RealGM Top 100 List #18

[Senior]

1. Hakeem is a better player than David so when talking about a better player at his peak that's relevant. I wasn't attempting to be tricky.

2. The point about their teams is that at best they are a wash outside of the big men, but overall the talent and coaching edge goes to the Rockets imo. The Spurs won more than 70% of the time. You can make statements about game plan or whatever but it really shouldn't be ignored. That's a massive number.

3. I have no problem with sample sizes in the playoffs in general. I do have problems trying to claim Dream outplayed David based on only one series. That is a sample size problem for me--especially in the light of their RS over a 7x larger sample. Its taking one series and defining 2 players in a way that doesnt begin to tell the story. I could make all sorts of guys look poorly in comparison if I get to cherry pick that small of a sample.

4. Again, I recognize Dream is a better player than David and that David has poor PS performance. It's why Dream is well above David in this project and my personal rankings. Im not attempting to argue Robinson > Dream. What I am stating is that David got the better of Dream when they went H2H if we take an overall look and not just focus on one series. But 32-10 suggests that some of that impact Dream was having a la Dirk was more than being matched by Robinson, at least imo.

The thing is, the championship Rockets weren't constructed until 1993, both roster and coaching wise. The first three years of the head to head (1990-1992) have a completely different Rockets team - taking on SAS with Larry Brown coaching them in 1990-first half of 1992.

Before 1993, the Rockets ran their offense through the perimeter guys such as Maxwell and Sleepy Floyd instead of Hakeem, which went as well as you might've expected. Their coach, Don Chaney essentially gave those two the green light. You can see this in their shot attempts from 1990-1992 - perimeter players have way more shots than they should with a center of Hakeem's caliber on the team.

1990 Rockets are 41-41
Hakeem - 20 FGA
Buck Johnson (SF) 12 FGA
Maxwell - 11 FGA
Mitchell Wiggins - 12 FGA
Floyd - 10 FGA
Thorpe - 12 FGA
It gets worse in the next two years

1991 Rockets are 52-30
Hakeem 17 FGA
Maxwell 15 FGA
Kenny Smith 13 FGA
Floyd 12 FGA (in 23 minutes!)
Buck Johnson 12 FGA
Thorpe 12 FGA

Maxwell and Floyd shoot 41%

1992 Rockets are 42-40
Hakeem 17 FGA
Maxwell 15 FGA (41%)
Floyd 9 FGA in 20 minutes (41%)
Jet 11 FGA
Thorpe 12 FGA

In no universe should a guy like Maxwell be taking nearly as many shots as Hakeem. This style of offense is basically the opposite of their championship years, although I would agree that the Rockets supporting cast was better than SAS in those years - Cassell, Horry, Maxwell/Thorpe in 94, Drexler in 95, Jet, Elie - all were championship caliber role players and had a still pretty good Drexler in 95.

1993 - Hakeem 20 FGA, Maxwell 12 FGA, everyone else 10 or under.
1994 - Hakeem 21 FGA, Maxwell 13 FGA, everyone else 10 or under.
1995 - Hakeem 22 FGA, Drexler 15 FGA, Maxwell 12 FGA (suspended for playoffs), everyone else 10 or under.

Now to be fair, I don't know much about the early 90s Spurs, but it seems like they have superior coaching since they have Larry Brown from 1990 to 47 games in 1992. From 1993-1995 the Rox have the better coaching with Rudy T compared to the revolving door in San Antonio.

All in all I don't think we can put *that* much stock in the RS W-L record, knowing that one player was basically held back for three years. I also don't know how much the last three years matter since the Spurs had a clearly superior team (Duncan alone makes them better) from 1999-2001 - Hakeem's team loses all 10 games between 1999 and 2001.

edit: added FGA for 1993-95

[magicmerl]

So it looks like we're unofficially in the runoff between Moses and David. Unless basically all of the Barkley supporters switch to Moses we're done here, right?

[D Nice]

Yeah, I'm really not placing a lot of value on PotY shares. Maybe I would if I had been involved in that project, but people using it as a the centerpiece of their arguments isn't all that convincing, since, yknow, it was a thread on RealGM, not a representation of anything real. I consider MVP shares much more relevant, as they were at least voted on at the time by people who had supposedly watched the players play.

For all of the maligning I did (then and now) of several of the 00's valuations I do believe RGM-POY > MVP as a representation of who the top 5 players were those seasons, sometimes significantly so.

The flaw in his analysis is that there is no measure of impact dispersal on a year-by-year basis. The reason Dirk/Wade isn't a legitamite comparison is because the '07 and '08 gaps in favor of Dirk are CHASM'S (similar to Bryant/Garnett in '09 and '10) incomparable to the other "prime-ish" years they share, and his post completely ignores the (very valuable) campaigns Dirk put together from '01-'04.

It's not so much there is anything wrong with referencing POY as there was in his analytic miss-steps in presenting the results (intentional or otherwise) the way he did.

And there is also no mention of years where the top-5 is overcrowded (like 2003), where that campaign for Dirk I have 7th but would finish around 5 in many other instances.

[ElGee]

Spoiler:

I've run the numbers and nothing shows the Spurs defense having a significant falloff in the postseason. I agree with those who have expressed doubt here that without a causal explanation, it seems strange...and it it indeed verified by the results that nothing out of the ordinary happened to the Spurs on defense in the playoffs. There is a small decline against 110+ offenses in the PS as you can see on the graph below, but that decline comprises 33 games.



There is enormous variation in ORtg -- moreso that SRS. For SRS, the 95% significant point for a 33-game sample is about 2 points in differential. The standard deviation for the Spurs DRtg in this sample was 11.1, slightly higher than the 10.6 for their SRS in the same sample. Keep in mind that they only played 53 PS games in these 6 playoffs (Robinson missed 1992), and all of their opponents had a 108 offense or better (rounded). In the PS sample, the Spurs gave up 109.0 pts/100 at -1.4 pts relative to the opponent, a slight decline from their RS performance against 108+ defenses of 108.1 pts/100 at -2.2 pts relative to the opponent. Is that statistically significant?

I did not run a formal statistical test but significance seems impossible given that the variation is higher than the variance in SRS and that difference wouldn't produce significance for an SRS sample. In short, that small decline you're seeing in the Spurs PS defense, it's likely just noise. As an example to illustrate this, the 138-132 OT loss in Robinson's rookie season to Portland cost the Spurs 5 DRtg points that postseason and 0.6 points in the 53 game sample.

And of course, even if the sample were large enough for statistical significance...look at the absolute numbers. Less than 1 point per game...hardly enough that it seems it would matter, even if somehow all of the results could be attributed to Robinson.

PS There was a 0.96 correlation in the RS between opponent RS ORtg and the DRtg of the Spurs...meaning they don't feast on bad teams or anything like that -- their relative performance is essentially constant against all teams. Their graph of the above mapped to relative DRtg has a slope of 0.003.

This is very useful overall but...how do we discern individual data-points? Are the dots (circles) 1-per-year for the playoffs and 2-per-year for the regular season? Doesn't seem clear to me.

I guess it's one of those graphs where the inferences are easy enough to draw even if the individual data points aren't. Either way, thanks for posting.

My personal pick would be Barkley, but D-Rob is a fine choice too, he seems to be the more consistent choice given project voting trends.

