AEnigma wrote:DraymondGold wrote:As you point out, many of our voters had a tendency to vote for Bigs first, as well as a tendency to vote for Title-winners first. How much are these tendencies Preferences (justifiable/reasonable) vs biases (things that led us astray from the right answer)? I'm sure you could argue either way. Personally, I think we may have overcorrected slightly for preferring bigs. Similar to this, I think we may have overrated traditional 'two-way players' (players who can score and defend, which often aligns with bigs) at the cost of underrating creation (which is often aligned with perimeter players). I also agree we may have over-corrected for title-winners. But that's just me.
Whether a bias or preference is justified or not probably depends in large part on our own biases and preferences lol. I understand you trying to separate them, but I am not too worried about it with the project because most of the time people were at least making sincere efforts to take a generally consistent and coherent approach.
On the question of undervaluing creation: I do not entirely disagree (at the very least I was voting for Nash much earlier that most), but of course then the question starts with, who else “should” be in the top fifty? Maybe you had Grant Hill in mind; fair enough, he had some backing, although I personally am not sure how high his creation value was. Drexler, perhaps. Manu, although of course we always have the issue of minutes. I kind-of had 2009 Brandon Roy in mind as a wing option, perhaps in contrast to or alongside Drexler, Hill, and Manu. Among point guards, Deron Williams is the player I had as the top creator remaining, and if you look through my posts, I very passively tried to test the waters for him at different points, but absolutely zero people bit on that. Jason Kidd has a case, even if his passing ability outpaces his playmaking ability. Overall, though, not exactly a group I would expect in a top fifty conversation, even if Hill, Kidd, and Drexler at least have those top three MVP finishes which we like so much, and Kidd and Drexler have their Finals appearances on top of that.
I would have heavily considered 2009 Roy and 2010 Deron for my top sixty, for whatever that is worth. Probably Hill and Kidd too, although I do have my issues with their postseason scoring profile.
Lol, agreed about bias. There's no objective way to fully separate preference and bias... it's just a spectrum, with a grey area in the middle.
As for creation, I don't want to retread the specific rankings too much -- but like you say, there's players who could have been included and players who were included but could have ranked higher/lower. For example, me personally, I'm lower on e.g. Hakeem, Giannis, Wade, and Moses than the voting bloc here, mostly because I'm lower on their creation / how they fit into a high-level offensive team. Likewise, I'm a bit higher on players like Curry, Bird, West, Chris Paul because I'm higher on them in those areas. No big deal, and of course there's other opinions that are valid -- it's just interesting to see the patterns in how people weigh areas like scoring/playmaking/defense.
AEnigma wrote:DraymondGold wrote:AEnigma wrote:Definitely easier to compare positionally, and to that point, the reason I think we saw 3-8 go ahead of Magic/Bird/Steph just as in 2019 and in 2015 (adding Garnett ahead too) is because the people who have [[BIGS]] ahead are probably going to try to clear them out first. If we have six people who would put Steph, Bird, and Magic top five, and fourteen who have them behind those bigs, well, the bigs go ahead.
To me it seems sensible that voting for one of Wade or Kobe would garner a close vote for the other… yet what happened in the prior two projects was that Kobe was tied to McGrady instead! To go back to your “biases”, this bloc was generally more interested in titles (again, 25 of the top 26 were title-winners, and 21/25 were the leaders for those titles) and playoff success. McGrady falls, but he cannot drag Kobe with him, so Wade is left as the obvious contemporary comparison. Only once both are clear do those voters see their consensus collapse on itself, as a new consensus forms. Which is a nice illustration of how these ties can fracture in different ways.
Agreed on your assessment of why Tiers 2 and Tiers 3 didn't mix. To me, this ties back to my earlier comment of preferring 'two-way players' (players who score/defend) at the cost of creation/playmaking. You can argue how much this is a preference (i.e. justifiable) or a bias (i.e. something that led us astray), but at the very least it's an interesting trend to notice.
As for Kobe, great point! Looking back, it does seem like Kobe's peak is more tied to McGrady in the previous projects than Wade. And like you say, I'd definitely prefer Kobe/Wade be tied together than Kobe/McGrady.
Re: your numbers for title bias, presumably the 1/26th non-title winner is Jokic (who may get a pass as his career is far from over). Who are the 4/25 that are not leaders for those titles? Maybe Oscar, West, Robinson, AD?
Yep, even while recognising that the latter three are frequently credited as co-leaders (perhaps to a comparable or even greater extent as 2001/02 Kobe was on the Lakers).
How much do you think title-bias went into the selection of the year? By my count 8/26 players had non-title years as their peak(Kareem, Garnett, Oscar, West, Jokic again, Kobe, Robinson, Kawhi). 4/26 players had their year change from non-title years last time to title years this time (Curry, Giannis -- though 2021 wasn't an option back in 2019, Wade, Durant... also Pettit, Reed if you count the non-top-26 players), while 1/26 went from title years to non-title years (Kawhi... also Frazier from the non-top-26 bunch).
Some voters definitely made that a priority, but for the overall voting bloc (and speaking for myself too) I think it mattered more that the players were indisputably title leaders even if as with Kareem, Garnett, Kobe, and Kawhi they led titles in different years.
However, much as what Dutchball is arguing, those non-title arguments almost certainly limit the voter ceilings of those years. Zero doubt in my mind that all four go higher with a title in those years, even if they played pretty much identically or perhaps even slightly worse. Which perhaps is the irrational bias you want to examine, but of course “peak” is so vaguely defined that many can still see it as perfectly rational.
