RealGM 2023 Top 100 Project - #11 (Stephen Curry)

[70sFan]

How big is his longetvity edge. I think with the injuries the career value could be comparable depending on how you view harden. Idk I'd actually take 2023 KD over 2023 Harden honestly.

I have 2020 as the best year of any of the two fwiw and i think 2015, 2018, and 2019 all have cases.

He came out with better CORP number from my evaluation for what it's worth:

Kevin Durant

GOAT-level: 0
All-time: 0
MVP: 5 (2013, 2014, 2016-18)
Weak MVP: 2 (2012, 2019)
All-nba: 4 (2010, 2011, 2021, 2022)
All-star: 2 (2009, 2023)
Sub all-star: 1 (2015)
Role player: 1 (2008)

James Harden

GOAT-level: 0
All-time: 0
MVP: 3 (2018-20)
Weak MVP: 2 (2015, 2017)
All-nba: 4 (2013, 2014, 2016, 2023)
All-star: 3 (2012, 2021, 2022)
Sub all-star: 0
Role player: 2 (2010, 2011)

I can see giving Harden 2 additional MVP-level seasons (2015, 2017) but it still wouldn't make him better. I can also see giving Durant less MVP-level seasons, but I can also see giving him additional weak-MVP season (2021).

I'd easily take 2023 Harden over 2023 Durant by the way.

We probably disagree on the durant side of things then. I don't see 2013-2016 as mvp level based on the playoff performances. Similar as 2018 where he isn't anything special in the regular-season and his team underperforms in the playoffs. 2019 injury and again pretty poor rs followed by underperformance vs the rockets and the clippers so i don't even have that at weak-mvp.

2012 he has way too little responsibility outside of scoring(and is still registering more turnovers than assists somehow) and he shows in the next two playoffs that his scoring can't mantain when he's given the load of mvp-level players, so i'd probably have that at all-nba. I maybe put 2021 up to weak mvp based on bucks series but the end-result is my evaluation of durant is alot lower than yours I think. I'm not even sure i have 2017 at mvp-level because he really wasn't anything special till the finals against a not elite defense.

If I make the adjustments you described here (2013-16 weak MVP, 2018 weak MVP, 2019 all-nba, 2012 all-nba, 2021 weak mvp, 2017 weak mvp), that still would put him slightly ahead of Harden (156 vs 152.5).

[OhayoKD]

He came out with better CORP number from my evaluation for what it's worth:

Kevin Durant

GOAT-level: 0
All-time: 0
MVP: 5 (2013, 2014, 2016-18)
Weak MVP: 2 (2012, 2019)
All-nba: 4 (2010, 2011, 2021, 2022)
All-star: 2 (2009, 2023)
Sub all-star: 1 (2015)
Role player: 1 (2008)

James Harden

GOAT-level: 0
All-time: 0
MVP: 3 (2018-20)
Weak MVP: 2 (2015, 2017)
All-nba: 4 (2013, 2014, 2016, 2023)
All-star: 3 (2012, 2021, 2022)
Sub all-star: 0
Role player: 2 (2010, 2011)

I can see giving Harden 2 additional MVP-level seasons (2015, 2017) but it still wouldn't make him better. I can also see giving Durant less MVP-level seasons, but I can also see giving him additional weak-MVP season (2021).

I'd easily take 2023 Harden over 2023 Durant by the way.

We probably disagree on the durant side of things then. I don't see 2013-2016 as mvp level based on the playoff performances. Similar as 2018 where he isn't anything special in the regular-season and his team underperforms in the playoffs. 2019 injury and again pretty poor rs followed by underperformance vs the rockets and the clippers so i don't even have that at weak-mvp.

2012 he has way too little responsibility outside of scoring(and is still registering more turnovers than assists somehow) and he shows in the next two playoffs that his scoring can't mantain when he's given the load of mvp-level players, so i'd probably have that at all-nba. I maybe put 2021 up to weak mvp based on bucks series but the end-result is my evaluation of durant is alot lower than yours I think. I'm not even sure i have 2017 at mvp-level because he really wasn't anything special till the finals against a not elite defense.

If I make the adjustments you described here (2013-16 weak MVP, 2018 weak MVP, 2019 all-nba, 2012 all-nba, 2021 weak mvp, 2017 weak mvp), that still would put him slightly ahead of Harden (156 vs 152.5).

huh. impressed how fast you calculated all that. fwiw I'd probably have 2020 harden at a hypothetical in-between tier for mvp and all-time but idk if that would bridge the 4-corp gap. May need to reconsider Harden over KD then. I do try to assess things off-court as a tie-breaker but I'd need to look into if there's a clear winner there.

[One_and_Done]

Vote: Because I am having trouble deciding between Steph and Bird, I'm just going to vote for George Mikan.

Seven championships in eight seasons(if we count his NBL seasons), where, with few exceptions, he was always #1 or #2 in both points and rebounds(this seems like a crude measurement, but there's really very little data for players back then). Great relative efficiency at the beginning and solid relative efficiency throughout. The most era-relative dominant player left.

Alternate: Larry Bird(where I'm leaning for now)

I'm going to spend most of this post focusing on my nomination.

For my nomination, I'm going to nominate Charles Barkley.





This is not because I think he should be inducted just yet - I think at least the current five nominees plus Oscar should get in first - but because I absolutely think he should be championed among the pool of players being discussed beyond that(DRob, Dirk, Nash, etc). I'm probably higher on Barkley than many here, so I wanted to give him some love. In particular, I want to hone in on Barkley in relation to Karl Malone, who is also in that pool.

Malone and Barkley has long been a debate in basketball circles - arguably the two best PFs of their era(depending on how you view McHale), rivals, contrasting styles, etc. On the last Top 100, they were separated by five spots - Malone at #16 and Barkley at #21. Simply put, I object to the notion that Malone was five spots better than Barkley, or even better at all(whether that means Barkley should move up or Malone should move down is up for debate, frankly Malone was above DRob and Mikan last time too and I don't think I agree with that either).

To start with, let's stipulate that Barkley and Malone have some glaring mutual weaknesses - namely that neither one ever won a ring, neither one played much defense worth writing about, and they both have been known for falling short in the big moments(Barkley and the Suns blew a 2-0 lead over the Rockets in 1994 after stealing the first two games in Houston, and then blew a 3-1 lead over the Rockets in 95 despite having two of the remaining three games at home, while Malone missed potentially decisive FTs in Game 1 of the 97 Finals that could've allowed the Jazz to steal HCA, and also famously turned the ball over right before MJ's big shot at the end of Game 6 of the 98 Finals).

Now, for my pro-Barkley arguments.

He was one of the most efficient scorers on this list(so far) in his prime, and overall was simply a more effective scorer than Malone because of it.

Compare their rTS:

Barkley:

Code: Select all

85 +5.6
86 +7.8
87 +12.2
88 +12.7
89 +11.6
90 +12.4
91 +10.1
92 +8.1
93 +6.0
94 +3.5
95 +2.9
96 +4.3
97 +4.5
98 +4.0
99 +3.5
00 +1.1


Malone:

Code: Select all

86 -3.7
87 -0.2
88 +3.0
89 +5.5
90 +8.9
91 +6.2
92 +6.8
93 +7.6
94 +2.2
95 +4.7
96 +3.3
97 +6.4
98 +7.3
99 +6.6
00 +5.9
01 +5.4
02 +1.2
03 +1.5
04 +3.9


Barkley averages +6.9 to Malone's +4.3.

Furthermore, during Barkley's prime, he had a stretch where he posted a 10+ rTS for five consecutive seasons, which is insane. I don't see another player(that we've discussed so far) that has done that. Not Wilt, not Kareem, not MJ, not LeBron, not Steph, not Magic, not KD, not Giannis, not Jokic, etc. The closest I see is that Stockton did it four years in a row, but his volume wasn't close to Barkley's; Steph also did it three times in four years.

And he's achieving this without really shooting many threes at all. He's achieving that efficiency almost entirely off off two-point shots as a guy who is listed at 6'6' but who has long been said to be closer to 6'4'.

Those same five consecutive seasons, he shot 60+% from 2P, and again, none of the other players that have been discussed so far ever did that. The closest I've come across so far is Jokic, who is currently on a streak of three seasons.

Barkley posts a career average 185.8 TS ADD(197.8 if you omit his final injury-shortened season), compared to Malone's 153.4.

It is also worth noting that Barkley put up his offensive numbers without ever having a Stockton to set him up.

Barkley is more impressive rebounder

Barkley pulled 15.9 rebounds per 100 possessions for his career, while Malone pulled 13.9. Further, look at their career rebounding percentages:

Barkley:
ORB%: 12.5
DRB%: 23.7
TRB%: 18.2

Malone:
ORB%: 7.9
DRB%: 23.5
TRB%: 16.0

Barkley looks like a significantly better offensive rebounder, by a margin of over 4.5 percentage points, which is enough to lift his overall TRB by over 2 percentage points over Malone.

And, again, this is while being 3-5 inches(depending on which height you believe) shorter than Malone.

Barkley was pound-for-pound a GOAT-tier rebounder in addition to his crazy-efficient scoring, and I believe his prowess in that area was somewhat overshadowed by playing in the same era as Dennis Rodman. He has a clear advantage over Malone here, imo, all things considered.

Barkley was a better playoff performer

All of the numbers I've looked at so far were for RS. Let's look at some playoff numbers.

Scoring

Barkley, for his career, scored 30.0 points per 100 possessions in the PO. Malone scored 32.6 per 100. So it looks like a small advantage for Malone, until you look at TS. Barkley's career PO TS is 58.4%, compared to Malone's 52.6%. I didn't bother looking at those TS numbers relatively or adjusting for opponent or any of that, because these are two players playing in almost the same exact time frame, in the same league, etc. I feel like a nearly six-point gap in absolute career playoff TS is not insignificant. Basically, they scored at a similar rate in the playoffs, but Barkley did it much more efficiently.

Rebounding

Barkley's rebounding edge not only holds up, but grows. For his career, Barkley pulled 16.7 boards per 100 possessions in the playoffs, compared with Malone's 14.1, giving Barkley a 2.6 board advantage up from his 2.0 board RS advantage. Looking at the percentages:

Barkley:
ORB%: 12.3
DRB%: 25.3
TRB%: 18.9

Malone:
ORB%: 7.6
DRB%: 23.3
TRB%: 15.5

Barkley's 4.6% RS advantage holds nearly identical, a 4.7% PO advantage. His 0.2% RS DRB advantage jumps up to a 2.0% PO advantage, which results in his overall 2.2% RS TRB advantage jumping to a 3.4% PO advantage.

