Greatest Peaks Project (2022): #11 - 2016-17 Stephen Curry

[ardee]

1. 1977 Bill Walton

Has everyone forgotten about him? In 1977 and 1978, here's the Blazers' record with and without him:

1977 Walton healthy: 44-21
1977 Walton hurt: 5-12

1978 Walton healthy: 48-10
1978 Walton hurt: 10-14

74.7% win rate while he's healthy, and 36.5% while he's hurt. And that's over a pretty big sample size.

Quite honestly I see him on a similar level to Russell, whom I have at 9. Just incredible defensive impact, if you watch the Finals against the Sixers he has the defensive equivalent of a scorer having a 20 point quarter. The commentators were freaking out and screaming "they cannot find a way to score on Bill Walton!"

I think him and Steph are pretty debatable.

2. 2017 Steph Curry (HM: 2016, 2021)

As Doctor MJ said, Curry's play from 2015 onward has basically reshaped the NBA. For someone to have that big of an influence on how other teams play, he's got to be a special player.

In a lot of ways the evidence for this was already there though I think 2021 and 2022 helped a lot of us see him in a different light. Some of the stuff Doctor MJ has posted, in particular the fact that from 2017-19 Curry led the Warriors to a better record when Durant WASN'T playing than when both of them were playing, is really something.

I will say that he likely suffers from not having his best RSes and PSes line up in the same year. As others have said, if you combined his 2016 RS+2017 PS or the 2021 RS+2022 PS, he'd be a top 5 contender. Hell, even if he just didn't have that 2 month cold streak this year I still think he'd be higher. I think 2017 is the pick here because despite his raw stats falling the impact stats show his 2017 RS wasn't that much worse than 2016 (+17.2 On/Off on an 11.35 SRS team). We can put the production drop partly down to incorporating Durant into the system, and the rest is made up for by the better Playoff performance.

Overall I honestly do think 2021 was his peak ability wise, but it's hard to vote for a season without a Playoff appearance.

3. 2008 Kobe Bryant (HM: 2006)

I've spoken about Kobe's raw impact quite a bit in different threads. In this season specifically, he led the Lakers to a 7.34 SRS with just 27 games of Pau and 35 games of Bynum. Odom was the only other player on that team who could generate much of his own offense. The rest of the rotation consisting of Fisher, Vladimir Radmanovic, Farmar, Vujacic and Turiaf doesn't exactly scream a 7.3 SRS cast.

On top of that, he put together a Jordan-esque Playoff run. 32-6-6 on 60% TS against 3 50 win teams in the Western conference, including a 6.9 SRS Jazz team and a -5.7 defensively Spurs team. His Finals weren't anything to write home about but honestly were not any worse than Jordan against similarly good defensive teams (the '93 Knicks for example).

Wade is likely the next spot down for me.

[LukaTheGOAT]

1. 1977 Bill Walton

Has everyone forgotten about him? In 1977 and 1978, here's the Blazers' record with and without him:

1977 Walton healthy: 44-21
1977 Walton hurt: 5-12

1978 Walton healthy: 48-10
1978 Walton hurt: 10-14

74.7% win rate while he's healthy, and 36.5% while he's hurt. And that's over a pretty big sample size.

Quite honestly I see him on a similar level to Russell, whom I have at 9. Just incredible defensive impact, if you watch the Finals against the Sixers he has the defensive equivalent of a scorer having a 20 point quarter. The commentators were freaking out and screaming "they cannot find a way to score on Bill Walton!"

I think him and Steph are pretty debatable.

2. 2017 Steph Curry (HM: 2016, 2021)

As Doctor MJ said, Curry's play from 2015 onward has basically reshaped the NBA. For someone to have that big of an influence on how other teams play, he's got to be a special player.

In a lot of ways the evidence for this was already there though I think 2021 and 2022 helped a lot of us see him in a different light. Some of the stuff Doctor MJ has posted, in particular the fact that from 2017-19 Curry led the Warriors to a better record when Durant WASN'T playing than when both of them were playing, is really something.

I will say that he likely suffers from not having his best RSes and PSes line up in the same year. As others have said, if you combined his 2016 RS+2017 PS or the 2021 RS+2022 PS, he'd be a top 5 contender. Hell, even if he just didn't have that 2 month cold streak this year I still think he'd be higher. I think 2017 is the pick here because despite his raw stats falling the impact stats show his 2017 RS wasn't that much worse than 2016 (+17.2 On/Off on an 11.35 SRS team). We can put the production drop partly down to incorporating Durant into the system, and the rest is made up for by the better Playoff performance.

Overall I honestly do think 2021 was his peak ability wise, but it's hard to vote for a season without a Playoff appearance.

3. 2008 Kobe Bryant (HM: 2006)

I've spoken about Kobe's raw impact quite a bit in different threads. In this season specifically, he led the Lakers to a 7.34 SRS with just 27 games of Pau and 35 games of Bynum. Odom was the only other player on that team who could generate much of his own offense. The rest of the rotation consisting of Fisher, Vladimir Radmanovic, Farmar, Vujacic and Turiaf doesn't exactly scream a 7.3 SRS cast.

On top of that, he put together a Jordan-esque Playoff run. 32-6-6 on 60% TS against 3 50 win teams in the Western conference, including a 6.9 SRS Jazz team and a -5.7 defensively Spurs team. His Finals weren't anything to write home about but honestly were not any worse than Jordan against similarly good defensive teams (the '93 Knicks for example).

Wade is likely the next spot down for me.

1978 Walton produced the best WOWY score of all-time too.

[Doctor MJ]

1. 1977 Bill Walton

Has everyone forgotten about him? In 1977 and 1978, here's the Blazers' record with and without him:

1977 Walton healthy: 44-21
1977 Walton hurt: 5-12

1978 Walton healthy: 48-10
1978 Walton hurt: 10-14

74.7% win rate while he's healthy, and 36.5% while he's hurt. And that's over a pretty big sample size.

Quite honestly I see him on a similar level to Russell, whom I have at 9. Just incredible defensive impact, if you watch the Finals against the Sixers he has the defensive equivalent of a scorer having a 20 point quarter. The commentators were freaking out and screaming "they cannot find a way to score on Bill Walton!"

I think him and Steph are pretty debatable.

Love that you're bringing him up. I haven't forgotten about him, and I think you can make an argument he should have gone in long ago. To me the Kareem vs Walton argument is not open and shut.

I suppose though I wasn't looking to try to argue for him before Giannis among the bigs. Again not saying the case is open and shut Giannis > Walton, but Giannis has a really solid case and I suppose I'd just be really surprised if many people put Walton with his limited minutes even in his biggest seasons, ahead of him.

[Doctor MJ]

Now it's true that the ABA did have some talent, as people have mentioned. But when the ABA and NBA merged, Erving's production took a clear drop. Erving almost looks better in 1982/1983 than he did in 1977-1979. Is there any context that I'm missing? I'd love to hear from Erving fans, since I'm far from a Dr. J expert!

I will say that in the playoffs from '77-'79(really on the higher end of star PS production rises), Erving's production rose but it was still nowhere rly near as good as 1976- they also weren't as dependent on him as the 76 Nets were i'd say. In 1977 he basically led them to the finals as McGinnis was pretty much dead weight that run but the team wasn't especially dominant.

I think part of the bad adjustment was the lack of three point line spacing in the NBA, and part of it were strange fits around Julius. Those teams would sometimes run double centers like Caldwell Jones and Darryl Dawkins together, George McGinnis was an awful fit alonfside Julius as they wanted to do many similar things, and World B. Free's ball dominance did not help either, they all crticized for some of these decisions. Some of those decisions helped the defense but the offense was just not optimizing him(could possibly be an argument against his portability cuz it wasn't like they were terrible offensive casts.
https://vault.si.com/vault/1977/03/21/good-but-why-not-the-best

Another problem was Julius having shaky knees throughout his career and he looked pretty reguvenated because of that, and the addition of a 3 point line by 1980:
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/09/21/archives/ervings-kness-pass-first-court-test-dr-j-back-knees-pass-court-test.html

There are only like 4 ABA(from 74 to 76) Julius games available on YouTube but he really did not look all THAT different than he did in the NBA playoff games immediately after to me as if he went from randomly dropping from an all-time peak to an all-nba ish level player in one year, part of me feels im either overrating ABA Julius or underrating what NBA Julius would be in a vacuum due to the bad fit and inconsistent role year to year(some years being very dependent on his scoring and other years utilizing him more like an all-around specialist), because by 1976 the ABA wasn't too far off the NBA in player quality.

The WOWY indicators are what give me the most concerns, he looks far more inconsistent year to year than other all-timers in on/off data for the NBA. Some years looking strong and other years having a...negative on/off?

Julius Erving On Court + On/Off by year

77: (+5.2/+6)
78: (+4.9/+0.6)
79: (+1.7/-0.1)
80: (+4.9/+3)
81: (+5.7/-6.7)
82: (+8.6/+10)
83: (+11.4/+10.3)
84:(3.6/+4.4)
85: (+2.9/-3.2)
86:(+4.1/+4.6)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZxRM9p2dFil5w6s21VEB4HnQZJymEY8_2vej-jREuUo/edit?usp=drivesdk

Now these are heavily influenced by fit and utilization, and he also rose in production in the playoffs. We also do not have this data for the ABA when many people have him on their ballots for exclusively what he did relative to ABA competition.

We also don't have more lineup/rotation data to really see why this is happening(one thing I see is how Bobby looks very strong as a replacement in these coming off the bench so I wonder if that factored in to it a bit because of the lineups they faced), it still looks kinda unimpressive to me even factoring these in but idk how much value should be placed into these for a ranking with all that information missing. I hope someone else defending Julius right now could answer those for me.

Glad you're bringing this up. As someone who named himself on these boards after Erving, I came in a strong supporter of Erving and I've become less and less so - from a player value ranking perspective - with time. This was true before we saw his 76er +/- data already to some degree, but I have to admit being pretty shocked by how little Erving stood out here.

It has been speculated that it's possible that having a player as unusual as Bobby Jones may cause raw on/off data to look pretty strange. Jones was speculated as potentially a huge per minute impact guy before we saw the data, and the data seems to have bared that out. If the 76er rotation was such that Erving & Jones were significantly staggered in their minutes, it's possible that what's happening is that we're not getting a number for Erving that represents anything at all like the off replacements for other players.

That wouldn't explain everything though. Erving's on/off looked pretty pedestrian in the first two years in Philly before they got Jones.

And yet, I remain convinced that Erving's impact in the ABA was truly exceptional, and I think the dropoff the Nets had with his departure backs that up.

