RealGM Top 100 List #9

[magicmerl]

Got it. I said I wondered how hakeem would've fared against jordan's bulls in 94 and 95 if he never retired, but that didn't factor into my ranking for him.

I recall Phil saying that he thought that the Bulls matched up *very* well vs the rockets, so if they'd just managed to get past the Knicks, they would have been favoured in the finals.

[tsherkin]

Like I said, you're trying to mind read again. You have no idea why or how Kidd learnt to shoot 3's, just like you have no idea why Hakeem started playing better. Maybe one of Kidd's coaches just told him "shoot more like this every day", and suddenly he could shoot, just as maybe one of Hakeem's coaches said "from now on, focus more on playing like this". Alternatively, maybe something inside them just clicked. We don't know. That's why Jason Kidd becoming a 3 pt shooter is exactly the same as Hakeem suddenly impacting games a lot more. If you won't give Kidd retrospective credit for the skill set of 3pt shooting that he could have had all along, if only circumstances had been different, then you can't credit Hakeem for how he might have played, if things had gone differently.

Kidd and his 3pt shooting are tough to evaluate. He hit the league with the shortened line and was doing fine with it by his third season, then took two seasons to adjust to the longer version. A career 34.9% 3pt shooter, he hit or passed that mark in 9 seasons. His later development had more to do with shot selection and assisted proportion of shooting volume than any major development on his part, a major component of why most roleplayers shoot more effectively from 3 than volume scorers.

Hakeem was indeed a great player, I'll be voting for him next if he doesn't get in this go around, but we should only be giving him credit for how his career actually panned out, and you guys are trying to prop him for a skill set and impact he never consistently displayed pre-93. That's not going to fly with me.

And yet, he DID show the skill set a lot early on. There's plenty of qualitative evidence of coaching and teammate breakdowns undermining his efforts passing out of the post, for example, and the scoring efforts are pretty clear VERY early on in his career. His defensive value is demonstrable, as is relative teammate value. It's pretty hard to ignore that in most cases, it was his team holding him back despite remarkable performances on Olajuwon's behalf more than anything else. One has to evaluate how much weight to give that truth, of course, but you can't just say "let's evaluate based on what actually happened" when you're comparing players with different contexts in terms of variables beyond player control. That just isn't logical.

It's true that certain elements of Hakeem's game improved over time, for example his FT%, but at the same time, if you look at what he was doing in the postseason, his ability to elevate his game was there essentially from the first but like many others in league history, he couldn't win titles without the raw stuff on the roster. Even the GOAT couldn't even make it to .500 with roster limitations. How do you account for that narrative? If you look at the talent on the Chicago teams of the first three-peat, or even the hyper-competitive squads of the two seasons leading into that one who challenged the Pistons, and then compare that to the Rockets supporting cast and competition, it becomes a fairly significant gap, and thus impossible to ignore.

You're trying to write off factors that no player can really control or surmount, and that doesn't make a ton of sense to me. I see some of the value inherent to a "evaluate a player based on how things went down," but at that point, what you really should be saying is "evaluate individual performance and not team result," which means stripping out any mention or consideration of team result from the conversation and looking strictly at how the player performed and how that contributed to the team's chances to win the game. And that's not been what's happening in these discussions or votes, nor is it necessarily the best route in the first place.

[shutupandjam]

It seems that the Sonics argument has lost sight of the original point, which was this: The Sonics usually beat the Rockets in the mid-90s - they beat them in the playoffs in 93 and 96, for example. In 94 and 95 the Sonics lost to vastly inferior opponents in the first round. If they had just taken care of business, there's a decent chance they would have beat the Rockets one of those years. And if the Sonics had beat the Rockets in those years and Hakeem hadn't won those two titles, we might look at him in a different light.

Got it. I said I wondered how hakeem would've fared against jordan's bulls in 94 and 95 if he never retired, but that didn't factor into my ranking for him.

The sonics had a tendency to perform below expectations after having excellent regular seasons, so this hypothetical shouldn't be a defining characteristic of hakeem's career. It's clear there's a few posters who like to cling to certain arguments, though.

True, and this is true for George Karl teams in general. Neil Paine wrote a great article on the subject once: http://insider.espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/9250250/nba-why-george-karl-nba-most-disappointing-playoff-coaches

Here's the article for those who don't have insider:

Spoiler:

Another year, another first-round departure for the Denver Nuggets. With their defeat in six games at the hands of the Golden State Warriors last week, the Nuggets now have lost in the Western Conference quarterfinals nine times in the past 10 years. Making the playoffs in 10 consecutive seasons is a remarkable accomplishment in and of itself -- it's the NBA's second-longest active streak (behind the Spurs' 16 straight postseason appearances) -- but that's cold comfort for fans in the Mile High City after another unsatisfying spring.

Making things tougher to swallow is the fact that Denver wasn't an overwhelming underdog in most of the series it lost. The Nuggets had home-court advantage in three of those 10 first-round matchups -- including this season's battle with the Warriors -- and they finished the regular season within five wins (or better) of their opponents in three of their other seven series. The Nuggets' futility defies probability; by chance alone, you'd think they would stumble into more than one series victory in their past 10. In fact, we can use probability to quantify how disappointing Denver has been in the past decade of the postseason -- and what it says about their coach, George Karl.


To judge the odds of one team beating another in any given game, we need to regress the teams' records to the mean and apply Bill James' "Log5" formula to the regressed winning percentages (factoring in the league's typical home-court advantage of roughly 60 percent). Using that same logic, we can stretch those single-game probabilities over an entire series to estimate the probability of one team beating another in a playoff encounter.

For instance, the Nuggets, who won 10 more games than Golden State during the 2012-13 regular season and held home-court advantage, would be expected to beat the Warriors 75.7 percent of the time in a seven-game series, according to the method outlined above. That they didn't represents a loss of 0.757 points of series win probability -- having started with a probability of 75.7 percent (0.757 expected series wins), they fell to 0 percent when they lost the series. That mark, minus-0.757, then goes on Karl's record as a coach, representing more than three-quarters of a series lost below expectations.

