Retro Player of the Year 2004-05 UPDATE — Tim Duncan

[Hook_Em]

Playoffs or not speaking of KG: how many players have led their team in pts, rbs, ast, stls and blk and had a winning record? FWIW the T-Wolves were 11th in NET in 05’.

[Lebronnygoat]

Gotta go Duncan here.

1. Duncan- superb defense. Led his team to a fantastic level in the playoffs even if he’s not the offensive engineer. He’s still a good offensive player and ATG defender.
2. Nash- superb offense. Insane series here vs the Spurs and Mavs. Playmaking in the interior nearly half the time he playmakes is incredible.
3. Kevin Garnett- coming off 04 and seems to be the same level of a player but no playoff volume
4. LeBron James- not quite at his 06 level (maybe he is but I haven’t seen it) and not at KG’s level
5. Dirk- lackluster playoffs but idk who I would put over him, I have to respect engineering that team to that offense and 58 wins with mid season coach changes.

[AEnigma]

As I said on page one, not going to tally ballots this weekend (estimate is 36 more hours). However, contrary to what I said on page one, I will hold off on opening the 2006 thread until receiving some feedback on whether people would prefer I leave this as the only active thread.

[Djoker]

I don't mind keeping it open but if you have the time to do it, feel free to start the 2006 thread.

[One_and_Done]

Might as well put it up. This thread is clearly going to Duncan in a landslide.

[Matt15]

Gotta go Duncan here.

1. Duncan- superb defense
2. Nash- superb offense
3. Kevin Garnett- coming off 04 and seems to be the same level of a player but no playoff volume
4. LeBron James- not quite at his 06 level (maybe he is but I haven’t seen it) and not at KG’s level
5. Dirk

Pretty much this…

[Doctor MJ]

With the Duncan Ginobili discussion, I feel like people don't talk about how much the Spurs defense dropped off in the playoffs. When we look at the team's overall performance and offense/defense splits:

Regular season
Duncan and Manu: +20.38 (114.51, 94.13)
Duncan, no Manu: +10.53 (106.54, 96.01)
Manu, no Duncan: +9.88 (109.49, 99.61)

Playoffs
Duncan and Manu: +9.24 (114.25, 105.01)
Duncan, no Manu: -10.56 (102.59, 113.15)
Manu, no Duncan: +10.27 (113.95, 103.68)

RS-PO difference
Duncan and Manu: -11.14 (-0.26, +10.88)
Duncan, no Manu: -21.09 (-3.95, +17.14)
Manu, no Duncan: +0.39 (+4.46, +4.07)

The argument is always that despite Ginobili getting better offensively in the playoffs and Duncan getting worse, Duncan was still the defensive anchor on a defense first team and thus better overall. But if the Spurs defense fell off so drastically in the playoffs in Duncan's minutes and they were better on offense than defense, why is he still their playoffs MVP?

Like with Wade and Shaq though, it doesn't matter whether Ginobili was better than an injured Duncan in the playoffs if the regular season gap was too large to overcome. I would still have Duncan #1 POY but the question is how high Ginobili should go too because when they were healthy, the Spurs were more than dominant enough to have two top 5 guys.

To your question: He wasn't, in my maybe-not-so-humble opinion.

Ginobili was the playoff MVP of those Spurs, the most impactful per minute payer that season in the entire league, and of course doing all of this after leading a drastically less talented Argentine team to the Gold over the US the previous summer.

I think anyone not seriously considering Ginobili here is honestly still trapped by the thinking of the NBA back 20 years ago setting the tone for evaluation today. I don't play today's people for this, but would urge them to really let themselves reconsider.

[One_and_Done]

Your views of Manu are an outlier though. You think Manu was incredible in 03 and 04 too, even though in 03 the Spurs were 10-3 in games he didn't play.

Manu was indeed an incredible player, so I'm surprised that I'm the one pumping the breaks on him, but he was not the best player in the league in 05. He wasn't even top 5. He was an all-nba calibre guy by the playoffs though.

