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

[OhayoKD]

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:

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.

You misread. I do consider the Early Celtics "stacked", but it was in response to someone who was ignoring similar evidence for the Bulls also being "stacked." That's why I said(not verbatim) "since good arguments are internally consistent, I will acknowledge that Russell joined a stacked team." But that still leaves 11 rings and what we have would suggest that at least some of those 11 rings were not on stacked squads and when you can win "some" championships with less, I think that marks a significant advantage. that sample is completely legitimate imo, but the posters who point it out also decided to completely hand-wave an 82-game sample from 1970 where the Celtics drop by more(relative to what is "league-best") with a similar roster than the Bulls improve between 84 and 88(by box and non-box mj's likely "situational value" peak.

What also has been handwaved is the Celtics consistently staying league-best with russell's "co-stars" missing time(sometimes even doing a bit better) or leaving.

. 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.

Well, as outlined in the bottom of the post, all that 'improvement" is literally smaller than the drop-off(accounting for srs tresholds) we see with player-coach russell leaving in 1969(both had bad positional replacements). Having done the math(or really looking at statmuse's math), in year two, by net-rating they're a 31-win team without(27-by record) and -0.5 srs with him in games he played >20 minutes(i dont know what the srs is for the without, and no, i am only counting games jordan completely missed for the without).

[Ambrose]

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.

You misread. I do consider the Early Celtics "stacked", but it was in response to someone who was ignoring similar evidence for the Bulls also being "stacked." That's why I said(not verbatim) "since good arguments are internally consistent, I will acknowledge that Russell joined a stacked team." But that still leaves 11 rings and what we have would suggest that at least some of those 11 rings were not on stacked squads and when you can win "some" championships with less, I think that marks a significant advantage. that sample is completely legitimate imo, but the posters who point it out also decided to completely hand-wave an 82-game sample from 1970 where the Celtics drop by more(relative to what is "league-best") with a similar roster than the Bulls improve between 84 and 88(by box and non-box mj's likely "situational value" peak.

What also has been handwaved is the Celtics consistently staying league-best with russell's "co-stars" missing time(sometimes even doing a bit better) or leaving.

. 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.

Well, as outlined in the bottom of the post, all that 'improvement" is literally smaller than the drop-off(accounting for srs tresholds) we see with player-coach russell leaving in 1969(both had bad positional replacements). Having done the math(or really looking at statmuse's math), in year two, by net-rating they're a 31-win team without(27-by record) and -0.5 srs with him in games he played >20 minutes(i dont know what the srs is for the without, and no, i am only counting games jordan completely missed for the without).

Right, but that's placing that drop solely on the loss of Russell, which we know is not the case, and we are using the literal worst versions of Jordan as a comparison.

[OhayoKD]

You misread. I do consider the Early Celtics "stacked", but it was in response to someone who was ignoring similar evidence for the Bulls also being "stacked." That's why I said(not verbatim) "since good arguments are internally consistent, I will acknowledge that Russell joined a stacked team." But that still leaves 11 rings and what we have would suggest that at least some of those 11 rings were not on stacked squads and when you can win "some" championships with less, I think that marks a significant advantage. that sample is completely legitimate imo, but the posters who point it out also decided to completely hand-wave an 82-game sample from 1970 where the Celtics drop by more(relative to what is "league-best") with a similar roster than the Bulls improve between 84 and 88(by box and non-box mj's likely "situational value" peak.

What also has been handwaved is the Celtics consistently staying league-best with russell's "co-stars" missing time(sometimes even doing a bit better) or leaving.

Well, as outlined in the bottom of the post, all that 'improvement" is literally smaller than the drop-off(accounting for srs tresholds) we see with player-coach russell leaving in 1969(both had bad positional replacements). Having done the math(or really looking at statmuse's math), in year two, by net-rating they're a 31-win team without(27-by record) and -0.5 srs with him in games he played >20 minutes(i dont know what the srs is for the without, and no, i am only counting games jordan completely missed for the without).

and we are using the literal worst versions of Jordan as a comparison.

No? We are using 1988 which is top 3 or 1 by basically every box or non-box-metric lol. There's a good chance from an impact perspective that is literally his most valuable year and I'm giving him credit for --all the improvement-- his team experiences from 1984. That is literally the best signal to be had for Micheal. You'd have to pretend he wasn't on the bulls in 95 and ignore rodman to get close with somethign else.

Right, but that's placing that drop solely on the loss of Russell, which we know is not the case,

Uh. It's the same roster except for sam jones who was a 28 mpg role-player. The 2nd best player, hondo actually got better and the Celtics offense improved by 2-points. I do not think it's self-evident the Celtics were a weaker team minus russell in 1970 than 1969(where they were also horrible without him over a much smaller sample).

As is all the players from that loaded squad he joined were basically gone or diminished by 1960-1962 and we know the celtics didn't really get affected too much by teammates missing:

For instance, when his teammates missed time, Boston rarely missed a beat. In 1958, Bob Cousy sat for seven games and the Celtics played far better without him. In ’59 and ’60, Sharman, Cousy and Tom Heinsohn missed a few games each, and the machine kept on ticking. In ’61, Sharman missed 18 games and the Celtics were (again) better without him. In ’62, Cousy missed five and, yes, the Celtics were better without him (portending his retirement years).6

But Russell missed four games in 1962 and Boston’s differential fell by 22 points. Four games is infinitesimally small, but all of these stories point in the same direction. It was only when Russell was hampered by injury (in the 1958 Finals) that the Celtics fell short of a title — the single time a Russell team failed to win in a 12-year span dating back to college.7

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.

There's no real evidence for Russell's teams always being stacked so when you always win(even as a retiree player-coach facing an all-time gauntlet)...

[Ambrose]

Well, as outlined in the bottom of the post, all that 'improvement" is literally smaller than the drop-off(accounting for srs tresholds) we see with player-coach russell leaving in 1969(both had bad positional replacements). Having done the math(or really looking at statmuse's math), in year two, by net-rating they're a 31-win team without(27-by record) and -0.5 srs with him in games he played >20 minutes(i dont know what the srs is for the without, and no, i am only counting games jordan completely missed for the without).

and we are using the literal worst versions of Jordan as a comparison.

No? We are using 1988 which is top 3 or 1 by basically every box or non-box-metric lol. There's a good chance from an impact perspective that is literally his most valuable year and I'm giving him credit for --all the improvement-- his team experiences from 1984. That is literally the best signal to be had for Micheal. You'd have to pretend he wasn't on the bulls in 95 and ignore rodman to get close with somethign else.

Right, but that's placing that drop solely on the loss of Russell, which we know is not the case,

Uh. It's the same roster except for sam jones who was a 28 mpg role-player. The 2nd best player, hondo actually got better and the Celtics offense improved by 2-points. I do not think it's self-evident the Celtics were a weaker team minus russell in 1970 than 1969(where they were also horrible without him over a much smaller sample).

