70sFan wrote:f4p wrote:his comment was about the quality of the league as it has gotten deeper over time, not the box score.
Please read the first sentence I quoted.
he said people fall off from the ABA to the NBA because the NBA was better. then says the modern NBA is better than the old NBA.
that seems like he was talking about league quality.
and if someone was saying jaylen brown is a superstar, why would they be doing so by being blinded by love of the box score? exactly which box score composites is he great in? or even close? 16.4 PER and 0.086 WS48 in the last 2 playoffs. seems like you and box score agree. this is where an irrational dismissal of the box scores leads you.
He doesn't say that and I am well aware of Brown poor boxscore composites (which I already mentioned), but people are still in love with raw ppg averages unfortunately.
so then why did you say someone must be looking at the box score too much to say jaylen brown is a superstar?
I don't have any "irrational dismissal of the box scores", why do you think that's the case?
well...
I don't find PER useful at all
that, for one.
, because it doesn't measure anything.
sure it does. it measures production.
BPM is a bit better, but it still fails on a lot of levels. If you want to start the discussion that raw RAPM is useless, then don't do that, because I don't find ranking players based on RAPM values useful either.
so you're taking the unibro approach. all the numbers are bad?
Box score numbers are useful at what they measure. They have their limitations, but you use them as a starting point of your analysis if you want to evaluate scoring ability for example. Rebounding impact can be also taken to some degree from boxscores, although it's tougher. Evaluating playmaking by these raw stats usually doesn't give you much info and trying to esitmate defensive impact is useless. All of these things have their value, but looking at basketball-reference to conclude who is the better player when we talk about ~top 50 players makes no sense.
so we shouldn't look at the most common stats we have for all of the players for all of history? things that can give us a common basis for comparison for everybody. just sweep it away? you realize that for some of these older players, we are very limited in what data we have available. i mean you seem to personally have a lot of video, but watching most of these older players is not the kind of thing that has just seeped in by osmosis like seeing a bunch of bird or magic games on espn classics or hardwood classics. unless one has dedicated a whole bunch of time to finding and watching old basketball games, there is only so much some people are going to have seen certain players. and even for the most diehard, there is apparently very limited ability to basically see anything from the 60's and before (someone once said 9 full games i think?).
To create such a list, I think it's critical to understand how players actually play, what are their strengths and weaknesses, how was the context of their careers, how players scaled up or down their roles and impact etc.
yes, that's all fine and good. if we all had watched everybody play their whole careers, that would be great for this project. but i suspect we haven't all gotten around to an in depth look at everyone's career. even the people really dedicated to doing such things. unless we want like 4 people voting, we'll have to accept some substitution of stats vs watching. and even then, how are you going to determine their strengths and weaknesses. do we just take your word on it? you say Player A is great at defense. someone else watches and says Player A is bad at defense. presumably you are going to have to quantify it in some way. it may not necessarily be the box score, but it will involve some sort of stats, individual or team as it may be. the box score is just one more in a series of stats we can use to quantify/confirm what we are observing.
It's significantly more complex than saying that Rick Barry is a weaker player than Siakam, because he doesn't have fancy PER or TS% numbers.
and again, Siakam does not have as good of numbers as Barry, especially in the playoffs. you've now said equating Brown to Havliced and Siakam to Barry are because of the box score, when neither are on their level based on the box score.
Iggy himself mentioned many times that he never watched some of the players he argues for or against, how can you say anything about a player you've never watched?
i suspect lots of people in this project have said lots of things about lots of players they have never watched. and definitely commented on games and series that now exist only in a spreadsheet. and even saying someone "watched" a player from the 60's might mean they saw a 10 minute clip of a few games. all sorts of sports lists are made that feature players the rankers have never seen. one way to do this is think about players and archetypes you have seen play a lot, think about what their numbers look like, and then look at the older player's numbers and try to surmise things from that. if you understand how the archetypes and numbers usually work, you don't necessarily have to see Player A numbers > Player B numbers; therefore, Player A > Player B. if you know Player B is a better defender and a creator who is likely to be underrated in certain stats and they are already close to parity with Player A, you can guess that Player B is actually the better player. maybe some people aren't comfortable with being able to do that.