[Doctor MJ]

So, it feels right for me at this point to not actually vote, but I think it's good for me to put down my thought on this year through my current lens as it was such a paradigm shifting year for me - and thus led me to join RealGM.

In real time, this year was the story of Steve Nash and D'Antoni's "Seven Seconds or Less" Offense. Internally the Suns were emphasizing the terms "pace" and "space", but the SSOL name is what got the attention early on.

When the Suns signed Nash I was actually disappointed because I wanted to see what Leandro Barbosa could do with the keys to the car. Immediately after seeing how the Suns were playing with Nash as the head of the snake there was definitely a "Oh, never mind." moment, but I still didn't really understand what was going on.

When Nash won Player of the Month the first month, it bothered me. I thought that I knew that a point guard posting the box score numbers Nash was posting was valuable but "not that valuable". I was one of the folks thinking that it was probably more about Amar'e Stoudemire emerging as a top tier star...but over time that too became a "Oh, never mind" thing.

As the season went on, I started watching the Suns offense differently and started understanding better how Nash's play was getting his teammates great shots, and then embraced the fact that not only was Nash the team's most valuable offensive player, but that he was the most valuable offensive player in the league by a good margin. This then sucked me into debates on the internet, and RealGM became my place because it had the best discussion...but I still thought most people were missing what I was now seeing because they were thinking like I had thought before the season.

In terms of MVP, I still had Tim Duncan as my guy right up until his injury, and this represents a broader truth about the '04-05 season: The best players of the '00s - Duncan & KG - were having problematic seasons that year. Nash wasn't as valuable overall as Duncan & KG in the years before '04-05, but that year, I do think Nash was the right choice for MVP.

In terms of going from MVP to POY, I'll first note that during the '04-05 RPOY voting, I believe I was with the rest of the crew supporting Duncan, and in doing so effectively elevating Duncan over Nash because his team won the title. I think we were thinking about it more in terms of "We know Duncan's the better player, and his team won, so why are we quibbling about injuries?", but regardless, I now disagree with this reasoning.

I think one of the big mistakes I was making back then was thinking that Duncan-based teams had a match-up advantage over Nash-based teams...but that's not actually what was going on. The reality is that pace & space damaged Duncan's impact on both sides of the floor...but Ginobili emerged as a Sun-killer.

I'm not going so far as to say that I think the Spurs win the title without Duncan, but I do think it was Ginobili's improvisational brain that really countered the schematic advantage that the Suns had. By that same token, I don't think the Spurs get to the point where they are a contending team without the structure and leadership of Pop...but he had his team at a schematic disadvantage compared to the Suns, and his Spurs would continue to have these issues until eventually adapted going into the 2010s. People are resistant to believing this because the Spurs won titles any way, but of course, it's not like there's good reason to think that a team that never goes back-to-back couldn't have won more titles. So yeah, I think the Spurs could have won more titles if they'd shifted paradigms earlier, and focused their offense around Ginobili when he was at his apex.

Those who were a part of the Top 100 project already saw me bloviate about Manu so I'll try not to bore people here, but people shouldn't be thinking it's a "wacko fringe view" to argue that Pop didn't properly understand what to do with Ginobili for a number of years. There are quotes from basically everyone around the Spur team back then, including Pop & Duncan, that attest to the same thing. Ginobili's instincts and ability to process the game were just way ahead of everyone else in the locker room.

None of this was enough, in my assessment, to match Duncan's overall value when Duncan was 100% because of Duncan's all-world defense, but in '04-05 after Duncan's injury, it was enough, and it being enough had everything to do with why the Spurs eliminated the Suns & Pistons. If Ginobili were truly only a fringe all-star level player, the Spurs don't win that playoff tournament, because they weren't healthy enough to be at their best. But they did win.