If you do this for every coach in every series since the NBA expanded to a 16-team playoff bracket before the 1983-84 season, it turns out Karl does not fare well at all. The teams Karl coached won 13 of their 35 playoff series against an expectation of 16.9 series wins, for a total of nearly four full series wins below expectation. Not only is that the worst mark among all active coaches, but it's actually worse than any other NBA coach to helm a playoff team in the last 30 years -- and it's not particularly close. The second- and third-most disappointing coaches in that span, Mike Fratello and Lenny Wilkens, were each only 2.7 series wins below expectation, more than a full series' worth of wins better than Karl.

Here are the most and least disappointing coaches on a series level since 1983-84:

Rank Coach Series W L Wins Above Expected
1 Phil Jackson 65 56 9 +14.0
2 Rudy Tomjanovich 17 12 5 +4.7
3 Gregg Popovich 39 28 11 +2.8
4 Larry Brown 32 18 14 +2.7
5 Jeff Van Gundy 17 8 9 +2.1
... -- -- -- -- --
96 Bob Hill 8 3 5 -1.6
97 Flip Saunders 19 8 11 -2.4
98 Lenny Wilkens 23 8 15 -2.7
99 Mike Fratello 14 3 11 -2.8
100 George Karl 35 13 22 -3.9

Of course, viewing things like these, at the series level, is about as zoomed-out a perspective as you can get on coaching performance. Perhaps if we look at it from a game-to-game perspective, using the same matchup probabilities but only assessing whether a coach's team performed above or below expectations in each game, would give a more nuanced look at which coaches live up to what we'd predict from their teams' regular-season records.

But even if we take that approach, Karl is the NBA's most disappointing playoff coach since 1984, winning 11 fewer games than he should have, according to the game-by-game win probabilities of his teams. It's a closer race this time, with Wilkens leapfrogging Fratello and finishing within less than a game of Karl in the race for the most upsetting playoff coaching performance of the past three decades, but Karl stands at the bottom of the list no matter how you view things.

Rank Coach Games W L Wins Above Expected
1 Phil Jackson 333 229 104 +40.4
2 Chuck Daly 126 75 51 +10.2
3 Gregg Popovich 199 122 77 +9.6
4 Rudy Tomjanovich 90 51 39 +9.0
5 Larry Brown 172 92 80 +7.6
... -- -- -- -- --
96 Flip Saunders 98 47 51 -5.3
97 Mike D'Antoni 59 26 33 -5.8
98 Mike Fratello 62 20 42 -8.3
99 Lenny Wilkens 114 45 69 -10.1
100 George Karl 185 80 105 -11.0

The only saving grace is that Karl is not the most disappointing coach when you take Championship Leverage Index into account, an ignominious distinction that instead belongs to Rick Adelman. But that's mainly a function of the very topic of this article: Karl's early postseason exits. Paradoxically, in order to do badly in a metric weighted toward Championship Leverage, you need to first navigate deep enough into the playoffs in order for the Leverage Index to get high. Adelman's teams have underwhelmed relative to expectations in the playoffs, and they've also done it at critical times late in the postseason; Karl's teams never even make it that far.

Disappointing playoff coaches by Championship Leverage Index
Rank Coach Games Wins Above Expected Leveraged WAE Diff
1 Phil Jackson 333 +40.4 +63.6 +23.2
2 Rudy Tomjanovich 90 +9.0 +17.4 +8.4
3 Pat Riley 253 +3.7 +11.6 +8.0
4 Gregg Popovich 199 +9.6 +16.7 +7.1
5 Lenny Wilkens 114 -10.1 -6.4 +3.8
... -- -- -- -- --
96 Larry Bird 52 +3.0 -2.6 -5.6
97 Jerry Sloan 196 -4.8 -10.6 -5.8
98 Stan Van Gundy 87 +2.1 -3.9 -6.0
99 Mike Brown 83 +3.2 -2.8 -6.0
100 Rick Adelman 157 +0.4 -8.3 -8.7

It's possible to construct numerous theories about why Karl's teams underperform, including conspiracy theories about him doing a deficient job of giving minutes to his most "productive" players. But I think a better, if counterintuitive, explanation is that he's actually quite a good coach (and that there's a reason ESPN's panel of experts voted him their 2012-13 Coach of the Year in a landslide).

A few months ago, we looked at which teams had gotten "lucky" in a variety of different ways, and whether there was some aspect of coaching that caused the apparent luck to actually be statistically significant (and therefore sustainable) instead of random noise. Only a select few coaches could maintain a level of positive luck that proved to truly be significant, names like Rick Carlisle, Phil Jackson, Chuck Daly and Pat Riley. But do you know who else was on the list? Karl.

That means Karl was able to significantly improve his teams' regular-season win-loss records above and beyond the underlying talent of the players he was working with. In essence, he's one of the best coaches in the game at extracting extra wins out of his rosters, and that fact also offers a possible explanation for why his teams disappoint come playoff time. Karl's coaching causes his teams' records to be inflated relative to their actual talent, leading to miscalculated seedings and then apparent underachievement in the postseason.

But what this system -- and many fans -- view as underachieving may actually just be playing to the natural talent level of Karl's rosters, rosters that were not as good as their records would indicate, but overachieved in the regular season. (This is the same explanation frequently offered in defense of former manager Bobby Cox in baseball, whose Atlanta Braves often won far more than expected during the regular season but flopped just as frequently in the playoffs).

It's of no solace to Denver fans, who have suffered through a decade of consistency both in making the playoffs and failing once there, but it could just be that Karl's regular-season coaching ability is his own worst enemy in the postseason.

[Baller2014]

Even the GOAT couldn't even make it to .500 with roster limitations. How do you account for that narrative?

