AEnigma wrote:Mark Jackson is 25% ahead of Andre Miller and Rajon Rondo for the list of assist leaders we have excluded. Eaton is over 20% ahead of Tree Rollins for the list of excluded block leaders.
That is without getting into how scoring quality is about more than raw scoring efficiency.
Well, fair enough. But no one has ever argued for those guys to be in the Top 100, while Mullin has made it four times before and Issel five times. Now, I don't lean on that argument too hard because you can say the same type of thing for Dominique and English and some others that I'm less excited about, and newer players are always entering the discussion, but at the very least we can say that historically there has been support for Mullin and Issel where there never was for Jackson or Eaton. Maybe people didn't value the right things, I don't know, but it's worth thinking about.
The Bulls traded their starting centre for Thurmond. They did not get him for free, and even if you want to argue the Bulls were done with him in the playoffs, that leaves a 2500 starting centre void to fill! (Oh, and incidentally, Thurmond started in the conference finals the next year.) Boerwinkle takes up 900 of that, alright, now what about the other 1600? Oh, that is right, you trade your primary two bench wings for two backup centres who combine to cover two thirds of that.
First, I see Boerwinkle with 2045 MP in 75-76, not 900. To compare Thurmond 75 to Boerwinkle 76:
Boerwinkle 76: 8/10 on 35.6 TS Add, 3.0 DWS, .147 WS/48 in 2045 MP
Thurmond 75: 7.9/11.3 on -155.8 TS Add, 5.4 DWS, .081 WS/48 in 2756 MP
I don't mean to imply Boerwinkle>Thurmond generally(of course Thurmond was better and had the better career), but I do think Thurmond was on the downswing by the time he got to Chicago(otherwise why would they have traded him?), and it does not seem like there was a dramatic drop in production at the center position.
And FWIW, in the 12 games Thurmond played for the Bulls in 75-76 before being traded, they were 3-9. If you truly think Thurmond was that much better in 1974-75 and dropped off that much in one offseason, ok, but I don't think that's what happened.
Now, it is true that the center DEPTH got worse. Having worse backups may have been part of the collapse. But it's still hard for me to believe that that was as big a factor as losing Walker.
Age 29 Chet leaves the 76ers and they drop a point, and he joins the Bulls and they maybe go up a point. You really need to believe Chet retired at his peak to not have that weigh on what you see looking at the 1976 Bulls.
I mean, if you look at Walker's career trajectory, his numbers DO get bigger later on, possibly/probably due to him having greater primacy as a scorer in Chicago than he had in Philly.
Six of his eight highest raw PPG came in his last six years in Chicago.
Three of his four highest TS Adds came in his last four years.
The 168.5 TS Add he posted in his final season is the fourth highest of his 13 year career.
The 174.8 TS Add he posted in his penultimate season is the third highest of his 13 year career.
And because these things are correlated, his .205 WS/48 in his final season was the third highest of his career.
The 2.9 DWS he posted in his final season was tied for the fifth highest of his career.
I don't know that I can say he peaked in his last year, but by the numbers he was still playing some of his best basketball at the end. This is not a guy who fell off. He was remarkably consistent.
Because those are not characteristically superstar values. “Usually doing better with than without” is a bare minimum standard. You were just giving Artest grief for being +1 over 15 playoff games, but a +2.5 full season value two years removed from an arguable peak season is a good signal?
I didn't give Artest grief about it, I noted it one time and you took strong issue with it. And maybe you were right seeing as that +1 appears to be a low outlier in his playoff career.
Anyway, Mullin had sustained a couple of injuries between said "arguably peak season" and 93-94. I don't know that I'd assume his on/off in 89, 90, 91, or 92 would be the same as that 94 number. Particularly since he posted higher on/offs with the Pacers later on(+7.5 in 98, +5.6 in 99).
We just don't have a whole lot of individual impact data for Mullin. I'm not saying that the little we have is some hugely strong argument, I just don't think it hurts him at all the way you're saying.
You can take that approach with almost anyone. If Horace Grant were a volume scoter he would have gone in before Kevin McHale. Yeah, Issel being a weak frontcourt defender is what limits him; why would that stop now?
It doesn't stop being true, but most of the players left have glaring weaknesses you can point to. Why should Issel's defensive deficiencies be more disqualifying than Dominique's inefficiency, Hill's lack of playoff accomplishment, Luka/Tatum's lack of longevity, etc etc.?
And again, Walker was constantly at or near the top of the league as a scorer throughout his Bulls tenure.
No, he never had a top ten finish playing his entire career in a league with 9-18 teams.
Depends, top ten in what? Are you talking about PPG? Because, as I've stated before, Walker had a plethora of Top 10 league finishes(and even a few Top 5 finishes) in TS Add and WS/48:
In those six seasons, his TS Add was Top 5 in the league twice and Top 10 in the league five times.
