Post#37 » by TrueLAfan » Mon Oct 20, 2008 2:50 pm
Well, I'd say Kobe. But the question is pointless. You can't just look at scoring in a vacuum and ignore the other effects of the person shooting the ball on pace, passing, chemistry, offensive style...so many different things.
Like most statistics, TS% is a relative term. Adrian Dantley is, perhaps, the best example of this and being a chemistry killer. (Okay...maybe second to Reggie Theus.) On paper, Dantley gets a decent amount of assist and scores with remarkable efficiency. AD is in the top 5 of all time in TS%, a remarkable achievement for a volume scoring G-F. But it doesn't matter. He was not nearly as good of a scorer as his numbers show.
We often forget the most valuable statistic. They're called "wins." If a player puts up fantastic numbers on a team that gets 30-35 wins, one of two things must be true.
1) The supporting cast is epically bad and might not win 20 games with an "average" player replacing the fantastic-numbers player.
2) The fantastic-numbers player is not really that valuable.
There is no #3. And #2 happens a lot. It's a good example of player value. A valuable player gets their team to win. His numbers are usually relevant to this...but, ultimately, they are secondary. The prime example for me is Kareem in 1977. Without him, the Lakers were truly lousy. They had no real point guard. Other than Kermit Washington--who played barely 1300 minutes in the season--they had no other low post defenders or scorers. Really, they didn't have much in the way of perimeter backcourt D either. The two decent players on the team other than Kareem were on the downhill slide and would be out of the league in two years or less. That team won 52 games. It's incredible. Put an "average" C on that team, and I'd be amazed if they won 30 games. Kareem was worth more than 20 wins that year; maybe 25. He was the MVP.
(This, incidentally, points out why MVP voting is generally good. People that dislike MVP voting often point out that players on sub-40 win teams rarely get into the top 3. That's because they shouldn't. If you're a top 3 player in the league, you should be making a 20-25 win team into a 40 win team. If that doesn't happen, the odds are that the player is not that valuable, despite great numbers.)
That #2 happened all the time with Dantley. Dantley's scoring never seemed to help his team much. When he was a "good" (18-22 ppg) scorer, teams didn't want him. When he was a "great" scorer, with Utah, the teams did poorly. When Dantley was hurt in his peak period, the teams did just as well without him. The 1981 Jazz without Dantley were probably better than the 1977 Lakers without Kareem. The Jazz had Darrell Griffith that year. They had Wayne Cooper and Allan Bristow, who were okay players (and were young and improving). They won 28 games. The next year they lost Cooper, but Rickey Green blossomed into a good player. They added Jeff Wilkins and Danny Schayes, who were okay out there. They dropped to 25 wins. The next year, Dantley was injured for most of the year, missing 60 games. The missing court time was taken up by a combination of John Drew and Jerry Eaves. The Jazz went up to 30 wins.
My conclusion is that Dantley's scoring--he averaged about 30 ppg while in Utah--was meaningless. His efficiency is irrelevant. His TS% is irrelevant. His scoring did not help his team. Looking at a "system," or counting possessions shows that you are spending a lot of time crunching numbers and not so many watching basketball. If you are scoring a lot of points to the detriment of the rest of your team, you are not ever going to be a great scorer. Efficient, possibly. High volume, certainly. but "good"--and I am thinking good means "something good comes from it"--no.
In that sense (which is a real world sense), Kobe Bryant's scoring is always better than Dantley's. Which is not to say that Kobe's scoring has always been "good" either. Personally, I am of the opinion that the 2005 Lakers were a decent team without Kobe. Plenty of talent there and a good coach. I think the chemistry of the team was horrible, and I think Kobe was the primary cause. His statistics in 2005 are really about the same as in 2004. But the 2004 Kobe was a better scorer. It's because his scoring helped his team more (even if the 2004 Lakers had chemistry issues, they did win 56 games and go to the finals).
Now, if we're trying to set this up as a "well, we're talking about pure scoring" or something like that...nonsense. Ridiculous. It's like asking how fast a car is in a laboratory rather than on a track. What's the point? Scoring is a function of offensive play; the byproduct of scoring and ultimate goal is victory. Adrian Dantley scored about the same amount of points of points per game as Kobe Bryant. He did it with less shots. Anyone who looks at those two statistics in a vacuum, out of the real world context, will try to argue that Dantley should be talked about with Kobe as a scorer, perhaps placed ahead. It's completely wrong. Dantley was the more efficient scorer. But that efficiency meant very, very little in the actual games. The better scorer was and is Kobe Bryant.
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