RealGM 2023 Top 100 Project - #19 (Karl Malone)

[penbeast0]

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Without doing a line by line rebuttal, the fact that you take a Hall of Fame player and replace him with a non All-Star replacement guy and your team improves and wins a title is not an answer in itself, but it is some evidence that possibly the Hall of Famer was not as key to the Warriors' team as had been thought.

I have always maintained that inefficient volume shooting tends to be a negative on most teams. There are occasional outliers like Iverson who showed he could be a decent floor raiser despite being an inefficient scorer but they built a defensive team around him plus he did one other thing (turnover avoidance) very well. Nate's offense didn't have much of a playmaking component either.

Nate, even with the Warriors, was shooting a lot less starting in 72-73 and that trend down continued in Chicago and later Cleveland. Was it a coaching decision, age, or a recognition of his limitations? I don't know. 75 did see a jump in his assists as Motta tried to fit him into Motta's playmaking center with scoring forwards scheme but it was a 1 year bump that then went back down.

[AEnigma]

Sorry, when was Nate Thurmond the key to team wide over performance?

1967, 1969, 1973…

My memory of him was team wide underperforming their talent on teams built around Barry's scoring and playmaking and Thurmond's rebounding

Well that would be incorrect unless you think the team’s inability to handle Thurmond’s absences qualifies as “underperforming their talent”.

then they traded Thurmond for Cliff Ray and won a title but that's memory and anecdotal rather than stat based.

That is indeed what literally happened, but I think what is more relevant is Thurmond being old and in decline and injured often enough to cost his team contending opportunities. It is not because Cliff Ray was secretly some superior player talent.

Thurmond has some excellent head to head series defensively against other ATG bigs; there's a reason he's often mentioned as the GOAT man defender at center.

But he's an offense killer through most of his GS time, averaging almost 16 shots a game for a decade plus in Golden State on .425 shooting in an era where big men were the most efficient shooters.

This is a tired narrative.

1) The Warriors generally did not have any notable offensive improvement when Thurmond missed time.

2) Do you think there is any meaning to the bulk of Thurmond’s shot attempts coming when he was, for all his inefficiency, one of the three or four best scorers on the team, and that when Barry or Wilt were present, his shot rate was notably lower?

3) Do you think there is any meaning to players taking more shots per game when they average high minutes per game?

Ray came in, only averaged 7 shots but on .522 shooting, freeing up Barry for that hot playoff run in 75.

1) Just because Barry shot more, Cliff shot loss, and they won a title, does not mean those three concepts are inherently the reason they won the title. Do the 1975 Warriors defeat the 1973 Lakers? I doubt it.

2) On that note, in the playoffs Barry averaged essentially the same per minute shot rate in 1973 as he did in 1975.

3) 1975 was an outlier volume season even relative to his years with Cliff Ray.

4) Barry’s highest volume scoring season occurred with Thurmond in 1967.

5) Barry himself was not incredibly efficient throughout his career, yet ceding volume to other more efficient scorers did not produce more success than his two highest volume scoring seasons.

6) Thurmond replaced Ray in Chicago, and despite apparently being a shot vampire, the shot rate of the other four starters maintained.

It was a good trade given the results and Thurmond’s age and injury history. In the 1975 postseason, Thurmond was again limited. We do not need to pretend it was because the front office / coaching staff thought Thurmond taking shots was costing them chances at a title.

Without doing a line by line rebuttal, the fact that you take a Hall of Fame player and replace him with a non All-Star replacement guy

A “replacement guy” who was also one of the best defenders in the league and had been the defensive anchor of one of the most successful regular season teams of the prior four years.

and your team improves and wins a title is not an answer in itself, but it is some evidence that possibly the Hall of Famer was not as key to the Warriors' team as had been thought.

Why not. The Warriors had Thurmond and Barry together for two postseasons. In one, they made the Finals and lost in six games to Wilt leading an 8.5-SRS team. In the other, they made the conference finals (by upsetting the ~8-SRS Bucks) and lost in five games to Wilt leading an 8-SRS team. Do you think the 1975 Warriors are beating either?

I am fine saying that 1975 Cliff Ray was able to exhibit similar enough impact to late/post-prime Thurmond that in Barry’s peak season and with the addition of excellent rookie Jamaal Wilkes, they were able to win a title against the weakest field of opponents since the 1950s. No part of that seems like a real criticism of Thurmond himself.

I have always maintained that inefficient volume shooting tends to be a negative on most teams. There are occasional outliers like Iverson who showed he could be a decent floor raiser despite being an inefficient scorer but they built a defensive team around him plus he did one other thing (turnover avoidance) very well.

Thurmond was the fourth most efficient rotation player on the 1973 Warriors and had a notably lower shot rate than the other four starters.

Thurmond was also the fourth most efficient rotation player on the 1972 Warriors and had a lower shot rate than Jeff Mullins and Cazzie Russell (and the very efficient Ron Williams was by that point a total non-shooter).

Thurmond was again the fourth most efficient rotation player on the 1971 Warriors, and here he did probably take more shots than ideal relative to Jerry Lucas… but Jerry Lucas was never really a high volume scorer, and his shot rate that season was the highest it had been since 1966. Almost exact same story in 1970, except Lucas had a laughably low shot rate despite not even having a large sample of games with Thurmond.

And then we have already gone over 1969:

Same for Thurmond who was still in his "Nate the Great" mindset taking 20 shots a game at a ts% efficiency of .460 while leading his team to a .500 record (which is good for a team with that talent level, but not amazing).

He took twenty shots a game because he played 45 minutes a game and had one competent scorer on the team.

Thurmond was fourth on that team in shot rate, and Mullins and an inefficient LaRusso were already in the top twenty for shot rate league-wide; to whom exactly should he have been sacrificing volume? Not Clyde Lee or Joe Ellis, and arguing Al Attles should have shot more is akin to arguing Don Buse should have shot more.

As I have said repeatedly, it makes zero sense to look at per game averages when Thurmond plays so much more than anyone else. Per minute, he is consistently acting as fourth option, and maybe a third option when the situation is desperate (as it was in 1969).

Nate's offense didn't have much of a playmaking component either.

More than with most centres.