Odinn21 wrote:Going by point by point.
Doctor MJ wrote:However:
1. To my knowledge, we never see him lead elite offenses.
Not many did though. It's a rare sight to high usage, high scoring players leading elite offenses. I mean will we be holding 2003 McGrady back when we come to the Magic thread? I guess it's been so long about this because Dantley is a polarizing figure about this topic.
Oh yes, without hesitation. I consider TMac to be quite overrated by most tied to the NBA.
Now, I will say that in this particular project we can focus on one year, and TMac is noteworthy for his peak year also being the only year when his efficiency wasn't a problem. Given the greater body of work though, I think we can confidently say that it was largely an accident that TMac was efficient that year. It was the year everything was going in for him, and even there, his efficiency was nothing impressive by current standards.
To be clear: Obviously Dantley's efficiency is amazing so I'm not saying efficiency alone would let TMac off the hook. I do however get frustrated when people talk about TMac's proto-heliocentrism through the misguided lens of being a great facilitator for others. TMac was a very good player, but I would not say that the Big Sleep played the game with great levels of awake-ness.
Odinn21 wrote:2. His coaches seemed to get driven nuts by the way the offenses went stagnant as teammates just looked to get Dantley the ball.
Well, as I keep saying, as an outsider to the US, getting my hands on games were a lot easier than getting off-court material. Especially off-court material that did not make the highlights. If you have any about this topic, please share with me. I'd like to see them.
Well first thing I want to say is that even when I'm vehement about stuff like this I can admit there's much I don't know, so I don't want to talk like you'd agree with me if you just knew all the things I've heard over time. I might just be wrong.
But here's some stuff.
From Sports Illustrated in 1979:
Journey's End for AD? His Fourth Team in Four Seasons should be Adrian Dantley's Last - unless, of course, the struggling Utah Jazz, like the Braves, Pacers, and Lakers, up-and-trade him too.If Dantley is puzzled by his forced march around the NBA, he isn't the only one. "He's a great player and we worked hard to get him," says Utah General Manager Frank Layden. "Three other teams made serious mistakes about him."
On the whole, Wilkes has never been either the scorer or rebounder Dantley is, so eyebrows were raised when Wilkes was kept and Dantley was let go. "I don't think anybody in the league thinks Wilkes is a better player than Dantley," says Utah Coach Tom Nissalke. "I think they made a real mistake with A.D."
In the manner of all good wheeler-dealers, Layden can't help gloating over the steal he got in Dantley. "I think his market value right now is much greater than it was three months ago," Layden says. "We could get a lot more than Spencer Haywood for him now. But, of course, Adrian's not going anywhere. Right after he got to Salt Lake City a rumor went around that we were thinking of trading him, so I went to Adrian and told him there's no way we'd trade him. We want to build around him. We want Adrian Dantley to finish his career here."
(Worth noting it was Jerry West that Layden & Nissalke was accusing of making this mistake.)
A retrospective on '83-84:
‘You gotta have heart’: The Utah Jazz’s first playoff run was their most important. Here’s why.“Frank did a masterful job of coaching and making everybody buy in to what he was doing. And it resulted in winning a division and having a banner raised,” Griffith said. “So to me, that was probably the foundation of the Jazz’s playoff success. That made us relevant, that made the fans realize that, ‘Hey, we’ve got a good team here.’ It woke everybody up in the NBA.”
(Leydon, who had only been GM before, was now coach, and won NBA Coach of the Year this year.)
From 1986:
Dantley Is Relieved To Finally Leave UtahDantley's problems with Layden began in earnest the following season. During Dantley's preseason holdout for a new contract, Layden, who also serves as the team's general manager, accused Dantley of "trying to hold the team hostage," and stripped him of his position as team captain.
Late last season, the two clashed again after Dantley defended then-rookie Karl Malone in a locker room altercation with Layden. A short time later, Layden suspended Dantley for one game, reinstating him only after a lengthy meeting with team officials. After his reinstatement, Dantley held a news conference explaining his position in the situation, an action that infuriated Layden.
(I'll be the first to say that Layden being furious may just be about Layden having anger issues, but of course if the team had been winning while this was happening, things may play out differently.)
