I never said that was an all-time season by Wilt. It's an interesting question how far off his prime he was, but saying "hey West and Wilt were contending so that's the excuse why he got no votes!" is misleading because that isn't Wilt at his best. But if Havlicek is truly a top 15 player, shouldn't he be able to top West? That's my point. You can continue to attack other points and make a flashy show out of it and get angry, but please respond to those points. Is Havlicek as good as Jerry West? That's a good comparison. Same era, both non-bigs before the three-point line came in, and West is usually top 15 on lists.
Dude, you have a
serious problem with moving goalposts and debating strawmen. It doesn't matter to the 1972 voting whether that was an all-time great season
for Wilt. All that matters is that it was an all-time great season, period. And you
ABSOLUTELY CANNOT SAY THAT IT WASN'T an all-time great season, because if any other center had that kind of season for a 69-13 title-winner, you would sure as hell class that as an all-time great season, a centerpiece season for almost every other center in NBA history, the kind of season that might have won Dave Cowens MVP, except
better. The fact that it was only the 3rd-most-valuable season per the voters is an indication of how
GREAT the competition was for MVP that year, not weak. Big name fallacy has
NOTHING to do with it. Except for
your thinking that Wilt's '72 would somehow not be worthy of a Top-3 MVP vote in most other years, that's
your big name fallacy, the warped lens
you're using.
I don't even put high weight into MVP shares and all-NBA teams, but I'm simply trying to find some objective way of looking at contemporary accounts of the player in relation to his peers. I'm wondering what the bridge is between his accolades as a peak player and how on a lot of mainstream media lists he's like top 15. I don't get it. I assume it's because of his gaudy career totals. So go ahead and call me a stathead for not buying the career totals argument I guess. Instead of fighting every sentence I write, perhaps you can tell me how Havlicek is top 15/20 from a peak argument.
Man, if you "don't even put high weight into MVP shares and all-NBA teams" but "trying to find some objective way of looking at contemporary accounts of the player in relation to his peers", then you're **** out of luck, because that's pretty much all we have for that, and that stuff is way, way, way more reliable than you seem to give it credit for. Look at the revisionist threads here, done by some of biggest basketball eggheads around. A spot here, a flub there. The voters aren't all that wrong all that often.
And you should spend more time reading and digesting what you read. I'm not arguing now nor did I argue that Havlicek is right now still Top 15-20. He's not. No one thinks he is, anymore. But it was only 10 short years ago when he was! And it was for good reason, then! Top 30, now? Hell yes. Somewhere in the 20-30 range. Frankly, to anyone who hasn't fallen for underthought anti-old-school arguments, Havlicek's case for Top 30 should take about 3-4 minutes to intuit from a scan of his bkref page. So, here, here's my argument.
http://www.basketball-reference.com/pla ... ijo01.htmlThe challenge is for you to realize why Havlicek is easily, obviously Top 30 to the vast majority of the world that thinks about basketball, not for me to prove that to you as if my position is the more doubtworthy. But here's a few hints: All-NBA (4 + 7 =
11), All-Defensive (5 + 3 =
8),
eight championships (his role on each ranging from crucial role player for the first few to
featured star on the
next four then back to crucial role player in '76),
six top-ten finishes in scoring,
seven top-ten finishes in assists,
eleven consecutive top-ten finishes in Defensive Win Shares, a Finals MVP...who in the Top 20-30 range has a better resume than that?
And please, don't assume I'm a dumbass who cares about career totals. Sorry, but you're going to want to set your sets higher, in terms of making eye contact with my basketball history IQ. Up, up...way up. There. Now, listen:
YOU ARE NOT MORE SOPHISTICATED THAN ME, lol, so stop acting like it.
"Why are you being so severe with this? That's really angry language."
Because you give me a headache, and that pisses me off.
I don't "suppress" the inferiority of the ABA. I've written a few long posts on why this is a myth, and I've spent a long time looking at the issue. I think the '76 the leagues had similar strengths, in like three seasons before that the ABA was a little weaker by not by much. I don't think it's outrageous to say Dr. J was better than Havlicek at his peak. And I don't see how that's a superficial point. You're the one relying on how many first-team all-NBA's he's had, and I simply argued that a little context would take a bit of luster off of those since one of the greatest small forwards ever (third best, by consensus, I think) had some of his best seasons in a rival league. And then you'd have other forwards like George McGinnis to contend with. It's also why I pointed out Kidd's first team selections. It doesn't make him one of the truly best players ever (and he was second in MVP voting too.)
