RealGM 2023 Top 100 Project - #81 (Adrian Dantley)

[Samurai]

Vote for #81: Adrian Dantley. I acknowledge that the 6-time all star can be a polarizing player. But in his prime he was an elite scorer, leading the league twice and finished in the top ten in ppg 5 times. Preferred higher percentage shots closer to the rim rather than hoisting 30-footers, finishing in the top 15 in TS% for a dozen consecutive years. He was also a magnet at drawing fouls, finishing in the top ten in FT attempts 10 times, leading the league twice.ote : Adrian Dantley. I acknowledge that the 6-time all star can be a polarizing player. But in his prime he was an elite scorer, leading the league twice and finished in the top ten in ppg 5 times. Preferred higher percentage shots closer to the rim rather than hoisting 30-footers, finishing in the top 15 in TS% for a dozen consecutive years. He was also a magnet at drawing fouls, finishing in the top ten in FT attempts 10 times, leading the league twice.

Alternate vote: Sidney Moncrief. Doesn't have elite longevity but has six strong seasons of prime. Great all around player who impacted the game with his scoring, playmaking, defense and leadership. Also consistently finished in the top 3 in rebounds/game among guards during his prime. Moncrief didn't have a ton of success in the play-offs but he did consistently manage to lead teams to the play-offs and be competitive against stacked 76ers and Celtics teams. Five time all star with five All NBA Team selections (one first team and four seconds). Outstanding defender with five All Defensive Team selections, four of them on the first team.

Nomination: Sam Jones. Ten rings but some will take that with a grain of salt for being Russell's teammate. Three-time All NBA Second Team (cursed by playing guard at the same time that Oscar and West were in their primes) and had three top ten finishes in MVP voting. Seven top twenty finishes in both points/game and TS% indicates that he was not only a scoring threat but an efficient shooter as well. I don't have a good feel on how good he was on defense; he had 9 top twenty finishes in DWS but Russell was obviously the primary driver of the team's excellent defense and KC Jones typically drew the assignment of defending the opposing team's primary backcourt scorer. One of the greatest bank shot artists of all-time; he was banking in shots before Tim Duncan was even born.

Alternate nomination: Tony Parker. Don't have particularly strong feelings here. Seems like an all star level peak but solid longevity and consistency. Six-time all star and four All NBA Team selections (three 2nd teams and one 3rd team).

[trelos6]

How does DJ look by PIPM? Is his entire career available?

I appreciate the lists of guys on peoples minds. Guys I'm likely to support/and or am currently supporting.

Old man Davies
A pair of ABA stars - Daniels/Issel
A trio of #3s - Grant/Parker/Bosh
The old Celtics SGs - Sharman/Jones

So still about ~10 slots that'll be open for me to hear sales pitches on.

[Doctor MJ]

Nomination #1: Bob Davies
-1st great guard.
-Star on 2 title winners.
-Too much of early years analysis is looking at TS%.
-Would easily move to the top of my ballot if he were to be nominated.

Of the early superstars, we've voted in Pettit, Schayes, Arizin, Russell, Mikan, Wilt, Cousy. All aside from Cousy were legit top 50 careers.

What makes Davies better than Neil Johnston? I'm high on Neil, but am not even bothering to nominate as he got no traction for many rounds. He was All 1st team for 4 seasons, 2nd team for another. I'd call all of those seasons Weak MVP level.

Even Max Zaslofsky has a case against Bob Davies. He was 1st team all NBA/BAA for 4 seasons, though his career nosedived in the 50's.

Even Ed Macauley had 3 All NBA 1st, a 2nd team, and 3 more all star seasons.

So I'll chime in as someone who has Davies higher than everyone else in conversation now, and just hasn't pulled the trigger because he hasn't ever gotten traction in this project (props to eminence for fighting that good fight).

If I just post these guys, plus contemporary Bill Sharman, by my personal POY shares, here's what I have:

Davies 2.2 (4 Top 5 seasons)
Macauley 0.9 (3)
Johnston 0.7 (1)
Sharman 0.3 (1)
Zaslovfsky 0.3 (1)

After Davies, Sharman would be the one I have next followed by Macauley & Johnston. How am I seeing each in general?

I see Davies as the 2nd accomplished overall and offensive competitive pro of the decade that came after World War II after Mikan. (Shout outs to Bob Kurland as an amateur, and Goose Tatum & Marques Haynes of the Globetrotters). On what basis do I say this?

