Retro POY '64-65 (Voting Complete)

[TrueLAfan]

A couple of thoughts about the Lakers and Royals this year. I’m wondering how “bad” the teams were without Jerry and Oscar. Jerry west played alongside Elgin Baylor during the regular season, and as bad as the Lakers frontcourt was (which will be, pretty much every year prior to 1966, near if not dead last in scoring and rebounding and defense). But Elgin alone makes the remaining three starters and bench at least…well, mediocre. Bad balance. But not awful in anything like a historic sense. And in terms of mathcing up with Philly, the Lakers were doing something smart...focusing on theri strengths (perimeter scoring and play), which was not a strength of Philadelphia compared to the Celtics, who could throw waves of defenders at West (and/or Baylor, had he been available). You do have to wonder what Wilt would have done against Imhoff and Wiley, who were better at D than scoring...which is saying about as little as you can say.

Same issues with the Royals and Oscar, except more so. Oscar had Jerry Lucas, Wayne Embry, Jack Twyman, and Adrian Smith starting alongside him, with Tom Hawkins and Happy Hairston coming off the bench. That actually seems like a very good team, with a nice mix of scorers (Lucas, Smith), veterans (Embry, Twyman), defenders (Embry, Hawkins), and frontcourt players (Embry, Lucas) to go with Oscar. It’s not a perfect team; the bench didn't shoot well and there’s not a lot of depth beyond the #7 or #8 rotation player(s), but you could do a lot worse than a team that started Oscar, Adrian Smith, Jack Twyman, Jerry Lucas, and Wayne Embry. Three of those starters are HOF players…and the other two are pretty capable.

[Doctor MJ]

Doc, Nash's assists are so valuable because they're coming on double teams to the open man what allows other players to score without defensive attention. it's exactly the same situation with Oscar and Royals and is evidenced by their team offense and its drop off without Oscar. 7 APG difference in this case is like 7 easy scores generated for teammates. 12 pts on 53% TS are that much more valuable ? c'mon man, you know better as Magic/Nash fan.

the comparison to Kobe was made because there's about 12 pts/7 APG difference between them too. you thought that I was suggesting Nash was clearly a better offensive player with similar boxscore comparison, but it's not even that. my point is valid even if Nash was EQUAL to Kobe in any of those seasons offensively, because I was arguing that Oscar wasn't WORSE than West in the playoffs, not that he was better than him.

so if you think West is clearly ahead of Oscar this year, then Kobe is clearly ahead of Nash too, despite much worse team results and with lower offensive +/- too. that's my analogy.

but all of this comparison seems to be lost for Oscar for one simple reason: he didn't have the opportunity to pound the worst defensive team in the league. his performance against Boston was nowhere near Oscar's against the Sixers actually. with his raw pts and TS% down a lot (and still poor APG numbers in this comparison), I don't really see a case for West over Oscar based on the finals. especially considering that his team was a joke against the Celtics, being blown out is probably an understatement...

Hmm. I wouldn't feel comfortable saying Nash's assists come from passing out of double teams while assists by mere mortals don't. It's true his assists tend to come from manipulating the defense out of position, thus creating an effect like a double team, but when a team really decides to hard double Nash, and does it effectively, Nash struggles like everyone else. In general, I'd say Nash's value comes not from the quantity of assists but from his impact in virtually every possession with his decision making and scoring ability.

Given Oscar's volume scoring, double teams do make more sense against Oscar and he was smart enough to take some advantage. With that said, the fact that Oscar appears to have a solid +/- does not mean his assists were magically more valuable than other people's assists. Just means he's a great player who by his points, assists, and a bunch of other intangible things contributed value.

I'll say again: Jerry West showed similar +/- impact, just not when prime Baylor was around. The clear conclusion to me is not that West miraculously became vastly superior when Baylor disappeared, but that there was overlap in capabilities between West & Baylor. Again, doesn't mean you can't give Oscar credit over West in the times where Oscar's +/- is superior, but there's no evidence at all that there was an inherent vast +/- impact difference between the two, let alone one based on West being more of a volume scorer.

(Something else I'll say, just cause I haven't said it yet, and I want to get that out there: One might be tempted to say that because Oscar's role was more of a distributor he'd have gotten ore out of a team with Baylor. The thing is though it's not that Baylor didn't get utilized. He did. He jacked up shots a huge volume with really unimpressive efficiency basically his whole career, with or without West. I really question if the answer to the question "How do you make better use of Baylor?" is "make less use of Baylor Jerry, you're a much better scorer, just keep the ball".)