To 1988:
TIRED OF ALL THAT JAZZ
COACH FRANK LAY DEN, WHO MADE A POOR NBA TEAM A GOOD ONE, QUIT BECAUSE THE GAME CEASED BEING FUNWhy did Layden quit when everything seemed to be going so well? "The game actually consumes you," he says. "You are no longer in charge of your life. After a while, the ball dribbles you. I decided I'd have more fun hitting golf balls in Palm Springs."
Says Jazz general manager Dave Checketts ruefully, "Finally, at last, we have built a team that has credibility and respectability, and the sucker bails out on me." Karl Malone, the Jazz's All-Star forward, told SI's Steve Rushin, "Frank is one of the greatest coaches and motivators in the game, and he just hangs it up. I already miss him. I dedicate the rest of my career to him." The Mailman is now wearing basketball shoes with FRANK printed on each heel.
Layden's wife, Barbara, says, "One night Frank came home and asked me, "What happened to the dignity I had in this wonderful game? I'm so unhappy." Fans are really cruel. I just can't imagine getting so upset that you would spit on someone over a game."
The second major reason Layden quit is Adrian Dantley, which may seem strange considering that Dantley has been with Detroit since the start of the 1986-87 season. But before the 1984-85 season, Dantley wanted to renegotiate his Jazz contract, which still had a year to run at $550,000. He refused to come to training camp until it was done. Layden, taking a firm stand, said that inasmuch as he had a valid contract, Dantley would have to play, and then discussions could begin. Dantley missed camp, nine preseason games and six regular-season games. He showed up when Sam Battistone, then the club's owner, undermined Layden by acceding to Dantley's demands. Last week Battistone admitted, "I'm sure it was difficult for Frank."
Checketts says Layden "was never the same" after that. A year later the Jazz traded Dantley. Most Jazz insiders have little doubt that the Dantley deal was the beginning of the end for Layden, who felt he held the moral high ground and that it was ripped from under him. Current owner Larry Miller says that the Dantley experience "soured" Layden on the business aspects of pro ball.
3. Despite people saying as Dantley went along that his previous teams clearly made a mistake letting him go, history didn't really seem to prove this correct and meanwhile those who acquired Dantley seemed to go from "We got an amazing steal!" to trading him as a matter of course.
To finish up here: It's unfair to attribute Dantley with being so problematic that he'd drive any coach out of basketball, but what's absolutely the case is that Layden built everything around Dantley for years and over time he soured on Dantley and this was part and parcel to the entire experience souring on him.
The man who drafted Stockton & Malone and clearly believed in them both would hire Jerry Sloan as the new coach and step back into the shadows serving as Utah Jazz President through 1999.
Odinn21 wrote:I'll also say: You say he didn't hold the ball too much, but he certainly did at times. Was it as big of an issue as it was made out to be? I don't know, but it happened.
Oh, like any other ISO scorers, he sure did at times. He did not do it long enough for to earn such reputation though. That was how I intended. It was not to say it did not happen. For example Carmelo Anthony held the ball far more than Dantley did but he does not have a reputation for it as much as Dantley has.
I think this is mostly about differences in era. Lord knows I've been talking about what's wrong with Melo as a scorer for forever.
Odinn21 wrote:And there's the matter that Dantley clearly had tunnel vision issues. It wasn't even just him going into his scoring attempt and forcing a tough shot (which he'd hit better than most), but him wandering around with the ball looking to find a scoring attempt when his initial move was stymied.
I certainly agree with this. For a player that his first instinct was to score from the low post, he was like Olajuwon before Rudy T in this regard (but Dantley was not the defender Olajuwon was of course, lol).
Yeah and it makes sense to ask what Dantley could do with a bunch of 3-point shooters around him.
Odinn21 wrote:Dantley was willing to pass out of double teams, but seems like a case of a volume scorer who didn't make attacking passes in those circumstances so much as he passed it out for a reset.
Saying all this, I want to say again: I don't know exactly how much this hurt his teams, and I also don't know how much better things could have been with Dantley's teams with better offensive strategy and fitting teammates.
Dantley seems like he may be a guy who truly never had offensive superstar impact creating elite team offense in reality, but could have gotten there if better utilized.
Looking at Harden under D'Antoni's coaching, I think Dantley would be one of the most benefited players from more coaching tools. In terms of his strengths and weaknesses, he was underutilized in some aspects or was utilized totally wrong.