It's for all years 1990-1996 combined where Robinson plays. The x-axis is the opposing offensive quality. So in the regular season, you can see performance against 102, 103, 104 etc offenses, but SAS didn't play such teams in the PS. The worst offense they faced in the PS was a 107. You will see that 108, 109, etc. all have 2 dots -- one for RS and one for PS...keeping in mind PS samples are very small, which is part of the issue.

fpliii and Lorak were discussing sample size, and yes, you have to be very careful with making strong conclusions about the PS given sample size. If you have a 20-game sample, and you are looking at rebounding rates, sample size is probably not an issue. If you have a 5-game sample and you are talking about SRS, ORtg, or even individual shooting percentages, then yes, sample size is an enormous issue. At that point you're basically just looking at noise (normal perturbations) and arbitrarily making it definitive.

[ThaRegul8r]

Spoiler:

Everyone seems to be talking about this like it's offense vs. defense, but David Robinson's offense is quite clearly better than the defense of the others in consideration. This is a guy who led the league in scoring - for reference, neither Barkley nor Moses ever did this

Speaking solely for myself, this doesn't particularly mean much to me, considering he stat-padded in the last game to win it. He never came close to 71 points before or after, and it was done solely to win the scoring title, not to help his team. His teammates deserve some credit for that in aiding him:

The San Antonio Spurs are making no apologies for David Robinson's 71-point barrage that brought him his first scoring title.

Spurs coach John Lucas and his players readily acknowledged [...] that aside from trying to beat the Los Angeles Clippers [...], their goal was to help Robinson secure the scoring title.

"Everyone wanted him to get it and everybody was mad that he was passing some shots up," Lucas said. "David deserves it. Sometimes I have to push David to become selfish."

The Spurs continually fed Robinson the ball during the Spurs' 121-97 victory. Robinson is only the fourth NBA player to score 70 or more points in a game.

If Robinson's coach and teammates weren't intent on him winning the scoring title, he wouldn't have done it. It's as much a team achievement as Wilt's averaging 50 in '61-62.

Eh, citing the stat-padded final game is really minimally relevant wrt Robinson winning the scoring title, and is completely irrelevant to shutupandjam's larger point (which is that Robinson was a very good scorer and offensive player):

The stat-padding game is relevant when it resulted in the aforementioned scoring title. If the point is that Robinson was "a very good scorer and offensive player" then that should be shown. Magic Johnson is considered by this board to be the GOAT offensive player, yet he never came close to winning a scoring title.

And if someone were to hold up Robinson's winning a scoring title and Barkley never having done so as "evidence" that Robinson > Barkley on offense, I would have difficulty taking such an assertion seriously. Barkley >> Robinson offensively regardless of however many scoring titles Robinson won and Barkley didn't.

*Robinson didn't need to score 70+ in the final game to clinch the scoring title. He only needed to outscore Shaq by 4 pts in their respective final games (which were being played the same day). Shaq scored 32 pts, so DRob actually only needed 36 to be scoring champ; 71 was beyond over-kill.

We don't know whether Robinson would have scored 36 in the flow of the game or not. What we do know is that his teammates set out to win him the scoring title by helping him score as much as possible, and he never came close to that kind of scoring output before or afterwards (he scored 52 once, the previous season).

**And fwiw, it could be that Shaq and the Magic were marginally stat-padding in the final game, too, for Shaq to get those 32 pts. I admit I don't know the context or details of the Magic's final game, but they won by a whopping 29 points......and yet Shaq played 41 minutes. That seems at least marginally high for the circumstances; practicality would err toward protecting your superstar for the playoffs during a rs blow-out. That they instead chose to keep playing Shaq suggests they were somewhat mindful of the scoring title, too.

With all due respect, "could be" is not evidence. And as you admit you don't know the context nor the details of the Magic's final game, that makes the above paragraph nothing more than baseless conjecture. I don't know how one can possibly suggest anything without first posessing the pertinent facts or bothering to obtain them. I've seen too many people on internet forums run with stuff without having any facts whatsoever. It also goes to what I've said before about people being unaware of something, yet talking about it anyway.

(Not to mention the fact that Shaq >>> Robinson as a scorer. 32 points on 12-21 FG, 8-14 FT is hardly anything out of the ordinary for a scorer of Shaq's caliber.)

***Robinson was averaging 29.3 ppg going into that final game, about 0.05 ppg behind Shaq. Even if he had had an "average" game of just 29-30 points, he'd still have been <0.1 ppg away from a scoring title (which is closer than Moses or Barkley ever came).

****He scored SEVENTY-ONE POINTS!, and did so on excellent efficiency. He did admittedly have 8 turnovers, although he also had 5 assists (ast:TO ratio still better than ANY single-season ast:TO ratio of M.Malone's entire career, except for '92--->where he played limited minutes in a mere 11 games). But he otherwise scored that 71 points on .683 TS% (26 of 41 from the field with 25 FT attempts)! and they won the game. The Spurs agenda was obvious, and yet the opposing D was powerless to stop him.
Let's not pretend that you can dump the ball relentlessly to any big (or even any good offensive big) and get a 70+ performance on good efficiency.


In summation, it's a bit disingenuous to brush aside the implications of a 71-pt game on good efficiency, because most would simply be incapable of matching that under ANY circumstances.

The fact of the matter is that we don't know what other good offensive bigs could or would have done because the only offensive big in NBA history who was ever in a similar situation was Wilt in '62.

Wilt and Robinson are the two highest scoring bigs in NBA history as far as single game output is concerned, and they both had the blessing and aid of their coaches and teammates. Wilt scored 100 on 64.9% TS (36-63 FG, 28-32 FT), and Robinson scored 71 on 68.3% TS (26-41 FG, 1-2 3-Pt. FG, 18-25 FT). (Wilt did have other games of 78, 73 [twice] and 72, while Robinson's 71-point game was a complete aberration.) We have no idea what other offensive bigs could have scored if they had coaches and teammates who green lighted them to score as much as they can and did everything in their power to maximize their scoring output because they were never in that situation and/or even had the inclination. For the life of me, I don't understand how some people can say certain players were in favorable situations as far as winning championships, yet those same people are incapable of seeing how certain players are in favorable situations as far as accumulating so-called "individual" statistics.

Re: "the opposing D being powerless to stop him":

Nothing against David, he's a great player, but how can you let a guy get 71 points? I think it's ridiculous. If they want to play him the whole game, that's fine, but the way we played him, it's like we helped him. I've never seen anything like this in my career.

Furthermore, a scoring title never helped a team win anything. In NBA history, only Mikan, Kareem, Jordan and Shaq ever helped their teams win championships while also leading the league in scoring. Other posters have addressed how Robinson's flaws kept him from effectively utilizing his scoring in the postseason to help his team win, and that same year he won the scoring title he averaged 20 on 41.1 FG% and 47.1% TS in the postseason when his team could have actually used that league-leading scoring ability.

And it's further at least a little disingenuous to say that stat-padding that game won him the scoring title, when in truth there was a fair (if not even probable??) likelihood that he wins it regardless, as all he needed was a "good" (but decidedly NOT great) game against a somewhat poor defense. And frankly, if the Magic and Shaq weren't marginally stat-padding themselves, it's possible that even an "average" game would have been sufficient for Robinson to nab the scoring title.

