Outside wrote:Owly wrote:Well whilst I can't speak for others, nor necessarily for their candidates (I wouldn't back Greer (x2), Daniels, Webber (Alternative), Anthony (alternative) or Parker (prior and likely trex vote)) I can offer reasons why Worthy might not be the choice here ...
So who is better? Everyone is flawed at this point.
Low peak: Worthy has as many seasons with a PER north of 20 as Matt Geiger or Eric Murdock (and by a similar, low distance above that threshold). WS/48 is more sympathetic (liking his efficiency and playing on good teams) but even so he's peaking at .185. Put simply his boxscore production was unexceptional.
Low career value: We've established Win Shares is the more sympathetic of the two main, primarily box-score composite metrics. And you know where Worthy ranks all time in Win Shares? 144th ABA/NBA combined, 141st NBA only. He quite a way off the conversation just on the boxscore.
You're considering RS only. Worthy is 42nd in career PS win shares, ahead of many players already voted in and ahead of everyone mentioned as a candidate on this thread.
Accolades: Not something I go in for, but Worthy was never so much as 2nd team NBA (making two third teams in '90 and '91 - I'd argue '91 is almost a farce picking him over say a Nance or Pippen, but then as I say that's why I don't value these things - had 3rd team been available earlier in his career, maybe he'd have had more of them). Nor was he ever in MVP contention, only once ever even getting votes, I think, and then very minimal. As such we can say Worthy, rightly or wrongly, probably wasn't really percieved as an elite player.
If we're going down the accolades road, it's in Worthy's favor that in 1996 he was voted onto the NBA's 50 Greatest Players of the First 50 Years list (as was Hal Greer).
The rebounding thing: The real point is covered in the metrics and production but ... Worthy collected 8.9 percent of available rebounds over his career. At small forward I'd say that's slightly below average. Probably more so when I don't think LA were a great rebounding team (though one would have to go through the data properly to see where LA were year on year) to factor this in properly).
Picking their 1984-85 title year, here's what I see regarding rebounding
The Lakers were 9th overall in rebounding. A reason for that is that they were 1st in FG%, which limited opponent defensive rebounding opportunities as well as their own offensive rebounding opportunities -- they were 1st in opponent rebounding despite being 20th in offensive rebounding.
Kareem led the Lakers with 7.9 TRB/game. Worthy was second with 6.4, Rambis had 6.4, Magic had 6.2.
They had a bunch of really good rebounders, so that will lower Worthy's average somewhat compared to, say, Grant Hill in Detroit, where he led them in rebounding but didn't have nearly the number of quality rebounding teammates that Worthy had. Chris Bosh averaged 9.4 reb in Toronto, but once he got to Miami, his rebounding numbers dropped significantly when surrounded by better rebounders.
Worthy's numbers were lower because he was on such great teams that shared the load. In that 1984-85 season, for example, no one on the Lakers was in the top 20 in rebounding, and only Kareem was in the top 20 in scoring. This is the pattern during Worthy's prime, with one Laker in the bottom half of the top 20 in scoring and none in the top 20 for rebounding, until AC Green cracks the top 20 in rebounding in 1987-88 and again the following season.
The playoff game raising ...: Has been discussed [by me] a thread or two ago ... The gist is, it's from a low baseline mainly versus a weak-era Western conference. In absolute terms his playoff numbers are solid but unspectacular.
13th in career points for the finals
25th in career finals PPG, ahead of Havlicek, Duncan, Hayes, Pierce, Magic, McHale, even Wilt
Tied for 41st highest scoring finals game - only 17 players have scored more in a finals game
None of that was against weak-era Western conference.
Did you see him play? He was definitely spectacular.
1) Nance, Marion, Brand, Jones just amongst forwards, off the top of my head.
