Post#47 » by drza » Sun Sep 28, 2014 3:42 am
Since the comp is still directly relevant, I'm going to re-post my Kidd vs Payton post I made a few threads back.
Jason Kidd vs Gary Payton
Stylistics
This is another fun comp, between two Bay Area local legends. To me, this comparison is largely about their differences in styles. Both were excellent at what they did, but they often used similar tools to do very different things, with similar goals. Both are big for point guards, on the order of 6-3 or 6-4. Both are tenacious defensive players, two of the best that we've seen at the position. Both lacked the shooting range of many of their contemporaries, but both were still strong offensive players.
Despite all these similarities, their approaches were often almost diametric opposites. In a simplistic sense, on both offense and defense I see Payton as the better 1-on-1 player but Kidd as the better team player.
Offense
On offense, Payton was more of a scorer than Kidd. He owned his lack of shooting range, and adapted with a game that used his size and physicality to produce good looks from mid-range and in. He was an excellent post-up player for a point guard, able to get the shot that he wanted over the (almost always) smaller guard defending him. He also was good at getting a step and finishing from the paint or with a reasonable mid-range shot out to about 18 feet. As a point guard, Payton had good vision and was able to run the show off the dribble out front or with his back to the basket. He was a good floor general with good passing ability, but to me he never exhibited the type of pure point guard flare of the Magic/Stockton/Kidd/Nash type PGs. He was definitely a scorer as well as a floor general, and it was the combo of the two that made him great.
Kidd, on the other hand, wasn't a very good one on one scorer. His set-shot jumper eventually got better, but he was never a good scorer off the dribble. But he was a brilliant floor general with outstanding passing skills. As such, when he was probing a defense off the dribble, he was almost always looking to set up a teammate before his own shot. He would call his own number enough to average in the teens (sometimes upper teens), but his scoring efficiency/volume was never his strong point. No, his strong point was that on his teams all of his teammates tended to maximize their production. That's why, in the vs. Nash and vs. Paul comps I've done in recent threads, we see Kidd with a consistently strong offensive RAPM despite the fact that his box score offensive numbers would argue that he should be weaker.
Way back when we were comparing Larry Bird and Hakeem Olajuwon I broached the concept of "team offense" as the analogy to the accepted "team defense" term. I argued that Bird's individual scoring efficiency issues in some of his early playoffs were way overblown and that he was still having mega offensive impact in those situations because with his passing and floor generalship he was providing excellent team offense independent of his 1-on-1 scoring. I made a similar argument for KG. Similar for Scottie Pippen (though under a different name, as I think we just called it a "point guard effect" or something like that). But the point is, I think that this "team offense" thing has some meat to it, and that it's a particular strength of Kidd's that doesn't show up in the box scores...but does show up in the +/- stats.
Defense
The defense seems to mirror the offense, with these two players. Payton's nickname was "The Glove", and it mirrored his on-court persona. He was aggressive, strong, and would climb into his opponent's shorts to keep him from getting to the rim. Trying to drive on or score against Payton was famously difficult, with all manner of players (including Jordan) weighing in on it through the years. Plus, Payton's penchant for trash-talking and mind games often worked to his advantage on defense as he could frankly tick his opponents off and have them make mistakes.
Kidd, on the other hand, was again more of a team defender. Which is really strange, because that's not often something you see at point guard. But Kidd played defense more like a forward than a guard. He was a solid 1-on-1 defender, especially against big guards, but he wasn't who you would think of as a "stopper" to put on the opponents point guard to take him out of the game. And as Kidd got older, some of the lightening bug quick PGs could give him some trouble 1-on-1. But Kidd was very strong (for a PG) at help defense, with quick/smart rotations and the size/physicality to switch onto bigger wings and forwards and give them difficulties. Then, at the end of the possession, Kidd was an absurdly strong rebounder for his position...again, more like a big forward than a point guard.
The impact stats
Usually when I'm doing these types of comps I list box score stats, but I didn't here (more for reasons of convenience due to me sneaking to write this from work, but also because I don't know how much bearing it has for my analysis). If you want to see them, it's a quick B-R search away, but I think most of us know the cliff notes version: Payton was the better scorer by both volume and efficiency, while Kidd was the better distributor by both volume and efficiency and also the better rebounder. We could have gathered most of that from the stylistic comparison above, though. The more important question to me, then, is how did these different styles and approaches change how much Payton and/or Kidd were able to impact the games.