Assists-To-Turnover Ratio

For his career, Barkley recorded 5.1 assists and 3.7 turnovers per 100 possessions in the playoffs, for a 1.38-to-1 ratio.

Malone recorded 4.2 assists and 3.8 turnovers per 100 possessions in the playoffs, for a 1.11-to-1 ratio.

It may seem marginal, but it's still an edge. I'd be interested to see what other metrics like passer-rating, etc say about this, but they're behind a paywall.

Box impact stats

For his career, Barkley posted .193 WS/48 in the playoffs, including 5 seasons where he was .200 or greater.

Malone posted .140 WS/48 in the playoffs, including 2 seasons where he was .200 or greater.

For his career, Barkley posted a 6.3 BPM in the playoffs, including 9 seasons with a 6+, 6 seasons with a 7+, and 4 seasons with an 8+.

Malone posted a 4.1 BPM in the playoffs, including 5 seasons with a 6+, 2 seasons with a 7+, and none with an 8+.

Finals Performances

To finish off this section, I'll just take a quick anecdotal look at how they performed on the biggest stage(this is less important than the above since it's individual series, but still interesting to look at).

Barkley / 1993 Finals:

27.3ppg/13rpg
5.5apg/1.7 to/pg
54.4% TS(93 Bulls held opponents to 53.9% TS)
46.2mpg

Malone / 1997 Finals:

23.8ppg/10.3rpg
3.5apg/2.3 to/pg
48.5% TS(97 Bulls held opponents to 50.9%)
40.8mpg

Malone / 1998 Finals:

25ppg/10.5rpg
3.8apg/3.8 to/pg
55.3% TS(98 Bulls held opponents to 50%)
40.4mpg

So Barkley played more minutes, so the difference in raw numbers is inflated, but in one Finals, Malone had a significantly worse TS, and in the other, he turned the ball over as many times as he was credited with an assist. Also, of Malone's 5% TS above what the 98 Bulls held opponents to, nearly 3% of that is from Malone's 72.7% FG in the Game 3 42 point blowout(when the Bulls' starters played fewer minutes because they were up so much) alone.

Given the combination of rebound rate, assist/turnover ratio, and efficiency, I think an argument could be made that Barkley's finals performance was the best of the three.

Malone's advantages

It seems to me that Malone's two key advantages that people will focus on are his longevity and, relatively speaking, greater amount of team success.

Speaking to the latter first - I feel like this is sort of analogous to Duncan/Garnett, in that one player was drafted into an ideal situation, and the other was plagued with poor management for most of his prime years. Malone got Stockton and Sloan for his whole career, and then got to ring chase with Shaq, Kobe, and Phil.

In contrast, Philadelphia inexplicably traded Moses away when he still had at least 4-5 good, productive years left, and got very little back(all due respect to Cliff Robinson[no, not that Cliff Robinson] and Jeff Ruland) for him, all while Doc was heading towards retirement. Barkley was left with pretty crappy teams from 1987-1992. It's no wonder he wanted out, and the fact that those teams even got to the second round in 1990 and 1991 is a credit to him.

And then by the time he got to Houston, that team was already on the decline, and they really only had that first year of contention.

His time in Phoenix is the real black eye - even with the success of the 93 team - given the two second round losses to Houston and the blown leads both times.

But neither guy ever won it all. You're talking about three Finals appearances and six Conference Finals appearances for Malone(and really, it's two and five as a #1A option) vs one Finals appearance and two Conference Finals appearances for Barkley, with Barkley being held back by those poor Philly teams during his prime years.

I'm not inclined to give Malone a ton of extra points over Barkley for team success.

As for longevity - I've said over and over that I'm not a big longevity guy. In this case, in absolute terms, we're talking about 19 seasons vs 16 seasons. In less absolute terms, Barkley missed most of the last season, and he did decline a little more than Malone did in his later years. But while Malone has the longevity edge and deserves the credit for keeping his body in shape, I think the size of the gap is a bit overblown.

Look at Barkley's final playoff series - the 1999 first round vs the Shaq/Kobe Lakers that would win the title the following season:

23.5ppg/13.8rpg/3.8apg(with 2.0 turnovers, a nearly 2-to-1 ratio) on 57.9% TS at the age of 35.

And this is Barkley's sixteenth and final season, 1999-00, with the last two games he played(the one where he got injured, and the one he came back for at the end, he having played 7-8 minutes in each) removed:

15.9ppg/11.4rpg/3.4apg(to 2.3 turnovers) on +2.1 rTS in 33.7mpg

For comparison, here is Malone's 16th season, 2000-01:

23.2ppg/8.3rpg/4.5apg(to 3.0 turnovers) on +5.4 rTS in 35.7mpg

So Malone has an advantage, but not a giant one. Barkley still has a healthy rebounding advantage(a 6'4' 36 year old grabbing over 11 boards a game is nothing to sneeze at) and is still scoring on a healthy-if-not-great positive rTS margin.

And yes, you can say Barkley's defense was terrible at the end, but it was never good, so I don't really consider that a longevity thing.

Impact Metrics

There just aren't many for these guys, unfortunately. I concede that the RAPM and on/off we do have favors Malone, but I have to think that's because what we have is for the back ends of their careers, and given Malone's longevity edge, it shouldn't be a surprise.

The one thing in Barkley's favor here is that looking purely based on O-RAPM, Barkley still matches or tops Malone in each of his last four seasons:

2.42/5.11/6.16/4.79
vs
2.45/3.36/3.51/2.57

Looking at RAPTOR and RAPTOR WAR, Barkley has big advantages. Looking at their career averages:

Barkley:

RS Raptor: 5.60
RS War: 10.95
PO Raptor: 6.36
PO War: 1.83

Malone:

RS Raptor: 3.56
RS War: 9.50
PO Raptor: 1.41
PO War: 1.15

The PO numbers in particular seem to re-enforce my earlier position that Barkley was a better PO performer.

On the other hand, PIPM seems to favor Malone, which I don't quite understand since it's supposed to use more box stuff?

Malone career average: 13.6
Barkley career average: 11.7(12.4 without last injury season)

Conclusion

I believe Barkley's superior offensive efficiency, superior rebounding, comparable(or even marginally superior playmaking), and superior playoff numbers can make up for Malone's longevity and team success advantages; whether they are 16/17 or 21/22 or somewhere else, I very much disagree with Malone being five spots ahead of Barkley and, prime vs prime, I'd take Barkley over Malone most times.

One final thing to mention - though I know it's sort of outside the scope of this project - is Barkley's performance with the 1992 Dream Team. He was the breakout star of that Olympics.

So I nominate Charles Barkley, and hope to see a little more respect be put on him here.

How about we agree to discuss Chuck, and you nominate someone you actually think should go here? I recommend D.Rob, so next round the rest of us have someone else palatable to vote on.

[Gibson22]

He came out with better CORP number from my evaluation for what it's worth:

Kevin Durant

GOAT-level: 0
All-time: 0
MVP: 5 (2013, 2014, 2016-18)
Weak MVP: 2 (2012, 2019)
All-nba: 4 (2010, 2011, 2021, 2022)
All-star: 2 (2009, 2023)
Sub all-star: 1 (2015)
Role player: 1 (2008)

James Harden

GOAT-level: 0
All-time: 0
MVP: 3 (2018-20)
Weak MVP: 2 (2015, 2017)
All-nba: 4 (2013, 2014, 2016, 2023)
All-star: 3 (2012, 2021, 2022)
Sub all-star: 0
Role player: 2 (2010, 2011)

I can see giving Harden 2 additional MVP-level seasons (2015, 2017) but it still wouldn't make him better. I can also see giving Durant less MVP-level seasons, but I can also see giving him additional weak-MVP season (2021).

I'd easily take 2023 Harden over 2023 Durant by the way.

O.T. but can I ask how would that look for lebron?

Sure:

LeBron James

GOAT-level: 4 (2009, 2012, 2013, 2016)
All-time: 5 (2010, 2014, 2017, 2018, 2020)
MVP: 2 (2011, 2015)
Weak MVP: 1 (2008)
All-nba: 6 (2005-07, 2019, 2022, 2023)
All-star: 1 (2021)
Sub all-star: 0
Role player: 1 (2004)

There isn't somewhere where you've maybe written all of those, like, for all the players you've done this for, right?

[70sFan]

O.T. but can I ask how would that look for lebron?

Sure:

LeBron James

GOAT-level: 4 (2009, 2012, 2013, 2016)
All-time: 5 (2010, 2014, 2017, 2018, 2020)
MVP: 2 (2011, 2015)
Weak MVP: 1 (2008)
All-nba: 6 (2005-07, 2019, 2022, 2023)
All-star: 1 (2021)
Sub all-star: 0
Role player: 1 (2004)

There isn't somewhere where you've maybe written all of those, like, for all the players you've done this for, right?

I think I will at some point, but I don't have the time to do it now. I calculated these for over 70 players, to make it available I'd have to find a way to publish it in a simple way.

[OhayoKD]

Curry and Bird are all-time shooters. Bird is possibly the best shooter of the entire 80s, who provides extra spacing benefits by pulling a Forward out of the paint. Curry is the GOAT shooter. Likewise, Curry and Bird are all-time off-ball players. Bird may be the best off-ball player of the 80s. And Curry may be the GOAT off-ball player ever.

This combination of all-time shooting and movement creates open, easy scoring opportunities for scoring opportunities for teammates that doesn’t get recognized in a cursory eye test, in highlights, in basic box stats, or in all-in-one box stats.

TLDR: Bird is 80's Steph?

Yeah, alright I got some (optional)HW for you:
[url]

Watch on YouTube

;t=658s[/url]
See this iconic game from Bird?

Count for me how many times Bird moves one defender who otherwise might have stopped a score/open look(time-stamps would be appreciated) keeping in mind
-> creation typically involves completely taking out multiple defenders during a possession
-> wide-open looks(near 3/4ths of the game(4th quarter, most of 1st half) tracked we've spotted 3? overall) are easier to convert than not wide open looks

And then maybe recall a metric that gives Bird credit simply for shooting a bunch of 3's relative to era doesn't see him as a high-volume creator(even though it likes mj, loves steph, and really really loves contemporaries like magic).

