RealGM 2023 Top 100 Project - #16 (George Mikan)

[Cavsfansince84]

What you've described appears to me an acknowledgment of Mikan pioneering the game which i completely agree with. The difference in opinion we have is how its weighted and the relevancy in the ranking. I barely if at all consider projecting careers out to modern standard because its unfair, so Mikan's portability into NBA didn't even come into the equation for me.

Overall competition is a salient point, I guess you could call it 'bringing him down', I'd prefer to describe it as an absolute consideration that we apply to everyone else, and apply in micro-terms when it comes to SRS and modern players. Level of competition is a vital ingredient in assessing the value of era related dominance. In very similar way dominance in an overseas basketball league vs NBA looks like today. If we extended this project historically to european players/leagues the logical hurdles would become even more pronounced. George however benefits greatly from the NBA umbrella (albeit amongst multiple other leagues that crashed and burned during his playing days). More succinctly the idea of only 'beating who is in front of you' holds very little weight with me personally when applied against a scale of thousands of NBA players across 75+ years.

I enjoy the discussion more than anything, unlike a few others upset with his ranking, I'm not going to pretend I have a monopoly on logic. I look forward to the Bob Cousy discussions

Like I said, its pretty subjective how we want to weigh his era dominance. I don't think its quite fair to compare it to someone who is over in the Euroleague dominating since for the most part he was going up against the best players in the world at the time(granted there were two leagues and semi pro which Kurland played who may have been Mikan's equal). He won titles in both though, had a reputation for being probably the best player on both sides of the ball and created the template of the big man which includes books on how to play it which guys who came after him read and used to improve their skills. Much like how the guys who came before MJ also influenced how he played. So I think its easy to be dismissive of the guys from before the 60's but I think its better to err on the side of caution in how we rate them historically. The idea that we could throw any player from today to back then and think they'd turn out anywhere like they are today is far fetched to say the least(not to say you are saying that but to put into perspective their talents and how they may appear on film).

[One_and_Done]

It's appropriate that the thread with the least participation and interest saw Mikan sneak over the line because people forgot to vote/preference. An apt metaphor for his forgettable era.

[AEnigma]

Maybe if you added another fifty posts ranting about him then that would have been enough to swing the vote.

[Doctor MJ]

Given your focus on accomplishment, I'm curious why Mikan isn't one of the 3 you're considering. He's comfortably the most accomplished and dominant and if I'm tracking correctly, you are not trying to use a modernist lens here.

My focus is on accomplishment adjusted for league.

I'll push back hard against:

1. The idea that the NBA between the '60s and '00s was that radically different.
2. The idea that basketball was an utterly new thing in the '40s.

But I do see plenty of statistical evidence that makes me see the '40s & '50s as considerably weaker than the '60s, and that hurts Mikan.

ftr, I had Mikan as 23rd on my pre-project rough draft. So that's a great deal of respect as an all-time great, but just a bit further back than many here see it.

I don't mind at all Mikan getting in already. One of the most important players in basketball history, and very hard to place if you factor in league quailty. Glad people were passionately championing him.

Yeah, I think he was due for a bit of a rise with the meta-questions regarding approach that have been lingering. He is also a two-way anchor at a point where the stock is all-time high(lebron, kareem, duncan, hakeem, and kg all seem to have risen in board-opinion as a result). He also potentially benefits from a lack of data. In some ways, how he was covered/perceived is the best evidence we have.

The approach where a player like Steph is not pushing for top 2 or 3 is not really in sync with one where Mikan is out of the top 20 I think.

I am curious if anyone else from that period has a shot at making this list. Am trying to maintain era-relativity as a standard, but basic knowledge is a hurdle. On that note, am curious where Russell's teammates are going to land up. If people are willing to vote him out of the top 3 based on league-weakness, then it's hard to justify paticularly high-placements for the teammates for his teammates given the rather consistent track-record he has as the gold-standard of individual era-dominance in all the data/emperics we currently have access to.

I put alot less stock in "regressed over long periods of time psuedo rapm" than you do, but russell destroys both that and large-sample/granular analysis in a way no one else does. If 11-rings as the most dominant force ever gets you to 4th, not sure how we can justify putting his teammates(who his teams were largely unaffected without) as high as "hall of fame" and "all-star selections" would suggest.

