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*** As a request from Bizme, I've started Part 2 of the Goat Thread, Continue from part 1 here viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2393113

@ Mods feel free to merg any goat related threads Into this one once again, up to you guys which ones.
Feel free to edit title/thread once sticky etc.

For The Poll: I have kept both Jordan, Lebron and Kareem, to compare them with the new players that have been entered Into the poll and as normal "Other Insert Comment" only have 10 slots

If we get a Part 3 going later down the track, I will change players once again - sorry but you can't keep everyone happy.

Choose Wisely!

Talk about anyone Y'all want and believe who Is the Goat, Keep It Basketball related please.

Many thanks to Zimpy the sticky master and Bizme for being able to start another thread, while the other one Is getting full.

Enjoy and Peace Out!

Slim. Date Is 20.01.2025

;t=223s

;t=275s

Where is Bill Russell on the poll? Come on.

I go back and forth between Russell and LeBron as my picks, voted Bill in the poll (other) to give him some love.

Can see weaker cases for Kareem/Duncan.

Don't really buy other cases at this point.

The guy with the 2 3 peats is the greatest player i have ever seen

Continuing from prior thread:

AEnigma wrote: That is not a comparative exercise; you are just throwing out rankings as if “all-defence” should be blindly taking the top ten in DRAPM and calling it a day.

And of course you when you take the approach that everything from 2009-13 should be sequestered, you are then primarily taking five-year splits which tend to sunk by one particularly bad year. So NBARAPM has him 21st in 2006/07 DRAPM, 17th in 2007/08 DRAPM, 9th in 2015/16 DRAPM, 2nd in 2019/20 DRAPM, and 6th in 2020/21 DRAPM. Increase it to three years, he is 35th from 2005-07, 28th from 2006-08 (and 33rd from 2005-08), 22nd from 2014-16, 28th from 2015-17, 5th from 2019-21, and 34th from 2020-22 (and 28th from 2019-22).

I really don’t see why you think this is helpful to you. It is well-understood that RAPM is far less reliable with smaller samples due to having high variance. All you’re saying is that in far less reliable data, LeBron’s defense looks better than in more reliable data. It’s obviously not persuasive and is transparently trying to rely on noise.

And while you can say larger timespans can be sunk by one particularly bad year, that’s generally otherwise known as things evening out in terms of variance in larger samples. If LeBron has enough particularly bad DRAPM years that he doesn’t have three-year or five-year spans that are particularly good, then that absolutely tells us something. You know full well that RAPM over relatively small samples is highly flawed due to its high variance, and yet you’re wanting to cherry-pick out smaller samples that do not include the more negative years. Again, it’s transparently trying to rely on as much positive noise as possible, and needless to say is not a serious approach.

And of course you typically glossed over what his career (or most of a career) long stretches all indicate, which is not something you see from pretty much any other “short defensive peak” player — again, as you are fully aware. But no one is arguing he should have been on an all-defensive team in 2018, or even recently, so why the focus on those specific samples.

Career RAPM is only tangentially relevant to this discussion, because it really doesn’t tell us anything about how his defensive impact ebbed and flowed throughout his career. So yeah, I glossed over something that is largely irrelevant. You want to use career RAPM to draw some tortured inference about what you think it suggests about specific timeframes in his career, but we actually have RAPM for those specific timeframes in his career and they do not agree with the inference you’re trying to draw. Obviously data that directly bears on the actual question is more persuasive than an inference you are taking from data that clearly isn’t on point for the discussion.

I would also note that, as you know, career RAPM is very flawed. It has a major problem since players’ quality changes a lot over the course of their career and it is very difficult to account for that in a 28-year RAPM measure. It is something that ends up requiring a prior to try to roughly approximate where players were in their career or just curving players based on their age. This introduces serious issues. There is a sweet spot with RAPM where the timespan is long enough to not have high variance but not so long that it runs into massive problems with player aging. That sweet spot is often considered to be five-year RAPM (which is why, for instance, BPM was tested against five-year RAPM). And that’s what I used. So the data I used was not only far more relevant to the actual discussion, but is better data anyways.

Hilarious how trying to look at the specific years in question is too noisy and thus we must include 2018 in any sample (but absolutely not anything from 2009-13!), yet also any longer measure that shows your attempt to dismiss two decades of strong defence as one five-year peak is simply too long.

