RealGM 2023 Top 100 Project - #3 (Michael Jordan)

[70sFan]

I don't have enough time to write a post with convincing arguments (I am abroad for the full week), but it's shocking to me that after all these years people came back to the idea of Russell's Celtics being uterrly stacked and counting HoF teammates in Boston squads. Overall, the level of discussion is high as always, but this particular thing is a big downgrade from what we achieved as a community in this regard.

This is obviously referring to me, but I think you’re missing that I freely acknowledged that some of those hall of famers are basically just in the hall of fame for being along for the ride. My point is that they were really talented teams even when we take a totally sober view of some of those hall of famers. A team with Bill Russell, John Havlicek, Sam Jones, Bailey Howell, Tom Sanders, Don Nelson, etc. is an objectively very talented team, and one doesn’t need to blindly rate players on hall of fame induction in order to come to that conclusion. And that’s probably the least talented team of the bunch! I understand bristling at the shorthand of talking about hall-of-famers since there’s some hall of famers amongst those Celtics teams that might be very overrated by that shorthand, but I don’t think that contextualizing that should lead us to a conclusion that Russell’s teams weren’t really talented and certainly not that they were “depleted,” which was the specific claim I was contesting. Russell always had a very talented team, and I think it’d be genuinely odd for someone to suggest otherwise. I think one could make the argument that they occasionally faced similarly talented teams. Perhaps the 1969 Lakers or 1967 Sixers were even more talented! But those Celtics were always quite strong.

Your criticism is in context of Russell vs Jordan comparison though. You made a clear statement that the Celtics were more talented than the Bulls and O fail to see the logic behind it.

[lessthanjake]

I wouldn’t exactly say that having one of the top 10 defenders in the league is the equivalent of 1996 Harper—who only ever got one all-defensive team vote in his entire career (and it wasn’t in 1996). I get that things like all-defensive teams were easier to make back then when there were fewer players in the league, but who knows how many Sanders would’ve made if all-defense had started before 1969, and meanwhile Harper was a good defender that was nowhere even remotely close to making that. And Sanders was putting up more raw numbers than Harper anyways. It’s not the worst comparison I suppose (and peak Ron Harper was a better player IMO), but I don’t really think it’s quite there, and also there’s definitely no comparison with John Paxson (i.e. the PG in the first three-peat).

Definitely disagree very strongly about Nelson vs. Longley. Longley was not a positive contributor to the Bulls. I watched essentially every single one of their games in that era, and he really just wasn’t. He was a good passer, so the triangle was a good system for him, but he was otherwise a weak player. And I’ll note that you can see that the Bulls were better with him off the court, even though he was a starter.

I just wanted to make a few quick points to some of the comments here.

I’m not going to argue that Harper was a better overall career defender relative to his league than Sanders was to his, but all defensive teams aren’t a very good measure of who is a very good defender. Ron Harper had a top 20 RAPM in a partial sample in 1996, almost his entire value coming on defense, the second highest DRAPM for heavy minutes players behind only Patrick Ewing’s DRAPM. You mentioned that you watched almost every single minute of these Bulls, so I’m sure you’ll remember that he was their point of attack defender, relinquished all offensive duties that he had in the past, and concentrated completely on defense, and he did a tremendous job. An approximated regressed 1996 RAPM from the +/- data available had Harper’s 1996 as a top 15 RAPM player,

As for Luc Longley, overall he wasn’t a very impressive player, but I do want to mention that in the partial sample RAPM for 1996 he was a strong plus player in 1996 and in the regressed approximation RAPM, he actually has a top 30 RAPM. Phil Jackson actually made it a point to go to him in game one of the NBA finals and then he had another especially strong game in game three as he was their second leading score. Overall in these Finals he averaged 12 points a game on the highest true shooting percentage of anyone on the Bulls, with many of those shots coming on post moves using both hands, and averaged 2 blocks as well.

Yeah, I agree on Harper. Wasn’t saying he wasn’t a good defender. He definitely was. His length at the PG position and his defensive tenacity was great for those Bulls teams. And it was especially a help because they also had Kerr who was obviously a much more limited defender at that position. But I don’t think he was quite the defender that Tom Sanders was. I can’t say I feel super strongly about Tom Sanders, though, and I do like Harper.

On Longley, I don’t think we should put a whole lot of value in one partial-year RAPM sample. That’s definitely a very noisy indicator, and we do also know that over the entirety of 1996-1997 and 1997-1998, Longley had a -1.1 regular season on-off and a -4.1 playoff on-off. I never really felt that he was particularly better than Wennington, though overall I suppose I’d say he was by a hair. He was a bit of a bigger body and a better passer, but Wennington was a better shooter. Overall, I think it’d be hard to grade out Luc Longley as anything more than a weak-starter-level player. That said, I did actually like him (and Wennington), because they sure were better than Will Perdue IMO (who the Bulls somehow managed to turn into Dennis Rodman, in one of the steals of the century).

In many ways, that 1994 Bulls team was the best the Bulls ever were outside of Jordan. Kukoc was definitely the best fourth-best player the Bulls ever had, but in the second three-peat he was paired with Pippen and Rodman. And while Rodman is superior to Grant all time, he wasn’t actually in his prime on the Bulls (and nor was Pippen by the end), and Pippen and Grant at their very peaks is probably better than Pippen + Rodman ever was. So I think 1994 Pippen + Grant + Kukoc is probably the best three non-Jordan players the Bulls ever put together on one team in the 1990s.

I agree that 1996 or 1997 or 1998 Rodman wasn’t as good as Grant was in 1994, but it’s reasonably close. Additionally, we also have to give Grant credit for how good he was in the 1991 to 1993 as well, that’s often handwaived away, when making the case for Jordan. Perhaps he was not as good as he was in 1994 and 1995, but then again, why wasn’t the absence of Jordan’s gravity/play making affecting Grant in 1994, 1995 and 1996.

Oh, I’m not suggesting Horace Grant wasn’t good in 1991-1993. I just think he was peaking in the years just after that. And I’m not suggesting Rodman was ever far off 1994 Horace. Rodman is a very hard player to gauge the impact of, and I did like him more than I ever liked Grant (the spectacle of Rodman, and his cartoonish rebounding was amusing), but do think that leaving aside my personal bias for Rodman that Horace Grant peaked out higher for the Bulls than Rodman did (though Rodman is a solidly greater overall player IMO, given that he has his Pistons years too).

I disagree that the 1994 team was the best team outside of Jordan. 1996’s 4th best player was Rodman who was better than Kukoc was in 1994. Additionally, Tony Kukoc in 1996 was one of the best Impact players in the NBA let alone on the Bulls. If you put 1996 Toni Kukoč on the 1994 Chicago Bulls, there’s a pretty good chance that team wins 58-60 games and has a real good shot at the NBA finals. Their fifth best player in 1996 was Ron Harper, a defensive menace in 1996. Lastly, 1994 had a heavily negative player in Pete Myers who played over 2000 minutes, whereas the 1996 Bulls had Randy Brown, a negative who only played 1300 minutes.

Yeah, there’s something to be said for the idea that Kukoc improved over time. It’s not a bad point. But Kukoc came into the NBA a pretty polished product, so I don’t think he was far off in 1994. But that is a good point. On Harper, as I mentioned, I think mid-1990s BJ Armstrong was briefly better than second-three-peat Harper was. Armstrong was actually a legitimately good player for a few years there. As I said, I think Harper was close, but I’d take mid-1990s Armstrong. As for Pete Myers, obviously Myers was an enormous downgrade from Jordan, but it’s basically the effect of that downgrade that we’re trying to gauge, so that falls under the “outside of Jordan” caveat in what I said.

But yeah, I think if you wanted to say that the 1996 Bulls outside of Jordan were as good or better than the 1994 Bulls outside of Jordan, then I wouldn’t argue too much. I do think the best sans-Jordan group would have to be one with Kukoc, since he was just definitely the best player they had in that era outside of Jordan, Pippen, Grant, and Rodman. And the only teams to have Kukoc were the second three-peat and the 1994 and 1995 teams. The 1995 team is out because there was no Grant or Rodman. And I think the 1994 Pippen + Grant combination was probably better than any Pippen + Rodman combo ever was. So I think I’m of the view that the 1994 Pippen + Grant + Kukoc combination was the best set of three non-Jordan players the Bulls ever had. But I think it’d be defensible to say Kukoc was enough better in 1996 that you’d go with the 1996 Pippen + Rodman + Kukoc combination. Then there’s the PG position, where I think the best PGs they had were mid-1990s Armstrong and early-second-three-peat Harper (better than Paxson). I slightly prefer Armstrong, and that’s what the the 1994 Bulls had. Kerr was also the best backup PG (better than Hodges), but he was on both the 1994 and 1996 team and was similarly good IMO (though there’s maybe an argument he was more effective in 1996 because of the shortened three-point line). And honestly I tend to think the center position on those teams is all a bit of a wash. The 1994 strategy of just having a third of your roster be made up of mediocre centers that you cycle through was as good a strategy as any.

Overall, though, while I stick by my conclusion, I wouldn’t strongly disagree if you’d take 1996 instead. But of course, those who are using 1994 to diminish Jordan’s impact don’t measure the 1994 team as compared to the 1996 supporting cast—because that would make Jordan look like he had a lot of impact actually, given how good the team was in 1996. Instead, they compare against 1993, which in some sense feels more natural since it was just one year apart, but there were a lot of improvements from 1993 to 1994 (Kukoc, Kerr, Pippen improving after a down year, etc.). Not to mention that the Bulls obviously had coasted a bit in the 1993 regular season, so the comparisons are to somewhat artificially deflated numbers of a team that proceeded to go into the playoffs and dominate.

[lessthanjake]

I don't have enough time to write a post with convincing arguments (I am abroad for the full week), but it's shocking to me that after all these years people came back to the idea of Russell's Celtics being uterrly stacked and counting HoF teammates in Boston squads. Overall, the level of discussion is high as always, but this particular thing is a big downgrade from what we achieved as a community in this regard.

This is obviously referring to me, but I think you’re missing that I freely acknowledged that some of those hall of famers are basically just in the hall of fame for being along for the ride. My point is that they were really talented teams even when we take a totally sober view of some of those hall of famers. A team with Bill Russell, John Havlicek, Sam Jones, Bailey Howell, Tom Sanders, Don Nelson, etc. is an objectively very talented team, and one doesn’t need to blindly rate players on hall of fame induction in order to come to that conclusion. And that’s probably the least talented team of the bunch! I understand bristling at the shorthand of talking about hall-of-famers since there’s some hall of famers amongst those Celtics teams that might be very overrated by that shorthand, but I don’t think that contextualizing that should lead us to a conclusion that Russell’s teams weren’t really talented and certainly not that they were “depleted,” which was the specific claim I was contesting. Russell always had a very talented team, and I think it’d be genuinely odd for someone to suggest otherwise. I think one could make the argument that they occasionally faced similarly talented teams. Perhaps the 1969 Lakers or 1967 Sixers were even more talented! But those Celtics were always quite strong.

Your criticism is in context of Russell vs Jordan comparison though. You made a clear statement that the Celtics were more talented than the Bulls and O fail to see the logic behind it.

Well I’ve explained why I think that’s the case in a fair bit of detail, so I think it’s perhaps a case of you just not agreeing with me. Which is okay! Judging talent is ultimately a subjective exercise. I also don’t feel super strongly on the topic anyways, to be honest. I watched those Bulls, so I do feel pretty strongly about what their talent level was, but I am not old enough to have watched Russell’s Celtics live, so the quality of that team would never be something I feel *incredibly* strongly about, as I’m more just assessing it by reference to limited footage I’ve been able to see and looking at stats/accolades and having been a student of NBA history for many years. I think I’m fairly informed on the topic and I don’t think it’s right to portray the Russell Celtics as ever being “depleted,” but generally my view of anything from that era is naturally a lower-certainty conclusion because I did not watch it live. Which is why in my write-up for why I have Russell #4, I wrote that I have a large possible range for Russell.

[OhayoKD]

Hey all. I just want to say that a number of you have been putting some amazing content into this project so far. The sheer VOLUME of material produced by a few of you (OhayoKD, lessthanjake, One_And_Done, and our facilitator Doctor MJ, to name a few), has been utterly astounding to me. Seriously, good job.