Re: last paragraph. Against Boston West went for 33.8 PPG on 51.2% TS. Against Philly Oscar went for 28 PPG on 52.8% TS. I don't think it makes sense to talk about how low West's efficiency was when Oscar's was hardly better going up against a much weaker defensive team, and Oscar didn't have to deal with the team's other major scoring threat being gone.

To be clear though, I think you make a good point that West's stats look so stunning because of the team they played before Boston. I certainly wouldn't say that West's finals performance put him decisively ahead of Oscar for the season.

[drza]

2) As Warspite pointed out, Philly had to reconfigure their entire scheme in order to fit Wilt in, including displacing what had previously been one of their best players to another position. I'm not going to completely re-quote Warspite's post, but just in a vacuum it is extremely logical to me that fitting a player of Wilt's style onto a team that already had a style and personnell of its own might take some time. To me, it is to their credit that they figured it out after only 30-something games, in time to put it together for the postseason.

I read Warspite's post, but I don't know what you mean. could you elaborate on that ?

I'm speaking of his post where he points out how big of an adjustment that it was for Philly to incorporate Wilt onto the team, both on and off the court. He pointed out that Wilt played the same position as one of thir previous best players, forcing that player to switch positions. He points out that Wilt takes a lot of shots, and everyone would have to adjust to that. He also gives a bit of historical context about other things that may have made it difficult for Wilt and his teammates to adjust to one another outside of game-play.

All of those things ring true to me. It would be a huge deal trying to adjust your entire team on the fly, especially with (as you pointed out before) 2 very young players as key guys. As such, the lack of wins out the gate doesn't shock me. Now, that wouldn't have been enough for me to excuse that record if that's all there was. If the Sixers continued to play like a .500 team in the playoffs, which meant they would have been sent home by the Royals, then I'd buy every bit of the Wilt-didn't-make-an-impact argument and we wouldn't be having this discussion.

But that's not what happened. After 30-something regular season games of adjustments, they came out in the postseason as a potential champion. It seems to me that by then the transition was complete, and we got to really see what the Sixers team built around Wilt would look like.

[drza]

Good post, solid points.

The one additional thought I'll put out there: Regardless of the adjustments needed to fit Wilt in, while they were making them, they were beating Cincy in the regular season, and getting killed by the Lakers in the regular season. I'll be spending these last minutes thinking about what you've said, but the idea that Cincy doesn't look back for losing to Philly in the post-season because of how good Philly was in the post-season doesn't really wash with the fact that Cincy wasn't good enough to beat the "bad" Philly team in the regular season.

I can respect that. My follow-up to that would be (and apologies for continuing to analogize to 2010, but hopefully it makes my viewpoint clearer) that even the "bad" Celtics of 2010 weren't losing every game. They still beat the Mavs and Cavs, for example. Of course, they also lost to the Knicks and Nets. I guess my feeling on this kind of phenomenon is that there are limits as to how much I can read into this before I feel like I'm stretching.

Of course, piggybacking on my discussion with Bastillion, perhaps this could also indicate that the Royals just really didn't have an answer for Wilt. That even when all else was going wrong with the team, Wilt was such a mismatch for the Royals that he swung those games. And once the Sixers figured it out, it was no longer even a contest.

:Shrugs: I think we've each made our points as best we can at this point, and from here it's just about each of us deciding which argument vibes the most to us.

[Doctor MJ]

One last response:

-"bad" Celtics weren't losing to everyone, but they weren't showing signs of having being the favorites against Cleveland and Orlando based on the regular season, and isn't that the key point?

-Cincy, just no answer to Wilt? 4-1 vs the Warriors with Wilt this year, 8-6 the previous year when when Wilt was healthy all season. I can buy that they don't match up well against Wilt, but I don't think it's something super dramatic. I don't think the answer is that Cincy just matched up poorly, I think it's more that the Lakers were playing really damn well down the stretch before losing Baylor.

[bastillon]

IMO it appears to me that you're cherry-picking evidence to support your opinion. For example, above you just got done praising Jones and Cunningham (who weren't even on the '65 team), implying that they were difference-makers as rookies. Yet here, you want to use the performance of the '69 team (at which point Cunningham and Jones were entering their primes, with Cunningham especially playing a much larger role) as evidence that the '65 team wasn't a fringe playoff team? You can't make both of those two arguments, not and be logically consistent. In my view the '65 squad with Wilt was a championship contender, as evidenced by their demolition of the the #2 seed and their coin-flip series with the best team in history. The fact that they also performed almost exactly as they would in the next few seasons is just icing on the cake to me.

