RealGM Top 100 List #34

[drza]

With Gilmore I do understand the concerns. Let's start by establishing what Gilmore meant in the beginning.

When he joined Kentucky they saw an over 8 point SRS improvement. This despite the fact that the team didn't really add anyone else, and the team already had a respected big man in Dan Issel. Where did that impact come from? Well a 2.4% defensive eFG improvement relative to the league average resulting in the team going from below average to far better than any other team in the league (gap between Kentucky & #2 was bigger than between #2 & #7 in an all-team league). More stunning still on defense, a 6% defensive FT/FGA improvement relative to league average which made the team 4.9% better than league average.

Now remember, Gilmore came into the league with "that's not possible athleticism". Look at the picture on the original post on that thread. I've done estimates before on where his reach was there, it's comparable to what Dwight Howard did in the slam dunk contest a few years back, except that Howard needed a running start (again estimate, not precise, I won't say he was clearly above Howard in how high he could get but he was certainly at least comparable). Gilmore's ability to get up and block shots no one else could that in addition to his 5 blocks per game, he racked up goaltending charges at simply bizarre levels, which Rick Barry insists were typically were not actually goaltending.

And of course, the team also saw a major improvement in offensive eFG (1.9% relative to average), indicating Gilmore was contributing lift on the other side of the ball.

People will talk about the fact that the team got upset in the playoffs and that's certainly relevant. But that doesn't change the fact that he was having huge impact generally, and it's not like his Colonels didn't have great playoff success over the next few years.

So basically: If you respect the ABA early in Gilmore's career, you need to look at Gilmore as someone with a Top 5-level peak.

Big "if" though, right? I get it, the early ABA was weak, people's stats went down after Gilmore's rookie year, and Gilmore was typically not a top 5 level player in the NBA. It all seems coherent with the idea that Gilmore just dominated a minor league...

Except that he literally was in a league with guys like prime Erving, Barry, and Billy Cunningham and until Erving later on, none showed signs of being clearly better players than Gilmore. I've heard some people say that Gilmore was disproportionately successful in the ABA because the league happened to be weak on big men, but this seems silly to me. This isn't a Wilt Chamberlain situation where his team just kept feeding him the ball because there was no one who could match up with him, this is a guy dominating primarily on defense as an unspeakable shotblocker. The guys in this league have seen 7 feet tall shotblockers before, and they know what to do about it (it's pretty obvious). Yet you have a pro like Rick Barry telling us Gilmore was like nothing he had ever seen despite playing against Russell and Wilt and playing with Thurmond.

This was perhaps the best description for Gilmore that I've seen in the project so far. Like RealBigThree mentioned, I've also been waiting to see this and also waiting to see the counters. So far none of the counters have moved me. As such, right now Gilmore is still in line to get my vote this thread.

As for the nomination, I still lean to Zo Mourning on quality but I agree with David Stern that it doesn't seem right that Pierce and TMac are gearing up to be voted in while Iverson still isn't even on the list. At the very least he deserves to be argued with them, if not finishing before them. So if Iverson gets some momentum, I might move to him.

Ironically, this same logic would argue that I should vote for Chris Paul, as I also think that he has peaked high enough to be compared with any of the current generation players under consideration and perhaps could sneak out on top. I don't favor that line of logic in making my nominations outside of a tie-breaker case (which is why I've been staying with Mourning), but I guess I wouldn't be averse to casting a tipping vote for Paul either.

[ElGee]

re: Kidd. I still have him mid 50s right now. I'm just not seeing anything in these discussions for the last umpteenth threads that have resonated with me...and Kidd's career is one I've watched fairly closely since he went to Phoenix.

Then you dig deeper, and you notice that in 2000, a year after leading his ONLY top-10 offense, Phoenix had an offensive rating of 104.7 with Kidd starting and 104.1 in 15 games he missed with Randy Livingston "replacing" him (Penny was still offensively savvy then). That's sort of like an anti-Steve Nash thing...