Thanks Rex! It's been interesting. I guess I can give a few cents to some of your notes

One aspect of the "truth" that I don't think is legitimately debatable: he's on the short-list of GOAT candidates. REALLY hard to argue him lower than maybe 5th with credibility [*and consistency], imo.

Interesting you see Duncan as the gatekeeper. Though I would think Magic and Hakeem can be argued among similar lines(impact focus, less volatile personalities, longevity(curve fot aids), better playoff elevation for Hakeem). If you view Jordan's peak low as the big-sample signals seem to suggest, lots of stuff becomes viable. From a skillset stand point valuing two-way bigs or top-tier all-controlling helios highly also makes sense I think with historical trends.

Critics say Jordan left, and the Bulls were still a 55-win team [SRS pegs them more like just 50 wins, fwiw] that went 7 games with the eventual EC champions in the semis.

Accounting for health they post an rs srs of 55-wins[.b] and of course the next year with their best players not missing significant games they play like a [b]52-win team. I don't really understand why that piece of context is left out here.

HCL made a solid case for the 96 cast being stronger, but I also think playoff-only, 1991 might have been Pippen's best year. Pete myers I'd say was a negative I think and Pippen spent games as an SG.

That aside, I think 1994 being the "center" is a bit of a distraction because that still is not peak Micheal. What I would say is most damning is 1988 because situationally that should be his peak and yet giving him all the credit for the bulls post-84 improvement does not paint him as a "tippity top" player. Using full-strength ratings, an about to retire Bill Russell sees a bigger drop when you account for SRS tresholds(matches if you do not do health adjustments).

If there's context you think applies there(I assume the cast improves with Oakley(2-point d drop when he leaves) and the net-rating marks them at 31-wins by 1986), I'd be interested in hearing it. But if that team is similar or better by 88 than that is not really goat-tier lift and it's the best signal we can get for mike I think.

(iirc, both West and Robertson has MORE impressive WOWYR numbers than Russell).

WOWYR is working off a 2.2 per season game sample for Russell and things get further messed up by similarly small amples being used to apply adjustments for significantly distanced years. Bur, no, not necessarily:

This trend would hold throughout most of Russell’s career. In ’66, Sam Jones missed eight games and Boston’s performance didn’t budge. Jones missed 11 more contests in ’69 and the team was about 2 points worse without him. All told, as the roster cycled around Russell, his impact seemed to remain. A more detailed calculation of his game-level value has Russell at the top of the impact-heap in his era, while similar studies have him behind only Jerry West and Oscar Robertson (who both had the fortune of playing on dominant teams during the most watered-down years in NBA history).

What's also important to remember is that SRS is not the goal. It's championships and what WOWYR implies is that Russell's cast was on average(for his career) a 40-win team(WOWY similarly small sample but no distortions) says it was 35-wins, and with a simialr roster and an improving best player, the 1970 Celtics fall off by more or as much(health adjustment for the former, none for the latter) than the 84 Bulls have improved by 1988 with MJ at his box-and non box statistical peak.

Will also note, though you probably have seen this by now, that those same measures have Jordan topped by his own contemporaries

As for the defensive and offensive scores shifting, it's interesting, though I'm skeptical adjusted win-shares has much to offer here(that's not a criticism of moonbeam's work, just the nature of what's being used). Would want to see what the break-down looks like, but I will note that the various other signals(including what happens when russell's teammates miss time which lets us get around a weak backup as a confounding factor) are "holistic" meaning that "distribution" is already factored in.

Russell, otoh, I'm not 100% confident would be much better than a Rudy Gobert or Bam Adebayo today. DPOY or DPOY candidate, for sure. Elite rebounder and screen-setter, absolutely. How many of such that I've described are the most dominant in the league today?

Interesting you mention Gobert. Draymond feels more natural. Not that it hurts your point. I think if you are thinking about era-translation rating Russell low is reasonable. But I don't think questioning his era-relative dominance makes much sense. We are not going to be "certain" about anything, but what we have favors Russell consistently with the exception of a rookie-sample with plenty of championships still to go.

Overall, though, while I stick by my conclusion, I wouldn’t strongly disagree if you’d take 1996 instead. But of course, those who are using 1994 to diminish Jordan’s impact don’t measure the 1994 team as compared to the 1996 supporting cast—because that would make Jordan look like he had a lot of impact actually, given how good the team was in 1996.

1996-1994 has been brought up(17-wins by record), it is just not a "best ever" mark, and it doesn't really do Jordan any favors compared to Bill. Naturally you adjust for health for both years

You could get him to +6.5 if you decide to pretend he wasn't on the 95 team and Rodman didn't join(excellent looking by WOWY, strong defender, all-time extra-possession generator), but I'm not sure even sure all those favorable extraps get him there(though we dont have many comparisons for an atg joining a +5 team so maybe?)

Regardless plenty has been offered outside of 1994. So I'm not sure why we're fixating there.

I watched those Bulls, so I do feel pretty strongly about what their talent level was, but I am not old enough to have watched Russell’s Celtics live,

Yeah that doesn't really mean much if all "watching those bulls" gets you to is comparing top 100 lists, and game-scores as proof of "the most individual dominance!" lol. You can watch as much as you want, but how to weigh what happens on the court still requires an understanding of what produces or leads to winning which is why a useful eyetest generally will not constantly be contradicting what is available. Good holistics -> good eyetest -> vice versa.

But when you consider "production" the forest, an eyetest is not going to get you far.

[lessthanjake]

1996-1994 has been brought up(17-wins by record), it is just not a "best ever" mark, and it doesn't really do Jordan any favors compared to Bill. Naturally you adjust for health for both years

You could get him to +6.5 if you decide to pretend he wasn't on the 95 team and Rodman didn't join(excellent looking by WOWY, strong defender, all-time extra-possession generator), but I'm not sure even sure all those favorable extraps get him there(though we dont have many comparisons for an atg joining a +5 team so maybe?)

Regardless plenty has been offered outside of 1994. So I'm not sure why we're fixating there.

Your big piece of evidence outside of 1994 is literally to just compare the results of one roster that was without Michael Jordan with a completely different roster that had Michael Jordan, and with different coaches too. Which I’ve explained is literally meaningless. You might as well compare how many wins the 1988 Bulls got with how many wins some completely random other team got in a random year. It doesn’t tell us anything about anything. It’s neither a good indicator nor a bad indicator—it’s just not an indicator at all. It’s just you trying as hard as you can try to to come up with some way you can squint at some numbers and reason your way to a conclusion you want to come to. And it’s a type of reasoning you’d completely reject if it led to a conclusion you didn’t like—like if someone said LeBron’s Heat peaked out at a 7 SRS and the 2010 Heat had a 2 SRS, so LeBron’s highest possible impact must be a 5 SRS lift and that it’s actually lower because the team was actually better since they added pieces like Bosh, Allen, Battier, etc. You’d reject that, but are somehow completely convinced by something that’s extremely similar and, if anything, even more nonsensical (at least those 2010 Heat actually also had Wade—a major similarity). I highly doubt that there’s anyone who has read you making that argument that is at all convinced by it.

Yeah that doesn't really mean much if all "watching those bulls" gets you to is comparing top 100 lists, and game-scores as proof of "the most individual dominance!" lol. You can watch as much as you want, but how to weigh what happens on the court still requires an understanding of what produces or leads to winning which is why a useful eyetest generally will not constantly be contradicting what is available. Good holistics -> good eyetest -> vice versa.

But when you consider "production" the forest, an eyetest is not going to get you far.

But of course that’s not all my argument has been. Not even close. Though that’s much stronger evidence than your back-of-the-napkin 1986 vs. 1988 comparison.

What’s particularly amusing (or perhaps perplexing) is you seem to not accept any evidence besides your festival of apples and oranges comparisons. I provided you the available RAPM data on Jordan—which is quite good for Jordan given that (1) it’s very unlikely that someone would come out so consistently highly in a bunch of low sample sizes in a fairly noisy stat unless they were actually pretty systematically far ahead of people in the full sample; and (2) the only attempt to do a decade-long RAPM for Jordan had him way above the pack. I provided you comprehensive box-score-derived data on Jordan’s playoff performances—data that other players simply cannot and do not match. Among other things, I also come at this discussion as an independently knowledgeable person about Jordan’s career and his teams, since I watched virtually all their games, and I’ve tried to impart some of that knowledge on you, which you obviously do not independently have. So I’ve come at this from a lot of different angles. You refuse to accept any of it. You will only accept your own arguments that, as far as I can tell, you very obviously came to by simply coming to your preferred conclusion first and then figuring out some sort of lame-brained argument to get you there. And I suspect the way that this happened is that your preferred conclusion was first that LeBron > Jordan, but then once you’d devised arguments for that, you drank your own kool-aid and started applying those arguments to put MJ below even more players. And I’m sure you think that the kool-aid drinking is actually just you internalizing new truths you’ve uncovered. But you’re really just repackaging preconceived notions into boldly-pronounced arguments that are based on absurdity, like that we can measure Jordan’s impact by comparing the results of two essentially completely different rosters.

Anyways, none of this matters much, because Jordan is almost certainly going to get voted #3—which is in a sense a shame, since I’m a little curious just how far down you’d go before voting for Jordan. Maybe Scottie should go ahead of him! Let’s go workshop up some “extraps” to get us there!

[iggymcfrack]

It is a better argument for Duncan, but you still voted for Russell.

I'm with the Russell skeptics like Jake and Rex. Russell wouldn't be getting talked about as a top 10 all-timer if he played today, and that matters. I certainly won't be voting for either Wilt or Russell top 10, or Mikan at all.

You do understand most people do not craft these lists based on who they think would thrive today (or alternatively, in a random NBA year)… right? Taken literally, a lot of our ballots might quickly look more like Iggy’s; are you really sure someone like Shaq could be better than Jokic in today’s game?

I’m not sure that Shaq could be better than Jokić in todays game , but that’s just because I think when Jokic’s career is over there’s a pretty good chance he’ll be a top 2 player of all-time. The idea that Shaq wouldn’t translate to a modern environment is nonsense though. We saw what Shaq would look like in the modern game. He’d be the same fast, athletic player who could close out quickly on perimeter shooters and block shots all over the court he was in Orlando. When he was playing for the Lakers, he made a conscious decision to eat more, bulk up, and put on weight because that was the strategy he felt was best to dominate the physical low post game being played at the time. Given the results, it’s hard to argue with him. I think he’s an incredibly portable player though and I have no doubt he’d be incredibly dominant in any era the game was played in. If Shaq played in the modern era, he’d never get over 300 pounds and you’d see a completely different peak player than he was in LA. You’d be wowed by his speed, agility, and closeout ability.

[One_and_Done]

I'd push back on that a little. Shaq would still be amazing, but I think his longevity would be severely limited carrying all the weight. I also think he'd have the same high pick and roll weakness Jokic has. It's too naive for us to just assume he'd keep the weight off given the habits he displayed through his career. When he went to Miami he vowed to slim down, and he did manage it. For about a year. Then he lost motivation and started to put it back on and it never came off again. Shaq would joke about how to beat the tests for conditioning with team mates. While his initial bulk up was partly strategic choice, it was also inevitable.

[f4p]

well, weak in the context of the guys we are talking about. and more specifically, weak in the sense of resilience. i think that's hard to dispute. certainly on an individual stats level. and at the very least, i don't see the warriors having lived up to their regular season dominance in the playoffs to some degree. their 73-9 team lost 9 games in the playoffs and is one of the few +10 teams to not win a title. and when they have exceeded their regular season, it's arguably only in years where they have very obviously not given a crap about the regular season (2018 and 2019 where they somehow didn't even win 60 games) or they missed a huge amount of games in the regular season before not missing a single game in the playoffs (2022). in other words, when the situation was perfectly set up for them to outperform.