Pretty easily. Jordan's teams didn't have much talent early on, and as soon as they did they were awesome. I'm not sure what years you would describe as underperforming for the Jordan bulls, the outcomes all seem satisfactory. Meanwhile Hakeem has a tonne of seasons from 87-92 that just look unacceptable (even disregarding his struggles with the Sonics over the next 4 years). Losing to the McDaniel Sonics (twice), the Blackman Mavs, not making the playoffs at all in 92, winning 41 games one year. Come on, this is not the result we should be seeing, especially not when he seemed to have some pretty solid support casts. Otis Thorpe was a 17-10-3 defensive all-star calibre big in his first 4 seasons with the Rockets, with insane scoring efficiency and a jumper to boot. Sleepy Floyd was not the best player in the world, but he was in his prime and he'd made the all-star team only a few years before arriving on the Rockets. Their were plenty of other decent role players on these Rocket teams (I covered this in depth in earlier mega posts about the Rockets). In the biggest sample we have of Hakeem missing games, over 91 and 92, the team record was 28-20 without him (Edit: 18-20). Or, if we want to split that up into 2 separate seasons; in 91 they were better without Hakeem than with him, and in 92 their record with Hakeem would still have been worse than the Clippers that year... the Clippers. Come on, this was not the Jordan Bulls here, nor was Jordan the GOAT in his first year or two. He took time to become the Jordan we came to know later. Hakeem was (supposedly) fully formed from 87-92. He can't use that excuse, not if you're trying to claim his pre-93 years are the same quality as 93-95.

[penbeast0]

Did you watch Otis Thorpe play? Defensive all-star is a bit of a stretch; think taller Carlos Boozer in Utah.

[Baller2014]

Otis Thorpe was extremely tough. He wasn't Dale Davis obviously, but he sure wasn't Carlos Boozer either.

[Basketballefan]

Got it. I said I wondered how hakeem would've fared against jordan's bulls in 94 and 95 if he never retired, but that didn't factor into my ranking for him.

I recall Phil saying that he thought that the Bulls matched up *very* well vs the rockets, so if they'd just managed to get past the Knicks, they would have been favoured in the finals.

That's a crock of bull...i respect Phil and all but no way they were beating Hakeem that year.

[penbeast0]

It seems that the Sonics argument has lost sight of the original point, which was this: The Sonics usually beat the Rockets in the mid-90s - they beat them in the playoffs in 93 and 96, for example. In 94 and 95 the Sonics lost to vastly inferior opponents in the first round. If they had just taken care of business, there's a decent chance they would have beat the Rockets one of those years. And if the Sonics had beat the Rockets in those years and Hakeem hadn't won those two titles, we might look at him in a different light.

Got it. I said I wondered how hakeem would've fared against jordan's bulls in 94 and 95 if he never retired, but that didn't factor into my ranking for him.

The sonics had a tendency to perform below expectations after having excellent regular seasons, so this hypothetical shouldn't be a defining characteristic of hakeem's career. It's clear there's a few posters who like to cling to certain arguments, though.

True, and this is true for George Karl teams in general. Neil Paine wrote a great article on the subject once: http://insider.espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/9250250/nba-why-george-karl-nba-most-disappointing-playoff-coaches

Here's the article for those who don't have insider:

Spoiler:

Another year, another first-round departure for the Denver Nuggets. With their defeat in six games at the hands of the Golden State Warriors last week, the Nuggets now have lost in the Western Conference quarterfinals nine times in the past 10 years. Making the playoffs in 10 consecutive seasons is a remarkable accomplishment in and of itself -- it's the NBA's second-longest active streak (behind the Spurs' 16 straight postseason appearances) -- but that's cold comfort for fans in the Mile High City after another unsatisfying spring.

Making things tougher to swallow is the fact that Denver wasn't an overwhelming underdog in most of the series it lost. The Nuggets had home-court advantage in three of those 10 first-round matchups -- including this season's battle with the Warriors -- and they finished the regular season within five wins (or better) of their opponents in three of their other seven series. The Nuggets' futility defies probability; by chance alone, you'd think they would stumble into more than one series victory in their past 10. In fact, we can use probability to quantify how disappointing Denver has been in the past decade of the postseason -- and what it says about their coach, George Karl.


To judge the odds of one team beating another in any given game, we need to regress the teams' records to the mean and apply Bill James' "Log5" formula to the regressed winning percentages (factoring in the league's typical home-court advantage of roughly 60 percent). Using that same logic, we can stretch those single-game probabilities over an entire series to estimate the probability of one team beating another in a playoff encounter.

For instance, the Nuggets, who won 10 more games than Golden State during the 2012-13 regular season and held home-court advantage, would be expected to beat the Warriors 75.7 percent of the time in a seven-game series, according to the method outlined above. That they didn't represents a loss of 0.757 points of series win probability -- having started with a probability of 75.7 percent (0.757 expected series wins), they fell to 0 percent when they lost the series. That mark, minus-0.757, then goes on Karl's record as a coach, representing more than three-quarters of a series lost below expectations.

If you do this for every coach in every series since the NBA expanded to a 16-team playoff bracket before the 1983-84 season, it turns out Karl does not fare well at all. The teams Karl coached won 13 of their 35 playoff series against an expectation of 16.9 series wins, for a total of nearly four full series wins below expectation. Not only is that the worst mark among all active coaches, but it's actually worse than any other NBA coach to helm a playoff team in the last 30 years -- and it's not particularly close. The second- and third-most disappointing coaches in that span, Mike Fratello and Lenny Wilkens, were each only 2.7 series wins below expectation, more than a full series' worth of wins better than Karl.