In the end, I'm left feeling like Erving needs to be seen as someone capable of great impact, but not of his own adaptation. He was someone who did his thing, and if you had the right fit around him you resonated with what he was doing. If not, the level you achieved with him wasn't something so high that you couldn't do something similar with a quality team effort.

I might draw analogy to Kawhi's defense toward the end of his time on the Spurs. While his focus on defense had started to wane at this point, there was still no doubt that he was a terrifying man defender that opponents looked to avoid. But while this led to good defense by normal standards, the entire team ran like a defensive machine knowing just what to do to work in the scheme Pop told them to run, and it made the everyday defensive impact of Kawhi a bit murky.

[letskissbro]

1. 2004 Kevin Garnett
(2003)

Spoiler:

KG is arguably the most ahead of his time player ever and I think that peaking in the most defensive environment in NBA history on a team practically void of talent suppressed his raw box score numbers and his all-around game, and has led to him becoming underrated even on this board. Because he was the lone offensive threat on his team most of the time he was forced to take more low percentage shots than other stars when he could've been mixing his midrange game with playing closer to the basket and rolling to the rim. I don't want to unfairly assign guys new attributes based on speculation but it isn't hard to believe that with better coaching he'd be taking more 3s instead of foot on the line-2s which would've been a huge boost to his efficiency.

I'm a really big fan of his IQ and all-around skillset. Versatility is what I value the most in basketball and KG was probably the #2 most versatile player ever. He was an elite passer, midrange shooter, and one of the 5 or so best defenders ever. He's maybe the most switchable, low mistake defender ever and he quarterbacked his teams by calling out rotations, an extremely underrated value-add. He essentially combined the best attributes of a stretch big and a wing, two of the most valuable role player archetypes in the modern game, resulting in a matchup proof player who I think has the best intangibles ever. This bears out in his impact stats where 04 is pretty unanimously a top 3 season on record and he's 2nd only to LeBron in career RAPM in the 21st century.

In the postseason where he catches a lot of flack for dropping off, his numbers remained elite and again, 2nd to only LeBron, indicating the enormous value of these intangibles. In fact by RAPM he actually improved, and that's with him missing the playoffs during what should've been the best years of his career.

https://public.tableau.com/views/PostseasonRAPM1997-2021/PostseasonRAPM1997-2021?%3Aembed=y&%3AshowVizHome=no#2

Even if this drop off is as significant as his raw box score numbers suggest, I'm less inclined to penalize him for it as I am guys like Steph Curry or Karl Malone, as he brings much more to the table in other areas of the game. Really he shouldn't even be asked to be the offensive engine anyways and would be best suited playing an offensive #2, defensive #1 type role where his resiliency would improve.

In an optimized NBA I have 0 doubt about his impact translating whereas I don't know if guys like Duncan or Shaq would've been as effective, offensively and defensively. I actually think KG should've been on here a long time ago but as much as this board might like to think it's above winning bias, I think there's a clear case of it being shown in this project.

2. 1995 David Robinson
(1994, 1996)

Spoiler:

Was undecided between a few guys here but decided to lock this one in. Follows a similar plane of logic as KG. Monster 2-way impact and some of the best APM numbers ever. The difference is that KG's skillset is better for playing 2nd option on offense. There are question marks surrounding his postseason resilience but post-prime, when he moved to playing 1B to Duncan, his monster impact translated into the playoffs. Had he played with Ginobili and Parker in his prime I doubt that the results would be that much worse if at all than what the Spurs achieved with Duncan.

3. 2016 Steph Curry

Will elaborate later on.

[capfan33]

I am typing up a response to your other questions but I wanted to ask about this real quick. From the data i've looked at, Kobe has a very consistent edge in APM data looking at multi year stretches(Kobe looking like a >+5/g player for the entire 06-10 stretch and KD never hitting a +5 aside from in 2016 where he hit a +6.3 - higher than any Kobe mark), while KD has a consistent, large edge when looking at box metrics and box +/- hybrid metrics in the regular season. Though in the playoffs Kobe then gains a small lead in hybrid metrics over his prime.

Is this accurate based on your findings? How did you decide to balance them? I found it surprising you concluded they suggest KD=>Kobe rather than Kobe=>KD when i'm assuming you believe the former should have more value in larger samples at least but maybe i'm doing some weird nitpicking lol

I suspect if you take out the Golden State years Kobe would have a clear cut advantage in the playoffs even though that may be my personal bias shining through. I generally would feel more comfortable with Kobe in the playoffs than KD even if Kobe may not have quite the ceiling KD has.

More than scoring efficiency where at absolute worst durant may be similar in the playoffs to kobe in comparable circunstances

I think is passing that gives kobe an advantage here

For sure, the point I was making really was that KD consistently dropped in the playoffs in OKC which is somewhat masked by his GS years. But yea, Kobe's playmaking, ballhandling and decision-making are the reasons I favor him over KD, not as much scoring.

[falcolombardi]

1. 1977 Bill Walton

Has everyone forgotten about him? In 1977 and 1978, here's the Blazers' record with and without him:

1977 Walton healthy: 44-21
1977 Walton hurt: 5-12

1978 Walton healthy: 48-10
1978 Walton hurt: 10-14

74.7% win rate while he's healthy, and 36.5% while he's hurt. And that's over a pretty big sample size.

Quite honestly I see him on a similar level to Russell, whom I have at 9. Just incredible defensive impact, if you watch the Finals against the Sixers he has the defensive equivalent of a scorer having a 20 point quarter. The commentators were freaking out and screaming "they cannot find a way to score on Bill Walton!"

I think him and Steph are pretty debatable.

Love that you're bringing him up. I haven't forgotten about him, and I think you can make an argument he should have gone in long ago. To me the Kareem vs Walton argument is not open and shut.

I suppose though I wasn't looking to try to argue for him before Giannis among the bigs. Again not saying the case is open and shut Giannis > Walton, but Giannis has a really solid case and I suppose I'd just be really surprised if many people put Walton with his limited minutes even in his biggest seasons, ahead of him.

My issue with walton is fragility, even in 77 he missed a bunch of games. Is why i probably will put robinson above him even if walton offensive skillsrt is more valuable in a playoffs setting

[MyUniBroDavis]

#1.) Oscar Robertson (Pick a year) -> Triple Double Machine.

#2.) 1995 David Robinson

#3.) 2017 Stephen Curry

Hi mdonnelly1989, glad to see you joining the conversation Just so you know, I think you need to have at least 1 sentence of reasoning for each player, so you might want to add some details/explanation to get your vote counted!

____________
Since Garnett Curry and Giannis were the top 3 in the last thread, let me compare them!

Here's Garnett vs Giannis vs Curry by the stats:

Spoiler:

Plus minus data
Ai. AuPM: 16/17 Curry > 04 Garnett > 19/20/21 Giannis
Aii. Postseason AuPM: 17 Curry > 04 Garnett > 21 Giannis
Bi. Goldstein RAPM: Garnett > Curry > Giannis
Bii. Goldstein RS/Playoff PIPM: Curry > Garnett > Giannis
C. Fivethirtyeight’s Overall RAPTOR +/-: Curry >> Giannis. Note: this is a per 75 stat. If we do per season volume, Curry rise and KD rise, but per season Raptor rewards long playoff runs.
 No Garnett Numbers
D. Bball-Index’s LEBRON: (19/20 Regular Season Giannis) > Curry > (21/22 Giannis) (no Garnett numbers)
E. DARKO: Curry > Giannis (no Garnett Numbers)
F. WOWY: Curry >> Garnett (No Giannis numbers)
G. Additional plus minus stats: ESPN’s RPM: Curry > Giannis > Garnett
H. Additional plus minus stats: Backpicks’ CORP evaluation: Curry > Garnett > Giannis


Box score-based data
Ii. Backpicks BPM: Curry >> Giannis > Garnett
Iii. Postseason Backpicks BPM: Curry > Giannis > Garnett
Ji. BR’s BPM: Curry > Giannis > Garnett
Jii. BR’s Postseason BPM: Giannis > Curry > Garnett

The data supports: Curry >> KG and Giannis.
16/17 Curry is clearly over 21/22 Giannis by the data: Curry beats Giannis in 12/13 of the all-in-one metrics we have.
16/17 Curry is clearly over 04 Garnett by the data: Curry beats Garnett in 10/11 of the all-in-one metrics we have.

We discussed this last time, but I wanted to bring it up again incase anyone wanted to join the conversation. Happy to discuss more if people have more comments!
Resilience Concerns for Giannis: tl;dr 1) Massive scoring decline, particularly an efficiency decline in midrange/free throw/3 point shooting. 2) Giannis doesn't improve enough in his best series compared to Curry. 3) Despite offensive improvement in 21/22, he still declines more against better defenses than other peaks, likely because they can take away his rim attempts. 4) Personally, I don't see the defense as enough to make up for the offensive drop.

1) Scoring Decline: In literally every prime playoff, Giannis has had a scoring decline, and scoring is his best offensive trait:
in 2019 playoffs: Massive drop in scoring (-2.2 pts/75 drop, -6.8% rTS efficiency drop)
in 2020 playoffs: Drop in scoring (-2.2 pts/75 drop, -1.4% rTS efficiency drop)
in 2021 playoffs: Drop in scoring (-0.5 pts/75 drop, -3.3% rTS efficiency drop)
in 2022 playoffs: Massive drop in scoring (-1.3 pts/75 drop, -6.8% rTS efficiency drop)

There's a clear shooting decline from the free throw line, long midrange, and 3 point line, and a rim-scoring decline against tougher defenses Giannis has declined in Free Throw percentage in literally every playoff run, at an average of -9.2%. Why? Here's my hypothesis: Certain high-motor players (e.g. Westbrook) show a 3 point / free throw decline if they're exerting extra offensive / defensive energy and don't get the chance to calm down before taking the shot. This might be true for Giannis. Let's say, entirely hypothetically of course, in Giannis' best playoff run the fans were counting down his Free Throw shooting to make sure he got it off on time... that might cause a decline in shooting, not that something like that would ever happen

2) Giannis doesn't improve enough in his best series: In the last thread, people mentioned Giannis improves vs Curry in Giannis best playoff series. Maybe he does! But is it enough?

2017 Curry's 2 best series: 28.3 pts/75, +13.0 rTS%, 4.32 ScoreVal. 7.1 ast/75, 10.9 Box Creation, 2.0 PlayVal. 9.4 AuPM, 9.2 BPM
2021 Giannis' 2 best series: 31.6 pts/75, +5.9 rTS%, 2.50 ScoreVal. 4 ast/75, 7.7 Box Creation, 1.2 PlayVal. 6.3 AuPM, 6.5 BPM

Of course Giannis has the defensive advantage, but the offense is a landslide in Curry's favor, and the all-in-one metrics are too. You might argue the defense doesn't get captured in the all-in-one metrics, but AuPM/BPM also underrate Curry's off-ball impact/off-ball creation.