Then he goes to New Jersey and receives a lot of MVP love in the weakest conference basically ever, but no one notices the team is defensively driven. Why? Because they never do. The Suns offense goes from 100.3 (19th) and 2.7 points below league average to 103.3 (19th) and 1.2 points below league average. Relatively speaking, the Suns improved by a 1.5 points there. It was nice to see a non-scorer receive so much love, but the narrative there was way off.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the Nets go from -3.0 relative to the league and ranked 24th to -0.5, ranked 17th, and still below league average. Only the 01 season was marred by injury (Kittles for the season, 15g for Marbury, 33 games for Van Horn, 14 games for Martin) and the 02 season a healthy one that also saw the addition of a dynamic 6th-man in rookie Richard Jefferson. Hard to give Kidd credit for all of that 2.5 point relative shift on offense.

In 2004, right in the heart of Kidd's prime, he missed 15 games. The Nets basically didn't have a backup point guard, so they started Lucious Harris. Kenyon Martin missed 10 of the 15 games, so it wasn't exactly an inspirational squad of Collins, Harris, Jefferson, Kittles and Rodney Rodgers trotting out there nightly. The results? An offensive rating of 102.5 vs. average defenses of 103.8 (-1.3). But in the 67 games Kidd played, the average ORtg was 100.5 (-2.4)! Technically, better on offense without Kidd.

The 02 Nets were a 3.7 SRS team...in the last 10 years (297 team seasons) that places them 66th. Which means on average, that was a non-serious title contending team that would have been about the 6th or 7th best team in a given year. So yes, it was a 9 SRS improvement, but it was not to elite (or historically good) status.

By comparison, the 10 Thunder improved from -6 to 3.6 (+9.6) without major changes. And the other teams mentioned with Kidd's "turnaround" of the Nets, the 08 Celtics (+13 change to 9.3 SRS) and 05 Suns (+9 to 7.1 SRS) became two of the better teams of the decade. I don't see those changes as equatable at all.

---
No one has still addressed my issues with early RAPM. Ridge regression is a squeezing technique -- it will lump the population closer together. The math being used in the early single-year RAPM, ignoring that the one-year sample size is always an issue, seems to be squeezing the whole league into a tight pocket.

Am I to believe that in the middle of the decade, individual impact suddenly became much better according to Englemann? The 2002 leader was Shaq at +3.4 (peak Shaq, fwiw), Doug Christie (3.2, eek) and peak Duncan (3.0). In 2006, they would be ~ the 35th best players in the league. No one finds a problem with this??

Finally, I've always said this about the +/- family of stats, but how good the team is needs to be accounted for as well. I've written about it in detail, and I just don't see any way around the fact that both empirically and logically it's easier to improve a bad team by a bunch than a good team by the same amount. As far as I can tell, no APM/RAPM number adjusts for that, so when you see Tim Duncan and Elton Brand have the same number, but one makes his team +10 and the other +3, I don't see those as equatable values.

[penbeast0]

Gilmore has as many titles as a starting player as Walton and as many playoff MVPs. Just that he did more in the rest of his career.

And, if Moncrief is better than Paul at scoring (similar volume on better efficiency), better defensively (2 DPOYs and clear eyeball test), to say nothing of better at rebounding, then Paul's advantage must come from the "Nash effect" . . . he must make his team appreciably better offensively.

But New Orleans only had one impressive year, 2008. The other 5 years of Paul's career they've been a relatively unimpressive offensive team . . . better defensively than offensively. Where's the "Nash effect"?

And without it, Moncrief is much better defensively and similar if not a little better offensively.

[RoyceDa59]

Vote: George Gervin
Nomination: Bill Walton

[penbeast0]

...
As for Gervin being a more explosive scorer than Pierce -- were defenses stacked to stop him the way they were in Pierce's iso prime?