Here are the most and least disappointing coaches on a series level since 1983-84:

Rank Coach Series W L Wins Above Expected
1 Phil Jackson 65 56 9 +14.0
2 Rudy Tomjanovich 17 12 5 +4.7
3 Gregg Popovich 39 28 11 +2.8
4 Larry Brown 32 18 14 +2.7
5 Jeff Van Gundy 17 8 9 +2.1
... -- -- -- -- --
96 Bob Hill 8 3 5 -1.6
97 Flip Saunders 19 8 11 -2.4
98 Lenny Wilkens 23 8 15 -2.7
99 Mike Fratello 14 3 11 -2.8
100 George Karl 35 13 22 -3.9

Of course, viewing things like these, at the series level, is about as zoomed-out a perspective as you can get on coaching performance. Perhaps if we look at it from a game-to-game perspective, using the same matchup probabilities but only assessing whether a coach's team performed above or below expectations in each game, would give a more nuanced look at which coaches live up to what we'd predict from their teams' regular-season records.

But even if we take that approach, Karl is the NBA's most disappointing playoff coach since 1984, winning 11 fewer games than he should have, according to the game-by-game win probabilities of his teams. It's a closer race this time, with Wilkens leapfrogging Fratello and finishing within less than a game of Karl in the race for the most upsetting playoff coaching performance of the past three decades, but Karl stands at the bottom of the list no matter how you view things.

Rank Coach Games W L Wins Above Expected
1 Phil Jackson 333 229 104 +40.4
2 Chuck Daly 126 75 51 +10.2
3 Gregg Popovich 199 122 77 +9.6
4 Rudy Tomjanovich 90 51 39 +9.0
5 Larry Brown 172 92 80 +7.6
... -- -- -- -- --
96 Flip Saunders 98 47 51 -5.3
97 Mike D'Antoni 59 26 33 -5.8
98 Mike Fratello 62 20 42 -8.3
99 Lenny Wilkens 114 45 69 -10.1
100 George Karl 185 80 105 -11.0

The only saving grace is that Karl is not the most disappointing coach when you take Championship Leverage Index into account, an ignominious distinction that instead belongs to Rick Adelman. But that's mainly a function of the very topic of this article: Karl's early postseason exits. Paradoxically, in order to do badly in a metric weighted toward Championship Leverage, you need to first navigate deep enough into the playoffs in order for the Leverage Index to get high. Adelman's teams have underwhelmed relative to expectations in the playoffs, and they've also done it at critical times late in the postseason; Karl's teams never even make it that far.

Disappointing playoff coaches by Championship Leverage Index
Rank Coach Games Wins Above Expected Leveraged WAE Diff
1 Phil Jackson 333 +40.4 +63.6 +23.2
2 Rudy Tomjanovich 90 +9.0 +17.4 +8.4
3 Pat Riley 253 +3.7 +11.6 +8.0
4 Gregg Popovich 199 +9.6 +16.7 +7.1
5 Lenny Wilkens 114 -10.1 -6.4 +3.8
... -- -- -- -- --
96 Larry Bird 52 +3.0 -2.6 -5.6
97 Jerry Sloan 196 -4.8 -10.6 -5.8
98 Stan Van Gundy 87 +2.1 -3.9 -6.0
99 Mike Brown 83 +3.2 -2.8 -6.0
100 Rick Adelman 157 +0.4 -8.3 -8.7

It's possible to construct numerous theories about why Karl's teams underperform, including conspiracy theories about him doing a deficient job of giving minutes to his most "productive" players. But I think a better, if counterintuitive, explanation is that he's actually quite a good coach (and that there's a reason ESPN's panel of experts voted him their 2012-13 Coach of the Year in a landslide).

A few months ago, we looked at which teams had gotten "lucky" in a variety of different ways, and whether there was some aspect of coaching that caused the apparent luck to actually be statistically significant (and therefore sustainable) instead of random noise. Only a select few coaches could maintain a level of positive luck that proved to truly be significant, names like Rick Carlisle, Phil Jackson, Chuck Daly and Pat Riley. But do you know who else was on the list? Karl.

That means Karl was able to significantly improve his teams' regular-season win-loss records above and beyond the underlying talent of the players he was working with. In essence, he's one of the best coaches in the game at extracting extra wins out of his rosters, and that fact also offers a possible explanation for why his teams disappoint come playoff time. Karl's coaching causes his teams' records to be inflated relative to their actual talent, leading to miscalculated seedings and then apparent underachievement in the postseason.

But what this system -- and many fans -- view as underachieving may actually just be playing to the natural talent level of Karl's rosters, rosters that were not as good as their records would indicate, but overachieved in the regular season. (This is the same explanation frequently offered in defense of former manager Bobby Cox in baseball, whose Atlanta Braves often won far more than expected during the regular season but flopped just as frequently in the playoffs).

It's of no solace to Denver fans, who have suffered through a decade of consistency both in making the playoffs and failing once there, but it could just be that Karl's regular-season coaching ability is his own worst enemy in the postseason.

Looking at those coaching ratings, something jumped out at me. Karl is -3.9, the all-time worst in 30 years; -11 wins under expected. At the other end, the second/third best playoff coaches in the last 30 years (at the time) were Tomjanovich at "4.7 and Pop at +2.7, in terms of games it would be Daly at +10 and Pop at _9.6 . . . then there is Phil Jackson at +14.0series and +40.4 games . . . more than 4 times as many as any other coach in the last 30 years. I have him as my GOAT, but those are unbelievable numbers if I am reading this right.

[90sAllDecade]

Hakeem will likely be selected #9 or #10, nobody's ripping him, I think you're being too hyperbolic.

But you're wrong. People are specifically singling out Hakeem's pre-93 team success as a point of contention in his ranking, and that's a concern I wanted to address, since it has broader implications through this whole project. This is a guy who, when he had some talent, took his team to the Finals through the reigning-champ Lakers when he was in his second season. Then his teammates fell off and he had some coaching issues that undermined team success despite significant individual performance. The arc looks very similar to what we've seen from basically every other player in league history under similar circumstances. It parallels early Jordan, Minny Garnett, everyone. And this is a point of discussion in this particular ranking thread right now over the last few pages, so it is eminently relevant to this discussion. Whether or not he's apt to be ranked #9 is irrelevant because that is the tone and content of the discussion right now.