Yep, agreed here
AEnigma wrote:I felt a similar confusion about Giannis being so high as you did Oscar/West, but some disagreements with a diverse bloc of voters are inevitable.
To clarify, I was not confused so much as I was unable to find much of a simple articulation of why the collective took Oscar
and West over that Walton/Jokic/Robinson trio. “Impact” plus postseason reliability is probably the tidiest explanation if forced, but that applies a little more clearly to West; as I pointed out, Oscar kind-of had his own thing going on.
Yeah, perhaps confusion was the wrong word to use. Like you say, impact plus postseason performance could be a high-level explanation for why I personally argued for West over Oscar. This forum has a history of voting Oscar over West, though I've never found the arguments compelling enough.
AEnigma wrote:Small quibble: I'd rather call Moses a forward than call Durant a big, but regardless of terminology, the point about Durant/Davis receiving penalties for their title circumstances seems fair.
Question: what's your reasoning for saying Moses received a penalty for his title circumstance?
Convenience. Nevertheless…
It seemed to me people were more concerned with his skillset (lack of passing/defense) than the circumstances of his title like his teammates/opposition, but I may have missed something.
… perhaps a slick way to phrase it would be that those concerns call into question his ability to win a title on teams that were not defending conference champions.
Ah, I see. Well, as one of Moses' nay-sayers in this project, I guess I'd agree with something like that. In my mind, my critique of Moses always focused on the skillset and team building aspect more than the title or its context. But to your point, a lot of Moses' proponents argued that his teammates underperformed, which of course gives Moses more credit for their playoff success.
AEnigma wrote:AEnigma wrote:Mikan: as covered in that thread and the following thread, sense of “it is his turn” eventually wins out just as it did in 2019.
…
McGrady: Little bit of Mikan energy here…
…
Pettit: It was his turn…
The point about "it was his turn" is an interesting one. To me, this might come from having a small bloc of voters consistently vote for a player for enough rounds that people feel like it's due -- Mikan especially had a lot of rounds where he got mentions before he finally got selected. Is this what you had in mind by "it was his turn"? If so, do you see any other players (e.g. Curry or Moses) where this trend might apply, or no?
If Moses had come after Nash and Paul instead then I probably would have affixed that label to him, but as is he was instead nestled between the two other high-scoring forwards/bigs who swapped onto teams with some major preexisting talent (basically just Lebron for the Lakers) and then immediately won a dominant title. However, both here and in 2019, I agree there seemed to be a reasonably concerted effort to secure Moses ahead of some of the non-winners, in perhaps a collective sense that he “deserved” that acknowledgement.
So there is an element of that to the last guy in any clearly defined tier. It was Russell’s turn as the last top tier big. It was Steph’s turn as the last of the top-ish perimetre players. But with Mikan and Pettit and Baylor (who I forgot in my tiers lmao), and to a somewhat lesser extent McGrady and Westbrook and Luka, they simply hit a point where enough voters — and yes, this can be in large part a matter of somewhat random variance in the members of any thread’s bloc — thought it was time to admit them even without those voters tying them to a particular group (Westbrook saw a lot of overlap with Pippen and Draymond voters like Homecourt and Ohayo… and then those two dropped out, leaving his fate in the hands of a completely different bloc of voters).
Yeah, I buy this theory.
AEnigma wrote:For Mikan and Pettit and Baylor, this is obviously era dependent, but in all cases, at some point people will decide, “Ah, well, probably a good time to vote for this guy…” even if it they are not clearly sorted into any particular tier. Mikan is the best encapsulation of this for me because no one has any real opinion on his film, there is little ability to analyse era translation (and in fact is often entirely abandoned as an approach)… but both here and in 2019, there was a collective decision that well no one else pops out so may as well be him. There is really no better way to handle it, and the fact there is no better way is why I have repeatedly argued inclusion of a pre-shot-clock era contributes next to nothing to the project.
I get why people have mixed feelings about starting in the shock-clock era. The oldest players are historically under appreciated and under recognized. Mikan, somehow, is only
just getting his jersey retired
this year. 
I wonder if there's some feeling that, if we aren't going to appreciate or study these players, who else is? A lot of the things we know about the oldest players (film, statistics) are thanks to the fantastic research of people on this board, and I wouldn't want to stifle that by dropping them from the next Greatest Peaks project.
On the other hand, there's definitely more interest in the Great players that started immediately after the shot clock (Russell/Wilt/West/Oscar) compared to the ones immediately before (e.g. Mikan), so adding a post-shot-clock requirement wouldn't stifle the discussion much. And the exact placement of pre-shot-clock players like Mikan does feel somewhat arbitrary for the voting bloc, given how much less info we have on them and how different the league context was.
All in all, I wouldn't mind if there was a shotclock-era requirement for the next project, but I also wouldn't mind if there wasn't.
AEnigma wrote:Pettit was more just a sudden rush of voters. He could have been grouped a little more coherently but instead he ended up being something of a blip in engagement. Similar with Baylor, but there you can probably argue that was just part of the traditional run of old-school players closing out every project. Luka was not sudden but was more a gradual acceptance that none of us had enough remaining names we would actually want over him. And McGrady? Yeah, mostly just a label given because he is in a weird spot; his voters carried over fine from Barkley and Ewing and Malone, but he is his own type of player and in a distinct era.
The more towards the end of the project you get, the more the overall voting bloc shrinks... so tiny fluctuations in who votes and how many people vote can make a bigger difference for players like Pettit.