Oh hell yeah. He had one year I particularly remember where his front line was George Johnson, Mark Iavaroni, and Reggie Johnson . . . basically three bangers with no shot. He and James Silas were the whole offense; when Silas was hurt, usually Larry Kenon was the second banana and neither was as big a gunner as Antoine Walker. Defenses were keyed on Ice every game.

[penbeast0]

Funny note, we have 3 votes for Chris Paul and another one that is on the fence for him . . . but 3 of those 4 admit that they don't think Paul is the best nominee, just want to join the bandwagon because their player probably won't get the nomination . . . but, if the bandwagon guys jump off, Reggie Miller is leading the nomination vote with two and KJ and Zo are only one out . . . and I'd vote for any of the three over Paul at this point in his career. ElGee is the only real Paul supporter and he seems to be basing it on some sort of Steve Nash effect on team offense that Paul's teams don't really show.

[lorak]

With Gilmore I do understand the concerns. Let's start by establishing what Gilmore meant in the beginning.

When he joined Kentucky they saw an over 8 point SRS improvement. This despite the fact that the team didn't really add anyone else, and the team already had a respected big man in Dan Issel.

Issel was a rookie in 1971 and players usually have bigger impact in second season. Colonels also had three coaches during that year before Artis, so for sure that had negative effect on their overall result. But when they finally had one coach for longer period of time they advanced to the finals. On the other hand with Gilmore they lost in first round with 44 wins team! (Colonels won 68!). And that's the Gilmore's story in the ABA - almost always his teams underperformed.

It's also very telling that his best year was his first season, when the league was the weakest. But as ABA improved Gilmore's level of play was lower and lower.

And he was supposed to be great defensive player but his teams were almost always (also before his injury!) below average on defense in NBA. In ABA it's different story, but he never had any serious competition among big men in ABA. Second best ABA's PF/C played with him in Kentucky. So his impact level in the ABA is screwed because of lack of quality big men, sort of like Mikan in BAA - he also had great impact, but not because he was so good, but because there was no one who could challenge him.

[Lever2Beaver]

^Wonderful post and right on the money
Gilmore above Cousy is ridiculously funny
The Colonels were loaded to say the least
that's not to deter from Artis; he was a beast
But with the ABA's greatest ever back-court and it's two best bigs
it's hard to figure why they only won one ring
They never beat a good team in the playoffs, not even once
The Colonels got fat on the second rate chumps

And back to Chris Paul, he's above Cousy?
if CP is a squirt gun, Bob is an UZI
I understand the big ears and short shorts look funny
But Cooz created the position that Paul is currently best at running
Ignore the percentages and feel the impact
Cousy revolutionized the fast break attack
He won titles, an MVP and all-world acclaim
Even in ten years time Chris Paul won't be able to say the same
Now I'm open minded and willing to learn
Someone explain to why it's taken this turn
Never before have I seen such rankings
if you were my children I'd give you all spankings
But in the mean time, I'll lend you my ear
Why is Paul greater than Cousy? I'm waiting to hear...

[Doctor MJ]

As I said, more went on than just the point guard swap. But compare what we know about Kidd and the Nets in '02 to what we know about the other two huge team-turnarounds of the last decade: Nash and the Suns in '05 or KG and the Celtics in '08. In both of the latter cases, a lot more went on than just one player. But also, in both of the latter cases, the eye test agreed that they were the 2 best players on the team...and the accolades agreed...and we had detailed +/- and APM data to quantitatively show that they were the 2 most impactful players on the team.

Now, consider Kidd in '02. The eye test told us that he was easily the best player on those Nets. The accolades tell us that the "basketball pundits" agreed with that eye test. And while we don't have detailed +/- data for the whole of 2002, we DO have detailed +/- data starting in 2003 showing quantitatively that Kidd was clearly by-far the biggest impact player on his team (and among the best in the NBA) the very next year and moving forward.

