falcolombardi wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:Texas Chuck wrote:Nothing more pointless than judging players/teams against modern standards and mocking them for it. Of course tactics advance, and as 70s pointed rule changes and non-enforcement of certain rules really significant. But Bill Russell is still influential on how defense is played 60 years later. People need to have more respect and understand "standing on the shoulder of giants" applies to the NBA too.
Who cares that modern teams would beat older ones? Who cares that Jessie Owens times now wouldn't have him on the Olympic team. He was still a "greater" sprinter than the guy who has a faster time now because of all the innovations that helped him to that mark.
I don't know if you're referring to me as someone "mocking" historical players, but let's make distinctions:
1. There's how dominant a player was in his own era.
2. There's how influential a player was on his own era and the future.
3. There's evaluating players in terms of goodness at basketball without normalizing for things that we would expect a player could pick up if he grew up in a different era - like equipment and training.
4. There's evaluating players in terms of goodness at basketball in terms of how their athletic advantages would scale against the developed skill of their competition.
Of the four approaches, I think only #3 is a waste of time when doing actual player comparisons (it's useful when evaluating the equipment, training, etc, but not the impressiveness of the athletes themselves).
I'm all for doing analyses of #1, but it has to be noted that traditionally on these boards, that's not been the primary focus. If it had been, then Mikan would be much higher on our Top 100s.
I'm particularly keen on #2, which has everything to do with why I've probably done more pre-NBA analysis than anyone else on these boards, but again, this has not been the primary focus on these boards.
So from my perspective, our main focus has been on #4, and that seemed to work pretty harmoniously until the 3-point revolution came in and changed the game so profoundly. And there the issues wasn't so much that the more modern league was "better" - because we had no issues putting Wilt over Mikan on such grounds - but that the modern league getting better in this way changed the structure of the basketball court, and thus dramatically changed what techniques could be expected to achieve greatest impact.
The question then becomes how one deals with such a sea change in one's assessment.
Obviously I've been someone pushing an approach that feels disruptive, but I'd note that I think I'm still just doing #4.
I've seen others - like 70sFan - who are leaning toward approach #1 - not in line with how we've done things around here traditionally, but it's arguably the easiest way to make a coherent - and thus meaningful -list.
But I think most folks are still doing a version of #4, but it's a more abstract form of it. It's effectively giving a "league quality" score to the context the player played in, and then evaluating the player's ranking based on how far he stood out from his peers along with that league quality.
I don't actually have a problem with people doing this necessarily, but it's easy for people to get non-sensical when they do this.
Take the '06 Wade vs '22 Curry thread:
It was pretty clear early in that thread that a lot of people were having takes along the lines of:
Peak Curry > Peak Wade > '22 Curry, with '22 Curry's lesser shooting excellence compared to his peak being used as a clear divide.
When one does this, one is essentially saying, "Curry has to be shooting his absolute best to be better than Wade". This sounds reasonable, but the reality is that Curry only had a "poor shooting year" relative to his own outlier standards. He remained considerably more effective at shooting 3's than anyone who played in Wade's time period, remained the scariest long-distance threat in the league he was in, and led his team to a title that way. To me it makes us ask the question:
Exactly how many more 3's did Curry need to make in order to surpass Wade?
And I would suggest that there's no basketball-meaningful answer to that question.
What do I mean by "basketball-meaningful"? Well, the answer to that question is going to have to be based on algorithmic thought wherein the 3-point shooting of Curry and the 3-point shooting of Wade are not compared in an apples-to-apples sense. Hence, wherever one decides the dividing line is, it will be not only subjective and arbitrary, but it will have less to do with thinking about how the basketball games were played, and more about number crunching.
Doing this isn't the end of the world - I'm fine with people doing it - but when it seems to be alleged that I'm "mocking" older players because I'm trying to focus my comparison on trying to understand actual basketball playing capacity, I think we have a problem.
In general, in any field, if the "right way" to do things requires that you don't factor in context that is obvious to ask questions about, you tend to hit a wall with your learning. What I'm doing is trying to avoid hitting that wall, as best I can.
I dont think anyone arguing wade in that thread did it on the basis of 3 point shooting
Everyone knows that even im a down year curry jumpshot threat and spacing generated by it is a lot better than wade (understatement of the century)
But 3 point shooting is not the sole aspect of basketball
Well, they largely didn't talk about basketball specifics. While discussing a player known primarily for his 3-point shooting, statistics were used as evidence he wasn't as good as in the past, and those statistics were heavily influenced by a drop in his 3P%, which everyone in the thread knows.