69-70 - 143.2(next on team - Bob Love, 82.8), #9 in league
70-71 - 135.7(next on team - Bob Love, 60.3), #11 in league
71-72 - 231.1(next on team - Jim King, 3.7), #3 in league
72-73 - 128.6(next on team - Clifford Ray, 28.1), #7 in league
73-74 - 174.8(next on team - Clifford Ray, 42.8), #5 in league
74-75 - 168.5(next on team - Matt Guokas, 40.4), #7 in league
For five out of six seasons, Walker was #1 on the team in WS/48(the one season he wasn't, he was .004 below #1). In those six seasons, his WS/48 was Top 3 in the league three times, Top 5 4 times, and Top 10 5 times.
69-70 - .172(#10)
70-71 - .178(#11)
71-72 - .268(#2)
72-73 - .213(#3)
73-74 - .191(#5)
74-75 - .205(#3)
Because that is not a real comparison. Andre Iguodala was on the 2012 Olympic team that was nearly as dominant as the Dream Team. Carmelo was on that one, plus the Redeem Team, plus some more. Your talk of shooting and scoring can apply to a similar degree for players like Kiki Vandeweghe, Dale Ellis, Mullin’s teammate Mitch Richmond, and so on. Yeah, he was a good player. Anyone who was not would not be discussed.
A few things. First, you ignored the first part where I said those five consecutive 25+ppg in 4+ rTS seasons stand out to me. No one else we're talking about has done that.
Second, Mullin played a bigger role on the Dream Team than Iggy did.
Iggy/2012: 12.8pp36, 8.3rp36, 4.1ap36 on 70% FG while playing 12.0mpg
Mullin/1992: 21.4pp36, 2.7rp36, 6.0ap36 on 61.9% FG while playing 21.6mpg
And I believe my reasons for not supporting Melo are known by now.
Third, regarding the other guys you mentioned. Since we're talking about them in the context of scoring/shooting, Richmond and Ellis aren't close to Mullin in career average TS Add - Richmond is 65.5, Ellis 61.9.
Kiki, on the other hand, is actually about three points higher than Mullin in career average TS Add. So why hasn't he ever gotten close to the Top 100 and Mullin has made it four times? I'm guessing because of defense?
I wouldn't call Mullin a high-level defender or anything, but Kiki looks like a turnstile, a genuine liability. I don't think DWS is the most optimal measure of individual defense, but it's kind of the best individual stat we've got for these pre-databall guys.
So, if we first look at career total OWS, the two are very close - 69.2 for Mullin and 66.8 for Kiki. But when we look at career total DWS, it's 23.8 for Mullin and an anemic 8.8 for Kiki.
For reference, most of the really good defenders that haven't gotten in yet are in the 30s and 40s for career total DWS. Mullin is not on that level defensively, but it looks like he's at least passable, which is more than you can say for Kiki.
It reads like a copout reason. A guy gets recognised as an MVP and is the key common thread across two title teams, but you know, other box score data could look better for a teammate, so we should overlook it. Again, you can use whatever approach you want, but that is functional exclusion of the most decorated guard on the board.
I don't think it's a copout at all, and it's not like I just made it up - I've been saying this for weeks. And you can't possibly think I'm excluding him because of era when I've been the biggest champion of Sharman in the project and when I was a supporter of Mikan and Arizin and all the other 50s guys that have made it. And when I was voting for Hagan before the bottom fell out of his support.
You mention that Davies was on two title teams. We literally don't have playoff stats or any assist numbers or any measure of scoring efficiency for the first of those teams. This is what I'm talking about.
Sure, but that is an adjusted standard with little connection to any comparative approach. “Oh well he feels like more of an outlier scorer, his accomplishments are not that light, and he seems generally good enough.” He does not really fit outside of how you are personally assessing him as a higher tier talent.
I feel like we're starting to talk in circles about Mullin. I also feel like part of the disconnect is that you don't seem to value hyperefficient volume scoring as much as I do. If that's the case, I don't know what else to say.
But there is more to their game than sheer scoring, and they had their best years at basically the same time with us being able to see Beaty was better.
Yeah, like I said, something about those two peak years of Beaty's strikes me as very odd. He misses a full year of play, then at the age of 31, comes back in the earlier ABA and posts two seasons that statistically surpass anything he did in the NBA? And then after those two years he declines fairly quickly? I get what you're saying, but I just have this skepticism that I can't shake.
What changed is that I did not have a strong sense of what it means to go 100 deep adding some options past what you would choose. Wilkins and English and Worthy were not even doubts the way those two conceivably were, and now it looks shaky for at least one of them and possibly all three.
FWIW I think Worthy has a much stronger case than the other two.