I was talking about 69 season because you mentioned 66-68 period as the evidence to their 65 playoff excellence. it needs to be taken into account that 69 team was exactly as good as 66 team and without one of their key players too.

today in the NBA OKC are praised by everyone just because they're young and everyone is taking for granted their natural improvement and you won't even acknowledge that most of that team was extremely young and were still developing ? it seems like a reasonable point to me. 23 y old guys tend to get better. maybe it's just me though.

I've already stated my case. Statistically Wilt was right there with either West or Oscar in both the regular and postseason, and it is very clear to me that he was the biggest change between a fringe playoff team and a contender. That it took 30-something games for the Sixers to get up to speed doesn't bother me at all, because it was ultimately irrelevant. No matter how good they'd have looked in the regular season after the Wilt trade they weren't catching the Celtics' 62 wins, so they still wouldn't have had HCA in their series. When it counted, they showed what impact the Wilt trade really had for their team.

it still makes no sense to me. this is how I understand it:

1) Wilt was poor in the RS and great in the playoffs. West and Oscar were both great in the RS and PS. Wilt would have to be A LOT better in the PS to offset the advantage guards have based on vastly superior RS.

2) at least that's how I understood it. now you seem to be saying that he was their equal in the RS too. anchoring 10-28 Warriors was equaling Jerry West and Oscar ? not improving Philly in the RS equaled them ? I just don't see a case for Wilt in the RS. he made no impact.

if it's 1), which is more reasonable, then how much greater than Oscar/West can you be to offset the huge adv in RS ? after all, they were pretty elite in the PS.

[bastillon]

Same issues with the Royals and Oscar, except more so. Oscar had Jerry Lucas, Wayne Embry, Jack Twyman, and Adrian Smith starting alongside him, with Tom Hawkins and Happy Hairston coming off the bench. That actually seems like a very good team, with a nice mix of scorers (Lucas, Smith), veterans (Embry, Twyman), defenders (Embry, Hawkins), and frontcourt players (Embry, Lucas) to go with Oscar. It’s not a perfect team; the bench didn't shoot well and there’s not a lot of depth beyond the #7 or #8 rotation player(s), but you could do a lot worse than a team that started Oscar, Adrian Smith, Jack Twyman, Jerry Lucas, and Wayne Embry. Three of those starters are HOF players…and the other two are pretty capable.

you're looking only at offense. they were #1 offense in the league. defensively this team was atrocious and that's why they weren't great overall. Lucas and Embry provide no shotblocking, no help defense and Lucas is a big liability as a man defender too.

Re: last paragraph. Against Boston West went for 33.8 PPG on 51.2% TS. Against Philly Oscar went for 28 PPG on 52.8% TS. I don't think it makes sense to talk about how low West's efficiency was when Oscar's was hardly better going up against a much weaker defensive team, and Oscar didn't have to deal with the team's other major scoring threat being gone.

it makes sense when you add that Oscar averaged 12 APG and West had 5 and 0 in available games.

[JordansBulls]

1. Bill Russell
2. Jerry West
3. Wilt Chamberlain
4. Oscar Roberston
5. Sam Jones

[Doctor MJ]

Last call.

[Dr Positivity]

Again, just how good Philly was in '65 isn't a clear-cut answer. But this is how I look at it:

1) We just saw, this year (2010), that a team "underachieving" in the regular season based upon circumstances outside of basketball doesn't always capture the reality. The '10 Celtics were getting beaten right regular by inferior teams at the end of the regular season, despite the fact that nominally they had their full-power team out there. Even after KG and Pierce came back, they were still losing. And I don't think anyone on here would consider a team beating the late regular season Celtics as the same thing as beating the team that went to game 7 of the Finals. Thus, I'm hesitant to give much extra credence to a team for beating the late-season '65 Sixers. We know that the Sixers were under .500 after the Wilt trade in the regular season, so I don't think it's new information that they were getting regularly beaten by a good team. But the way those Sixers handled the Royals, followed up by the way they went at the Goliath Celtics, followed by my point 3 below is enough to make me very comfortable in my assessment that the postseason '65 Sixers were a huge step forward from the late regular season '65 Sixers.

