70sFan wrote:First of all - you can't compare SRS from 14 teams league to SRS from 30 teams league. 3.32 SRS is an excellent number in much smaller league, it doesn't matter than now, with higher variance caused by bigger population, it's not nearly as impressive.
Sure, it's not a 1:1 perfect cross-era comparison tool, but it's a good metric to use for establishing a ballpark on how well certain teams dominated their in-era competition. Also, i think it's ElGee who noted that having a higher SRS in 1990 is probably more impressive than in 1971, due to it being probably more harder to achieve in a bigger league with wider talent pool.
Like, i don't find having a 0.91 SRS and a +0.5 Net Rtg. impressive in a league that has just added three new horrible expansions teams... And that's the team Kareem faced in the Finals to win his first championship... You can hop, skip & jump claiming that team defeated a defending-champion Knicks team with a crippled Willis Reed in 7 games, i still won't find that impressive relative to any era...
Bucks beat 3rd SRS Sixers, 4th SRS Lakers (without West) and 4th SRS Bulls. Not to mention that the Bullets beat champions Knicks in 1971, so looking at their RS SRS probably undersells them a bit (a lot of people will probably tell in future that James faced weak Heat team in 2020 based on SRS). They also played 3rd SRS Celtics and 1st SRS Lakers to a draw basically.
The Sixers were probably the 3rd best team in the league in 1970, yes, but come on, the league was probably in a worse state at that time than it had been in the 60's in terms of strength, let alone post merger and further into the future... only 6 out of 14 teams in the league had a positive net rating, and one of those was the Hawks barely at +0.4.
In 1971 Lakers didn't even win 50 games despite expansion and in the Playoffs they faced Milwaukee without West (their best player, and Erickson, another key rotational player)... I don't even know how they got past Chicago. Major choke job by the Bulls losing that series where everyone was shooting terribly and it still went to 7...
Well the 2020 Heat massacred the Bucks and Celtics (much better teams than the '71 Sixers) much more convincingly than the Bullets defeated the Sixers in 1971, which went to 7 games, and then another 7 game against the Knicks with Willis Reed clearly not being what he was anymore.
I don't see how 1974 Bulls were past it either - they went to the WCF in next year, almost beating champions Warriors. It was the best defensive version of this Bulls team and they won 54 games, which is thier 2nd best record in the 1970s. If this version of Bulls wasn't legit, then no version was.
They weren't a bad team, in fact, i said they were probably the best team Kareem defeated in a Playoff series when he was on the Bucks... either them or the 1970 Sixers (he had less help in 1970, fwiw), but they were horrible offensively and a good matchup for Kareem (which were most teams who didn't have a proper 7 footer at the time, due to the nature of the league).
Anyway, i'm not saying we should condemn Kareem for it, i just found it odd how the best team Kareem actually beat in the Playoffs in the 70's was a +3.1 net rtg. Chicago Bulls team... But okay, Kareem was usually losing to every team he was suppose to lose, so it's not that big of a deal... Except in 1972 against the Warriors which was a massive choke job against one of maybe two teams in the league that actually had someone who could defend Kareem in the post. And i also don't like the 1978 loss vs. Seattle... The Sonics weren't as good as they were in 1979, Kareem had a good enough cast to win but he shot .526 %TS from the floor, had more turnovers than assists and was horrible in the FT department. But ok, since i really hate 3-game series it's not as bad... Many other greats would look also far worse if we cut some of their 6 or 7-game series into 3 game sample sizes...