What happened before his rings should be taken into consideration and given the proper weight and context.
Some believe that he was partially responsible for some of the disappointments, nobody's saying he was not a great player even at that point

Right, but taking what I said and trying to extend it into a complaint that people aren't respecting him as a great player is fallacious and not what I was arguing. We're talking about people using his team success as a critique of his potential ranking in this project, and I want to address that concept. We dance around it often and waffle frequently but have not really discussed the point to a meaningful degree over time, and that was the point of my comment. You can take exception to the word "ripping" if you like, but it's a semantic point not terribly salient to the meat of what I was saying. People are using that portion of Hakeem's career to attack his candidacy for the position, so I want to discuss the point.

To whit, we're talking about a guy who looked like this through the 92 season:

RS: 22.9 ppg, 12.5 rpg, 51.3% FG. 69.3% FT (6.9 FTA/g), 55.3% TS, 109 ORTG, .184 WS/48
PS: 26.5 ppg, 12.5 rpg. 54.0% FG, 68.0% FT (8.9 FTA/g), 58.0% TS, 118 ORTG, .223 WS/48

There are many other and deeper ways to analyze his performance, and season-by-season is more appropriate than a full overview, but I want to look at this... the guy's a perennial high-quality defensive anchor by almost every measure, he's performing pretty well in the RS on offense (we've seen the RAPM stuff and it shows a player who was very effective on O) and he absolutely murders it in the postseason for the most part, and this is all pre-peak performance. We watched Sampson fall apart due to injury and saw some noticeable offensive decline under Chaney. We've seen the in/out data for Hakeem and the notes that his teammates had a largely unsustainable and unrepeated streak of success in his absence which helped them go 16-10 in his absence in the 91 season, and we saw the slight turnaround when Rudy T took over midway through the following season. Further, it behooves one to remember that through most of this period, he was still contending with the Showtime Lakers and Drexler's Blazers in his conference, as well as the rising Sonics, the Jazz and the Suns. It's not like he was in some easy conference where he could feast on a lot of bad teams, and he didn't really have comparable talent at all.

So in terms of expectations, it's a little unreasonable to project that he should have won a ton more once you factor in competition, injuries and coaching. Obviously, Hakeem wasn't his peak self the entire time, I mean he had to develop as a shooter from the mid-range and even at the line, etc, but his playoff performance was pretty spectacular and there's a pretty clear decline in the team's efficacy as Sampson lost effectiveness due to injury and then vanished entirely, and with what was he replaced? Olajuwon didn't even have Thorpe until the 89-90 season and then his backcourt didn't round out properly until the early 90s either, and didn't even have Drexler until mid-way through the second title season.

There is some basic threshold of roster quality past which no one can do a ton. Like I said, even Jordan wasn't able to do anything but lead his first couple of teams to sub-.500 records before the roster fleshed out more properly, and further wasn't able to gain real traction in the postseason until Phil got there. I don't mean to directly compare them, because most consider Jordan the GOAT and he's got the full package of accolades, individual ability and postseason success to render that conversation somewhat moot, but it remains relevant: if the putative GOAT couldn't do a ton, what can we really expect from any other player?

NBA basketball is a game where, more so than most other major sports, an individual can exert a hugely palpable force on any given night and thus over the course of a season, but even at the highest levels of individual performance, there's only so much to be done to overcome a poor supporting cast... which is something Hakeem, and many others, experienced during stretches of their career.

Kobe's another one where we have to discuss this, because people seem to forget that the Lakers were actually 24-19 before Rudy T quit and then 10-19 under Hamblen. The divide wasn't so obvious mid-season when Rudy T took over for Don Chaney, but there was a palpable difference mostly on the basis of coaching. We've seen all kinds of qualitative discussion over the mismanagement of the Rockets' offense prior to Tomjanovich's arrival, so there is ample evidence to suggest that factors beyond Olajuwon's control were major contributors to his lack of success through the given period.

And again, that's a major point of discussion. At what point do such factors determine "greatness" as we intend to explore it in this project? It seems that it is inevitable that a list of accolades and team success are the ultimate final determinants... only we're seeing that some of the most decorated players are beginning to fall in our collective estimation now (as we see with Bird and Magic here in this project), so there should be some concurrent elevation of those players who struggled and eventually overcame lame-duck management as well, no? That's the keystone point here.

This is an outstanding post and speaks to the elephant in the room, the guys in this GOAT list needed team support to win, even Jordan, Kareem, LeBron, Garnett, everyone.

Some were fortunate to have played with an all star or HOF coach thier entire career (Russell, Magic, Bird, Duncan with Pops and even Wilt with his quota all stars back then.)

But if you really want to seperate the wheat from the chaff, see how those guys did without that team support, in adverse situations.

This comparison shows how the GOAT players faired without an all star or HOF coach, it is incomplete as it only happened to a few players certain years.

Regular Season Records and Playoff success comparison of top 10 players, during the years without HOF coaching or HOF or All Star teammates:

Jordan (no Pippen, Grant or Phil Jackson):

84-85 (Rookie):
38-44, -0.50 SRS, 11th Ortg, 20th Drtg, Lost 1st Round

85-86 (Injured for season, healthy for Playoffs):
30-52, -3.12 SRS, 8th Ortg, 23rd Drtg, Lost 1st Round

86-87 (Coaching change):
40-42, 1.27 SRS, 12th Ortg, 11th Drtg, Lost 1st Round

Kareem (no Oscar, Magic or Pat Riley):

75-76:
40-42, 0.17 SRS, 7th Ortg, 13th Drtg, No playoff appearance

76-77 (Coaching change):
53-29, 2.65 SRS, 5th Ortg, 10th Drtg, Lost WCF (1st round byes back then)

77-78:
45-37, 2.59 SRS, 3rd Ortg, 11th Drtg, Lost 1st Round

79-80:
47-35, 2.95 SRS, 5th Ortg, 10th Drtg, Lost 2nd Round

Kevin Garnett (No All star players):