As is all the players from that loaded squad he joined were basically gone or diminished by 1960-1962 and we know the celtics didn't really get affected too much by teammates missing:

For instance, when his teammates missed time, Boston rarely missed a beat. In 1958, Bob Cousy sat for seven games and the Celtics played far better without him. In ’59 and ’60, Sharman, Cousy and Tom Heinsohn missed a few games each, and the machine kept on ticking. In ’61, Sharman missed 18 games and the Celtics were (again) better without him. In ’62, Cousy missed five and, yes, the Celtics were better without him (portending his retirement years).6

But Russell missed four games in 1962 and Boston’s differential fell by 22 points. Four games is infinitesimally small, but all of these stories point in the same direction. It was only when Russell was hampered by injury (in the 1958 Finals) that the Celtics fell short of a title — the single time a Russell team failed to win in a 12-year span dating back to college.7

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.

There's no real evidence for Russell's teams always being stacked so when you always win(even as a retiree player-coach facing an all-time gauntlet)...

I've only been referring to the first three seasons of Jordan's career, which are quite obviously the three worst versions of him as a Bull. Unless you never think he improves beyond that in his career.

Handwaving the loss of Sam Jones as if he's a meaningless role player is silly. Ignoring a new and rookie head coach is silly. Any team losing their best player, 3rd or 4th best player and replacing their coach with a rookie is going to see a significant drop. I do think you bring up solid points but I also believe you're maybe attributing too much or too little to certain players in certain situations.

[OhayoKD]

and we are using the literal worst versions of Jordan as a comparison.

No? We are using 1988 which is top 3 or 1 by basically every box or non-box-metric lol. There's a good chance from an impact perspective that is literally his most valuable year and I'm giving him credit for --all the improvement-- his team experiences from 1984. That is literally the best signal to be had for Micheal. You'd have to pretend he wasn't on the bulls in 95 and ignore rodman to get close with somethign else.

Right, but that's placing that drop solely on the loss of Russell, which we know is not the case,

Uh. It's the same roster except for sam jones who was a 28 mpg role-player. The 2nd best player, hondo actually got better and the Celtics offense improved by 2-points. I do not think it's self-evident the Celtics were a weaker team minus russell in 1970 than 1969(where they were also horrible without him over a much smaller sample).

As is all the players from that loaded squad he joined were basically gone or diminished by 1960-1962 and we know the celtics didn't really get affected too much by teammates missing:

For instance, when his teammates missed time, Boston rarely missed a beat. In 1958, Bob Cousy sat for seven games and the Celtics played far better without him. In ’59 and ’60, Sharman, Cousy and Tom Heinsohn missed a few games each, and the machine kept on ticking. In ’61, Sharman missed 18 games and the Celtics were (again) better without him. In ’62, Cousy missed five and, yes, the Celtics were better without him (portending his retirement years).6

But Russell missed four games in 1962 and Boston’s differential fell by 22 points. Four games is infinitesimally small, but all of these stories point in the same direction. It was only when Russell was hampered by injury (in the 1958 Finals) that the Celtics fell short of a title — the single time a Russell team failed to win in a 12-year span dating back to college.7

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.

There's no real evidence for Russell's teams always being stacked so when you always win(even as a retiree player-coach facing an all-time gauntlet)...

I've only been referring to the first three seasons of Jordan's career, which are quite obviously the three worst versions of him as a Bull. Unless you never think he improves beyond that in his career.

Yeah, and I'm saying we can literally just take peak Jordan when he had a better head coach, oakley(whose depature immediately coincided with a regression), and the Bulls had kicked out a bunch of defensive negatives for positives, and had drafted pippen and rodman and compare his team's improvement from 84. What do those three "worst versions of jordan" prove in a comparison with bill?

Handwaving the loss of Sam Jones as if he's a meaningless role player is silly. Ignoring a new and rookie head coach is silly. Any team losing their best player, 3rd or 4th best player and replacing their coach with a rookie is going to see a significant drop.

So we're going to handwave that Russell's best teammate got better and the Celtics offense incidentally improved by 2-points?. Sam Jones was the 6th mpg dude from the regular season(which is what is being used here). The 2nd best player(hondo) jumped up significantly in 70. Sam Jones was not their [b[3rd or 4th best player[/b] by the time he retired. This is the thing, for a bunch of those 11 rings the all the talent Russell played with from that initial superteam were either diminished or not even on the team.

I do think you bring up solid points but I also believe you're maybe attributing too much or too little to certain players in certain situations.

Maybe. The forum's 60's experts don't seem to rate 69 sam jones that highly tho. He did play a more significant(at least by minutes) in the playoffs but i dont think if he "elevated" per say. Hondo did though. But that's seperate from an rs comparison. I've only watched some games(including the finals) from that run, so I'm not some expert on the coaching though Tom Heison is at least considered good(and did win championships a few years later when Hondo peaked and they added a bunch of pieces like Cowens)

[lessthanjake]

Sorry in advance for the long post f4p —am not trying to inundate you, and am actually enjoying the discussion, but I suspect it might be difficult to respond to all of this. I eventually just got past the point of no return!

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.

I don’t know that they were coasting in 2018 as much as it was that Curry missed 31 regular season games. They played at a 66-win pace when Steph played, and simply had only 58 wins because they played at just a 45-win pace without Steph. So perhaps you might say that they didn’t overperform in the playoffs if they were really a 66-win team with Steph. But this is an excellent example of my point. Steph pretty obviously was why they were so good in the regular season—they were incredible with him and fairly close to average without him—so it’d be a perverse outcome to mark it down against him (or as a neutral) that they didn’t overperform how well they’d played with him. He made them a truly great team, and they did about what you’d expect a truly great team to do (i.e. still have trouble with the 65-win, 8.21 SRS Rockets, and then destroy the Cavs). In a sense that’s neither an overperformance or an underperformance, but that’s only from a baseline of a 66-win-pace team—and that baseline internalizes enormous positive impact from Steph.

As for 2019, I guess you could say they didn’t overperform because they didn’t win the title, but they were a 57-win, 6.42 SRS team missing their second-best player in the business end of the playoffs, and they managed to finish off the 53-win, 5 SRS Rockets and then sweep the 53-win 4.4 SRS Blazers. Then they lost to a 58-win, 5.5 SRS team, and that was only really based on lost games with Klay injured too (they were 2-2 and ahead in the second half of another game in games Klay played). It’s of course difficult to quantify what Durant and later Klay being missing should do to the over/underperformance baseline, but I think we certainly can’t reasonably say they underperformed, and they probably did actually overperform.

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.

I think we’ve got to talk a bit about why Steph’s numbers tend to drop in the playoffs. He is legitimately defended meaningfully different in the playoffs. Teams sell out cartoonishly hard on him in the playoffs, in a way that they don’t do quite as much in the regular season (presumably because there’s not time in the regular season to come up with and practice such cartoonish game plans). These game plans are obviously designed to make it as difficult as possible for Steph to get going. As Ty Lue said, teams see Steph as the head of the snake and they focus all their efforts on stopping him. The result is that it IS harder for him to get going. But it is ALSO true that it breaks their defenses in rather astounding ways.

For instance, take a look here at a lengthy video that shows many examples from the 2015 Finals, a series that you’ve mentioned him underperforming in:

Watch on YouTube

This is a player who is being defended in a completely suicidal way. The way the Cavs were playing Steph, all it took was someone screening for Steph miles behind the three-point-line or Steph running around a screen or sometimes just Steph standing there, and it was systematically causing good looks for the Warriors, because the Cavs’ strategy was to sell out on him completely. If the defense is going to do things like decide to systematically trap a guy off a screen even when he’s like 10 feet behind the three-point line, then it sure will be the case that that guy will probably see his shooting efficiency drop, but that guy’s team will probably win the series, because the other team is also letting his presence destroy their defense. And that’s exactly what happened. Also, as a sidenote, I’d point out that Steph actually still scored more than his regular season average in this series.