The early superteam is somewhat immune from this(but the league is also not where it is going to be by the 60's), but we have plenty to suggest that a bunch of that dynasty was more of a carry-job than a should-be-dynastic buzzsaw. Then again, people seemed mostly willing to drop the "60's weak" line with Wilt...

I would guess that most of the guys who made the list before will make the list again, just in general. Among Russell's teammates, that's Bob Cousy, Sam Jones & John Havlicek - with both Cousy & Havlicek getting their support arguably more from their time without Russell than with. Does anything about that seem odd to you?

Is an ineffecient 23 ppg while you lose to playoff-fodder "pretty effective"? I'm not using this as some indictment of what he was in his prime, but I do not really understand how this helps him comparatively

So first, let's not ignore the regular season. Here are Robinson's scoring numbers in the final 3 months in the regular season:

Feb - 20.3 PPG, 56.4% TS
Mar - 20.1 PPG, 58.8% TS
Apr - 22.0 PPG, 60.6% TS

So, near Duncan's volume, generally more efficient, despite the fact that Duncan's out injured for a chunk of the time.

To me we're seeing pretty clear indicators that Robinson role-shifted as needed and did so effectively. As I've said, if Robinson were a normal superstar, he'd have remained the primary scorer in Duncan's in those early Duncan year, and the narrative around '98-99 is that Robinson won a title with Duncan as a sidekick. The fact that Duncan had primacy is more about Robinson choosing to prioritize the future of Spurs ahead of his own glory.

That would depend greatly on them winning the title though(in comparably dominant fashion would help). As is, regular-season production was not really the question mark. "If Pippen's Bulls won the championship in 94", if "kobe beat the suns in 2006", "if the celtics beat the magic without kg", if "lebron beats the warriors without kyrie and love", "if miami beat the mavs with wade outplaying lebron", and "if kareem wins in 72 and 74 in-spite of oscar/dandrige/allen injury" are all more interesting hypotheticals for me.

Prime maybe best rs peak-of-the-era David Robinson had his run as a #1. He hit similar(or lower) playoff heights to KD without the Warriors, Pippen without Jordan, and Embid's sixers. Then he got worse and his minutes went down and....they go 15-2.

We can certainly debate how likely it would be that the Spurs would have won the 1999 title if they shifted more shooting load to Robinson instead of Duncan. I wouldn't claim it to be a given, but I would ask people to look at the series in the 1999 playoffs and ask which of the 4 teams the Spurs play would have beaten the Spurs with that change. To give a quantitative starting point. Here are the Spurs MOV for each of their series:

Minnesota: +6.3
Lakers +8.0
Portland +10.3
New York +5.0

I would point out that it's not a given that Duncan was having 5.0 points of offensive impact relative to replacement - simply because that's a lot of offensive impact - and that that's not actually what we're talking about here. Here, we're just talking about shifting about 1/3rd of Duncan's shooting load over to Robinson, a proven NBA volume scorer.

If this were to actually cause a problem for the Spurs, I think it would be more about the loss of Robinson's defensive intensity being unable to be made up for by Duncan, given that it was the defense that allowed them to dominate their competition.

What about the playoffs?

Let's start by recognizing that the Suns were a 53-29 team with a +5.26 SRS and the #3 DRtg behind the Lakers and Spurs. That's a contender-level team that is a contender because of their defense. You dismissing a team like that as "playoff fodder" honestly just makes you look like you need to look more closely.

I recognized that, and rather generously took it at face-value(as well as a 1-point mov based on a singular blow-out win) when I pointed out the massive drop off from 1999(7-point drop iirc), But no, I said playoff fodder, not regular-season fodder. The suns went onto face the Lakers and performed vastly worse than the +6 blazers or the +4 pacers. Besides the Drob Spurs, they won an incredible 3 playoff games over 4-years.

If that is not "Playoff fodder" then what is? Did they have to literally win 0 games to qualify? If we can question sweeping the 7srs raptors as an achievement, we can also question how impressive it is to notch a singular blow-out win against the team everyone else was running through until Nash arrived(including rookie duncan+drob...).

I mean, by this definition, the '00-01 Spurs with Duncan were playoff fodder on a far worse scale, which makes us wonder how they were more impressive than the '99-00 Spurs sans Duncan. I think we need to be careful about dismissing teams lightly.