95-96 (Rookie, High School player):
26-56, -5.14 SRS, 25 Ortg, 20th Drtg, No playoff appearance

97-98 (Coaching change):
45-37, 0.17 SRS, 7th Ortg, 23rd Drtg, Lost 1st Round

98-99 (Lockout year, only 50 games played):
25-25. -0.17 SRS, 17th Ortg, 11 Drtg, Lost 1st Round

99-00:
50-32, 2.67 SRS, 8th Ortg, 12th Drtg, Lost 1st Round

00-01:
47-35, 1.81 SRS, 11th Ortg, 16th Drtg, Lost 1st Round

02-03:
51-31, 2.46 SRS, 5th Ortg, 16th Drtg, Lost 1st Round

04-05:
44-38, 1.73 SRS, 6th Ortg, 15th Drtg, No playoff appearance

05-06 (coaching change):
33-49,-1.75 SRS, 28th Ortg, 10th Drtg, No playoff appearance

06-07:
32-50, -3.16 SRS, 25th Ortg, 21st Drtg, No playoff appearance

LeBron James (no All star player):

03-04 (Rookie, High School player):
35-47, -3.07 SRS, 22nd Ortg, 19th Drtg, No playoff apperance

05-06 (Coaching change):
50-32, 2.17 SRS, 9th Ortg, 14th Drtg, Lost 2nd Round

06-07:
50-32, 3.33 SRS, 18th Ortg, 4th Drtg, Lost in Finals

07-08:
45-37, -0.53 SRS, 20th Ortg, 11th Drtg, Lost in 2nd Round

09-10:
61-21, 6.17 SRS, 6th Ortg, 7th Drtg, Lost in 2nd Round

Hakeem Olajuwon (No All star player):

87-88:
46-36, .082 SRS, 13th Ortg, 4th Drtg, Lost 1st Round

88-89 (Coaching change, Don Chaney):
45-37, 0.22 SRS, 18th Ortg, 4th Drtg, Lost 1st Round

89-90:
41-41, 1.71 SRS, 21 Ortg, 1st Drtg, Lost 1st Round

92-93 (Coaching change, Rudy T):
55-27, 3.57 SRS, 6th Ortg, 3rd Drtg, Lost 2nd Round

93-94:
58-24, 4.19 SRS, 15th Ortg, 2nd Drtg, Won NBA Championship

[magicmerl]

Are we in the run off now?

Yes.

[therealbig3]

In the biggest sample we have of Hakeem missing games, over 91 and 92, the team record was 28-20 without him.

Actually, they were 18-20 without him...76-50 with him.

In the 38 games without him over these 2 seasons, the Rockets had a -1.79 MOV and a -2.03 SRS. With Hakeem over both of these seasons, they had a 2.34 SRS. So Hakeem was in the +4-5 SRS range in terms of impact (+4.37 to be exact)...from what I understand, once you're in the +7 territory, you're having GOAT-level impact. So while not quite at that level in 91 and 92, he was still a first-class superstar (+4-5 SRS still means you're having major impact).

He can't use that excuse, not if you're trying to claim his pre-93 years are the same quality as 93-95.

Nobody claimed that.

[90sAllDecade]

Forgot young Shaq, I'll try to get to Kobe later as well:

Shaq (No All star player, Phil Jackson or Pat Riley):

92-93 (Rookie):
41-41, 1.35 SRS, 13th Ortg, 12th Drtg, No playoff appearance

93-94 (Coaching change):
50-32, 3.68 SRS, 3rd Ortg, 15th Drtg, Lost 1st Round

[Baller2014]

Actually, they were 18-20 without him...76-50 with him.

My bad on the math. Nonetheless, they are clearly still decent without him, which is the point. They were not a bad team, in spite of the unexpected loss of Hakeem. Like I said, I've got Hakeem next slot anyway, so it's not like I dispute he was a star or anything. But the claims he had an inadequate support cast to do more (when your comparison is Larry Bird who turned a 29 win team into a 61 win team as a rookie) don't hold up.

He can't use that excuse, not if you're trying to claim his pre-93 years are the same quality as 93-95.

Nobody claimed that.

I'm pretty sure people are claiming that. All decades and Ronny among them.

[acrossthecourt]

Spoiler:

Hakeem will likely be selected #9 or #10, nobody's ripping him, I think you're being too hyperbolic.

But you're wrong. People are specifically singling out Hakeem's pre-93 team success as a point of contention in his ranking, and that's a concern I wanted to address, since it has broader implications through this whole project. This is a guy who, when he had some talent, took his team to the Finals through the reigning-champ Lakers when he was in his second season. Then his teammates fell off and he had some coaching issues that undermined team success despite significant individual performance. The arc looks very similar to what we've seen from basically every other player in league history under similar circumstances. It parallels early Jordan, Minny Garnett, everyone. And this is a point of discussion in this particular ranking thread right now over the last few pages, so it is eminently relevant to this discussion. Whether or not he's apt to be ranked #9 is irrelevant because that is the tone and content of the discussion right now.

What happened before his rings should be taken into consideration and given the proper weight and context.
Some believe that he was partially responsible for some of the disappointments, nobody's saying he was not a great player even at that point

Right, but taking what I said and trying to extend it into a complaint that people aren't respecting him as a great player is fallacious and not what I was arguing. We're talking about people using his team success as a critique of his potential ranking in this project, and I want to address that concept. We dance around it often and waffle frequently but have not really discussed the point to a meaningful degree over time, and that was the point of my comment. You can take exception to the word "ripping" if you like, but it's a semantic point not terribly salient to the meat of what I was saying. People are using that portion of Hakeem's career to attack his candidacy for the position, so I want to discuss the point.