Well, thing is Harden was quite clearly the smartest man on the floor back when he was on OKC. I still remember Jeff Van Gundy frothing at the mouth just gushing how good this 6th man was at a time when the basketball world was still thinking of Harden as a disappointment as a mere bench player on the Durant/Westbrook Thunder.
While I think D'Antoni could have done good things with Dantley, Dantley was no Harden.
Odinn21 wrote:At the same time: You can't argue that his teams weren't trying to feature him. The Jazz were trying to build around him as their franchise player for more than half a decade, with the same GM (Layden) who basically bet his career on Dantley right from the start and would eventually take over as coach trying to make it all work. How did it end? With Layden cutting his losses with Dantley and successfully building a true contender with his next group. And with Dantley feeling like he'd been treated badly by Layden despite Layden trying to build everything around him for years.
This also depends on the coach. Popovich tried to build a team around Duncan and did one hell of a job. Saunders tried to build a team around Garnett and he did not do well in that regard.
I don't think it's given that Layden did a good job with Dantley. Like I said, I do not know much about the team's situation. Just voicing my scepticism around this premise. It may be true and it also may not be true.
Well, Layden was the only GM ever to decide to make Dantley his franchise player, and as noted, when he took over at coach, he won Coach of the Year. Add in that as GM he was busy acquiring Stockton & Malone and the Jazz would continue to have him be the big basketball boss in the shadows all through their glory years in the '90s and I think what we've got to say is that Layden was smarter than most coaches/GMs of the day and gave Dantley more opportunity than anyone else.
For him to end up souring so badly on Dantley is pretty sad given all of this. He surely didn't sour on Stockton & Malone the same way.
Odinn21 wrote:In the end, the reason why Dantley got traded from team to team was quite clearly because he never had the kind of offensive impact his volume & efficiency would indicate. Full stop. People back then saw those stats too. They weren't missing it. They were trying and it wasn't working that well. We might be able to, if we had all the granular data, pinpoint all of the reasons why Dantley just got unlucky, but as NBA fans we're used to top guys being so good we rarely have to dive into these details to justify players. Chances are, there was a hitch in the giddy up.
As for my Top 5, I'm going to chew on it further, but I'll say this:
I think it's clear that up to a certain point Dantley was the Jazz GOAT. Nobody from the '70s need apply.
But I struggle putting Dantley ahead of Eaton, one sided specialist who actually was the most valuable player of his generation at his side of the court. I might find that on a peak basis I like Dantley's best year better than Eaton's, but Dantley's offense never had the kind of impact Eaton's defense did - from anything I've seen - and that's just how it goes.
Lack of available data about him is one of the reasons why it's so hard to agree when the topic is Dantley. But I'll say this, if his impact in the sense we usually take matched his efficiency, especially on that scoring volume, he'd probably a top 25 ever. It's obvious that he isn't. But I also do not see the point of being overly critical of him because those critics usually too much imo.
So, you're starting from the stats you trust and then you're rounding down based on lack of team success, etc.
I'd be more likely to look at it in terms of whether I'm confident that Dantley as he was playing was able to be a true high-ceiling raiser. If in the end you're talking about with Dantley as a floor-raiser who can lead a good but not great offense, then to me, that's what he was, at least in the game at the time.
I'll also say that it does strike me that Utah basically represented "the most things going right" for Dantley, and still stuff was going wrong. It makes me look at those other places he played and think "Yeah, they saw something it's hard for us to see."
I want to go back to the Lakers here for a second:
I think the apparently simplest answer to the confusion there was that West understood that with a Kareem led team, they needed an off-ball player like Wilkes more so than an on-ball scorer like Dantley. Taken just with that information we can argue that Dantley was the better player but the worse fit.
However it has to be noted that the Lakers had would soon enough hand control of the offense to Magic Johnson. While it may seem unfair to compare Dantley to Magic - you don't have to be as good as Magic to be the best player the Jazz have ever had - I'd be inclined to say that if Dantley had just found a way to synergize with Kareem, they would have kept him.
And as a 6'5" guy who can put the ball on the floor, when you join Kareem's team, isn't it obvious that your job is to synergize with Kareem?
What happened instead is that Dantley got less playing time as the year went on as the team chose instead to play Wilkes more.
His time in LA thus sure seems to represent a failed audition with the best eyes the sport of basketball has ever produced (West) as judge.