More assertions based on conjecture. And it isn't "disingenuous" to say that stat-padding the game won Robinson the scoring title when it is factually what happened. He won the scoring title by scoring 71 on the last day of the season. "Feelings" are irrelevant.

But as far as my own criteria, I cut through all the irrelevant stuff to get down to the brass tacks of how much did a player help his team win. Scoring titles, MVPs, accolades are all irrelevant to that question. Scoring 71 in a meaningless regular season game--the last day of the season, no less, when some coaches sit their players to rest them for the playoffs--is irrelevant to helping your team win. It didn't translate to the postseason. If you want to talk about high-scoring games, how about Elgin Baylor's 61 in Game 5 of the '62 Finals that gave his team a 3-2 series lead over the three-time defending champions, pushing them to the brink of dethronement? That actually helped his team.

But as I said from the beginning, I'm only one person speaking solely for himself. There are lots of people who care a lot about those kind of things.

[Basketballefan]

Its interesting that D-Wade finished #22 in 2011 and has won 2 titles since then, yet he has received 0 support so far.

I don't get it either. I mean most of the voters were different so that got a lot to do with it.

It's possible that he will end up even lower this time. I think he should go in at 20-21 but that's just me.

His rapid decline has made a lot of people forget how good he really was IMO. Also his 2014 season ultimately ended as a failure with how bad he looked in the Finals and that's despite being given 28 games off during the RS. Some act like he was always some sort of scrub now .I am hoping for a comeback season of sorts, kind of a bounce back season Kobe had in 2013.

Edit: One thing that does bother me is when people say LeBron carried him to both the titles. I agree he was bad during the 2013 playoffs though he had an okay Finals. In 2012 he was inconsistent at times but overall he was still a solid #2. He was great to close the Pacers series, inconsistent against the Celtics but he was a solid #2 guy in the OKC series.

I agree. People act like Wade's 2012 run should do nothing for his legacy. Yes Lbj was the clear best player but he did not carry Wade, Wade averaged like 36 ppg during the last 3 games of that Indi series, if he doesn't play like that they lose in the 2nd round it's that simple. All in all for the playoffs he averaged 23 5 5 on 52-53 TS%, not great efficiency but not awful either. It's like revisionism is already starting to happen to Wade.

[ushvinder88]

Erm..how is looking at head to head a good way to measure how good players are, especially when you are comparing two players who never went head to head with each other?

The next best thing is judging him relative to his era. We do that using head-to-head playoff series against other contemporaneous stars, ideally playing the same position.

In other words, did the player dominate or struggle against the era's best competition in high-stakes games (the playoffs)?

The H2H data suggest:

1. David Robinson < Hakeem
2. David Robinson < Karl Malone
3. Moses > Kareem

The only case where Robinson > Moses is if you believe both

1. Hakeem >> Kareem

and

2. Karl Malone >> Kareem

(Remember, Kareem averaged an NBA-leading 27.1 ppg in the 1983 playoffs.)

I believe the more likely conclusion, that Moses > Robinson.

But that is just arbitrary, because that is just analyzing 1 vs 1, which holds no real barring on overall impact. All that shows is who had better isolation and better man to man defense on those plays (incredibly low sample sizes as well). You also picked three arbitrary players, and yes, they are arbitrary, I know why you picked them, but they are arbitrary none the less. Moses and Robinson played against more stars than just those guys, but you just picked the guys who are on the top 20, which is an arbitrary cut off.

Also, Hakeem would make BBQ chicken out of Moses Malone in a head to head match up regardless, that was Hakeem in his peak.

David Robinson and Karl Malone do not even play the same position, that is a mismatch.

The point you're trying to make has too many holes in it.

Really? LOL, from 1985 to 1990, Moses outscored,m outrebounded and shot a better field goal percentage against hakeem head to head. This is 30-35 year old moses vs 22-27 years old hakeem. In some of these games moses roasted dream, keep dreming pal.

[D Nice]

Spoiler:

I've run the numbers and nothing shows the Spurs defense having a significant falloff in the postseason. I agree with those who have expressed doubt here that without a causal explanation, it seems strange...and it it indeed verified by the results that nothing out of the ordinary happened to the Spurs on defense in the playoffs. There is a small decline against 110+ offenses in the PS as you can see on the graph below, but that decline comprises 33 games.



There is enormous variation in ORtg -- moreso that SRS. For SRS, the 95% significant point for a 33-game sample is about 2 points in differential. The standard deviation for the Spurs DRtg in this sample was 11.1, slightly higher than the 10.6 for their SRS in the same sample. Keep in mind that they only played 53 PS games in these 6 playoffs (Robinson missed 1992), and all of their opponents had a 108 offense or better (rounded). In the PS sample, the Spurs gave up 109.0 pts/100 at -1.4 pts relative to the opponent, a slight decline from their RS performance against 108+ defenses of 108.1 pts/100 at -2.2 pts relative to the opponent. Is that statistically significant?

I did not run a formal statistical test but significance seems impossible given that the variation is higher than the variance in SRS and that difference wouldn't produce significance for an SRS sample. In short, that small decline you're seeing in the Spurs PS defense, it's likely just noise. As an example to illustrate this, the 138-132 OT loss in Robinson's rookie season to Portland cost the Spurs 5 DRtg points that postseason and 0.6 points in the 53 game sample.

And of course, even if the sample were large enough for statistical significance...look at the absolute numbers. Less than 1 point per game...hardly enough that it seems it would matter, even if somehow all of the results could be attributed to Robinson.

PS There was a 0.96 correlation in the RS between opponent RS ORtg and the DRtg of the Spurs...meaning they don't feast on bad teams or anything like that -- their relative performance is essentially constant against all teams. Their graph of the above mapped to relative DRtg has a slope of 0.003.

This is very useful overall but...how do we discern individual data-points? Are the dots (circles) 1-per-year for the playoffs and 2-per-year for the regular season? Doesn't seem clear to me.

I guess it's one of those graphs where the inferences are easy enough to draw even if the individual data points aren't. Either way, thanks for posting.

My personal pick would be Barkley, but D-Rob is a fine choice too, he seems to be the more consistent choice given project voting trends.

Spoiler:

It's for all years 1990-1996 combined where Robinson plays. The x-axis is the opposing offensive quality. So in the regular season, you can see performance against 102, 103, 104 etc offenses, but SAS didn't play such teams in the PS. The worst offense they faced in the PS was a 107. You will see that 108, 109, etc. all have 2 dots -- one for RS and one for PS...keeping in mind PS samples are very small, which is part of the issue.

fpliii and Lorak were discussing sample size, and yes, you have to be very careful with making strong conclusions about the PS given sample size. If you have a 20-game sample, and you are looking at rebounding rates, sample size is probably not an issue. If you have a 5-game sample and you are talking about SRS, ORtg, or even individual shooting percentages, then yes, sample size is an enormous issue. At that point you're basically just looking at noise (normal perturbations) and arbitrarily making it definitive

Ah its a 7-year aggregation with no intra-year labeling, gotcha, thanks for explaining. I probably could have gleaned this if I read the surrounding discussion more carefully but thanks for elaborating.

Still, next time you do a graph like this, even if you don't have room on the axis, I'd use a thin vertical line (dotted or bolded) just to separate the year-by-year info for sake of clarity/posterity.