That doesn't mean that losing is an accomplishment of course, but as I've said:
The Spurs won the 38.8 MPG they had Robinson on the court.

Well if we take that sample at face-value then perhaps we need to give drob a bigger chunk of the pie and everyone outside of duncan/drob a lower chunk. Implicitly that would also lead to duncan getting more credit for sharing the court with whoever on the bench was letting drob down so much. And tangent it may be I guess this is a good point to return to a point I wanted to make regarding RAPM. RAPM indeed does "adjust" for rotation effects, but it is approximating. It is still prone to bias when top players have their minutes tied(or as with duncan, the opposite), which is why its good to use things like minute distribution/rotation sheets(thanks squared)/real-world lineup-splits/wowy(or indirect) to see in which direction the "variance" produced by the correlation goes. From what squared posted it seems magic/kareem, mj/pippen(and oakley?), might see the opposite effect to what you get with duncan/drob.

Seems to me that no matter what specifics we get into here, one can say that whatever actually caused the Spurs to lose the series without Duncan speaks to Duncan's value. Fundamentally, I don't disagree, I've just been chafing at your tendency to simply down the story and then round up what that says about Duncan. This just wasn't a case of the Spurs going from being a champ to a chump without Duncan. Losing Duncan hurt, but not to some extreme degree that left everyone talking about how bad the Spurs looked.

As I've said, that didn't happen until the following year.

Am planning a more in-depth response regarding that, but back to the topic, I will say that both doing well(relative to expectation)without each other warrants some extra-credit and hints towards something I don't think is covered much. People act like duncan and drob were great fits next to each other as a result of them finding success together. But I've never seen that sort of point made for any other great whose best teammate happens to naturally play the same position and is also very good at their strongest value add(in this case paint-protection for both).

Do we actually think they look better next to each other than they would paired with kobe or a penny? That both are considered to be good fits next to each other based on them winning a bunch anyway is a testament to the situational resliency of their skill-sets(and/or a higher value-base than people give them credit for). Robinson gets some(but perhaps not enough) credit for this while Duncan seems to get none.

I think you get a better offense with Kobe/Penny as the offensive star and Robinson/Duncan as the offensive sidekick yes.

Re: Duncan no credit for situational resiliency. Oh I'd disagree strongly for that. I think Duncan's ranking in these projects has been profoundly helped by that 2014 championship and the time surrounding that where Duncan took on less scoring primacy, and it hasn't really seemed to hurt him that the offense got better like that.

I feel like what you're identifying is the polarization we're encountering. There are people who are skeptical of some of the most enthusiastic interpretations of Duncan's career, such as myself, but if we made up the majority, he wouldn't be rising in stature with every project in the years since he's retired. So we skeptics are there, and we may well be in the wrong, but if you're not perceiving the majority that exists around you, well, that's I'd say that's how polarization tends to work. From my perspective though, I certainly perceive Duncan getting credit for all sorts of things, be they explicit or implicit.

If I put shaq next to mourning, curry next to westbrook, or jordan next to kobe, I imagine our opinions of their "port" might drop. I think it's also apparent that offensive great+defensive great works better than two guys who generate big value on the same side of the floor. Pair love with a defensive anchor, oh wow his lineups look kind of awesome. Pair him with another negative defender...yeah not great. Duncan and Drob play the same position and were both great defensive anchors(we can check post-drob results or pre-duncan results to verify that claim for both). Their most valuable attribute on that end was protecting the rim. And both were more valuable as scorers than playmakers. That pairing still winning enough to trick people into thinking that their fit was a privilege is a testament to both.

And with that, I think i've talked myself into robinson over karl malone.

Well how 'bout that, we're in agreement in the end.

To your point though: I don't disagree that fit tends to be an issue with similar guys playing next to each other. It's just that if we're talking about a better fit here, since we're not talking about getting a better defender as a teammate, we're talking about getting a better offensive player as a teammate and relegating either Duncan or Robinson to a lesser scoring primacy...and so much of the focus of Duncan leading his team to titles is based on his scoring primacy.

If we can agree that Duncan/Robinson had iffy offensive fit because Duncan really wasn't that valuable as a volume scorer, well, then we agree...but it goes in the face of how a lot of those who champion Duncan look to champion him. I'd argue that this particular thing - leading team to a title while being the lead scorer - is what separates Duncan from Garnett in the eyes of many.