Now, just like neither Garnett nor Nash should have gotten ALL of the credit for their teams big turnarounds but DO deserve a big piece of the pie, the same is true for Kidd in New Jersey. The Kidd/Marbury swap was by far the BIGGEST of the changes for both teams, the team results were exact mirror images, AND the individual quantitative info from the very next year confirms Kidd's impact. I don't see the argument for minimizing his role in that turnaround.

For me the big thing is actually my increased confidence in nailing down how much defensive impact we can reasonably have expected Kidd to have because the Nets turnaround is a story of defense. A few years back it seemed odd, but I wasn't ready to really call it out. Now though we have data that basically tell us that point guards don't have enough impact to make a defense turn around, which also happens to fit with Kidd's +/- numbers say: When he was a star, his primary impact was on offense, just like every other star point guard we have +/- data for.

This doesn't mean Kidd wasn't the MVP of those Net teams, or that he doesn't deserve praise, but when a team's improvement comes primarily in an era that the star in question is simply not a superstar, this is less impressive than if the improvement had come in his wheelhouse.

[Dr Positivity]

Well I still just can't get behind the 1-2 year superprimes in Walton, Tmac, Paul and the argument that you have a better chance of winning a title with 1 or 2 years as a top 3 player than 10 years as a top 10 one.

I think it's very important to have at least like... 5 years. To win a title you need a lot to go right... you need teammates to fit, chemistry to fit, luck in the playoffs, health, to be able to avoid an unbeatable competitor (great example: longevity allowed Olajuwon to have bad luck by facing a GOAT team in the 86 Finals and having his teammate's career collapse - but then have luck to get a Jordan retirement in 94 and 95), you need a team who can win without taking lumps and experience hits in the playoffs first (I would say the 08 Hornets and 09 Cavs are GREAT examples of this), etc.

Yes, Walton was able to beat the odds. He also wouldn't have done it without landing Maurice Lucas on his team from the start, or a relatively weak competition in 77, or the Sixers kind of self combusting.

I think there's a lot of proof in the pudding that disproves the Walton theory. You've got Paul and Tmac themselves, peaking at best in the league level and not even getting within a stone's throw of a title team. Bernard King had a crazy year and didn't come close. You've got Lebron having a first 8 years as good as anyone's in the regular season and going titleless. KG repeated the same in Minnesota. You've got Jordan playing 6 magnificent years and not winning on. Kareem went from 72 to 79 as by far the best player in the league and didn't get one. Wilt, Oscar, West lost a lot.

Likewise, you CAN win a title or make the finals with Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, Reggie Miller, Alonzo Mourning, Willis Reed, Dave Cowens, Pau Gasol, Jason Kidd. Because all of them either have a title or have been closer than Tmac and Paul. They were all closer than freaking 87 and 88 Jordan or 2009 and 2010 Lebron, much superior players.

I think if you take Tmac or Paul over contemporaries, you're putting a ton into the hands of LUCK. That everything will come together just for that year or two and not the ones where they aren't there. Yeah it's hard to get a player who's best on a title team caliber like those guys were, but it's also hard to get a supporting cast good enough for them, too. Just mentioning Paul first, I don't think he's proven that with merely good players he can win a title. The 08 and 09 teams were pretty solid by my standards. As good as 77 Walton's? Not that far off. Tmac had his 05 and 07 good teams... it wasn't his superprime, but how much worse was he that it'd make the difference between Round 1 knockout and title caliber with that team? Even the GOATs can't pull a 77 Walton or 94 Olajuwon or 11 Dirk on a dime. Not even Walton or Olajuwon or Dirk most of the time

There are very few shortcuts in the league IMO. The majority of title winners and Finals teams had best players in the 2nd half of their careers, who'd already seen close to it all in the playoffs. Even the teams that won with under 25 stars like Wade, Duncan, Magic, Kareem, Russell had someone else on the team that'd been through it: Shaq, Robinson, Kareem, Oscar, Cousy on those teams. I think most of the time if you take the Tmac and Paul route of a young star beginning his career with a franchise and having that early peak only, you're going to lose. IMO. Virtually the only exception is Walton, who won right before the widely accepted weakest title teams (Seattle, Washington) in the druggy, ABA transition, parity league, against a chemistry nightmare team, where they fell down 0-2 in the Finals and just had everything go right from that point on and had help from the GOAT basketball Finals crowd. I just don't think you can dependably ape the 77 Blazers.