[HeartBreakKid]

The next best thing is judging him relative to his era. We do that using head-to-head playoff series against other contemporaneous stars, ideally playing the same position.

In other words, did the player dominate or struggle against the era's best competition in high-stakes games (the playoffs)?

The H2H data suggest:

1. David Robinson < Hakeem
2. David Robinson < Karl Malone
3. Moses > Kareem

The only case where Robinson > Moses is if you believe both

1. Hakeem >> Kareem

and

2. Karl Malone >> Kareem

(Remember, Kareem averaged an NBA-leading 27.1 ppg in the 1983 playoffs.)

I believe the more likely conclusion, that Moses > Robinson.

But that is just arbitrary, because that is just analyzing 1 vs 1, which holds no real barring on overall impact. All that shows is who had better isolation and better man to man defense on those plays (incredibly low sample sizes as well). You also picked three arbitrary players, and yes, they are arbitrary, I know why you picked them, but they are arbitrary none the less. Moses and Robinson played against more stars than just those guys, but you just picked the guys who are on the top 20, which is an arbitrary cut off.

Also, Hakeem would make BBQ chicken out of Moses Malone in a head to head match up regardless, that was Hakeem in his peak.

David Robinson and Karl Malone do not even play the same position, that is a mismatch.

The point you're trying to make has too many holes in it.

Really? LOL, from 1985 to 1990, Moses outscored,m outrebounded and shot a better field goal percentage against hakeem head to head. This is 30-35 year old moses vs 22-27 years old hakeem. In some of these games moses roasted dream, keep dreming pal.

So in other words not the same version of Hakeem that we're talking about? Keep "dreming" pal that Moses Malone is better than Olajuwon.

[ushvinder88]

But that is just arbitrary, because that is just analyzing 1 vs 1, which holds no real barring on overall impact. All that shows is who had better isolation and better man to man defense on those plays (incredibly low sample sizes as well). You also picked three arbitrary players, and yes, they are arbitrary, I know why you picked them, but they are arbitrary none the less. Moses and Robinson played against more stars than just those guys, but you just picked the guys who are on the top 20, which is an arbitrary cut off.

Also, Hakeem would make BBQ chicken out of Moses Malone in a head to head match up regardless, that was Hakeem in his peak.

David Robinson and Karl Malone do not even play the same position, that is a mismatch.

The point you're trying to make has too many holes in it.

Really? LOL, from 1985 to 1990, Moses outscored,m outrebounded and shot a better field goal percentage against hakeem head to head. This is 30-35 year old moses vs 22-27 years old hakeem. In some of these games moses roasted dream, keep dreming pal.

So in other words not the same version of Hakeem that we're talking about? Keep "dreming" pal that Moses Malone is better than Olajuwon.

So your just going to disregard the fact that hakeem was 22-27 and moses was well past his prime well too bad. There were head to head meetings between 86-89 where moses roasted olajuwon. Unlike david, moses himself is an excellent low post scorer, except hes also much stronger than hakeem and would bully him in the paint and get his points, just like he did when he roasted hakeem in november of 86. A mid 30s moses outplays a mid 20s hakeem, but peak olajuwon would tool peak moses despite giving up huge strength advantage and the fact that moses was thrashing kareem from 78-83, not buying it.

[E-Balla]

People asked about Robinson vs Ewing:

To be honest the debate confuses me. Every one knows that if we went simply by regular season Robinson tops not only Ewing but Olajuwon, so the argument against Robinson is the playoffs. And people then take that, link that with Robinson's style, and seem to come to conclusions that he's not a "true" big.

But if you look at playoff stats, Robinson still has a pretty big edge in the playoffs. .

Ewing had a playoff PER north of 22 once, Robinson did it 9 times.

Well that's offensively and it doesn't account for Robinson killing bad teams while underperforming against good teams. In 90 and 91 he was great in elimination. In 92 he missed the playoffs. In 93 he was fine but immediately after that you have 94 (19/9, 41%), 95 (24/11, 44%, killed by Hakeem), 96 (19/9, 47%), and 98 (19/13, 39%). He never played great defenses in the playoffs before these defenses were making him look very bad (he also had a better offensive supporting cast).

Ewing on the other hand has 1990 against Detroit (27/10, 47%), 91 against Chicago he was bad, 92 he played very good against Chicago (20/10, 47%), in 93 against Chicago he was amazing (26/11, 53%), 94 has been talked about ad nauseum but Pat was great against a very good Chicago defense (23/12, 53%) and he played great defense along with terrible offense in the Finals, in 95 they played Indy and fell one layup short (19/9, 53%), in 96 they played the GOAT Chicago squad (23/11, 47%), and in 97 they played the top ranked Miami defense (24/11, 49%).

Looking at that I'd take Ewing in the 90 playoffs over any Robinson season and Ewing in the playoffs every year over Robinson in the playoffs from 92-98. In that stretch of 7 seasons Robinson only played well once (in 93). Pat can at least say he has more than 3 great postseason performances.

All the normal disclaimers apply about PER not being a perfect stat, but for anyone who was thinking "yeah, but Robinson falls off in the playoffs", eliminate that from your rationale. Statistically there's basically no comparison between the two ever except for that one seasons ('89-90).

I'd say Pat is over Robinson in 90, 92, 96, and 97. That's 4 out of the 8 years they both played in their primes. That is before considering the level of opponents the two had (Pat played a ton of top 10 defenses in these seasons and Robinson played 3 while playing horribly 2 of those 3 times).

So then the question becomes, is there really something that can push Ewing over the top is you DON"T start with the assumption that Robinson's so suspect that you should ignore his general performance?

Some might be thinking of how good the Ewing Knicks were at defense, and that's cool, but there's zero doubt that Robinson was capable of huge defensive impact.

Huge defensive impact sure but we have no idea how much more impactful he could've been than Ewing (or less impactful). I do know that man to man he's not going to be as good as Pat and that Pat successfully led the greatest post Russell defenses mainly due to his ability to guard the great centers of the 90's mostly one on one (rewatch the 94 Finals and notice how little Hakeem was doubled).

I know people tend to focus on the Hakeem series, but I think people tend to focus on the individual stats rather than the team performance too much given that the Spurs made a choice to play the Rockets as they did rather than swarm Olajuwon at all times. Take a look at the ORtgs of Houston in the series they played that year:

1st - 120.6
WCSF - 115.9
WCF - 110.6
Finals - 117.1

The Spurs were the only team to hold Houston under GOAT-ish levels.

Now, I would still expect Ewing's Knicks to do an even better job because it was a stellar team offense - and Ewing was certainly a big part of it - but the notion that Robinson was exposed in that series as RS only defender is silly. That Rocket team caught fire, frankly more than they ever did the previous year.

The Rockets catching fire is not saying much to me considering the reason they lost was that Hakeem dominated Robinson and that the Rockets only played one above average defense in 95 (the Jazz - who had possibly the worst centers in the league) outside of Robinson (the Magic were 13th and the Suns 19th out of 27). Against the Knicks Houston had a 100.1 ORTG and Hakeem individually had his worst series in his peak offensively (before considering who he was up against).

And it wasn't just Hakeem but also Zo. As a rookie Pat held him to 20 pp36 down from his regular season 22 average and 52TS/98ORTG down from 59TS/112ORTG. In his first Miami campaign he held him to 19 pp36 down from 20 and 50TS/90ORTG down from 58TS/106ORTG.