Curry wins in literally every one of these stats if we compare their performance vs the 19 Raptors.

3) Despite improvements, 21/22 still loses more against top defenses than other Peaks. Does Giannis' offense and resilience improve in 21/22? Sure! For example, the scheme has changed to have Giannis more off-ball and with more spacing around him. But... he still doesn't show great resilience.

Well, let's look at his offensive peak in 21/22 playoffs:
-Against bottom 10 defenses (21 Nets, 21 Hawks, 22 Bulls): -0.0 ScoreVal, -0.1 pts75, -1.5 rTS%
-Against other top 10 defenses (21 Miami, 21 Suns, not including 22 Celtics): +0.1 Scoreval, -0.2 pts/75, -4.5 rTS%
-Against all Top 10 defenses (21 Miami, 21 Suns, 22 Celtics): -1.1 ScoreVal, -0.5 pts/75, -6.9 rTS%
So Giannis has shows small decline in volume and efficiency against bad defenses, a large decline in efficiency against top defenses even if we don't include the Celtics, and an all-time decline in efficiency if we don't filter out the Celtics. Here's my hypothesis: Giannis' ranged shooting (midrange/free throw/3 point shooting) gets worse in the playoffs, possibly due to increased effort/motor on both ends, regardless of opponent. The greater scoring dip against better defenses is because better defenses can better take away his rim attempts in the half court. It's worth noting that the Bucks as a whole also show a greater decline against better teams than other Greatest Peak players' teams, so I tend to think Giannis' resilience disadvantage does impact team results. Question for people: Are we sure we're not biased for Giannis' resilience just because of a single playoff series vs Suns?

4) Defense: I'm also unconvinced that the defense is enough to make up for it. There's two factors that people have argued against in this thread:
-Does Giannis play in a worse era for defense? This is absolutely true! And his defense would definitely improve in a worse era (though I tend to think his offense would decline). But like Doctor MJ has said, Garnett and Russell are certainly at least at the same level of defensive athleticism, while they're vastly superior mentally. I tend to give them the nod. Hakeem might have less mobility than Giannis (not sure about who's smarter -- open for suggestions!), but Hakeem is the superior man defender and rim protector. Adjusting for era isn't quite enough to put Giannis in that top tier of defenders, to me at least.
-In 2021/2022, was he coasting? 2020 was certainly his best regular season defense. Let's grant that he was just coasting in 2021 and 2022. I do see a slight decline in motor and athleticism, but let's say he makes up for it with better BBIQ. Well, if people aren't downgrading 21 Giannis for coasting in the regular season, I hope they're consistent with other players who showed less regular season value and improved in the playoffs.

Giannis vs Garnett:
Peak Garnett and Giannis are far closer. They're tied 5-5 in the stats I had above. Interestingly, Giannis wins all 4 box metrics and ESPN's RPM, while Garnett wins every other stat based on plus minus data (AuPM, PS AuPM, RAPM, PS PIPM, CORP). To me, this is likely because Garnett has more defensive value that doesn't get captured in the box score than Giannis.

So let's consider some contextual factors.
Scalability: Garnett > Giannis. He's a far better shooter and spacer, passer, general facilitator, and overall off-ball player (though Giannis has gotten better off-ball over the years, which is lovely to see! )

Resilience: I've argued both Garnett and Giannis have resilience issues. I definitely don't think any player has an extreme advantage here. In 2008, with a good fitting team, Garnett did show better resilience than Giannis has shown in my opinion, but Garnett didn't show it at his peak. Let's call it a tie, but I certainly don't think Giannis has the clear advantage here.

Health: Not much of a factor. Garnett was slightly healthier throughout his prime, but in 2021 Giannis wasn't too impacted by injury (credit to him! very glad his finals weren't impacted )

Defense missing in the stats: Garnett > Giannis. Giannis definitely had more impact in his own era, and I'm skeptical Giannis would be a better defender than Garnett in either era (though he would improve back in the 2000s!). Garnett's' bigger boost from the box-stats to the plus-minus stats adds credence that his defensive impact is bigger.

Team Fit limiting stats/success: Garnett > Giannis. The 2021 Bucks were certainly a better built team than Garnett's 2004 team. Garnett was definitely more limited by a poor situation.

Time machine: Garnett > Giannis. I'd say Garnett improves more today: his horizontal defense is GOAT-level, and his passing and spacing would be even more valuable. Meanwhile, Giannis' defense would improve in the past, but with stricter dribbling rules and less spacing in the half-court, I'm worried he'd be facing "build a wall" defenses more often.

Anyway, that's why I personally have Curry > Garnett > Giannis. To be clear: I love Giannis' peak, and I definitely think it has an argument for top 20. His athleticism is great, and those transition and defensive highlights are something to behold. But I just can't see Giannis over Garnett or especially Curry. Let me know where y'all disagree!

I wanted to get a more in depth reply since I think you do bring up valid points

Is there PIPM for 2021? I thought it was bought out at the end of 2020. I’d be suprised if Giannis’s Regular season PIPM in 2020 wasn’t impressive

In any case, all in one metrics for singular playoff runs especially are very noisy, but in any case I think giannis’s 2021 case revolves around his playoff performance rather than his regular season performance.

I might’ve missed your reply, so I’ll reiterate in more detail I guess

I think what’s important is there’s a difference between pointing out a players effeciency as a concern for the level of performance vs a concern for a tangible issue.

I think you’re approaching this from the second perspective, as that Giannis’s game gets clearly worse in the playoffs, but again I don’t think putting 2019 and 2020 in the same lines as 2021 and 2022 makes much sense to me.


In 2019 and 2020 there were clear tangible process struggles, while in 2022 it was far more a situation of increased volume/role + a bad matchup, whereas in 2021 it was more so noise.
I’m confident in this statement because when diving deeper into a “what went wrong” perspective the issues in the 2019 and 2020 playoffs end up far differently vs the 2021 and 2022 runs, which matches the perception we had at the time as well

Has Westbrook shown this ft decline btw decline?

On one hand, giannis’s ft shooting in the playoffs has clearly been an issue. I will admit I personally think this is noise related, and the hypothesis that a more tired giannis shoots worse from the ft line seems a bit far fetched, in the series where his load was the biggest he ended up with the same ft% as the series prior.

In any case, I think offensively giannis has shown he can be a high impact player regardless of if he is a 60% ft shooter like he was in 2020 (where RAPM, LARAPM, and LEBRON give him an all time great peak).

His three point shooting has only been an issue in his past two playoff runs, it’s hard to think of it as anything other than noise given this isn’t a reoccurring trend.

More importantly though giannis did have clear tangible issues in scoring in the playoffs, in the sense that in specific series the “bread and butter” of his game, one way or another, was heavily limited without it being made up for in other ways.

They then switched to a 4 out 1 in system and combined with his growth, that bread and butter of his offense remained effective throughout the 2021 run, whereas vs the Celtics it was clearly a situation of far increased load and volume + a really difficult matchup.

While I’m a bit more open to the idea that his ft shooting is worse in the playoffs for whatever reason, when it comes to the idea that he suddenly became unable to shoot threes in the playoffs the past two years versus it simply being noise, I’m more inclined to believe the latter. In any case more effort doesn’t explain why this only occurred in the past two years, and defenses closing out harder would be odd considering that’s a shot you want him to take

Again breaking it down by his inside the arc scoring, where we see a clear consistent issue in 2019 and 2020, in 2021 we don’t really see that trend in the same way contextually, and in 2022 there’s a huge increase in his load that makes it fairly reasonable

The idea that he had tangible issues in his playoff scoring reseliency in the roles he had 2019 and 2020 are extremely valid, because we saw large issues in specific series.

His rts drops in 2021 and 2022 make it almost seem as if he had larger issues offensively those years, but I think anyone who followed the 2019 and 2020 runs vs rhe 2021 and 2022 runs know that simply isn’t the case

With his 2019 and 2020 runs, it wasn’t simply just his scoring effeciency dropped, there were just so many possessions where he was stopped completely or the offense just died. As a system the bucks offense simply failed with giannis on the floor those two years. Offensive performance is more than simply

Beyond that though, we have a situation where thete

In 2021 this wasn’t really the case at all.

In 2022, it was a case of a bad matchup. I think earlier you mentioned currys performance vs that same Celtics team, and that defensive adjustments and matchups shouldn’t be able to account for that gap.

On one hand, that Celtics team was incredible well equipped to guard giannis, for the majority of the time the worst matchup against Giannis was Tatum!

In the other hand, the Celtics ran drop coverage against Curry for 4/6 games, they’d switch things up in the fourth in many of those games and we’d see a pretty drastic change.

This isn’t to take away from currys finals performance, it was absolutely an ATG finals performance and his best one ever, but I don’t think those two situations are comparable. At the end of the day a teams defensive ability =/= their defensive performance in a given series, joe Harris going 1/25 from three in a 7 game series is a poor shooter, the Celtics dropping on Curry and only having one defender that’s good at chasing guys around screens in white (whose really good at that, so Curry being able to still score on him is impressive) is hardly similar at all to them being able to go beyond a wall and construct a fortress against giannis.

Back to 2021 specifically, his drop in scoring can mostly be accounted for by the Miami heat series. It’s hard to take seriously a 4 game sweep where 3/4 games ended in a blowout, as a damning series to him.

More so than that, I think I would take that series more seriously if it was a situation where he continuosly showed an inability for “his game” to work as it did vs the raptors in 2019 for example

However, it just seems more apparent to me this was a situation where he had a poor game 1, and shot poorly from three, and simply didn’t force the issue in games they were winning by 20-30 points.

In any sense, lets look at his low effeciency series from each year, in terms of his scoring inside the arc

2019 vs raptors
6/13
9/16
2/13
8/14
7/15
5/13

2020 vs Miami
4/7
9/17
7/14
7/9 (injury)

2021 vs Miami
10/24
11/16
6/10
8/14 (15 assists)

2022 vs celtics
9/23
10/23
15/24
14/28
14/22
12/27
9/22

To me, these situations are clearly different, at least from 2019, but even from 2020 it seemed like he was being stopped leading to late possession resets more so, and I think there’s a specific, although maybe he figured something out by the time he got hurt by that time their offense had concerns

For the 2021 Miami series, there really isn’t any issue outside of game 1 regarding his scoring inside of the arc, at least anything of concern. He was fantastic in g2 and 4 (considering his 15 assists on 2 turnovers) and faulting him for low volume in a 29 point win seems silly, I feel low volume scoring in large blowout wins doesnt matter much to me, because it’s essentially blaming players for not stat chasing when offense is working well

In 2022 we have a situation where volume got pushed up to the extreme along with a tough matchup.