Par for the course.

AEnigma wrote:Hilarious how trying to look at the specific years in question is too noisy and thus we must include 2018 in any sample (but absolutely not anything from 2009-13!), yet also any longer measure that shows your attempt to dismiss two decades of strong defence as one five-year peak is simply too long.

Par for the course.

Are you seriously trying to say that James has been playing strong defense for two decades? Come on man do you watch the games?

My personal favorite apm length is actually 4 year, but anywho.

A drapm 'ranking' in the 40s/50s is perfectly reasonable for a big minutes non-big man to be considered an All-D contender.

Possessions played can't be left out of an award consideration. LeBron has always played a huge possession volume, sure there are some specialists who might provide greater defensive value on a given possession, but if they're playing 1/3rd the possessions LeBron is still providing more cumulative value.

Edit:

Removed an erroneous list, data entry/scraping is a pain.

It should be noted that the defensive impact metrics for his LA years are an obvious case of multicollinearity from playing with Davis. AD is handily the Lakers' most impactful defender since he came over. Lebron has been anywhere between slight positive and negative for the last five or so seasons.

Anyways there's little to no evidence from impact data that Lebron is an All-Defense caliber defender outside of 2009-2013 except for maybe the 2016 playoffs. His 2014 selection actually looks pretty suspect based on impact. And the tracking data shows that he generally doesn't fit the archetype of a high impact defender. He has very low defensive usage in terms of shots contested, in turn contests very few shots at the rim where a lion's share of defensive impact comes from, and has no rim deterrence with opposing teams taking more shots at the rim with Lebron in the game than when he's sitting.

For what its worth here is LeBron's Defensive Plus-Minus based on a weighted average of advanced stats
2015: +1.0
2016: +1.8
2017: +0.9
2018: +0.3
2019: +1.0
2020: +1.4
2021: +1.7
2022: +0.6
2023: +0.7

Djoker wrote:It should be noted that the defensive impact metrics for his LA years are an obvious case of multicollinearity from playing with Davis. AD is handily the Lakers' most impactful defender since he came over. Lebron has been anywhere between slight positive and negative for the last five or so seasons.

Anyways there's little to no evidence from impact data that Lebron is an All-Defense caliber defender outside of 2009-2013 except for maybe the 2016 playoffs. His 2014 selection actually looks pretty suspect based on impact. And the tracking data shows that he generally doesn't fit the archetype of a high impact defender. He has very low defensive usage in terms of shots contested, in turn contests very few shots at the rim where a lion's share of defensive impact comes from, and has no rim deterrence with opposing teams taking more shots at the rim with Lebron in the game than when he's sitting.

I will never understand his 2014 selection. It always baffled me since he was pretty much just a slightly better version of his 2015 self, which did not warrant consideration at all. Much like a lot of Kobe’s selections, I think he just got in on reputation at that point.

With that said, it can’t be understated how good of a defender he was in 2009-2013.

AEnigma wrote:Hilarious how trying to look at the specific years in question is too noisy and thus we must include 2018 in any sample (but absolutely not anything from 2009-13!), yet also any longer measure that shows your attempt to dismiss two decades of strong defence as one five-year peak is simply too long.

Par for the course.

This is a *really* odd assertion for you to make, when you recently spent a whole thread arguing that actually LeBron’s defense in 2018 wasn’t bad and that defensive on-off numbers from that season were not a correct representation of his defense. You analogized the situation to 2017 Kawhi having bad defensive on-off despite being a good defender. See here for a link to some of your posts to this effect: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=112297694#p112297694; https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=112233482#p112233482; https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=112234133#p112234133; https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=112233752#p112233752

In other words, you yourself have argued that LeBron’s 2018 bad defensive impact data is largely just a product of negative noise. And yet here you are acting like it is improper to have a larger sample that includes that year. In other words, you just want to take out years with unfavorable variance—which will obviously almost certainly lead to a remaining sample that is biased in LeBron’s favor. It’s just shameless stuff and not even remotely close to serious analysis. (Meanwhile, you’ll find that your assertion that I said we must not include anything from 2009-2013 in a sample is objectively false, since I specifically noted LeBron having good five-year RAPM in 2007-2011 and 2008-2012—but I suspect you already knew that your assertion was false but just couldn’t stop yourself from taking a baseless shot, perhaps due to pent-up frustration).