Well, let's start by noting that in the 9 years that followed World War 2, Mikan's teams won the championship in the top league 7 times, and Davies' Rochester Royals won the other two years. And let's add in this bit: In both Mikan & Davies' cases, they changed co-stars along the way.

Mikan began on the Chicago Gears with Bobby McDermott as his co-star, and then moved to the Minneapolis Lakers where it was Jim Pollard.
Davies played his whole career with the Royals, but in the first title Al Cervi was his best teammate, and in the second Arnie Risen was. (imho in both cases of course).

I'd say the main argument I could see against Davies being the #2 of this era is if you wanted to argue for Pollard instead, but of course the thing about Pollard is that his box score stats really don't look impressive (to the point where we've had debates about whether he's even the 2nd best player on those Lakers).

What about Zaslofsky? Well as you acknowledge, it's those first 4 years where Zaslofsky is really noteworthy. In that last year, he's 24, while Davies is 30, and the two make up the All-NBA 1st team backcourt. And despite the fact Davies was 6 years older, he was the one of those two guys who would keep making All-NBA teams after that. Thus, if we're just talking about perception of the time in the NBA, I just don't think there's much of a debate as to whether Davies had the more admired career.

In terms of reasons to be skeptical of this, I don't see much. Davies was a legendary passer, Zaslofsky was a legendary scorer. Sure a legendary scorer can be more valuable, but scorers are not typically underrated in any era. If would be something if Zaslofsky's teams proved to be better offenses, but no, those are Davies teams.

I do think the question of what cause Zaslofsky's career to fall off abruptly is a great one to consider. The obvious thing here is that his team, the Chicago Stags, folded and he went to the Knicks. There the team was quite successful, but Zaslofsky was not seen as the clear cut best player on his team any more, and if I recall correctly there was increasing strain on the relationship along the lines of Zaslofsky wanting more, and the Knicks deciding to move on from him - with Carl Braun being the you might say decided to build with going forward. This then gives a situation where Zaslofsky was undoubtedly hoping to prove to the world he was an all-world guy, but instead bouncing around for the rest of his career. He would play for another finalist in the Fort Wayne Pistons in '54-55, but he would be largely nailed to the bench in the playoff run as the 3-years-older Andy Phillip was trusted as an on-ball pass-first point guard.

I'd say it's within the realm of possibility that these teams were wrong not to feature Zaslofsky, and it's also possible there was some antisemitism involved along the way. But I do tend to see a guy in Zaslofsky as a guy who probably didn't achieve more than Braun or Phillip, let along Davies.

Should the 4 All-BAA/NBA's matter enough to overwhelm the rest in the name of longevity? Well, this gets into the rub where the NBA was improving rapidly in this era, and we see a watershed where some guys continue to swim with the current but others really fall off. Zaslofsky is a volume scorer who is about neutral-at-best in TS Add after Chicago folds, but not because it dropped with out a prior trend in New York. Zaslofsky's relative advantage over the league was already dropping by that time, and so if those trends in Chicago had simply continued, we'd be talking about the same sort of thing.

I'll note that I think the trend here is that the big scorers of the '40s fared worse in the '50s than the big playmakers. (Zaslofsky not being the posterboy for this trend because of the stark drop off of Joe Fulks.)

Briefly on Sharman & Macauley, I think Macauley was more of a lead star in Boston than Sharman, but what Sharman accomplishes after Macauley leaves more than makes up for that.

On to Johnston: I have a great deal of skepticism with him, and the root of it is this question that we see Johnston's breakout in '52-53:

What does it mean when you post the best individual scoring stats in the league...on the least effective offense and overall team in the league? In theory you could argue it make the individual even more impressive - "He's doing it all by himself, imagine if he had help!".

But we're talking about an interior scorer here, and the thing is that interior scorers are dependent on others to give them the ball. This is a problem even for actual giants of the game, but even early on in the NBA Johnston was no giant.

And then the true giants showed up, and the effect on Johnston was very much noticed. Johnston would have experience a steep descent then to retire before 30, and while health was certainly part of the equation, I think it's clear that contemporary observers saw more than that.

Alright, just circling back to Davies here and speaking to my process leading up to this current project:

I looked to compare first within era, and then across era. The across era comparisons certainly involve a) how great a run did a player have, and b) how tough an era did he play in. The comparison of the latter becomes something less than hypothetical when there's overlap or near overlap.

So if we look at Davies compared to Cousy, that's an 8 year age difference...but it was a direct hand off from Davies' Royals being the top offensive team around in '51-52, to Cousy's Celtics who would set the offensive standard in the NBA for the next 3 years before dropping off quickly. It's really not a question as to who led a longer offensive dynasty between Davies & Cousy, nor is it a question of whose personal shooting efficiency aged better.

