Doctor MJ wrote:
KG going from '04 to '05 saw his On court +/- go way down and his Off go way up. By all +/- impact studies he was considerably less effective in '05 than '04.
I''m not sure if on/off is the best indicator - but I've stumbled into this conundrum before while assessing KG (and Duncan).
To me, Kevin Garnett's 3 "main years" when he's really in his peak is 2003, 2004 and 2005.
You are right in that 2005 his impact stats are not as good as 2004. However, in 2003, his impact stats are the best in the NBA - that is quintessential high +/- KG and I still feel like people are
scared to say Kevin Garnett was better than Tim Duncan in 2003. I ask myself all the time - do I really have Duncan as the best player in 03 because I truly think this or because I am just following everyone else?
I mean, Tim Duncan won a championship with a non star studded team while KG was bumped in the first round, however - Duncan's "bad" team wasn't actually bad relative to KG's, it was superior and much better coached (some how this gets lost in the shuffle, the Spurs were just a more efficient machine than pretty much any version of the Timberwolves even 04).
Even in the playoffs Kevin Garnett was good in 2003 - if we want to cut it down to just first round performances so the sample sizes are even, KG in 03 (27/16/5, 51%/60%, 5 FTA, 3 TOV) still looks a bit better looking than Duncan in 03 ( 19/16/5, 52%/69%, 9 FTA, 3.7 TOV, 3.5 BLK) or KG in 04 for that matter (26/15/7, 45%/71%, 8.5 FTA, 4.5 tov).
But perhaps the greater point is this - what are really the two big Kevin Garnett years? The two years where he is most accomplished from a narrative stand point? 2004 (his MVP season) and 2008 (his championship season).
What are the only two years Kevin Garnett ever won POY? 2004 and 2008 (and really, in 2008 he was hardly the only candidate). Kevin Garnett was a better player in Minnesota than he was in Boston, and the level of competition wasn't really worse in the 00s than what he faced in 08 yet he still won POY.
Tim Duncan is an even greater example.
The years Tim Duncan won a championship as the 'guy' were 1999, 2003, 2005 and 2007.
The years he won the retro player of the year were 1999, 2003, 2005, 2007.
Isn't that a bit too much of a coincidence? Was Tim Duncan really better in 1999 than he was in 2002? That's incredibly hard for me to believe (just glancing, he was better in 02 than in 99) - and his competition Shaq in 1999 was worse than he was in 2002? (offensively sure, but defense and games played - nope, seems like 99 Shaq was better than 02 Shaq). That's equally as hard for me to believe.
The narratives around Duncan, Shaq and Garnett getting POYs are highly tied to the years they won big accolades, the
correlation is as high as you could possibly get actually.
So the thing is: We're not just talking about "weaker supporting cast, weaker team result, but everything about the player is the same". Context shifts, the things that were working before stop working and the player's impact literally wanes a good deal. Are you going to try to normalize for all of that to ensure that the POY goes to the "best" player every year?
My conclusion is that "best player" evaluations are much harder to pin down and best left for multi-year holistic analysis. In a given year, what we can look at is how the player achieved what he did, and look at the various stats and team accomplishments to provide context for the scale of the achievement.
Why not try? It should be a difficult thing to assess, not an easy thing.
Re: Erving. His '76 playoffs were literally the most impressive thing he ever did though. We're not just talking about knocking him in '75 for getting destroyed in the first round against a vastly inferior team, we're talking about the fact that what Erving did in the '76 playoffs was probably more impressive than any other playoff run by any other player the entire decade. The Nets had no business beating the Denver Rockets in those finals, yet they did and Erving played like a god against the best team in the league who would soon enough display the best defense in the entire NBA the following year.
But we are also talking about 76 Erving going against 76 Kareem - 76 Kareem had a much better year than he did in 75. However, Kareem did not even make the playoffs that year (but famously won MVP despite not making the post season).
Julius Erving being superior to Kareem Abdul-Jabar doesn't sound that accurate to me, it sounds like that's just the year he's "supposed" to win it.
Julius Erving in 75 won the MVP in the RS - but was upset in the post season, so yes, I would also argue that his season might not have been as good as his 76 season. However, his competition in 75 was
iwaaaay nferior - Rick Barry is really not that great of a player, and that was a year where everyone was giving their votes to Bob McAdoo (he placed second). Julius Erving is not an inferior player to Rick Barry, much less Bob McAdoo.
The highest placing ABA player that year in 1975? Artis Gilmore. Who won the ABA Championship that year? The Kentucky Colonels.
Dr.J was in his peak for 1975, he very much was the same player as he was in 76 - his sample size over his MVP RS kind of points to this. I hate to use the "no one at the time argument thought this" - but, well, I don't think anyone in 1975 thought Artis Gilmore was better than Dr.J.
Dr.J had the best RS of his career in 1975, and had already been an ABA champion the year right before so it's not like he was an RS darling - everyone already knew his play was not empy, it transfers over into post season play and not only did he not win RPOY, he placed 4th place behind Rick Barry, Bob McAdoo and Artis Gilmore. I would argue it is very hard that one of those guys was better than Dr.J that year, but all three? Almost zero chance.
Re: Kareem should win 9 POYs. I didn't understand how Walton could win an MVP over Kareem until I watched them play head to head. It's a Curry vs Durant situation. Walton made Portland play like they did, and it was a better way of playing than how a Kareem-dictated team played. Proactive, energetic, confident. Kareem's teams when he was the dominant stylistic force just didn't work like that, and didn't work that well.
I'm not saying Kareem didn't deserve a lot of POYs, but Kareem was an individualist in a team game and the shape of his impact followed from that. Additive rather than multiplicative. Big, but able to be surpassed by the type of star who made his team catch fire, and also something that seemed to get weighed down when Kareem wasn't in his best mental place. And part of that specifically were the cluster headaches that afflicted him in ways a stuffy nose just doesn't an athlete.
Again, not looking to deny narrative impact here, but it's one thing to say we shouldn't count series victories and quite another thing to ignore the fact that monster performances in the biggest stage are what define the legacies of all these players, and so the literal weight of the playoff series is so high that narrative center of mass simply has to be based around them.
Fair enough, though it's worth mentioning Walton didn't get POY. Hey, Kareem did pretty well for himself - he only won like 7 of the POYs, but I'm just saying there's a chance he might have lost one or 2 of them to some guys with sexier stories.
I have no attachment to the 70s, Kareem or Dr.J - I just was reading the RPOY threads in the 70s a month or 2 ago and simply was not all that convinced of the arguments made in some threads. Not saying every post has to be an ElGee book, but a lot of them were kind of just write offs due to lack of success coded in prettier words.