Of course, the data I’ve outlined is not just a product of 2018 anyways. For instance, NBArapm does four-year RAPM, so we can look at what happened in the four years just after the 2009-2013 timespan without having 2018 come into the mix, and LeBron is 39th in DRAPM. He’s also ranked 28th in DRAPM in the four years immediately after 2018. And, by the way, we can do the same for the four years prior to the 2009-2013 timespan, and LeBron comes out ranked 33rd in DRAPM. These are pretty good rankings (albeit tailored to not include what is likely at least partly just a negative variance year, so it’s likely biased in LeBron’s favor), but they’re definitely worse than the spans he had that are all or mostly encompassed in 2009-2013, and are not indicative of an all-defense-level player (and the all-defense voting was also consistent with this).

The guy with the most points ever and led the most playoff series wins.
The guy who's led 3 different teams to championships.

lessthanjake wrote:

AEnigma wrote:Hilarious how trying to look at the specific years in question is too noisy and thus we must include 2018 in any sample (but absolutely not anything from 2009-13!), yet also any longer measure that shows your attempt to dismiss two decades of strong defence as one five-year peak is simply too long.

Par for the course.

This is a *really* odd assertion for you to make, when you recently spent a whole thread arguing that actually LeBron’s defense in 2018 wasn’t bad and that defensive on-off numbers from that season were not a correct representation of his defense. You analogized the situation to 2017 Kawhi having bad defensive on-off despite being a good defender. See here for a link to some of your posts to this effect: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=112297694#p112297694; https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=112233482#p112233482; https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=112234133#p112234133; https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=112233752#p112233752

In other words, you yourself have argued that LeBron’s 2018 bad defensive impact data is largely just a product of negative noise.

Yes, which is an entirely different concept from what his plus/minus that year actually was.

And yet here you are acting like it is improper to have a larger sample that includes that year.

No, I am saying it is improper for you to transparently work to make sure it is included.

In other words, you just want to take out years with unfavorable variance

No, I want you to not make a deliberate point to only use samples including it.

—which will obviously almost certainly lead to a remaining sample that is biased in LeBron’s favor.

Career long trends are biased samples now.

It’s just shameless stuff and not even remotely close to serious analysis.

And there is the iconic LTJ projection.

(Meanwhile, you’ll find that your assertion that I said we must not include anything from 2009-2013 in a sample is objectively false, since I specifically noted LeBron having good five-year RAPM in 2007-2011 and 2008-2012

While also characterising that as a product of how good he was outside of 2007/08, yes.

but I suspect you already knew that your assertion was false but just couldn’t stop yourself from taking a baseless shot, perhaps due to pent-up frustration).

The frustration is evidently on the side that patently refuses to ever analyse the player in good faith and prefers to misrepresent him as a relative one-off defender.

Of course, the data I’ve outlined is not just a product of 2018 anyways. For instance, NBArapm does four-year RAPM, so we can look at what happened in the four years just after the 2009-2013 timespan without having 2018 come into the mix, and LeBron is 39th in DRAPM. He’s also ranked 28th in DRAPM in the four years immediately after 2018. And, by the way, we can do the same for the four years prior to the 2009-2013 timespan, and LeBron comes out ranked 33rd in DRAPM. These are pretty good rankings (albeit tailored to not include what is likely at least partly just a negative variance year, so it’s likely biased in LeBron’s favor), but they’re definitely worse than the spans he had that are all or mostly encompassed in 2009-2013, and are not indicative of an all-defense-level player (and the all-defense voting was also consistent with this).

Eminence already outlined the obvious flaw with this approach. Yes, Lebron peaked as a defender in 2009-13, when he was the league’s best defensive forward and more valuable than all but a couple of top tier bigs. But until this past year, that has never been the standard for all-defensive recognition for non-centres.

AEnigma wrote:

lessthanjake wrote:

AEnigma wrote:Hilarious how trying to look at the specific years in question is too noisy and thus we must include 2018 in any sample (but absolutely not anything from 2009-13!), yet also any longer measure that shows your attempt to dismiss two decades of strong defence as one five-year peak is simply too long.

Par for the course.

