PooledSilver wrote:That stuff matters in terms of off ball value but it gets ridiculously overstated sometimes, the best ceiling raiser is whoever is the best offensive player ever, I guess maybe you can argue if you think it’s jordan, that jordan not being a good shooter from three hurts him but it would be kinda weird to blame him for that when it wasn’t an emphasis in that era
I’m not making this point to argue for any particular person, but I think the bolded part above is generally too reductive. Obviously, whoever is the best player overall is surely going to rate highly in terms of ceiling raising (or floor raising). But that person isn’t necessarily the *best* ceiling raiser. I suppose this discussion inherently depends some on how we define “ceiling raising,” but I think a reasonable way to conceptualize it is to say it’s basically about the impact a player has on a team with lots of other great/good players (i.e. a great supporting cast). Meanwhile, “floor raising” would be about the impact a player has on a team that does not have a lot of other great/good players (i.e. a middling or bad supporting cast). Obviously there’s going to be correlation between those two—someone who is great at one will almost certainly be great at the other too. But in a game where people play wildly different styles individually, we would expect there to be differences in how players grade out between those two concepts. So I think it really isn’t necessarily the case that the best player overall is the best at both (and that player may not even be the very best at either!).
Of course, it’s also ultimately a bit of an amorphous concept that is hard to definitively prove anything about. If Player A and Player B both played with supporting casts that we think are equally really good, and Player A’s team does better and he seems to have more impact on his team, then do we know Player A is a better ceiling raiser? We could draw the inference, but it probably wouldn’t be something we could be entirely sure about. After all, maybe the supporting casts were equally good, but Player A’s supporting cast happened to fit his playstyle better, and if we randomly picked two other sets of equally good supporting casts Player B might be the one with better results. Or maybe the sample sizes of everything in basketball are small enough that actually if the two players’ teams played a huge sample of games it’d actually be Player B’s team that does better and Player B that looks more impactful. That sort of uncertainty makes this not at all something we can reduce to a precise science. That might in some sense lead us to throw our hands in the air and just say there’s too much uncertainty and the player we think is best overall is probably also the best at ceiling raising specifically. But I don’t think that that truly logically follows.