Don’t you think you’re artificially limiting what seasons you’re considering? Like you’re not considering 2018, 2019, or 2022 because you think there’s factors to explain their overperformance of the regular season. But of course if you take out 3 of a guy’s finals runs where his team overperformed, then his team might on average underperform in the playoffs!

i don't know why i even listed 2019, since they didn't win and it wasn't an overperformance. but i assume you would agree that the 2018 warriors are on a short list with the 2001 lakers for team that least cared about the regular season, right? hell, even the 2002 lakers came back from their 1 loss playoffs to have a +7 regular season. the warriors went from 67/73/67 (already on cruise control in the regular season in 2017) and 16-1 in the playoffs to 58 wins and +5.8. my point is pretty much everyone in the world knew they were better than a 58 win team so "overperforming" is hardly an achievement. and in 2022, their big 3 played 11 minutes together in the regular season and then hundreds of minutes together in the playoffs. like i don't know how much better it can be set up.

Even then, though, the Warriors didn’t underperform in the 2017 playoffs—as good as they were in the regular season, they were even better in the playoffs.

that's part of the problem. the first time until 2022 that steph's numbers didn't drop in the playoffs was when he was on the most ridiculously likely to win team in history. whose best opponent got injured while they were beating the warriors by 20. outside of 2022, we either see steph a) underperform or b) overperform in the most low-pressure situation possible. this isn't hakeem having to knock out like 8 straight amazing series and outplay 3 all-time great centers to win his 2 titles, with nary a point to spare in almost any direction.

And they actually overperformed SRS in 2013—beating a Nuggets team with a 4 SRS advantage.

definitely a point in steph's favor, even if it was against george karl. an excellent first playoff series. and, just so i'm not failing to acknowledge things he has done, he did have a very good record as a favorite until losing to the lakers this year (now he's back in the middle of the pack on win percentage for the 17+ series as a favorite guys). his case is tough to analyze because he did win as a favorite for a lot of years, which i like, but he tended to be a huge favorite, then he threw in not only a loss as a huge favorite in the finals, but even did it with a 3-1 lead, the only blown 3-1 lead in finals history. while playing badly, especially in game 7. because his team misses the playoffs so much, almost all of his series in the playoffs are as a very good team so he doesn't have the first round losses that would have come with sneaking into the playoffs. he's the heaviest average favorite in history at +3.71. but he also does have one of the highest series win percentages ever (i think only behind russell) to go along with being such a favorite. but with an average loss as only a small underdog to go against that.

It also can’t really be about the 2015 playoffs, since they won the title while only dropping 5 playoff games and having a massive +10.2 net rating in the playoffs. So what is the notion of Warriors not living up to regular season dominance in the playoffs based on? It seems like it’s basically just a conclusion based completely on the 2016 playoffs.

it's based on his numbers decreasing in the playoffs all but 2 years, and one of those years being a low pressure 2017. i said it in my last post, but no one survives underperformance like steph. you say it can't be 2015. but his numbers decline at a fairly decent level. -3.5 PER, -3.1 TS%, -0.060 WS48, -1.1 BPM. the first time all season that the warriors didn't score 60 through 3 quarters was game 2 vs cleveland. the second time was game 3. until the warriors made a switch they never thought they would in going to the death lineup because they were struggling so much. although obviously it worked out great. but since their opponent was majorly injured, no harm no foul for winning a title.

they have a dominant team and 3-1 lead in 2016. steph's numbers for the playoffs drop -9.2 PER, -6.6 TS%, -0.166 WS48, -4.9 BPM. historic drops. if you want to say he was injured, what does it say that he can miss most of the first 2 rounds of the playoffs without getting knocked out, then play waaayyy below the regular season and even well below the normal "best player on a champion" type level (22.3 PER, 0.152 WS48 is nothing amazing if you just want absolute numbers and not declines) and still be one minute away from a title against peak lebron? even someone in a great team situation like duncan missed out on a 2000 chance at a title because his team didn't survive round 1 without him.

and of course 2018 is more of the same. he misses the first 6 games of the playoffs. the warriors still easily whoop a 48 win team with the #3 defense in the spurs, then steph drops -5.9 PER, -8.5 TS% (!!), -0.085 WS48 (loses over half of his offensive WS48), -0.6 BPM, and he wins a title! so he misses a chunk of the playoffs and puts up 22.3 PER, 59.0 TS%, 0.182 WS48 (i.e. no shaq-like or hakeem-like or duncan-like numbers here). and gets a title. even with a historic team on his side of the bracket. which he gets by on because of injury. in the 5 games before the talent advantage became crazy and the warriors had to be pretty worried they were going to lose, he put up 23.8 ppg, 6.4 rpg, 4.8 apg on 56.0 TS%.

in 2019, he keeps his regular season numbers a little lower to lessen the decline but declines all around it is. we get a 3rd sub-23 PER in 4 years from a guy with 3 career regular seasons above 28 and who almost set the record in 2016. we get another sub-0.190 WS48 from a guy with 5 straight seasons above 0.225. a 5.2 BPM for a guy with 6 seasons at 7.4 or better. against the rockets, which looked to be the warriors most important series, he post 23.0 ppg, 4.7 rpg, 5.0 apg on 53.9 TS% and gets out-game scored by draymond and almost by cp3 hobbling around. basically numbers just as bad as the 2016 finals with no injury to possibly blame, and even wins with harden having probably his best series ever. margin.

in 2021, he has the worst regular seasons numbers in a while so they all go up in the playoffs, but if you like absolutes, then we're back to a 24.4 PER, 60.6 TS%, 0.203 WS48, 7.7 BPM, again not necessarily that amazing.

and in 2022, we're back to the declines. -3.7 PER, -6.8 TS%, -0.062 WS48, -1.0 BPM. and now just outright poor numbers outside of BPM with 20.4 PER, 58.8 TS%, and 0.131 WS48. although other guys from his era in harden, KD, and lebron also put up playoff numbers way below their career numbers so maybe it was just the changing of the guard this season. .

and maybe i should focus on those absolutes. this place has talked about playoff resilience as long as i've been here so not sure why the pushback in this project. steph in the regular season is not some box score loser whose only value shows up in impact numbers, he does plenty well in the box score. which also tends to make for the numbers that are easiest to compare between the regular season and playoffs. but anyway, if we just want to look the playoffs, here is a list of guys with the most 25+ PER or 0.200+ WS48 playoffs runs (any length).




he's so far down the list. and the top of the list is basically a who's who of the top 10 of this project. even bill russell, who probably has more of his value missed by the box score than any player in history, managed to have just as many as steph. and this wasn't a list made for steph (probably for hakeem if i had to guess why i made it), so before i get the "but steph had 2 playoffs at in the 24's, you're just picking numbers to hurt steph", yes steph has 2 PER's between 24 and 25 and, if we're being generous, two WS48 above 0.180, but those thresholds add 4 for kobe, 3 for wade and at least 2 for all of the top 6 guys so the list is just shifting upwards in number for the most part, not changing the order if we pick other numbers. even on an absolute basis, steph simply isn't producing at historic levels and it can't just be an excuse that everyone else can do it but steph is exempt. he's down there with larry and kobe, but without kobe's longevity.

also, i'm just now realizing how long your response was. not sure i will get to it all.

Beyond the fact that that’s just one year, should we really penalize Steph for his team underperforming in the playoffs one year (in a year where he got injured in the playoffs)? And is it fair to massively penalize him for the team’s underperformance of an incredible regular season when he was such a huge driver of the regular season being so good—would you feel better about Steph as a player if he’d simply played less well in that 2016 regular season and the Warriors had won a lot fewer games and lost in the finals? And would that make sense?

see above for why his absolute numbers from 2015-2019 don't look great by historic standards, outside of 2017.

ok, but i feel like this is saying it was a finals just short of the brilliance of lebron. but it was a bad finals. 22.6 ppg, 4.9 rpg, 3.7 apg on 4.3 turnovers per game, 13.1 game score. that's just a bad finals. even if it wasn't after the greatest offensive regular season ever. and his team was still 1 minute away from winning it all, even with lebron maybe having his greatest series ever. that's quite a margin of error. and that margin seems to apply to other parts of curry's career.

I actually think that this response underscores how good Steph is. 23/5/4 on 58% TS% is actually not “a bad finals,” and especially not for someone who was injured during the playoffs and who has so much impact that doesn’t get on the scoresheet (i.e., gravity). It was definitely a weak showing compared to how Steph had played in the regular season, and it’s not the sort of series Michael Jordan would have. But the players we will be considering soon have things worse than that or at least similar.

we can't rewrite history to say 2016 wasn't bad. 23/5/4 in 2016 is not a great slashline by any standard. a 13 game score i suspect would rank way down the list for the last 30 or so years for top 50 guys in a finals. and part of the steph magic is his typically gargantuan TS%. he's not so far ahead of everyone else, just due to gravity, that it can drop down into a normal player range of 58% and steph still maintain a ton of value (as top 15 all-time players go). again, his gravity is theoretically constant. and his value comes from gravity and the actual points he puts on the board with extraordinary efficiency. one part of that can't just go away without the value being hurt.

Magic Johnson has the 1983 Finals disaster-class. Duncan was pretty rough in the 2005 Finals (which, I’ll note, his team didn’t just come close to winning but actually in fact won). Hakeem had a rough series when they lost in the 1996 WCF as two-time defending champions. Heck, even guys already voted have things as bad or worse. LeBron’s 2011 finals was definitely worse. Kareem was really rough in the 1973 upset loss to the Warriors. The Lakers won the 1982 Finals even with Kareem not doing much (and this was when he was still not very old). Etc. If a guy’s low point is 23/5/4 on 58% TS% when he’s had an amazing regular season but got injured in the playoffs, then I tend to think that actually reflects well on the player.

as noted above, this was far from the one time his numbers dropped or look on the low side in absolute terms. 1983 wasn't magic's peak season. 1996 is hakeem at age 33 after winning 6 straight series as an underdog and going against the defense that gave MJ his worst series (i.e. not being guarded by kyrie). kareem's is straight up bad.

well, yes, they have been dominant. but with very talented teams. that fit extremely well together. not something everyone else gets, even when they have talented teammates. and as is seen, draymond is literally the leader, having managed to get one more than curry.

…

that's the benefit of fitting together. you say fit is an achievement, but does it really seem to apply to steph and draymond? if i knew i had either of them and was going to build another player in a lab to play with them, i would end up building steph for draymond and draymond for steph. steph is the greatest off-ball player ever, whose biggest offensive requirement would be an extremely high IQ player to make all the reads and mind meld with him to get him the ball where he needs it. after all, you can't be off-ball without relying on your teammates to do the on-ball work. well draymond just happens to not only be a point-forward, but an elite point-forward. an elite point-forward who doesn't even want to shoot, which obviously helps with team chemistry. and now that we've got the offense sorted, we go to the other end where draymond is his generation's greatest defender, one who also seems to get even better in the playoffs. it literally could not work out better.

…

To some degree it’s surely right that it’s great for Steph that he’s played with guys that he fits well with. But I do think it’s telling that virtually everyone seems to fit well with him. Draymond is a great fit. Klay is a great fit. Durant was a great fit. Iguodala was a great fit. Wiggins hadn’t been a good fit with anything in the NBA, and he suddenly becomes a good fit with Steph. It’s genuinely part of the greatness of Steph that he’s easy to fit well with. Are you good on the ball? Great, Steph doesn’t need the ball that much, so you can maximize yourself despite playing with a massive star. Are you good off the ball? Great, the team can use plays for Steph for you too, and Steph’s gravity will also get you easy baskets on cuts. Are you a great passer? Great, you can use that really effectively on the short roll to take advantage of teams doubling Steph miles from the basket. Are you a great shooter? Great, you’ll be left open a ton due to Steph’s gravity and will be able to rack up tons of shots without even needing to create your own shot. Are you not a good shooter at all? That’s okay, because Steph creates so much space that the team can run good offense even with multiple non-shooters on the floor. Are you offensively limited but great defensively? That’s okay, Steph is so good offensively that the team can take advantage of your defensive prowess while relying on Steph to paper over any offensive limitations. Are you a big-bodied big man that isn’t overly skilled but can do the dirty work well? Great, you’ll get lots of value setting off-ball screens for Steph.