And note said metric, as ltj rather fairly points out, makes no effort to account for range(further out is better)

FWIW, we do have a singular instance(14:55) where Bird draws an off-ball double in what we've looked at.

Will also note, in a lineup where everyone was a capable ball-handler/on-ball playmakers, two of whom were strong isolation scorers, and all of whom were positive to strong defenders(who played at a 45-win pace without in years they were not winning titles(89, 87/88), Bird generated...

-> nowhere near goat-offense(resonably can be argued to be sub or on par with what we've seen from Kobe depending on the lens)
-> 3 titles(kobe had 5)
-> one all-time team when the team specifically spiked defensively and was actually worse than they would later be on offense

I'll be getting more into depth regarding this but simply put: the idea that Bird was some steph-esque off-ball creator in his own time is probably miles off

80's(and extremely discount) Steph would be Reggie, who led better comparable playoff offenses to Larry(and I'm not too sure it was the help)

[MyUniBroDavis]

VOTE: Kobe Bryant
NOMINATE: Oscar Robertson
Curry is going to win this round regardless, so for the most part I will use this post partially for future readers to have access to some criticism and also to telegraph where I go with my votes after.

RK’s write-up is a good starting point. Talked about this before, but Curry’s nine postseasons plus 2021 is a meaningful longevity disadvantage to Kobe’s thirteen postseasons as a starter plus 2013. And for all this talk of how Curry probably could have played more on a worse team, I am a lot more skeptical his body could consistently handle a high minutes load. Missed nearly an entire season in 2012, missed the bulk of two postseason rounds in 2016 (immediate death sentence for many teams…), missed thirty games and a postseason round in 2018 (again, death sentence for many teams), missed thirteen games in 2019, missed effectively the entire 2020 season… missed nine games in 2021, and with no Klay, no depth, and a still evolving Wiggins, that time it did cost them the postseason… Missed eighteen games in 2022 but this time the team was back to being good enough to endure, and missed twenty-six games this past year but again the team was good enough to endure. On a random team, I think that overall becomes far more consequential than it generally has been on the Warriors when they had the rest of their core players.

[^ I will come back to this regarding one recently nominated player…]

I also think it helps Curry to play under one of the best coaching staffs in the league and off-ball of some of the smartest players in the league.

this is going to get some Curry stans mad and I don't really care, but you also need to acknowledge that his late game execution is also on the low tier out of the top 15 guys. For whatever reason he makes a lot of bonehead plays and momentum killing TOs and jacks up shots. Stamina is the biggest issue with his particular archetype imo because they're targeted by defenses. In nearly every series you're guaranteed 1 game by Steph that's an absolute dud while he was at his apex, to more of a degree than others he's compared to.

He wasn't a great finisher at all, just a high percentage one because he was picky with his spots and guys HAD to play his jumper first, second, and last. His decision making, vision, and passing ability was poor for a PG and his biggest reason for improvement in 2016 was that Kerr moved him to SG which is his natural position and gave PG duties to Draymond. He's weak on defense. His handles are extremely flashy but some of the sloppiest handles among PGs.

When Curry plays well I have to constantly hear about how none of those things are true, and through the playoffs I'm hearing the same. Then the Finals happens and as you can see in those clips all those weaknesses are front and center. Richard Jefferson just ripping those sloppy handles. Horrible shot selection and complaining about a missed non call (because it doesn't looks like JR touched him) while they get an easy bucket. Stupid behind the back passes for no reason to an open Klay. Horrible telegraphing of his passes and general PNR misplays. All series long similar things happen. In such a close game mistakes like that are directly losing the game for your team. Not getting back on defense because you want a ghost call, having very dumb turnovers and letting Kyrie get out in transition up against guys he's always gonna make the layup on, letting Richard Jefferson take your cookies because you wanted to get flashy instead of protecting the ball... And to him not attacking Kyrie and RJ, he didn't do that in 2015 (game 1) or 2017 either because Curry doesn't attack Gs in isolation commonly. That's not his game at all. He's not super athletic and he doesn't have the sharpest handles, why would he try to attack 2 guys with quick feet off the bounce? 6 games, 7 isolation buckets (not far off his regular season numbers, he averaged about 1 iso bucket a game in 2016), 3 on Kevin Love, 3 on Tristan Thompson, and 1 on Kyrie where Kyrie completely locked him up and he hit a good shot. He was "healthy" in 2015 and 2017 and didn't beat Kyrie or RJ in isolation once in 6 games and I'm willing to bet he didn't even try to do it often because why would he? He needs a screen to get separation unless it's a mismatch. Always had. I posted the numbers already he turned the ball over on about a quarter of his PNR possessions in the 2016 postseason. That was his biggest issue, bad decision making (I'm not willing to go possession to possession to count all his blown possessions in the 2016 playoffs to make 100% sure right now though - I did this for the isolations only because I knew I'd find either no or only a few isolation scores from Curry against anyone outside of Love and TT).

I can keep going but if you rewatch those games watching Curry more than you're watching Kyrie and LeBron (because it's hard to ignore LeBron having some of the best plays ever and Kyrie giving him a performance most dream their #2 could have) you'd notice exactly how bad he was at times in those games. Gravity and making the defense key in on you is cool, what's better is not coughing up the ball every few minutes, playing defense, and running the offense well. Steph in [2016 Finals] game 1 had 11 points, 6 assists, 5 turnovers, 15 shots, a -1 +/- and they still blew out the Cavs.

Personally I think a player should take a hit for having great coaching and teammates if they cover for you often. I've said for years Curry benefits so much from Kerr's offensive system, his teammates, and being able to hide on D. As such I'd always took a bit off how I felt about his seasons. This last series [2019 Finals] he wasn't able to thrive off great coaching and while he stepped up offensively (easily his best offensive series IMO considering the strength of the D he played) his defense was godawful. I'd go as far to say it's easily one of the worst defensive series I've seen from someone, it seemed like every other minute Toronto hit a wide open shot because Steph left a 40+% shooter in the corner

Primarily eye-test stuff, so take it for what it is (obviously I am quoting it because of my own moderate agreement), but despite many fan assertions to the contrary, I think it is essential to keep our assessments tied to what a player is actually doing.

Without participating in the project (or writing anything on here in a very long time), I actually tried to take a look at this.

My (incredibly rough) methodology involves looking at on court offensive ratings in both the regular season and the playoffs (per minute played) for Curry, and then weighting this vs the expectation set by Curry's opponents.

From 2015-2019 -

* Curry played 3442 minutes in the playoffs, and obviously, far more than this in the regular season.
* The On-court ORTG for the Warriors with Curry during the playoffs was 115.86 vs a 107.66 average defence (+8.2).
* In the regular season, this number was 119.99 vs a 108.40 average defence.
* Opposing team defences being only 0.74 PP100 tighter than the regular season expectation is actually quite low.

The obvious major caveat to this methodology is the presence of injuries/lineup changes, but without doing something as drastic as, say, assigning individual regular season player value (e.g. DRAPM) vs playoff minutes in every playoff series, this is probably close to as good as we'll get. And of course, we could nitpick certain things (e.g. Durant not playing the entirety of the 2019 playoffs) but then this ignores things such as Durant also missing regular season time in 2017/2018, and other opposing players missing time vs the Warriors. So, for the sake of simplicity, I'll call this even.

I haven't calculated this on a wider scale yet, but a -3.39 drop seems quite large, and also somewhat jibes with the fact that Curry has one of the larger relative TS% drops on record (from memory, a game-weighted glance took Curry from approximately +10.1 TS% to +7.3 TS% relative to the opponent) and in general, has fewer assists and points/slightly more turnovers.

So, whilst Curry still has tremendous value in the playoffs, he does appear somewhat more human in a playoff context, and the relative team efficiency follows. In fact, the opposing player for the #23 slot (CP3) actually had a 5 year span (2013-2017) underneath this methodology with a relative playoff on court ORTG of +8.73 (i.e. higher than the Warriors), albeit in clearly fewer games.

There have also been criticisms levelled at Curry for not having tremendous on court playoff ORTGs without Durant, and it kind of holds true - in 2015, his playoff ORTGs in each series were +7.9 (against a fairly poor Pelicans defence), -0.4, +3.6, +1.1, in 2016 he had +3.8 and +4.2 in his final two series (i.e. the ones where he played every game), and he had +9.3 (against a league average defence that lost Jusuf Nurkic right before the playoffs) and +3.0. Note that in 2015, the Warriors were also the #2 ranked offence in the league, and #1 in 2016. Outside of 2017, which was a simply stunning playoff run, there is a fairly strong correlation between the relative ORTG with Curry on court in the playoffs and the opponent's relative DRTG - 0.79 across 13 series. In other words, outside of 2017, the Warriors obliterated weaker defensive teams, but looked far more mortal than their regular season expectation against the stronger defensive teams with Curry on the court. Aside from 2017, that entire 5 year stretch follows the same general trend, i.e. Warriors feasting on "easier" opponents and then ranging from above average to good against the stronger opponents (I'm talking between +1 and +5 relative ORTG).

Without actually undertaking such a detailed analysis for every star player we're considering, there definitely appears to be a notable amount of evidence that Curry is clearly more human in the playoffs, and even more so against the toughest defences. And this doesn't mean that he's a playoff scrub at all - he's still fantastic, but it does mean that the individuals that aren't voting Curry in at this point, or second guessing his impact based on the playoffs... just might be onto something. The degree as to which somebody weights the playoffs vs the regular season, or how much they feel that the Curry drop-off is real, is up to them.

This is really just food for thought though, because Curry's playoffs always seem to become a talking point.

Just from memory, other stars have evidence that points to higher playoff resilience - for example, Wade's relative TS% reached +6 in his healthy playoff years from 2005-2011 (i.e. ignoring 2007) after being at +3-3.5% in the regular season, Nash/Magic had stupendous postseason offences, Paul has a clear scoring uptick (IIRC, he's at something like +6 TS% on higher volume from 2008-2017 himself), Kobe's got some great offences and increases his TS% from 2008-2010, etc.