I don’t think I would fault giannis for having a bad matchup to be honest. For example, there was a trend that Curry would struggle against switchy defenses when he went against Houston.

(Curry vs Houston).
25-6-6 2018 57.9TS 2018
24-5-5 2019 53.9TS 2019

I think it goes deeper than this and part of this comes with the issue I mentioned earlier of series stats vs individual games bringing it down, but I think it’s fair to say all players have bad matchups. That may not be so bad for other players.

As a whole though, I do think that the idea that giannis has offensive reseliency concerns might be supported by a broad look at the data, however when looking at it in more granular detail to me it seems apparent that there’s a shift from 2019 and 2020 vs 2021 and 2022

The idea that his offensive concerns come from his three point shot getting worse just seems really unreasonable to me, because it’s implying that he fixed his issues from 2019 and 2020 and somehow got a new one that’s completely unrelated to the new offense they run + logically makes no sense since giannis is someone you allow to take threes anyways. Just from a basketball perspective him simply being worse from the three point line for noise related issues makes far more sense than any sort of explanation on why a guy who you let shoot threes for some reason developed a new issue of being unable to shoot threes in the playoffs under a altered offensive system that allows for bigger driving lanes, if anything that should open up his three point shot.

Now in an absolute sense, it’s valid that his effeciency dropped a bit in the playoffs, even if it’s not a concern in terms of a skillset issue (the ft shooting might be a but valid even though it’s quite odd historically speaking, the three point shooting, it just doesn’t make sense logically for it to not be noise, especially since it’s an extremely recent trend that isn’t particularly caused by any different set of circumstance)

But he was still effecient as a whole in 2021 playoffs, and their offense as a whole was still quite effective (equal to his 2020 effeciency).

However, to be clear I’m not against giannis being less impactful offensively in the playoffs than in the RS. I think his defensive improvement in the playoffs more than makes up for it.

When we discuss the nets series as one of his best series, while I can sympathize with the idea that maybe his effeciency is overstated because of his poor ft shooting, I do think any of these discussions on the nets defence are kind of odd to me.

Giannis did absolutely dominate that series but had a really bad series from the line. Unless we’re arguing that the nets have a special defense that specifically turns giannis into a sub 50% ft shooter whereas he’s more a 60% ft shooter in the playoffs in general, I feel these conversations miss the point.

As a whole though I do think what misses the point for me is 2021 playoff giannis isn’t seen as in this tier because he was the best offensive and defensive player in the league, that would put him in argument for 1st place

For me his argument does 100% revolve around his defensive impact. The caveat is his regular season defensive impact isn’t too great post 2020, but I do think personally that’s due to coasting. The fact that the bucks defense is a league average one that has been the best playoff defense two years in a row, without even looking at their competition, with his defensive data looking great for that playoff run in particular relative to his other rotation teammates, I feel supports this

An evaluation of Giannis I think depends on how you view his playoff defense. If you think of it as the same as his RS defense it’s probably not deserving of a spot here at all, I wouldn’t put it above 2019 Kawhi with that in mind

Otoh, both 2019 and 2020 Giannis look really good defensively by a lot of metrics

In particular, 2020 RS Giannis to me does have the defensive profile of an historic ATG defender. I feel the teams results, his RAPM stuff we have (in standard deviations relative to his peers), contextually etc etc, all point to it being absolutely historic in that regard.

How historic can be debated I think, but as far as I know it looks like the most impressive defensive season ever by shotcharts NPI RAPM and shotcharts luck adjusted RAPM all things considered, although I’ve seen another data set that puts him as a clear but not outlier first place defensively.

Otoh, NPI RAPM in general while obviously very kind to them, doesn’t paint out seasons like 04 garnett and 03 Duncan as defensive outliers relative to their competition, 04 Garnett is 7th defensively in the engelman dataset. Even in PI rapm he’s third on D as in the middle I feel as a tier 1 defender

I feel there’s an assumption that Giannis simply isn’t a tier 1 defender, but that doesn’t seem to be the case to me. Giannis’s 2020 RS could be argued as on the same tier as Boston Garnett (and looks better in some ways).

Now it does depend much on where you view 2021 playoff Giannis defense vs 2019 and 2020 RS giannis defense

But I think if you err on the side of 2020, there’s nothing wrong with him being a tier 1 defender all time to me.

Again, he was the best defender on an all time great defensive team, that in 20 games without him with the same core were slightly better than average, and two different RAW impact metrics, shotcharts LA-RAPM and RAPM, basically put him at a tier on his own relative to his era other than maybe Boston Garnett (and even then he does look a lot more impressive in std dev I think) and that’s with collinearnity issues bringing him down.

I’ve been pretty consistent with Playoffs>>>>RS for dominant teams for me, it’s why Curry is so high for me as well.

I think if playoff giannis was as good offensively as let’s say, 2020 bubble AD, he’d be an absolute lock as a top 5 peak for me

We probably aren’t far apart in our evaluations of Giannis offensively, it’s probably more about the defense. I don’t really see how timberwolves Garnett was clearly better in era to 2020 Giannis on defense, and while I don’t think 2021 giannis’s playoff defense was quite on that level, (tracking data works but impact looks the same looking at his teammates especially), I do think that it’s a discussion

I think if you think 2021 playoff defense giannis = 2020 RS Giannis then Giannis being a tier above defensively is fair as well

[falcolombardi]

Now it's true that the ABA did have some talent, as people have mentioned. But when the ABA and NBA merged, Erving's production took a clear drop. Erving almost looks better in 1982/1983 than he did in 1977-1979. Is there any context that I'm missing? I'd love to hear from Erving fans, since I'm far from a Dr. J expert!

I will say that in the playoffs from '77-'79(really on the higher end of star PS production rises), Erving's production rose but it was still nowhere rly near as good as 1976- they also weren't as dependent on him as the 76 Nets were i'd say. In 1977 he basically led them to the finals as McGinnis was pretty much dead weight that run but the team wasn't especially dominant.

I think part of the bad adjustment was the lack of three point line spacing in the NBA, and part of it were strange fits around Julius. Those teams would sometimes run double centers like Caldwell Jones and Darryl Dawkins together, George McGinnis was an awful fit alonfside Julius as they wanted to do many similar things, and World B. Free's ball dominance did not help either, they all crticized for some of these decisions. Some of those decisions helped the defense but the offense was just not optimizing him(could possibly be an argument against his portability cuz it wasn't like they were terrible offensive casts.
https://vault.si.com/vault/1977/03/21/good-but-why-not-the-best

Another problem was Julius having shaky knees throughout his career and he looked pretty reguvenated because of that, and the addition of a 3 point line by 1980:
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/09/21/archives/ervings-kness-pass-first-court-test-dr-j-back-knees-pass-court-test.html

There are only like 4 ABA(from 74 to 76) Julius games available on YouTube but he really did not look all THAT different than he did in the NBA playoff games immediately after to me as if he went from randomly dropping from an all-time peak to an all-nba ish level player in one year, part of me feels im either overrating ABA Julius or underrating what NBA Julius would be in a vacuum due to the bad fit and inconsistent role year to year(some years being very dependent on his scoring and other years utilizing him more like an all-around specialist), because by 1976 the ABA wasn't too far off the NBA in player quality.

The WOWY indicators are what give me the most concerns, he looks far more inconsistent year to year than other all-timers in on/off data for the NBA. Some years looking strong and other years having a...negative on/off?

Julius Erving On Court + On/Off by year

77: (+5.2/+6)
78: (+4.9/+0.6)
79: (+1.7/-0.1)
80: (+4.9/+3)
81: (+5.7/-6.7)
82: (+8.6/+10)
83: (+11.4/+10.3)
84:(3.6/+4.4)
85: (+2.9/-3.2)
86:(+4.1/+4.6)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZxRM9p2dFil5w6s21VEB4HnQZJymEY8_2vej-jREuUo/edit?usp=drivesdk

Now these are heavily influenced by fit and utilization, and he also rose in production in the playoffs. We also do not have this data for the ABA when many people have him on their ballots for exclusively what he did relative to ABA competition.

We also don't have more lineup/rotation data to really see why this is happening(one thing I see is how Bobby looks very strong as a replacement in these coming off the bench so I wonder if that factored in to it a bit because of the lineups they faced), it still looks kinda unimpressive to me even factoring these in but idk how much value should be placed into these for a ranking with all that information missing. I hope someone else defending Julius right now could answer those for me.

Glad you're bringing this up. As someone who named himself on these boards after Erving, I came in a strong supporter of Erving and I've become less and less so - from a player value ranking perspective - with time. This was true before we saw his 76er +/- data already to some degree, but I have to admit being pretty shocked by how little Erving stood out here.

It has been speculated that it's possible that having a player as unusual as Bobby Jones may cause raw on/off data to look pretty strange. Jones was speculated as potentially a huge per minute impact guy before we saw the data, and the data seems to have bared that out. If the 76er rotation was such that Erving & Jones were significantly staggered in their minutes, it's possible that what's happening is that we're not getting a number for Erving that represents anything at all like the off replacements for other players.

That wouldn't explain everything though. Erving's on/off looked pretty pedestrian in the first two years in Philly before they got Jones.

And yet, I remain convinced that Erving's impact in the ABA was truly exceptional, and I think the dropoff the Nets had with his departure backs that up.

In the end, I'm left feeling like Erving needs to be seen as someone capable of great impact, but not of his own adaptation. He was someone who did his thing, and if you had the right fit around him you resonated with what he was doing. If not, the level you achieved with him wasn't something so high that you couldn't do something similar with a quality team effort.

I might draw analogy to Kawhi's defense toward the end of his time on the Spurs. While his focus on defense had started to wane at this point, there was still no doubt that he was a terrifying man defender that opponents looked to avoid. But while this led to good defense by normal standards, the entire team ran like a defensive machine knowing just what to do to work in the scheme Pop told them to run, and it made the everyday defensive impact of Kawhi a bit murky.

