Special_Puppy wrote:The difference in support between KG and Stockton+CP3 is interesting. People seem way more willing to accept advanced stats-based historical revisionism when it comes to KG as opposed to CP3+Stockton.
So I'll speak to this some, first from a perspective in what I've seen in the community, and second from how I've done my own analysis.
First, I think a natural starting point is the fact that KG is an MVP while Stockton & Paul are not. Now, MVP votes can be wrong and folks are free to say that that's what they believe to be the case here, but as a starting point, I'd say it makes sense to expect Garnett to have a higher stature here like he did in mainstream voting during his career.
Paul proponents will naturally point to him arguably deserving an MVP in '07-08 over Kobe...but this is a board - back in 2010 - that voted Garnett over either for RPOY, so while that can be disagreed with and debated, makes sense that this board would favor Garnett over Paul based on that.
Now, something 14 years ago doesn't necessarily relate to something now - major turnover in everyone involved - but I can say pretty objectively that it happened in part based on the extreme indicators of impact that were seen for Garnett in '07-08 which were unrivaled by anyone in the league in the estimate of those voting for him. I should say that I voted for Kobe - with Paul second - over Garnett at the time so I'm not part of that number...but eventually I agreed with their reasoning and now I have Garnett #1 for that year.
Over to Stockton and +/- data, the thing there has always been that we got access to the +/- in reverse chronological order and we still don't have it for his whole career. That's important because
a) Early +/- assessment of Stockton helped his standing based on what was going on in Utah post-prime years. At the time folks like myself noted that there was a clear possibility that with full data we'd end up concluding Stockton was generally the more impactful player than Malone...but it was also possible that earlier years wouldn't tell the same story. The latter not just because it's a logical possibility, but because guys age differently, and so does their impact, particularly when in differing roles with different primacy.
b) We know when Utah peaked it came with Stockton's role decreasing and Malone's increasing. That frankly made it hard to imagine ever concluding "No actually, Stockton was the Jazz MVP in Malone's NBA MVP" seasons.
c) Since we've gotten more data from that era, it's indeed been more valuable to Malone. Oh, you can make arguments that Stockton was more valuable per minute, but even that's not clear, and Malone was playing a lot more.
Now, while in theory it should be possible for the 2nd best Jazz candidate from the era to be up there with Garnett - Team A can have 2 guys better than Team B - I think it's understandably hard for people to get their mind around arguing for one team's 2nd best player over someone they see as a legit MVP.
Okay, now just speaking for myself in the context of this project. Leading up to the 2023 project I went back and did a personal Retro POY and I'm going to share the POY Shares I gave to these 3 guys in a second. I do want to emphasize a) POY Shares don't represent the entirety of my holistic assessment, but b) the process did hurt Garnett in my ranking this time. I'm more impressed with Garnett as a basketball player than Tim Duncan, but from a perspective of team sport achievement, I don't feel comfortable Garnett achieved more than Duncan and the POY Shares were part of that assessment.
Feel free to ask more details on that, but here's how the 3 players in question here stack up by my current historical POY Shares:
Garnett 3.7
Paul 1.3
Stockton 0.3
So yeah, obviously there's a pretty clear pecking order there. What explains this? Well I think first and foremost remember that these shares are done by year-by-year assessment on a 10-7-5-3-1 scale where ranking 6th in the entire league gets you nothing. As so yeah, Stockton's career is a hell of a lot more impressive than that number indicates to me filled a good number of Top 10 seasons, but it's just hard for me to put him up at the very top in any given year.
Now with Paul by contrast I did see him as a guy who was a candidate to hit the top of those charts in general, and was surprised at repeatedly slotting him lower than I had in the past. What happened? Those playoff disappointments.
Now, I don't want to blow this phenomenon out of proportion: I think Paul's had an absolutely all-time great kind of career and I'm really not looking to call him "overrated!" in general, but the competition is fierce at the top and it doesn't take much to slide when using the scale I'm using.
But there's just a number of disappointments in the playoffs that end up dropping him a bit in my rankings in any given year. This is something we could get into in any given year, but the essence of it is that Paul's teams have tended to get upset in the playoffs, and they've been even more likely to lose from ahead with Paul finishing small - and yes, injury's a big part of that.