FWIW,
I think Curry is an amazing player... but the arguments for Curry (grandiose impact, changing the game, team culture) are strong, and the arguments against Curry (durability, worse in playoffs, longevity) have merit too. Do we have to be so dismissive of the other school of thought and plummet into an online pool of rage?

i appreciate the effort but i also feel the 2015 and 2016 postseasons are more indicitive. That better defenses tend to do better vs the warriors is a bit in line with the idea that

Since currys impact is mostly derived from
Pick and roll action
Off ball movement to create breakdowns defensively
Set plays to get open shots

And defenses are more creative targetting the pick and roll, vs mostly autopilot in the RS, and analyze more plays and off ball movement to avoid breakdowns over a series. A lot of it is coaching for sure, but Curry doesn’t really go into iso against good or elite defenders that much relative to some other guys. His isos are mostly switches or misdirection/change of pace type quick hitters where he lulls a defender to sleep because they’re expecting a different action and he pulls up or just drives quickly. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if we’re talking about “okay let’s go to work” I wouldn’t have Curry at the top

My main point wasnt that currry wasnt their most important offensive player or anything, but that it shifts a bit to durant. Whereas in the RS its 70-30 curry durant, because of the nature of the playoffs its probably more 60-40, maybe even favoring durant in some matchups

Will submit a more specific Kobe compilation post in a moment.

I said teams drop against Curry I need to be cancelled lmao Jesus Christ

My current take on peak Curry is basically that as a on ball pick and roll operator he’s basically perfect except his iso scoring against strong individual defenders isn’t quite as good the rest of his game, like I wouldn’t expect him to score consistently on switches against Kawhi for example, and he’s not like a Lebron where even in a specific tough matchup they can utilize the pick and roll to score consistently regardless of whose on ball either (see 2017 finals for example).

It Lowkey is a bit of an issue, it was awhile back but it felt a big issue in 2016 was he couldn’t score on TT, even if he wasn’t at 100% it was glaring, ditto with vs some of those rockets teams.

He’s the best off ball player ever but his ability on ball is far more important even if less historic.

Curry is probably a bit overrated because of that, there are some people on the board who seem to think he had arguments as the best in the league over bron in that 2016-2020 time period and it just really isn’t even a discussion. You could pretty reasonably argue he wasn’t top 2 in 2018 and 2019 either. He’s great and a top tier offensive player ever but I feel people think Curry at his best was a completely different tier than guys like harden/Durant/Kawhi, and honestly I don’t think that’s super justified. From 2017-2019 at least 2 of those guys always had a reasonable argument over him I think (maybe not 2017 actually). I think those guys are great too, but brons the only guy that had a ton of seperation

I disagree with him not being a good finisher though he’s an amazing finisher but he’s very in control. To an extent he picks his spots well and he doesn’t finish quite as well when he’s out of control whether it be from rushing something or the defense but he rarely is out of control. of course to an extent because defenses respect his 3 so much but he probably has one of the best floaters ever and is still really great at the rim most of the time too. He’s not as good a finisher as like Kyrie though of course

On defense he’s fine but he’s 6ft3 and not too strong (stronger now) so it’s gonna be a bit worse in the playoffs, but he’s fine.




I’d put peak Kobe above in an absolute sense but I ain’t tryna make a huge Kobe post lol

[f4p]

3 sub-23 PER's in the playoffs in his 2016-2019 prime? in 3 years where he averaged 28 PER in the regular season? for an offensive player for whom scoring is a big part of what he does? that's really low by historical standards of the guys we are looking at, especially when steph was getting mentioned for the top 10.

I may have missed it at some point, so this is a genuine question, but have you ever responded to my point that teams clearly gameplan in crazier ways for Steph in the playoffs? We absolutely see cartoonish defensive schemes against him in the playoffs (as well as offensive schemes laser focused on hunting Steph in order to make him tired, in the hopes that that’ll limit his offense) that are more uncommon than in the regular season. If teams focus more on limiting you, then we’d expect it to work to at least some degree in terms of lowering your box-score numbers. But that gameplanning has consequences. For example, all those traps well behind the three-point line create lots of 4-on-3 situations for the Warriors. Trying to hunt Steph in order to make him tired has the obvious effect of leaving the rest of the team less tired. I could go on. This is why the relevant question is whether his *impact* is still great, not simply what happened to his box score numbers. And all available evidence indicates that his playoff impact is massive.

so, yes, teams do gameplan for steph. and yes, with his fairly unique brand of basketball with off-ball play and deadly 3 point shooting, the defenses they come up with will look cartoonish compared to what we're used to seeing against other players. maybe there's even a chance that they are the most cartoonish (can't say for sure, though). but i think it might just be a difference in kind, not in quality of gameplanning. other players get gameplanned for. lebron james faced a very unique defense in the 2011 finals (and sucked). i've never seen a team try harder to prevent someone from driving than that mavs team against lebron. he got a triple double in one game without even being aggressive because he would practically draw two defenders if one of his muscles twitched in the direction of the paint. the 2013 spurs tried something similar, with some effect. i've seen videos of the 2008 celtics against kobe and they seem very keyed in on him in a way a regular season defense wouldn't be. once, in a regular season game, the milwaukee bucks guarded james harden by putting his defender behind him! and in the 2020 playoffs, the lakers double-teamed harden 30+ feet from the basket constantly. and not because the rockets set a pick and they trapped. the lakers just left russell westbrook and went and doubled him with the bet that westbrook couldn't play the draymond role of going 4 vs 3 (they were correct). imagine what his 30 ppg on 66 TS% would look like in that series if he just got to cook in single coverage.

so yes, curry does get guarded in crazy ways, but it probably looks crazier because most of the guys i mentioned aren't being guarded so intensely while they don't have the ball because that's curry's biggest strength while others players biggest strengths are often what happens after they catch the ball or start driving. so we're used to seeing what defenses do against the other guys, even if the focus of the defense is just as ferocious and all 5 players are practically standing in the paint with their eyes only focused on one player.


go read AEnigma's post quoting the curry stuff from the previous project to see a lot of what i'm talking about (also, with a lot of good comments about curry's struggles and the warriors struggles against their actual better opponents, which was my point in an earlier post about how curry's biggest series, the actual competitive series, seem to be the ones where he struggles the most). but there's this quote from the previous project:

theres reason to believe currys impact as a whole is mitigated in the playoffs beyond his lower box score numbers, such as his off ball impact being lessened since at its core its about causing breakdowns which are gonna occur less with greater scouting and attention to detail, and less effective ball screening actuon which is just a given.

i think curry being worse in the playoffs is not an unreasonable expectation to have and i think it plays out. curry is not a physical freak like a lebron or MJ or a prime wade. beyond being the best shooter ever, part of what makes him so spectacular in the regular season is that you aren't ready for him. like when the warriors run started in 2015, that play where curry drives and gets cut off and then gives up the ball, but then sprints to the corner for a 3. that worked constantly. no one had ever seen it before. even in the playoffs, it basically worked. and for a lot of the 2016 regular season. but by the 2016 playoffs, teams had finally started paying attention to it.

steph has a million things that have maximized his skills that aren't based on just physically outmatching you. and that's part of everything with the warriors. so much of their success is from the motion and cuts in their offense that you can't gameplan for in the regular season but can in the playoffs. it's still really difficult, but you can pay way more attention. i think this same thing applies to someone like harden. he's a short SG who isn't that fast and can't leap that high. he dominates the regular season because he's found every loophole under the sun (fouls, stepback non-travel, etc) and maximized it in a way you can't prepare for in the regular season. but the playoffs start and you can pay attention to those things and avoid them.

whereas with lebron, you might be able to gameplan, but at the end of the day he's just bigger and faster and stronger. you can't really gameplan away massive physical advantages, you just have to work around them. but you can tell someone to stick with curry once he gives the ball up.

so yes, teams do go to amazing lengths to stop curry. sometimes his teammates even get a wide open layup out of it. but his numbers go down in the playoffs. and not just points, but shooting and the warriors offense often goes down at the same time and often looks worse against their best opponents (even if those opponents aren't the best because of defense) and sometimes they only survive thanks to injuries.

And, with Steph finishing above Draymond in AuPM/g in 6 out of their 8 playoff runs—including all the other title runs—and by quite a lot on multiple occasions, Steph would seem ahead in a playoff sample size that’s at least a little larger.

well, there seem to be other measures that have draymond ahead, especially in the 2015-19 range. considering draymond will probably be lucky to make the top 50, steph should presumably be way ahead if this is one of steph's biggest selling points.

For reference on this sort of thing, by the way, in the 6 years the Spurs went to the finals, Duncan only had the highest playoff AuPM/g on the team twice (2003 and 2007), and a teammate of his was 1st on two occasions (1999 and 2005).

no one ever really responded to it, but i tried to point this out with duncan, at least as it relates to unadjusted on/off plus/minus. duncan was literally a negative on/off guys in 3 of the spurs title runs, which seems pretty amazing (and presumably plays into him not winning AuPM/g) and something that should detract at least a little from his impact case.

And, of course, ultimately we can actually get a very good indication of “their true independent impact” by stepping back and looking at an actually considerable sample size. When we do that, we see that, in the last decade in RS+Playoff games that both players played, the Warriors’ net rating with Steph on and Draymond off was 4.92 better than it was with Draymond on and Steph off. And that goes up to 6.03 if you count all games, rather than just all games both players played. While Draymond is definitely a very impactful player, Steph is clearly the more impactful player. And the arguments otherwise basically must involve muddying the waters with stuff that is based on tiny sample sizes.

except that tiny sample size is the playoffs. it's like your argument that the warriors are secretly a sub-0.500 team without steph because of regular season "off" plus/minus but then the playoffs start and they go 9-3 but somehow we're just supposed to treat that like 12 random games from january. when we all know championship type teams can slack off in the regular season and then ramp up in the playoffs. and we even have things like gambling odds that gave the warriors massive favorite odds against a team like the 2018 spurs even though they knew steph would be out for the series. the kind of odds that only make sense if you think a team is actually really, really good. so much of the argument against steph is based on the playoffs so we can't just treat it all as a small sample if it's the thing that's most important.

