Prime and Career value: Sheed vs Dominique Wilkins?

[1993Playoffs]

Who was better in their prime and who has more career value?

[migya]

Dominique was a multiple allstar and featured among the best scorers every year, more prominent than Rasheed. Sheed might be better for winning with the right mix around him but for what they did in their careers it's Nique.

It's interesting thought if Wilkins would have had as much success in Melo's place on the mid to late 2000s Nuggets.

[homecourtloss]

In terms of winning impact, Rasheed for both.

[tsherkin]

It's interesting thought if Wilkins would have had as much success in Melo's place on the mid to late 2000s Nuggets.

Hard to imagine him not matching Melo's success on those Nuggets, particularly in his 90s form when he'd learned how to shoot 3s.

[migya]

It's interesting thought if Wilkins would have had as much success in Melo's place on the mid to late 2000s Nuggets.

Hard to imagine him not matching Melo's success on those Nuggets, particularly in his 90s form when he'd learned how to shoot 3s.

Melo didn't seem to shoot the three much himself. Dominique in the 80s scored from everywhere except volume threes. Agree, he'd do as well as Melo but they are similar.

[tsherkin]

Melo didn't seem to shoot the three much himself. Dominique in the 80s scored from everywhere except volume threes. Agree, he'd do as well as Melo but they are similar.

They are similar, yes.

Also, Melo shot a comparable number of 3s to 90s Nique, who averaged 3.4 3PA/g prior to the line being shortened, from 90-94. Obviously less in the 80s, though. 93 was his big year. He was mediocre outside of that, even within that stretch, but it helped out his scoring efficiency a fair bit. He was kind of bleh, volume aside, otherwise. We remember the highlights and some big duels and stuff, but he also only had one season over 99 TS+ during the 80s. He was sort of your prototype weak-D volume gunner with mediocre playmaking. Melo was better than that, of course, more like 90s Nique, and in part because he was a little better at drawing fouls earlier in his career and wielded the 3 more and at a higher percentage earlier on.

That said, I think Denver would have worked out nicely for Nique because the talent was more complementary to a scoring wing who liked those spots.

[bkkrh]

I'm a big fan of both but this isn't even close. Nique lead the league in scoring, has more than double the amount of All Star games, made 7 All NBA teams and was viewed by many as the biggest snub of the NBA 50th Anniversary team. Sheed was super entertaining and talented, never made any kind of All NBA team, lead the league in technical fouls and was often viewed as player that is the most talented on the court, but not the most consistent.

[homecourtloss]

I'm a big fan of both but this isn't even close. Nique lead the league in scoring, has more than double the amount of All Star games, made 7 All NBA teams and was viewed by many as the biggest snub of the NBA 50th Anniversary team. Sheed was super entertaining and talented, never made any kind of All NBA team, lead the league in technical fouls and was often viewed as player that is the most talented on the court, but not the most consistent.

If you’re talking about winning impact, yes, it probably isn’t close in favor of Rasheed.

[Cavsfansince84]

I'm a big fan of both but this isn't even close. Nique lead the league in scoring, has more than double the amount of All Star games, made 7 All NBA teams and was viewed by many as the biggest snub of the NBA 50th Anniversary team. Sheed was super entertaining and talented, never made any kind of All NBA team, lead the league in technical fouls and was often viewed as player that is the most talented on the court, but not the most consistent.

Accolade wise, Nique is likely one of the more overrated players while Sheed is probably the opposite in terms of all nba or all def honors. The question with Nique is to what degree could he have sublimated his own need to shoot 25+ times in both the rs and ps on teams that could truly contend and weren't just 1st or 2nd exits. No one really knows because we never really saw it and he didn't bring that much else to the table outside of off reb and some rim protection.
With Dantley for instance at least we saw him shift to a lesser scoring role while still leading a team in scoring that lost a close game 7 in the finals. Also, fwiw, we also saw Sheed be probably the best player on teams that went 35-15 and 59-23 and lost in the wcf in b2b years then moving to a team where he was a big piece on teams that go to b2b finals and won it all. So I think that in terms of actual results there's more there which would lead to thinking that Sheed has more impact on winning or can better fit his game to teams that can actually contend than Nique can.

[bkkrh]

I'm a big fan of both but this isn't even close. Nique lead the league in scoring, has more than double the amount of All Star games, made 7 All NBA teams and was viewed by many as the biggest snub of the NBA 50th Anniversary team. Sheed was super entertaining and talented, never made any kind of All NBA team, lead the league in technical fouls and was often viewed as player that is the most talented on the court, but not the most consistent.