2) As Warspite pointed out, Philly had to reconfigure their entire scheme in order to fit Wilt in, including displacing what had previously been one of their best players to another position. I'm not going to completely re-quote Warspite's post, but just in a vacuum it is extremely logical to me that fitting a player of Wilt's style onto a team that already had a style and personnell of its own might take some time. To me, it is to their credit that they figured it out after only 30-something games, in time to put it together for the postseason.

3) Given the hindsight advantage that is one of the key tenets to the project, we know that this Philly team would have the best record in the league for the next 3 seasons in a row and that they would win the only non-Celtic title of that period. Of course there were some changes from year to year, but the foundation of the team was in place by the postseason of '65 and to me it makes a lot of sense that postseason '65 Philly was much more similar to 66-68 Philly than regular-season '65 when they were getting used to life with the Dipper.

+1

The Sixers pre Wilt were mediocre as most teams with a 2nd team All-NBAer as their star are, then they get Wilt and contend for the title in the playoffs, and have the best record in the league in 66. To say the first 40 RS Wilt games was the true impact and put more weight into the 69 Sixers than the 64 one when the former is the one with MVP level Cunningham, is absurd

Really every Sixer record makes sense if you follow a talent model

Pre Wilt the Sixers have middle level talent. A team of Greer, Jackson, Walker in an 8 team league with Russell/Jones/etc., Wilt, West/Baylor, Oscar/Lucas... that makes them the 5th most talented team at best. If you really hate Wilt's Warriors teammates, I guess 4th. Either way in an 8 team league, that makes you a pretender. It translates to 12-18 range in a 30 team league which is not even close. As I said it's like the Paul Pierce Antoine Walker team compared to the Shaq Kobe Lakers, Webber Kings, Duncan Spurs in the early part of the decade

With Wilt now you have MVP GOAT contender + top 10-15 player in Greer + Jackson, Walker, etc. That's top of the league in talent. Unsurprisingly they contend. When they add Cunningham, Wali and a good coach, they become ridiculous. This is analogous to that Pierce Celtics team getting prime Shaq. Now they have MVP + Pierce as 2nd option which is enough

69 Sixers have MVP candidate Cunningham, top 10-15 player Greer + Walker, Jackson, Wali, etc. Again they have the guns at the top and good help behind them. 55 Ws isn't that surprising. Just like how 94 Bulls had MVP candidate in Pippen and a fringe all-star in Grant. With defense that's enough to be frisky.

All this considered, Wilt's impact as an MVP caliber player shows up just fine, IMO. It's pretty obvious to me the Sixers results from 65 playoffs to 68 with Wilt should vastly outweigh the first 40 regular season games

[Doctor MJ]

'64-65 Results

Code: Select all

Player             1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th Pts   POY Shares
1. Bill Russell     15   0   0   0   0 150   1.000
2. Jerry West        0  11   2   2   0  93   0.620
3. Oscar Robertson   0   2  10   3   0  73   0.487
4. Wilt Chamberlain  0   2   3   8   1  54   0.360
5. Sam Jones         0   0   0   1  14  17   0.113
6. Hal Greer         0   0   0   1   0   3   0.020


[drza]

IMO it appears to me that you're cherry-picking evidence to support your opinion. For example, above you just got done praising Jones and Cunningham (who weren't even on the '65 team), implying that they were difference-makers as rookies. Yet here, you want to use the performance of the '69 team (at which point Cunningham and Jones were entering their primes, with Cunningham especially playing a much larger role) as evidence that the '65 team wasn't a fringe playoff team? You can't make both of those two arguments, not and be logically consistent. In my view the '65 squad with Wilt was a championship contender, as evidenced by their demolition of the the #2 seed and their coin-flip series with the best team in history. The fact that they also performed almost exactly as they would in the next few seasons is just icing on the cake to me.

I was talking about 69 season because you mentioned 66-68 period as the evidence to their 65 playoff excellence. it needs to be taken into account that 69 team was exactly as good as 66 team and without one of their key players too.

today in the NBA OKC are praised by everyone just because they're young and everyone is taking for granted their natural improvement and you won't even acknowledge that most of that team was extremely young and were still developing ? it seems like a reasonable point to me. 23 y old guys tend to get better. maybe it's just me though.

