Doctor MJ wrote:AEnigma wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:
Yup, these are the sort of things I was talking about - why one might choose not to hold a guy's negative effect on offense due to too much primacy against him. I'm currently going with an approach that's really based on what was actually achieved rather than who the more complete player was, but I understand others doing it differently.
To respond to your specific points:
1) The tricky part of "nobody told me not to" is when you consider a teammate who didn't need to be told. So the Hayes vs Unseld situation. If it turns out that Unseld was more valuable to the Bullets than Hayes specifically because he instinctively chose a better use of his skills, I'd chafe at ranking Hayes ahead on the grounds that he could have been the Bullets' MVP if someone had told him not to shoot so much.
Then of course there's the matter that there are all sorts of stories of Hayes being selfish and unpleasant to be around, which make it seem unrealistic that Hayes played the way he did simply because that's how coaches told him he needed to.
I say all of this not seeing it as a given that Unseld was more valuable than Hayes, and as we get to them, I'll listen to arguments comparing the two.
2) The theory of a big man camping in the mid-range rather than the low post, and thus being easier to pass to and reducing turnovers when the team passes to him, makes sense. It still leaves the question though of whether this is a wise choice of attack.
I think Aldridge does make sense to bring up given that he was not particularly inefficient by TS Add and was a focal point on good offenses. I'd feel better about Aldridge though if the Blazers actually had their best offenses with him in the era. At the time there was a question of "Yeah they're a good offense, but is the meh efficient mid-range volume scorer really something that can't be improved upon?", and I think we've since got a pretty clear answer of "Yes, it can."
Since Hayes & Thurmond were inefficient even for their own not-efficient time period, I'm not sure it makes sense to me to be try to see what they were doing on offense as a positive.
3 & 4) Regarding the cost of Wallace being able to be left alone, this is very relevant if you're considering how guys would do in the modern league - where opposing defense actually do this. As I've said, based on my current criteria, it's not particularly relevant to me, but it certainly could be for others.
When I think about this though, I tend to think about where you want guys to be placed as part of the offensive plan, and that means either a) positioned so that they can crash the boards, or b) positioned so they can hit an open 3.
If I want my big to be a Stretch 5, then I don't want Wallace...but I also don't want Hayes or Thurmond. (Aldridge would be okay, but not playing the way he did when he was an all-star.) If I want someone to crash the boards, well, then I think Wallace works pretty well.
The situation where everything is broken and my 5 happens to get the ball wide open from mid-range does make me prefer to have someone who can shoot that shot better, but I wouldn't see that as anything but a tiebreaker. I'll also say that it's not like Wallace never took and made shots from the midrange - he was the worst shooter of this bunch to be sure, but he did take these shots when it made sense. He was more likely to pass back out to the interior for a reset - which is of course what all of these guys should have done in most circumstances - but it's not that he never shot or that his form looked utterly toddler-like when he did so.
One last note:
When I think of leaving a guy unguarded, to me that's something you consider for perimeter players who can't shoot - the Tony Allens of the world. The idea isn't just that the player isn't a threat, but that there's other real estate you'd rather place your free defender, and that real estate is toward the interior.
When an offensive player wants to play on the interior, as Wallace does, the offensive concern with that is not that his man will be able to roam freely away from him, but that he and his man will clog the interior and prevent other methods of attacking the hoop. This gets back to the whole thing where if what you want is a Stretch 5, you don't want Wallace...but I don't think you want Hayes or Thurmond either.
I have gone into this about Thurmond before, but the Hayes comparison is deeply unfair. And I am not even really bothered by Hayes’s shot profile in the context of his era, but there we have a much clearer case of him not ceding shots to players who deserved shots more. This was not really the case with Thurmond.
AEnigma wrote:- The Warriors generally did not have any notable offensive improvement when Thurmond missed time.
- The bulk of Thurmond’s “bad” shot attempts came when he was, for all his inefficiency, one of the three or four best scorers on the team; when Barry or Wilt were present, his shot rate was notably lower.
- Because Thurmond played so many minutes, and specifically more minutes than anyone else on his team, Thurmond’s shot rate superficially looks higher than it actually is.
- Barry’s highest volume scoring season occurred with Thurmond in 1967.
- Barry himself was not incredibly efficient, yet ceding volume to other more efficient scorers did not produce more success than his two highest volume scoring seasons.
- When Thurmond replaced low volume Cliff Ray in Chicago, the shot rate of the other four starters maintained despite Thurmond allegedly being a shot vampire.
AEnigma wrote: Thurmond takes a lot of grief for his poor shot efficiency, and some have even unfairly maligned him as a chucker (he was not, he just played heavy minutes in a fast league). Look at those 1969 Warriors. Jeff Mullins is rightfully their leading scorer, although that year I think there around fifteen scorers I would take over him. Past Mullins, they have an inefficient Rudy LaRusso as their second option, and then by necessity Nate Thurmond is the third option. He took twenty shots a game because he played 45 minutes a game and had one competent scorer on the team.