To whit, we're talking about a guy who looked like this through the 92 season:

RS: 22.9 ppg, 12.5 rpg, 51.3% FG. 69.3% FT (6.9 FTA/g), 55.3% TS, 109 ORTG, .184 WS/48
PS: 26.5 ppg, 12.5 rpg. 54.0% FG, 68.0% FT (8.9 FTA/g), 58.0% TS, 118 ORTG, .223 WS/48

There are many other and deeper ways to analyze his performance, and season-by-season is more appropriate than a full overview, but I want to look at this... the guy's a perennial high-quality defensive anchor by almost every measure, he's performing pretty well in the RS on offense (we've seen the RAPM stuff and it shows a player who was very effective on O) and he absolutely murders it in the postseason for the most part, and this is all pre-peak performance. We watched Sampson fall apart due to injury and saw some noticeable offensive decline under Chaney. We've seen the in/out data for Hakeem and the notes that his teammates had a largely unsustainable and unrepeated streak of success in his absence which helped them go 16-10 in his absence in the 91 season, and we saw the slight turnaround when Rudy T took over midway through the following season. Further, it behooves one to remember that through most of this period, he was still contending with the Showtime Lakers and Drexler's Blazers in his conference, as well as the rising Sonics, the Jazz and the Suns. It's not like he was in some easy conference where he could feast on a lot of bad teams, and he didn't really have comparable talent at all.

So in terms of expectations, it's a little unreasonable to project that he should have won a ton more once you factor in competition, injuries and coaching. Obviously, Hakeem wasn't his peak self the entire time, I mean he had to develop as a shooter from the mid-range and even at the line, etc, but his playoff performance was pretty spectacular and there's a pretty clear decline in the team's efficacy as Sampson lost effectiveness due to injury and then vanished entirely, and with what was he replaced? Olajuwon didn't even have Thorpe until the 89-90 season and then his backcourt didn't round out properly until the early 90s either, and didn't even have Drexler until mid-way through the second title season.

There is some basic threshold of roster quality past which no one can do a ton. Like I said, even Jordan wasn't able to do anything but lead his first couple of teams to sub-.500 records before the roster fleshed out more properly, and further wasn't able to gain real traction in the postseason until Phil got there. I don't mean to directly compare them, because most consider Jordan the GOAT and he's got the full package of accolades, individual ability and postseason success to render that conversation somewhat moot, but it remains relevant: if the putative GOAT couldn't do a ton, what can we really expect from any other player?

NBA basketball is a game where, more so than most other major sports, an individual can exert a hugely palpable force on any given night and thus over the course of a season, but even at the highest levels of individual performance, there's only so much to be done to overcome a poor supporting cast... which is something Hakeem, and many others, experienced during stretches of their career.

Kobe's another one where we have to discuss this, because people seem to forget that the Lakers were actually 24-19 before Rudy T quit and then 10-19 under Hamblen. The divide wasn't so obvious mid-season when Rudy T took over for Don Chaney, but there was a palpable difference mostly on the basis of coaching. We've seen all kinds of qualitative discussion over the mismanagement of the Rockets' offense prior to Tomjanovich's arrival, so there is ample evidence to suggest that factors beyond Olajuwon's control were major contributors to his lack of success through the given period.

And again, that's a major point of discussion. At what point do such factors determine "greatness" as we intend to explore it in this project? It seems that it is inevitable that a list of accolades and team success are the ultimate final determinants... only we're seeing that some of the most decorated players are beginning to fall in our collective estimation now (as we see with Bird and Magic here in this project), so there should be some concurrent elevation of those players who struggled and eventually overcame lame-duck management as well, no? That's the keystone point here.

This is an outstanding post and speaks to the elephant in the room, the guys in this GOAT list needed team support to win, even Jordan, Kareem, LeBron, Garnett, everyone.

Some were fortunate to have played with an all star or HOF coach thier entire career (Russell, Magic, Bird, Duncan with Pops and even Wilt with his quota all stars back then.)

But if you really want to seperate the wheat from the chaff, see how those guys did without that team support, in adverse situations.

This comparison shows how the GOAT players faired without an all star or HOF coach, it is incomplete as it only happened to a few players certain years.

Regular Season Records and Playoff success comparison of top 10 players, during the years without HOF coaching or HOF or All Star teammates:

Jordan (no Pippen, Grant or Phil Jackson):

84-85 (Rookie):
38-44, -0.50 SRS, 11th Ortg, 20th Drtg, Lost 1st Round

85-86 (Injured for season, healthy for Playoffs):
30-52, -3.12 SRS, 8th Ortg, 23rd Drtg, Lost 1st Round

86-87 (Coaching change):
40-42, 1.27 SRS, 12th Ortg, 11th Drtg, Lost 1st Round

Kareem (no Oscar, Magic or Pat Riley):

75-76:
40-42, 0.17 SRS, 7th Ortg, 13th Drtg, No playoff appearance

76-77 (Coaching change):
53-29, 2.65 SRS, 5th Ortg, 10th Drtg, Lost WCF (1st round byes back then)

77-78:
45-37, 2.59 SRS, 3rd Ortg, 11th Drtg, Lost 1st Round

79-80:
47-35, 2.95 SRS, 5th Ortg, 10th Drtg, Lost 2nd Round

Kevin Garnett (No All star players):

95-96 (Rookie, High School player):
26-56, -5.14 SRS, 25 Ortg, 20th Drtg, No playoff appearance

97-98 (Coaching change):
45-37, 0.17 SRS, 7th Ortg, 23rd Drtg, Lost 1st Round

98-99 (Lockout year, only 50 games played):
25-25. -0.17 SRS, 17th Ortg, 11 Drtg, Lost 1st Round

99-00:
50-32, 2.67 SRS, 8th Ortg, 12th Drtg, Lost 1st Round

00-01:
47-35, 1.81 SRS, 11th Ortg, 16th Drtg, Lost 1st Round

02-03:
51-31, 2.46 SRS, 5th Ortg, 16th Drtg, Lost 1st Round

04-05:
44-38, 1.73 SRS, 6th Ortg, 15th Drtg, No playoff appearance

05-06 (coaching change):
33-49,-1.75 SRS, 28th Ortg, 10th Drtg, No playoff appearance