Well, as I understood it, you were rebutting my original point that Wilt in 1965 took a team that would have been fringe playoffs in 1965 and made them a contender in 1965. I'm with you that maybe Walker and Jackson (the young guys in 1965) may have been better by the postseason of '65 than they were at the start of the year just because they were young and got experience. But my rebuttal to that particular point was that Walker and Jackson were the 3rd and 4th best players on the team, and that even at the absolute best that they ever played in their careers they could not have come close to replicating that 1965 playoff run without Wilt. Thus, I don't believe that improvements to Walker and Jackson are sufficient (or even really in the discussion) for explaining how that '65 Sixers became contenders by season's end.

Now, as a second point (and where I accused you of cherry-picking a bit), you suggested that the additions of Jones and Cunningham as rookies were a potential explanation for why the Sixers were so good from 66 - 68. Yet, you then suggested that my original point (that Wilt was the main reason that the '65 team was a contender as opposed to a fringe playoff team) wasn't valid because the Sixer in 1969 were still a 55-win team. Your implication as I understood it was that the '65 team couldn't have been a fringe playoff team, because the '69 team won 55 games as a natural progression from where they were in '65. But Cunningham (and Jones), the centerpiece of the '69 team, wasn't even on the roster in 1965. So the only way that the '69 team's success could be used to suggest the '65 team wasn't fringe before Wilt and that the progression was natural, is if you are then implying that Greer, peak Walker and peak Jackson would have been enough as a base for the success we saw in '69.

Only (outside of the obvious of that being clearly untrue), you just argued that even rookie Jones/Cunningham were keys in 1966. If rookie Jones/Cunningham were important for 1966, then obviously prime Jones/Cunningham would be vital for 1969. And therefore, you can't explain the postseason success of the '65 squad as mainly natural progression for the young guys as evidenced from 1969.

Do you see where I'm coming from? Those are contradictory arguments, but it seemed to me that you were trying to use them in different ways so that each would support your rebuttal that Wilt wasn't in-fact the difference between a fringe playoff team and a contender in 1965.

I've already stated my case. Statistically Wilt was right there with either West or Oscar in both the regular and postseason, and it is very clear to me that he was the biggest change between a fringe playoff team and a contender. That it took 30-something games for the Sixers to get up to speed doesn't bother me at all, because it was ultimately irrelevant. No matter how good they'd have looked in the regular season after the Wilt trade they weren't catching the Celtics' 62 wins, so they still wouldn't have had HCA in their series. When it counted, they showed what impact the Wilt trade really had for their team.

it still makes no sense to me. this is how I understand it:

1) Wilt was poor in the RS and great in the playoffs. West and Oscar were both great in the RS and PS. Wilt would have to be A LOT better in the PS to offset the advantage guards have based on vastly superior RS.

2) at least that's how I understood it. now you seem to be saying that he was their equal in the RS too. anchoring 10-28 Warriors was equaling Jerry West and Oscar ? not improving Philly in the RS equaled them ? I just don't see a case for Wilt in the RS. he made no impact.

if it's 1), which is more reasonable, then how much greater than Oscar/West can you be to offset the huge adv in RS ? after all, they were pretty elite in the PS.

I'm not going to pretend that I know exactly what happened with the Warriors that year. I've seen at least one person suggest strongly that the team was built poorly, there's another guy screaming that Wilt had a heart attack, and I just know little of the situation. But in Philly, Wilt averaged 30, 22 and 4 on 53% FG during that half of the regular season. Statistically, he was right there with Oscar and West even in the regular season but (as I've said a few times now) it seems to me Wilt and the team needed to learn how to play with each other. And it seems to me that by the time the postseason rolled around, all involved had figured it out and the team played much better. But I don't know that all of a sudden Wilt individually took it up 10 notches and therefore the team got better, more that once everyone learned how to play together the whole team took it up 10 notches when built around Wilt's s abilities.

Thus, I don't see it as Wilt was individually poor once he reached Philly, so therefore he had to perform at a certain level in the postseason to bridge the gap. I'm looking at it more as a whole...did Wilt have a big impact in Philly? If he had no impact, then his numbers (both regular and postseason) are diminished when compared to guys like West and Oscar. Based off the regular season I'd have some doubts about Wilt's impact, but ah, the postseason comes along and convinces me that yes, he did have a big impact in Philly. A fringe-to-contender level impact as an individual, which is pretty huge. OK, so if he had an elite impact, then I don't feel the need to disregard his individual stats the way I might have otherwise.

