done for defensive players since the box scores do such a poor job of covering the defensive stats. However, RAPM is good for identifying non-boxscore impact on offense as well. Of course, we have no RAPM for either Bird nor Hakeem (especially the pre-1993 Hakeem that has gotten so much attention here). However, I do think it's fair to look at trends from the RAPM data that we DO have (1998 and after) to see how certain offensive styles tend to measure out.
For Bird, here are some of the things that we know to be in his offensive toolbox: excellent scorer, excellent court vision and passing, deadly and timely jumpshot, excellent off-ball talent (Doc MJ's off-ball savant post details well).
For Hakeem (especially pre-93) we know him to be an excellent scorer, outstanding scoring production from the post and paint, more raw as a passer. He had an assist/turnover ratio below 1 every year of his career up until '93, then he was slightly above 1 from 93 - 96, then was back below 1 for every other year of his career except '98.
Now, let's pan out and look at the trends. For Bird, I would compare him on offense to other forwards with a) great shooting range, and/or b) excellent playmaking. For Olajuwon, I would compare him on offense to other big men with a) good scoring volume and b) a great post game.
For Bird, the two most obvious comps (IMO) are LeBron and Dirk. Neither are perfect matches, but between them they tend to be most similar to Bird's offensive gifts. According to Doc MJ's RAPM spreadsheet (prior-informed, year-to-year from 1998 - 2012, normalized by year-to-year standard deviation), LeBron and Nowitzki are the two forwards with the highest 5-year peaks in normalized Offensive RAPM (average +8.1 and +7.0 in those 5-year peaks, respectively). The next two forwards with the highest marks are Antawn Jamison (+5.9) and Kevin Garnett (+5.3), one of which scored at volume with long shooting range and the other with a mixture of volume, range and playmaking. If you sort the spreadsheet for 1-year peaks instead of 5 (to help with players that might not have 5 full years in the '98 - '12 range), the next 5 highest forwards that weren't previously mentioned are Karl Malone (+7.3 from '98 - 2000), Charles Barkley (+7.5 from '98 - 2000), Carlos Boozer (+6.9 over his two All Star years of '07 and 08), Detlef Schrempf (+7.0 in '98), Scottie Pippen (+7.0 in '98) and Grant Hill (+6.3 from 98 - 2000). While I wouldn't comp Bird with the pure 4s (Malone/Barkley/Boozer), I would say that Schrempf (big tweener 3/4 with range), Pippen (point forward) and Hill (do-everything-forward) all have enough similarities to be reasonable comps.
For Hakeem (especially pre-'93) the player who I'd be most comfortable comping him to on offense would be Tim Duncan (5-year peak average offensive RAPM +4.8). Shaq is the highest rated post player (+7.6), but I really don't see a lot of overlap between Hakeem's approach and Shaq's so I don't see that as a comp. There really aren't a lot of volume-scoring back-to-the-basket pivots that measure out very well in the '98 - 2012 RAPM data. Perhaps that's due to a talent gap (e.g. there just might not be very many talented post big men this generation). I tried to think of bigs that do their damage in the paint that regularly averaged 20+ points with assist-TO-ratios less than 1, I think of some of these names:
Shaq (1998 - 99, after 2003): +6.6 (98, 99, 04, 05, 06)
Duncan (1998 - 2000; by 2002 he regularly had A/TO well over 1): Offensive RAPM + 3.7 from '98 - 00
Zo Mourning (98 - 2000): +3.7 from '98 - 00
Amare Stoudemire: +2.9 5-year peak
Dwight Howard: +2.8 5-year peak
Zach Randolph: +2.3 5-year peak
Yao Ming: +1.9 5-year peak
Al Jefferson: +1.0 5-year peak
Food for thought: Normally I call this section 'conclusions', but I didn't put enough here to really conclude anything. This is just food for thought. It seems to me that, generally speaking from the RAPM data that we have since '98, there are an awful lot of players that have similar qualities to Bird that measure out extremely well in the offensive RAPM studies. Meanwhile, the players that seem to play most like pre-93 Olajuwon just don't seem to measure out nearly as well on offense.
Some will look at this post, see "RAPM", and immediately tune it out. I can't do anything about that. But for those that have read this far and at least have an open mind about it, I ask you to consider a few things:
1) Is it plausible (likely, even?) that there really is a "spacing" effect that stretch forwards bring to the table that benefits the offense simply by forcing defenders to account for them further out?
2) Is it plausible (likely, even) that there really is a version of a defensive "warping" effect that volume scoring players have that draws defensive attention (usually from more than one source) to them? And that if there is such a locus around that player, that having the locus on a dynamic or perimeter-based player might distort the defense away from the rim and thus increase the probability that the other offensive players might get higher percentage shots?
3) Is it plausible (almost certain, even) that players that can intelligently floor general/act as an offense initiator for their teams can really put their teammates into great positions to score with the way that they run the offense?
If so, then I would argue that these three things are all elements that can make up great "help offensive" players.
My follow-up theory that I'm working through is that, just like help defense vs. 1-on-1 defense, that "help offense" can have a larger impact on the team's offensive results than 1-on-1 offense. And since the elements of help offense don't rely upon game-to-game scoring efficiency, I'd argue that Bird (even in his 20.5 ppg/50.5% TS days) could have been having a (potentially much) larger positive offensive impact on those early Celtics playoff teams than pre-93 Olajuwon was having on the Rockets.
As I said...it's food for thought. I've been working through this "help offense" thought process over the last thread or so, and I don't know that it's something that anyone has ever researched (perhaps the "offense created" work that ElGee was doing?). But I do think there is something to this, and whether it affects this particular vote or not (likely not) I still hope to at least get a few thoughts considering the possibility that scoring rate and efficiency are really not (close to) sufficient to determine someone's offensive impact.