This is a *really* odd assertion for you to make, when you recently spent a whole thread arguing that actually LeBron’s defense in 2018 wasn’t bad and that defensive on-off numbers from that season were not a correct representation of his defense. You analogized the situation to 2017 Kawhi having bad defensive on-off despite being a good defender. See here for a link to some of your posts to this effect: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=112297694#p112297694; https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=112233482#p112233482; https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=112234133#p112234133; https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=112233752#p112233752

In other words, you yourself have argued that LeBron’s 2018 bad defensive impact data is largely just a product of negative noise.

Yes, which is an entirely different concept from what his plus/minus that year actually was.

And yet here you are acting like it is improper to have a larger sample that includes that year.

No, I am saying it is improper for you to transparently work to make sure it is included.

In other words, you just want to take out years with unfavorable variance

No, I want you to not make a deliberate point to only use samples including it.

—which will obviously almost certainly lead to a remaining sample that is biased in LeBron’s favor.

Career long trends are biased samples now.

It’s just shameless stuff and not even remotely close to serious analysis.

And there is the iconic LTJ projection.

(Meanwhile, you’ll find that your assertion that I said we must not include anything from 2009-2013 in a sample is objectively false, since I specifically noted LeBron having good five-year RAPM in 2007-2011 and 2008-2012

While also characterising that as a product of how good he was outside of 2007/08, yes.

but I suspect you already knew that your assertion was false but just couldn’t stop yourself from taking a baseless shot, perhaps due to pent-up frustration).

The frustration is evidently on the side that patently refuses to ever analyse the player in good faith and prefers to misrepresent him as a relative one-off defender.

Of course, the data I’ve outlined is not just a product of 2018 anyways. For instance, NBArapm does four-year RAPM, so we can look at what happened in the four years just after the 2009-2013 timespan without having 2018 come into the mix, and LeBron is 39th in DRAPM. He’s also ranked 28th in DRAPM in the four years immediately after 2018. And, by the way, we can do the same for the four years prior to the 2009-2013 timespan, and LeBron comes out ranked 33rd in DRAPM. These are pretty good rankings (albeit tailored to not include what is likely at least partly just a negative variance year, so it’s likely biased in LeBron’s favor), but they’re definitely worse than the spans he had that are all or mostly encompassed in 2009-2013, and are not indicative of an all-defense-level player (and the all-defense voting was also consistent with this).

Eminence already outlined the obvious flaw with this approach. Yes, Lebron peaked as a defender in 2009-13, when he was the league’s best defensive forward and more valuable than all but a couple of top tier bigs. But until this past year, that has never been the standard for all-defensive recognition for non-centres.

Not sure where you are getting that he was the leagues best defensive forward from
09/13….by statistical support that would have been Garnett in 10/11 and Paul George in 12/13. But you did say that he has been playing “strong” defense for two decades when again statistical evidence supports that his defense has been declining for the last seven years.

Here's the list of guys ahead of LeBron for the 3 year '15-'17 sample using the previous method/source:

1. Draymond Green

I'm not one to 100% commit to a particular ordinal ranking, but LeBron was a very very good defender for plenty of seasons outside of '09-'13.

AEnigma wrote:

lessthanjake wrote:

AEnigma wrote:Hilarious how trying to look at the specific years in question is too noisy and thus we must include 2018 in any sample (but absolutely not anything from 2009-13!), yet also any longer measure that shows your attempt to dismiss two decades of strong defence as one five-year peak is simply too long.

Par for the course.

This is a *really* odd assertion for you to make, when you recently spent a whole thread arguing that actually LeBron’s defense in 2018 wasn’t bad and that defensive on-off numbers from that season were not a correct representation of his defense. You analogized the situation to 2017 Kawhi having bad defensive on-off despite being a good defender. See here for a link to some of your posts to this effect: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=112297694#p112297694; https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=112233482#p112233482; https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=112234133#p112234133; https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=112233752#p112233752

In other words, you yourself have argued that LeBron’s 2018 bad defensive impact data is largely just a product of negative noise.

Yes, which is an entirely different concept from what his plus/minus that year actually was.

And yet here you are acting like it is improper to have a larger sample that includes that year.

No, I am saying it is improper for you to transparently work to make sure it is included.

In other words, you just want to take out years with unfavorable variance

No, I want you to not make a deliberate point to only use samples including it.

—which will obviously almost certainly lead to a remaining sample that is biased in LeBron’s favor.

Career long trends are biased samples now.

It’s just shameless stuff and not even remotely close to serious analysis.

And there is the iconic LTJ projection.