On this issue of “overperform[ing] in the most low-pressure situation possible,” I just think that’s again penalizing him for his own greatness. Why was the situation with the KD Warriors low-pressure? Because they were so good, right? But, in those years, they only had a 24-23 regular season record and a -0.8 regular-season net rating and -1.0 playoff net rating without him. That team did not perform great without him (aside from one series against a mediocre Spurs team, and they still ended up with a negative playoff net rating without him overall despite that). So you’re discounting great performances as being in “low-pressure situations,” but the situations are only low-pressure because of how good Steph made the team! You’re penalizing him for his own greatness!

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.

I’d refer you to the above discussion about what happens with Steph in the playoffs. I think the 2016 drop was more than that, but he also was injured in the playoffs. You’re right that they did fine when he missed 6 playoff games that year. It was not two rounds, though. He got injured with them up 26 in game 1 of the first round, and he also did come back to play limited minutes in another win in that series. And then when he came back in the second round, they were only up 2-1—with the home team winning each game. The Warriors actually went 4-2 in the playoff games he didn’t play in (and a win in game 4 of the first round that he played limited minutes in). And the home team won each of those 6 games. And their opponents were a 41-win 0.34 SRS team, and a 44-win 0.98 SRS team. So all the 2016 Warriors really did without Steph in the playoffs was hold serve at home and lose away against average teams (and win an away game that Steph played but not high minutes). It’s not bad for a team missing its best player, but it’s also hardly an indictment on Steph’s impact.

And as for what it says about the Warriors that they could lose a finals but have it be close when Steph is injured and plays below his normal level, let’s step back for a moment and realize that the Warriors lost. They very likely win that series if Steph isn’t injured. Anyways, I suppose despite the non-stat-sheet impact from Steph being fairly maximized by how Lue played him, you could say that they did well to even take it to 7 with Steph not at his best. But that’s still talking about a 7-game series that they *lost*. And when you drill down into this point, it starts to fall apart. Steph’s performance of course wasn’t just totally constant in the series. And they actually only won one game he didn’t play well in. So is your point that his situation must’ve been incredible because they won Game 1 of the 2016 Finals at home while he didn’t play well? Does it make sense to basically hang an argument on the outcome of one home game, when we have so much other aggregate information telling us that Steph has enormous impact on the Warriors? And does it make sense to imply the Warriors needed to be incredible because they almost beat LeBron at his best despite Steph not playing well, when actually LeBron did not have a good game in that one game they won without Steph playing well (and neither did Kyrie or Love)? I don’t really think so.

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%.

Your team beating a 47-win team without you is good, but hardly some huge indictment on his impact, when we’re talking about a team considered possibly the greatest team of all time. And also, it’s a low sample size and when we zoom out we see that, despite that series, the Warriors in the KD era were still outscored in the playoffs with Steph off the court. And those stats about his stats dropping are obscuring that he still had a 26/6/6 on 59% TS% stat line! The exclamation points after the TS% drop go to this point about penalizing Steph for his own greatness. It was a drop because Steph had just posted the highest TS% for a guard in the history of the NBA! Despite a big drop from *his* average that year, he still scored efficiently in those playoffs! And, again, that’s despite teams gameplanning cartoonish defenses against him in the playoffs, where their plan was literally to single-cover Kevin Durant in order to completely sell out on Steph.

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.

I think this 2019 year kind of goes against your “low-pressure” thing. Durant was going wild the first two rounds of those playoffs, and the Warriors were feeding him a lot as a result. But then Durant went down, and the pressure on Steph obviously went up. Steph proceeded to average 33/6/6 on 63% TS% for the rest of the playoffs. And even that’s downplaying it, since Steph also scored 16 points in the last 14 minutes of game 5 against the Rockets to win the game after Durant went down in that game. And then in the Finals when Klay Thompson was out too, Steph put up 47 points. I don’t think the 2019 playoffs can reasonably be seen as playoff dropping.

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.

…

I think you mean 2022. In any event, I’d say those numbers are pretty amazing when we are talking about someone whose impact comes much more outside the stat sheet than most other players. Steph is not a player who optimizes for high PER, since PER simply doesn’t measure a huge amount of what he does. Impact metrics do though, and he looks great in those, including in the playoffs.

And I think you’re choosing to compare Steph’s stats against his numbers that season when it makes him look worse (i.e. looking at his TS% efficiency drop in 2018 playoffs as compared to his 2018 season, where he had his highest TS% ever that season), and downplaying an increase above his regular season numbers when it would make him look good (i.e. we shouldn’t care about him rising in the 2022 playoffs because his 2022 regular season was a down year).

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.

First of all, I don’t think his gravity IS constant. I think it’s even stronger in the playoffs, because teams devise even more wild gameplans to limit him in the playoffs than they do in random regular season games. Opponents in the playoffs basically choose to try to suppress Steph’s efficiency more, at the cost of breaking their defense even more. And the effect of that gravity IS perhaps far above everyone else, because his impact metrics in the playoffs are very very good.

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.

Yeah, there’s probably a baseline level of basketball IQ required to fit well with Steph. But that’s part of why I said it’s hard to think of a template “of a good player” that wouldn’t fit with Steph. A player who does not have the basketball IQ to play in a motion offense is not a good basketball player IMO—it’s not a very high bar. The fact that basically any star or borderline star could probably fit well with Steph is a *huge* advantage as a player.

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.

But that’s basically just you saying you refuse to believe the numbers because you refuse to believe Steph is this good and this impactful. It’s not something actually suspect about the numbers. Your prior point was that you didn’t think the numbers were plausible because they weren’t elastic enough to account for Steph’s worse shooting in 2022. But that wasn’t actually correct when we dove in. They were actually quite elastic to it. And now you’re just saying that you don’t believe the numbers because you don’t believe that Steph was good enough to have such numbers. But he did! And the year in question was a year he ended up winning the title, so we have some strong indicators that he was a highly impactful player that year!

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.

Wiggins wasn’t the 4th starter. He was absolutely better than Klay. Indeed, he was even better than Draymond in the finals at least. But yes, you are right that a different team *might* have shed talent. But I’d say two things: First, an owner is *way* less likely to shed talent to save money if their team is winning. If Steph wasn’t as good, his team wouldn’t have won titles, and then the Warriors’ owner would have been way less likely to shell out more money moving forwards. If that 65-win Rocket team had won the title, maybe they’d have been the same. Second, to the extent another team might’ve shed talent to save money, it *almost certainly* would’ve come in the form of not signing Klay to a max contract after he just had a catastrophic injury. And Klay wasn’t really a net positive in 2022 anyways. The bottom line is that the 2022 Warriors were not a strong team as championship teams go. They were one of the weakest supporting casts for a title team in recent memory. And frankly, they *really* probably should’ve lost the Finals, but Steph basically refused to let it happen.

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.