Kidd is absolutely one of the best 30-50 players ever, and I personally have him ranked ahead of Pierce. What Kidd did almost single-handedly with those Nets in '02 and '03 was as impressive as what Pierce did with two other all-timers. Does five 1st Team and one 2nd team All-NBA selections get you an automatic berth into Havlicek's stratosphere, just like Havlicek's eleven? No. 11 is almost twice as much as 6. But wait, are you saying Kidd wasn't one of the five best players in the league those years when he made the 1st Team? Well, I'd say the years he finished 5th and 2nd in MVP voting, he was. For sure. The other years, when he finished merely 8th, 8th, 9th, 11th...that's close enough of a match to prove my point.
The best estimates I've seen for describing how much weaker the ABA was, is somewhere in the 70-90% as good range, depending on the year. Take Julius's '74 and knock it down by 20% across the board. See what you come up with.
Context
BARELY takes
ANY luster off Havlicek's selections, because except for
THAT ONE YEAR when Julius freaking Erving
might have knocked Hondo to (gasp) the 2nd team, there aren't really any other years where you could do the same thing, were there? You wound up name-checking George McGinnis...against John freaking Havlicek. You cannot possibly believe that McGinnis would've beaten out Havlicek for a spot, had McGinnis been playing in the NBA with Havlicek in the same year.
That's really short-sighted.
There's a reason the stats revolution made people look at things on a per possession/minute basis. If you play huge minutes, you're not necessarily "producing" more points. Say you're an average scorer by volume and efficiency, and aren't notable in any other way (just a true "Joe Smith.") If you play 48 minutes a game, you're not offering an extra five or whatever points more to your team. That's misleading. Because you can replace his minutes with another average player and get the same totals.
The stats revolution only
THINKS it has everything figured out, and then when no one is looking the more honest geeks will admit that their maths have huge blind spots, and it all has to do with qualitative aspects and subjective reasoning about stuff that probably won't be reliably quantified for another 10-20 years. And when it IS quantified, guess what the nerds (whom I adore, just not posers who only think they're clever) will probably discover? That voters more or less had everything right, that the senses aren't fooled all that much, that people can intuitively judge things in a surprisingly accurate way without having a wealth of cutting-edge statistics, with just a tiny bit of data and their eyeballs, because the human brain is the best SportsVU mechanism ever invented, and people have been using that technology for generations.
Speaking of brains, did you forget that Havlicek played defense, too? Those extra five minutes of defense alone from Havlicek would be worth something. Even his tired-offense would be better than an average replacement, if that concept can even be transferred from baseball, since baseball is not basketball, which is far less quantifiable than baseball. But, again, Havlicek hardly tired. His stamina is not a myth. It's a biological fact. No advanced-stats guru today worth a damned thing, if put in charge of managing the mid-70's Celtics, would have played Havlicek a minute less, if they knew what they hell they were doing, if they understood the strategy of Auerbach and Russell and Heinsohn, which was predicated on exactly the kind of advantage you'd have in those five minutes when the other team's stars were dragging their asses and the Celtics' stars were still running, still charging, still guarding, like crazy. And
THAT IS A BIG PART OF WHY THEY WE WON THIRTEEN OUT OF TWENTY CHAMPIONSHIPS. It wasn't out of ignorance, it was the exact opposite. The ******* nerve, honestly, for some amateur-ish mathematically-hip basketball fans to think they know the keys to basketball better and deeper than Red Auerbach, Bill Russell, Tom Heinsohn, et. al.
"Of course being an iron-man is valuable. I believe that too. But you first have to pull back the numbers and analyze how a player is doing each possession before you add in that value. That sounds backwards, but I think that's the best method."
I think you're not quite sure what you're talking about, are you?
"And people conflate pace with energy too often. You still play the same minutes. Sometimes fast breaks are easier because it's straight-line running. Half-court modern NBA offenses/defenses can be brutal. We have better conditioning today with a huge volume of available players, yet no one is playing Hondo minutes. Are they inferior? I think *that* is ridiculous."
Yes, they are inferior.
TO HONDO.
You're confusing today's occasional fast breaks between long stretches of standing, walking, and bumping with a nearly constant series of fast breaks with only slightly less hard contact than today otherwise.
"Of course. Hondo is probably a freak much like Iverson. No one played type of career minutes he did as a non-center until like ... the 90's or something crazy. But Iverson playing 42 a game doesn't make him better than Pierce or top all-time guys like Kobe. I want just to look at the whole picture, and I don't see how Havlicek is better than all but 15 players in NBA/ABA history."
UGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGH.
) were the only guards who won the award until Dr. J in 1981. 