I forgot to ask you about this, but i feel even mpre convinced now green vs giannis defensively is much more of a diacussion tham people think

Warriors: reg sea/play-offs

2015: -4.2/-7.5
2016: -2.6/-4.5
2017 -4.8/ -6.9
2018 -1.0/-7.9
2019 -0.9/-2.0
Avg: -2.7/ -5.8

Now lets compare green led defenses to giannis led defenses

2019 -5.2/-8.9* (corrected)
2020 -7.7/-2.8
2021 -0.9/-6.7
2022 -0.2/ -7.4
Avg: -3.5/ -6.3

They stop being a good defense in regular season but so do green warriors, they have a higher regular season peak too and overall the have a -3.5 defense in reg season over a 4 year stretch

Warriors average defense in reg season over this stretch is -2.8 over a 5 year stretch

Giannis bucks 19-22 are better than green warriors 15-19 in reg season as well as in the playoffs

Is not fully apples to apples as is 4 vs 5 seasons. But there is no indication per team resulrs that warriors led defense by peak green are better than bucks giannos led defense

This in spite of giannis much, much greater offensive load and imo with comparable defensive talent around them

If bucks have a strong run defensively next season they will joinf duncan spurs, ewing knicks and garnett celtics for more dominant prolonged (5-year stretch) defensive runs ever outside russel

Essentially there is not any team level result that suggests green is in a level above giannis as defenders and that is with giannis taking a huge offensive load (relevant if what we are discussin is theorical highest level of defense they can play)

Bucks are a great year away of a historic 5-year run that may end up among the best of the post russel era in relative defensive rating. Including maybe the best postseason one over the robinson/duncam spurs

That seems like something noteworthy

Are we really sure is green and not giannis the best defender of this era?

Is not like the playoffa defensive results argumenr for green>gobert applies to giannis

Both had great defensive casts but giannis had the slightly better results even as he shouldered his team offense too

[DraymondGold]

-The data also suggests KD >= Kobe, but it's pretty close. KD has the scalability advantage, while Kobe is more resilient and I'd argue KD benefited from a better fitting team. Another tough choice.

I am typing up a response to your other questions but I wanted to ask about this real quick. From the data i've looked at, Kobe has a very consistent edge in APM data looking at multi year stretches(Kobe looking like a >+5/g player for the entire 06-10 stretch and KD never hitting a +5 aside from in 2016 where he hit a +6.3 - higher than any Kobe mark), while KD has a consistent, large edge when looking at box metrics and box +/- hybrid metrics in the regular season. Though in the playoffs Kobe then gains a small lead in hybrid metrics over his prime.

Is this accurate based on your findings? How did you decide to balance them? I found it surprising you concluded they suggest KD=>Kobe rather than Kobe=>KD when i'm assuming you believe the former should have more value in larger samples at least but maybe i'm doing some weird nitpicking lol

I suspect if you take out the Golden State years Kobe would have a clear cut advantage in the playoffs even though that may be my personal bias shining through. I generally would feel more comfortable with Kobe in the playoffs than KD even if Kobe may not have quite the ceiling KD has.

Thanks for the comments! I figured I'd do the stats for the next tier of players I have.

Without further ado, Here's the Stat Box for Curry, Garnett, Robinson, Giannis, Jokic, Durant, Kobe, Oscar, Walton, West:

Spoiler:

Qualifier: I was a bit looser with rankings this time... if A had a slightly better 1-year peak than B but a slightly worse 2-year peak, I said they're about equal using a ~ symbol. Parenthetical comments are given for players who are about equal to explain whether they have better 1 year or better 2 year. Maybe if I have time I can order each of the tier rankings.
Ai. AuPM: Jokic (best in 22, near-worst in 21) / Curry / KG / Robinson (better in 94 lower in 95) > KD / Giannis (better 22, lower 21) > Kobe
Aii. PS AuPM: Curry > Robinson (99) > KG (04) > Jokic (highest in 22 in this tier, lowest 2/3-year avg in this tier) ~ Kobe (lowest 08, highest 2 year avg) ~ KD (near highest 1 year avg, great warriors years, worst non-warriors) / Giannis (highest 1 year avg, drop other years)

Bi. RAPM: KG > Curry > Robinson > Kobe > Jokic > Giannis > KD
Bii. RS/PS PIPM: Curry (best 2 year avg and postseason-only) ~ KG ~ Robinson (best in 94, worse after) > Giannis ish ~ KD > Walton > Kobe > Jokic
D. WOWY: Curry > Robinson > Oscar > West > Kobe > KG > KD
E. ESPN’s RPM: Jokic > Curry > Giannis > KG > KD ~ Kobe (KD lower peak, higher other years)
F. CORP: Curry > KG > Robinson ~ Kobe ~ KD (Kobe > KD > Robinson after greatest peaks series, reverse before) > West > Oscar

Gi. BPM: Curry > 22 Jokic > 17 KD > Robinson (better 94, 95/96 worse) ~ Giannis (best non peak 19/20, tie 21 with 95/96) ~ KG (best peak year) > Kobe > Oscar > Walton > West
Gii. PS BPM: Curry / 17 KD > Kobe ~ Jokic ~ Giannis > Robinson ~ KG > Walton > Oscar > West

Ballpark Rank according to the data:
Tier 1 (great in all stats): Curry:
Tier 2 (good in almost all stats, better in more-trusted stats): KG ~ Robinson
Tier 3 (good in most stats, better in less-trusted stats): Giannis ~ Jokic >~ KD ~ Kobe
Tier 4 (incomplete data, less good in stats we have): Oscar ~ Walton ~ West

Tier 1: Curry. Top 2 in every stat. Best in all postseason-only numbers. No player beats him in more than 1 category.

Tier 2: KG/Robinson. Like I mentioned before, KG and Robinson are tied in stats they win. Both do better in the stats based on real plus minus data, which we tend to trust more as measuring real value. I think film analysis / context would be needed to argue which is better.

Tier 3: Giannis/Jokic/KD/Kobe.
-I've talked a lot about Giannis' stats, so I won't repeat here too much. He tends to do better in regular-season-only and box-score based stats compared to true plus/minus stars in the tiers above.
-Jokic in 2022 looks like he might be in Tier 1 or 2. Jokic before looks like he could be near the bottom of the group. I will say it's slightly concerning that, like Giannis, he tends to do better in box-score stats (BPM especially, and AuPM has box-inputs) compared to the real plus minus data (RAPM, PIPM). We'll see if he keeps this up in 2023 -- I wouldn't be shocked if he got ranked higher with more hindsight.
-KD, like y'all suggest, does much better in the Warriors years, particularly in box stats (BPM). His lower "true" plus minus ranking make me question whether he's benefiting more from Curry's playmaking than vice-versa. His stats are also a bit more inconsistent with what his peak year is; in some stats, 17 is a clear outlier; while in others, 16 or 14 peak ahead. His low RAPM (together without a high PIPM or WOWY) are concerning. Still, where KD gains is in portability and resilience (when paired with another playmaker / person to attract the defense).
-Kobe's interesting. I'm actually a bit surprised that the data has him lower. In general, KD clearly does better in his Warrior years and in the box stats. Kobe does a hair better than KD's non-Warriors years. For both BPM and AuPM, KD's ahead in both Warrior and non-Warrior years in the regular season, but KD's only ahead in the Warriors years in the playoffs. KD's also ahead in RS/PS PIPM in both Warrior and non-Warrior years. Kobe pulls ahead in RAPM and WOWY. KD's clearly ahead, but the question becomes how much did KD benefit from a better fit (I think the Warriors' playmaking helped KD more than vice versa). I see Kobe as more resilient (I think KD's resilience comes from playing with MVP playmakers), while KD's more scalable.
Casual "eye-test" fans tend to overrate Kobe. Casual "analytics" fans tend to underrate Kobe. More experienced fans probably find a compromise, but it'll be interesting to see his arguments vs KD, because KD does have the statistical advantage.

Tier 4 Oscar/Walton/West. Here, we're limited by a lack of data. The 3 older players are at the bottom in Backpicks BPM and Postseason BPM. In WS/48, they're all below Curry/Robinson/KD/Jokic/Giannis, though West beats Kobe/Walton and Oscar also beats KG. The two guards beat Kobe/KG/KD in WOWY. Within this tier: Oscar clearly wins over West in the stats, though the gap becomes less clear in the playoffs and West has the scalability/defense advantage that might be lost in the box-stats. Walton seems closer to West than Oscar by the stats. Of course, Walton also has the scalability/defensive advantage, so it's possible more wholistic stats (like RAPM/PIPM) would have shown Walton/West rising higher by capturing defense the box score just misses.

Comment on years:
-Robinson: According to the stats, 94 Robinson > 95 Robinson. Do we trust this? He didn't have a great postseason, so I imagine 95 proponents are making a resilience argument. Do we see playoff improvement from 94 to 95 to make it be worth taking over 94's regular season?
-KD: 14 doesn't look clearly best. 16 looks just as good as 14, and 17 is clearly the best (if we ignore context)
-Kobe: 08 is probably best. It wins in regular season BPM, RAPM, RS/PS PIPM. Still, 09 gets close in postseason BPM/AuPM, and i'd sooner take 09 than 06.
-West: 66 is probably best considering health, but I'd be open to taking other years (e.g. 68-70)

[DraymondGold]

1) Were the 83 76ers really as dominant as we remember? The 83 Philadelphia 76ers definitely had a great run. Personally though, I have them clearly as the least dominant team in that chart. Yes, they did win a lot of games. But their margin of victory is certainly not Top 6 Playoff Team of all Time level. Going by playoff SRS, they're 28th GOAT team. Now you might think this is underrating them (perhaps so!), but it's hard to imagine MOV is underrating them enough from them to go from 28th to Top 10 all time, at least to me.

yes, they won a lot of close games. but they won 65 regular season games and felt confident enough to predict "Fo Fo Fo" before the playoffs started and then almost did it. some teams seem to be able to live that low margin of victory life and don't just pack on points in easy games or in games they have won. some teams are the kind where they mess around but ultimately win when they get serious. maybe they could have cheap-shotted marques johnson or kicked junior bridgeman in the balls if they really wanted to win game 4 against milwaukee to keep their perfect record, but 12-1 will have to suffice. beating the lakers by +10 ppg makes it seem like they saw the finish line and put the hammer down.

Thanks for the comments! Yep, they were a good team to win 65 games. Don't mean to suggest otherwise! I just wouldn't put them in my top 10 most dominant teams ever.