[E-Balla]

Spoiler:

I've run the numbers and nothing shows the Spurs defense having a significant falloff in the postseason. I agree with those who have expressed doubt here that without a causal explanation, it seems strange...and it it indeed verified by the results that nothing out of the ordinary happened to the Spurs on defense in the playoffs. There is a small decline against 110+ offenses in the PS as you can see on the graph below, but that decline comprises 33 games.



There is enormous variation in ORtg -- moreso that SRS. For SRS, the 95% significant point for a 33-game sample is about 2 points in differential. The standard deviation for the Spurs DRtg in this sample was 11.1, slightly higher than the 10.6 for their SRS in the same sample. Keep in mind that they only played 53 PS games in these 6 playoffs (Robinson missed 1992), and all of their opponents had a 108 offense or better (rounded). In the PS sample, the Spurs gave up 109.0 pts/100 at -1.4 pts relative to the opponent, a slight decline from their RS performance against 108+ defenses of 108.1 pts/100 at -2.2 pts relative to the opponent. Is that statistically significant?

I did not run a formal statistical test but significance seems impossible given that the variation is higher than the variance in SRS and that difference wouldn't produce significance for an SRS sample. In short, that small decline you're seeing in the Spurs PS defense, it's likely just noise. As an example to illustrate this, the 138-132 OT loss in Robinson's rookie season to Portland cost the Spurs 5 DRtg points that postseason and 0.6 points in the 53 game sample.

And of course, even if the sample were large enough for statistical significance...look at the absolute numbers. Less than 1 point per game...hardly enough that it seems it would matter, even if somehow all of the results could be attributed to Robinson.

PS There was a 0.96 correlation in the RS between opponent RS ORtg and the DRtg of the Spurs...meaning they don't feast on bad teams or anything like that -- their relative performance is essentially constant against all teams. Their graph of the above mapped to relative DRtg has a slope of 0.003.

This is very useful overall but...how do we discern individual data-points? Are the dots (circles) 1-per-year for the playoffs and 2-per-year for the regular season? Doesn't seem clear to me.

I guess it's one of those graphs where the inferences are easy enough to draw even if the individual data points aren't. Either way, thanks for posting.

My personal pick would be Barkley, but D-Rob is a fine choice too, he seems to be the more consistent choice given project voting trends.

It's for all years 1990-1996 combined where Robinson plays. The x-axis is the opposing offensive quality. So in the regular season, you can see performance against 102, 103, 104 etc offenses, but SAS didn't play such teams in the PS. The worst offense they faced in the PS was a 107. You will see that 108, 109, etc. all have 2 dots -- one for RS and one for PS...keeping in mind PS samples are very small, which is part of the issue.

fpliii and Lorak were discussing sample size, and yes, you have to be very careful with making strong conclusions about the PS given sample size. If you have a 20-game sample, and you are looking at rebounding rates, sample size is probably not an issue. If you have a 5-game sample and you are talking about SRS, ORtg, or even individual shooting percentages, then yes, sample size is an enormous issue. At that point you're basically just looking at noise (normal perturbations) and arbitrarily making it definitive.

Great information but we don't really have it for any other player to make conclusions. What if Moses led teams held teams to -3 or if Ewing's teams held them to -5?

Plus there's the whole team accomplishment not individual accomplishment thing.

[trex_8063]

Eh, citing the stat-padded final game is really minimally relevant wrt Robinson winning the scoring title, and is completely irrelevant to shutupandjam's larger point (which is that Robinson was a very good scorer and offensive player):

The stat-padding game is relevant when it resulted in the aforementioned scoring title.

Again, point I made was that them stat-padding (which they certainly did) wasn't necessarily even required to enable him to win it. Do I know he'd have scored 36+ without his teammates gunning for him? Of course not. But you seem to be asserting (correct me if I'm wrong) that he only got it because they stat-padded. When, in fact, it is entirely possible he'd have won it anyway.

If the point is that Robinson was "a very good scorer and offensive player" then that should be shown.

You mean shutupandjam should have made that clear? I thought he did; and I quote: ".....David Robinson's offense is quite clearly better than the defense of the others in consideration.....". That's the point he was fairly clearly trying to drive home: Robinson's offense was better than the defense of Barkley or Malone. He mentions the scoring title almost as an after-thought, as a quick-reference bit of evidence for his former assertion.

And if someone were to hold up Robinson's winning a scoring title and Barkley never having done so as "evidence" that Robinson > Barkley on offense, I would have difficulty taking such an assertion seriously. Barkley >> Robinson offensively regardless of however many scoring titles Robinson won and Barkley didn't.

I don't think anyone is trying to claim Robinson is a better offensive player than Barkley. I don't wish to speak for him, but I'm fairly certain shutupandjam invoked Barkley's name in relation to scoring titles (or lack thereof) as means of simply saying, "Look: it's not any old player that wins a scoring title. Even some of the GOAT-level scorers (like Barkley) sometimes don't win scoring titles."

*Robinson didn't need to score 70+ in the final game to clinch the scoring title. He only needed to outscore Shaq by 4 pts in their respective final games (which were being played the same day). Shaq scored 32 pts, so DRob actually only needed 36 to be scoring champ; 71 was beyond over-kill.

We don't know whether Robinson would have scored 36 in the flow of the game or not. What we do know is that his teammates set out to win him the scoring title by helping him score as much as possible, and he never came close to that kind of scoring output before or afterwards (he scored 52 once, the previous season).

Fair point already acknowledged: A) his team stat padded (true) and B) he won the scoring title (true). It's the direct cause/effect angle (or at least the absolute necessity of "A" in order to get "B") that I question.

**And fwiw, it could be that Shaq and the Magic were marginally stat-padding in the final game, too, for Shaq to get those 32 pts. I admit I don't know the context or details of the Magic's final game, but they won by a whopping 29 points......and yet Shaq played 41 minutes. That seems at least marginally high for the circumstances; practicality would err toward protecting your superstar for the playoffs during a rs blow-out. That they instead chose to keep playing Shaq suggests they were somewhat mindful of the scoring title, too.

With all due respect, "could be" is not evidence. And as you admit you don't know the context nor the details of the Magic's final game, that makes the above paragraph nothing more than baseless conjecture. I don't know how one can possibly suggest anything without first posessing the pertinent facts or bothering to obtain them. I've seen too many people on internet forums run with stuff without having any facts whatsoever. It also goes to what I've said before about people being unaware of something, yet talking about it anyway.

Oh jeez, you caught me.
Seriously though: what's a potential reasonable context that would require 41 minutes of your superstar in a 29-point blow-out (up by 16 after three quarters)? I'll allow there could be some oddities where it's justified, but come on......you'd have to admit they're somewhat few and far between. And particularly when considering this fact: the game meant NOTHING to the Magic. They could have lost, it would not have changed their seeding (or any seeding in the Eastern Conference) or any HCA situation at all.
It's fishy. Yes, this is pure conjecture; but I'm not exactly pulling this out of thin air.

***Robinson was averaging 29.3 ppg going into that final game, about 0.05 ppg behind Shaq. Even if he had had an "average" game of just 29-30 points, he'd still have been <0.1 ppg away from a scoring title (which is closer than Moses or Barkley ever came).

