RealGM Top 100 List #23

[penbeast0]

The flip side on Nash is that in his heyday in Phoenix, he didn't have a bunch of teammates who "(do) nothing more than stand there." He had a team built around mobile shooters who were undersized but quicker and with better range than their counterparts. D'Antoni deliberately accepted defensive mismatches at most positions to maximize having shooters on the floor; this made the team more effective offensively than it would have been if those players had been playing their normal positions (this applies more than anyone else to Shawn Marion at PF and Amare Stoudamire and Boris Diaw playing center but Phoenix made a conscious choice to favor shooters to take maximum advantage of Nash's abilities -- as you probably should when you have a generational player like that). Thus Nash's effect on those teams' offenses is probably overstated when it comes to looking at team offense and his weakness on defense is similarly overstated if you look at those defenses -- though many Nash advocates also claim that PG defense isn't important and minimize that side of the equation.

Compare Nash's main teammates to those of similarly skilled John Stockton.

C. Amare (or Diaw, Kurt Thomas, or even Gortat) v. Eaton or Olberding (or even Keefe)
-- much better shooting, range, and quickness to get open
PF Marion or Channing Frye v. Karl Malone
-- Malone is obviously a great scorer, but again, Marion and Frye have superior range and move better without the ball
SF Q Richardson, James Jones, Marion, Grant Hill, or Dudley v. Bob Hansen, B. Russell
-- Again, look at the variety and ability of the shooters, particularly how well they move without the ball v. Byron Russell's weak offensive game
SG Joe Johnson, Raja Bell, Barbosa, J Richardson V. Jeff Malone, Blue Edwards, Jeff Hornacek
--The one area where it is close (though only Hornacek in Utah was a real 3 point threat) as this is the traditional place for the move without the ball, catch and shoot player.

Looking at these players, you can see that the Phoenix offense (and defense) ratings may be distorted by other factors than the relative skill set of Nash or Stockton . . . the player personnel and coaching styles of D'Antoni and Sloan may be a bigger relative factor.

[Sports Realist]

Nash is one of my favorite players, I actually thought top 30 is already fairly high for him... And I just checked quite a lot of rankings, it is... He's usually in the 40's.

His defense is kind of a negative, on offense he's one of the deadliest shooters and best playmakers ever.


I actually praised him here earlier:

"One of the best offensive playmakers/PG's ever, and during his MVP winning / peak years, had some of the best seasons of any PG ever. A member of the elite 50/40/90 club, certifying himself as one of the greatest shooters ever. Nash also had tremendous impact on a Phoenix Suns team, leading to his MVP's..
Nash would fit on most teams, he's an easy character, unselfish, a great leader and teammate, stuff you want to be, players you want to be surrounded with..."

But I still consider scoring the most important aspect of basketball... An alpha scoring type is the biggest think to look for in your leader, and the trademark of a franchise player. That's the guys I want leading my team, and that I think, ultimately, will give me the best change of winning... Which is why I have other, more dominant scorers above him. Bigger forces, or insane all-around perimeter players such as Pippen, Stockton, Havlicek... Who Nash doesn't have much of an argument over, realistically.

And the most important thing, Nash hasn't been relevant nearly as long as he would need to be to finish in the 20's... He was ELITE for a good 4-5 years... 2005-2008, 2010.

Thank you for responding.

First thing I see is you saying Nash is typically in the '40s. It should be noted that he was ranked 24th on our last list. If other people list him lower, well, that just says something about different people thinking differently.

Regarding your philosophy of scoring's paramount importance, I'm glad you basically speak of it as such. You're certainly entitled to your own option and it should be based on how you see the game not on how others see it.

Now though, you've expressed confusion at how others come to their conclusions so it's worth understanding how one might come to a different conclusion:

The biggest thing to understand is that when a player scores a basket he's not creating something out of nothing. Each team gets the same number of possessions. Most of those possessions will yield shots. Many of those shots go in. Take the world's best 30 PPG scorer and remove him, the team will not get anywhere near 30 points worse. All scorers work by using opportunities that are essentially there, and thus there is a cost to that opportunity.

So from the start, this is why an inefficient scorer isn't helping his team much with his scoring. There have absolutely been times in NBA history where a guy is seen as an elite star but in reality he isn't having any net positive impact at all because of his waste.

Considering it from a perspective of optimization, we start to be able to see what situations would lead to a particular type of player being most valuable.

If a scorer is enough more talented than his opponents and teammates, the best thing to do will be to feed that scorer again and again.

This is really extreme though if we talk literally rather hyperbolically, because if the defense knows exactly what you're going to do, and what you're going to do is pass it to your star for her to score it, a smart defense will basically be able to go 5 on 1 against the star, and in any league worth anything, that's enough to stop the scorer much of the time.

Even more insidious: It's possible to pass enough that teams don't overwhelm you and kill your efficiency, and yet still get in your team's way. This is the story of Wilt Chamberlain, who I bring up in part because I saw you bring him up. Wilt Chamberlain only rose to true offensive efficacy when he stopped volume scoring. Why? Because volume scoring Wilt meant the defense could cause turnovers as the team tried to get him the ball, as he got the ball before he could shoot, and as he passed it back out in times where he was stymied, plus the passivity of his teammates led them to be less effective when they actually got a chance to make a move.

(And yeah, if you don't believe me when I talk about Wilt's efficacy, I can go into more detail, but the bottom line is that the offenses on the Wilt Warriors were typically below average. Most think of Wilt as just tearing apart a helpless opponent, but in reality they did fine.)

So yeah, balance is the name of the game, and the question is simply whether it's very important or the most important thing. And that really depends on team context.

If you're on a team where there aren't other scoring threats - or more realistically, guys who are focused on other roles like rebounding - well then you're relying on a guy who can carry the team with some imbalance.

If you've got a team that's largely full of guys who can hit a shot, then the most important job is the guy who can choose who has the best shot and get the ball to him (super bonus points if you pull a Nash and you manipulate the defense to get him open while he does nothing more than stand in place).

You're probably thinking the latter is unrealistic, but I would submit to you that the most important paradigm shift of the past decade or two is the realization that it's not hard to hit a 3 if you're open. Almost any perimeter player good enough to make the NBA can hit it at high percentage with a bit of practice. With this realization, volume scoring has become less valuable while passing has become more important.

Last with all of this you're probably thinking, "Yeah but sometimes you just need a guy who can recognize when he owns the other team and explode, and sometimes you need a guy to just create something by himself." And you'd be right, but your mistake would be in assuming that you can tell whether a guy can do this based on his PPG. Nash was excellent at both these things.

Regarding longevity, know that Nash had huge impact from '05 to '12, and he was an all-NBA level player in the years before that. That doesn't make his longevity perfect, but it makes it actually pretty good.

I actually agree with most of this... I usually don't rank VOLUME scorers that high... Kobe/Havlicek/Baylor are the only "inefficient" guys ahead of Nash all-time for me..

Nash can do those things... I'd just rather have my go-to-guy, someone being going to another guy.. Nash was pretty darn good in '11 or '12, but not really all-nba stuff.. Nash wasn't in 2009, 2011, 2012...

For me, I think I could put Nash as high as 33... That's above McHale/Ewing/Frazier/Gervin on my list, who I just have above Steve atm, but I could definitely be convinced by Steve's arguments once he IS picked in the RealGM #100.

BTW: I can't write PM's yet, but sure, understood.. Wasn't meant to seriously anyway.