I think if you thought about it, you’d find that most teams don’t use their best offensive players to offset quite that much offensive deficiency from others. The Warriors have two non-shooters on the floor with Steph by default. And when they were giving minutes to Oubre and Wiseman and whatnot, it was often three non-shooters. That’s not really how teams play offense nowadays. The Warriors get away with it because of Steph. And you say we can’t choose to not blame Steph for the “bad offense,” but the offense literally was good when he was on the court! I *really* don’t think we can blame a guy when his team runs super defensive lineups with him on the floor and he still makes the offense good, and then the offense is utterly awful with him off the court and so the overall net offensive rating isn’t good!

[lessthanjake]

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.

Maybe the team *did* get worse! We have no idea, since they were a completely different team with a different coach! There’s no basis for comparison whatsoever. You might as well have chosen a team that wasn’t even the Bulls.

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

Yes, because Havlicek working on his fourth all-NBA appearance is analogous to Pippen as a rookie bench player. Come on.

And yes, you’re right that in a sense talking about Chicago help vs. Miami help is *also* comparing apples to oranges. The difference is that no one is trying to quantify impact data based on that and then drawing conclusions based on that exact nonsense data output, like you are purporting to do. At a certain point in these comparisons, we do have to compare apples to oranges because players played for different teams in different eras. We don’t have to construct nonsense empirical data about a player’s career and impact and talk about that data like it’s meaningful, though.

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.

Of course you want to “weigh that against Wade breaking down,” but in other areas show no interest in things like Kukoc joining, Pippen, Grant, and Armstrong peaking, etc. And you magically want to delve into really small sample sizes (in playoff games with Wade and Bosh where they both started, for instance), that are not analogous to your argument about Jordan (there was no non-Jordan playoff year that you’re comparing to). Anyways, there’s no point in quibbling with the details of your data manipulation, because the whole premise is nonsense. You surely are aware of that unless you’re really drinking your own kool aid. There’s just objectively no conclusions to be drawn from the outcomes two completely different teams have. You’re just spinning around a bunch of completely useless numbers and thinking you’re making smart points.

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).

This is basically just all misrepresentation or willfully ignoring my prior responses to this stuff, and I won’t bother going through it all again. I do find it interesting that you seem to contest the idea that “Kareem was the help” in multiple championships, though. I’d love for you to try to justify that.

Also, on this “small-sample, multi-year extraps says Jordan>LeBron, larger sample multi-year extraps say Jordan isn’t goat-tier” thing, did you ever wonder whether maybe the “small-sample, multi-year extraps” were “small-sample” because the measures weren’t so dumb as to include the meaningless data that has gone into your own personally-cooked-up “larger sample multi-year extraps”? Sometimes, one just has to accept that there’s not a large sample for things and therefore that a certain approach isn’t *super* helpful (which is the case with the WOWYR stuff). Replacing it with garbage doesn’t make it meaningful.

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.

Yes, what’s wrong with posting PER? Is it not meaningful that Jordan essentially had the highest PER of anyone in all of his playoff series’? You’re welcome to try to chip away at that fact by pointing out that PER doesn’t account for everything, such as defense (which Jordan is great at) or high-leverage situations (which Jordan is also great at) or off-ball gravity (which Jordan was good at as well, though obviously not at a Steph level). Or you can try to argue that PER should be weighted differently and then try to construct and justify some sort of weighting that might actually leave other players ahead of Jordan in playoff series’. But at a baseline level, it surely is very relevant that Jordan was constantly putting up the highest PER of anyone on his team or the opposing team (and did so on his way to six career titles). And posting that fact is mostly just contextualizing for you what anyone that watched those series’ would say—that Jordan was always the best player in every playoff series. I know you didn’t watch them so you don’t know that, and therefore I posted data to back up the point. But you don’t want to accept it, so you reflexively reject the data for seemingly no reason.

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!

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

Well I for one am now thinking about ranking Jordan outside of the top 100. You see, in my large-sample multi-year extrap, I’ve found that the Bulls won 57 games with Jordan in 1993, and then he got replaced by a below-replacement-level Pete Myers and the team added a rookie Toni Kukoc, and they won 55 games. We can assume that if Pete Myers had just been replacement level, the Bulls would’ve been able to maintain the same record as in 1993—after all, they were very close as it was. And would’ve maintained the same SRS too if they’d been as healthy as in 1993 (fully-healthy SRS in 1994 was already close!). So that has Jordan’s value above replacement level in 1993 as being roughly the same as the value that Toni Kukoc coming off the bench in his rookie season brought—since the effects of Jordan leaving and Kukoc joining seems to have canceled out. Meanwhile, if we try to measure Jordan’s value at his peak in 1991, we see that, without Jordan, the 2015 Hawks won just 1 fewer game than the 1991 Bulls with 3.8 SRS lower. So this large-sample multi-year extrap shows that Jordan only provided about a 3.8 SRS lift in 1991. And Jordan had a better team than the 2015 Hawks—the Hawks didn’t have Pippen or Grant, both better than anyone on those Hawks!—so that 3.8 SRS lift is really the upper bound. And that’s at Jordan’s peak year! Obviously, our other extrap shows that, by 1993, he was only worth as much as a rookie Toni Kukoc. Meanwhile, we know that in the second three-peat, Jordan was past his peak, so we can assume that his value/impact only went down from there. So what these extraps show is a guy who, at his very peak, could provide at most a 3.8 SRS lift (probably less!) and then quickly became only as impactful as a rookie Toni Kukoc, before retiring and then coming back in 1995-1998 in further diminished form. I don’t think this is an impact profile I can put in the top 100. The bottom of the top 100 includes guys like Carmelo Anthony. Carmelo even in his rookie year showed more SRS lift than Jordan ever did, lifting his team from -7.41 SRS the year before he got there, to 1.65 SRS his rookie year. That 9.06 SRS lift is almost 2.5x peak Jordan! And that was Carmelo’s rookie year at age 19, not even close to his peak! And Carmelo also has the longevity edge on Jordan. When large-sample multi-year extraps massively favor rookie Carmelo over peak Jordan AND Carmelo has the longevity edge, there’s really no argument for Jordan over Carmelo. So I don’t see how Jordan can be top 100. In fact, given that almost-peak Jordan was equivalent in impact to rookie Toni Kukoc according to the extraps, I think we’re looking at Michael being roughly a Kukoc-level player at best, with who I’d put ahead depending on whether we think Jordan’s drop from his 1991 peak to 1993 was more or less than Kukoc’s improvement from his rookie year to his peak. I’d have to run some more extraps to figure that out.

[homecourtloss]

Official vote: Bill Russell

I have been enjoying, watching a lot of footage that’s been made available and my opinion of Bill Russell, Jerry West, and Oscar Robertson have all gone up aside from the statistical markers and impact metrics that we have for them. Posts made about Russell by Doc, OhayoKD, and others have made an excellent case for him not only at this spot, but maybe at the number one spot overall.