Bottom line is that it’s hard to think of a template of a good player that *wouldn’t* fit well with Steph Curry. Steph’s teams have always seemed to be as much or more than the sum of their parts, in large part because there’s few strengths that other players can’t maximize value from alongside Steph, and he’s able to paper over quite a lot of weaknesses, particularly on the offensive end. So I just don’t think it’s as simple as saying Steph is lucky to have a great fit. Part of his greatness is that he’s a player that’s easy to fit with!

yes, he probably provides a good template for fit, but as we saw in 2021, no one could figure out why kelly oubre didn't know how to run a motion offense. turns out, plenty of nba players aren't iggy and draymond in the IQ department. but the warriors have done a good job of avoiding the oubre's of the world, which is easier when picking role players. his two best teammates fit perfectly with him. and so does his coach. once the coach and 2 best teammates fit, pretty much everything works because it's much easier to find role players who fit than stars who do and role players can't whine about their roles and will do what is necessary to keep their jobs. in fact, you would probably be hard-pressed to think of teams where the top 3 players are a good fit but the team somehow doesn't work because of the role players.

i would say he needs his individual numbers to not fall off significantly in 2015, only to arguably be saved by injury, and very significantly (historically so) in 2016 and 2018, only to be saved by injury again in 2018, and also not survive the 2nd round in 2019 with horrible play, for me to think that his margin of error for playoff success isn't extremely high and that he isn't being boosted by having an elite defense and draymond around him. for all of kobe's problems, he seems to have been able to maintain his regular season play better, and either he or hakeem is arguably the best at "actual vs expected" championships, with kobe managing to finish 2nd not only in raw delta but also in percentage delta.

I think you could say this sort of thing about virtually everyone. Most teams that win a title had some serious luck along the way—injuries to great players on other teams, upsets resulting in facing relatively weak teams, etc. It’s just how things go, and if we discounted every title for that sort of reason, then there’d be very few titles we’d put value on.

I also don’t think “actual vs. expected championships” is all that helpful, since it can just penalize a guy for being better than other guys in the regular season. If Steph leads a team to a 73-win season by being a supernova in the regular season, and then he loses in the finals while not playing as well as in the regular season, is that worse than if he’d played less well and only led the team to a 55-win season, and then he loses in the finals playing the same? The latter would be better from an “actual vs. expected championships” standpoint, but it isn’t *actually* better. Steph led his teams to the most regular season wins in a three-year span in the history of the NBA. He’s a huge cause of his team’s number of expected championships being really high! He shouldn’t be penalized for it! Other players who didn’t do as much in the regular season may show more “playoff resilience,” but in most cases they’re just resilient in staying at a lower level!

yes, it will always be tough to tell when we are penalizing for the regular season. but who says a team isn't every bit as good as it looks in the regular season, without their best player necessarily being worth some enormous number of extra wins, and then falling short in their playoffs because the best player part of "team = best player + supporting cast" is falling short? i guess it's hard to know either way. but the main reason i mentioned kobe, is a big part of kobe's low expected champions is just the lakers facing really good teams in lots of rounds. even the 2001 lakers, if they had been a +8.7 team instead of +3.7, would have only had a 28% chance. and instead they had probably the best playoffs ever because they just played that well.

i realize we shouldn't throw things away just because it gives results we don't like, but i do think curry finishing first every year, in every situation, even when his own play falters, is at least somewhat problematic. no different than watching david robinson or chris paul look so amazing by various box and impact metrics where it seems they clearly don't live up to it. i bring up 2022 where curry had a down season for a reason. the idea that curry has off-ball value is obvious. but part of his value is also that he makes a lot of shots at extremely high efficiency. it's not as if he ups his "intangibles" and off-ball impact to perfectly offset poor shooting, then decreases his intangibles and off-ball impact when he's shooting well. if the numbers can't even tell me he had a poor year when he clearly did and had people asking "what happened to steph's shot?" all season long, then another 2nd or 3rd place finish isn't going to mean as much after a while. and all those 1st place finishes, when there wouldn't have been a single year that ended with people calling steph the best in the world after the playoffs, brings us back to the resilience argument.

I don’t think that that’s factually right though: It *did* show up in the data. In 2021-2022, Steph had easily his lowest Offensive RPM since 2012-2013. Similarly, NBAshotcharts had Steph’s offensive RAPM in 2021-2022 at its lowest level since 2012-2013. Steph’s Offensive RAPTOR in 2021-2022 was the lowest they have on record. Advanced metrics definitely did capture a decrease in offensive value in that season. His overall numbers were just still really good, because his baseline level of offensive impact was so high (such that even his lowest offensive impact is still really good) and a lot of the metrics detected a better-than-normal defensive impact (which makes sense since he was widely considered to have gotten better defensively that year, partly from bulking up). So I don’t think this is a reason to discount these metrics at all—if anything, I think this discussion should validate them to you.

and i guess i can't see his baseline impact being so enormous that, in a league with so many good players, that steph can fall off all the way back to 2013 and he's still besting almost everybody, especially coming off a year where this impact giant played even better and didn't make the playoffs with the #4 defense at his back.

even 2022 tries to get written as some underdog story for steph. but he was on the team with the highest payroll in the league with all of the payroll healthy for the playoffs. an owner willing to pay $25M plus huge luxury tax for someone like andrew wiggins. do you want wiggins as your franchise player? of course not. do you want his elite athleticism along with 17 ppg scoring (without caring if he gets the ball) to be your 4th best starter if money is no option? of course yes. on top of poole going crazy in the playoffs. on top of still having the #1 defense in the league courtesy of draymond once again. with klay still around? that seems like a fairly loaded team in a post-superteam world. though i won't deny curry played very well in the finals this time.

I think talking about the payroll is obscuring the fact that the payroll was basically just filled with bad contracts. Klay was the second-highest-paid guy on the team and he wasn’t there most of the season and was rough when he did come back (and had a negative on-off in both regular season and playoffs—massively so in the playoffs). Wiggins was the third-highest-paid guy on the team, but his contract was considered an albatross contract when the Warriors got him, not some high-value player. Their fifth-highest-paid guy was James Wiseman, who did not play the entire year. Their sixth-highest paid guy was Jonathan Kuminga, who basically only got like 35 minutes of garbage time in the entire last two rounds of the playoffs. So I think it’s reaching to look to the payroll and conclude that it means the 2022 Warriors were actually really great. They weren’t. That really was a floor-raising title.

i think ignoring payroll obscures the fact that most players would have seen their team shed talent to not pay the largest luxury tax bill ever. that's a benefit most players don't get. hell, i remember tillman fertitta inheriting a 65 win rocket team and the very first offseason he lets trevor ariza walk over $15M dollar and we get carmelo and MCW to replace him. those things matter. also, that league high payroll didn't even include jordan poole making any money. the warriors thought enough of him to give him $35M/yr in the offseason so any money kuminga and wiseman were making is offset there. and which team had a better 4th starter than andrew wiggins? his contract was an albatross if your owner is poor and you need wiggins to be the best or second best player. either way, the warriors thought enough of his play that they signed him to an even higher deal in the offseason, so it couldn't have been that much of an albatross.

i would have more sympathy if the warriors had an amazing offense and missed the playoffs. but, in fact, they had the #4 ranked defense in 2021. curry is an offensive weapon par excellence, so i would imagine making the playoffs is not a great threshold if we know the defense is very good. but they finished #20 in offense and missed. are there reasons for that? sure, but seemingly no more convincing reasons than their are reasons for why the warriors looked so good for so many years.

2 missed playoffs in your prime hurts kareem's story. it seems like it has to hurt steph's (2020 was looking even more disastrous than 2021 so there's not much reason to think the warriors are doing any better than maybe battling for the 8th seed). and i might have more sympathy to that if he wasn't the leader in the clubhouse for missed playoffs (in this range of players). he missed 5 times by his age 33 season. even a guy in a horrible situation like garnett only missed 4, and he had an age 19 and 20 season while curry started at 21, not making the playoffs until he was 24, which goes back to longevity.

The Warriors had a good offense when Steph was on the court that year. They also won at a 48-win pace when Steph played. Again, if one of the biggest knocks against a guy is his value in a season where he was #3 in MVP voting, then that’s an incredible signal that he should be very highly ranked all time!

i would say the low teens is pretty high. i'm objecting to needing to be nominated soon. also, only media darling steph could be the only guy in the last 40 years to finish top 3 in the mvp voting without making the playoffs.

As for the defense and offense thing, I think we have to recognize that defense and offense are not independent in the NBA. And what the Warriors have often chosen to do with Steph is to stack defense-minded lineups around him, knowing that his presence can salvage what would otherwise be unplayably bad offensive lineups. In that season, the Warriors were really frequently putting out lineups that had Steph and two or three of the following: Draymond, Looney, Wiseman, Oubre, etc. It’s very little shooting, especially in this era, where having 2 or 3 non-shooters on the court is a huge problem offensively. They did it even worse that year since they just had even less shooting in general, but they do it even now. Those Draymond/Looney lineups are really good defensively, but they’re only really good because Steph’s so good offensively that he can make that a playable offensive lineup. For instance, in the last three regular seasons + playoffs, Draymond/Looney lineups with Steph are +14.9 with great 121.7 offensive efficiency, but Draymond/Looney lineups without Steph are -3.2 with a bad 110.7 offensive efficiency. Steph allows the Warriors to stack defensive players onto the court while still having a functioning offense! Not to mention that their offense is horrible when he’s off the court. So I don’t think it makes sense to suggest that the Warriors having a great defense that year has nothing to do with Steph or that them having a mediocre offense was his fault. The reality is that they had good offenses with him on the court despite running really defensive lineups that helped their defense be great, and then their offense collapsed with him off the floor.

yes, but theoretically all teams use their best offensive players to offset their best defenders. steph will obviously be better than most, but we can't just break it up and say steph made the warriors defense good by being so good on offense, but also you can't blame him for the bad offense. the total talent of the team with draymond and wiggins doesn't seem like it should be impossible to make the playoffs. and they even had two shots at a play-in game.

true, it's not easy to win a title. but i think my biggest argument is in how the credit is distributed. even look at klay, the weakest of the big 4. he misses 2 years and the warriors don't even make the playoffs. he comes back and they win it all. steph has never made the playoffs without klay. same with KD. the warriors go from 9 playoff losses to the most dominant playoff run ever, but we've spent the last 6 years bombarded with "but look at the warriors plus/minus with only steph on the court" type stats trying to pretend KD was irrelevant. sorry, but "we got way better after adding a new guy, but it wasn't really the new guy, it was everyone else" is the type of thing that makes me doubt all the impact stuff, at least in its ability to go from the line-up specific world where that data lives to the overall big picture results.

The Warriors were 30-9 that season before Klay came back. They finished 53-29, and Klay had a -2.9 on-off. A good bit of that slide had to do with injuries, but the team was clearly elite without Klay. And then in the playoffs, Klay had a -11.7 on-off. I think the most reasonable conclusion is that the Warriors winning the title when Klay came back was correlation not causation.

perhaps. klay certainly isn't old klay and wasn't that season either. but steph also started the season crazy hot and then was so bad at shooting in the 2nd half that he not only reversed that hot streak back to average, but dragged it down to his worst shooting in almost a decade, so that played a part.

[f4p]

Spoiler:

If people want to take the position that Hakeem was just flat out underrated by his contemporaries that’s fine. Sometimes players are. I think the stats, the commentary of the time, and my own observations, are aligned in suggesting that in 1993 everything clicked for Hakeem.

so what happened from 86-88? we see him pull off one of the great upsets in league history, in taking down Showtime in 1986.
this wasn't some weak version of the lakers. they were the defending champs. they won the next 2 championships. they were 62-20 and perfectly healthy (afaik) in 1986. and hakeem wasn't just along for the ride. he put up 31/11/4 in a series where he somehow had way more steals (11) than turnovers (7). with the 1st team center in kareem on the other side. he even gives the '86 celtics 2 of their 3 playoffs losses (magic and bird lost 9 playoff games in 1986, and 6 were to hakeem).

he then follows it up with even better per 100 numbers across the board the next season, in a 10 game playoffs that isn't significantly shorter than duncan's 2006 you reference later. and then of course in 1988 he basically shatters all of the playoff box score records in the 1st round. PER of 39 was the record and still is (minimum 50 minutes). WS48 of 0.385 was the record, only eclipsed by 2009 lebron. BPM of 14.5 was the record, only eclipsed by 1991 jordan and 2009 lebron. even if he had followed it up with his worst box series of the next 6 years (1990), he still would have been at 29.8 PER, 0.233 WS48, and 9.2 BPM. in other words, still great. and that's just assuming he plays poorly in the 2nd round for no reason.

all his best playoff numbers are actually from this 3 year span, not 1993-95. so the idea he was a 3 year wonder doesn't make much sense. his loss to the 7th seed as a 6th seed in 1987 will be the last time he's ever upset in the playoffs. and of course, he had already beaten the 3rd seed so his team went further than it was supposed to. the only time his team didn't at least match it's seed in performance was his rookie season. then never again for 17 more years.