[Dr Positivity]

Really though, I don't know how it can be argued Wilt didn't have superstar impact throughout his career. We can talk about his impact being less than West and Oscar, particularly during the high FGA years. But he's still in-arguably one of the greatest players of all time... of course the impact is there. Every guy who's appearing on these ballots is a big impact player. With Wilt it's easy to see - He turns chicken crap early on to 48 W+ teams, then contends in Philly and leads a GOAT team, then leads consistent contenders and a GOAT team in LA. Career W average is I believe 54. The question isn't whether Wilt had MVP caliber impact, it's whether he had more than Russ, West, Oscar's MVP caliber impact. At least to me.

[mopper8]

Do you see where I'm coming from? Those are contradictory arguments, but it seemed to me that you were trying to use them in different ways so that each would support your rebuttal that Wilt wasn't in-fact the difference between a fringe playoff team and a contender in 1965.

To further rebut the somewhat contradictory arguments, the idea that players improve as they mature and as such much of the improvement in 66 and 67 can be attributed to internal improvements of those guys and the additions of Cunningham and Jones, rather than the addition of Wilt, would also imply that the 69 "supporting cast without Wilt" team that did well would be better than the actual supporting cast Wilt had in 67 and 68, as guys like Cunningham and Jones would be expected to be better players in 69 than they were in 68. And especially so with Cunningham, that improvement is obvious. As such, the logical conclusion to draw is that the team in 69, even if its comprised of largely the same players as the previous few years (+ Imhoff and Clark, IIRC), that is still better than the supporting cast Wilt had in 68, because individuals like Wali Jones and Billy Cunnignham especially are still improving.

Saying the 68 Sixers were basically a 55-win team without Wilt is overstating it big time. Subtract Clark and Imhoff and make the young guys one year younger/greener/further from their prime, and that's not a 55 win team, its probably a high-40 win team. And instead, they won 62 games and lost in 7 to the champion Celtics. That's high-level impact.

[semi-sentient]

Site updated: http://www.dolem.com/poy

Wilt moves up 3 spots to #8, and Russell is up to #12. West cracks the top 15 and is just .003 behind Garnett. At this point it's becoming pretty clear that Wilt will not be passing Kareem or Jordan, but will likely pass up Magic. Russell is probably going to fall just short of those two as well, but he does have a shot at catching them with a string of unanimous seasons. West is going to jump past Garnett and Malone after the next round of voting and it looks like he's got a great chance of getting past both Kobe and Hakeem.

Code: Select all

1.  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar  10.221
2.  Michael Jordan        9.578
3.  Magic Johnson         7.114
4.  Tim Duncan            6.153
5.  Larry Bird            6.147
6.  Shaquille O'Neal      5.910
7.  Julius Erving         5.046
8.  Wilt Chamberlain      4.659
9.  Karl Malone           4.649
10. Hakeem Olajuwon       4.380
11. Kobe Bryant           4.326
12. Bill Russell          3.973
13. Moses Malone          3.478
14. Kevin Garnett         3.388
15. Jerry West            3.385

[mopper8]

Site updated: http://www.dolem.com/poy

Wilt moves up 3 spots to #8, and Russell is up to #12. West cracks the top 15 and is just .003 behind Garnett. At this point it's becoming pretty clear that Wilt will not be passing Kareem or Jordan, but will likely pass up Magic. Russell is probably going to fall just short of those two as well, but he does have a shot at catching them with a string of unanimous seasons. West is going to jump past Garnett and Malone after the next round of voting and it looks like he's got a great chance of getting past both Kobe and Hakeem.

Careful, you advertise this too loudly and Silver Bullet might suddenly rejoin the project

[Dr Positivity]

Russell has 8 seasons left to make up 6.23 share to get Kareem. I'd actually be surprised if he didn't get there especially with the crazy DRTG stats we have for those Celtics teams now. I'm not voting for Wilt's 45-50ppg years over Russ

[mopper8]

Russell has 8 seasons left to make up 6.23 share to get Kareem. I'd actually be surprised if he didn't get there especially with the crazy DRTG stats we have for those Celtics teams now. I'm not voting for Wilt's 45-50ppg years over Russ

Russell has been averaging .7946 shares per season through probably the portion of his career with the most competition; not only is Wilt in his prime, he's winning. Now we get to the years where Wilt's teams were not nearly as good (no seasons over 50 wins, only 1 trip to the Finals, lost to Boston 3 times, 2 in 7 games and once in 6). If Russell simply continues to average for his remaining 8 seasons what he's averaged up to this point, he'll end up with an additional 6.35 shares, enough to pass KAJ