I used to have Jordan I had a Russell and while the 1988 to 1993 stretch level can rival anyone else’s any six year span (even though much of the credit that’s usually given to Jordan for that first Chicago ascendancy came about due to the rise of Scottie Pippen, Horace Grant, and the coaching a Phil Jackson), I have been been less impressed lately with the second stretch from 1996 to 1998 as well as the lack of longevity and being able to adjust to different playing environments. I think the 1996 regular season gets underrated but the finals performances in 1996, 1997, and 1998, aided in part by a very generous, free-throw rate, often on calls out on the floor or touch fouls out on the perimeter on fadeaways, gets overrated; watching those teams win tightly contested finals games, using defense and often rebounding as primary catalysts have brought about some questions for me as has the success his teams had without him out on the court, e.g., 1994, dip from 1991 to 1992 but the team even better, etc.

[Doctor MJ]

Head's up, there's so much in your post I'm going to split my response up between two (at least) posts.

i'm not sure how is he beating hakeem, shaq, duncan, or magic. all guys with longevity advantage, even magic. and big time playoff performers vs the decliner that is steph. and it's hard to say he's really got an argument over wilt. and personally i think kobe is just way too far ahead on longevity while being fairly playoff resilient. and i would think this board is going to pick KG ahead.

I have to say I think this notion of Curry being a weak playoff performer really concerns me. We're talking about a guy with incredible team playoff success where none of us have actually seen his team lose very often, and we're talking about a guy with a career playoff average with 27 PPG on 60+% TS.

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.

Okay, so drilling down on the concept of resilience, my thoughts:

1. I think having a concept of resilience that compares a player's performance against in PS to RS is a reasonable statistical lens to be concerned with. I do think we need to be careful overly-fixated on the relative compared to the absolute.

2. I realize the need to consider adjustments relative to league, but we need to remember that these things are not linear, and that our statistical gaze is secondary to the basketball gaze. What a statistically-oriented cynic might call "inflated stats" is on the court in fact a player finding a way to reach a new threshold of proficiency.

The idea of trying to say that 27 PPG on 60% TS over a playoff career is a problem, is something I see as a problem, in other words.

3. I think we need to understand that productivity-resilience and impact-resilience are very, very different things, and that the former in the end matters only to the extent we can expect it to impact impact.

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.

I'm glad you can express that that's how you feel, because I think many people feel this way, whether they know it or not, precisely because of the even you focus first...which I also stated below:

I think it's critical for folks to remember that so much of this has its foundation in the 2016 Finals, which has then been used again and again in LeBron vs Curry debates - which is fine, but since LeBron was already voted in at #1, that's a problematic thing to shape our assessment when considering Curry with everyone else.

Let's just bear in mind that, from '12-13 to the present, the Warriors are:

23-5 in playoff series, having played 20 series with HCA and 8 series without (please do check my count).

I find it hard to believe that people would expect this based on their gut feelings about the Warriors in the playoffs.

I think you have to remind yourself that this is not how people remotely we're feeling when the Warriors were up 3-1 during the 2016 finals, and it's certainly not something that was created by the Warriors' playoff performances in 2017, 2018 & 2019.

Now of course the other thing pertaining to this, which would be a natural thing for someone to bring up, were those play-in games, which I know for a fact some people took as further evidence that Curry and the Warriors had a softness to them.

Let's bear in mind Curry's numbers in those games:
vs Lakers: 37 points, 69.8% TS, 40 min, +4
vs Grizzlies: 39 points, 62.7% TS, 47 min, +4

So yeah, let me just say up front that for anyone still holding those 2 games against Curry when you weight out your assessment of him in the playoffs, you need to re-think that.

I think it's critical for folks to remember that so much of this has its foundation in the 2016 Finals, which has then been used again and again in LeBron vs Curry debates - which is fine, but since LeBron was already voted in at #1, that's a problematic thing to shape our assessment when considering Curry with everyone else.

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.

Yup. It was the most disappointing series and playoffs of Curry's career no doubt. People will bring up injury stuff, but it doesn't change the fact that it was an epic disappointment.

The real question is how much we're looking to use one series & playoffs as the basis for our assessment of a player. I'll say flat out that the idea of picking that moment precisely because it's the one time he didn't win the title seems exceptionally harsh to a degree that I think it's pretty clear that no one judges every player consistently that way.

I think the scale of that moment in the basketball landscape makes us all feel the reverberations more...but analytically, I don't think we should.

As is often said: Try not to evaluate a guy primarily based on his best or worst moments that sandwich the meat of his career.

I also think that when we bring up guys where we have +/- data on and want to talk about longevity, we should get clear just what an outlier the Warriors have been on this front.

If we look at "Post-Season Centuries", ahem, post-seasons with a raw +/- in the triple digits, here's what we've got going back to '96-97:

Draymond Green 6
LeBron James 6
Steph Curry 5
Chauncey Billups 4
Tim Duncan 4
Danny Green 4
Manu Ginobili 3
Kyrie Irving 3
Kawhi Leonard 3
Klay Thompson 3
Ray Allen 2
Giannis Antetokounmpo 2
Kobe Bryant 2
Mario Chalmers 2
Kevin Durant 2
Joel Embiid 2
Derek Fisher 2
Rick Fox 2
Dirk Nowitzki 2
Kevin Garnett 2
Richard Hamilton 2
Andre Iguodala 2
Michael Jordan 2 (only 2 years we have data for)
Kevin Love 2
Khris Middleton 2
Shaquille O'Neal 2
Scottie Pippen 2 (only 2 years we have data for)
Tayshaun Prince 2
Dwyane Wade 2
Rasheed Wallace 2

What we can see here is that if we're talking about ultra-successful playoff team dominance with guys in this era, it's really about a) LeBron and b) Golden State. Now, team game, and we can have conversations about the credit those around Curry deserve, but I think we need to recognize that we've already seen a rarely-ever-seen sustained dominance in the playoffs by a team built around Curry which really isn't matched by those we might think achieved something similar based on counting chips.

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.

I'll emphasize again that I don't agree with the premise that we should try to hold fit against players when evaluating their accomplishments.

Reasonable for you to bring up Draymond's edge here, I think I'll get into that more when responding to the back half of your post.

Of course I'm not saying that only these years should count when doing our holistic assessments - I've said I'm not ready to put Curry over Duncan for example - but seriously, how many more ultra dominant runs does Curry need to be the foundation of before he's seen as being as "resilient" in the playoffs as Kobe? Negative 3? When we get to this point, I think we need to consider how out notions of a guy as a player performer have been manufactured.

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.

"only to arguably be saved by injury...". . Yeah so, biggest thing, I think you need to really reflect on how much shade you throw at the greatest franchise run of the last decade plus.

From 2013 onward, here are the counts of the various franchises by series victories:

Golden State 23
Miami 16
Cleveland 13
Boston 12
San Antonio 10
Toronto 9
Denver 8
Milwaukee 8
Houston 7
Lakers 6
Atlanta 5
Clippers 5
Oklahoma City 5
Philadelphia 5
Phoenix 5

Now, let's grant how impressive LeBron is up front, and recognize that he's already been voted in.

After that, the gap between Golden State and everyone else is massive. It basically goes without saying that no other franchise has been anywhere close to the Warriors...

and so, if the Warriors seems "weak", what does that say about everyone else? Super-weak? How bizarre to have this idea in our heads - and to be clear, I think it IS in OUR heads that all these players and teams today are soft - while we rationally know that the top teams of today would utterly trounce what came before 1980-present.

How can this split be reconciled? I don't think that it really can. I think it speaks to the subtle ways we get polarized in the present environment that we have to think to question before we can see things with less of a slant.

