Dr Mufasa wrote:If we're talking caliber of play, this is true. A guy like David Robinson, if he won like 3 titles as the man, he'd have a crazy resume. A peak of 25-29ppg, 10-12rpg, 3bpg, .58 TS% and 10 FTA a game getting opposing bigs in foul trouble, while spreading the floor for penetrations + DPOY interior d, and one of the all time "great guys". Where would that guy rank? Ahead of Magic and Bird for "big over small + INTERIOR D > ALL" reasons? I think so. Does he challenge top 2-3 of all time like Kareem? And on the topic of Drob. I think his hype for his time is underrated. I read Bill Simmons book a few months ago and at one point talking about Drob in his first two years he says "at that point I would've bet ANYTHING this guy ends up a top 10 player of all time. He had everything" After reading that the first thing I thought of was Lebron. Right now it seems like there's no way in hell he doesn't land in the top 10 of all time. But if he doesn't win a title as the man you know what will happen. He will be considered a worse player than Wade and Kobe. If Wade goes on with Bosh or Amare and gets a 2nd title and an MVP and Lebron ends up with no title as the man, comparing them will be a joke... in Wade's favor
What it really comes down to is the gap in rankings is not so much for caliber of play, as much as historical relevance... where you stamp your place in the game... because at the end of the day stats and on court performance only matters when you accomplish something with it. Ultimately we put a lot of weight in titles and titles as the best player... but maybe that's how it should be. Because all these guys proved they can come through with it... whereas with the "if only they're supporting cast/luck was better" types, it's more of a guessing game
Good point. The issue is the small sample size. Only one team can win a title any given year, which means only one or two 'great' players can win a championship any given year. On the flip side, one team
has to win. That is to say that while you can look at the 97 Finals and say "Yeah, Jordan and Pippen deserve a ring for that, but Stockton and Malone should get some type of credit too", you can also look at like 1979 and say "Yeah, I think it'd be better if we just had the 02 Kings get credit for this title somehow."
The fact is, there have been some teams that lost the conference finals in year X that were better than the the finals champ in year Y. And I think most serious sports fans- because it goes beyond basketball- understand that. We can deal with that cognitively. But when you extend that to say that player X who never won [whatever] is better than player Y who did (or maybe did several times), the wheels come off. Sports fans
do not like that. It's why the rings argument is so pervasive in basketball, and to a lesser extent football. Baseball? By the nature of the game, it's comparatively unimportant.
The difference between 7 and 20 in the list of all-time great basketball players is very small, but what's more is that we need to acknowledge how large a role luck and circumstance play in it. I mean, I'm on the fence about Bryant and Olajuwon, but if someone says Kobe is marginally better on the virtue of one of Kobe's rings it gets tortured. Doesn't that kind of argument lend itself to Kobe Bryant being a better basketball than Hakeem Olajuwon partially because Vlade Divac accidentally tipped a rebound to Robert Horry one day and Horry made a shot? If Jordan is better than Chamberlain because of six titles where five wouldn't have cut it, is Jordan better because Horace Grant once made a nice pass to John Paxson for 3?
There's got to be a better system, and that's why I side with statistics usually. An objective representation of
most- if not all- of a players production on the court. And try to just leave it at that.