[Doctor MJ]

Kidd on the other hand has flaws. Everone says he's inefficient, a bad shooter. But he's perhaps one of those players that boxscore stats don't fully do him justice.

My "whoa" epiphany as I analyzed people in this project was the realization that I literally had nothing to point to to favor Kidd over Pierce. Am I absolutely certain Pierce is better? No, because as you say, these are two very different players. But literally every piece of objective data I look at rates Pierce above Kidd, and that includes the +/- which I became a fan of generally because I thought it was much better at capturing point guard impact relative to the other positions compared to box-score stats.

[Doctor MJ]

His teams weren't always good. It's not like he was making a huge impact pre big 3. He didn't much with Antoine Walker.

Here are the SRS of Pierce's team pre-Big 3:

99: -1.75 (22nd)
00: -1.00 (20th)
01: -2.40 (22nd)
02: 1.75 (9th)
03: -0.74 (19th)
04: -1.99 (20th)
05: 0.34 (14th)
06: -1.59 (20th)
07: won't count it because he was injured

So the average ranking is 18.3 and average SRS was -0.92. We punish McGrady because of his lack of team success, but Pierce barely had any success pre Big 3 except for a ECF in the worst conference in history. He put up big numbers on losing teams. Only 2 positive SRS seasons.

Clearly this should be part of the conversation, but it needs analysis before using it to draw conclusions.

There's no doubt that Kidd's accolade edge over Pierce has much to do with team success, and I'll fully admit I was skeptical of Pierce's ability to thrive with other stars until the Big 3 era in part because of the limited team success.

At the same time, it's my firm belief that one man cannot do it alone. That a player played on bad teams does not mean he caused them to be bad, and that a player played on good teams does not mean he prevented them from being bad.

As I was with Garnett: If I see a guy having solid +/- numbers on bad teams, and then see that he has no problem joining with other stars to make a good team, I have a real hard time holding it against him. Pierce is nowhere near Garnett's level of course, but in terms of finding a reason to specifically knock Pierce, I just don't have it.

[drza]

No one has still addressed my issues with early RAPM. Ridge regression is a squeezing technique -- it will lump the population closer together. The math being used in the early single-year RAPM, ignoring that the one-year sample size is always an issue, seems to be squeezing the whole league into a tight pocket.

Am I to believe that in the middle of the decade, individual impact suddenly became much better according to Englemann? The 2002 leader was Shaq at +3.4 (peak Shaq, fwiw), Doug Christie (3.2, eek) and peak Duncan (3.0). In 2006, they would be ~ the 35th best players in the league. No one finds a problem with this??

Finally, I've always said this about the +/- family of stats, but how good the team is needs to be accounted for as well. I've written about it in detail, and I just don't see any way around the fact that both empirically and logically it's easier to improve a bad team by a bunch than a good team by the same amount. As far as I can tell, no APM/RAPM number adjusts for that, so when you see Tim Duncan and Elton Brand have the same number, but one makes his team +10 and the other +3, I don't see those as equatable values.

I've mentioned it before, but I don't think your oft-repeated bolded stance is true. I think you are somewhat talking about a "diminishing returns" effect, but that you're applying it incorrectly. The diminishing returns aren't so much a factor of "the team is as good as it can be so can't be improved more" as much as it is a factor of "this player is contributing something to the pot that none of his other teammates can". Which isn't the same thing.