Now let me go back to Curry's numbers falling off:

1. There's some truth in it, and some of that represents actually playing worth at times.

2. Remember that on average Curry's playoff numbers are fantastic.

3. Remember the distinction between production and impact.

[ShaqAttac]

I don’t really feel the need to go through all this, because there’s a lot of obviously motivated reasoning going on here that I don’t think many people would find persuasive on its face, but just a few minor things:

-> 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...

Talking about “expansion fodder” is misleading when it does not acknowledge that the league expanded as the game got substantially more popular and more centralized at the professional level. I don’t think there’s good reason to think that an average team in the 1960s had more talent than the average team in the 1990s, despite there being fewer teams. In fact, I think most people would think the opposite. And if the average team wasn’t more talented, then those semifinals against definitionally median teams weren’t more difficult than a first-round matchup for the Bulls (it’s against about the 50th percentile team either way).

To the extent you’re talking about literal expansion teams that were bad because they just started as franchises, I’d note that that’s an out of place argument when talking about playoff record, as you are here. The Bulls weren’t facing bad expansion teams in their 27-2 playoff run, since those teams don’t make the playoffs. And I’d also note that the size of the league almost doubled in Russell’s time in the league, so he had more than his share of beating up on new teams.

...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

Again, as I’ve pointed out a bunch of times, a semifinal opponent in an 8-team league is not really conceptually different from a round of 16 opponent in a league with almost 30 teams. You’re talking about roughly median teams either way. The league was so small in Russell’s era that the semifinals were the “weaker early round opposition.”

-> Led two dominant teams(statistically better with most of the Bulls if you go by standard deviation(more relevant to winning championships than "srs")), one was probably with less

This idea that standard deviations above the mean is more important than something like SRS is basically just nonsense. Again, as I’ve explained to you, if you had an 8-team league, where one team wins 60% of their games, two teams win 45% of their games, and the rest win 50% of their games, that team that won only 60% of their games would be 2.5 standard deviations above the mean. Which would be similar to a 66-win team in an era like today. Would we think that that 60% winning-percentage team would have a better chance of winning the title than a 66-win team (assuming an equal sized league)? Of course not. Teams with the best records in sports/leagues with more parity (i.e. a league with a small standard deviation interval) are not more likely to win championships than teams with the best records in sports/leagues with less parity. We see that very demonstrably in baseball, where the best teams win about 60% of their games, and are routinely upset in the playoffs despite playing best-of-7 series’. If the best teams only beat average teams like 60% of the time, then the chances of them losing a playoff series is much higher than if the best teams beat average teams more like 80% of the time or something. It’s just a basic fact of probability. There’s less of an absolute gap between the teams, and that’s what’s important. You are just wanting to use standard deviations to data-manipulate your way into suggesting that Duncan’s teams (or, at various times, I believe you’ve argued this for Russell’s or Kareem’s) were as dominant in the regular season as Jordan’s in the 1990’s, when they simply demonstrably were not.

A few notes
-> As noted earlier, the "identical record' bit is a bit disingenuous. Russell is 27-1 in series he was available for. If missed games are a detriment, then Jordan is 27-3. Actually there are alot of issues with this framing(all the issues at the top). Will add that because of the length(beyond natural aging) Russell had to play alot more regular season games to get to those 11 championships.

This is some really wild stuff. Russell literally played in 4 of the games in the series loss you’re trying to discount, and the Celtics went 1-3 in those games. You’re comparing that to series’ in which Jordan literally did not play a single second? It’s nonsense. (And, of course, it is an even richer bout of fact-twisting when we realize that getting to Jordan being “27-3” requires you to count a series loss in a series he didn’t play a second of against him but *not* count a series win that he didn’t play a second of in that same year. Of course, neither should count, but there’s plainly no reasonable heuristic by which 27-3 exists, and yet that’s somehow what you’ve come to. And I think you should take a step back and wonder why you’re getting to nonsense conclusions like this and consider whether in your fervor to put LeBron above Jordan you’ve not gone overboard into complete bias-ridden fiction-land regarding Jordan).

-> SRS thresholds being lower also do not necessarily mean the league was weaker(see: post-merger 70's, early 2000's where Duncan led 3 Chicago-tier outliers)

-> SRS tresholds being higher also do not necessarily mean the league is stronger(90's)

Yes, that is right. A team with an SRS number in one era isn’t necessarily equal to a team with the same SRS number in another era. But, here, the player whose opponents had lower SRS also played in an older league that could generally be agreed to be weaker since the sport was nowhere near as popular or organized professionally. If anything, a team with a given SRS in the 1990’s would be superior to a team with an equal SRS in the 1950s or 1960s.

Relatedly, if we assume eras have equal average talent—which is probably a very favorable assumption when comparing the 1950s/1960s and the 1980s/1990s—then higher SRS opponents will be tougher to beat, since a higher-SRS team in a league with an equal average talent pool will presumably be a more talented team.

You can only get to a conclusion that lower SRS teams in the 1960s were as strong as higher SRS teams in the 1990s if you genuinely think the average talent level in the NBA in the 1960s was higher than in the 1990s…which I think would be a pretty wild conclusion.

More than a few notes:
-> As has been pointed out(and ignored), the Cavs playoff-rotation posted a net-rating of +5.8 without the mentioned pieces. A caveat is that they played below average competition, and to my knowledge no one's calced the SRS. They do about as expected vs playoff-teams going by record(3-5).

This is literally 100% nonsense. You say the Cavaliers’ “playoff rotation” had a +5.8 net rating in games “without the mentioned pieces.” That is false. As I mentioned already, in those 1993-1994 playoffs, the Cavaliers did not have Brad Daugherty, Larry Nance, or Hot Rod Williams—all starters and major pieces for them. And there was *not even one* single regular season game that year in which they were missing all of those players, so any claim about what net rating their “playoff rotation” had “without the mentioned pieces” is just 100% fiction, because their team was so ravaged in the playoffs that there literally was not a single game “without the mentioned pieces” before they played the Bulls in the playoffs.

-> Pippen and Grant, after barely missing any games in 1993 missed a bunch in 1994. Even if the other teams are not always healthy, the Bulls themselves were healthy in 93 when Jordan played with them making the non-health adjusted numbers misleading

Yes, they were healthy when Jordan played with them in 1993. They also completely destroyed the opposition in the playoffs in 1993 and lost in the second round in 1994. Enormous difference. And when Jordan did not have a healthy team in 1998, he still led the team to 62 wins and won the title. The Bulls were not a real contender in 1993-1994, and I suspect you weren’t watching basketball back then if you think they were. Being 11th in the league in SRS, beating a completely ravaged team in the first round, and then losing a close series to a team that lost in the finals is not the resume of a significant contender, and no one thought they were. For reference for what it’s worth, they went into the next season with the 9th highest betting odds to win the title—tied with the Golden State Warriors. People knew they were still a good team, but they were definitely not a top-tier contender. Meanwhile, with Jordan they were a dominant, inevitable buzzsaw.

Russell who kept winning that initial "superteam" was depleted, not Jordan

Jordan dominated with two different groups. Pippen is the only other common denominator. They weren’t super teams anyways, but as a factual matter they were two wildly different rosters.