Whether he became a better passer as some suggested, or a better leader, or started playing harder/more consistent, that is the opinion many people have. I am one of them, and I think the stats tend to point to that. His regular season numbers take a marked upturn, and his playoffs numbers are consistently better (not “they were always this good if we look only at this limited sample from a weird angle).

1991 and 1992 are probably the easiest things to ding hakeem for. and i think fairly. his regular season numbers take a dip.
although based on 1993, arguably because the coach thought taking the ball from hakeem was a good idea which Rudy T immediately proved devastatingly wrong when he took over. he even misses the playoffs and has a stretch of 25 missed games in 1991 where the rockets go 15-10 without him (though they did go 12-2 right when he got back). similar to kareem's missed playoffs in the 70's, it feels like these 2 years set hakeem's floor low enough that at least some questions can be asked. and keep me from really considering him with the Mount Rushmore Big 4. even the roster was somewhat similar to the championship roster at this point, so we have to ask how much of the improvement was just Rudy T implementing a much better system and why hakeem didn't do more in 1991 and 1992. of course, if hakeem had a Pop in his corner all the time, would he need to wait 9 years for a decent system?

I tend to think improved attitude/leadership/decision making and increased consistency played a part, but I’m open to other explanations. I don’t really care why it happened, only that it did. I think a lot of people forget that Hakeem was seen as a cancer with a bad attitude before 1993, and had been trying to force his way out of town. Obviously by 1995 he was seen as a mature player, who embodied humility and veteran leadership.

people tend to seem like cancers with bad attitudes when they play with less talent than any other great player ever. by expected championships, totaling up hakeem's entire career, he was expected to win.... 0.1 titles. less than carmelo anthony, before you tell me it was only because hakeem wasn't good enough to make it higher.

What I don’t think you can argue is that he was always seen as a top level player, and that he just wasn’t being recognized because of team wins and the like. Here are Hakeem’s MVP finishes from 1985 to 1992:

1985: 12th (behind players including Terry Cummings, Bernard King, Moncrief, Isiah Thomas, Calvin Natt, Alex English, and his own team mate Ralph Sampson)
1986: 4th (behind Bird, Dominique Wilkins whose Hawks only won 1 more game than Houston and Magic)
1987: 7th (behind Magic, Jordan, Bird, McHale (Bird’s sidekick), Wilkins and Barkley; Barkley’s team only won 3 more games than Houston)
1988: 7th (behind Jordan, Bird, Magic, Barkley, Clyde and Wilkins; Barkley’s Sixers won only 36 games, 10 less than Houston, and Wilkins Hawks only won 4 more games).
1989: 5th (behind Magic, Jordan, Karl Malone and Ewing; Karl and Ewing’s teams only won slightly more than Hakeem’s Rockets)
1990: 7th (behind Magic, Barkley, Jordan, Malone, Ewing and rookie David Robinson; Ewing’s Knicks won 4 more games)
1991: 18th (behind a cast of characters that included Barkley, Malone, Clyde, KJ, Wilkins, Terry Porter, Ewing, Stockton, Thomas, Parish, Dumars, and even Kenny Smith, Hakeem’s own team mate!)
1992: N/A (didn’t place; even Barkley placed this year, on 35 win team while demanding a trade and trying to eat his way out of town)

so your contention is guys like barkley and clyde and ewing were better for almost a decade, then hakeem just magically murdered them all in the playoffs when he finally got a competent team around him? doesn't it seem more likely that the guy whose best numbers actually came all the way back in 86-88 was just waiting to get another half decent team around him before resuming his playoff mastery?

I don’t even agree with all those votes`, but it tells you where the public perception of Hakeem was at the time. Being on a bad or mediocre team didn’t stop other lesser players getting votes, so it’s not about Hakeem being out of the spotlight because his team was out of the spotlight. The voters knew who Hakeem was, he’d made the finals in 1986, they had seen him perform on the highest stage. Obviously Hakeem only lost to great teams in the playoffs, except that he lost to the 53 win Aguirre Mavs, the 39 win Sonics led by Xavier McDaniel, the 41 win Dantley Jazz, and the 47 win Sonics led by Dale Ellis, and those were not great teams. He didn’t even make the playoffs in 1992. Then contrast that with what Duncan did with lamentable support casts in 2001-2003.

lamentable supporting casts don't have a top 5 rim protector and the best defensive guard in the game, in an era perfectly suited for those guys to shutdown all the isoball of the era. along with a GOAT-candidate defensive coach to put it all together. those supporting casts may be around the level of hakeem's 1994 cast (well, not 2001, robinson is still too good), and of course hakeem won 58 games and a title with that one.

From 85 to 92 Hakeem’s pp 100 hovered between 27 and 31. From 93 to 96 he scored 33 to 35 pp 100. That’s a substantial increase, and his TS% went higher than it had previously been while he upped his scoring. In the same 1985 to 1992 period he generally had about 3 assists per 100, that climbed to 4.5 assists per 100 the next 4 years. Hakeem’s playoffs are all over the map, but on the whole the per 100 numbers when compared to Duncan’s prime from 98 to 07 suggest Duncan was better.

they're all over the map as in they consistently look great? he's at 26.0 PER, 0.223 WS48, and 7.2 BPM and 58.0 TS%. that's pretty good. duncan's 99-07 is 27.0 PER, 0.227 WS48, 7.6 BPM and 56.0 TS%. so duncan's best stretch is maybe a tiny bit ahead of hakeem's stretch that you label as all over the map and a period you say shows that he wasn't that good for most of his career.

He also did it over a huge sample, whereas some of Hakeem’s crazy numbers come in 1st round losses to meh teams. Hakeem put up huge stats in a 4 game 1st round loss to the Aguirre Mavs in 1988. But it’s 4 games. Against the 1988 Mavs. And they lost.

what do you think hakeem could have done to win that series? he scored 37.5 ppg on 64 TS%. he had 16.8 rpg and 2.8 bpg. and had as many steals as turnovers. and broke a bunch of records. if that's not enough, then why even look at what players do. just check who won the series and tell us that player was the better player

His longest pre 1993 sample is the 1986 finals run, and he does post great numbers on that run. But those numbers are worse than comparable Duncan runs during his prime.

Hakeem 1986 playoffs: 34-15 per 100 on 566 TS%
Duncan 2002 -37-19 per 100 on 550 TS%
Duncan 2003 – 31-19 per 100 on 577 TS%
Duncan 2006 – 37-15 per 100 on 625 TS%

but compare favorably to duncan's 30-15 on 57.3 TS% in his 2nd season.

Duncan’s runs are just better than Hakeem, up until 1993 when Hakeem starts posting postseasons that are comparable to Duncan.

how are they better than 1986 and 1987 and 1988? how is a pretty bad 2004 where duncan blows a 2-0 lead while scoring 17.5 ppg on 38% shooting in the final 4 games better than hakeem? how is getting obliterated by the 2001 lakers, by a far worse MOV than any other lakers opponent, so much better than hakeem? and we still haven't gotten to hakeem winning a title with a 2003 duncan level supporting cast one year and then winning the least likely title against the tougher group of opponents ever the next year. and still having an age 34 playoffs that dwarfs duncan's age 34 playoffs (losing to an 8th seed).

Unfortunately for Hakeem, he only did it for about 3 years, and I think Duncan was still better. I’m particularly troubled by the Sonics beating the Rockets in 93 and 96 by pushing the boundaries of the illegal defence rules to mess up Hakeem’s offense.

while the near 100% doubling in 1996 did affect hakeem and maybe give him his worst series ever, can you say who it wouldn't affect? it's not like they just hedged at hakeem and made life a little difficult. it was just straight hard doubles on basically every possession, daring the rockets role players to have an answer. and it's not like the 1996 sonics were a mediocre team that just proved how to stop hakeem with a scheme. they were a 64 win, +7.4 SRS team with a -5.5 defense that finished 2nd. they held stockton to 33 points through the first 5 games of the WCF. they gave jordan easily his worst finals performance. part of why they could double hakeem is they were stupid quick on the perimeter to recover to everything and deep enough to not get tired with seemingly every 6'6 athletic wing in the nba who couldn't shoot on their team.

and it doesn't really seem to apply much in 1993. hakeem averaged 23 ppg on 52% shooting and was getting 4.7 apg as a result of all the doubles. maybe too many turnovers, but this certainly isn't some level of series that duncan never had offensively.

and in 1997, with barkley around to finally give him some help, he averaged 21.7 ppg on 57.5% shooting.

It suggests to me Hakeem, who struggled consistently against the Sonics, would have had a reduced impact in today’s game where there is no illegal D protection, and teams have anti-post defences that are designed to prevent the outlet pass and pressure them in ways that frankly didn’t exist in Hakeem’s day. All Hakeem had to do was hold the ball, and wait for the hard double to come. If it did, easy pass. If not, try to score. These days bigs have to make so many more adjustments and decisions, and be so much better under different types of pressure defences.

joel embiid, hardly an amazing passer, just won mvp. and one of hakeem's biggest strengths was that he didn't hold the ball to wait for the hard double. he is probably tops in nba history in terms of time from when he caught the ball to how quickly he started making a move. oftentimes starting as he landed from the catch. maybe it affects hakeem, but if he grew up around it and got to play in an era where people try to defend the post with small forwards, i'm thinking he'd do fairly well.

But looking at longer samples that adjust for pace, Duncan’s numbers are better anyhow. Take Hakeem’s best 10 year stretch, and compare it to Duncan from 98-07, and per 100 it’s probably going to come out pro-Duncan.

probably? i have hakeem winning playoff box score from age 22-31, with is 1999-2008 for duncan (basically the same as 98-07) and 1985-1994 for hakeem.

I also prefer Duncan’s defence. Hakeem was flasher, getting more blocks. Duncan stopped the blocks from happening in the first place, because the other team wouldn’t go near him a lot of the time. He’s a better man defender for mine too, as highlighted in part by his excellent defense on Shaq in 2002. Hakeem was credited with shutting down Shaq in the 95 finals, but in reality Shaq put up huge numbers, arguably better than Hakeem. Shaq's team wasn’t as good is all.

duncan also had david robinson to guard shaq and certainly wasn't guarding shaq all the time. hakeem's big man help was , uhh, 37 year old charles jones and i guess chucky brown or robert horry. hakeem did probably win a title specifically for having such elite man defense that he destroyed patrick ewing to the tune of a 39 TS% in the finals, one of the worst numbers i've ever heard of for a series.

I'm not going to respond to most of this for a number of reasons, the biggest being that it will sprawl. I'm instead going to focus of getting several concise answers from you.
1) You claim Duncan had D.Rob to help him guard Shaq in 02. It has been explained many times that D.Rob was hurt in 02, and could not have neen guarding Shaq. People have posted video of Duncan guarding Shaq, and pointed to this many times. So why do you continue to say D.Rob helped guard him?

robinson played 25 mpg for 3 of the games. so he almost certainly guarded shaq some. unless he picked up 13 fouls in 75 minutes guarding samaki walker. but i suppose i have lost robinson's injury to the sands of time and over-remembered his total contribution. however, for duncan guarding him, i believe 70's Fan's numbers indicate 17 of shaq's 94 shots were in isolation against duncan. so certainly others must have guarded shaq quite a bit.

2) You contimue to ascribe much of Duncan's success to D.Rob. You even called him a 'top 5 rim protector' from 01 to 03. If D.Rob is so valuable during these years why did the teams defense get much better the 2 years immediately after he retired? Why did the Spurs go 15-3 in games he missed in 03, and as his role was reduced the team seemed unaffected?

are we really questioning whether david robinson was a great defender and really handy to have around in a world where teams still didn't shoot 3's? certainly in game 6 against the nets, a big part of kenyon martin's 3 for 23 performance came against robinson.