Accolade wise, Nique is likely one of the more overrated players while Sheed is probably the opposite in terms of all nba or all def honors. The question with Nique is to what degree could he have sublimated his own need to shoot 25+ times in both the rs and ps on teams that could truly contend and weren't just 1st or 2nd exits. No one really knows because we never really saw it and he didn't bring that much else to the table outside of off reb and some rim protection.
With Dantley for instance at least we saw him shift to a lesser scoring role while still leading a team in scoring that lost a close game 7 in the finals. Also, fwiw, we also saw Sheed be probably the best player on teams that went 35-15 and 59-23 and lost in the wcf in b2b years then moving to a team where he was a big piece on teams that go to b2b finals and won it all. So I think that in terms of actual results there's more there which would lead to thinking that Sheed has more impact on winning or can better fit his game to teams that can actually contend than Nique can.

Well the weird thing is that somehow Nique still has better general and advanced stats in basically every category besides blocks. PER, WS, BPM, VORP are all clearly higher for him, no matter if you look at career average, or highest season peaks.

The Hawks had 50+ Win seasons with him as the best player in a period where they competed in the East against the Bird Celtics, Bad Boy Pistons & Jordan Bulls. They had not much Playoff success, but they lost either against the Celtics, Pistons, or a pretty strong Bucks team, so exactly the same teams that Jordan couldn't beat at the same time either.

The best team mates Nique had during his prime were Doc Rivers, Tree Rollins, Kevin Willis & Spudd Webb. I feel that he is viewed kind of similar to how Jordan was viewed before his first title. Unfortunately he never got a good enough supporting cast to be part of a realistic title contender. The only player from the same era that had similar team situtation was Olajuwon outside of the time he played with Sampson and before he got Drexler.

Now look at the teams Sheed played on. Those late 90ies Trailblazer teams were 10-11 players deep. There were seasons were his current roster was better than a combination of all of Wilkins' team mates. Now I can agree that in the end he was the best player on the team, but there was not much of a gap between the top 5 players on the team.

He won a title with the Pistons and was definitely a big factor, he still was at best the 3rd best player on that roster during those playoffs. Look at any playoff series of that title run, there was always at least 1, most of the time 2 games were he was absolutely horrible.

So guess it comes down to preference if you value a player more that has more personal statistical accomplishments, or a player that might have been one of the best 3rd or 4th best players on a championship team of all time.

[Cavsfansince84]

Well the weird thing is that somehow Nique still has better general and advanced stats in basically every category besides blocks. PER, WS, BPM, VORP are all clearly higher for him, no matter if you look at career average, or highest season peaks.

The Hawks had 50+ Win seasons with him as the best player in a period where they competed in the East against the Bird Celtics, Bad Boy Pistons & Jordan Bulls. They had not much Playoff success, but they lost either against the Celtics, Pistons, or and also pretty strong Bucks team, so exactly the same teams that Jordan couldn't beat at the same time either.

He won a title with the Pistons and was definitely a big factor, he still was at best the 3rd best player on that roster during those playoffs. Look at any playoff series of that title run, there was always at least 1, most of the time 2 games were he was absolutely horrible.

So guess it comes down to preference if you value a player more that has more personal statistical accomplishments, or a player that might have been one of the best 3rd or 4th best players on a championship team of all time.

I get all of that and I am sort of high on Nique in terms of all time ratings relative to this board but even things like bpm and vorp don't take defense into account very well so if one guy is neutral to bad on defense and another is good to very good on it then bpm and vorp isn't that good for a straight comparison. For volume scorers such as Nique I think its better to look at their rts and how resilient they tend to be in the playoffs. I think there's a case for saying Nique here but I was just responding to what you wrote above and saying there is a case for Sheed as well that has some definite merits to it.

[bkkrh]

Well the weird thing is that somehow Nique still has better general and advanced stats in basically every category besides blocks. PER, WS, BPM, VORP are all clearly higher for him, no matter if you look at career average, or highest season peaks.

The Hawks had 50+ Win seasons with him as the best player in a period where they competed in the East against the Bird Celtics, Bad Boy Pistons & Jordan Bulls. They had not much Playoff success, but they lost either against the Celtics, Pistons, or and also pretty strong Bucks team, so exactly the same teams that Jordan couldn't beat at the same time either.

He won a title with the Pistons and was definitely a big factor, he still was at best the 3rd best player on that roster during those playoffs. Look at any playoff series of that title run, there was always at least 1, most of the time 2 games were he was absolutely horrible.

So guess it comes down to preference if you value a player more that has more personal statistical accomplishments, or a player that might have been one of the best 3rd or 4th best players on a championship team of all time.

I get all of that and I am sort of high on Nique in terms of all time ratings relative to this board but even things like bpm and vorp don't take defense into account very well so if one guy is neutral to bad on defense and another is good to very good on it then bpm and vorp isn't that good for a straight comparison. For volume scorers such as Nique I think its better to look at their rts and how resilient they tend to be in the playoffs. I think there's a case for saying Nique here but I was just responding to what you wrote above and saying there is a case for Sheed as well that has some definite merits to it.

Funny enough even DWS and DBPM are not as much in favor for Sheed as I personally expected. Sheed has better numbers and was of course 100% the better defender. I get what you mean though and I think the issue is mostly that it is generally a difficult comparsion due to their different roles.