For example, the 2011 Heat were not optimized to the greatest extent possible based upon the talent upon the team. Logically, the Wade/Bosh-led cast was better (with LeBron removed) than any of the Cavs casts without Bron. Yet, the Heat actually won fewer games than the last couple of LeBron-led Cavs, and LeBron's APM was lower. For the diminishing returns concept to be based purely on how good your team is, this couldn't be unless LeBron suddenly just got a lot worse. But when you look at it through the lens of redundancy, we see how the ways that LeBron could be maximized overlapped in large part with the way that Wade (and to a lesser extent Bosh) needed to be maximized. As such, LeBron's value wasn't purely additive because he was bringing things to the table that others already did.

On the flip side, Nash joined a Suns team in '05 with a lot of talent on it led by Stoudemire, Marion and Johnson and shot the team up a bunch of notches because his skill set WASN'T replicated by his talented teammates. When you put his skillset together with theirs, it was a strongly additive effect, more so than what we saw with LeBron this year.

A player's ability to be strongly additive regardless of the team situation is definitely a plus for that player, but it isn't easily quantified by the data we have now. Likewise, it is fair to talk about that as a potential weakness in APM to the extent that with players on strong teams with redundant talent it may be difficult in the short term to separate that player from his teammates. But this just reduces to the "colinearity" issue with APM studies that is a well-vetted issue that is best addressed by looking at multiple years at a time.

In the specific case of Kidd, as I've pointed out several times, we don't HAVE a multi-year APM study that covers his peak without also covering his decline. Thus, the best that we have to look at are multiple single-season studies taken during his peak with the best single-season APM studies that we have access to. But the fact that Kidd consistently measures out among the better in the league (and better than Pierce by a solid margin) for four consecutive years before he obviously started on an age/injury downside in his mid-30s, to me, is very convincing. I look at that, and see no way that a multi-year 2003 - 2007 APM study wouldn't conclude that Kidd had a clearly higher value than Pierce over that period.

I'll let someone else tackle the issue of Englemann's compressed years...when it was brought up before, someone (probably Mysticbb) explained that the year-to-year compression was due to him choosing different lamdas for different seasons and that the take-home was to analyze differences within-seasons more-so than trying to compare across seasons. If that's not enough to satisfy you on that front, I'll have to leave it to Mystic (or someone) to address that for you.

But as for the improving from bad to average being harder than from average to great, despite how many times you've repeated it I still see nothing to support your stance. At least not nearly to the disqualifying degree that you've been attempting to use it. And I'm really not sure about the Duncan/Brand example you gave, as my quick perusal had Duncan comfortably ahead of Brand in each individual year between 2003 and 2011 in RAPM as well as in both the Ilardi 03 - 09 and the Englemann "10 year APM" studies...so as far as I can tell, the RAPM studies we've been heavily discussing agree with you.

[drza]

Kidd on the other hand has flaws. Everone says he's inefficient, a bad shooter. But he's perhaps one of those players that boxscore stats don't fully do him justice.

My "whoa" epiphany as I analyzed people in this project was the realization that I literally had nothing to point to to favor Kidd over Pierce. Am I absolutely certain Pierce is better? No, because as you say, these are two very different players. But literally every piece of objective data I look at rates Pierce above Kidd, and that includes the +/- which I became a fan of generally because I thought it was much better at capturing point guard impact relative to the other positions compared to box-score stats.

Doc, I'm not sure if you DR;TLed my post on the top of page 4 of the thread where I addressed you saying this before, but again, I'd be interested to see your rebuttal so I'll post it again:

There are two relevant multi-year APM studies that I am aware of for comparing Pierce and Kidd: Ilardi's 2004-09 study, and Englemann's "10 year ranking" (which I'm not sure is exactly 10 years, but is at least the most comprehensive long-range study he has). We could use Englemann's 05 - 10 or 06 - 11 studies as well, but since a) it's clear that Kidd's peak was earlier in the decade and b) the 2 shorter/later studies were done by the same person as the "10 year ranking" so presumably should be factored in, it seems to me that the Ilardi '04-09 and the Englemann "10 year" are the 2 to look at. And the results of these two studies are:

Ilardi: Pierce +6.5, Kidd +4.8 (note, this "difference" actually overlaps in standard error)