Furthermore, you talk about Russell winning when an initial superteam was “depleted,” with the implication that he won at some point with a less talented group. But Bill Russell literally never played on a team that had less than 6 Hall of Famers in it, and even that was just one year—the rest were 7-9 Hall of Famer teams. The idea that his team was ever “depleted” is just crazy.

A good theory has explanatory power. What phenomenon does "Jordan was more valuable" explain? If you can't think of a satisfactory answer to the question, then perhaps Bill Russell is just better, and we don't need a theory saying otherwise.

It explains Jordan being both incredibly individually dominant and incredibly dominant with his team, in an era that was stronger than Russell’s and that involved more than two playoff rounds while being on teams much less stacked with a bajillion hall of famers.

idk much about baseball but someone saw this and messaged me somethin their friend said

"I came across this and had to say something, the reason the best teams are routinely upset in baseball is because there’s a lot more variance in baseball than basketball. False equivalency if I’ve ever seen one, someone should really call him out on this"

[lessthanjake]

idk much about baseball but someone saw this and messaged me somethin their friend said

"I came across this and had to say something, the reason the best teams are routinely upset in baseball is because there’s a lot more variance in baseball than basketball. False equivalency if I’ve ever seen one, someone should really call him out on this"

Lol, that’s exactly the point. “More variance” is otherwise known as a higher parity environment where the best teams win a smaller percent of their games.

And I like the act here hahaha—this comment from you was apparently double hearsay from “someone” messaging you what “their friend” said.

[ijspeelman]

Quick thoughts on each candidate before I make my vote.

Wilt Chamberlain

Where Wilt loses value for me is his offense. Wilt is known in the public eye as the most dominant NBA player of all time. This may be true with his scoring, but he did not use his scoring to generate offense for his other teammates. His teams were consistently not top offenses despite Wilt’s efficiency and volume shooting in the paint. This was due to his lack of a passing game. Even in his season where he led the league in assists, he was more of a “Rondo Assist” kind of passer and not someone who bent the defense to set-up his defenders (LeBron, Magic, etc).

Wilt’s value for me comes more from his defense. Especially compared to era, he was one of the best defensive centers of all time. This started showing up more and more when his volume decreased and spent more time focusing on that end at the bottom of his 6ers tenure and with the Lakers.

Tim Duncan

In the early parts of his career, Duncan combined dominant post scoring with elite post and help defense. This era mainly consisted of the illegal defense rules so both post scoring and post defense were at a premium. To me this all culminates with the 2002-03 Spurs champion where he led a team with an aging Robinson, a young Parker, and a young Ginobli.

After the illegal defense rules were abolished, offense became more and more perimeter based, but even so most teams did not abandon the post. Duncan kept up his post scoring and efficiency for almost his entire career, albeit at a slightly lesser rate than his two MVP seasons. To touch on it quickly, Duncan’s spacing with his midrange is often overstated. That 10-16 footer that he shot as 20% of his FGs only went in 40% of the time.

Duncan will always be brought up with his stellar teammates, the aforementioned Robinson, Parker, and Ginobli, but more importantly with Popovich. This connection seems to downplay Duncan unfairly. He was graced with great teams which then resulted in great team success, yes, but without his dominant defense and scoring, the Spurs would not be regarded as they are today. You can look at prime David Robinson for what it looks like when a star Spur doesn’t have a great team.

Michael Jordan

There is not a lot to say about MJ that hasn’t already been said. I think the mythos around MJ has actually caused more recent fans to either revere him as an untouchable figure or disown him as if his achievements were not real.

We can talk about tangible facts though.

What constantly floors me about MJ is how he ramps up when the playoffs come around.

While his points/75 possessions drops compared to his regular season stats for his 6 playoff runs where he won a championship (a 1.28pts/75 difference), his TS% is on average 1.2% higher. MJ, an already incredibly efficient volume scorer, who was +2-7% relative TS% in these years, increased his efficiency with a marginal decrease in scoring.

This is all combined with underrated passing and disruptive defense (that is often overrated, but still exists).

Hakeem Olajuwon

Olajuwon may be the greatest floor raiser of any team ever with his post scoring. Somehow this is not his best attribute.

Olajuwon is well known for his elite footwork and touch on his post moves. In a post dominant era, he was the best in the league. In 1996-97, shot distance was tracked so we had a glimpse into statistical volume and efficiency for each shot distance. Sadly, this year is the last year where Hakeem was considered an all-star by his peers, but it gives us a good glimpse of his domination even with his decline.

Out of the 190 players that qualified, he ranked 17th in efficiency on shots within 3-10 feet. Out of those players, he shot the most from that range (in quantity and % of total shots). In the same year, he shot 45.9% on shots from 10-16 feet on similar volume. This was near the efficiency and volume of MJ.

This same positive for being able to take and make these shots later in his career actually hurts him earlier on. Due to his shot diet, but lack of mastery of difficult shots earlier in his career he was a much less effective isolation post scorer. In the 80s, Hakeem ran around league average to only a small amount above league average in TS%.

This type of isolation post offense and the fact that his team created a four out type offense around him during and around his championship years meant we got to see Hakeem’s playmaking. Hakeem was an early adopter of the kick-out from the post and it was highly effective in generating offense. He was not an incredible passer, but had very good speciality passes that paired well with his offensive game so he was able to manipulate defenses with his scoring, but not in incredibly dynamic ways.

Olajuwon’s best attribute was his incredible defense. In his 12 all-star seasons, he led his league to a top 5 defense in 7 seasons. He translated his incredible footwork in the post to incredible footwork defending the post. He also possessed other worldly athleticism in teleporting to erase shots on the weak side.

Bill Russell

For me, the ratings of Bill and Wilt are connected. It's hard to talk about one without talking about the other. Where Wilt had incredible offensive box scores, Bill did not and did not try to. Wilt and Bill were gifted with an assortment of all-star teammates who were some of the best offensive pieces at the time. Where Wilt blasted by them with his volume scoring, Bill did not.

Russell’s teams, however, were not offensively talented. During a majority of Bill’s career, the Celtics were a below to bottom of the league offense in ORTG. Some people use this as a positive to show that it was Bill Russell’s defense that created his value as one of the greatest of all time. While I believe this true, his lack of offensive prowess was a detriment to his team, but not as much as it could have been if he forced shots. The big man, unlike today, were both the defensive and offensive monsters of their era. The average center at the time was expected to be an offensive positive with his scoring which Russell was not.

Russel, as previously mentioned, makes a lot of this value back by being potentially the best defensive player of all time. Where Wilt laid more idle in wait near the post to deter shooters and block the shots that did come up, Russell was a complete disruptor. He was a master of blocking passing lanes, moving to cover up holes, and yes, blocking/deterring shots.

[ShaqAttac]

idk much about baseball but someone saw this and messaged me somethin their friend said

"I came across this and had to say something, the reason the best teams are routinely upset in baseball is because there’s a lot more variance in baseball than basketball. False equivalency if I’ve ever seen one, someone should really call him out on this"

Lol, that’s exactly the point. “More variance” is otherwise known as a higher parity environment where the best teams win a smaller percent of their games.

And I like the act here hahaha—this comment from you was apparently double hearsay from “someone” messaging you what “their friend” said.

think what u wanna think ig. i just c and p. i know football ain't like that tho.