(Meanwhile, you’ll find that your assertion that I said we must not include anything from 2009-2013 in a sample is objectively false, since I specifically noted LeBron having good five-year RAPM in 2007-2011 and 2008-2012

While also characterising that as a product of how good he was outside of 2007/08, yes.

but I suspect you already knew that your assertion was false but just couldn’t stop yourself from taking a baseless shot, perhaps due to pent-up frustration).

The frustration is evidently on the side that patently refuses to ever analyse the player in good faith and prefers to misrepresent him as a relative one-off defender.

Of course, the data I’ve outlined is not just a product of 2018 anyways. For instance, NBArapm does four-year RAPM, so we can look at what happened in the four years just after the 2009-2013 timespan without having 2018 come into the mix, and LeBron is 39th in DRAPM. He’s also ranked 28th in DRAPM in the four years immediately after 2018. And, by the way, we can do the same for the four years prior to the 2009-2013 timespan, and LeBron comes out ranked 33rd in DRAPM. These are pretty good rankings (albeit tailored to not include what is likely at least partly just a negative variance year, so it’s likely biased in LeBron’s favor), but they’re definitely worse than the spans he had that are all or mostly encompassed in 2009-2013, and are not indicative of an all-defense-level player (and the all-defense voting was also consistent with this).

Eminence already outlined the obvious flaw with this approach. Yes, Lebron peaked as a defender in 2009-13, when he was the league’s best defensive forward and more valuable than all but a couple of top tier bigs. But until this past year, that has never been the standard for all-defensive recognition for non-centres.

I think you’ll find that, while centers do tend to do particularly well in DRAPM, being ranked 39th or 28th or 33rd in DRAPM does not make you one of the four highest-ranked forwards. It’s still good, but it’s really not indicative of all-defense level, even keeping in mind centers doing particularly well compared to other positions. Indeed, I’ve even made a thread recently about how top-tier guards and wings often feature in the top 10 in five-year DRAPM! You just don’t have a leg to stand on. Your arguments are: (1) to transparently lobby to exclude negative variance years and therefore create as biased a sample as you can; (2) even when that is done, to insist that LeBron’s rankings indicate all-defensive level for a forward when it doesn’t; and (3) to rely on career RAPM numbers that you know are highly flawed and that in any event obviously are not on point in a discussion of how LeBron’s defensive ability ebbed and flowed at different points in his career. It’s all just obviously awful reasoning.

AEnigma wrote:

lessthanjake wrote:

AEnigma wrote:Hilarious how trying to look at the specific years in question is too noisy and thus we must include 2018 in any sample (but absolutely not anything from 2009-13!), yet also any longer measure that shows your attempt to dismiss two decades of strong defence as one five-year peak is simply too long.

Par for the course.

This is a *really* odd assertion for you to make, when you recently spent a whole thread arguing that actually LeBron’s defense in 2018 wasn’t bad and that defensive on-off numbers from that season were not a correct representation of his defense. You analogized the situation to 2017 Kawhi having bad defensive on-off despite being a good defender. See here for a link to some of your posts to this effect: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=112297694#p112297694; https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=112233482#p112233482; https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=112234133#p112234133; https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=112233752#p112233752

In other words, you yourself have argued that LeBron’s 2018 bad defensive impact data is largely just a product of negative noise.

Yes, which is an entirely different concept from what his plus/minus that year actually was.

And yet here you are acting like it is improper to have a larger sample that includes that year.

No, I am saying it is improper for you to transparently work to make sure it is included.

In other words, you just want to take out years with unfavorable variance

No, I want you to not make a deliberate point to only use samples including it.

—which will obviously almost certainly lead to a remaining sample that is biased in LeBron’s favor.

Career long trends are biased samples now.

It’s just shameless stuff and not even remotely close to serious analysis.

And there is the iconic LTJ projection.

(Meanwhile, you’ll find that your assertion that I said we must not include anything from 2009-2013 in a sample is objectively false, since I specifically noted LeBron having good five-year RAPM in 2007-2011 and 2008-2012

While also characterising that as a product of how good he was outside of 2007/08, yes.

but I suspect you already knew that your assertion was false but just couldn’t stop yourself from taking a baseless shot, perhaps due to pent-up frustration).

The frustration is evidently on the side that patently refuses to ever analyse the player in good faith and prefers to misrepresent him as a relative one-off defender.

