post wrote:michaelm wrote:post wrote:
cherry picking? lol
i just gave a mountain of evidence showing russell beat a lot of teams that didn't have much of a chance by srs standards which others in this thread have propped up as a good tool to use
are you illiterate? kareem was 37 and 38 in the years i mentioned, not over 40
I have a very good memory and am quite literate, both quite provably, but in the mountain of posts you have made my memory failed me on whether it was a 40 year old or a 38 year old Kareem was unchanged from earlier in his career; the 2 year difference hardly changes my challenge to the validity of your assumption, 38 is old for an NBA player, particularly a center.
Your SRS post was in reply to another poster and was not the post to which I replied.
You have continued to argue from the start of this thread that HOF qualification was the measure of the quality of the players on Hakeem's and Russell's teams and have not rebutted the manifold challenges to this assertion including that even apart from admission to the HOF not having set criteria/being arbitrary at any time the HOF has been evolving over 50 years with different people running it, and a number of players from a particularly dominant team, still the most dominant team in NBA history, which was around at the very start of the thing gained admission at a time there was no perspective in regard to how long it would last, how large it would become, how large the NBA would become, what rate of continuing admission would make it unwieldy etc, etc. Perhaps an immortal clairvoyant sole selector might have picked the same players over the entire 50 years but you can't know that. You also don't know what influence playing with Hakeem or Russell had on developing player quality; maybe some of Hakeem's team would have been HOF quality players (whatever that might be) playing multiple years with Russell and the Celtics players wouldn't have been as good /have developed as they did playing with Hakeem, particularly give only one of the 2 players has proven coaching credentials.
You argue that your eye test tells you that Hakeem could have done all the things Russell did if he had needed to do so, and place him above Russell because of more ppg, but as a point of elementary logic Russell didn't need to score more ppg for his team to win those 11 titles.
michaelm wrote:post wrote:
if a hypothetical guy scores 30 ppg on the same percentages when he's 20 years old, 30 years old, and 40 years old it doesn't make a ton of sense to say "look how good that old man scored against that young dude. imagine how he'd dominate him in his younger years." this is the logic i'm using to rebut those who say "look how good kareem played in some games when he was old as dust against hakeem"
my argument has evolved throughout the thread. if you can't detect that by now you probably don't want to or aren't capable of it
Bandying academic credentials on the internet is pointless and stupid, so I won't do it, but your last 2 replies once again demonstrate that argumentum ad hominem is among the many logical errors you employ.
lol. so robert horry might be a hofer playing with russell. that's a good one. the sun might explode in an hour from now too
no, eye test says hakeem could do whatever russell could and he could play russell's role but russell could not play hakeem's role. it has nothing to do with the fact russell didn't need to score more for boston to win. there are two scenarios. hakeem puts up the same exact stats playing on boston russell did and wins 11 chips or hakeem plays on boston and scores more than russell and they still win 11 chips. hakeem by eye test could do either and russell could not come close to matching hakeem's offensive production if he had to play on houston in the 90's. i've been over this already. you keep forcing me to repeat myself. if that leads to me denigrating your intellect that's your responsibility to stop being a simpleton
More nonsense, and more argumentum ad hominem in particular. I choose btw not to draw any broader inferences myself, but a substantial component of the posts you have made on this thread are idiotic imo.
You can prove Hakeem was a great player and a great iso scorer, and that his 2 title wins were particularly meritorious; this is known to anyone with even a casual acquaintance with the sport of basketball, and hardly needs to be proven to the members of an NBA fan forum such as this one. You can also make an obvious case for the relative difficulty of winning 11 titles in Russell’s era being different vs 30 years later, which you have mostly not chosen to do but which I don’t think many if any of your opponents on this thread would dispute. I don’t think anyone has argued Russell could have taken Hakeem’s teams to the 2 titles they won on the basis of iso scoring in Hakeem’s place either.
You have mostly chosen to denigrate Russell rather than pursue the topic of your own OP however.
You haven’t and can’t prove that Hakeem would have won 11 titles in Russell’s place, on the basis of your own eye test or any other basis, you can only speculate ie give your opinion and stating that opinion ever more stridently doesn’t make that opinion fact.
I actually agree as I implied above that the Celtics winning 11 titles can be over-rated compared to winning titles in other eras, but how on earth could Russell do more than win 11 of the 13 titles contested during his career, the last 2 as player-coach, the Celtics losing only in the 2 seasons when he was absent or injured, and indeed losing without him in the 2 years on either side of his career?. Perhaps he could have been even more durable, but that Hakeem could have been as durable as him, could have maintained motivation as long as he did or have been successful as a player coach are among the things you can’t prove, even apart from Russell being vilified for being black the whole time, the marked lessening of same by Hakeem’s time being something you should be grateful to the likes of Russell and Chamberlain for on Hakeem’s behalf imo.