You mention Bowen too, who wasn't there in 01 (which is part of why Kobe went off; their wing rotation was lamentable), and didn't play all of 02 either, yet the Spurs were still good on D. It seems like the common denominator was Duncan.

again, are we really questioning if bowen was good at defense? i mean you literally mentioned kobe going off in the absense of bowen just one sentence ago. and bowen played 59 games and all of the playoffs in '02. he was there.

3) It was very much in the press that Hakeem was struggling vs the Sonics due to their pushing the limits of the illegal defence rules. This fact is easy to google. Why are you downplaying something Hakeem's own team attributed to their losses?

it certainly was a big deal in the 1996 series. and that series has shaped a lot of the hakeem/sonics narrative, even the idea the rockets couldn't have beaten the 1994 sonics even though the two teams split the season series and played a double-OT game 7 the year before. i'm not seeing how 1993 hakeem averaging 23 ppg on 52% shooting and having the most assists he ever had in a series is a level of struggling that should make us question hakeem in 2023. even today few teams have the defensive personnel that the mid-90's sonics did or deploy it in such an aggressive way.

On the whole it's clear we just see things differently. You blame Duncan for not holding onto a 2-0 lead against a better team, when for too many series Hakeem never got a lead in the first place. You dismiss Hakeem's losses to superior foes, without blaming Hakeem for not floor raising his team to enough wins thus ensuring an easier 1st round foe. You are dismissive of Hakeem's support casts, but never really explain why they were so bad or were losing to such weak teams prior to 93.

and you seem to think they played with the same level of teammates. tim duncan played with 2 hall of famers for their entire primes in parker and ginobili, a hall of famer in david robinson who still led the league in WS48 for 3 of duncan's first 4 seasons, and then got the early prime seasons of kawhi leonard. hakeem didn't play with a hall of famer until mid-way through year 11, and drexler wasn't some young kobe or wade to ease hakeem into retirement. drexler was in year 12 and hakeem was supposed to carry him! the 1994 rockets, all the way from 2-15 on the roster, had otis thorpe make a single all-star game 2 years before, and then had sam cassell make a single all-star game 10 years later. i would venture there is no championship team close to having only 2 combined all-stars in the entire 2-15 supporting cast.

people have brought up the "hakeem should have made the team better" argument, but let's frame it this way. 1993 and 1994 hakeem are universally agreed to be amazing regular seasons. even you are putting them up there with duncan. hakeem's offense was at or near it's peak and he was still playing DPOY defense. he also played all but 2 games across the 2 seasons, so the regular season team was not held back by injuries to hakeem. the rockets supporting cast was basically the best of hakeem's career and also enjoyed very good health. thorpe and maxwell missed about 10 games each in 1993 and then the other 4 starters only missed a combined 12 games in 1994. so health to the supporting cast didn't hold back the regular season version of the team. and we know hakeem and the supporting cast must have meshed fairly well because, after all, they did win the title in 1994. all of this to say, this is arguably the ideal circumstance of hakeem's career, with almost perfect health. with a team that knows how to win. so where did the 1993 rockets finish in SRS? 6th. where did the 1994 rockets finish in SRS? 6th?

it would seem, over 164 games, that the team's true talent level simply did not rise to a very high level, even with the absolute best hakeem regular seasons possible. the fact seems to be that the team, especially hakeem but certainly others, truly was just a playoff rising team. to an amazing degree. and so there's also no reason to think that hakeem's previous teams were just secretly a bunch of +6 and +7 teams that hakeem was holding back.

I don't think Hakeem's support casts were that bad, comparing them to the worst incarnations of the Spurs anyway, and find blaming team mates for his losses to 500 or sub-500 playoff teams, or just missing the playoffs completely, to be unconvincing. You even blame it on coaching, when Hakeem's coaches included Larry Bird's former coach Bill Fitch and Don Chaney who won COY in that span.

presumably because this only focuses on offense. duncan had to do a lot of heavy lifting on offense early in his career but enjoyed tremendous defensive support. hakeem did not.

[One_and_Done]

I'm not going to respond to most of this for a number of reasons, the biggest being that it will sprawl. I'm instead going to focus of getting several concise answers from you.
1) You claim Duncan had D.Rob to help him guard Shaq in 02. It has been explained many times that D.Rob was hurt in 02, and could not have neen guarding Shaq. People have posted video of Duncan guarding Shaq, and pointed to this many times. So why do you continue to say D.Rob helped guard him?

robinson played 25 mpg for 3 of the games. so he almost certainly guarded shaq some. unless he picked up 13 fouls in 75 minutes guarding samaki walker. but i suppose i have lost robinson's injury to the sands of time and over-remembered his total contribution. however, for duncan guarding him, i believe 70's Fan's numbers indicate 17 of shaq's 94 shots were in isolation against duncan. so certainly others must have guarded shaq quite a bit.

See, this comes across as astonishingly disinterested. You insisted repeatedly to me that Duncan didn't really guard Shaq, because he had D.Rob around. I tell you D.Rob was injured in 2002, as do a number of other posters, and now you finally say "I must have misremembered", yet you remain convinced that "someone else" must have done most of the defense on Shaq. You don't spend the 2 minutes it would take to look at the series stats on bball reference after pursuing this argument for so long, but assert that "certainly others must have guarded Shaq quite a bit". Let me save you the 2 minutes. The only other bigs playing non-garbage minutes were Malik Rose and 6-9 power forward Mark Bryant (for 38 minutes all series). Malik Rose is about 6-5 btw. D.Rob played less than 25 minutes a game in 3 games, whereas Shaq played over 39mpg in 5 games. So clearly Duncan must have been the primary defender on Shaq for most of the series. Malik and Bryant were not defending the paint against Shaq, no matter how low Malik's center of gravity is. The only game of the series the Spurs won was also a game D.Rob missed, which should tell you how ineffective he was at this point. The very next year the Spurs went 15-3 when D.Rob was out.

The more measured conclusion is not that Duncan must not have guarded him much, but that Shaq found it much harder to get position against Duncan and wasn't able to get his shot off him much at all (in isolation). That also gels with my recollection, and the video of the series I have watched. It doesn't tell us at all how much Duncan guarded him relative to others, not really. Maybe you are just misremembering this also. It feels like when the evidence changes, your position should also.

2) You contimue to ascribe much of Duncan's success to D.Rob. You even called him a 'top 5 rim protector' from 01 to 03. If D.Rob is so valuable during these years why did the teams defense get much better the 2 years immediately after he retired? Why did the Spurs go 15-3 in games he missed in 03, and as his role was reduced the team seemed unaffected?

are we really questioning whether david robinson was a great defender and really handy to have around in a world where teams still didn't shoot 3's? certainly in game 6 against the nets, a big part of kenyon martin's 3 for 23 performance came against robinson.

You mention Bowen too, who wasn't there in 01 (which is part of why Kobe went off; their wing rotation was lamentable), and didn't play all of 02 either, yet the Spurs were still good on D. It seems like the common denominator was Duncan.

again, are we really questioning if bowen was good at defense? i mean you literally mentioned kobe going off in the absense of bowen just one sentence ago. and bowen played 59 games and all of the playoffs in '02. he was there.

We are really questioning whether D.Rob was still a great defender in 02 and 03, because he was old and couldn't move properly or stay on the court for long. You act confused, but these points were really not confusing, and your replies don't respond to them at all. You just respond with more questions. I ask you again; if D.Rob was so impactful, why was the team 15-3 in games he missed in 2003? (and 21-5 in games he missed from 00 to 03) If D.Rob was such an impactful guy on D, why were the Spurs EVEN better on D the 2 years after he retired? If The same goes for Bowen; he wasn''t there for the full season in 2002, but there doesn't seem to have been any significant impact on the D in his absence. The constant was Duncan.

I'm going to stop there, because I think I've made my point, and others can judge for themselves the rest of what you've written.

[f4p]

...is probably better than a player who posts a worse record of 27-3 (or 27-2) over a convenient 7 or 8-year frame while getting to dunk on weaker early round opposition

expanding to 16 teams does not seem to have resulted in jordan facing weaker teams. if only because russell faced incredibly weak teams for the first 9 seasons of his career.

russell wins his first title playing two negative SRS teams. then two 0-1 SRS teams, and loses.

the next year he gets a 3.7 team in the first round, but a negative SRS team in the finals.

then he goes 4 years without facing another team above 3 SRS, which almost seems impossible.

then after two +4 teams, he goes right back to a negative team and a +1.7 team.

by the time he's 6 championships in, he's only faced teams with a combined 19.9 SRS, lower than the single championship runs of the 2001 and 2002 lakers and 1995 rockets.

-> All else being equal, a player whose teams are a bigger regular-season outlier(7.0 expected championships vs 2.9 per fp4's calc) and then who overperforms in the playoffs by a bigger margin(11 actual championships vs 6 by basketball reference), probably was better

i would be careful about saying russell overperformed more. now he can't beat jordan in percentage terms even if he wins 13/13, so that's not fair. but in general, these top players we are talking about convert a lot of their good chances. but even good chances rarely exceed much over 50%. so the best way to exceed your expected total is usually to have a lot of 40+% chances. now russell arguably is limited because he had so many 70% chances that he can't gain much, but jordan is limited because he essentially has 0% chances before 1991, the kind of odds where basically no one wins. all of his actual and all of his expected come from 7 seasons, with no chances to build otherwise. and even if you think someone could have made 1990 better as you say in other posts, even if we assume bill russell could come to 1990 and somehow massively surpass peak michael jordan to turn the bulls from a +2.74 team all the way into a +6.74 team, a fairly incredible change, the bulls would still only be at 18.4% odds and unlikely to win (russell converted on lower chances but also both losses were on higher chances).

[f4p]

I'm not going to respond to most of this for a number of reasons, the biggest being that it will sprawl. I'm instead going to focus of getting several concise answers from you.
1) You claim Duncan had D.Rob to help him guard Shaq in 02. It has been explained many times that D.Rob was hurt in 02, and could not have neen guarding Shaq. People have posted video of Duncan guarding Shaq, and pointed to this many times. So why do you continue to say D.Rob helped guard him?

robinson played 25 mpg for 3 of the games. so he almost certainly guarded shaq some. unless he picked up 13 fouls in 75 minutes guarding samaki walker. but i suppose i have lost robinson's injury to the sands of time and over-remembered his total contribution. however, for duncan guarding him, i believe 70's Fan's numbers indicate 17 of shaq's 94 shots were in isolation against duncan. so certainly others must have guarded shaq quite a bit.

See, this comes across as astonishingly disinterested. You insisted repeatedly to me that Duncan didn't really guard Shaq, because he had D.Rob around. I tell you D.Rob was injured in 2002, as do a number of other posters, and now you finally say "I must have misremembered", yet you remain convinced that "someone else" must have done most of the defense on Shaq.

in the future, i will refrain from admitting my mistakes, as it seems to offend you so, and simply dig in on whatever i previously said.

You don't spend the 2 minutes it would take to look at the series stats on bball reference after pursuing this argument for so long, but assert that "certainly others must have guarded Shaq quite a bit". Let me save you the 2 minutes. The only other bigs playing non-garbage minutes were Malik Rose and 6-9 power forward Mark Bryant (for 38 minutes all series). Malik Rose is about 6-5 btw. D.Rob played less than 25 minutes a game in 3 games, whereas Shaq played over 39mpg in 5 games. So clearly Duncan must have been the primary defender on Shaq for most of the series. Malik and Bryant were not defending the paint against Shaq, no matter how low Malik's center of gravity is. The only game of the series the Spurs won was also a game D.Rob missed, which should tell you how ineffective he was at this point. The very next year the Spurs went 15-3 when D.Rob was out.

i, in fact, did spend the 2 minutes and saw malik rose's minutes were pretty high. i have quite specific memories of malik guarding shaq at times and also from the game 5 i watched a while ago. i just did two minutes of my own research:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-may-10-sp-spursrep10-story.html

"Malik Rose has been guarding the Lakers’ 7-foot-1 center, and he was skeptical Thursday of how real the injuries are.