Englemann: Pierce +4.9, Kidd +4.7 (Englemann doesn't list the standard error, but I see no way these don't overlap)

So, the accurate statistical conclusion that one could make from these 2 multi-year APM studies is...that there is no statistical difference between Kidd and Pierce over these time periods. So, unless there are other multi-year APM studies that you were considering that I have not accounted for, the next step is to then go and look at the best shorter-term APM studies that are available to see if there is relevant info there. As I've alluded to in the past (and as I plan to post in a separate post here, time willing), Kidd consistently measured out higher than Pierce in the RAPM year-to-year data from 03 - 06, with Pierce finally catching him in '07 and passing him in '08.

Considering that, again, Kidd was in the league earlier and thus should be expected to decay sooner than Pierce, it seems very intuitive to me that Kidd being consistently higher than Pierce in RAPM during their early overlapping peaks with a Kidd decline while Pierce maintains would explain how both of the long-term APM studies (one ending in '09 and the other in '11) could have Pierce and Kidd fairly even over a long stretch. And thus, the fact that during their shared peaks Kidd was consistently measuring better tells me that, at least according to the best APM data available, Kidd peaked higher than Pierce. By a reasonable and repeatable degree. This is important to the way that I have ranking in this project based on "how great they were at playing the game of basketball" as my top criterion. And to come full circle, my analysis would seem to run exactly opposite to your statement that Pierce "beats Kidd fairly soundly"...if anything it looks to me like Kidd beats Pierce in APM pretty comfortably.

[ronnymac2]

Jason Kidd is the point guard version of Kevin Garnett. He's not going to dominate his own matchup, not going to score 40 while holding his opponent to 13. He's not going to score 35 points and draw 15 foul shots. He's not going to average 30 efficient points for a playoff series, even if you cover him with one guy.

Kidd isn't a dominant matchup player.

But like KG, he's a "help my teammates, hurt the opposition" player. Like Bill Walton and Bill Russell before them, KG and J-Kidd provide a superstar-type foundation for a team in an unorthodox way. Just because they do so in that unorthodox way doesn't mean they are inferior to traditionally dominant superstar foundations. There's no reason to believe that type of foundation can't win just as the same: see Russell's dynasty, Walton's Chappelle Show, and Garnett's 2008 salvation.

Now, is peak Kidd on the level of a peak Bill 2x or Big Ticket? No. But he's still an amazing basketball player.

I wrote this on my blog in May:

Jason Kidd is one of the greatest players of his generation. He was a triple-double machine, an all-time great defender, and the possessor of possibly the greatest court vision of any point guard in NBA history (Magic Johnson may have something to say about that though).

Unable to win a championship in his prime despite being carried to two NBA Finals by Jason Collins, Kidd is trying to win a title alongside Dirk Nowitzki. He’s the co-second best player on the team, along with Tyson Chandler and Jason Terry. On a team that is built around Nowitzki’s top-end talent and the fit around him, Kidd’s job is to provide size and rebounding at an unorthodox position, defend intelligently, hit the open 3 and run the half court offense. What would winning a ring do for his all-time standing in this role?

It’d be the same as what a ring would have done for Scottie Pippen if the Portland Trailblazers hadn’t gotten game seven asphyxiation vs. the Lakers in 2000. Kidd is the guy with a lot of Finals experience on a hungry team; he fills in where needed as a peripheral player, much like Scottie. Portland and Dallas are much alike actually, except Dallas has a dominant go-to offensive anchor in Nowitzki, while Portland played hot potato in the clutch.

What would the title do? It would help illuminate that prime/peak Jason Kidd could have definitely been the clear-cut second best player on a title team. I’ve personally always thought that, but a title for Kidd would validate my stance somewhat. It would also obviously give him a championship as a legitimate contributor (read: not what Gary Payton did in 2006 with Miami) on his resume, which I personally use as a tiebreaker when figuring out where a player goes on an all-time list.