And so while I can acknowledge that Cousy played against better competition, I can't really say that I think Davies showed any sign beyond advanced aging that would have kept him from doing his thing going forward, whereas I think Cousy would have needed to change his approach to thrive in later eras in order to keep up with the climb in efficiency the league would see.

So then I'll leave it with: I certainly understand those who don't see neither Davies nor Cousy as guys who should get voted in here depending on how one views era differences, but if you see Cousy as someone who was deserving and you don't think Davies is, I think you should make sure you really know why.

And folks may have great reasons, but part of what I mean here is that Cousy just got far more publicized after his career than Davies did, and I don't think one should assume that this is because it was clear cut that Cousy actually the more effective basketball player.

[Doctor MJ]

How does DJ look by PIPM? Is his entire career available?

I appreciate the lists of guys on peoples minds. Guys I'm likely to support/and or am currently supporting.

Old man Davies
A pair of ABA stars - Daniels/Issel
A trio of #3s - Grant/Parker/Bosh
The old Celtics SGs - Sharman/Jones

So still about ~10 slots that'll be open for me to hear sales pitches on.

Re: ABA. How about Zelmo?

[eminence]

How does DJ look by PIPM? Is his entire career available?

I appreciate the lists of guys on peoples minds. Guys I'm likely to support/and or am currently supporting.

Old man Davies
A pair of ABA stars - Daniels/Issel
A trio of #3s - Grant/Parker/Bosh
The old Celtics SGs - Sharman/Jones

So still about ~10 slots that'll be open for me to hear sales pitches on.

Re: ABA. How about Zelmo?

A worthy pick. He always slips the cracks a bit for me, as I find his NBA career rather forgettable and don't mentally have it fully connected to his ABA career where he was a worthy rival to Daniels.

[Doctor MJ]

So, I found this lawsuit:

TIME INC v. JOHNSTON (1971)

The defendant is the publisher of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, a weekly periodical devoted to sports and athletics. Annually, it features its selection of “Sportsman of the Year”. In 1968, it chose Bill Russell, a star on the professional basketball team of the Boston CELTICS, as its “Sportsman of the Year” and engaged George Plimpton, a well-known writer, especially in the field of sports, to write the feature article. In developing his article, Plimpton chose to quote from interviews he had had with persons acquainted with Russell and his exceptional talents as a basketball player. In quoting an interview with Arnold Auerbach, the coach of Russell with the CELTICS, Plimpton included in his article the following paragraph:

“* * * That's a word you can use about him–he (Russell) ‘destroyed’ players. You take Neil Johnston– * * *, Russell destroyed him. He destroyed him psychologically as well, so that he practically ran him out of organized basketball. He blocked so many shots that Johnston began throwing his hook farther and farther from the basket. It was ludicrous, and the guys along the bench began to laugh, maybe in relief that they didn't have to worry about such a guy themselves.”

The “Johnston” referred to in the quoted paragraph is the plaintiff. At the time of the incident referred to, he was an outstanding professional basketball player with the Philadelphia WARRIORS basketball team. He subsequently retired from professional basketball and is now the assistant basketball coach at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Following the publication of the article, he sued the defendant, contending that he had been libeled in the quoted paragraph and had been “damaged (him) in his chosen profession, that of coaching basketball.”

[Clyde Frazier]

Vote 1 - Adrian Dantley
Vote 2 - Sidney Moncrief
Nomination 1 - Tony Parker
Nomination 2 - Sam Jones

Looking at the controversy with dantley leaving DET and them winning the championship following his departure, and it seems overblown. Dantley’s averages in the '88 finals (loss) are as follows:

21.3 PPG, 5 RPG, 2.3 APG, .6 SPG, 57.3% FG, 85.6% FT, 67.6% TS, 127 ORTG

Games 6 and 7 of the 88 finals were decided by a total of 4 points, and this was with a substandard game 7 by the injured isiah thomas. If he’s healthy, they very well could’ve won the title that year. I don’t hold the turn of events against dantley all that much relative to general perception.

Some great research here by Moonbeam on Dantley and other star SFs of the 80s:

Spoiler:

I love looking at these guys because most of my favorite players are small forwards, and it was such an exciting time to watch, as these guys were each capable of amazing offensive outbursts.

