nonjokegetter wrote:Chuck Texas wrote:nonjokegetter wrote:
A lot. Maybe 100. Now can you answer my question?
What is the relevance of comparing every NBA player at his best against Duncan's most recent 3 years? It suggests you think Duncan is ranked exclusively on those last 3 years instead of his career as a whole.
Because in the last 3 years, he has ostensibly leapfrogged people like Shaq and Magic and Bird, and I'm wondering three years of, say, prime Zach Randolph-level play would warrant that. But see, I think prime Zach Randolph was probably a bit better than Tim Duncan over the last three years, so it's not even really that, is it?
So you take Duncan's career from 1997 to 2011 and say it's #7 or #8. Then you say "Let's add three years as a top 20ish player to that." Is that something that sounds like it's worthy of catapulting him over those other players? Not to me.
Which is why some people think we're dealing with a subconscious recency bias.
That's the relevance.
Sedale Threatt wrote:nonjokegetter wrote:
I dunno? I'm also not sure of the relevance, unless we're trying to actually highlight the recency bias instead of downplay it.
It's massively relevant. You pick Duncan, and you're basically getting an All-Star for nearly two decades. Forget championship impact or whatever. The simple fact he's still at a league-best level at his age, independent of whatever his team puts him in position to do, is gigantic. Compare that to, say, 10 or 12 with Bird and Magic. That's a huge, huge difference, and I struggle to see how it's not part of the equation. Given the choice to start a franchise with any of the three, knowing what we know, how does one not take Duncan, given the fact he's going to give you an extra five or six or maybe even more years of quality, cornerstone-type play? If we're just ranking careers, maybe it's different, at least for Magic. But from a practical standpoint, I'm taking Duncan over all but about four or five guys. Maybe not that many.
Okay? I didn't know 3 years of Zach Randolph were enough for you. It's not to me. Whether or not we're getting prime Zach Randolph play when a guy is 25 or 37 doesn't really matter, if you're just tacking on three years of that. Duncan's a great player. But 3 years of top 20 play doesn't bump him significantly from where he was in 2011 (which is a ranking I agree with).
Zach Randolph?!? Duncan was freaking All-NBA
first team two seasons ago, and he wasn't far from that last year or the year before. Duncan is putting up PERs at 35-38 -- All-Star level stuff -- that are comparable to Randolph's
prime. Plus, he plays better defense than Zach Randolph ever did even at this stage. That alone separates him. And we're not even getting into intangible qualities like leadership and professionalism.
I mean, it's whatever, but there are very, very fine lines when you're ranking stuff like this. You think about the thousands of players who have come through the NBA, there aren't vast chasms between the top eight or so. And Duncan was pretty much permanently ensconced there even before these last three years. Then when you add those seasons, which are way better than you're giving him credit for, at a point where pretty much everybody but Kareem and Karl Malone were shells of themselves, it's fairly lazy to chalk up any elevation in his ranking strictly to recency bias.
We've already known for years and years that Duncan is an elite championship cornerstone, one of the three or four best two-way bigs in history. Then when you add this last finishing run, surely it's not a stretch to put him over someone like Bird or Magic, who were inferior two-way players and had significantly less longevity. It's always up for debate, but you can make a damn good case: 17 seasons with a 22 PER or better -- 17 seasons!!! -- elite rebounding and defense, impeccable intangibles. As I said earlier, it's impossible to overrate that.