Title or no title, Kidd is a championship player in my eyes. But that title would certainly aid along the public’s perception of him in a generational sense.

Kidd was a special player.

[Dr Positivity]

Vote Pierce

Nominate Cowens

I'm going to nominate Cowens and Reed until they get in. I understand they were a little overrated in their time and played in a weakish era, but do they really deserve to go 20 spots below teammates they had more accolades than in their primes? These guys played the most important position and had incredible success and recognition for doing it and we're looking at a lot of players with "only" 5+ years or less at their elite levels so that's not an issue. Call me a narrative whore, but I could never vote for Tmac over Cowens or Reed. There's more to the game and winning than pure skill and ability. This is not baseball. Having one of the most notoriously tough and firey players vs one of the most notoriously soft players matters. Teams generally take after their leaders. You win wars with great generals and lose them with cowardly ones

I still think Cowens has a very hefty scoop of Bill Walton in him. He's Gimili Bill Walton

[drza]

Vote: Artis Gilmore
Nominate: Alonzo Mourning

[Dr Positivity]

Just to confirm drza, are Kidd's post Vince APM stats just as good? Because I could see the argument that he meant a special amount to the Kmart teams because they needed an offensive creator and his transition ability so much, but if Kidd's numbers are as good and better than Pierce and Tmac's with Vince there and improved APM methods, that's pretty impressive to me. Probably not enough to make me put him over Pierce (I just think Pierce is flat out the better offensive player), but enough to make me consider Kidd a top 50 guy which I don't think I currently do

[Doctor MJ]

No one has still addressed my issues with early RAPM. Ridge regression is a squeezing technique -- it will lump the population closer together. The math being used in the early single-year RAPM, ignoring that the one-year sample size is always an issue, seems to be squeezing the whole league into a tight pocket.

Am I to believe that in the middle of the decade, individual impact suddenly became much better according to Englemann? The 2002 leader was Shaq at +3.4 (peak Shaq, fwiw), Doug Christie (3.2, eek) and peak Duncan (3.0). In 2006, they would be ~ the 35th best players in the league. No one finds a problem with this??

Finally, I've always said this about the +/- family of stats, but how good the team is needs to be accounted for as well. I've written about it in detail, and I just don't see any way around the fact that both empirically and logically it's easier to improve a bad team by a bunch than a good team by the same amount. As far as I can tell, no APM/RAPM number adjusts for that, so when you see Tim Duncan and Elton Brand have the same number, but one makes his team +10 and the other +3, I don't see those as equatable values.

I think shining a light on the weirdness of Engelmann's 1-year numbers has to be done. Not that it say Engelmann is doing something wrong, just that one needs to be very careful with how one tries to use the data.

When I'm really doing player comparisons, I rely primarily on the multi-year sample sizes to make proactive conclusions, and I tend to use shorter term stuff to help add to "benefit of the doubt" (if I see red flags with a player, but his +/- is solid, I don't worry so much).

The scale of the numbers themselves though on RAPM has always been problematic. Standard APM has a built in scale, but RAPM arrives at final numbers through a machine learning process. All indicators are that this makes for a better ranking system, but it means that 2 RAPM points doesn't actually equate to a made basket in any real sense.

So in that sense, we already know not to take the exact numbers too seriously, but I'm with you that I don't understand why Engelmann doesn't find it problematic to have clearly different scales from year to year.

EDIT: One thing I did want to add. A lot of people on here have heard me talk about how perimeter players are typically the true offensive stars of the game. This fits with my eye ball test, my common sense, and with what we see in +/- stats in general.

However, now that we have RAPM going back part way through Shaq's prime, we have some new data that I was dying to have: How does arguably the greatest offensive big man in history do by these metrics?

Answer: Very, very well. Shocking I know, but good to know nonetheless.

[Dr Positivity]

Who was it that said something along the lines of "For a stat to be reliable, it has to show Shaq was the best player in the league from 00-02, because he absolutely was." I liked that quote.