One thing I've taken a hard look at is how to weigh up offensive statistics in the context of team offense. There has been a fair bit of discussion in the Top 100 poll about how to gauge individual performance based on team performance (e.g. Garnett's Minny teams did not generally excel on defense, how to compare Kidd's team offenses to Payton's given teammate quality), so I tried to come up with a rough model of expectations for team offense.

I used offensive win shares as the basis for this analysis. I know many aren't happy with OWS, but on a team-level, it is very strongly correlated with offensive rating, which is a good measure of overall team offensive performance. I looked at all regular season data from 1977-2014 to come up with a set of aging curves to encompass different types of peak shapes. I've used five different levels of peak sharpness and five different peak ages (21, 24, 27, 30, and 33), which makes it possible to model a player's career based on OWS/48, like this:



This is a very simple approach, but I wanted something specific enough to broadly capture the relationship between offensive production and aging, but not too specific as to produce perfect models - I'm interested in the deviations from expectations, after all, so I'm happy with a bit of noise.

Based on these curves of expected OWS/48, I then looked at team offense relative to expectations as judged by total OWS. I'm still looking to road-test this analysis, so if you know of any instances where you felt a team overachieved or underachieved its talent level, I'd be eager to check it against my model!

I parsed out performance relative to expectations for each of these players plus Larry Bird (in >28 MPG seasons) and their respective teammates as a whole. Why 28 MPG? I wanted to include enough seasons to get a big picture view, plus I wanted to avoid discontinuities where I could (e.g. Bernard King's 1988 season). Here are the resulting plots of player OWS, player expected OWS, teammate ("help") OWS and expected teammate OWS:

















Over this span, here are the MP-weighted averages for player OWS, % of team OWS, both rate and raw difference of help OWS to expectations:

Code: Select all

Player   WtOWS   %Off  Help Rate  Help Diff
Aguirre  5.112  0.166    1.018      +0.428
Bird     7.429  0.220    1.048      +1.056
Dantley  8.803  0.394    0.844      -2.155
English  6.536  0.246    1.016      +0.307
Johnson  5.954  0.253    1.040      +0.636
King     4.466  0.269    0.887      -1.413
Wilkins  6.084  0.255    1.015      +0.260
Worthy   5.065  0.155    1.116      +2.809


On the surface, it looks like Dantley (and to a lesser extent, King) may be getting their Win Shares somewhat at the expense of teammates, while Bird and Worthy are associated with boosts for their teammates. How much praise (or blame) should be apportioned for performance of teammates is up for debate, but I think it at least provides a framework for comparison.

Taking a look at the 5-year intervals in the OP:

Code: Select all

Player  Years   WtOWS   %Off  Help Rate  Help Diff
Aguirre 84-88   5.920  0.187    1.041      +1.005
Bird    84-88   9.933  0.302    0.989      -0.257
Dantley 80-84  11.213  0.553    1.083      +0.606
English 82-86   7.849  0.268    1.026      +0.548
Johnson 79-83   7.192  0.275    1.057      +0.984
King    81-85   6.675  0.323    0.919      -1.268
Wilkins 86-90   7.835  0.270    1.158      +2.891
Worthy  86-90   6.465  0.180    1.181      +4.496


Dantley is clearly the leader in both OWS and percentage of team offense (some of those supporting casts in Utah look dreadful), but perhaps he didn't provide the "lift" as others (or worse, perhaps his presence deflated his teammates offense). If we split his career into phases, it seems his early career is where his teammates fared the worst (0.731 rate, fit issues with Lakers?), while in Utah they performed nearly to (awful) expectations (0.968 rate), while in Detroit during 87-88, the rate fell to 0.801 (problems of fit with Isiah?), and across 89-90, it was 0.935.

I don't think Worthy's help numbers are attributable to him so much as they are to Magic, but he clearly fit into Showtime quite well. Wilkins looks like he could have provided decent lift across 86-90, and Aguirre's apparent issues with teammates did not seem to affect his teams' offenses.

I've got H2H stats I can post later, but I thought I'd put this out there as it's a fascinating comparison for me.

Entire discussion here:

http://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=41264223#p41264223

[iggymcfrack]

Vote: Sidney Moncrief
Nasty defense, nasty WOWY numbers, would likely be an impact superstar with modern data.

Nominate: Kevin Johnson
Tremendous offensive engine. Very efficient for his day. Had some good playoff runs and looked good in the on/off data we had at the tail end of his career.

Alternate: Baron Davis
Best RAPM numbers left by far. Playoff on/off was even better than regular season and his box score numbers while a little bit pedestrian in the regular season really popped in the playoffs including a memorable upset of the 1 seed Mavericks in ‘07.

