Baller2014 wrote:
Less possessions to score = less possessions to get assists. It's incredibly speculative that assists were counted worse back then, I've seen arguments either way, it's way too speculative to be used to alter someone's stats. His scoring would clearly drop too, a much lower pace = less possessions to score on.
3 Point line = can get his numbers on less possessions. It is pretty close to balancing out, so I dont really understand your point. Unless you think Jerry West wouldn't be able to shoot from down town, I don't understand what you think of his numbers. Do you think West couldn't break 20 points because of pace? He was one of the lead scorers of his time.
I've never seen an argument that has said that assist were counted better in the 60s than today. That would make very little sense.
I think you are grasping at straws if you think Jerry West would only average something like 3 assist per game as a point.
I don't think I saw a single list which had West over both KG and Kobe. If people want to take West's numbers literally (or even close to literally) then they should have voted him top 10 over those 2. Nobody did. I'm asking for a bit of consistency here.
This is an incredibly poor argument, that could be used against every player for every pick in the top 100. I dont understand why there needs to be an arbitrary measure of people rating West over both KG and Bryant (in which I am almost positive at least one person did). I dont even get why rating him over Bryant would mean he would go over Garnett, as Garnett and Bryant are vastly different players who are rated the way they are for very different reasons (hence the polarizing debate when they went head to head).
I can just as easily counter this point by mentioning that Oscar Robertson went in at #12, and there are plenty of people who think West is better, if not as good as him, so doesn't that mean West should have went #13?
I have no idea what being a point guard has to do with efficiency. Efficiency is efficiency. Use TS% if you like, but the fact bigs tend to score at higher efficiency is a reason they're more valuable, not a reason to scoff when they post high efficiency and say "yeh, it's high... but he's a big, it was expected he'd be efficient".
Bigs are not more valuable than smalls because they score at a higher efficiency, they are more valuable because they grab more rebounds and can protect the rim. You are isolating these stats far too much from each other, you need to look at other things to get a sense of context.
Smalls have always been more useful for offensive on average than bigs. Bigs being more efficient doesn't mean anything.
Your argument is also very black and white. You are saying that numbers are numbers, regardless of what position players play. This may be true, but you still have to take into account in how much that enhances ones team.
If a center averages 10 rebounds, and a point guard averages 9 rebounds, who is helping their team more on glass? It is the point guard by far. The average starting point guard may average 2.5 rebounds per game. That means the point guard is giving you +7.5 rebounds per game, while the center may be giving you +2 rebounds per game.
That is like saying Michael Jordan does not have Godly efficiency because he often would go below 50% from the field. You absolutely have to take into account other factors when rating efficiency. You have to take into account how the player gets those points (put backs vs set ups vs created shots), you have to look at what position they play, what type of offense they run, what their peers get (as having good or bad efficiency is
100% relative), the amount of attempts at which they shoot (higher volume generally means less efficiency). It makes no sense to literally look at their TS and say, well this guy has higher TS, he is more efficient. At that point, you could just as
so what? It doesn't translate to more impact, then it does not matter.
