AEnigma wrote:As a voter who had Jordan ahead, and also as a project runner who would have been a bit concerned if Jordan had lost this vote, I think it would be more productive if instead of analysing post counts, there were a committed effort to address the arguments made by those who did not vote Jordan. Regardless of my disagreement, I appreciate that most of those who did not vote for Jordan took the time to explain why. It would be nice if people bothered by their votes would take the time to address them in turn, rather than defaulting to meta-commentary which makes no actual attempt to refute the stances expressed.
Discussion is the primary purpose of these projects. If this project were comprised of voters just posting some emptily reasoned ballots which perfectly mirrored your own, would that be more valuable than a spirited back-and-forth which occasionally produced unexpected deviations?
If we’re being honest, there’s not a lot to the reasoning of most of the Magic votes here. Some pretty bare-bones explanations for a lot of them that can’t really be meaningfully engaged with, along with a gimmick post I genuinely cannot even understand, as well as a smattering of meta-reasoning (for instance: “also let stop the goat peak talk. Russ and Bron exist”). And even the ones with some on-topic explanation seem obviously unpersuasive to me, and I can’t imagine you really disagree, given that, even after seeing all the explanations, you’re admitting you “would have been a bit concerned if Jordan had lost this vote.”
The only real through-line I saw in the explanations is a consistent theme that Magic had a lot less help and his team only won 3 fewer regular season games. Multiple people said something to that effect, and so it seems like the talk track here. That’s one of the things I find very unpersuasive, for reasons others have already pointed out in this thread. For one thing, I don’t agree that Magic had a lot less help. They weren’t the peak Lakers, but that team still had a really good supporting cast. Someone has already mentioned this in this thread, but that Lakers team won 43 games the next season without Magic (replaced by Sedale Threatt—a very replacement-level starting player), despite the fact that probably their two best and most impactful players (Worthy and Divac, the latter being a pretty underrated player) played only 54 games and 36 games (only starting 18 of them) respectively, after having played 78 games and 82 games in 1991. One of their other top several players, Sam Perkins, missed 10 more games in 1992 than in 1991. There’s no one notable who played more games for the Lakers in 1992 than in 1991. The idea that the Lakers were some weak supporting cast, when they won 43 games the next year without Magic while having substantially worse health amongst their main players seems obviously wrong to me. It also seems wrong just by being aware of who these players were and having watched them. At the same time, the Bulls were still growing as a team so weren’t at their best as a supporting cast yet IMO—they did take a leap that year, but it really was not the peak for that group yet. Meanwhile, it’s also the case that the fixation on the Lakers winning 3 fewer games is conveniently putting the difference between the two teams’ success in the best possible light for Magic, since we also know that there was a difference of almost 2 SRS between the Bulls and Lakers, and there’s the glaringly obvious fact that the Bulls won the title and the Lakers did not (though, yes, the Lakers did end up having health issues in the finals). Since this argument is focused on making an implication about regular-season impact, I’ll note that it’s also the case that, in the 50+ game samples we have for both, Jordan’s regular-season on-off is higher than Magic’s, while having a higher ON value (and I note that’s with the sample being skewed towards less good games for the Bulls, so Jordan’s actual numbers are likely even better than what we have), so it’s pretty clearly more impressive (though Magic’s numbers there look very good!). Again, this was already something pointed out in this thread.
Ultimately, it’s just not a persuasive argument (largely for reasons already pointed out by others in this thread), and the fact that multiple people decided to emphasize the same unpersuasive point and to articulate it in the same fairly narrow way (talking specifically about 3 fewer regular season wins) suggests to me that it is people grasping at whatever thin reed they can find to support a conclusion they want to get to (and *perhaps* doing so in an organized fashion, but that’s just speculation). This argument may be almost the only reed available to cling to and people may be clinging to it, but it doesn’t make it a substantial one. And, again, I suspect you don’t *really* disagree, since you just said, after having seen all these explanations, that as the project runner you “would have been a bit concerned if Jordan had lost this vote.”
Leaving all that aside, though, I think it is perfectly reasonable and warranted to discuss the reason(s) why, as here, votes in this project may be seemingly inconsistent with votes in prior projects. The fact that they are obviously very different than before is enough to very validly spark a “meta-commentary” that is actually part of why these projects are done. And doing that actually doesn’t require explaining why the votes in the current project may be substantively wrong. I could theoretically actually *agree* with the people voting Magic in this thread, and still come to the same conclusions that the votes here are not consistent with votes in past PC board projects and that an influx of new, like-minded posters is the cause of that shift. It’s just not a discussion that actually requires taking a position either way on the underlying substance.
