Doctor MJ wrote:Alright, a rambling post here. Pierce seems to be getting some serious traction, and I find myself puzzled at this. Now look, I absolutely do not want to say "he can't be this high, because he wasn't last time", but were Pierce to get voted in at around 35, it would represent I think the most dramatic shift we've ever seen. I'll also say up front that I feel like this is wrong, but I want to make sure I'm not trapped in oversimplistic thinking.
In 2006, he got placed at #94. At that point he'd already had his top 6 scoring seasons for his career (surpassing any of the next 5 years).
In 2008, he got placed at #76. At that point he'd already had his Finals MVP season. Kind of hard to imagine that his play the next 3 seasons have totally changed people's thoughts on him.
So what's going on? Well, obviously a retrospective change-of-heart partially based on Pierce being involved with the Big 3 Celtics, but what does that mean exactly?
Obviously, previous votings seemed to start more from the perspective of accolades, and then working backwards into the details. That we are delving more into the details to start here makes me think we are definitely going in the right direction, but Pierce at 35? I mean the first thought in my mind is "Is Vince Carter seriously going to be in our top 50?" Can we really be underrating what seems to me an entire class of swingmen that much before?
The statistical comparisons with Drexler and Gervin make sense. It's easy then to extrapolate and say that the difference in their accolades just had to do with luck. But then I consider that Pierce might be about to get nominated before Jason Kidd. This again, makes sense based on box score stats. But these two guys are basically contemporaries, and yet up until Pierce went to Boston, Kidd had 5 All-NBA 1st teams and a 2nd team while Pierce had only 2 3rd teams. Pretty massive difference there.
Of course the deal with Pierce being underrated has to be more than just era based, but also team success based. He was a big stat guy getting less love than he should because of weak team success. Is that true? Well, yes it is. But HOW underrated? Pierce is just the kind of player that gets promoted in this league, and he's not in the Top 100 of MVP shares. Just on a first thought kind of thing, if there was a guy who was that underrated because of team records, I'd kind of expect him to be eye-popping statistically in same way y'know?
So I went to the best seasons ever for PER on b-r.com. It lists the Top 250 such seasons. Can you guess how many times Pierce showed up?
None.
You know how many guys are on that list who we haven't nominated yet? 40.
I understand that Pierce beats a lot of them with his longevity. Maybe that justifies this jump, but I really question whether Pierce is getting unreasonable singled out. Guys who put up numbers like him just aren't that rare. Does Pierce really get deserve such a big boost because of intangibles associated with the Celtic success?
Talk me down hear fellas.
I don't put much stock into PER, because I think it's a flawed formula that suggests a lot of things that it shouldn't.
With regards to the Carter comparison, my view is that Pierce has always been better than Carter, it's just that we remember the highlight reel dunks, and we saw flashes of what Carter was capable of, and most people just assume that at the very least, Carter and Pierce go hand-in-hand. But both of them were primarily volume scorers...and Pierce has him beat in terms of efficiency, by a lot, while scoring nearly identical volume. Pierce has also been a better rebounder and defender, and their playmaking abilities seem comparable over their careers. Pierce also stepped up his level of play in the playoffs, while Carter notoriously declined. I think Pierce has sustained a level of play that clearly separates him from Vince Carter.
With regards to the Kidd comparison, Pierce has been considered a SF, not a SG, so him and Kidd are selected from a completely different group of players. Early on in the decade, Kidd was going up against a pretty weak crop of PGs (Marbury was his biggest competition), and his biggest SG challengers were Kobe, Iverson, and McGrady. Great players, but even if all of them were selected over him, he'd still make the 2nd team. There was also the narrative involved in 2002 and 2003.
Meanwhile, Pierce was going up against Duncan, Garnett, and Dirk, while Webber and Carter were constantly hyped up and got more attention. Also, from 05-present, LeBron, Melo, Durant, and for a couple of years, T-Mac, entered the picture.
Even then, I think Duncan and Garnett were the only ones clearly better than Pierce in 01, and I also think Pierce probably should have made All-NBA in 05, 06, and 08-present.
And in terms of Pierce being the kind of guy that gets promoted in today's league, I disagree. I think he's the opposite of what the league was trying to promote in recent years. They were looking for the next Jordan, the athletic, flashy swingman who could sell tickets and was very marketable. That's not Pierce. Pierce used to be somewhat athletic, but nothing like Carter or Wade or LeBron or even Melo. And for the last couple of years, it looks like Duncan might beat him in a foot race. He's the kind of guy the league doesn't care to market, much like Duncan and Nowitzki in fact, because he doesn't fit the mold of the next Jordan. That's why he's so underrated imo, he didn't get the press or the endorsements that guys like LeBron and Carter got. But he quietly put together some pretty big seasons, even while being stuck on a poor Celtics team for the most part.
And looking at more advanced measures beyond the box score stats, Pierce does very well in terms of APM and on/off, so the team impact is clearly there.
And I think you were right, simply looking at where Pierce was ranked in previous years, and then questioning the potential jump is absolutely the wrong way to go about things, so why mention it or even look to it as any sort of credible reasoning? It just opens things up to bias, in the sense that people will think to themselves "oh, there's just no way Pierce can jump 50 spots!"...like you mentioned, in the past, players were mainly judged on resume, and I agree, if that's the criteria, Pierce doesn't make top 50, but since we're supposed to look past that and look at what Pierce actually brought to the table, I think he absolutely deserves a top 35 spot.
And regarding the top 250 PER list (and again, I don't really care for PER), the guy that was just nominated, Clyde Drexler, shows up exactly once, at 238, with a 24.07 PER. Gervin shows up exactly twice, at 24.17 and 24.68. What about the fact that if you look at the rest of their careers, Gervin and Drexler post PERs that look practically identical to the PER that Pierce was putting up year in and year out? Those are just 1-2 years of great PER seasons from these guys, they're not indicative of what they consistently put up.