All of this makes a POY conversation very tricky. I think you can make a good argument that if you thought Nash deserved the MVP - as I do - nobody did enough in the playoffs to surpass him.

But I also think Ginobili was the MVP both of the WCF and the Finals, to go along with being the most impactful per minute player all year, and the best player in the Olympics. While the Olympics don't officially count here, the fact of their existence still presents itself as a direct rebuttal to the idea that Ginobili couldn't actually be the alpha on a team against top talent competition.

And I'm still not prepared to argue for Ginobili or anyone else over Nash for OPOY, with Nash having arguably the greatest offensive season of all-time that year...but I do also think it's easier to build a champion with Ginobili than with Nash due to the fact Manu's defense is outstanding as well.

Last thing: I think DPOY this year is just brutal (which pertains to why I think overall POY is led by offense-oriented players). In addition to Duncan & KG having some weak spots in their argument, the Piston defense fell back to earth, and right as it seemed like Kirilenko was going to start getting the hype he deserved, the injuries crippled his career.

[Doctor MJ]

Your views of Manu are an outlier though. You think Manu was incredible in 03 and 04 too, even though in 03 the Spurs were 10-3 in games he didn't play.

Manu was indeed an incredible player, so I'm surprised that I'm the one pumping the breaks on him, but he was not the best player in the league in 05. He wasn't even top 5. He was an all-nba calibre guy by the playoffs though.

My views on '04-05 Manu now can certainly be called "outlier" no doubt about it, just as my views on '04-05 Nash were an outlier at one time.

[One_and_Done]

I find it weird to call Manu a 'Sun killer' when he was clearly less impactful than Timmy that series. Duncan put up 27-14 on 591 TS% while being the best defender in the league. Like, obviously they don't win that year without Manu, but he wasn't better than Duncan this year and certainly not vs the Suns.

[Doctor MJ]

With regards to Nash, I think we have to take the offensive dominance with a bit of a reservation because the Suns were playing a very offensive style (both tactically and lineup-wise) and sacrificing defense for offense. Not saying what Nash was doing with the Suns wasn't impressive because it really was but compared to GOAT-level offensive anchors who produced similar or even slightly worse offensive ceilings on much better defensive teams, he has to be penalized just a bit IMO. In other words, there is a real argument that his teams were flawed and couldn't win in that era as constructed and/or schematically drawn.

On the bold, while this is technically true and relevant to the overall POY conversation, I think we have to remember that the people who first talked this way back in the day thought they were watching a "gimmick", when they should have been thinking "This is how NBA offense should have been being played for the last quarter century."

Sure the team was better on offense and worse on defense because they had Amar'e as their center, but trying to dismiss the team's offensive dominance by pointing to Amar'e doesn't make sense in the year 2025. What they were doing was first and foremost about pace & space, and while Amar'e helped the pace, he wasn't actually helping the space like a 3-point shooter would, and really in terms of the revolution, the space turned out to be more important than the pace.

As for Ginobili, I know that RAPM loves him but his minutes load is low enough that I don't seriously consider him to be among the 5 best players in the league and probably not even the top 10 best if I'm being honest. I think Manu vs. Chauncey is a good comparison for 2005 as well as the next few seasons. Savvy all-around players who knew what it took to win but not quite superstars. As for the Finals MVP in 2005, it's Duncan all the way for me. I re-watched Game 7 and Manu finished with an efficient 23 points but 6 of those points came in the final minute to ice the game. Duncan was the one who was constantly doubled and tripled and gave the others open looks from three. Manu just exploited the gaps that Duncan's presence created. And that's just the offensive end.

On the bold, I completely understand knocking him because he's playing less minutes, but would emphasize that this may not have been happening because he needed to play less minutes so much because of how Pop chose to allocate the minutes of the agent-of-chaos Ginobili next to the just-feed-Duncan offense he wanted the team to play.