****He scored SEVENTY-ONE POINTS!, and did so on excellent efficiency. He did admittedly have 8 turnovers, although he also had 5 assists (ast:TO ratio still better than ANY single-season ast:TO ratio of M.Malone's entire career, except for '92--->where he played limited minutes in a mere 11 games). But he otherwise scored that 71 points on .683 TS% (26 of 41 from the field with 25 FT attempts)! and they won the game. The Spurs agenda was obvious, and yet the opposing D was powerless to stop him.
Let's not pretend that you can dump the ball relentlessly to any big (or even any good offensive big) and get a 70+ performance on good efficiency.


In summation, it's a bit disingenuous to brush aside the implications of a 71-pt game on good efficiency, because most would simply be incapable of matching that under ANY circumstances.

The fact of the matter is that we don't know what other good offensive bigs could or would have done because the only offensive big in NBA history who was ever in a similar situation was Wilt in '62.

You're right, we don't know. This is more conjecture on my part. But guess what, this forum is LOADED with conjecture: how so-and-so would translate to a different era, to different circumstances.......what if this or that hadn't happened.......how did this factor effect player X or team X......we don't have impact stats on Russell, Wilt, West, etc, so we essentially speculate about that as well, based interpretation of the available data, anecdotes, and the ever-reliable eye test. We're engaged in conjecture ALL THE TIME here. It's generally reasonably well-informed conjecture, though.

This is not really any different. I'm speculating that this game---while a bit distasteful in that it was stat-padded----is nonetheless pretty impressive: 71 pts on >.680 TS% in the modern (non-~120 pace era) is damn impressive. Impressive enough that I believe there's a fairly finite number of individuals who could have pulled it off. I don't think this bit of conjecture is particularly revolutionary.

Most of the rest of your post labored the point that winning scoring titles doesn't necessarily help your team win games, and isn't terribly relevant to an all-time ranking. I'm not gonna argue those points because I don't disagree; never said (nor did shutupandjam) that the scoring title was a reason to vote for David Robinson. Again, it was only brought up as a quick-mention factoid to suggest that "hey, DRob was a pretty good offensive player."

[penbeast0]

Winning a scoring title may not correlate to winning a lot of games; but it did indicate in Robinson's case that he was capable of being a dominant scoring force at a high level of efficiency. The final game might have been an engineered fluke, like Kobe's 80 point game, or Wilt's century, but being in position to win a scoring title in the last game of the season while carrying a weak team to a good record is still a good indicator of offensive talent even if Shaq had scored 75 in his final game.

[ThaRegul8r]

Eh, citing the stat-padded final game is really minimally relevant wrt Robinson winning the scoring title, and is completely irrelevant to shutupandjam's larger point (which is that Robinson was a very good scorer and offensive player):

The stat-padding game is relevant when it resulted in the aforementioned scoring title.

Again, point I made was that them stat-padding (which they certainly did) wasn't necessarily even required to enable him to win it. Do I know he'd have scored 36+ without his teammates gunning for him? Of course not. But you seem to be asserting (correct me if I'm wrong) that he only got it because they stat-padded. When, in fact, it is entirely possible he'd have won it anyway.

I'm not asserting anything. I'm stating what actually happened. No more, no less.

If the point is that Robinson was "a very good scorer and offensive player" then that should be shown.

You mean shutupandjam should have made that clear? I thought he did; and I quote: ".....David Robinson's offense is quite clearly better than the defense of the others in consideration.....". That's the point he was fairly clearly trying to drive home: Robinson's offense was better than the defense of Barkley or Malone. He mentions the scoring title almost as an after-thought, as a quick-reference bit of evidence for his former assertion.

I said--speaking solely for myself--that the mere fact that Robinson won a scoring title doesn't particularly mean much to me (apparently I have to keep emphasizing this) because he stat-padded to win it. I also said it was a team accomplishment because his teammates did everything in their power to see that he won it. That's all that I said in the post that you responded to. No more, no less.

And if someone were to hold up Robinson's winning a scoring title and Barkley never having done so as "evidence" that Robinson > Barkley on offense, I would have difficulty taking such an assertion seriously. Barkley >> Robinson offensively regardless of however many scoring titles Robinson won and Barkley didn't.

I don't think anyone is trying to claim Robinson is a better offensive player than Barkley. I don't wish to speak for him, but I'm fairly certain shutupandjam invoked Barkley's name in relation to scoring titles (or lack thereof) as means of simply saying, "Look: it's not any old player that wins a scoring title. Even some of the GOAT-level scorers (like Barkley) sometimes don't win scoring titles."

I'm only going by what was said:

"This is a guy who led the league in scoring - for reference, neither Barkley nor Moses ever did this."

Robinson's scoring title is irrelevant in comparison to Barkley, because the latter was better offensively. I'm not sure why that statement would be disputable.

***Robinson was averaging 29.3 ppg going into that final game, about 0.05 ppg behind Shaq. Even if he had had an "average" game of just 29-30 points, he'd still have been <0.1 ppg away from a scoring title (which is closer than Moses or Barkley ever came).

****He scored SEVENTY-ONE POINTS!, and did so on excellent efficiency. He did admittedly have 8 turnovers, although he also had 5 assists (ast:TO ratio still better than ANY single-season ast:TO ratio of M.Malone's entire career, except for '92--->where he played limited minutes in a mere 11 games). But he otherwise scored that 71 points on .683 TS% (26 of 41 from the field with 25 FT attempts)! and they won the game. The Spurs agenda was obvious, and yet the opposing D was powerless to stop him.
Let's not pretend that you can dump the ball relentlessly to any big (or even any good offensive big) and get a 70+ performance on good efficiency.


In summation, it's a bit disingenuous to brush aside the implications of a 71-pt game on good efficiency, because most would simply be incapable of matching that under ANY circumstances.

The fact of the matter is that we don't know what other good offensive bigs could or would have done because the only offensive big in NBA history who was ever in a similar situation was Wilt in '62.

You're right, we don't know. This is more conjecture on my part. But guess what, this forum is LOADED with conjecture: how so-and-so would translate to a different era, to different circumstances.......what if this or that hadn't happened.......how did this factor effect player X or team X......we don't have impact stats on Russell, Wilt, West, etc, so we essentially speculate about that as well, based interpretation of the available data, anecdotes, and the ever-reliable eye test. We're engaged in conjecture ALL THE TIME here. It's generally reasonably well-informed conjecture, though.

The difference is that impact stats on Russell, Wilt and West, for instance, is an attempt to understand what actually happened by actually looking at as much data as is possible. That's quite a big difference from attempting to make a guess without even possessing any pertinent knowledge whatsoever. "I don't know the particulars, but I guess _____________" is not "reasonably well-informed conjecture." I was quite clear in what I said.

Most of the rest of your post labored the point that winning scoring titles doesn't necessarily help your team win games, and isn't terribly relevant to an all-time ranking.

I'll kindly ask you not to put words in my mouth. I said that winning scoring titles isn't terribly relevant to my all-time ranking. I don't know how many times I can possibly say "speaking solely for myself," or "isn't particularly important to me." Apparently I need to make the words bigger so they can't be missed. I just finished saying the other day that different people have different criteria, and thus one can't say one's choice is "wrong" without first understanding the criteria used:

Spoiler:

I would draft him in an all time draft high as I believe in BPA, and you are pretty much passive-aggressively saying that the people who voted for Walton are wrong.