2) PS Win Shares is a non-rate statistic in which playing in a dreadful conference alongside 2 top 10 all-time players (albeit initially both on the edge of their prime, then one maintaining peak powers as the other became increasingly insignificant) is nothing like a fair playing field to compare how good players are. But even if one did like this as a yardstick, Horace Grant would have to be the lead candidate here. And he's a better one than Worthy. Also you'd then have to push Robert Horry, Issel, Ben Wallace and Rasheed Wallace before Worthy. But as I say this really isn't anything close to a fair measure of how good the players are. Aside from the vast imbalance in teammate quality and thus opportunity for playoff minutes, there's the difference in the proportion of teams qualifying for the playoffs over different eras, and different numbers of rounds (and games per round) further making the opportunity to accumulate minutes uneven.
Disregarding sample size issues inherent in focusing on the playoffs, let's for a moment imagine that the playoffs is all that really matters in discovering how good a player was. Amongst players with a playoff career of at least 480 minutes (10 full games) - and this already arbitrarily means some players don't have chance - Worthy isn't in the top 100 ...
those that are include
Brook Lopez (small sample issue, although that will happen if you think playoffs are most important)
Kyrie Irving
Bernard King
Amar'e Stoudemire
Blake Griffin
Yao Ming
Baron Davis
Bobby Wanzer
Neil Johnston
Roy Tarpley
Cliff Hagan
George Yardley
Shawn Kemp
Gus Williams
okay that's just up to top 50. Worthy's at 108 (and 141 on an equivalent list for WS/48). And on the one hand some of these guys didn't get to prove it over larger samples. But even then many also didn't get to play as crummy opponents as Worthy consistently did for the first three round. Even if you allow for massively focusing on playoffs, and then also demand high minute totals (whilst disregarding context of teammate quality and conference depth) what's his case versus Wanzer, who just consistently played/produced really well in the playoffs? Or Hagan? Or Gus Williams?
3) I think after the fact accolades tend towards the "significant" players (noteworthy playoff moments) rather than consistently measuring player goodness. As I've stated I think accolades are a bad yardstick, but if obliged to use them, my preference would be for contemporary analyses, rather than significantly after the fact ones.
4) You don't seem to understand the point given. Rebound percentage accounts for available rebounds. It doesn't penalize you if you make a large proportion of your shots, because it tells you how many rebounds you got, of those which were available (at the very margins, a good shooting team, I believe, helps in that a larger proportion of the available rebounds are defensive, at which you should have a better chance). If the Lakers were a great rebounding team, and he was playing with great rebounders prove it. Calculate their total rebound percentage for each year and where it ranks in the league.
5) Ahead of "even Wilt" for finals scoring? You know which versions of Wilt played in the finals right? Jason Terry is above Wilt. So is Rip Hamilton. Invoking his name here is at best naively misleading.
The reason he got those totals you were citing is because he played in a weak conference. Now what's important is suddenly shifting. Well if it is finals points, then why not Hagan or Fulks or Toney. The point remains the opportunity afforded Worthy is there because he played on the same team as Magic Johnson (and earlier, semi-prime Kareem, cf: '80, '82 - LA make finals, and win, sans Worthy). I don't see the merit of privileging a single stat (points) in a single game, in a specfic round, as a method of comparing all basketball players careers.
For me there's no reason to believe players such as those mentioned above (Jones, Nance, Marion et al) couldn't have taken Worthy's place and the Lakers do just as well, and honestly, based on their production, better.
I have seen Worthy play. Honestly, and this is a complete tangent, I wouldn't describe his style as spectacular. More smooth. Aesthetically pleasing, certainly (for me anyhow). But that isn't how good he was. Unless what you mean by him being spectacular is meant to be a rebuttal to the calibre of play (rather than style) being not spectacular, and the "seen him play" was meant as a "my eye test trumps the numbers" without explaining why, or even "... and you probably never saw him ..." in which case further debate wouldn't be productive. I'll assume otherwise but ... as highlighted above, in absolute terms (rather than versus a relatively low RS baseline) Worthy's playoff productvity, especially in light of the levels of competition he mostly faced, isn't that really noteworthy.