Re: "but 6 of those points came in the final minute to ice the game". Strange the way you made "In the clutch Manu shined" make it seem like it was a weakness on Ginobili's part.

I'll also say that the notion that perimeter guys were lesser players reaping the benefits of the interior volume scorer was very much how people thought at the time...but the paradigm shifts of the past two decades have pointed to a very different conclusion.

For reference, here are the 4Q/OT TS% for the Spurs over the court of the entire '04-05 season (RS & PS):

Ginobili 65.5%
Duncan 53.7%
Parker 48.1%

While this doesn't mean Ginobili wasn't benefitting from the defense's attention on Duncan, I think it gives us an appreciation for why it was misguided to think that interior volume scoring was the best way to play offense. No competent offensive team today would be looking to feed a 53.7% TS scorer, and really, nor should they have been doing so back then if they had a better alternative even if they could better get away with it with their elite defense and tactically weak offensive competition.

[lessthanjake]

I find it weird to call Manu a 'Sun killer' when he was clearly less impactful than Timmy that series. Duncan put up 27-14 on 591 TS% while being the best defender in the league. Like, obviously they don't win that year without Manu, but he wasn't better than Duncan this year and certainly not vs the Suns.

The Spurs destroyed the Suns in that series with Duncan off and Manu on, and the Spurs got destroyed by the Suns with Duncan on and Manu off. Manu was very much a “Suns killer,” as I can definitely attest to from developing a large hatred of him at the time for that precise reason.

[Doctor MJ]

I find it weird to call Manu a 'Sun killer' when he was clearly less impactful than Timmy that series. Duncan put up 27-14 on 591 TS% while being the best defender in the league. Like, obviously they don't win that year without Manu, but he wasn't better than Duncan this year and certainly not vs the Suns.

The Suns' Amar'e was putting up 37 PPG on 61.1% TS while the Suns' offense put up a +14.5 rORtg, so any talk about the Spurs winning the series with shut-down defense was misguided. As I've said, I remember what people were saying at the time specifically because it was a moment revealing that people in basketball didn't know as much about how basketball worked as they thought they did.

And in terms of "impact", well:

Ginobili: On: +38 Off: -17
Duncan: On: +13 Off: +8
Parker: On: +1 Off: +20

While these are simple noisy numbers that don't tell the whole story, they certainly point in the direction of Ginobili. (And ftr, this trend generally continues across the era when the two teams played each other in the post-season. Duncan had a negative PS +/- against the Nash Suns, while Nash actually had a positive number against the Spurs, which is definitely part of what I'm alluding to when I say that the Nash Suns didn't actually have a match-up disadvantage against Duncan.)

[One_and_Done]

That's just an example of how plus minus can be misleading for all sorts of reasons, especially when you play fewer minutes and are deployed in more favourable match ups.

Duncan was the starting 4. His cover was technically Marion, who played abysmally, though obviously Amare and Duncan matched up alot too in the Spurs walkover victory.

[Doctor MJ]

Manu played 2977 mins

Nash played 3180 mins

Duncan 3070 mins.

Tayshaun and Rip both 4000+ mins.

Glad you pointed this out.

The thing is, when you start seeing who was actually in the MVP conversation, it becomes a bit absurd to say Ginobili didn't belong:

Nash 2573
Shaq 2492
Duncan 2203

Ginobili 2193

It's one thing if you were championing a 3000+ minutes regular season guy (like Dirk) for MVP over the lot of players, but if you - like the actual NBA world - were focused primarily on Nash & Shaq, it didn't really make sense to cross of Ginobili simply because he was playing drastically less minutes, because he wasn't.

As I said before, I think there's still a good case that Nash keeps his spot based on the playoffs.

Meanwhile, Shaq really should never have gotten as much attention as he got, and after Duncan got hurt, Ginobili was the Spur MVP the rest of the way through June.

Re: Dirk. For me, the idea that Dirk should rank above Nash for POY died with the Sun-Mav series. It's hard for me to care about those extra RS minutes when the two teams play in the playoffs and it's so clear who the star of the series is.

