OhayoKD wrote:lessthanjake wrote:I specifically said “ there’s not actually a lot of advanced metrics that go far enough back to capture his impact one way or the other.” I’m talking about impact metrics, specifically because I am well aware that that’s what this subforum is more focused on, and I am well aware of why.
If by "not actually a lot" you mean "virtually othing beyond WOWY and WOWYR" you would be correct. Given that I also spent a large part of my post covering those two metrics....
I’m also well aware of the crippling limitations that box-score-based metrics have at measuring defense. So my point was primarily that there’s not really much of an impact-metric-based case for Hakeem. And that’s for two reasons—both of which I mentioned in my first post on this. One is that there’s just not many impact metrics that go back far enough for Hakeem, because of a lack of tracking data. And the other is that the impact metrics that can go back that far (things like WOWY ratings—which are obviously going to be less precise than possession-by-possession impact metrics, but they’re what we have in pre-tracking-data eras) aren’t actually generally all that high on Hakeem.
Define "high". As outlined, "WOWY" sees Hakeem as a
regular season peer of Magic and Jordan and he is one of a handful of players to combine great single-year signals(one of 5 to have two instances of 25-win lift), great prime-signals, on-top of great longevity. Is top 10 and "arguable vs mj and magic" is not high?
Depends on which WOWY measure you’re looking at. One has him at 10th and one has him at 49th. 10-year scaled GPM has Hakeem at 29th. And then AuPM has him at 61st, although my understanding of that stat is that that’s a bit of a weird extrapolation stat. Which is why I talked about the overall picture. If you want to focus on one of those metrics, then I guess that’s fine. But I don’t think a fair reading of the overall impact-metric picture could be the justification for having him be super high. Which again, doesn’t mean he couldn’t be—just that advanced impact metrics aren’t what justifies it—in part because the best impact metrics don’t exist for Hakeem’s prime, and because the overall picture of the less good impact metrics that do exist for Hakeem’s prime wouldn’t justify a super high ranking.
Ultimately, it seems to me that the case for Hakeem is simply not an impact-metric-based case. Maybe there’d be such a case if we had more impact metrics for that era, but overall he doesn’t grade out super highly in what we do have for that era, so I certainly don’t think we can or should assume he would grade out really high in possession-by-possession impact metrics if we did have them. And we certainly shouldn’t build a case based on such an assumption. The case for Hakeem is based more on intuition than that, I think.
??? As outlined, the "impact metric" we have marks him out to be arguably the best rs player of his time-period. Did you stop reading half-way through?
Again, one iteration of it has him 10th, and other iterations have him much lower. Either way, on its face, it’s not a great justification for people having him a fair bit higher than 10th. I’m not sure why you’re fighting this. Your own post explaining your views on Hakeem was not rooted in impact metrics. And that’s okay! My case for plenty of players isn’t either—especially from the pre-tracking-data era! I just think that our certainty in our assessment of such players should inherently be lower, since we have less information. I would think it could be easily acknowledged that that’s a manifestly reasonable conclusion.
. It’s primarily things like that our eye test evaluates him as having incredibly good defense, his numbers (including offensive numbers) rose a lot in the playoffs, and he ultimately won titles without a super great supporting cast (particularly in 1994). Those are all valid points!
??? It is not just his offensive numbers. Like I outlined, *his teams consistently overperformed what they were in the regular season dating back to 1986. Hakeem is the 2nd best srs underdog in the playoffs after Lebron by % and total wins after Lebron.
Did they do that consistently though? In 1985 and 1987 they lost in the playoffs to teams that had worse SRS than them. In any event, the second sentence here is actually an interesting fact. But it’s nevertheless a bit squishy since it’s not isolating out Hakeem’s effect specifically, but rather is a fact about his team as a whole. Which is sort of my point here—the case for Hakeem isn’t about metrics that seek to isolate out Hakeem’s individual effect, but rather are about more basic stats from which someone could draw an inference about Hakeem. And, on this particular thing, I’ll note that winning as an SRS underdog is pretty clearly not an absolute measure of a player or team’s quality—it’s more a relative measure of whether they performed better in the playoffs than the regular season. In this case, Hakeem’s teams spent most of his career not being all that great in the regular season, so his team outperforming that in the playoffs doesn’t really tell us much as compared to other players who were on teams that didn’t outperform their regular season SRS in large part because their regular season SRS was typically better.
My point was just that this is squishier than a lot of other cases—it relies on things such as an eye-test evaluation of his defensive impact (along with inferences about his defensive impact based on his team generally having really good overall defensive efficiency), an intuitive sense of the quality of his supporting casts,
The cast stuff in my post was not "intuitive", it was based on how the Rockets played without Hakeem...
If that were the case, then his WOWY ratings would be higher, wouldn’t they? Hakeem also missed so few games in his prime that I think it’d be hard to really draw major conclusions based on their record without him (which is of course also a reason why WOWY ratings for him aren’t necessarily worth a whole lot either way). He had a bunch of seasons where there were no games without him! And if we’re talking about the title teams specifically, he only missed 12 total games in those two years—which is obviously a tiny sample size upon which virtually no conclusion could reasonably be drawn.
Also, I’m not really sure this is true in any event. From the start of Hakeem’s career through the 1996-1997 season, Hakeem missed 88 games. By my count, they went 36-52 in those games, which is a 41% win rate. That’s not really all that bad for a team playing without its main star (especially when the team’s overall winning % in that era was only 59% anyways). Even the KD-Warriors only won like 51% of their games without Steph—it’s hard for a team to win when their best guy, who the team is built around, isn’t playing. And even that win rate is largely driven by two seasons where they went 2-10 and 1-9 without him (1991-1992 and 1995-1996). The team actually had a winning record without Hakeem in the first 7 years of his career!
In essence, my point actually boils down to the exact opposite of your assumption that I was trying to focus on box-score-based measures. My point actually boils down to saying “We shouldn’t have such complete certainty in our ranking of a player if we don’t have impact-based metrics to back up the conclusion.”
Well this is a probabalistic exercise but absence of evidence =/ evidence of the absence and for whatever reasoning you aren't addressing the "impact" evidence I outlined. The "available" impact data has Hakeem as a top 10 peak, prime, and career whose on the same-level as Magic and Jordan in the regular season and then sees better team-wide improvement than either in the playoffs.
Is that not high?
I think you’re still misunderstanding my point. I’m not saying that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence. That would be silly here, since the fact is that there’s just not a lot of impact metrics that exist for Hakeem’s prime, so we really just don’t know for sure what they’d say. The crux of my point isn’t that Hakeem should be ranked lower. It’s that people should have less certainty than they do about his ranking, because the case for him is a squishier one that isn’t about individual impact data, but rather is more about eye test and inferences from the information we do have. I’m not saying that that case is wrong, but just that the degree of certainty in a case should be lower when the available information is lower. I could (and would) make the same argument about many players from pre-tracking-data eras if people were acting very very sure of an assessment of that player. Having more data can allow us to be more certain in our conclusions. That should be completely uncontroversial. And with players from older eras, we have less data, so we should be less certain about our conclusions, because our conclusions are necessarily centered around less precise info. So, for instance, to tie it back to this thread, I would object to the idea that there’s “no way” 2023 Jokic is as good as 1994 Hakeem (as I saw some people saying when reading through some of the responses), because that strikes me as having a level of certainty about Hakeem that I’m not sure can be justified given the relative lack of data we have (when, crucially, being above 2023 Jokic is definitely a very high bar). Maybe if that data existed, it’d go in Hakeem’s favor, and the certainty would be justified, but we just don’t really know.
