One_and_Done wrote:So I’m going to focus on the points f4p makes (see spoiled text below) that seem relevant, to try and keep this reply concise.
The first point f4p makes is that Duncan’s situation was so much better. As has been explained, on the whole this is no doubt true. But for various years we can see Duncan’s support cast was not good at all. 2002 and 2003 in particular are examples of teams where the support cast was simply bad for a contender, yet they were a contender anyway. In contrast, Hakeem does not lift his bad teams to contender status when his team is similarly bad to the 02 or 03 Spurs. Indeed, Hakeem has 1st round losses to all manner of weak teams like the 39 win Sonics, the 1988 Mavs, another weak Sonics team, etc. The Rockets didn’t even make the playoffs in 92. Sure, Hakeem was injured, but the results still aren’t coming out with a Duncan like lift even when he’s healthy. I actually think the 2001 Spurs were pretty bad too, and the 1999 Spurs seem to have gotten quite overrated. Watching some of their games compared to modern basketball is painful. The 1999 Spurs were much weaker than the 2007 Spurs, it was just the league was weaker in 1999.
if you think 2003 duncan was playing with a 1980's hakeem supporting cast, but instead of 42 wins and a 1st round loss, he was turning it into a 60 win team and a championship, then we are extremely far apart on hakeem and duncan. there is simply not a universe where either a) duncan was that much better than hakeem or b) hakeem
was that much worse than duncan but then improved so much between the late 80's and early 90's that he also eventually was able to take a weak cast to 58 wins and a championship.
To try and counter the points made above, f4p makes some arguments that do not stand up to scrutiny. A particularly dubious one is trying to look at “average series lost when you were an SRS underdog”. It is absurd, because he is in effect rewarding Hakeem for having mediocre teams, instead of asking “why is the SRS of Hakeem’s team so bad if he has a supposed Duncan like impact? Why isn’t he lifting the team to a good SRS, like Duncan could do in 2002 or 2003?”
well, why could duncan lift team so high but then lose as a favorite. not sometimes, but as an average. is your argument that he wasn't really lifting them as high as it looked? besides, go read the section about what hakeem would have needed to do to explain his career results. he would have needed to be almost 5 SRS points (13 wins) better every season to explain him winning 2 championships. duncan would have needed to be 0.6 SRS points (1.7 wins) better every season to explain him winning 5 championships. so if hakeem wasn't simply a playoff beast like we've never seen, you're saying really they were similar playoff players but hakeem was just underperforming a typical duncan season by 11.3 wins! that seems like a staggering difference, especially considering all evidence says Hakeem was in the conversation for post-Russell defensive GOAT.
This is similar to when Jordan fans want to look at home court advantage; an arbitrary fact that ignores all context (e.g. if a better team was missing their best player for 20 games, and still only won a single less game in the RS, were they really the “underdog” if their star was heathy again in the playoffs? Especially with the old 2-3-2 format?). The arguments are not balanced, they are selective. There seems to be a undue focus on arbitrary points of reference that do more to support the end position that Hakeem is better, as the selective use of SRS illustrates (see next para)
jordan was 25-0. how much context are we supposed to apply to that? besides, it's not like i made up the idea of comparing winning as a favorite/underdog or the idea of playoff resilience. should we just say every team that wins a series was better all along? what's the alternative? these guys get 82 games to establish a baseline. they the real season starts and we see who steps up and who doesn't.
The lengthy analysis he undertakes of “year by year” SRS comparison is therefore irrelevant, because Hakeem’s teams not having a high SRS to begin with is bad, and something we should be blaming him for. F4p purports to respond to this, but doesn't in any way that matters. He uses a super dodgy, invented stat where he tries to break SRS down with expected wins to calculate title odds, and then cites other stats like game score which I also think have nil value. He even attempts to use Hakeem's relatively bad SRS in the 2 title years as a positive, by saying 'see even when everything went well Hakeem's teams had bad SRS, so like, how could we expect him to have good SRS in non-title years?' It's a mind boggling take, because he spends so long using SRS to pump Hakeem. If SRS is meaningless why are you relying on it? I think the answer is pretty obvious.