I still think Dirk has a great case over Manu in isolation just looking at the minutes, but if they aren't giving him the nod over Nash for me, why would I use them elsewhere?

[Doctor MJ]

That's just an example of how plus minus can be misleading for all sorts of reasons, especially when you play fewer minutes and are deployed in more favourable match ups.

Duncan was the starting 4. His cover was technically Marion, who played abysmally, though obviously Amare and Duncan matched up alot too in the Spurs walkover victory.

Re: deployed in more favorable match ups. You're stating a theory like it's a fact without checking the facts. Any notion that Ginobili's +/- was due to playing against bench competition gets blown up by the RAPM.

Back in '05 it made sense to be skeptical of Ginobili's +/-, but in '25, we've got plenty of sample to back it up.

With Ginobili the question isn't whether he was as impactful per minute as the raw +/- indicate, but whether he had physical limitations that kept him from playing like a player of his impact caliber could.

Re: Duncan's cover was technically Marion. I mean, Amar'e was the star offensive big and the Sun offense torched the Spur defense during that series by the standards of the time so the idea that we should be calling Duncan the MVP of the series because of his coverage of a tertiary offensive player just doesn't make sense.

But to be technical, Marion was a perimeter player more likely to be guarded by Bruce Bowen in any given moment than Duncan.

[Doctor MJ]

RPotY

1. Tim Duncan. Again this stretch from 1998 to 2007 is probably the most underrated out of all the greats’ best stretches. 2005 was no different. 2005 might his best defensive season as well.

But '04-05 was absolutely different because of the injury, and this was pretty clear at the time. As I've said, I had Duncan as the MVP before the injury, but the injury knocked him out. Then in the playoffs, Duncan wasn't back to his 100% self, and the team really wasn't dominating with defense - and actually saw the DRtg improve with Duncan off the floor.

[Doctor MJ]

Duncan: He was the best player on the champs, the #1 RAPM in the league, and the Finals MVP. It would seem difficult to make any kind of case against him here.

Not sure what RAPM you're quoting specifically here, but my guess would be it's one based on the regular season. While any attempt at playoff RAPM is fraught with small sample, I think it can be informative when simply adding playoff +/- to regular season +/- changes things dramatically.

Here's the raw +/- leaders for the regular season (per b-r):

1. Duncan +692
2. Ginobili +675
3. Nash +662

And here's the tally when combining RS & PS:

1. Ginobili +844
2. Duncan +765
3. Nash +728

This doesn't mean it's utterly impossible for Duncan still to have the #1 RAPM if you combine RS & PS, but aside from the fact that I'm skeptical this is the case, if Duncan still keeps the top spot, it will because of what happened in the regular season before his injury.

[OldSchoolNoBull]

Duncan: He was the best player on the champs, the #1 RAPM in the league, and the Finals MVP. It would seem difficult to make any kind of case against him here.

Not sure what RAPM you're quoting specifically here, but my guess would be it's one based on the regular season. While any attempt at playoff RAPM is fraught with small sample, I think it can be informative when simply adding playoff +/- to regular season +/- changes things dramatically.

Here's the raw +/- leaders for the regular season (per b-r):

1. Duncan +692
2. Ginobili +675
3. Nash +662

And here's the tally when combining RS & PS:

1. Ginobili +844
2. Duncan +765
3. Nash +728

This doesn't mean it's utterly impossible for Duncan still to have the #1 RAPM if you combine RS & PS, but aside from the fact that I'm skeptical this is the case, if Duncan still keeps the top spot, it will because of what happened in the regular season before his injury.

It's J.E.'s single-season PI RS+PS RAPM that goes up through 2018-19. Or at least I've always been led to believe it was RS+PS. It has Duncan at #1(8.47), Garnett at #2(8.25), and Manu at #3(6.71).