I personally don't value "Fo fo fo" at all when measuring a team's value. It's an all-time epic quote to be sure! And it certainly made those playoffs have more enjoyable drama. It just doesn't make the team better. "A player says he's confident he can win... more news at 9"

2) Was Moses really the best player by that much? The stat that rates Moses Malone highest relative to his peers is PER, followed by WS/48, followed by BPM (which doesn't really have him better than the competition). I've been on record arguing in terms of accuracy: True Plus Minus Stats > Box Plus Minus > WS/48 > PER. Why? Well, PER is the least successful all-in-one metric at predicting the chances of winning future games.

one of the great things about the past is we don't have to predict anything. we can just check and see that the 76ers went 12-1 and had everybody thinking nobody else had a chance. unless the other 76ers have good reasons why they apparently could not put up stats to keep up with moses, then moses' performance stands out. from the regular season, his leads were only +2.0 PER and +0.031 WS48 and -2.8 BPM, behind 3 other guys. in other words, the playoffs started and he went to a whole other level and his teammates did not and it was good enough to dominate.

Sorry if I was unclear! By "predicting success", I meant there's less of a connection between having a good PER and having your team win than for other stats. Why does that matter? Well, it suggests PER is a worse measure at how much you're helping your team win than other stats.

So it's great if you won and had a dominant PER! But if you have a less dominant WS/48 (better stat than PER) and an even less dominant BPM (better stat than WS/48), it suggests you didn't actually help your team win as much as you might think if you just looked at PER.

Takeaway: it's great Moses had a great PER. But PER doesn't tell us how good Moses was compared to WS/48 or compared to BPM. So if he's worse in WS/48 or BPM, he's probably worse in reality. It's worth noting that he's also much worse than everyone else being discussed in WOWY, at a paltry +3.

-Offense: In terms of scoring, Moses was certainly the best on the team, but Andrew Toney and Julius Erving are definitely good 2nd and 3rd options on offense.

maybe normally, but they had a 49.6 TS% and 52.5 TS%, respectively in the playoffs. Dr. J fell off hard in these playoffs.

Good points! While I don't think Moses is a good enough peak to pick yet, he is plenty resilient, and maybe I overrated the offensive resilience of his teammates. Thanks for pointing this out!

The defensive point should (?) still stands though. The 76ers won many of their games with their defense as much as their offense, and to me at least, Moses is a step below the other defensive peaks we've considered. Perhaps that's where Moses got much of his support?

Erving Discussion!
Question for Erving voters: Are people concerned that when Erving joined a more competitive league immediately after his 1976 peak, his performance took a massive drop?

If we compare 1977/1978/1979 Erving with peak Curry, Garnett, Robinson, Kobe, KD, West, Oscar, Jokic, Giannis, and Moses:
-he's last in Augmented Plus Minus
-He's last in Backpicks' Box Plus Minus and Backpicks' Postseason Box Plus Minus
-He's last in Basketball Reference's Box Plus Minus (with a -6 BPM drop! from 76 to 77-79)
-He's last in regular season / postseason PIPM estimates
-He's 3rd to last in WOWY (just over KD and Moses)
-He shows a massive drop in WS/48, though I haven't compared the numbers yet
Now it's true that the ABA did have some talent, as people have mentioned. But when the ABA and NBA merged, Erving's production took a clear drop. Erving almost looks better in 1982/1983 than he did in 1977-1979. Is there any context that I'm missing? I'd love to hear from Erving fans, since I'm far from a Dr. J expert!

i looked at his numbers a few days ago also. it's really hard to figure out. his numbers fall off so much it seems like he couldn't hang with the nba. then 3 years later, his numbers shoot up to almost tops in the nba. his last 3 years in the ABA, he led in PER, WS48, and BPM. in years 4-6 in the nba, he led in PER one year, WS48 2 years, and BPM all 3 years. at ages 30-32! has to be one of the weirdest extended statistical dips and recoveries i've ever seen in sports. if you don't look at the 1976 peak, his playoff numbers from 77-79 in the nba don't look much different than his numbers in 73-75 in the aba, but the regular season drop is strange.

Thanks for the details! That is really odd. I love how much I'm learning through this project Given how much he dropped off when he faced expanded competition in the NBA, and given how he seemed to improve in the early 80s, what are your thoughts on saying Erving actually peaked in the early 80s instead of 76?

Is there PIPM for 2021? I thought it was bought out at the end of 2020. I’d be suprised if Giannis’s Regular season PIPM in 2020 wasn’t impressive

In any case, all in one metrics for singular playoff runs especially are very noisy, but in any case I think giannis’s 2021 case revolves around his playoff performance rather than his regular season performance.

...

Has Westbrook shown this ft decline btw decline?

Thanks for the very detailed reply MyUniBroDavis! Seriously, very informative. I don't quite have the chance to give a detailed response now, but I thought I'd quickly answer your 2 questions.

1) We do have composite numbers for 2021 Regular Season and Postseason! (though not postseason-only) Giannis' 21 composite PIPM is much worse than 20 and and 19, likely pulled down by the much worse regular season. 21 Giannis' PIPM is +5.03, which would be below Curry/Robinson/KG/Magic/KD/Walton, just over Kobe and 21 Jokic (no 22 numbers yet). If we take a 2ish-year average, he's still below the top Curry/Robinson/KG tier, but around same level as KD. [my previous post has more detailed stat rankings]. PIPM link here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1EIZvj_3-9SZULWomHz54V1CPL092j70u_0vUhoEEaIk/htmlview, see the database section.

2) Yep! Though I don't have the stats in front of me, I do recall people mentioning this in a film review. Westbrook used to have a much better free throw %, and some of this came from a much longer pre-shot routine (longer than was technically legal). He had to shorten his routine, and his percentage visibly declined! Too bad, I really enjoyed when he was efficient

I'll try to get to the rest of this when I have time. Good points all around!

[ardee]

1. 1977 Bill Walton

Has everyone forgotten about him? In 1977 and 1978, here's the Blazers' record with and without him:

1977 Walton healthy: 44-21
1977 Walton hurt: 5-12

1978 Walton healthy: 48-10
1978 Walton hurt: 10-14

74.7% win rate while he's healthy, and 36.5% while he's hurt. And that's over a pretty big sample size.

Quite honestly I see him on a similar level to Russell, whom I have at 9. Just incredible defensive impact, if you watch the Finals against the Sixers he has the defensive equivalent of a scorer having a 20 point quarter. The commentators were freaking out and screaming "they cannot find a way to score on Bill Walton!"

I think him and Steph are pretty debatable.

Love that you're bringing him up. I haven't forgotten about him, and I think you can make an argument he should have gone in long ago. To me the Kareem vs Walton argument is not open and shut.

I suppose though I wasn't looking to try to argue for him before Giannis among the bigs. Again not saying the case is open and shut Giannis > Walton, but Giannis has a really solid case and I suppose I'd just be really surprised if many people put Walton with his limited minutes even in his biggest seasons, ahead of him.

If I'm being honest with you, it takes a while for me to be comfortable ranking relatively newer guys over older legends. That's just how I view the game I guess. Even with Walton's limited sample size, the time that has elapsed since then ensures we have a very good grasp on his impact.

So with someone like Giannis, I'm just hesitant. I don't think that in 2009 anyone was saying LeBron just had the GOAT regular season. We said he was great, sure, but it took some time before we realized HOW great. So when I see guys like Giannis and Jokic shattering advanced stat records in the last few years I acknowledge that yeah they may actually be as good as the numbers suggest but it's going to take a bit for me to trust that's the case, moreso out of respect for the previous generations (I think this is what you were talking about with Curry).

Edit: also, what about Jokic vs Walton?

Jokic with his passing initially was basically a supercharged Walton offensively but in the last few years has gained a scoring game that IMO by itself should be comparable in impact to Walton's defense.

[ardee]

Random: does anyone else feel like there's no way to actually give every player the respect he deserves?

I remember doing a peaks project in 2012 for the first time and it felt kinda straightforward. Now, it's been 10 years since, and there have been so many amazing players since then who will likely definitely feature in the project (Durant, Curry, WB, Harden, Kawhi, Davis, Giannis, Jokic, Luka for starters), that it feels like no matter what someone is gonna get snubbed and look like he got a lower ranking than he deserved.

[MyUniBroDavis]

1) Were the 83 76ers really as dominant as we remember? The 83 Philadelphia 76ers definitely had a great run. Personally though, I have them clearly as the least dominant team in that chart. Yes, they did win a lot of games. But their margin of victory is certainly not Top 6 Playoff Team of all Time level. Going by playoff SRS, they're 28th GOAT team. Now you might think this is underrating them (perhaps so!), but it's hard to imagine MOV is underrating them enough from them to go from 28th to Top 10 all time, at least to me.

yes, they won a lot of close games. but they won 65 regular season games and felt confident enough to predict "Fo Fo Fo" before the playoffs started and then almost did it. some teams seem to be able to live that low margin of victory life and don't just pack on points in easy games or in games they have won. some teams are the kind where they mess around but ultimately win when they get serious. maybe they could have cheap-shotted marques johnson or kicked junior bridgeman in the balls if they really wanted to win game 4 against milwaukee to keep their perfect record, but 12-1 will have to suffice. beating the lakers by +10 ppg makes it seem like they saw the finish line and put the hammer down.

Thanks for the comments! Yep, they were a good team to win 65 games. Don't mean to suggest otherwise! I just wouldn't put them in my top 10 most dominant teams ever.

I personally don't value "Fo fo fo" at all when measuring a team's value. It's an all-time epic quote to be sure! And it certainly made those playoffs have more enjoyable drama. It just doesn't make the team better. "A player says he's confident he can win... more news at 9"

2) Was Moses really the best player by that much? The stat that rates Moses Malone highest relative to his peers is PER, followed by WS/48, followed by BPM (which doesn't really have him better than the competition). I've been on record arguing in terms of accuracy: True Plus Minus Stats > Box Plus Minus > WS/48 > PER. Why? Well, PER is the least successful all-in-one metric at predicting the chances of winning future games.

one of the great things about the past is we don't have to predict anything. we can just check and see that the 76ers went 12-1 and had everybody thinking nobody else had a chance. unless the other 76ers have good reasons why they apparently could not put up stats to keep up with moses, then moses' performance stands out. from the regular season, his leads were only +2.0 PER and +0.031 WS48 and -2.8 BPM, behind 3 other guys. in other words, the playoffs started and he went to a whole other level and his teammates did not and it was good enough to dominate.

Sorry if I was unclear! By "predicting success", I meant there's less of a connection between having a good PER and having your team win than for other stats. Why does that matter? Well, it suggests PER is a worse measure at how much you're helping your team win than other stats.

So it's great if you won and had a dominant PER! But if you have a less dominant WS/48 (better stat than PER) and an even less dominant BPM (better stat than WS/48), it suggests you didn't actually help your team win as much as you might think if you just looked at PER.