RAPM: 1998 and after
For the 1998 season Payton was 29 year old, in his 8th season. He would make the All-NBA and All-Defensive teams every year from '98 thru 2002 (two 1st team All NBA, five 1st team All Defensive nods). He also set his career bests in PER and Win Shares/48 in both the regular season and postseason during this time window. So this period definitely captures a good chunk of what would be considered Payton's prime, as well as some of his peak.
Kidd was a handful of years younger than Payton. So if we want to compare apples-to-apples as much as possible, I'll only consider Kidd's RAPM scores from his 8th season and after for this comp. Because Doc MJ normalized in his spreadsheet, we can compare RAPM scores from different years on essentially the same scale. So, let's do it.
3-year peaks:
Payton (1998 - 2000): +7.5, +4.5, +8.1, avg. +6.7
Kidd ( 2002, 03, 05): +7.3, +7.0, +7.3, avg +7.2
It's hard to draw very much from this, outside of that their impacts in these time windows looked pretty similar. So, let's separate this into offense and defense for closer looks.
3-year peak, ORAPM:
Payton (1998 - 2000): +6.2, +4.7, +6.8, avg. +5.9
Kidd ( 2002, 03, 05): +4.6, +4.2, +4.6, avg. +4.5
3-year peak, DRAPM:
Payton (1998 - 2000): +1.3, -0.2, +1.3, avg +0.8
Kidd ( 2002, 03, 05): +2.6, +2.9, +2.8, avg +2.8
I purposefully took the values from the years where their overall RAPM peaked, and didn't mix and match offensive and defensive peaks from different years, because I wanted to see how their impacts were distributed in their best years (e.g. Kidd, in particular, had better defensive values to pick from during his time in Dallas).
What jumps out at me right away is that Kidd's DEFENSIVE impact seemed to be noticeably higher than Payton's. That is a somewhat surprising finding, since so much of Payton's reputation comes from being the Glove on defense. But these results would argue that, at least in this portion of their careeers, Kidd's more team-defense approach had a bigger impact on his team's results than Payton's 1-on-1 brilliance.
The other thing that jumps out is that Payton was extremely strong on offense. Payton's 3-year offensive peak of +5.9 is 18th best from 1998 - 2012, and not far off from what we saw from Chris Paul's offensive peak according to ORAPM (+6.2 3-year avg.).
Longevity
I had planned to delve into the new on/off +/- data from 1994 - 1996 to give some estimates into what Payton was providing in his earlier prime, but I'm just flat out of time and my bosses are over my shoulder. But from memory, I don't believe that Payton was overly impressive in those studies (in fact, I think in one of them his on/off was dramatically negative in a weird effect that had folks looking into the Sonics' rotations for explanations).
But one thing that shows up in the later RAPM studies is that Payton's game didn't seem to age nearly as well as Kidd's. We looked at him from 1998 - 2000, then we don't have RAPM data for 2001. But from 2002 until he retired, Payton only had three more positive RAPM scores (peaked at +2.8 in 2003), with three negative scores as well. Meanwhile,Kidd was still posting an average +5.1 RAPM through his first three years in Dallas, and was about +2 even in 2011 and 2012 when he was on his way out the door. Kidd's defense weathered beautifully, especially as he took on more big-guard defense in Dallas, and his mix of part-time general + spot-up-shooter was a positive all the way up until 2012 (when he was essentially neutral). As such, Kidd's time as an impact player continued long after Payton's and gives him a legitimate advantage in longevity.
Bottom line
Kidd and Payton was every bit as fun of a comp as I expected. Payton, with his efficient scoring and still good floor generalship, peaked a bit higher than Kidd on offense (on the order of Chris Paul in terms of impact, from the information we have...side note, it's very interesting that RAPM sees peak Paul and Payton as similar on offense, but with PAUL as the higher impact defender). I didn't get to spend much time on Payton pre-98, so if anyone thinks that time period really changes his story I'd be interested in seeing more of that.
Kidd and Payton, in the years that we have available, peaked with very similar overall impact as measured by RAPM. Kidd's offense still measures (a lot) stronger than his scoring efficiency suggests, but on top of that he showed a marked defensive advantage over Payton. Also, Kidd's ability to adapt his game with age (less offensive primacy, more defensive and spot-up focused) allowed him to remain a high-impact player well into his mid/late 30s, during a time when Payton was consistently showing up as negative. Payton seemingly needed to be ball-dominant on offense to maintain his offensive impact, and his defense (at least from '98 on) never had the type of impact we may have expected (well short of what we saw from Kidd).
All in all, I'd say that I'm more impressed with Kidd's entire body of work. But as expected, they make quite the comparison.