This seems to be your main objection to looking at Steph’s great playoff impact profile. You seem to be arguing that impact stats must be wrong about Steph because he doesn’t really dip when he doesn’t do as well. But we’ve been over that this is just objectively not true. I previously pointed out that, when his shooting dipped in the 2021-2022 regular season, it absolutely did affect his impact—with his offensive impact being rated easily the lowest of his prime that season by various metrics (this difference was muted at least somewhat overall, since that was also his best season defensively).

in other words, the impact metrics found a way. by all evidence of both stats and just watching him play, steph didn't seem as good in 2022 and yet the defensive component rose up so much (an amazing +4.2 from 2021 in a stat like RPM) that he still managed to finish 3rd. after another first place finish in 2021 on a team that didn't make the playoffs.

And when his playoff performance dipped in 2015-2016, we find that he had his clearly worst playoffs in terms of impact metrics (for instance, his league ranking of 9th in playoff AuPM/g in those playoffs was easily his worst in the last decade). There’s really not any valid argument that impact metrics fail to catch when Steph doesn’t play as well, so this is very clearly not a reason to discount Steph’s incredible output in the playoffs in impact metrics.

well, every time i say he played worse, i tend to get a response from people (and not just you) that actually he was still just as good and impact tells us so. so is it now that he actually did fall off in impact when he looked worse in the playoffs by other measures as well?

And, leaving aside that implication, your argument really just seems come down to you saying that playoff impact metrics about Steph are not to be trusted because you think they rate Steph too highly “to [your] eye.” But that’s really not much of an argument, especially when it comes from someone who freely admits he’s a Steph Curry “hater.”

to me eye in the sense that he falls off a lot in other numbers and his team even struggles more than their regular season dominance would indicate they should, but then he doesn't seem to fall off enough in impact (again, according to others) in a way that explains both his individual regression and the +10 SRS team he's on not necessarily dominating like one and sometimes only winning because his opponent that seemed to have the upperhand would get injured.

[AEnigma]

neither one played much defense worth writing about

You did a fine job writing about Barkley’s advantage on offence — not something I think people contest too stridently — but for me this is not an especially serious starting point. Malone was an extremely strong post defender with good hands. Barkley was maybe kind-of not a huge liability when specifically positioned as a small forward.

[f4p]

So, I didn't respond to this before but I think I should.

While I totally understand why you'd term this concept "resiliency", I would object.

When an opponent commits to putting great pressure on you, it's generally the right thing to do to pass. While that pass will sometimes count for an assist, in general, when the defense commits like this, they're going to knock any holistic production assessment for an individual even though he may well be playing more valuably than if he had insisted on keeping the ball and shooting.

Resistance to adaptation which can result in decreased efficacy isn't resilience so much as stubbornness.

sure. but i also think i would be more sympathetic if steph's assists flew up and his volume went down but his TS% went up, indicating he was foregoing shot attempts in the face of tremendous defensive pressure. then i would just be penalizing him for giving up the ball. but i look at things like the first 3 games of the 2015 finals before the warriors lineup change where both the warriors and steph struggled, look at the struggle for both steph and the warriors against a non-elite defense in the 2016 cavs, look at the rockets switch-everything defense giving the warriors and steph trouble in 2018 (when healthy), look at the same defense giving steph one of his worst series ever in 2019 (with the warriors mostly surviving on KD going off individually). it feels like the warriors biggest struggles are around times when steph himself was limited, indicating to me that the two aren't unrelated and we didn't just see steph putting up lower numbers but his team still cruising.

To me you're saying here that you'd get it if Steph's numbers changed like an on-ball player's numbers would be expected to change if the defensive pressure on him compelled him to pass, but with Steph playing a distinct role where there is no such box score transition you're left feeling like Steph's just getting stopped and thus less valuable.

To which I'd say: The nature of the rover position is that anyone used to traditional box score methods of analysis will likely underrate the player's impact in such circumstances. Because if your job is to get a shot by roving, and the defensive pressure is so extreme this is prevented, it means you're not getting the ball rather than getting it and passing it. To the box score, the player looks as if he's doing nothing...but the box score is wrong. He's constantly running and distorting the defense which allows other players better opportunities, that just don't show up on his personal box score.

okay, but again i don't think we can just treat steph as some sort of non-box score player. he has regular season numbers that make hakeem look like he forgot how to play basketball. yes, teams try different things in the playoffs, but teams aren't just running 2 guys around with steph for 48 straight minutes in the playoffs while kevin durant takes wide open 3's. steph gets the ball, a lot. steph still runs the same PnR-trap-get ball to draymond for 4v3, a lot. steph could theoretically isolate almost any time he wants and i honestly think he should have done it more. maybe it's like the previous project post, and he just couldn't. even for guys who have the ball a lot, the defense isn't just directly forcing more assists and less shots. they are coming up with novel approaches to try to limit those guys, even their assists after they pass.

And so we should never expect box score data to effectively evaluate the value of a rover, and we should expect that particularly for this type of player you really can't conclude much at all analytically without impact data.

And of course, if the impact data I saw made Curry look like he really wasn't all that effective in the playoffs, I'd see things differently...but that's really not what the data says.

i just don't think the playoffs are so different for steph curry specifically that we can't look at his reduced box numbers and say that he has the same similarly poor resiliency to other guys whose numbers drop off (especially older guys for whom we'll never have impact numbers).

Beyond there's this thing where I just struggle to understand how anyone can think of these Warriors as playoff disappointments if they are taking in the entire picture. We're talking about a team that has won way more championships and playoff series compared to anyone else in the time frame, and who has also upset other teams (by standard measures, SRS, W/L, etc) more than they've been upset.

I feel like people really have run with what happened in a 3-4 loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers and let it define the foundation of their idea of Curry and the team. Oh sure people will also bring up '14-15's statistical struggles, but there we're literally talking about a team that won the championship and won at least 3 games in a row in every series - 3 times to close out the series, 1 time to go up 3-0 and basically clinch the series. If that's a critical part of the argument against them, then to me it shows how hard it is to justify the argument.

so i would say nba history says that the nba is predictable. "team with lots of talent in their primes, who all fit together" tends to be "team who wins" in most seasons. mikan won 7 of 8. russell won 11 of 13. jordan 6 of 6 or 6 of 7. magic and bird basically traded off 8 out of 9. the warriors got 3 very good players all with completely overlapping primes and then threw iggy on top of it and then threw durant on top of that. to go back to the steph/draymond synergy, not only did the warriors have that going for them, but then the 3rd member of the triumvirate, the 2nd offensive option, also happened to be one of his eras great off-ball players to fit perfectly with another off-ball player. and even iggy basically was just a mini-draymond like klay was a mini-steph, a high IQ point forward who was a generational wing defender. and they were all perfect for the new paradigm. a paradigm shift they helped usher in, but i tend to think of steph as the spark that lit the kindling that 10 years of 3-point analytics had laid on the forest floor. if you want to credit the front office, that's great, but these players could not have gotten luckier to have a better fit around them with perfectly overlapping primes. and again, they still got 3 years of kevin durant to replace their weakest position and with their biggest need in isolation scoring.

they absolutely should have wrecked the league like they did. their biggest consistent competition was lebron. yes, lebron just finished #1 in this project and was epic, but i think we can safely say, years later, that kyrie irving doesn't seem like the best winner ever and kevin love practically became obsolete the day steph launched his first 30 foot three in 2015. and they arguably got lucky to beat that team 2 out of 3 thanks to injuries. and their other big opponent was the 2018 rockets, and well, they were losing to them until chris paul got injured.

and i think if they looked more like the 90's bulls, it would be different. the bulls had one oddball 7 game series in 1992 where they dropped the hammer in game 7 and then a "last stand" 7 game series in 1998 when jordan was 35 (remember, the warriors were basically all in their primes in the 2015-19 period) but otherwise had 4 playoffs with 4 losses or less, including one where they faced 3 straight +6 SRS teams. the bulls didn't seem to escape due to injuries like the 2015 or 2018 warriors in series where steph struggled. jordan never got within 1 minute of a title with a 23/4/4 series where he had more turnovers than assists. to me, that's probably the biggest thing. it's not that the warriors didn't win, but in another life where the warriors aren't leaps and bounds ahead of everyone (some would say light years) or not benefitting from injuries, some of steph's biggest regressions (which led to team regression) are viewed as super disappointing finals or conference finals losses and i think we're having a very different conversation. we can all pretend we don't care about ringz, but "guy plays worse and his +10 SRS team loses finals" just plays differently than "guy plays worse and his +10 SRS team hangs on against injured team".

and keep in mind, larry bird won 3 titles and was on a decade-long dynasty and is considered a guy who has talents and impact beyond the box score and yet his playoff regression, which is basically based on the box score, is part of why he's basically gotten no traction to this point in the project. so this isn't just a steph-specific penalty that's being applied.

Re: Warrior struggles tend to come when Steph struggles. So 2 things I'd say here:

1. Shouldn't that tell you how central he is to the success the team has? It would be one thing if the team wasn't very successful, but when this is the team that's been the most successful of the era, if that success ends up depending on Curry, it speaks to how important he is, right?

i don't think i said he wasn't important. my pushback tends to be that the response to "steph struggles" has actually been "he really didn't because impact metrics, and also the warriors didn't struggle either". if people want to start from a "steph struggles and it causes his team to struggle" perspective, then we're closer to common ground.

I mean, I get it if you're using this as an argument for some guy in another era - I literally just voted for Magic over Curry - but I worry when it seems like people literally find Curry and the Warriors to be somehow disappointing, because to be perfectly honest, I don't know when we're going to have a team in the future have as much success as we've seen the Warriors have. While I'm bullish on the Nuggets, we could easily end up seeing the 2020s as the new 1970s where teams just can't reach dynastic levels.

sure, with load management and player empowerment and the seeming increase in important injuries, we may not get it again. but this is mostly just a front office thing, not some curry thing. curry on the hornets isn't doing this. curry with draymond and klay and durant is doing this. and just like the 1970's, it eventually ended and we got concurrent dynasties in the 80's and then the bulls in the 90's. a good draft pick here and a free agent signing there can shift the power in a league to one team, especially if all the other teams are similarly mediocre and can't rise up to challenge the new power.

2. I think this ends up going back to the fact that Kerr's offense just plain works differently from other offenses. It's a complicated machine that kicks ass once it gets into a groove, but before that happens it affects the box score of all the players in a way that you don't get with a more typical offense.