LaRusso was not an ideal second-best scorer by any means. I am not blaming him; it is a testament to his play that he shouldered what had been unprecedented scoring load for his standards upon joining the Warriors, and ultimately they were happy to have someone take that shot volume without burning the time by doing so. But he was maybe on the fringes of the top fifty as a scorer. It is fine. If you want to say above average qualifies as competent, go ahead. But no one should look at a team and think, oh, wow, Rudy LaRusso is their second option, they are in pretty good shape.
Thurmond was fourth on that team in shot rate, and Mullins and an inefficient LaRusso were already in the top twenty for shotrate league-wide; to whom exactly should he have been sacrificing volume? Not Clyde Lee or Joe Ellis, and arguing Al Attles should have shot more is akin to arguing Don Buse should have shot more.
Thurmond is an ineffective scorer, do not get me wrong, and this is his biggest weakness relative to almost every other all-time centre. If you need Thurmond to be your third best scorer, it is pretty ugly… but man, not many teams would ever need Thurmond to handle the scoring load needed on the 1969 Warriors.
Good points in general.
Re: shot vampire. So, this is a useful way of classifying players - Carmelo Anthony comes to New York, and Amar'e Stoudemire goes from MVP candidate to post-prime in a heartbeat. I wouldn't think this is what Thurmond was doing. Rather I'd just expect that offenses at the time would think it reasonable to see a Thurmond shot as a reasonable end to a possession, and yeah, understandable to think it unfair that Thurmond took shots that others thought were reasonable.
Re: who should Thurmond be sacrificing shots for? I feel like it's more a question of where is Thurmond taking shots that are successful, where is he taking shots that aren't successful, and why is he taking the latter? Perhaps there's no major divide depending on where Thurmond took the shots, but I'd guess that he like most bigs shot the ball better when he was close to the hoop than when he was far away.
If this is the case, then it becomes a question of how successful Thurmond was when he was shooting from further away, and how that compared not only to guys who are low primacy guys, but compared to the higher primacy guys passing to the open man (Thurmond, presumably, in this case).
If we look at the '68-69 Warriors as you've pointed out, we see that of all the rotation guys Thurmond is both
a) the worst free throw shooter of the bunch
and
b) the guy missing the most FGA (granted while playing more minutes than everyone else).
Again, perhaps those FGAs were about him just being horrible from short range, but if not, then it's about Thurmond moving away from the basket to a place where he was less effective as a shooter - and less able to rebound presumably - and then passing him the ball to shoot.
I'm doing a lot of speculation here as I'm trying to be clear, and that means there's a lot of insight others might be able to give me, but at the heart of this what I see is a team's choice to LET their big man shoot from somewhere other than the interior when his efficiency probably looked best when he was in the interior.
Hence, whenever I see an inefficient shooting big man with a volume other than minimal, I tend to see it as a mistake.
All this deep diving into exactly
why Thurmond was inefficient is interesting, but in the end his value comes from his defense and his rebounding, and the question is how much value was that?
I was a bit of a Thurmond skeptic coming in, and after spending some time looking a bit deeper, I'm still not convinced.
One the one hand, there's the positives:1. He consistently anchored positive defenses for eleven seasons with the Warriors with an ever-changing cast around him - for those eleven seasons, the Warriors had an average rel Def Rtg of -1.39.
2. His missed time in 1968 and 1970 provides significant with/without samples in which he comes out looking good.
196832-19(.627) with
11-20(.355) without
197021-22(.488) with
9-30(.231) without
And in the Barry-less years - 67/68 through 71-72 - those were the only two seasons they missed the playoffs. So it does seem like some clear evidence of floor-raising ability.
On the other hand, there are the negatives:1. In the three Barry-less years when Thurmond was healthy and the team made the playoffs, they won zero playoff series, and a grand total of four playoff games. Yes, it must be said that the teams they played in those years were the 1969 Lakers, 1971 Bucks, and 1972 Bucks, so it was stiff competition.
But also, the Warriors, with much the same personnel, beat that very same Bucks team the very next year, 1973, when Barry was back, in six games.
2. And yes, the Warriors won the title as soon as Thurmond was traded away. Maybe it's not causal, maybe it's not fair, but it doesn't look great.
3. Thurmond never once led the Warriors in RS WS or WS/48. For eleven seasons. Here's who did:
74: Barry
73: Barry
72: Mullins
71: Lucas
70: Lucas
69: Mullins
68: LaRusso
67: Barry
66: Barry
65: Wilt
64: Wilt
It's understandable that Wilt and Barry would best him, but from 68-72, he really should've led at least once or twice. For comparison's sake - since these big men have mentioned in this thread - Mutombo led his teams in WS eight times, Mourning did it four times, Big Ben did it twice, and even Jermaine O'Neal did it twice.
4. If you care about longevity, Thurmond had a pretty fast decline, and despite starting his lone season in Chicago with the league's first ever quadruple double, was a disappointment to those within the organization, and his minutes were cut way down in the playoffs. In an ironic twist, he ended up losing to the very Warriors team that traded him away.
I haven't looked too closely, but it doesn't seem like his two years in Cleveland were much better.
My impression is that he was a great defender and rebounder. I see compelling evidence that he was an impactful floor raiser, but I see equally compelling evidence that he was an underwhelming ceiling raiser. On the whole, I struggle to see an argument for him over several of the other candidates.
