RealGM 2020 Top 100 Project: #81 (Ben Wallace)

[sansterre]

Wow, neat names to run.

Neil Johnston looks profoundly dominant in the regular season during his career. But his career is pretty short, and the tiny sample size of his playoff performance looks quite bad. Really neat career.

Zelmo Beaty is a walking advertisement for ABA-stat caution. So Beaty's rolling along in the NBA, posting 10ish WS seasons when healthy, shooting around +3.0%. Then he jumps to the ABA. Suddenly he's a 15 Win Share player shooting +9.5%, and he was 31 when he made the jump. I currently give full faith to ABA numbers so Beaty comes out looking pretty good . . . but still.

Bernard King . . . he's like the anti-Neil Johnston. The guy played a lot of years, but not a lot of minutes. He played 16 seasons but broke 3k minutes once, 2.5k minutes seven times and under 500 three times. So he played a butt-load of seasons, but he played fewer minutes than McHale. His regular season metrics are all pretty underwhelming; between the low-ish minutes and limited value outside of his shooting (which was, too be fair, excellent) none of the metrics (BackPicks, PIPM, WS or VORP) like him a ton. WOWYR thinks he's above average for this group. But King is the anti-Johnston because in an 18-game postseason sample size during his prime he set the league on fire, absolutely eviscerating everybody. Still pretty skeptical overall, but hard to shake a stick at that two-year run in the playoffs.

[penbeast0]

One more thing about Zelmo Beaty. He suffered from knee problems from his college days on. In an interview, one thing he gives credit for his big 1st year in Utah was he took the previous year off and his knees felt better than they ever had as a pro. I would guess that the weaker league was a much bigger factor since his 72 season was very similar but that's what the player himself credits the improvement to

[trex_8063]

Happy for you to post stats in the thread, don't necessarily have much to say about them.

Re: Yardley as Arizin's man. Yardley was the Pistons' top rebounder all year, so it really doesn't make sense to try to blame the 6'4" Arizin for why Yardley and the Pistons outrebounded the Warriors, particularly since Arizin was busy being the guy who would have won Finals MVP.

You don't see the double-standard in giving Arizin a pass, in part [apparently/seems implicit] because he's 6'4" (Yardley was only 6'5", fwiw), after you'd JUST cited Johnston's 6'8" thin frame as a negative on him and within the context of noting the Piston's wupped them on the boards?

[trex_8063]

So we heard back from Hal14 on this runoff, but otherwise didn't get any new runoff votes.

So the count is 6-4 in favour of Ben Wallace. As per protocol [to not extend things in futility]: if after 12 hours of runoff a player still has a lead of 2 or more votes, we'll call it and move on.

Wallace takes this spot....

Spoiler:

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[quote=”sansterre”].[/quote]

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[Odinn21]

So we heard back from Hal14 on this runoff, but otherwise didn't get any new runoff votes.

He had Greer over Wallace according to post #34.

[trex_8063]

So we heard back from Hal14 on this runoff, but otherwise didn't get any new runoff votes.

He had Greer over Wallace according to post #34.

Yup, I said "we heard back" from him. That's what made it 4-6 in favour of Wallace (it was 3-6, with Hal being an unknown prior to that).

[Odinn21]

So we heard back from Hal14 on this runoff, but otherwise didn't get any new runoff votes.

He had Greer over Wallace according to post #34.

Yup, I said "we heard back" from him. That's what made it 4-6 in favour of Wallace (it was 3-6, with Hal being an unknown prior to that).

Ah. My bad, I read that wrong. My brain had that as "didn't hear". Cheers.

[tmorgan]

Good to see my guy Big Ben making it... but Greer is getting disrespected here. Get that man in!