[AEnigma]

“More variance” is otherwise known as a higher parity environment where the best teams win a smaller percent of their games.

No, variance here is essentially referring to how low scores and deeper rosters present easier opportunities for an upset. Three NHL teams have won more than sixty times across an 82-game season; none of them won the cup nor even made the Finals. NHL and MLB teams could win the same percentage and be innately far more prone to upsets than NBA teams. And it is weird you would try to drag in a baseball analogy without understanding that on a base level.

[f4p]

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.

so i finished the 2nd half and got:

Robinson - 18
Rose - 2
Duncan - 1

again, possessions where they guarded shaq even if the lakers didn't want to give shaq the ball because the defender was too good.

Total for Game

Robinson - 35
Bryant - 5
Duncan - 5
Rose - 3

so for the other poster, my original statement was that duncan was not just out there guarding shaq all day for the series. in the consideration that i can't rewatch every game from nba history before commenting, i would say the fact that the one game i see on youtube is a game where robinson guarded shaq 7x as much as duncan, the fact robinson played another 40 minutes in the series (to 34 in this game) and thus likely hoovered up at least another game's worth of guarding shaq, the fact i watched game 5 and didn't see duncan guard shaq much despite robinson's limited minutes, and the fact there are newspaper articles talking about rose and bryant at the very least sharing duties with duncan without robinson, i would say my original thought that duncan was getting significant help guarding shaq seems fairly accurate.

[lessthanjake]

“More variance” is otherwise known as a higher parity environment where the best teams win a smaller percent of their games.

No, variance here is essentially referring to how low scores and deeper rosters present easier opportunities for an upset. Three NHL teams have won more than sixty times across an eighty-two season; none of them won the cup nor even made the Finals. NHL and MLB teams could win the same percentage and be innately far more prone to upsets than NBA teams. And it is weird you would try to drag in a baseball analogy without understanding that on a base level.

Yeah, that’s beside the point. This is just you explaining some of the reasons *why* the best baseball teams lose a higher percent of their games. My point is that, holding other things constant, in a league or sport where the best teams lose a higher percent of their games, those best teams are more likely to lose in the playoffs. That’s an obvious point that should not be controversial at all. And it doesn’t matter for these purposes *why* those teams lose a higher percent of their games—obviously the reason for that will be different in baseball as opposed to a high-parity NBA environment, since the sports are completely different. And I don’t care to get into a further analysis of whether maybe some sports the best teams might win X% of their games but the distribution of who they win and lose against is different, leading to more or less uncertainty in the result of a specific matchup. The point was far more basic than that and is just essentially obviously true.

[AEnigma]

“More variance” is otherwise known as a higher parity environment where the best teams win a smaller percent of their games.

No, variance here is essentially referring to how low scores and deeper rosters present easier opportunities for an upset. Three NHL teams have won more than sixty times across an eighty-two season; none of them won the cup nor even made the Finals. NHL and MLB teams could win the same percentage and be innately far more prone to upsets than NBA teams. And it is weird you would try to drag in a baseball analogy without understanding that on a base level.

Yeah, that’s beside the point. That’s just explaining some of the reasons *why* the best baseball teams lose a higher percent of their games. My point is that in a league or sport where the best teams lose a higher percent of their games, those best teams are more likely to lose in the playoffs. It doesn’t matter for these purpose *why* those teams lose a higher percent of their games—obviously the reason for that will be different in baseball as opposed to a high-parity NBA environment, since the sports are completely different.

… No, again, it has little to do with regular season markers. An NBA team that won 65 games is more likely to win the title than an NHL team that won 65 games.

Remember that you tried to turn this into some commentary on the standard deviations of the Celtics regular seasons were irrelevant because they did not win enough games. No, it is deeply relevant. They were better than other teams and proved it by winning year after year after year after year after year after year after year after year… And in basketball, in a high pace era where Russell was playing basically every minute, that made them exceptionally insulated from upsets over the course of seven games.

[ShaqAttac]

“More variance” is otherwise known as a higher parity environment where the best teams win a smaller percent of their games.

No, variance here is essentially referring to how low scores and deeper rosters present easier opportunities for an upset. Three NHL teams have won more than sixty times across an eighty-two season; none of them won the cup nor even made the Finals. NHL and MLB teams could win the same percentage and be innately far more prone to upsets than NBA teams. And it is weird you would try to drag in a baseball analogy without understanding that on a base level.

so low scorin= more upsets and high scores = less upsets?

also if u need to cap about winnin to explain mj over duncan, should ya really be voting him over bill?

[AEnigma]

Please make more of an effort to clearly respond to a specific person when doing nested quotations.

[lessthanjake]

No, variance here is essentially referring to how low scores and deeper rosters present easier opportunities for an upset. Three NHL teams have won more than sixty times across an eighty-two season; none of them won the cup nor even made the Finals. NHL and MLB teams could win the same percentage and be innately far more prone to upsets than NBA teams. And it is weird you would try to drag in a baseball analogy without understanding that on a base level.

Yeah, that’s beside the point. That’s just explaining some of the reasons *why* the best baseball teams lose a higher percent of their games. My point is that in a league or sport where the best teams lose a higher percent of their games, those best teams are more likely to lose in the playoffs. It doesn’t matter for these purpose *why* those teams lose a higher percent of their games—obviously the reason for that will be different in baseball as opposed to a high-parity NBA environment, since the sports are completely different.

… No, again, it has little to do with regular season markers. An NBA team that won 65 games is more likely to win the title than an NHL team that won 65 games.

Remember that you tried to turn this into some commentary on the standard deviations of the Celtics regular seasons were irrelevant because they did not win enough games. No, it is deeply relevant. They were better than other teams and proved it by winning year after year after year after year after year after year after year… And in basketball, in a high pace era where Russell was playing basically every minute, that made them exceptionally insulated from upsets over the course of seven games.

See a sentence or two I edited in to my prior post before you posted this. I drew a simple analogy. I’m not concerned with all the precise differences between sports, for these purposes. The reality is that, holding other things constant (which is where the cross-sport nuances you’re identifying fall out here), the best team in an environment where the best team wins a higher percent of their games will be more likely to win in a playoffs. There’s obviously a million other nuances that get layered onto this, including whether there’s a single-game playoffs or a playoff series (and if so, how long the series’ are), whether the best teams win the same amount against everyone or always just always crush really weak teams and split with better ones or somewhere in between, the frequency of in-playoff injuries and how big an effect those have, etc. But at a base level, the point was a simple one that is pretty obvious. And it goes to a relatively minor point that, holding other things constant, how many standard deviations above the mean a team is is not going to be a better indicator of the team’s chances to win an NBA title than SRS or whatever. Those will only differ meaningfully where league parity is substantially different, and so the claim I was disagreeing with is basically that, holding everything else constant, a good team in a high-parity NBA is more likely to win than a team that had a superior SRS and won more games in a lower-parity NBA. I don’t think that that’s right.

I’d also note that you’re talking about the Celtics here, but I actually objected to it here in the context of a discussion about Duncan’s Spurs, not Russell’s Celtics. The claim made was that we should regard Duncan as having made his teams superior to Jordan’s Bulls, and this was one of the primary bases used for that argument.