brightsith wrote:Although I agree that Duncan could score 25 a game at his scoring peak,
Not the be a dick, but he peaked at 25.5 ppg, so there really isn't any question in this regard. He also managed a TS% of 57.6% pretty much underscores the point that he was a very efficient scorer (and that wasn't even his career-best in scoring efficiency, so it wasn't some random outlier season, either) and everyone knows that he had all the tools to score basically at will. I grant you he'd never score 30 ppg, or if he was asked to do so without the benefit of something like the Utah system with Stockton at the 1, his efficiency would drop, but he's a classic big man moreso than was Malone.
Malone's volume scoring (with high efficiency) for more than a decade shows that he both had the ability to do so, and actually did so, too.
Malone had a five-year peak in the late 80s and very early 90s where he was a high-volume scorer (basically 87-88 through 91-92).
Thereafter, he was a very good scorer for another 6 years or so (basically 26 or 27 ppg) and then he began to tail off as age forced upon him an increasing reliance on his jumper and his efficiency dipped.
Unlike Duncan, Malone's single-season best scoring performance came on an outlier season.
Malone set a career-high in FG% and TS% and that TS% was nearly 5% higher than his career average at 62.6% (he hit 60%+ only two other times in his career). The likelihood of Malone maintaining nearly 57% from the floor on almost 20 attempts a game over more than that one season is, of course, minimal (and, unsurprisingly, his 56.8% FG that year was 1.2% better than his next-highest performance in any other season).
Remember, Malone was a great, great scorer, yes, but unlike Duncan, he had some very consistent additions to his game outside the scope of his own talents that Duncan has not enjoyed. For 16 of the 18 years he was in Utah, Malone and Stockton started alongside one another (and both RARELY missed games).
For 15 of those years, Sloan was the head coach (Sloan started as the head coach in 88-89 after Layden finished the first 17 games of the season).
A decade and a half with the same coach running the same offense with the focus going through the same two players and the role clearly established for Malone as the high-volume scorer.
I think that says enough about the way Malone did his business; it certainly doesn't take anything FROM Karl, but if you plug Tim Duncan into that system, I don't think you find any problem with him scoring a fair sight more than he has in San Antonio.
Remember, Malone didn't hit the league with his uber mid-range jumper, nor was he more athletic than Duncan nor was he as capable in the low post.