I don't want to offend you, but yeah, pretty much voting for Walton IS wrong.

As I keep saying, it depends on the criteria. Some people rank players by "how good they were at their best," which basically makes the exercise one of arranging players by who had the best peaks. If this is one's criteria, then Walton will have to come up at sone point. At least one is being consistent with one's own criteria.

The thing is, everyone has their own criteria, no one's actually explicitly stated their criteria or referenced it when making a choice, but then they're judging other people's decisions by their own unstated criteria without bothering to consider what criteria the other guy is using or bothering to attempt to understand it.

Sometimes other people make different choices than I would make, but if they're not going by the same criteria as I, it wouldn't make sense for me to say they're "wrong" if we're not going by the same standards.

No one ever says on the internet, "I disagree with your choice, but I respect your right to make that choice." And the irony is, when someone else may disagree with their choice, they then proceed to get emotional over it while having no problem telling someone else their choice is wrong without even knowing the rational behind it.

I don't dictate what someone else's all-time ranking should be. Everyone makes his own choice, which I also just finished saying recently.

[Doctor MJ]

People asked about Robinson vs Ewing:

To be honest the debate confuses me. Every one knows that if we went simply by regular season Robinson tops not only Ewing but Olajuwon, so the argument against Robinson is the playoffs. And people then take that, link that with Robinson's style, and seem to come to conclusions that he's not a "true" big.

But if you look at playoff stats, Robinson still has a pretty big edge in the playoffs. .

Ewing had a playoff PER north of 22 once, Robinson did it 9 times.

Well that's offensively and it doesn't account for Robinson killing bad teams while underperforming against good teams. In 90 and 91 he was great in elimination. In 92 he missed the playoffs. In 93 he was fine but immediately after that you have 94 (19/9, 41%), 95 (24/11, 44%, killed by Hakeem), 96 (19/9, 47%), and 98 (19/13, 39%). He never played great defenses in the playoffs before these defenses were making him look very bad (he also had a better offensive supporting cast).

Ewing on the other hand has 1990 against Detroit (27/10, 47%), 91 against Chicago he was bad, 92 he played very good against Chicago (20/10, 47%), in 93 against Chicago he was amazing (26/11, 53%), 94 has been talked about ad nauseum but Pat was great against a very good Chicago defense (23/12, 53%) and he played great defense along with terrible offense in the Finals, in 95 they played Indy and fell one layup short (19/9, 53%), in 96 they played the GOAT Chicago squad (23/11, 47%), and in 97 they played the top ranked Miami defense (24/11, 49%).

Looking at that I'd take Ewing in the 90 playoffs over any Robinson season and Ewing in the playoffs every year over Robinson in the playoffs from 92-98. In that stretch of 7 seasons Robinson only played well once (in 93). Pat can at least say he has more than 3 great postseason performances.

I know people tend to focus on the Hakeem series, but I think people tend to focus on the individual stats rather than the team performance too much given that the Spurs made a choice to play the Rockets as they did rather than swarm Olajuwon at all times. Take a look at the ORtgs of Houston in the series they played that year:

1st - 120.6
WCSF - 115.9
WCF - 110.6
Finals - 117.1

The Spurs were the only team to hold Houston under GOAT-ish levels.

Now, I would still expect Ewing's Knicks to do an even better job because it was a stellar team offense - and Ewing was certainly a big part of it - but the notion that Robinson was exposed in that series as RS only defender is silly. That Rocket team caught fire, frankly more than they ever did the previous year.

The Rockets catching fire is not saying much to me considering the reason they lost was that Hakeem dominated Robinson and that the Rockets only played one above average defense in 95 (the Jazz - who had possibly the worst centers in the league) outside of Robinson (the Magic were 13th and the Suns 19th out of 27). Against the Knicks Houston had a 100.1 ORTG and Hakeem individually had his worst series in his peak offensively (before considering who he was up against).

And it wasn't just Hakeem but also Zo. As a rookie Pat held him to 20 pp36 down from his regular season 22 average and 52TS/98ORTG down from 59TS/112ORTG. In his first Miami campaign he held him to 19 pp36 down from 20 and 50TS/90ORTG down from 58TS/106ORTG.

So first, I didn't respond to other stuff from your post basically because I had nothing to say. It's a good post, and on the whole I didn't read it and go "Oh that's BS!".

To this last section:

Re: "the reason they lost". No. I reject this thinking entirely. This is team basketball. The Spurs could have stopped Hakeem, they chose a strategy that looked to stop the Rockets. That's WHY Hakeem's GREATEST series of his entire career is also the Rockets LEAST EFFECTIVE offensive series of that entire playoffs. Did you really think this was a coincidence?

Re: Against the Knicks..... Yes, against the Knicks, the year before, before they moved the 3 point line in! The Rockets were basically the original hub-and-spoke 3-point team leading the league in 3's in '93 on their way to the title.

Then they moved the 3-point in, and the team added Clyde Drexler, and when they jelled together, they were unreal. They would have made short work of the '93 Knicks, just like they did of two big-man based teams they played in the final two rounds.

[ThaRegul8r]

Winning a scoring title may not correlate to winning a lot of games; but it did indicate in Robinson's case that he was capable of being a dominant scoring force at a high level of efficiency.

Not in the postseason it didn't.

If whatever a player can do doesn't translate into the postseason, then it's worthless.

But as this thread is done, I don't want to keep bumping it.

[E-Balla]

People asked about Robinson vs Ewing:

To be honest the debate confuses me. Every one knows that if we went simply by regular season Robinson tops not only Ewing but Olajuwon, so the argument against Robinson is the playoffs. And people then take that, link that with Robinson's style, and seem to come to conclusions that he's not a "true" big.

But if you look at playoff stats, Robinson still has a pretty big edge in the playoffs. .

Ewing had a playoff PER north of 22 once, Robinson did it 9 times.

Well that's offensively and it doesn't account for Robinson killing bad teams while underperforming against good teams. In 90 and 91 he was great in elimination. In 92 he missed the playoffs. In 93 he was fine but immediately after that you have 94 (19/9, 41%), 95 (24/11, 44%, killed by Hakeem), 96 (19/9, 47%), and 98 (19/13, 39%). He never played great defenses in the playoffs before these defenses were making him look very bad (he also had a better offensive supporting cast).

Ewing on the other hand has 1990 against Detroit (27/10, 47%), 91 against Chicago he was bad, 92 he played very good against Chicago (20/10, 47%), in 93 against Chicago he was amazing (26/11, 53%), 94 has been talked about ad nauseum but Pat was great against a very good Chicago defense (23/12, 53%) and he played great defense along with terrible offense in the Finals, in 95 they played Indy and fell one layup short (19/9, 53%), in 96 they played the GOAT Chicago squad (23/11, 47%), and in 97 they played the top ranked Miami defense (24/11, 49%).

Looking at that I'd take Ewing in the 90 playoffs over any Robinson season and Ewing in the playoffs every year over Robinson in the playoffs from 92-98. In that stretch of 7 seasons Robinson only played well once (in 93). Pat can at least say he has more than 3 great postseason performances.