Takeaway: it's great Moses had a great PER. But PER doesn't tell us how good Moses was compared to WS/48 or compared to BPM. So if he's worse in WS/48 or BPM, he's probably worse in reality. It's worth noting that he's also much worse than everyone else being discussed in WOWY, at a paltry +3.

-Offense: In terms of scoring, Moses was certainly the best on the team, but Andrew Toney and Julius Erving are definitely good 2nd and 3rd options on offense.

maybe normally, but they had a 49.6 TS% and 52.5 TS%, respectively in the playoffs. Dr. J fell off hard in these playoffs.

Good points! While I don't think Moses is a good enough peak to pick yet, he is plenty resilient, and maybe I overrated the offensive resilience of his teammates. Thanks for pointing this out!

The defensive point should (?) still stands though. The 76ers won many of their games with their defense as much as their offense, and to me at least, Moses is a step below the other defensive peaks we've considered. Perhaps that's where Moses got much of his support?

Erving Discussion!
Question for Erving voters: Are people concerned that when Erving joined a more competitive league immediately after his 1976 peak, his performance took a massive drop?

If we compare 1977/1978/1979 Erving with peak Curry, Garnett, Robinson, Kobe, KD, West, Oscar, Jokic, Giannis, and Moses:
-he's last in Augmented Plus Minus
-He's last in Backpicks' Box Plus Minus and Backpicks' Postseason Box Plus Minus
-He's last in Basketball Reference's Box Plus Minus (with a -6 BPM drop! from 76 to 77-79)
-He's last in regular season / postseason PIPM estimates
-He's 3rd to last in WOWY (just over KD and Moses)
-He shows a massive drop in WS/48, though I haven't compared the numbers yet
Now it's true that the ABA did have some talent, as people have mentioned. But when the ABA and NBA merged, Erving's production took a clear drop. Erving almost looks better in 1982/1983 than he did in 1977-1979. Is there any context that I'm missing? I'd love to hear from Erving fans, since I'm far from a Dr. J expert!

i looked at his numbers a few days ago also. it's really hard to figure out. his numbers fall off so much it seems like he couldn't hang with the nba. then 3 years later, his numbers shoot up to almost tops in the nba. his last 3 years in the ABA, he led in PER, WS48, and BPM. in years 4-6 in the nba, he led in PER one year, WS48 2 years, and BPM all 3 years. at ages 30-32! has to be one of the weirdest extended statistical dips and recoveries i've ever seen in sports. if you don't look at the 1976 peak, his playoff numbers from 77-79 in the nba don't look much different than his numbers in 73-75 in the aba, but the regular season drop is strange.

Thanks for the details! That is really odd. I love how much I'm learning through this project Given how much he dropped off when he faced expanded competition in the NBA, and given how he seemed to improve in the early 80s, what are your thoughts on saying Erving actually peaked in the early 80s instead of 76?

Is there PIPM for 2021? I thought it was bought out at the end of 2020. I’d be suprised if Giannis’s Regular season PIPM in 2020 wasn’t impressive

In any case, all in one metrics for singular playoff runs especially are very noisy, but in any case I think giannis’s 2021 case revolves around his playoff performance rather than his regular season performance.

...

Has Westbrook shown this ft decline btw decline?

Thanks for the very detailed reply MyUniBroDavis! Seriously, very informative. I don't quite have the chance to give a detailed response now, but I thought I'd quickly answer your 2 questions.

1) We do have composite numbers for 2021 Regular Season and Postseason! (though not postseason-only) Giannis' 21 composite PIPM is much worse than 20 and and 19, likely pulled down by the much worse regular season. 21 Giannis' PIPM is +5.03, which would be below Curry/Robinson/KG/Magic/KD/Walton, just over Kobe and 21 Jokic (no 22 numbers yet). If we take a 2ish-year average, he's still below the top Curry/Robinson/KG tier, but around same level as KD. [my previous post has more detailed stat rankings]. PIPM link here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1EIZvj_3-9SZULWomHz54V1CPL092j70u_0vUhoEEaIk/htmlview, see the database section.

2) Yep! Though I don't have the stats in front of me, I do recall people mentioning this in a film review. Westbrook used to have a much better free throw %, and some of this came from a much longer pre-shot routine (longer than was technically legal). He had to shorten his routine, and his percentage visibly declined! Too bad, I really enjoyed when he was efficient

I'll try to get to the rest of this when I have time. Good points all around!

Rip Westbrook lol

Giannis’s 2020 ranking third all time is pretty impressive considering how bad relatively it was through the playoffs, I think his playoff pipm was +3.6 iirc.

His Defensive PIPM was third that year, which I feel is really impressive since the box score aspect would heavily rate Gobert and other more pure rim protectors over him

In any case I’m not all too suprised by his 2021 vs his 2020 year, especially since most of the drop can be attributed to his defense

Looking at it closely though the 2021 season is abruptly cut off for most players, giannis only has 19 games recorded, KD 16, which would fit it not being public ally available since it gotnprivatized afterwards mid 2021 season, so I don’t really think we can use his 2021 data

On an interesting note though, I guess I view his 2021 season almost as a reverse of his 2020 season, switching around his playoff performance and regular season and bring them closer together (so 2020 RS>2021 Playoffs>2021 RS>2020 Playoffs).

It makes me think a lot about 2020 AD because he probably takes this to an extreme though, his regular season was fairly unimpressive but his playoffs are really high up there for me, and I think especially if he was optimized it would have been a GOAT tier playoff run in level of play

[Proxy]

This post is gonna look kinda messy cuz I deleted what I was originally writing mid way by accident

11. 2017 Stephen Curry(explained in every thread since thread #3 but I could copy paste if needed) (2016)
12. 2004 Kevin Garnett(same as Steph, explained in every thread since #3  ) (2003)

Yep, I know what you feel like!

13.1977 Bill Walton ... I am SIGNIFICANTLY less confident in this pick compared to others and I might still change it to someone else I consider to be in this next tier of like 10 different players(i'm thinking Oscar, Jerry, KD, Kobe, Giannis, Jokic, Wade, Drob, Dirk, or Julius rn - maybe Mikan

Yeah around this time the tiers start getting larger and less clear. Which makes it interesting! I personally have Wade/Dirk/Erving lower, but I'm higher on Robinson who I have right in this tier.

Couple questions for you (or for others if they want to join):
1. Why do you have Walton > Robinson?
2. Why Oscar > West (or the other perimeter stars, like KD/Kobe/Erving)?

Walton over Robinson is because I have alot of concerns with Robinson as an offensive centerpiece, and think when we scale up to more and more offensive talent it gets to point where Walton's complimentary skills on offense(I am very big on passing and quick decision making as scalable traits) could eventually get him to be more valuable. I will say I still think David could get you to a better floor offensively in the RS but the fall off against better and better defenses is a problem even including the regular season and I don't think the level that he would be able to floor raises an average team offensively is impressive enough to be factored in TOO much but maybe i'm underselling him because the pretty poor ball handling on those Spurs team.

Defensively I think they are actually pretty even in an absolute sense, but think Walton has a slight edge because the rules of the era allowing an higher ceiling for defensive value. I think the WOWY indicators also seem to favor Walton in the very small sample and he led teams to a significantly higher level of quality with what I wouldn't call a ground breaking supporting cast or anything seeing they were almost 10 SRS points worse without him. I would probably gave David the time machine argument both ways but I don't really care about that too much, I think Walton has the scalability advantage, but not sure on resilience because the small sample. Really just splitting hairs again here but Walton looked more impressive to me in the games I watched.

Now my question to you now is how do you factor in the collinearity around the Spurs around Duncan's peak from the late 90s to early 00s as you've mentioned his AuPM numbers?:

• Robinson ’98-01 +25.1 on/off | +10.0 on

• Duncan ’01-04 +21.5 on/off | +7.3 on

• Ginobili ’03-06  +19.3 on/off | +11.2 on

https://thinkingbasketball.net/2021/07/08/playoff-plus-minus-part-ii-beyond-the-box-score-multi-year-data/

Do you believe we should mentally curve these players down for all having these insanely high marks overlapping in the same period or would you mostly brush it off as an indicator of scalability? Do you believe we should mentally curve for Popovich playing Manu or Drob more selectively and optimizing their lineup combinations when it's probably less likely they'd be able to ramp up their production rates on teams without Duncan or just other roster constructions in general in the playoffs?

[]Personally, I have Curry then Garnett at the top of this group (actually I have them in the tier before this  ). Other comparisons:

Yep same

-I have Robinson > Walton.
-The (hyper-limited) data we have suggests Oscar > West, but I wonder if West's Scalability/Time Machine/Resilience advantage is enough to put West first.

I don't actually have Oscar over West locked in, and for the last 2 years or so i've considered West better but I just brought up him because I had alot of stuff from him saved in my notes over the last few years.

I do think Jerry has the time machine and scalability advantages(I don't factor in the time machine thing too much), and he probably 'rises' more in the playoffs than Oscar, but i'm not entirely sure if that makes him become better against the same level of opponent in similar team circumstances, especially when Oscar at his peak was very resilient as well starting from a higher RS quality to rise from - never got around to doing a direct comp and it's hard without much film. I'd need more discussion there

-The data also suggests KD >= Kobe, but it's pretty close. KD has the scalability advantage, while Kobe is more resilient and I'd argue KD benefited from a better fitting team.  Another tough choice.

I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion that KD should be considered clearly ahead by the data in your other post, I think the nox box 1 numbers are capturing some of KD's problems that aren't really captured too well in the box score.

Some of the things I see on film are that are:
-I think he takes a hair longer than many other offensive players I think are on his level Dirk when it comes to recognizing the optimal pass or play and misses many tight windows.

-I believe he has court mapping issues and lacks diverse passing deliveries and the ability to make more than basic passing reads.

-I also feel he struggles to leverage his off ball scoring threat to pressure defenses within the flow of an offense(ex: doesn't really screen that much, and doesn't really fight as hard for little advantages for position in the post or off the ball like a Kobe or Bird that generate small advantages), he also occasionally gets stuck between scoring and passing modes but I think he got better at balancing the two the further down his career.

The very clear difference in how box 1 number metrics and pure APM metrics portray him over his prime give me a little bit of concern when concluding his profile should be looked at as more impressive. I will also say Kobe didn't play alongside a mega ball dominant player like Russ(those ball dominant high volume players tend to perform pretty well in those metrics) for most his prime to take away some of the credit like KD.

Otoh I think some of those OKC teams were extremely poorly suited when it came to optimizing either KD's(and Russ') offensive value and yet their PS team results together were still fairly impressive in the playoffs for some of those years. I could not buy those teams as being viable in the modern NBA.