[bastillon]

Well, as I understood it, you were rebutting my original point that Wilt in 1965 took a team that would have been fringe playoffs in 1965 and made them a contender in 1965. I'm with you that maybe Walker and Jackson (the young guys in 1965) may have been better by the postseason of '65 than they were at the start of the year just because they were young and got experience. But my rebuttal to that particular point was that Walker and Jackson were the 3rd and 4th best players on the team, and that even at the absolute best that they ever played in their careers they could not have come close to replicating that 1965 playoff run without Wilt. Thus, I don't believe that improvements to Walker and Jackson are sufficient (or even really in the discussion) for explaining how that '65 Sixers became contenders by season's end.

got ya. but why do you think it's Wilt that got better in the postseason ? it was Walker and Greer that stepped up the most actually. they got better, Wilt more or less played the same game. I suppose the most reasonable scenario to me is that Wilt meshed better with his teammates maybe and Greer and Walker played a lot better as individuals causing that improvement.

it's pretty clear Wilt had no impact in the RS. I just don't know why you're assuming that by the time playoffs started Wilt suddenly started to have impact just because his team got better. there could be a lot of reasons for that and I don't see Wilt as a very impactful player when he's volume scoring.

btw. Greer was a 25/7.5/5 on 52% TS. I don't know why you people gave Sam Jones that 5th spot so easily. (Walker was pretty good too, 20/7 with 54% TS - now that's improvement).

Now, as a second point (and where I accused you of cherry-picking a bit), you suggested that the additions of Jones and Cunningham as rookies were a potential explanation for why the Sixers were so good from 66 - 68. Yet, you then suggested that my original point (that Wilt was the main reason that the '65 team was a contender as opposed to a fringe playoff team) wasn't valid because the Sixer in 1969 were still a 55-win team. Your implication as I understood it was that the '65 team couldn't have been a fringe playoff team, because the '69 team won 55 games as a natural progression from where they were in '65. But Cunningham (and Jones), the centerpiece of the '69 team, wasn't even on the roster in 1965. So the only way that the '69 team's success could be used to suggest the '65 team wasn't fringe before Wilt and that the progression was natural, is if you are then implying that Greer, peak Walker and peak Jackson would have been enough as a base for the success we saw in '69.

nah, 65 WAS a fringe playoff team, I just don't like your theory that them being contenders in 66-68 means that Wilt took them to that level in 65. there could be a lot of reasons for why they stepped up in the playoffs and after seeing Wilt making no impact in the RS it's hard for me to believe that he was this reason.

and don't forget, we're dealing with a situation when this guy also left another team and that didn't make any impact on them, either. if it was just about fitting in Philly, then Warriors should've felt he was missing, right ? well, they did not.

in terms of putting everything into context 69-71 should be mentioned as well. Sixers didn't suffer as much as they should've, Lakers didn't improve when he played etc. this guy has a long history of making poor impact and I'm not sure I should take his value for granted just because incomplete boxscore stats suggest so.

I'm not going to pretend that I know exactly what happened with the Warriors that year. I've seen at least one person suggest strongly that the team was built poorly, there's another guy screaming that Wilt had a heart attack, and I just know little of the situation. But in Philly, Wilt averaged 30, 22 and 4 on 53% FG during that half of the regular season. Statistically, he was right there with Oscar and West even in the regular season but (as I've said a few times now) it seems to me Wilt and the team needed to learn how to play with each other. And it seems to me that by the time the postseason rolled around, all involved had figured it out and the team played much better. But I don't know that all of a sudden Wilt individually took it up 10 notches and therefore the team got better, more that once everyone learned how to play together the whole team took it up 10 notches when built around Wilt's s abilities.

so he was at West/Oscar level in the RS because his team was a contender in the playoffs ? that's how I understand your post and I'm like WTF now, so what am I missing here ?

[semi-sentient]

Careful, you advertise this too loudly and Silver Bullet might suddenly rejoin the project

I probably jumped the gun on that statement. West won't be getting any higher than 4th in 63-64, and I doubt he gets much love the following two seasons with Wilt, Russell, Baylor, and Oscar all looking rather dominant. He won't be cracking the top 5 in his rookie season, that's for sure. It'll be close, but he'll fall just short of both guys giving it a closer look.