I know people tend to focus on the Hakeem series, but I think people tend to focus on the individual stats rather than the team performance too much given that the Spurs made a choice to play the Rockets as they did rather than swarm Olajuwon at all times. Take a look at the ORtgs of Houston in the series they played that year:

1st - 120.6
WCSF - 115.9
WCF - 110.6
Finals - 117.1

The Spurs were the only team to hold Houston under GOAT-ish levels.

Now, I would still expect Ewing's Knicks to do an even better job because it was a stellar team offense - and Ewing was certainly a big part of it - but the notion that Robinson was exposed in that series as RS only defender is silly. That Rocket team caught fire, frankly more than they ever did the previous year.

The Rockets catching fire is not saying much to me considering the reason they lost was that Hakeem dominated Robinson and that the Rockets only played one above average defense in 95 (the Jazz - who had possibly the worst centers in the league) outside of Robinson (the Magic were 13th and the Suns 19th out of 27). Against the Knicks Houston had a 100.1 ORTG and Hakeem individually had his worst series in his peak offensively (before considering who he was up against).

And it wasn't just Hakeem but also Zo. As a rookie Pat held him to 20 pp36 down from his regular season 22 average and 52TS/98ORTG down from 59TS/112ORTG. In his first Miami campaign he held him to 19 pp36 down from 20 and 50TS/90ORTG down from 58TS/106ORTG.

So first, I didn't respond to other stuff from your post basically because I had nothing to say. It's a good post, and on the whole I didn't read it and go "Oh that's BS!".

To this last section:

Re: "the reason they lost". No. I reject this thinking entirely. This is team basketball. The Spurs could have stopped Hakeem, they chose a strategy that looked to stop the Rockets. That's WHY Hakeem's GREATEST series of his entire career is also the Rockets LEAST EFFECTIVE offensive series of that entire playoffs. Did you really think this was a coincidence?

Re: Against the Knicks..... Yes, against the Knicks, the year before, before they moved the 3 point line in! The Rockets were basically the original hub-and-spoke 3-point team leading the league in 3's in '93 on their way to the title.

Then they moved the 3-point in, and the team added Clyde Drexler, and when they jelled together, they were unreal. They would have made short work of the '93 Knicks, just like they did of two big-man based teams they played in the final two rounds.

Well the Rockets only shot 35% from deep against the Spurs. They didn't play that well outside of Hakeem. He averaged 35 ppg and 5 apg out of the team's 99 ppg. Now Robinson did have to deal with more but both teams kind of had the same strategy when it came to guarding Hakeem and Pat limited him while he flourished against Robinson.

[trex_8063]

Sorry to bump again, but I do want to voice some resentment at the accusations of putting words in your mouth (particularly with the condescending phrases like "apparently I need to make my words bigger so they can't be missed"). Admittedly, it's not that I didn't infer some things from your statements; but the statements were so close to what I inferred that I actually had to go back and read your original statement to make sure:

"Speaking solely for myself, this doesn't particularly mean much to me, considering he * stat-padded in the last game to win it." I must have mentally inserted the words "had to" where the * is; because it is just those five letters away from saying exactly what I interpreted it as. Further, the context/tone of your arguments did nothing to sway me away from my original (mis)interpretation--->I don't think it can be denied (with honesty) that your choice of words seem to be aimed at discrediting, to at least a small degree, Robinson's scoring title.
So if I read a bit more into your remarks than you'd intended, I'm sorry, but given all of the above I'd expect little more understanding (or at the very least a less snarky retort) on your part. Nonetheless, I apologize for not being literal enough in evaluating your words. But for the record, you appear to be guilty of the exact same indiscretion (more on that below).

Overall, I sense in you a general reluctance to acknowledge what was shutupandjam's larger point in the first place: that Robinson was a formidable scorer and offensive player. (again the scoring title thing appeared to be merely an after-thought, something that could be mentioned quick and without elaboration but which would nonetheless support the aforementioned point).
You've essentially refused to acknowledge (at least within our exchanges to this point) that Robinson might have won the scoring title even without stat-padding, as well as seemingly refused to acknowledge the point penbeast made: that being in a position (based on the 79 previously played games) to win a scoring title vs. prime Shaq with a good single-game performance is pretty impressive.

If you want to undermine Robinson's credibility as a scorer, that's your choice. I guess I don't quite understand the tactic of discrediting his scoring title, and simply turning your head away from his '94 rs accomplishments as a means of doing so; because a single stat-padded game aside, it's still quite obviously a noteworthy scoring season.
You've made mention of Robinson's playoff failings (an argument with much more traction wrt down-playing his offensive impact/skill, fwiw) only once, in response to penbeast (and only a single sentence at that). The playoff angle would be a point worth laboring in critiquing Robinson's offense.

As to your own indiscretion:

And if someone were to hold up Robinson's winning a scoring title and Barkley never having done so as "evidence" that Robinson > Barkley on offense, I would have difficulty taking such an assertion seriously. Barkley >> Robinson offensively regardless of however many scoring titles Robinson won and Barkley didn't.

I don't think anyone is trying to claim Robinson is a better offensive player than Barkley. I don't wish to speak for him, but I'm fairly certain shutupandjam invoked Barkley's name in relation to scoring titles (or lack thereof) as means of simply saying, "Look: it's not any old player that wins a scoring title. Even some of the GOAT-level scorers (like Barkley) sometimes don't win scoring titles."

I'm only going by what was said:

"This is a guy who led the league in scoring - for reference, neither Barkley nor Moses ever did this."

Robinson's scoring title is irrelevant in comparison to Barkley, because the latter was better offensively. I'm not sure why that statement would be disputable.

The above statement in dark blue came out of left field to me, as no one had made any such claims about Robinson > Barkley offensively: a point I spoke to in my original reply. Which you then responded with the above dark green statement. Now I would hate to be accused of putting words in your mouth again, but in North American English parlance when someone replies to the effect of "Hey, that's not what I/we/he/she was trying to say," and then you reply, "I'm only going by what was said" without acknowledging the validity of the prior reply........that generally that means you think your interpretation of original statements was accurate.

When you hold all of us to such strict literal standards for interpretation of your words, it hardly seems fair that you get to take such liberties with interpreting another person's words; words that you quoted yourself above:
"This is a guy who led the league in scoring - for reference, neither Barkley nor Moses ever did this."

All he has said is that Robinson won a scoring title, and Barkley and Moses did not. No more, no less. Show me where that statement (interpreted literally) claims anything more.

You loathe other people putting words in your mouth, but appear to have no qualms about doing it to shutupandjam (and by association, me).
Perhaps I'm guilty of misinterpreting you, but......people with glass houses, you know?

Beyond that, I think we should just drop it, because clearly we're just banging heads at this point.

[Doctor MJ]

Well the Rockets only shot 35% from deep against the Spurs. They didn't play that well outside of Hakeem. He averaged 35 ppg and 5 apg out of the team's 99 ppg. Now Robinson did have to deal with more but both teams kind of had the same strategy when it came to guarding Hakeem and Pat limited him while he flourished against Robinson.

Right, when you aim to stop the team rather than the star, the rest of the guys don't have as open of shots and they shoot worse.

Re: Same strategy and Hakeem just did better against Robinson. That's certainly a good point to make. I could offer little quibbles about the statement, but I won't deny there's truth in it.