super dodgy? excuse me? here is literally an article from the Ringer doing the exact same thing and getting the exact same numbers.
https://www.theringer.com/nba/2020/5/11/21254188/title-expectations-michael-jordan-lebron-jamesif you want a ton of careers looked at, the Ringer article has a spreadsheet that blows mine away. doing it on my own, though, has given me the year by year breakdown for the Top 100, which the Ringer does not have. so it's still good that i have my spreadsheet.
if we did a retro-Player-of-the-Series project, how many times would it probably pick the person with the best game score? i bet a lot. you think hakeem won 10 of 11 series from '93 to '96 by accident. that jordan led 35 of 37 career series by accident? that bird and magic led a decent chunk of their series by accident? and if you say things have nil value, then propose something else.
no one said SRS is irrelevant. you seem to be taking the approach that we just look at a team's SRS/win total and then decide how good their best player is. if they win 60 games, their best player is amazing. if they win 45 games, not so much. the garnett fans are not going to be happy to hear this.
This “let’s have it both ways” approach by f4p continues with his use of stats, as he has at times cited Drtg as an indicator of why the Spurs support team was so good, without recognizing that Duncan has the higher Drtg than Hakeem in the 10 year sample
DRtg can and is impacted by the overall team. it's why at the beginning of a season you will sometimes see one team have the top 3 or 4 guys in DRtg. it also is not adjusted for the league environment. hakeem playing when the league ORtg was 108 is different than Duncan playing in the deadball era. so hakeem's 93.4 in 1990 when the league was at 108.1 is basically the same as say duncan's 88.5 in 2004 when the league was at 102.9. hakeem led the league 5 years in a row in DRtg and duncan did it 4 times so they both seem pretty good by this stat. also, i'm not sure you can find DRtg to have value but not game score.
I cited in the last thread, comparing per 100 stats over Duncan’s prime from 98-07 in the RS and PS. Similarly, there is no explanation provided for why the Spurs were romping along at a 15-3 win pace without D.Rob in 2003, and were just as good or better without him the following year, if he was still so important. Similarly the Spurs were I think 10-3 in the games Manu missed in 2003. There is no indication of secretly awesome players on the Spurs in 2002 or 2003. The young guys in those years weren’t good enough yet, and the old guys were washed. It was all driven by Duncan.
so what happened from 2004 to 2011? with ginobili and parker getting so much better, with the loss of david robinson apparently being irrelevant with rasho around, sounds like we've got an 8-peat on our hands, right? well, 9-peat with 2003. you throw trash next to duncan and he wins, then i assume a couple of top 75 teammates in their prime for 8 years is all she wrote for the league. shaq and kobe even went away after 2004 so that obstacle was out of the way. i guess your argument is that duncan got much worse during this time period? or should we acknowledge that the spurs had a deep team of veterans, if no stars, and david robinson and bruce bowen are probably pretty elite defenders based on long careers of proving that.
We only have a couple of games he missed to judge by, but needless to say the Spurs lost them. In particular, the game he missed in the 2002 1st round series against the Sonics stands out. With every incentive to try their best to win without Duncan, because it’s the playoffs, the Spurs were embarrassed. They looked like they’d be lucky to win 20 games without him to be honest. F4p also continues to blur Duncan's prime and non-prime years without saying as much. Duncan's prime was 98 to 07. Use that for prime to prime comps please. Of course F4p continues to ignore per 100 stats, assumedly because they highlight the lack of volume stat advantage Hakeem has. Even TS% is not consistently cited.
i'm not sure what blurring i'm doing. but duncan can't simultaneously beat hakeem with his unbelievable longevity, but also anything starting in 2008 is off limits because he's too old for it to count. i believe i cited very few per 100 or box score composite stats, unless i'm forgetting. if you want prime to prime, Age 22-31 (99 to 08 for duncan, 85 to 94 for hakeem), i get hakeem with a postseason advantage (9th at 0.731 compared to duncan 14th at 0.705). and it's almost certainly getting better for hakeem if i expand it out to 22-34 for 13 year primes. and 98-07 or 99-08 for duncan doesn't change anything because 98 isn't better than 08.