Of course, the data I’ve outlined is not just a product of 2018 anyways. For instance, NBArapm does four-year RAPM, so we can look at what happened in the four years just after the 2009-2013 timespan without having 2018 come into the mix, and LeBron is 39th in DRAPM. He’s also ranked 28th in DRAPM in the four years immediately after 2018. And, by the way, we can do the same for the four years prior to the 2009-2013 timespan, and LeBron comes out ranked 33rd in DRAPM. These are pretty good rankings (albeit tailored to not include what is likely at least partly just a negative variance year, so it’s likely biased in LeBron’s favor), but they’re definitely worse than the spans he had that are all or mostly encompassed in 2009-2013, and are not indicative of an all-defense-level player (and the all-defense voting was also consistent with this).

Eminence already outlined the obvious flaw with this approach. Yes, Lebron peaked as a defender in 2009-13, when he was the league’s best defensive forward and more valuable than all but a couple of top tier bigs. But until this past year, that has never been the standard for all-defensive recognition for non-centres.

Since comments on the other thread are perhaps conveniently disabled, I very deliberately call posters with whom I didagree partisans, intending to recognise that most people on a fan forum including me are biased.

We can go back and forth a la the Monty Python argument sketch which I admittedly saw rather than read, and first saw before either Jordan or LeBron played NBA basketball, but calling someone with whom you disagree a Jordan worshipper is fairly clearly ad hominem, and to me at least indicates you are among those who consider only other people to be biased, a pervasive attitude on forums/fora (perhaps posting forums could be considered illiterate) as these in my experience

eminence wrote:My personal favorite apm length is actually 4 year, but anywho.

A drapm 'ranking' in the 40s/50s is perfectly reasonable for a big minutes non-big man to be considered an All-D contender.

Possessions played can't be left out of an award consideration. LeBron has always played a huge possession volume, sure there are some specialists who might provide greater defensive value on a given possession, but if they're playing 1/3rd the possessions LeBron is still providing more cumulative value.

Using nbarapm 5yr rapm, 2020-2024 (chosen as the most recent and to be a more middling drapm sample for LeBron - 55th in DRAPM in the league). Probably among LeBrons worst samples with this methodology due to his possession advantage dropping.

Possessions x DRAPM/100 to give an estimate of total defensive value over the period.
1. Gobert 1713
2. Bam 1674
3. Giannis 1414
4. Embiid 1280
5. Draymond 1233
6. Dillon Brooks 1192
7. Tatum 1132
8. White 1097
9. Jokic 1090 (a surprise to many I'm sure, but he is quite possibly the best defensive rebounder ever)
10. AD 1071
11. Lopez 1064
12. LeBron 1056

I would expect the ~12th most valuable defender over a period to have a couple All-D appearances given they aren't a strict center. Most notably '20 in this case (Kawhi has a worse case than LeBron, and Bam at forward was questionable).

It’s an interesting approach but I’m not really sure how you’re deriving these numbers. That website has “6-factor RAPM” that actually lists numbers of possessions so I’m assuming that’s what you’re using, but if you took LeBron’s 2020-2024 five-year DRAPM and divided by 100 and multiplied by possessions, it’d be just below 565, not 1056. I’m also able to find a whole bunch of guys you didn’t list who would also be ahead of LeBron (for instance, Alex Caruso would be at 658, despite much lower minutes).

Also, those possession numbers appear to include playoff possessions as well. Putting playoff possessions in the mix is defensible when comparing RAPM as a rate stat (though it’s not really directly relevant to all-defensive teams specifically), but it is pretty obviously not a fair thing to do if trying to convert a rate stat into a possession-weighted one.

I also think that weighting entirely by possession load is not really in the spirit of how people really think about all-defensive teams. Yes, it does matter for all-defense purposes if someone plays low minutes, but it’s treated more as a need-to-be-above-a-threshold thing. That said, I think there’s an argument it’d be a better approach if people thought of it this way instead. It’s a bit of a question of whether we want to be tallying up defensive value or identifying the best defenders—which can be subtly different things when people don’t play equal minutes.

The person complaining about poll, about Wilt not being in the first one, so I put Wilt in this one now they have a sook about Russell not being on the poll and thinks I'm trolling, wow just wow.

Mods if you want block this one start your own etc I'm not fussed I'm done here.

Just wow.