I've always maintained that stuff people tend to think is a function of Curry is really more about Kerr. We know Curry can play point guard. We know he can run the pick & roll. In an offense that just focused on that, his production would look more resilient. But Kerr wants a scheme that activates his "strength in numbers" philosophy, and the Warrior front office recognized value in that prior to his hiring specifically relating to getting more out of Klay Thompson. It then ended up paying off even more with how it allowed the emergence of Draymond Green as a playmaker.

There are downsides to this of course that go just beyond the complication that people rightly point out. It means that certain types of basketball players who are in the league really just for their bodies can't seem to fit in. On the other hand though, because NBA scouting is so focused on particular forms of body talent, the Warriors have been able to slot in guys who have something missing as a prospect into great success, and it's not even necessarily the case that they are super BBIQ guys. Gary Payton II I think really exemplifies this. This is a guy who if he had an obvious outlier BBIQ would have been a high drafted prospect, yet despite lacking this, on the Warriors he's been super valuable because of things that have everything to do with Kerr's philosophy and Curry's gravity.

yes it is unique. and partly, the warriors lack of any real offensive success before kerr should show that curry is not just a "plug and play" top 5 offense. perhaps curry would have better volume stats in a PnR heavy team, but i'm not entirely sure why it would make him more resilient. as for GPII, i guess i'm not sure what you mean. he was valuable because he provided a lot of defense and then was able to be a respectable corner 3 point shooter on a team that could give him all those open looks (obviously because of curry). james harden got ben mclemore off the nba scrap heap and gerald green off his couch and turned them into valuable role players for a while.

It's not so problematic if you talk about it one stat at a time "scoring volume resiliency" "TS% resiliency", in part because it reaches for less, but when you put it all under one umbrella and then use the term you literally penalized guys for making the right call at times.

And of course those who know me probably no where I'm going with this: I think Impact Resilience is more the thing to focus on here, both because Impact is in the end what matters, and it has no preferences as to whether a guy helps his team by volume scoring, playmaking, defense, or harder to see and quantify measures.

Now as I say this, in the context of a project like this, I'm also less interested in Resilience than I often would be. How Great you are is first and foremost about what you actually do when it matters, not by how that compares to how do other times.

so i know i brought up some of this a long time ago in maybe thread #3 or #4 and you responded with a really good post and i never got a chance to respond, but i'll bring up what i brought up then. when steph's impact seemingly always looks good, whether he plays well or not (i'll say more when i respond to DraymondGold), it makes me question the value of the numbers and whether we're not just getting some weird lineup/draymond effect in the numbers and not really impact, per se.

I appreciate you being open about your concerns here. It's absolutely worth talking through.

On the broadest level I think the thing to remember is this:

The only reason why we shouldn't take +/- data to be THE defining estimation of player value in that context is noise.
That noise is a very real and massive concern...but when you're talking about something that's "seemingly always" happening, it starts becoming very problematic to chalk it up to noise.

Now, you're using the terminology of "weird lineup effect" rather than "noise", and I think it's worth getting into what exactly that could be. It's possible that in the end we can reduce that down to un-reproducible luck, so we can look at that...but with you saying "seemingly always", to me that doesn't really fit with the concept of "luck", unless you're talking about fit as luck, which we can discuss, but which I'm on record saying I think that this is an association to be very, very cautious about.

by lineup effect, i just mean i think certain players look way more impactful in certain situations than they would in others, even if when it comes to the playoffs, a lower impact person can be just as indispensable to a team reaching its peak level of play. i'll mention steve nash again since he's the best example i can think of. steve nash joins the suns and his team wins 33 more games, he wins mvp, the suns seemingly can't do anything without him. he must be the most impactful player ever! meanwhile, his old team the mavs are like "steve who?" as they replace him with dampier and go to a finals by year 2 and win 67 the next. so is steve nash valueless or worth 33 wins? or when i look at 2022 luka having poor impact numbers but then doing what someone like me, less attuned to the impact metrics, would expect and putting up a massive volume series and knocking off a star-less 64 win team like various other superstars have done to "deep but superstar-less" teams before. even ignoring squared2020's RAPM for hakeem, i have a sneaky suspicion if we ever get RAPM data for hakeem, he won't look amazing. for whatever reason, he'll be of the archetype that can lead teams to amazing titles without looking like an impact king. i think steph is just one of those guys for whom the impact metrics outstrip his actual value.

obviously, he's still great. i mentioned this back in an earlier project thread, but we tend to only talk about the negatives of a person when we're trying to talk them down the rankings and only the positives when we're trying to talk them up the rankings. so you get situations like:

"you guys think steph is 11th? you're insane if you think he's the 11th best player ever."
"so where do you have him?"
"12th."

now i'm not quite sure i have him 12th (and he won't survive to the next round to test that theory), but he's still right there in the bird/west/curry 12-14 range.

Okay, think I'll leave it at that for now.

i can't get to the rest, so i will leave it there, too.

[SpreeS]

3 sub-23 PER's in the playoffs in his 2016-2019 prime? in 3 years where he averaged 28 PER in the regular season? for an offensive player for whom scoring is a big part of what he does? that's really low by historical standards of the guys we are looking at, especially when steph was getting mentioned for the top 10.

I may have missed it at some point, so this is a genuine question, but have you ever responded to my point that teams clearly gameplan in crazier ways for Steph in the playoffs? We absolutely see cartoonish defensive schemes against him in the playoffs (as well as offensive schemes laser focused on hunting Steph in order to make him tired, in the hopes that that’ll limit his offense) that are more uncommon than in the regular season. If teams focus more on limiting you, then we’d expect it to work to at least some degree in terms of lowering your box-score numbers. But that gameplanning has consequences. For example, all those traps well behind the three-point line create lots of 4-on-3 situations for the Warriors. Trying to hunt Steph in order to make him tired has the obvious effect of leaving the rest of the team less tired. I could go on. This is why the relevant question is whether his *impact* is still great, not simply what happened to his box score numbers. And all available evidence indicates that his playoff impact is massive.

so, yes, teams do gameplan for steph. and yes, with his fairly unique brand of basketball with off-ball play and deadly 3 point shooting, the defenses they come up with will look cartoonish compared to what we're used to seeing against other players. maybe there's even a chance that they are the most cartoonish (can't say for sure, though). but i think it might just be a difference in kind, not in quality of gameplanning. other players get gameplanned for. lebron james faced a very unique defense in the 2011 finals (and sucked). i've never seen a team try harder to prevent someone from driving than that mavs team against lebron. he got a triple double in one game without even being aggressive because he would practically draw two defenders if one of his muscles twitched in the direction of the paint. the 2013 spurs tried something similar, with some effect. i've seen videos of the 2008 celtics against kobe and they seem very keyed in on him in a way a regular season defense wouldn't be. once, in a regular season game, the milwaukee bucks guarded james harden by putting his defender behind him! and in the 2020 playoffs, the lakers double-teamed harden 30+ feet from the basket constantly. and not because the rockets set a pick and they trapped. the lakers just left russell westbrook and went and doubled him with the bet that westbrook couldn't play the draymond role of going 4 vs 3 (they were correct). imagine what his 30 ppg on 66 TS% would look like in that series if he just got to cook in single coverage.

so yes, curry does get guarded in crazy ways, but it probably looks crazier because most of the guys i mentioned aren't being guarded so intensely while they don't have the ball because that's curry's biggest strength while others players biggest strengths are often what happens after they catch the ball or start driving. so we're used to seeing what defenses do against the other guys, even if the focus of the defense is just as ferocious and all 5 players are practically standing in the paint with their eyes only focused on one player.


go read AEnigma's post quoting the curry stuff from the previous project to see a lot of what i'm talking about (also, with a lot of good comments about curry's struggles and the warriors struggles against their actual better opponents, which was my point in an earlier post about how curry's biggest series, the actual competitive series, seem to be the ones where he struggles the most). but there's this quote from the previous project:

theres reason to believe currys impact as a whole is mitigated in the playoffs beyond his lower box score numbers, such as his off ball impact being lessened since at its core its about causing breakdowns which are gonna occur less with greater scouting and attention to detail, and less effective ball screening actuon which is just a given.

i think curry being worse in the playoffs is not an unreasonable expectation to have and i think it plays out. curry is not a physical freak like a lebron or MJ or a prime wade. beyond being the best shooter ever, part of what makes him so spectacular in the regular season is that you aren't ready for him. like when the warriors run started in 2015, that play where curry drives and gets cut off and then gives up the ball, but then sprints to the corner for a 3. that worked constantly. no one had ever seen it before. even in the playoffs, it basically worked. and for a lot of the 2016 regular season. but by the 2016 playoffs, teams had finally started paying attention to it.

steph has a million things that have maximized his skills that aren't based on just physically outmatching you. and that's part of everything with the warriors. so much of their success is from the motion and cuts in their offense that you can't gameplan for in the regular season but can in the playoffs. it's still really difficult, but you can pay way more attention. i think this same thing applies to someone like harden. he's a short SG who isn't that fast and can't leap that high. he dominates the regular season because he's found every loophole under the sun (fouls, stepback non-travel, etc) and maximized it in a way you can't prepare for in the regular season. but the playoffs start and you can pay attention to those things and avoid them.

whereas with lebron, you might be able to gameplan, but at the end of the day he's just bigger and faster and stronger. you can't really gameplan away massive physical advantages, you just have to work around them. but you can tell someone to stick with curry once he gives the ball up.

so yes, teams do go to amazing lengths to stop curry. sometimes his teammates even get a wide open layup out of it. but his numbers go down in the playoffs. and not just points, but shooting and the warriors offense often goes down at the same time and often looks worse against their best opponents (even if those opponents aren't the best because of defense) and sometimes they only survive thanks to injuries.

And, with Steph finishing above Draymond in AuPM/g in 6 out of their 8 playoff runs—including all the other title runs—and by quite a lot on multiple occasions, Steph would seem ahead in a playoff sample size that’s at least a little larger.

well, there seem to be other measures that have draymond ahead, especially in the 2015-19 range. considering draymond will probably be lucky to make the top 50, steph should presumably be way ahead if this is one of steph's biggest selling points.