“He still throws it through the rim hard, so I don’t think his hand is bothering him at all,” said Rose, who has been sharing the O’Neal patrol with Mark Bryant and Tim Duncan while Spur center David Robinson recovers from an aggravated disk in his lower back."

tim duncan the 3rd name listed. in fact, malik/david/mark played almost exactly 240 minutes in the series (246), or 48 minutes per game over 5 games, indicating they probably got all the center minutes. and if 70's Fan tells us he tracked all the games and duncan guarded shaq in isolation on 17 field goal attempts, then shaq has 77 other field goals to account for. certainly some will be in transition or offensive rebounds or randomly wide open, but that would have to account for an impossible 60 of shaq's 94 shots before duncan would even be responsible for directly guarding half of the remaining 34.

The more measured conclusion is not that Duncan must not have guarded him much, but that Shaq found it much harder to get position against Duncan and wasn't able to get his shot off him much at all (in isolation). That also gels with my recollection, and the video of the series I have watched. It doesn't tell us at all how much Duncan guarded him relative to others, not really. Maybe you are just misremembering this also. It feels like when the evidence changes, your position should also.

nope, digging in now. just watched the first half of game 4 from 2002 at this link:

Watch on YouTube

;t=10s

they may have skipped a handful of possessions but not many. either way, through the first half, counting the person who was guarding shaq on a possession, whether he actually got the ball or not and even giving duncan one and robinson one where robinson was guarding him and then the lakers set a pick and duncan/robinson had to switch:

Robinson - 17
Mark Bryant - 5
Duncan - 4
Malik Rose - 1

so duncan is at 4 out of 27 so far, or 14.8%. and from the game 5 i remember watching, duncan was at like 5 by the middle of the 4th quarter. but i didn't see that one still on youtube when i looked just now.

2) You contimue to ascribe much of Duncan's success to D.Rob. You even called him a 'top 5 rim protector' from 01 to 03. If D.Rob is so valuable during these years why did the teams defense get much better the 2 years immediately after he retired? Why did the Spurs go 15-3 in games he missed in 03, and as his role was reduced the team seemed unaffected?

are we really questioning whether david robinson was a great defender and really handy to have around in a world where teams still didn't shoot 3's? certainly in game 6 against the nets, a big part of kenyon martin's 3 for 23 performance came against robinson.

You mention Bowen too, who wasn't there in 01 (which is part of why Kobe went off; their wing rotation was lamentable), and didn't play all of 02 either, yet the Spurs were still good on D. It seems like the common denominator was Duncan.

again, are we really questioning if bowen was good at defense? i mean you literally mentioned kobe going off in the absense of bowen just one sentence ago. and bowen played 59 games and all of the playoffs in '02. he was there.

We are really questioning whether D.Rob was still a great defender in 02 and 03, because he was old and couldn't move properly or stay on the court for long. You act confused, but these points were really not confusing, and your replies don't respond to them at all. You just respond with more questions. I ask you again; if D.Rob was so impactful, why was the team 15-3 in games he missed in 2003? (and 21-5 in games he missed from 00 to 03) If D.Rob was such an impactful guy on D, why were the Spurs EVEN better on D the 2 years after he retired? If The same goes for Bowen; he wasn''t there for the full season in 2002, but there doesn't seem to have been any significant impact on the D in his absence. The constant was Duncan.

I'm going to stop there, because I think I've made my point, and others can judge for themselves the rest of what you've written.

so why was Pop playing these guys at all? sounds like it was a waste of roster spots. could have just loaded up on some shooters and creators instead of ol' defensively irrelevant david robinson and bruce bowen. i guess kobe didn't go off in 2001 before bowen got there. i guess robinson didn't just guard shaq on 17 out of 27 possessions. robinson spent 5 straight years leading the league in DRtg in the 90's but now, even when he's just one year removed from leading the league in WS48, he is no longer worth anything on defense? even at 7'-2" just protecting the rim in a league still based around the inside? the final game of his career he put up 17/17. as for why they went 15-3, i don't know. teams do all sorts of weird things over short stretches that doesn't mean david robinson wasn't good at defense.

[One_and_Done]

Yeh I'm sure Malik Rose and Mark Bryant were the reason Shaq struggled that series. Someone should have told the other 3 teams Shaq destroyed in the 2002 playoffs. Apparently all the Nets needed was to sign Malik Rose to stop Shaq pouring in video game numbers.

Saying a guy is 'only 1 year removed' from being good, so he must still be good, is to ignore the history of the league. When most guys fall off it happens shockingly quickly, and unexpectedly. I'm also baffled by you citing Drtg as a useful stat, while ignoring that the Spurs Drtg went up ALOT the year after D.Rob retired. The year after it was better than before too. Hard to call 2 years a small sample, especially when it's backing up everything else we're seeing. As D.Rob's role shrunk the effect on the Spurs was minimal, and when he missed games it was minimal. He just wasn't much of a needle mover his last few years.

By the end of his career D.Rob just wasn't very good anymore, and I pointed you to a bunch of statistical indicators that back up the eye test. The Spurs didn't miss a beat without him.

[OhayoKD]

...is probably better than a player who posts a worse record of 27-3 (or 27-2) over a convenient 7 or 8-year frame while getting to dunk on weaker early round opposition

expanding to 16 teams does not seem to have resulted in jordan facing weaker teams. if only because russell faced incredibly weak teams for the first 9 seasons of his career.

Measured by raw srs which is not necessarily an indicator of league "strength"(high-srs counts tend to happen when the league is diluted by expansion) and obviously isn't particularly meaningful in a truly era-relative comparison. Again...

And where exactly did those extra playoff teams come from? I am winning at a 100% clip over a comparable stretch(8-years), and now I get to play two-rounds against what are, all else equal, weaker opponents. My "record" shoots up. Just because there are now more teams to gain "separation" against does not make the top-level teams materially better relative to the Celtics and If "best record" is the goal, an expanded playoff field means more wins when you are dominant. With all the series Russell played the ceiling was at 29 so he needed to go virtually perfect over 13-years to match or exceed a 8-year stretch for Micheal

If you are going by record, an expanded field is advantageous.

-> All else being equal, a player whose teams are a bigger regular-season outlier(7.0 expected championships vs 2.9 per fp4's calc) and then who overperforms in the playoffs by a bigger margin(11 actual championships vs 6 by basketball reference), probably was better

i would be careful about saying russell overperformed more. now he can't beat jordan in percentage terms even if he wins 13/13

There's nothing to be careful about. Having a higher "percentage" overperformance when you actually underperform by raw count is not a reflection of you or your team being more resilient, it's a reflection of the percentage gap naturally shrinking over longer periods as addition is slower than multiplication. Over uneven samples of volume, rate will skew towards teams with less "chances". If you want to do "percentage" you need to compare like for like samples. Otherwise you stick with the addition.

And of course there's that inconvenient bit where what we have suggests the chances are more a result of Russell being more valuable in the regular season than a disparity in help(which likely actually favors Jordan for at least some of Bill's rings.)

jordan is limited because he essentially has 0% chances before 1991, the kind of odds where basically no one wins. all of his actual and all of his expected come from 7 seasons, with no chances to build otherwise. and even if you think someone could have made 1990 better as you say in other posts, even if we assume bill russell could come to 1990 and somehow massively surpass peak michael jordan to turn the bulls from a +2.74 team all the way into a +6.74 team

This assumes that "help" remained constant throughout 1990 but the Bulls are a much better team even just going by rolling srs by the 90 playoffs than they are at the start of the season. Though you should already know that since you've responded to and replied to several posts explaining that...



Russell would not need to "massively surpass" peak Jordan. Significantly surpassing should suffice(we are assuming era-translation here) which, considering that 1969 Russell seems to have a bigger influence than peak Mike, doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

, a fairly incredible change, the bulls would still only be at 18.4% odds ad unlikely to win (russell converted on lower chances but also both losses were on higher chances).

Those 2 losses being when he missed half the series with an injury and when he ran into wilt+a loaded squad(as in they were really good without him) as a retiring player-coach. And even if you weren't aware of that context, you should know by now that using regular season srs for the 90 Bulls is fully misleading.



If you want to go by "chances" by the pistons series they are something between a +4 and +6 team(that might underrate them). Not at all an impossible upset to pull. But honestly we're missing the forest for the trees here:

Yes, and they were also 1-2 if you don’t include game 6.

They lost game 2 by 3 points with Russell leaving early. This Russell:

1957 Celtics: down 1-2 against the Hawks (+16 point differential) but win the series anyway

1962 Celtics: down 1-2 and eventually 2-3 against the Lakers (+5 point differential through three games) but win the series anyway

1963 Celtics: down 1-2 against the Royals (+15 point differential) but win the series anyway

1966 Celtics: down 1-2 against the Royals again (-3 point differential!) but win the series anyway

1968 Celtics: down 1-2 against the Pistons (-14 point differential!!) but win the series anyway, then are down 1-2 and eventually 1-3 against the 76ers (-8 point differential through three games) but win the series anyway

1969 Celtics: down 1-2 and eventually 2-3 against the Lakers (-2 point differential through three games) but win the series anyway

Russell literally never lost a 1-2 series where he played five games. I wonder if there could be any “motivated reasoning” to portraying it as some lost cause effort that in 1958 he was down 1-2 to the Hawks exactly like the prior year, with a better team and larger point differential through three games, and therefore probably would have lost anyway.

You are comparing a 13-year career record against a favorable 8-year stretch thereby avoiding Jordan's considerably worse Bulls-record(also 13-years) of 30-7, and even then, you can only force equality by giving Russell a loss in a series he did not have a chance to see through while simultaneously giving Jordan a pass for voluntarily denying himself an opportunity to win. But sure, absolutely not "motivated reasoning"

Just say the league wasn't good enough and you think modern players are better. We would not be caping this hard to present the two as comparable if there was a case for Mike based on "performance relative to the competition of their time".

[70sFan]

however, for duncan guarding him, i believe 70's Fan's numbers indicate 17 of shaq's 94 shots were in isolation against duncan. so certainly others must have guarded shaq quite a bit.

I posted Duncan numbers against Shaq, not the other way around. I hope I will upload another video next week.

[eminence]

.

Voting post

On the '18 Warriors, I wouldn't say the were particularly cruising in the RS (Dray may have been), it was mostly Steph being out injured. They were on a 66 win pace in the 50 games he played, and dropped to 46 win pace without him (counting his 2 minute game as being without Steph).

I don't think Steph was particularly good after coming back from injury for the playoffs, so no disagreement there (relative to the levels discussed in this thread and his own best levels).

Anywho, votes here Doc:

1. Bill Russell
2. Tim Duncan

Nomination: Kevin Garnett

Didn't get as much Russell/Duncan discussion as I'd hoped, but as expected. Doc - agreeing with your reply about Russell/Duncan not being that similar of players, I was more thinking of a 'career' archetype if such a thing exists when I said that.

Russell:
+Either the luckiest player of all-time, or knew how to play in competitive games like none other. I imagine a bit of both.
+Leading the forever #1 dynasty in league history is big points from me.
+Even with some reasonable Ortg/Drtg adjustments that are unfavorable Bill is still a defensive monster.
-I find his impact case oversold. We've got 2 samples to work with on Russell on that front - a pretty rough '57 sample, and a very good retirement sample.

Duncan:
+Very impressive '98-'10 prime. I have it approximately equal with '85-97 Hakeem and '85-'98 MJ and then Duncan went out and added notable career value from '11-'15.

Garnett:
+As said last thread, I don't see a serious individual player gap between Duncan/KG, so I'd feel remiss if they wound up significantly far apart on my own ballot.

I hope that's enough of a voting post Doc, and sorry Mikan for dropping the nomination, but I've got my own guy I'll want to vote for now

[f4p]

however, for duncan guarding him, i believe 70's Fan's numbers indicate 17 of shaq's 94 shots were in isolation against duncan. so certainly others must have guarded shaq quite a bit.

I posted Duncan numbers against Shaq, not the other way around. I hope I will upload another video next week.

Oh damn, you're right. 6 for 17 was Duncan shooting. Well, based on the first half of game 4 I just watched, Duncan has barely guarded Shaq and unless he guarded Shaq a bunch in the 2nd quarter of game 5 (primary, not just contesting the shot), I saw only a handful in the other 3 quarters. So it seems very low when Robinson plays.

