Doctor MJ wrote:cupcakesnake wrote:Ryoga Hibiki wrote:
in the greatest peaks he had Garnett over Duncan.
moreover, in the meantime he got even higher on Manu.
99% Garnett will be ahead
No one would take KG>TD for career success or total career impact. Duncan simply has too many deep playoff runs compared to KG.
However, 2004 KG>2003 TD isn't a controversial take. Both those peaks are amongst the best seasons we've ever seen from an NBA player, and I've seen plenty of good arguments for both.
And yeah, haha, in this podcast series, Manu keeps coming up whenever they're comparing playoff stats of everyone on the list, and it has Ben being like... are we sure Manu shouldn't be even HIGHER? He's such a tough player to compare to the all-time greats.
So I'll push back and say that I don't think it's a given that Duncan should be rated as having the better career over Garnett.
If someone thinks Garnett was literally better than Duncan at peak, there's no overwhelmingly obvious reason to side with Duncan based on longevity.
Certainly though, if we're focused on classical mega-team success accumulated over a career, Duncan tops anyone other than Russell and maybe Kareem (or Jordan if you just count chips).
I'd say it's perfectly fine to prefer Duncan, or to have a career assessment process that favors Duncan, but Garnett was elite in the minutes he played basically forever, and he played more career regular season minutes than Duncan did.
I'm said career success or
total career impact favors Duncan mostly because we have over 100 career playoff games more to go off of, where KG we have to build a bit of a theoretical case due to his outlier team situation.
KG hit the meat of his prime in 2004, wins and MVP and goes to the WCF where he's arguably a Cassell injury away from the finals... then that fragile roster collapses in such absurd, spectacular fashion that we have zero playoff games in KG's 28, 29, and age 30 seasons. The whole rest of prime wiped out from a playoff perspective, by bad luck and front office incompetence. We can tack his first year in Boston onto his prime, but the next year its the knee injury and a substantial drop off.
And yes, I'm speaking to the different ways people evaluate players and value peak vs. prime. My statement was that it wouldn't be weird for Ben/Cody to put KG over Duncan in this specific series, and that Duncan generally being much higher ranked has more to do with career success than peak (though Duncan has a peak argument too.)