To give a more extreme example, how would you even evaluate something like a Ben Wallace or a John Stockton vs Dominique WIlkins comparsion. I think it really kind of comes down to what you value more. You can argue that a "bad" franchise level player has still more value than an all time role player and the other way around. Like you will most likely not be a top team if a player like Dennis Rodman is your best player, but he will be the player that would turn a Nique or AI team into a contender.

And that's kind of how I see Rasheed. He was definitely the missing piece of the puzzle for the Pistons, he could easily be the best player in the game, but they weren't really fully depending on him to be that every game. He was always that kind of player where you felt he has generally the potential to be a franchise player, but his mentality and to a certain extend definitely also the bias referees had against him kinda avoided that.

[Owly]

I'm a big fan of both but this isn't even close. Nique lead the league in scoring, has more than double the amount of All Star games, made 7 All NBA teams and was viewed by many as the biggest snub of the NBA 50th Anniversary team. Sheed was super entertaining and talented, never made any kind of All NBA team, lead the league in technical fouls and was often viewed as player that is the most talented on the court, but not the most consistent.

Accolade wise, Nique is likely one of the more overrated players while Sheed is probably the opposite in terms of all nba or all def honors. The question with Nique is to what degree could he have sublimated his own need to shoot 25+ times in both the rs and ps on teams that could truly contend and weren't just 1st or 2nd exits. No one really knows because we never really saw it and he didn't bring that much else to the table outside of off reb and some rim protection.
With Dantley for instance at least we saw him shift to a lesser scoring role while still leading a team in scoring that lost a close game 7 in the finals. Also, fwiw, we also saw Sheed be probably the best player on teams that went 35-15 and 59-23 and lost in the wcf in b2b years then moving to a team where he was a big piece on teams that go to b2b finals and won it all. So I think that in terms of actual results there's more there which would lead to thinking that Sheed has more impact on winning or can better fit his game to teams that can actually contend than Nique can.

Well the weird thing is that somehow Nique still has better general and advanced stats in basically every category besides blocks. PER, WS, BPM, VORP are all clearly higher for him, no matter if you look at career average, or highest season peaks.

The Hawks had 50+ Win seasons with him as the best player in a period where they competed in the East against the Bird Celtics, Bad Boy Pistons & Jordan Bulls. They had not much Playoff success, but they lost either against the Celtics, Pistons, or a pretty strong Bucks team, so exactly the same teams that Jordan couldn't beat at the same time either.

The best team mates Nique had during his prime were Doc Rivers, Tree Rollins, Kevin Willis & Spudd Webb. I feel that he is viewed kind of similar to how Jordan was viewed before his first title. Unfortunately he never got a good enough supporting cast to be part of a realistic title contender. The only player from the same era that had similar team situtation was Olajuwon outside of the time he played with Sampson and before he got Drexler.

Now look at the teams Sheed played on. Those late 90ies Trailblazer teams were 10-11 players deep. There were seasons were his current roster was better than a combination of all of Wilkins' team mates. Now I can agree that in the end he was the best player on the team, but there was not much of a gap between the top 5 players on the team.

He won a title with the Pistons and was definitely a big factor, he still was at best the 3rd best player on that roster during those playoffs. Look at any playoff series of that title run, there was always at least 1, most of the time 2 games were he was absolutely horrible.

So guess it comes down to preference if you value a player more that has more personal statistical accomplishments, or a player that might have been one of the best 3rd or 4th best players on a championship team of all time.

So I'd just say here without expertise that when you say "advanced stats" you are talking things that are primarily boxscore aggregators. These do output Wilkins as the superior productivity player (PER gap wider than the others).

The thing with Rasheed is if one believes in impact stats to a significant degree ... he looks significantly better than his boxscore. Now our impact read on Wilkins is limited (I think some here weren't so impressed off their own, probably WoWY type analysis ... I haven't looked closely) so I won't pretend there is a way of an apples-to-apples comparison.

Regarding playoff production by some angles Wallace does drop off (BPM is actually up on his career, metrics seem to differ) and if one wants to highlight a production dropoff in #04 to argue him lower on the totem ... again there's non-box stuff that's missed but broadly, fair enough ... the problem with that in a Wilkins context is ... Wilkins sees (and varies on measure, BPM not so bad) one of the worse "star" dropoff in terms of PER and WS/48 dropoff over his career (an oversimplified illustration using arbitrary cutoffs and granting players don't always make the playoffs, and the average player standard and average opponent is tougher in the playoffs so some superficial drop could be a real-terms "hold" ... Wilkins has 9 1/2 regular seasons with a PER above 20 - most of which above 22 - and 2 such playoffs [both of which in fairness also clear 22]; 8 1/2 regular seasons with WS/48 above .150 ... and no such playoffs [.140 being the closest]. This is just illustrative. I tend to look at the average though there are issues with that with uneven samples and differing quality of opponents).

All of which is to say it depends what measures one trusts, but there are advanced metrics which "like" (that is to say "rate highly") Rasheed.