In 48 games from 2013 to 2016 they had a +5.25 rORTG on very heavily defensively minded teams running up to 4 non-high volume 3 point shooters around KD at times, and +8 PS Net Rating, and before that, from 2010 to 2012 they had a +6.73 rORTG and +7.1 Net Rating in 43 games, and this was before his peak, and before Russ or Harden really broke out as stars.

Showing how on a bit more balanced rosters he could honestly lead you to some pretty impressive offensive results as a very clear 1A offensively.

I will say he also did finally peak higher than Kobe by a clear margin in APM data in 2016 in a very poor team situation like I mentioned in my other post.

I am typing up a response to your other questions but I wanted to ask about this real quick. From the data i've looked at, Kobe has a very consistent edge in APM data looking at multi year stretches(Kobe looking like a >+5/g player for the entire 06-10 stretch and KD never hitting a +5 aside from in 2016 where he hit a +6.3 - higher than any Kobe mark), while KD has a consistent, large edge when looking at box metrics and box +/- hybrid metrics in the regular season. Though in the playoffs Kobe then gains a small lead in hybrid metrics over his prime.

I do think he performed the best he had as a player up until that point(mainly because of improvements on defense he started to make in 2015 before he got injured), and going to GSW in the middle of peaking hurt his performance in these metrics. I imagine his true value lays somewhere in the middle between his strong 2016 result and his GSW ones.

I agree with your conclusion that Kobe is probably more "resilient" as Kobe was one of the VERY few players to ramp up both his scoring and playmaking, while maintaining his turnover economy, and gave more effort on defense while playing against some of the toughest competition ever in his main 10 year prime stretch from '01 to '10.
RS -> PS:
28 Pts Per 75 -> 29 Pts Per 75
+2.8 rTS% -> +3.3 rTS%
8.45 cTOV% -> 8.4 cTOV%
8.43 Box Creation -> 8.3 Box Creation
+3.4 Team rORTG -> 5.6 rORTG

48.95 O Load -> 47.6 O Load
1.13 ScoreVal -> 1.24 ScoreVal
.89 PlayVal -> .9 PlayVal
4.88 BPM -> 5.1 BPM
+7.5 On/Off -> 9.0 On/Off

Average defense played in that stretch(148 Games): Ranked #5 in the league, -3.2 rDRTG

I also agree KD offers so much value when not put in the role as a lead playmaker as a hyper efficient play finisher that can play the 4/5 and drag rim protectors away from the paint unlike most wings that it might bridge the gap. This production was just absurd and so versatile in 2017


And it was also great in 2014

And 2016, basically excellent in every category for his prime:


His result of raising the Warriors to a +14.4 SRS level compared to the +10.4 in the 19 games in missed with a otherwise healthy roster in 2017 is probably one of the more impressive IRL ceiling raising results in history to me considering he generates most of his value from volume scoring, but it's hard to tell how much better many other players could do better in those circumstances(Like a Kobe).

I believe alot of the Kobe Vs KD debate depends on how much these are valued.

-KD/Kobe vs Oscar/West: The data does favor KD/Kobe > Oscar/West, primarily from the box-score stats, but I wonder how much older perimeter players are unfairly discounted by the box-score stats. Perhaps it's an accurate evaluation of guard value in that era, but you'd have to think Oscar/West would do better in more perimeter-centric era. I don't think it's enough to take Oscar/West over the top peaks we're still considering (over Curry/Garnett), but it might be enough to push them in contention with KD/Kobe.

Yeah i've heard elgee mention how it was harder to have separation as a playmaker in those eras and that's why Oscar and Jerry lag behind many modern engines in his PlayVal model and OBPM. They would probably look better if you moved them ahead a few years in the box data.

Though I also feel they both look better in WOWY data than Kobe/KD(their prime WOWYR samples are inflated by playing on mega dominant teams in a league watered down by expansion though).

Considering the flaws in the WOWY approach, I think there is just a very large range on where they could land on a large list like this. Like should I be THAT confident Jerry or Oscar was better than Dirk or Giannis relative to era?? I'm really not sure, but on the other hand they could also possibly be better than I gave them credit for and maybe better than a Bird or Magic. I'm kinda leaning the route of preferring them due to their WOWY footprints but I could definitely be convinced otherwise on this.

-Of course, it's great to have a ranking for the big men and the perimeter players separately, but the next question is how players compare across position (e.g. Robinson/Walton vs KD/Kobe). I wonder whether the fact that it's easier to compare similar positions is part of what biased us to vote 6 Big Men in a row from peak #3 to peak #8... hopefully we can do more cross-position comparisons in this next tier!

Yeah this is by far the hardest thing for me, I feel like i'm having a bias towards big men myself because I do believe at the very top they have been the most valuable position from most eras in NBA history.

This study even concluded that over time, smalls began to show higher impact in the PS than bigmen, the values completely flipping, more cross position comparisons rly should probably be made but I understand it's just so hard for voting.
https://backpicks.com/2021/07/10/playoff-plus-minus-part-iii-changes-in-the-postseason/

Without further ado, Here's the [b]Stat Box for Curry, Garnett, Robinson, Giannis, Jokic, Durant, Kobe, Oscar, Walton, West:

By the way, i'm curious on why you consider Wade a tier lower. He's another modern player with some of the most impressive statistical profiles ever in 2006, 2009, and 2010, not unlike the players you named, arguably looking better than both KD and Kobe. Is it the scalability and portability concerns or is it something to do with how you feel he translates to the playoffs maybe? I would have similar concerns honestly but would like to hear your specific reasoning. I'm also interested in your thoughts on Dirk and how he stacks up to that tier of players because I was considering him too but you said you view him as a tier lower - he has a similar APM data footprint as Kobe/KD in the RS tho I feel most would say his argument does seem like a weaker version of KD's. Dirk being a primary 4/5 rather than a 3/4 allowed him having more court tilting effect IMO and might be a better compliment for non shooting perimeter players and other isolation scorers, he also seems like a comparable scorer in the playoffs looking peak for peak, but he scored at such a high rate in the half court where expected points are lower(this helped his teams set up for defense more) and also had great turnover economy. Anyways, thanks for the continuted great discussion and I hope I gave you a satisfying response to that Erving question earlier.

[f4p]

Random: does anyone else feel like there's no way to actually give every player the respect he deserves?

I remember doing a peaks project in 2012 for the first time and it felt kinda straightforward. Now, it's been 10 years since, and there have been so many amazing players since then who will likely definitely feature in the project (Durant, Curry, WB, Harden, Kawhi, Davis, Giannis, Jokic, Luka for starters), that it feels like no matter what someone is gonna get snubbed and look like he got a lower ranking than he deserved.

yeah every time someone brings up someone who isn't in my top 3 in a given thread, i'm like "oh yeah, that guy". like i figured i would have 77 walton pretty high and now i'm trying to figure out where to squeeze him in and i want to get wade and garnett in at some point, but then i haven't put a jokic/giannis/curry season in and then i realize i have no idea what to do with guys like west and oscar. and apparently i should be thinking about 76 erving.

[jalengreen]

russ was a career 82.3% ft shooter thru 2017 and then the nba made it so that crossing the 3pt line between FTs was a delay of game. that was part of russ’ routine and he’s been a 69.7% ft shooter since then. with his best post-rule change FT shooting season being worse than his worst FT shooting season prior to the change.

[CharityStripe34]

Random: does anyone else feel like there's no way to actually give every player the respect he deserves?

I remember doing a peaks project in 2012 for the first time and it felt kinda straightforward. Now, it's been 10 years since, and there have been so many amazing players since then who will likely definitely feature in the project (Durant, Curry, WB, Harden, Kawhi, Davis, Giannis, Jokic, Luka for starters), that it feels like no matter what someone is gonna get snubbed and look like he got a lower ranking than he deserved.

Someone always does. While stats definitely matter, context and the eye-test also matter. I'm also reticent to give modern players "GOAT status" right off the jump until we see about a 4-5 year stretch of sustained excellence. It also comes down to how much do we value specific eras? There is a science to basketball thanks to advanced stats which help paint a more detailed picture, but this is still a game of aesthetics as well.

Good general rule of thumb is that the guys who we're discussing (pantheon-level) would probably be awesome in any era to varying degrees. I start with that assertion and then look at their peaks.

[homecourtloss]

Random: does anyone else feel like there's no way to actually give every player the respect he deserves?

I remember doing a peaks project in 2012 for the first time and it felt kinda straightforward. Now, it's been 10 years since, and there have been so many amazing players since then who will likely definitely feature in the project (Durant, Curry, WB, Harden, Kawhi, Davis, Giannis, Jokic, Luka for starters), that it feels like no matter what someone is gonna get snubbed and look like he got a lower ranking than he deserved.

yeah every time someone brings up someone who isn't in my top 3 in a given thread, i'm like "oh yeah, that guy". like i figured i would have 77 walton pretty high and now i'm trying to figure out where to squeeze him in and i want to get wade and garnett in at some point, but then i haven't put a jokic/giannis/curry season in and then i realize i have no idea what to do with guys like west and oscar. and apparently i should be thinking about 76 erving.

Absolutely. To have a top 10 peak or top 10 career value now requires something extraordinary though I do think with peaks we’ve seen it recently in Giannis, Curry, or Jokic peaks (and older LeBron) not to mention Harden who did things we might not see again for some time.

[LukaTheGOAT]

I think potentially part of the reason why the best 2 way bigs of today might not have the predecessors could be the increased offensive load and therefore having less energy to expend on defense (defense that requires you to be more mobile than ever). Box-score stats are sexier thsn ever because more offense is run through stars than ever before. Ben Taylor has his video on "heliocentrism," where offenses have decided to maximize themselves by giving the ball to the star more than ever and this is possible because teams purposely flanks stars with more spacing and therefore it opens up room for stars to perhaps to attack as they would like as the punishment for helping incorrectly can be quite severe.
https://youtu.be/r0934lGZ4dw

Heck, stars are better able in the PS to attack weak defenders by drawing a switch too. More spacing has allowed for more passing angles than ever before to be available to guys. Ruled favor offensive players more in regards to how they draw fouls and also the dribble moves that are allowed. Teams have more analytics staff in their offices and therefore tell the players of their optimal spots on the floor (this goes both ways as defenses are more prepared but I think good offense can often beat good defense with how the rules are).

That being said, I think it can be said offensive stars are on creating more separation because offenses are more dependent on them. However, this could perhaps prove harmful to their defensive value.

Anyways, the following is someone who conducted Scaled RAPM calculations for seasons since 01 and Giannis doesn't have a season in the top 30. At the same time you see offensive impact that is greater generally in more recent years.
http://www.cryptbeam.com/rapm/