06-07:
32-50, -3.16 SRS, 25th Ortg, 21st Drtg, No playoff appearance

LeBron James (no All star player):

03-04 (Rookie, High School player):
35-47, -3.07 SRS, 22nd Ortg, 19th Drtg, No playoff apperance

05-06 (Coaching change):
50-32, 2.17 SRS, 9th Ortg, 14th Drtg, Lost 2nd Round

06-07:
50-32, 3.33 SRS, 18th Ortg, 4th Drtg, Lost in Finals

07-08:
45-37, -0.53 SRS, 20th Ortg, 11th Drtg, Lost in 2nd Round

09-10:
61-21, 6.17 SRS, 6th Ortg, 7th Drtg, Lost in 2nd Round

Hakeem Olajuwon (No All star player):

87-88:
46-36, .082 SRS, 13th Ortg, 4th Drtg, Lost 1st Round

88-89 (Coaching change, Don Chaney):
45-37, 0.22 SRS, 18th Ortg, 4th Drtg, Lost 1st Round

89-90:
41-41, 1.71 SRS, 21 Ortg, 1st Drtg, Lost 1st Round

92-93 (Coaching change, Rudy T):
55-27, 3.57 SRS, 6th Ortg, 3rd Drtg, Lost 2nd Round

93-94:
58-24, 4.19 SRS, 15th Ortg, 2nd Drtg, Won NBA Championship

Comparing Olajuwon's teams in 1993 and 1994 to Garnett's in 2007 is pretty absurd, no offense.

I kept saying the same thing over and over again, but it's wrong to rate casts simply with "all-star player" for so many reasons.

[therealbig3]

I'm pretty sure people are claiming that. All decades and Ronny among them.

Seemed to me that everyone is acknowledging that Hakeem became a better player after 92. But I believe they're claiming that Hakeem's improvement as a player wasn't as big of a game-changer as the improvement in terms of coaching. He didn't magically become an MVP-caliber player overnight...the circumstances around him changed.

Instead of Don Chaney, you had Rudy T, who the Rockets had already seen improvement under when he took over halfway through 92. He restructured the offense to be more Hakeem-centric, and he built a system designed around ball movement and spacing. Hakeem makes improvements to his own game in terms of his passing and reading defenses. Now, Hakeem would have certainly looked better either way even if Don Chaney remained the coach, but I don't believe he would have all of a sudden been an MVP candidate if it wasn't for Rudy T actually designing an effective system around his talent (which is something that should be expected from every coach).

[Texas Chuck]

actually usage is one of the myths. If you look at the numbers(and remember watching Dallas from 01-04) its clear Nash wasnt under-used in Dallas. The biggest factor by far in the change from Nash in Dallas to Nash in Phoenix, is shockingly enough---Steve Nash. That and the Suns players were more symbiotic with him than Dirk in particular, but also the rest of the Mavs team.

Well, no, that's not entirely accurate and we'll get into that when it's more Nash-related. I look forward to that discussion, though, since while I disagree with you, I also don't generally agree that Nellie specifically did anything wrong with Nash. He was a senile old bastard who flouted convention for the sake of being different and it cost him at times, but that had more to do with his treatment of the team's frontcourt and defense than anything to do with backcourt control. Most wouldn't make the decision to go away from their obvious-star-is-obvious, generational-talent big man and give it to the scrappy guard no one had expected to turn into an All-Star, so it's hard to lampoon him for having Nash give up the ball for isolations to established All-Star players.

We will have to get into this later because your take on this really differs from both what the numbers say and what I remember from watching those teams every night. And referring to Nash in Dallas as a scrappy guard, while hilarious, is just a terrible description. Nash was an elite offensive PG in Dallas for a number of years.

[therealbig3]

(when your comparison is Larry Bird who turned a 29 win team into a 61 win team as a rookie)

You keep saying this, but then this leads to the obvious question in that case...did Larry Bird never improve from his rookie year? Was 1980 Larry Bird's peak in that case?

Because his supporting cast obviously gets a lot better as his career progresses (Kevin McHale, Robert Parish, Dennis Johnson, Danny Ainge, etc.), and the Celtics never win much more than 61 games in a season (they peak at 67 wins in 1986). So using this logic, it would make sense to say that Bird never got better as a player after his rookie year...and in fact, he probably regressed, since his supporting cast got a lot better, but he still couldn't push the team much further.

I think it makes much more sense to believe that there was a lot more going on to the Celtics' improvement in 1980 than simply the addition of Larry Bird. Yes, Larry Bird was probably the most significant factor, but he was far from the only major one, and it's pretty disingenuous to keep saying he took a 29-win team to 61 wins as a rookie, because that's not what happened.

[magicmerl]

Got it. I said I wondered how hakeem would've fared against jordan's bulls in 94 and 95 if he never retired, but that didn't factor into my ranking for him.

I recall Phil saying that he thought that the Bulls matched up *very* well vs the rockets, so if they'd just managed to get past the Knicks, they would have been favoured in the finals.

That's a crock of bull...i respect Phil and all but no way they were beating Hakeem that year.

Hey, Phil tweaked a lot of people by saying things that weren't necessarily true. Take it for what it is.

[PaulieWal]

I recall Phil saying that he thought that the Bulls matched up *very* well vs the rockets, so if they'd just managed to get past the Knicks, they would have been favoured in the finals.

That's a crock of bull...i respect Phil and all but no way they were beating Hakeem that year.

Hey, Phil tweaked a lot of people by saying things that weren't necessarily true. Take it for what it is.

OT but I feel like Phil is one of the underrated trolls in the NBA. He has a tendency of making trollish statements in the media .

[magicmerl]

OT but I feel like Phil is one of the underrated trolls in the NBA. He has a tendency of making trollish statements in the media .

Agreed. Remember the 'asterisk' that the Spurs needed to have after their lockout championship in 99?