There hasn’t been much discussion of Hakeem’s team mates, but I think for a number of years they were quite solid, certainly as good or better than the 2002 or 2003 Spurs (or even the 2001 Spurs to be honest).
yeah, again, this doesn't seem to be a widely held opinion, although you are certainly free to make the case. but we're back to you having duncan as like 20 wins better than hakeem. since you have hakeem 7th all-time, then you should apparently have duncan as the unquestioned GOAT.
F4p cites a number of stats I find unconvincing, like expected wins/titles or PER. I don’t really care about those stats, so I won’t speak to them. What I will say is that even useful stats like Adjusted plus minus are just one data point. They are not the be-all, and should be taken as just one bit of evidence. It’s kind of like the recent thread on adjusted plus minus stats, which supposedly prove KG is better because he has 0.4 higher in APM over their whole careers. That’s meaningless for stats that have so much noise and randomness thrown in, and it’s doubly meaningless when Duncan is doing it over such a bigger sample size. The bigger the sample, the less likely you are to be able to maintain your high numbers.
the vast majority of my post was about accomplishments in the playoffs, coming up big in the biggest series against the best opponents, winning as a staggering underdog with a KG-level amount of support for his career, about how he even managed to beat his best opponents at a rate similar to duncan, despite clearly not having the same level of support over his career (which even you acknowledge is the case).
F4p engages in a lengthy analysis of Hakeem’s post 1996 career. I don’t really care what he did after 1996, because he was posting largely empty numbers most of those years. He was mostly done. Barkley has talked about his time in Houston extensively, and admits as much. He and Hakeem were shadows of what they once were, and by Barkley’s own telling Scottie Pippen realized it the moment he got to training camp with them in 1999. He took one look and told them he was getting out of there as soon as he could, and Barkley didn’t even blame him. He knew they were washed. Hakeem was still pretty good in 1997, though nothing like what he had been, but yeh. After that it’s a literal drop off a cliff. There’s a reason those teams fell short.
his 1997 playoff numbers by the box score are every bit the equal of 1993-1995, though bumped up a little too much by his ridiculous 63 TS%. if 27 ppg on 59% shooting in the conference finals while you put up 9 rpg, 4 apg, 3 bpg, and 2 spg is empty then i'm not sure what to say. and who cares what barkley says. he's a hilarious showman, not a basketball analyst. hell, barkley was still very good in 1997 and even had a great 1999 playoff series. hakeem in 1999 put up 19 ppg, 9.5 rpb, and 2.5 bpg and made 3rd team all nba as a 36 year old. pippen's analysis seems pretty stupid, if that's what it actually was. and of course pippen himself gave us a sparkling playoff series with 32.9/27.3 shooting splits.
As I noted in my previous post, Hakeem has a number of things that are favourable to him which f4p does nothing to account for (weaker league, favourable rules, less minutes on his body, padding his stats against weaker 1st round foes, etc). Maybe Hakeem could have survived playing more minutes, and posted just as good stats against the best teams consistently, but the reality is he never did it and we are ranking guys on the careers that actually happened.
is the league being weaker just some obvious thing i'm supposed to agree to? hakeem and duncan's careers overlapped by 5 years, how much worse could it be? and then who else am i supposed to be knocking down from that time period?
the weaker first round opponent thing was already addressed in another thread. hakeem literally played 4 teams above a 6.7 SRS before 1993 even happened. average of 3.22 before 1993, which is pretty normal as things go. both his first round opponents in 1990 and 1991 were 6.7 or above. so he got, what, 4 series in 1987-1989 sandwiched in between peak celtics/lakers in 1986 and two more really good lakers teams in 1990 and 1991? the best way to face weak first round opponents is actually to be a 1st or 2nd seed.
also, the idea he padded his stats on weaker teams doesn't even follow what happened. the two worst teams he faced were his two very first series and he has low numbers (especially scoring) those 2 series. the 1986 lakers series was his best stat series of the first 2 years. the mavs team he bludgeoned was a +3.6 team, so basically the average of duncan's career.