[70sFan]

however, for duncan guarding him, i believe 70's Fan's numbers indicate 17 of shaq's 94 shots were in isolation against duncan. so certainly others must have guarded shaq quite a bit.

I posted Duncan numbers against Shaq, not the other way around. I hope I will upload another video next week.

Oh damn, you're right. 6 for 17 was Duncan shooting. Well, based on the first half of game 4 I just watched, Duncan has barely guarded Shaq and unless he guarded Shaq a bunch in the 2nd quarter of game 5 (primary, not just contesting the shot), I saw only a handful in the other 3 quarters. So it seems very low when Robinson plays.

Robinson played significant minutes only in game 4, it's not surprising that Duncan guarded Shaq the least in that game.

[Ambrose]

VOTE:
Bill Russell
Tim Duncan

There, voted(again )
I presented a case for Duncan in the last thread and somewhat alluded to one for Russell in my Kareem post. There, I focused on his average, peak, and prime "goodness" as that was a big-question mark. Here, for Russell, just like with Kareem, I will focus on what voters seem to be marking as an advantage for Jordan...

Spoiler:

Even with the high ends and what I feel to be a substantial argument for GOAT peak/prime in Jordan's favor, why I see him as career #3 all-time is due to the meaningful longevity/prime quality and overall longevity aspects. I haven't finalized intel for my pool aside from my Mt. Rushmore / GOAT candidates yet, but James & Jabbar (even Russell) both have more MVP+ level seasons - and better supporting years when factoring in the full body of work.

#1 Michael Jordan

To put it simply, I personally think Jordan is flat out better than anyone else left. There may be a run or two from Russell or Duncan or Wilt that look comparable but nothing like Jordan's stretch of combined individual and team dominance. I also don't think he has the dips or red flags the others have. I love data as much as anyone, (not saying data isn't high on Jordan) but sometimes we do use that in place of simply "proving it" and I think putting anyone else other than Jordan here would be an example of that. However, I'm quite on Russell offensively, so I can see why those who view him higher may disagree.

To go back to my stated criteria from a prior thread, I believe the per season title equity Jordan gives you outweighs the longevity advantage of Duncan, and there is no longevity concern against guys like Russell or Wilt.
Nominate: Magic Johnson

Vote: Jordan

His peak is now too hard to pass up, despite limited seasons compared to a few others.

I have him at 8 seasons being the undisputed best player, 10 as an arguable top 3 player, 11 all-nba, 14 as an all star level, and 9 all defensive years.

He edges out Bill Russell and Tim Duncan.

For now I’d have Russell 4, Duncan 5.

Nomination: Shaq

Vote 1 - Michael Jordan
Vote 2 - Bill Russell
Nominate - Magic Johnson

As more and more seasons pass and the game evolves, it makes sense that Jordan’s assumed status as GOAT would be tested. I'm sticking with him here, but the decision between Kareem and LeBron for #2 has become tougher. While I'm generally a longevity guy, if I feel the body of work is impressive enough without elite longevity (jordan, magic, bird, now curry)

Vote #3 - Michael Jordan

Probably a lopsided vote so I won't spend too much energy here. I like players who are by far the best of their generation like Lebron, Kareem and MJ. I don't think anyone has a big enough longevity advantage over him where it's not weighed out by being worse. I value Curry's era more but I rate him as less valuable than MJ for his time period and his star longevity is slightly worse, but I could be talked into nominating him relatively soon.

Nominate: Shaq

Looking through these I see three claims:

-> Jordan peaked higher/was better on average/had a better prime
-> Jordan provided more "championship equity"
-> Jordan was the "undisputed best player" of his era in a way Bill Russell was not

I will start with the first two, as I think they go hand-in-hand. Do keep in mind, that these are going to be era-relative arguments built on a player's likelihood to lift teams to championships. I do not have any way to convince anyone Russell would have likely been better in 1990 or 2023. Perhaps someone may be persuaded or Duncan(basketball did not peak in the 90's), but for Bill, I will try and justify the following claims:
Bill Russell was probably better at his peak
Bill Russell was probably better on average
It is more likely Bill Russell was the best player of his era than Jordan was the best player of his

First, let's start with a simple assumption:
-> All else being equal, a player who wins 11 rings in 13 years probably was better("more likely to win championships") than a player who won 6 in 13
-> All else being equal, a player who wins 8-rings in 8 years probably was better("more likely to win championships") than a player who won 6-rings in 8(or 7) years
-> All else being equal, a player who goes 27-2(or 27-1) over a much longer period of time(an entire career) with dramatically different personnel in a league without lower-end expansion fodder...
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KfFmPYlS0Mx00w0hri6LoGASkES3DWfBY25Q8vhHWoA/edit#gid=0
...is probably better than a player who posts a worse record of 27-3 (or 27-2) over a convenient 7 or 8-year frame while getting to dunk on weaker early round opposition
-> All else being equal, a player whose teams are a bigger regular-season outlier(7.0 expected championships vs 2.9 per fp4's calc) and then who overperforms in the playoffs by a bigger margin(11 actual championships vs 6 by basketball reference), probably was better

It's an interesting case. Some things I would point about this argument starts with the "all else being equal" part because I don't believe things were. Something I've seen you mention a lot is "pre-triangle" Jordan as what kind of seems like a way to discredit him, though I could be wrong. Regardless, let's call that what it is, pre-Phil. There is no pre-Auerbach version of Russell. It's worth acknowledging that Red had never gone below .500 in his six years with Boston, and had a winning record in 9/10 seasons as a coach before Russell arrived. Of course, there is a post-Auerbach version for Russell that also sees tremendous success as coach and that's to his credit. Though it is also worth mentioning he does so at the end of his career with Red still on board as an executive. I think it's safe to say that receiving great coaching in the beginning of your career is of a large benefit and often molds you into a player with winning habits, especially when that voice remains with the organization your entire career.

You refer to the 24 game sample size from Bill's rookie year as incredibly noisy that shows them being very good without him, not necessarily sure why, but we also have the previous handful of years that show Boston has been an above average team for basically six years prior to Russell's arrival, and then add Russell and Heinsohn to what had long been the league's best offense and the prior seasons 2nd best team by SRS. Adding the GOAT defender, and that years ROY/future HoF to typically the leagues best offense is highly likely to create an awesome team.

The way I tend it see it, Russell enters the NBA with something ~ equivalent to the 90 Bulls, and while lineups certainly change, there isn't really any significant drop well below that level. Where Jordan played on a team that won 27 games with a -4.5 SRS before he showed up, turns them into a -0.5 SRS as a rookie, and then in year 2 they went 22-42 without him despite adding Charles Oakley, posting a -3.12 SRS overall. Don't want to do the math but safe to say that number without him is lower considering they went 9-9 with him that year and 7-4 when he played 20+ mpg (albeit with - point differentials). That -3 SRS becomes a 1.26 the next year with him healthy. He also goes through three coaches in five years before reaching Jackson and the triangle. These are not struggles Russell had to deal with.

I don't think you can reasonably say "all else being equal" when Russell joins the league to an objectively good team, with another excellent player joining alongside him, to a league that doesn't see his main contemporary arrive until he's already won two titles (with said contemporary joining a bad team) and then he's a three time champ before the other two greats from his era arrive (both of whom join awful teams). It's the equivalent of throwing rookie Jordan on the ~1990 Bulls in 1984 but removing Magic, Bird and Moses from the league for three/four years and cutting the playoffs in half. I'm guessing if that's the case, Jordan comfortably wins more than six titles. Even that is an imperfect comparison that ignores Phil being a new coach, the smaller league size, etc. That's not a shot at Russell, as he actually succeeded more later which is quite remarkable but it does show the massive difference in launching points for these two guys careers, so I don't find all else being anywhere near equal.

[OhayoKD]

Your big piece of evidence outside of 1994 is literally to just compare the results of one roster that was without Michael Jordan with a completely different roster that had Michael Jordan, and with different coaches too.

And, unless the help got worse(am open to arguments that they did), that signal would likely either

A. Be accurate
or
B. Oversell Jordan

That's not "squinting", that's just a simple application of logic.

You might as well compare how many wins the 1988 Bulls got with how many wins some completely random other team got in a random year.

Ironically enough, that's what you did when you said that Miami help is the same as Chicago help and therefore Jordan is a better ceiling raiser. The difference is your assumption was just based on looking at the top names on the roster and you openly admitted you were ignoring health as a factor. Given how you assess things, Maybe I should mention that the 1988 Bulls had Pippen and Grant(2 members of the top 100!) and say they were stacked

And it’s a type of reasoning you’d completely reject if it led to a conclusion you didn’t like—like if someone said LeBron’s Heat peaked out at a 7 SRS and the 2010 Heat had a 2 SRS

Well, if you're replicating the process we did with Jordan, it's 7.7 but sure. That's not a bad starting point.

, so LeBron’s highest possible impact must be a 5 SRS lift

Well specifically, your "upper-bound" would be +5.7 regular-season lift on a +2 team, in that situation, but yeah. This is somewhat similar to what we've been doing with 93 where we took the Bulls best full-strength regular-season score(92) and used it in place of what they had in 93.

and that it’s actually lower because the team was actually better since they added pieces like Bosh, Allen, Battier, etc.

Well, you'd have to weigh that against Wade breaking down and the losses of Beasley and Jermain o Neal. There's also the matter of playoff elevation. Without any sort of health adjustment, Playoff Miami were +10 in 13 and +13 in 12. In games with Wade and Bosh where wade and bosh started they were +13.8. All considered it looks like great(not goatish) regular-season lift followed by nigh-unprecedented playoff-elevation. Considering that is a relative "impact" nadir(Lebron has significantly better looking signals both pre and post Miami), that's quite decent.

But of course that’s not all my argument has been. Not even close. Though that’s much stronger evidence that your back-of-the-napkin 1986 vs. 1988 comparison.

If you say so.

What’s particularly amusing (or perhaps perplexing) is you seem to not accept any evidence

The evidence was accepted, it's just I(and most posters here) weighed and interpreted it differently than you did(15-17 steph edging 15-17 Lebron in the regular season = Curry Impact King!). Though part of that is actually understanding how what you're using works(cough WOWYR cough) and the relative limitations(RAPM is not a substitute for raw-analysis). There's also the matter of spamming unsourced sets(cough github), constantly accusing people who make arguments you don't like of dishonesty, refusing to acknowledge your assumptions are...assumptions("Kareem was the help!"), refusing to acknowledge evidence you don't like(the celtics without Bill, the celtics without Bill's teammates), pushing and then dropping the same type of data when it becomes inconvenient(small-sample, multi-year extraps says Jordan>Lebron , larger sampled multi-year extraps say Jordan isn't goat-tier ), and actively including junk that isn't relevant to what you are arguing(games without Lebron, games without co-stars while arguing Lebron cannot fit with co-stars...hmmm).

I provided you comprehensive box-score-derived data on Jordan’s playoff performances—data that other players simply cannot and do not match.

This is a very sophisticated way of saying "I posted PER". There is "box-score-derived data" that says Rodman was the best player in the league. But because you've been drinking "your own kool-aid" for who knows how long you are under the impression that the "weightings" that follow your own conclusions must be accurate, and it is dishonest for other people to reject or challenge them. So into the kool-aid you are, you literally insisted how you weigh "production" was the "forest" and the rest of us are missing the point.

Among other things, I also come at this discussion as an independently knowledgeable person about Jordan’s career and his teams, since I watched virtually all their games,

If you say so.

and I’ve tried to impart some of that knowledge on you, which you obviously do not independently have.

Uhuh.

But you’re really just repackaging preconceived notions into boldly-pronounced arguments

Ironic.

Anyways, none of this matters much, because Jordan is almost certainly going to get voted #3—which is in a sense a shame, since I’m a little curious just how far down you’d go before voting for Jordan. Maybe Scottie should go ahead of him! Let’s go workshop up some “extraps” to get us there!

[/quote][/quote]
6 I think. Decided to move him over wilt a couple months ago, but Hakeem's grown on me. There are better places to direct your incredulity though. Iirc, there's a voter whose wondering if he should rank him 8th