[Doctor MJ]

Personal vote:

Induction Vote 1: Cliff Hagan
Induction Vote 2: Bill Walton

Siding again with Hagan here, the player here who showed an ability to star on a champion and did not have major health issues.

Going with Walton for the second spot, because what I think he did is singular and not something I see the other players as likely to match even in the best of times.

Nomination Vote 1: Jayson Tatum
Nomination Vote 2: Sam Jones

Continuing to side with Tatum. Honestly I'm not dead set on him, but I think a conversation about him is overdue.

For my second vote I'll go back to Sam. 2nd most important guy on the greatest dynasty in NBA history. No small thing.

[Doctor MJ]

Tallies:

Induction 1:
Nance - 3(AEnigma, trelos, eminence)
Dantley - 4 (beast, trex, Samurai, Clyde)
Walton - 3 (LA Bird, HBK, Ohayo)
Moncrief - 1 (iggy)
Hagan - 1 (Doc)

No majority. Going to vote 2 between Dantley, Nance & Walton.

Nance - 0 (none)
Dantley - 0 (none)
Walton - 1 (Doc)
none - (iggy)

Eliminating Nance:

Dantley - 1 (eminence)
Walton - 0 (none)
neither - 2 (AEnigma, trelos)

Adrian Dantley 5, Bill Walton 4
Adrian Dantley is Inducted at #81.


Nomination 1:
Parker - 3 (AEnigma, trex, Clyde)
Sam - 3 (beast, LA Bird, Samurai)
Marion - 1 (trelos)
Davies - 1 (eminence)
Horford - 1 (Ohayo)
KJ - 1 (iggy)
Tatum - 1 (Doc)
none - 1 (HBK)

No majority. Going to vote 2 between Parke & Sam:

Parker - 1 (eminence)
Sam - 1 (Doc)
neither - 4 (trelos, Ohayo, iggy, HBK)

Tony Parker 4, Sam Jones 4. Tie.
Both Tony Parker and Sam Jones will be added to Nominee list. No Nomination vote will be held next round.

[eminence]

Happy to see Tony/Sam nominated, good players who played meaningful roles in the history of the game.

I expect them to be my two top ballot spots next round.

[penbeast0]

It's funny, I used to defend Tony Parker from accusations that he was the weak link on those Spurs title teams then he pushed his scoring over the 20ppg mark and I now tend to end up on the other side of those debates.

[Cavsfansince84]

Nomination: Sam Jones. Ten rings but some will take that with a grain of salt for being Russell's teammate. Three-time All NBA Second Team (cursed by playing guard at the same time that Oscar and West were in their primes) and had three top ten finishes in MVP voting. Seven top twenty finishes in both points/game and TS% indicates that he was not only a scoring threat but an efficient shooter as well. I don't have a good feel on how good he was on defense; he had 9 top twenty finishes in DWS but Russell was obviously the primary driver of the team's excellent defense and KC Jones typically drew the assignment of defending the opposing team's primary backcourt scorer. One of the greatest bank shot artists of all-time; he was banking in shots before Tim Duncan was even born.

Alternate nomination: Tony Parker. Don't have particularly strong feelings here. Seems like an all star level peak but solid longevity and consistency. Six-time all star and four All NBA Team selections (three 2nd teams and one 3rd team).

Seems a bit strange to me that a guy who was second team all nba and had b2b seasons of being top 6 in mvp vote you are saying peaked at all star level(which is more like top 25-30 player).

[kcktiny]

Larry Nance:

- Absolutely belongs in the HOF. The fact that players like Alex English, Dominique Wilkins, and James Worthy are in the HOF and Nance is not is absurd and clearly shows how HOF voters have no clue how to evaluate NBA level defense, and thus simply choose not to. The fact that Bobby Jones was not elected into the Hall until 2019 is another example of this.

- Incredible combination of excellent defense and efficient offense with solid scoring.


Adrian Dantley:

- One of the greatest offensive weapons the league has ever seen, incredible scoring combined with incredible offensive efficiency. To this day fans do not appreciate this, and point to Utah's W-L records as "proof" he wasn't that good. How Alex English got into the HOF and not Dantley is mind-boggling.


Sidney Moncrief:

- His peak was outstanding (1980-81 to 1985-86), one of the best ever defensive SGs that was very good on offense. But his peak career is simply too short.


Bill Walton:

- Putting him in a Top 100 project is a joke. Never played 2300 minutes in a season, only once played 2000+ minutes in a season.


Cliff Hagan:

- His peak was short. There are others from his era I would consider first.