For reference on this sort of thing, by the way, in the 6 years the Spurs went to the finals, Duncan only had the highest playoff AuPM/g on the team twice (2003 and 2007), and a teammate of his was 1st on two occasions (1999 and 2005).

no one ever really responded to it, but i tried to point this out with duncan, at least as it relates to unadjusted on/off plus/minus. duncan was literally a negative on/off guys in 3 of the spurs title runs, which seems pretty amazing (and presumably plays into him not winning AuPM/g) and something that should detract at least a little from his impact case.

And, of course, ultimately we can actually get a very good indication of “their true independent impact” by stepping back and looking at an actually considerable sample size. When we do that, we see that, in the last decade in RS+Playoff games that both players played, the Warriors’ net rating with Steph on and Draymond off was 4.92 better than it was with Draymond on and Steph off. And that goes up to 6.03 if you count all games, rather than just all games both players played. While Draymond is definitely a very impactful player, Steph is clearly the more impactful player. And the arguments otherwise basically must involve muddying the waters with stuff that is based on tiny sample sizes.

except that tiny sample size is the playoffs. it's like your argument that the warriors are secretly a sub-0.500 team without steph because of regular season "off" plus/minus but then the playoffs start and they go 9-3 but somehow we're just supposed to treat that like 12 random games from january. when we all know championship type teams can slack off in the regular season and then ramp up in the playoffs. and we even have things like gambling odds that gave the warriors massive favorite odds against a team like the 2018 spurs even though they knew steph would be out for the series. the kind of odds that only make sense if you think a team is actually really, really good. so much of the argument against steph is based on the playoffs so we can't just treat it all as a small sample if it's the thing that's most important.

This seems to be your main objection to looking at Steph’s great playoff impact profile. You seem to be arguing that impact stats must be wrong about Steph because he doesn’t really dip when he doesn’t do as well. But we’ve been over that this is just objectively not true. I previously pointed out that, when his shooting dipped in the 2021-2022 regular season, it absolutely did affect his impact—with his offensive impact being rated easily the lowest of his prime that season by various metrics (this difference was muted at least somewhat overall, since that was also his best season defensively).

in other words, the impact metrics found a way. by all evidence of both stats and just watching him play, steph didn't seem as good in 2022 and yet the defensive component rose up so much (an amazing +4.2 from 2021 in a stat like RPM) that he still managed to finish 3rd. after another first place finish in 2021 on a team that didn't make the playoffs.

And when his playoff performance dipped in 2015-2016, we find that he had his clearly worst playoffs in terms of impact metrics (for instance, his league ranking of 9th in playoff AuPM/g in those playoffs was easily his worst in the last decade). There’s really not any valid argument that impact metrics fail to catch when Steph doesn’t play as well, so this is very clearly not a reason to discount Steph’s incredible output in the playoffs in impact metrics.

well, every time i say he played worse, i tend to get a response from people (and not just you) that actually he was still just as good and impact tells us so. so is it now that he actually did fall off in impact when he looked worse in the playoffs by other measures as well?

And, leaving aside that implication, your argument really just seems come down to you saying that playoff impact metrics about Steph are not to be trusted because you think they rate Steph too highly “to [your] eye.” But that’s really not much of an argument, especially when it comes from someone who freely admits he’s a Steph Curry “hater.”

to me eye in the sense that he falls off a lot in other numbers and his team even struggles more than their regular season dominance would indicate they should, but then he doesn't seem to fall off enough in impact (again, according to others) in a way that explains both his individual regression and the +10 SRS team he's on not necessarily dominating like one and sometimes only winning because his opponent that seemed to have the upperhand would get injured.

I agree that Curry box score numbers decrees in PO, but looking from team standpoint, GSW offense with Curry on the floor is still one of the best all time in PO. Lets compare the best PO offences (Nash/Jokic/Curry) in +/- era (1997-2023)

PO 1997-2023

Nash Ortg 113.06 rOrtg +7.54 on/off net ortg +6.97
Curry Ortg 115.52 rOrtg +6.25 on/off net ortg +9.03
Jokic Ortg 117.33 rOrtg +4.83 on/off net oortg +4.44

Nash has the best PO rOrtg in NBA history, but his team w/o him still was above league avarage +0.57. Curry team ortg w/o him is below lg avg -2.78 and he boost team offense +9.03

[DraymondGold]

Curry and Bird are all-time shooters. Bird is possibly the best shooter of the entire 80s, who provides extra spacing benefits by pulling a Forward out of the paint. Curry is the GOAT shooter. Likewise, Curry and Bird are all-time off-ball players. Bird may be the best off-ball player of the 80s. And Curry may be the GOAT off-ball player ever.

This combination of all-time shooting and movement creates open, easy scoring opportunities for scoring opportunities for teammates that doesn’t get recognized in a cursory eye test, in highlights, in basic box stats, or in all-in-one box stats.

TLDR: Bird is 80's Steph?

Yeah, alright I got some (optional)HW for you:
[url]

Watch on YouTube

;t=658s[/url]
See this iconic game from Bird?

Count for me how many times Bird moves one defender who otherwise might have stopped a score/open look(time-stamps would be appreciated) keeping in mind
-> creation typically involves completely taking out multiple defenders during a possession
-> wide-open looks(near 3/4ths of the game(4th quarter, most of 1st half) tracked we've spotted 3? overall) are easier to convert than not wide open looks

I just tracked a game where Bird generated more open shots for teammates 11 times. So I'm skeptical of this.

3 seems quite low, but a) you haven't tracked the whole game, b) you're not providing time stamps yourself so we can't check, c) it's one game, d) we don't know what the Celtics gameplan in this one game was (I've noted off ball players have numerous counters, which can prioritize other actions besides just off-ball creation of scoring opportunities for teammates).

Thinking Basketball, who's tracked Bird in great detail across far more than just one game, puts bird in the Top 10 playmakers ever (#8 in in Podcasts #23) for his combination of off ball movement and GAOT level passing. The Greatest Peaks video and his top 40 profile go into this more.

And then maybe recall a metric that gives Bird credit simply for shooting a bunch of 3's relative to era doesn't see him as a high-volume creator(even though it likes mj, loves steph, and really really loves contemporaries like magic).

And note said metric, as ltj rather fairly points out, makes no effort to account for range(further out is better)

FWIW, we do have a singular instance(14:55) where Bird draws an off-ball double in what we've looked at.

Box metrics aren't able to capture the subtlest forms of off-ball gravity and floor stretching. I've said this throughout the project, and Ben (the actual creator of these metrics) says this as well.

Will also note, in a lineup where everyone was a capable ball-handler/on-ball playmakers, two of whom were strong isolation scorers, and all of whom were positive to strong defenders(who played at a 45-win pace without in years they were not winning titles(89, 87/88), Bird generated...

-> nowhere near goat-offense(resonably can be argued to be sub or on par with what we've seen from Kobe depending on the lens)

If Bird never led an all time offense in the regular season, then neither did Magic or LeBron. To say nothing of Oscar or West or Kareem or Shaq or Jokic or Kobe. The 1988 Celtics had a better relative offensive rating than all those guys.

In the postseason, the 1990 Celtics produced a top 15 rORTG ever, higher than any Magic postseason offense or any Kareem team or any non-2001 Kobe team ever. 2001 does give credit to Kobe, but 2001 Shaq was also *far and away* more offensive help than Bird ever got. And this was at a time when the Celtics depth was completely falling apart.

Filtering out 5 game first round exits, the 1988 Celtics also produced an offense better than any non-Shaq-led Kobe team.

Taking a longer sample, the celtics were consistently near the top of the offensive rating in the regular season and the postseason throughout Bird's career, which I note in my post. These offensive results are extremely complimentary.

For someone who has supposedly taken an 'era-relative' approach, only Magic has stronger offensive results, and he did so with more offensive help. So being the 2nd best offensive *team* for a decade is very fitting of Bird being all-time great offensively (while also noting he's better than Kobe defensively).

-> 3 titles(kobe had 5)

You're free to ring count. Everyone has different criteria! I'm disinterested in doing so.

If you do want to ring count though, I"m sure you'' consider Jordan's 6 rings as a point in his favor over LeBron's 4

-> one all-time team when the team specifically spiked defensively and was actually worse than they would later be on offense

... while Bird was a better defender than Kobe ever was
... on a team whose roster was *defensively focused* (which would limit the offensive rating you're complaining about above)
... on a team whose offenses were far more *passing oriented* than scoring oriented, which is only made possible by off ball movement like Bird's... as I note in my post

I'll be getting more into depth regarding this but simply put: the idea that Bird was some steph-esque off-ball creator in his own time is probably miles off

80's(and extremely discount) Steph would be Reggie, who led better comparable playoff offenses to Larry(and I'm not too sure it was the help)

I'll end with some quotes from thinking basketball's top 40 profile, since he's done more study than both of us.

Bird: "Led some of the top offenses of all time with elite combo of scoring and creation"
"Bird was also the best off-ball forward ever, so much so that I’d classify his game as primarily off-ball. "
" All of this movement (and rebounding) created value without the ball."
"Bird was a key cog on premium defenses for much of his prime."
"His scoring and table-setting powered some of the best offenses the league had ever seen"

... and for someone who has argued that massive 2-year WOWY samples are some of the most compelling data we have (e.g. using 2010–11 Cavs change to argue LeBron over Jordan, using rookie Kareem to argue for his value)... Bird has one of the top 3 two-year WOWY samples ever. And he has far less contextual change in that timeframe than 2010 LeBron or rookie Kareem.

The single-season raw WOWY data puts Bird 9th all time, above Hakeem, Magic, Duncan, Russell, Kobe, Jordan, Wilt, Kareem. The multi-season WOWY database puts his prime above all those guys as well.

In thinking basketball's WOWYR, he notes Bird has the highest uncertainty of any player and explains why. But in other adjusted WOWY settings, like Moonbeam WOWYR data, we see Bird is clearly above both Hakeem and Kobe in league percentile.

This all seems pretty clearly *extremely complimentary* towards Bird, fitting of a candidate for a top 10 prime ever.

[f4p]

Voting
1. Kobe Bryant

Nomination:
David Robinson

Just to reiterate points from earlier, Kobe has longevity on Steph. His 2001 playoffs are at an age 2 years younger than when Steph even made the playoffs. Has absolute titles on Steph. Is amazing at actual vs expected titles, in part because so many of his titles went through good teams through 3 rounds and sometimes all 4 rounds. And he has shown playoff resiliency. He's been my top 10 gatekeeper for a while and I see no reason to change.

Wasn't sure who to nominate. Came down to Robinson or Dirk. I feel like younger Robinson in a slightly better situation maybe wins even with his playoff drop-offs. And while he has nothing like Dirk's 2011 run, that team did feel pretty optimized to that version of Dirk, with Kidd running the offense and Chandler anchoring the defense, leaving Dirk to do what he does best. Much like the Duncan Spurs seemingly left Robinson to do what he does best and he shows massive impact results during that time (but obviously without being the leader like 2011 Dirk).

[DraymondGold]

Voting
1. Kobe Bryant

Nomination:
David Robinson

Just to reiterate points from earlier, Kobe has longevity on Steph. His 2001 playoffs are at an age 2 years younger than when Steph even made the playoffs. Has absolute titles on Steph. Is amazing at actual vs expected titles, in part because so many of his titles went through good teams through 3 rounds and sometimes all 4 rounds. And he has shown playoff resiliency. He's been my top 10 gatekeeper for a while and I see no reason to change.

Wasn't sure who to nominate. Came down to Robinson or Dirk. I feel like younger Robinson in a slightly better situation maybe wins even with his playoff drop-offs. And while he has nothing like Dirk's 2011 run, that team did feel pretty optimized to that version of Dirk, with Kidd running the offense and Chandler anchoring the defense, leaving Dirk to do what he does best. Much like the Duncan Spurs seemingly left Robinson to do what he does best and he shows massive impact results during that time (but obviously without being the leader like 2011 Dirk).

Hey f4p, I find your discussion of Robinson vs Dirk interesting. I tend to agree Robinson could have absolutely won in more of his prime if he had a better fitting cast around him.

Just to get a better idea of your perspective:
-Dirk has better longevity than Robinson
-Oscar Robertson seems to be typically taken over both Dirk / David, typically because he’s considered to have a higher peak, more consistent prime, and era relative longevity isn’t too bad.

I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on why you lean Robinson here!

[AEnigma]

In the postseason, the 1990 Celtics produced a top 15 rORTG ever higher than any Magic postseason offense or any Kareem team or any non-2001 Kobe team ever.

They had (per basketball-reference’s estimates) an offensive rating 11.3 points higher than their opponent’s defensive rating across five games. The Lakers literally topped that result (with a better percentage increase) that same exact round — the difference being they won their series and consequently diluted it with additional games played.

2008 Kobe also did it in the first round by basketball-reference’s estimates, similarly with a better percentage increase. He did it again in the conference finals two years later, and that one is supported by NBA.com as well.

I would not be surprised if Bird himself has better single round results than this either way, but that is why this is a completely unserious argument to try to advocate. Were the 2003 Blazers an all-time postseason team because they outscored the 8-SRS Mavericks?

And this was at a time when the Celtics depth was completely falling apart.

??? In 1989 they were a +3 offence without Bird. And in 1992 they won five games without Bird in the playoffs (went 1-3 with him).

On that note…

For someone who has supposedly taken an 'era-relative' approach, only Magic has stronger offensive results, and he did so with more offensive help.

That 1989 Celtics result is a better result than the 1979 Lakers, the 1981 Lakers without Magic, and the 1986-1988 Lakers without Magic, as well as a much better result than any post-Magic and pre-Shaq Lakers team.

... on a team whose roster was *defensively focused* (which would limit the offensive rating you're complaining about above)
... on a team whose offenses were far more *passing oriented* than scoring oriented, which is only made possible by off ball movement like Bird's... as I note in my post

Again this is an assumption not based in much of any data. They had good defensive results in 1980-84, but in this period you are trumpeting, their only notable defensive year was the 1986 one-off with a full season of Walton.

Filtering out 5 game first round exits, the 1988 Celtics also produced an offense better than any non-Shaq-led Kobe team.

Well that is wrong, but he did seem to lead better offensive results in 1986 and 1987 than any Shaq-less Kobe team, so maybe you just made a typo.

[HeartBreakKid]

Do any blokes want to elaborate on Curry > West?

Curry was the gamebreaking, defence warping driver of GOAT offences in the modern game. West was not even the best player in a relatively amatuer league.

I mean Curry is not the best player in his league either. Jerry West has anchored the top offense before also.

Saying West was not even the best player of his time doesn't really mean much, as those players have been voted in and are generally considered superior to Curry. Big O will likely be within the same tier as Curry and West.

I think basketball fans do not really know what the term "game breaking" means. Bill Russell actually was game breaking. George Mikan probably was as well. Other than that, there aren't really players who were broken. Some dominant in untraditional ways (Shaq for example) but not to the point where they couldn't be contested.

Steph Curry influenced how others were playing (already trending that way before Curry became an MVP), but he wasn't game breaking. This was seen in the post season already where he was great but certainly not "broken".


It sounds more like your argument is that Jerry West played a long time ago, and because of that he's not that good. Which I suppose is a valid opinion, but doesn't really say much about West vs Curry.

[eminence]

Would a Robinson supporter please make their case over Karl Malone?

I see comparable RS impact metrics in prime, David looking better in lower minutes in the later years than later career Malone (approximately equaling one another out to my eye, but your mileage may very).

In Karls favor, better longevity and winning the head to head playoff matches pretty emphatically.

Robinson has being the #2 on a dominant title winner and maybe some skillset arguments?

[LukaTheGOAT]

Would a Robinson supporter please make their case over Karl Malone?

I see comparable RS impact metrics in prime, David looking better in lower minutes in the later years than later career Malone (approximately equaling one another out to my eye, but your mileage may very).

In Karls favor, better longevity and winning the head to head playoff matches pretty emphatically.

Robinson has being the #2 on a dominant title winner and maybe some skillset arguments?

On what basis are their prime RS impact metrics comparable? I'd have Robinson on a different tier from Malone.

Also would argue I would prefer neither one as a #1 option. However, Robinson's lob-threat and defense make it so he can have more impact when he has the ball less. I don't think Malone could have the kind of impact Robinson had as a 2nd guy in 99.

Robinson being a 5 who can floor-space is also a bigger advantage than Malone being a 4 who can floor-space. Robinson could play to next to non-shooting 4s, and allow them to go to work on the block, which is huge. Malone has to be a 4 ideally due to a lack of rim-protection outside of occasionally using his elbows.

[LukaTheGOAT]

I’ve talked a lot about the higher quality of modern basketball a lot throughout this project.

To my mind a fair amount changed in the NBA even between 2010 and 2011. By 2015 it had begun the process of turning into an almost different sport. In that sense, Kobe is no more of a modern player than Bird, because his entire prime happens before the changes to the league that warped it into a new sport. He was there for the introduction of the new rules that hyper-charged offenses from 2005 onwards, and he was there for the introduction of the new strong side defensive concepts which came in from 2008 onwards, but it’s notable that his prime appears to end in 2011, the same time that both concepts were adopted by a single team in the Mavericks (albeit to a limited extent).

By 2015 the Hibbert’s and Tony Allen’s of the NBA were finding they had no place, and the playstyles of inefficient Iso-kings like Melo had become untenable. I think Kobe was quite lucky his career ended when it did, as if he had been 5 years younger I think the flaws in his game would have received far more criticism; much like an elderly Kobe got over his final 2 years in the league.

This touches on something not sufficiently discussed, which is that Kobe was a terrible team mate who for a “modern” player had a play-style that was often the antithesis of today’s league. Look at him shooting his team out of the 2004 finals by refusing to pass to Shaq, because he was gunning for finals MVP. Look at his dreadful shot selection in 2008, and even 2010 where he relied on Pau to bail him out. Look at the horrid 2011 series where Dirk completely outplayed him. Kobe was a “my way or the high way” sort of guy, who caused a tonne of on-court and chemistry issues for his teams over the years with an attitude that would have seen him labelled as a cancer in today’s game. His game 7 v.s the 2006 Suns, where he deliberately refused to shoot in the 2nd half as a response to criticism that he should share the ball more, stands out as particularly Kyrie like in it’s childishness.

In order to be a player who could transcend the weaker eras of the NBA, you need to really stand out. Guys like Duncan, Hakeem, Shaq, and even Bird or D.Rob, pass this test. You can see the way Bird and D.Rob were the catalyst for the greatest team improvements in NBA history. You can see the floor raising of Duncan in 01-03, or Hakeem in 94, to lift bad teams into contender status. Then there’s Kobe. He starts getting minutes on a stacked Laker team, and in his years with Shaq we see a disturbing discrepancy. The Lakers play like a 60 win team in games Kobe misses, but Shaq plays. Invert that and Kobe is not even leading the Shaqless Lakers to 500 ball. We finally get to see Kobe without Shaq in 05-07, and it’s a disaster for his rep. He shows very limited floor raising compared to the all-time greats in discussion here. Then from 08 onwards he’s got a team so stacked they could win 50 games without him. Then his prime ends and that’s it. I walk away feeling confident that Kobe was not a great floor raiser. He was a complementary piece. Unlike a lot of complementary pieces like KG or Durant, you also need to be extra careful about how he’s deployed so he’s not a bad fit (and doesn’t feud with his team mates).

Kobe isn’t going to be in my top 20. He’s just not enough of an impact player, and that means longevity can only get him so far. Then there’s the question of how much longevity he even has. His fans only give him 10 prime years (00-10 is usually the proposed time frame, with 05 often excluded due to him supposedly being too injured). He adds some value in the other years, but he honestly doesn’t have that much longevity given the superior players he’s being compared to. Some guys like the Malones actually have more longevity than him, and KD is pretty similar.

I don't have Kobe in my top 20 (or 25) either, but to me it's a question of if Bird is top 30, or even top 50. Robinson, Duncan, Hakeem, Shaq, Dirk, etc, were all all-time greats.

You know, this board was quite ready to rebut against outsiders who claimed it was crazy that MJ wasn't #1, and that should be applauded.

But then, the fact that this take is just made passively, something that doesn't fit with the values of the other voters here, and no one outside of the person running the vote cares to make note of this.
..kind of shows that this board will only fight outlandish takes when it is about some players.

[Narigo]

Do any blokes want to elaborate on Curry > West?

Curry was the gamebreaking, defence warping driver of GOAT offences in the modern game. West was not even the best player in a relatively amatuer league.

Curry wouldn't be the best player in his 60s either with no 3 point line and no spacing in a league that had Wilt and Russell