I think the post I address below was largely written without reading my series of OPs in this thread, since it brings up a lot of things that were addressed in those OPs without acknowledging that or grappling with the points made on those issues. So I’d encourage people to read my posts, though I know there’s a lot there.
One_and_Done wrote:So the case with Stockton has been gotten into many times before, and boils down to the following points:
1) Stockton was not considered to be an MVP calibre player during his career
2) The results of the team with Stockton are not suggestive of the Jazz having a 2nd MVP calibre player
3) The skillset Stockton possessed is not what you expect from an MVP calibre player (even less so today)
Let’s go through those in turn.
During Stockton’s career, between 1988-03, Stockton was 7-15 in the MVP vote (when he got votes at all). The 7th place was kind of an anomaly (it happened in 1989, when people were a little high on Stockton’s supply), but he was mostly seen as a guy in the 10-15 range. He made two all-nba 1st teams, but those happened in years when other guys were injured or retired, and there was a dearth of talent at the guard spot. He was not actually seen as a top 5 guy. The public reaction to the way Stockton was ranked was… nothing. Nobody commented about how Stockton was being grossly underrated, etc. Stockton was largely felt to have been rated correctly.
This was addressed in one of the OPs, and in another post directed at you already in this thread, and you barely grapple with anything that was addressed in those prior posts (to the limited extent you do, I address it further below). Since you barely address those points, I would refer you back to those posts, including here:
https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=118770562#p118770562 and here:
https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=118805924#p118805924.
Of course, sometimes award voters and the media get it wrong, and a guy was really much more valuable than the numbers indicated. That happens. But there is no indication in the actual results that is suggestive of that being the case here. From 88 to 94 Stockton was the Jazz starter. At age 25-31 he was in what we would typically call the prime of a players career. During that time, according to Stockton’s revisionist supporters, the Jazz supposedly had 2 MVP candidates on the team, but the results don’t show that. The Jazz averaged only 51 wins per year over that stretch. They were fully healthy, and their SRS ranged from 1.74 to 5.7 during that time, but tended to be closer to the former than the latter. Over that stretch they were booted out in the 1st round three times, and made the conference finals only twice. Losses included some pretty underwhelming defeats, such as a sweep by the 43 win Warriors.
It is basically unprecedented in the history of the NBA for two MVP candidates, two top 5 players, to be together in their prime like this, and have such lacklustre results. They weren’t lacklustre in general, but by the standard of 2 MVP candidates being on the same team they were. No obvious justification for this exists. This isn’t a situation where 2 players weren’t an optimal fit (like say Lebron and Wade, who made it work anyway); Stockton and Malone were a perfect fit next to each other. It wasn’t a situation where they got unlucky with injuries; Stockton and Malone were iron men who were never injured. It wasn’t a case where the coach sucked and misused them; their coach was a well regarded HoFer who is seen as somewhat ahead of his time. Even worse for Stockton, he was playing in an era where a single player should have been able to have an even bigger impact for a variety of reasons (e.g. the star focused iso-offenses team ran, and the protection a star got via illegal defence rules).
What is actually “basically unprecedented in the history of the NBA” is for two great players to be on a team that over a period of many years did not have any significant player that even has a positive career BPM or a positive BPM in the years they played with those two great players. The Jazz supporting cast was awful. Seriously, I challenge you to find other instances of anything in history that fits that bill. The fact that Stockton and Malone averaged over 50 wins and roughly a second-round exit during that time period is actually very consistent with them being incredibly good players.
Of course, the reason you have to focus on 1988-1994 is precisely because there’s no argument that the results were “lackluster” afterwards. Which coincides with the Jazz finally getting another good player: Hornacek. Once their supporting cast stopped being awful, the Jazz quickly became a genuinely great team—which is further indicative of the fact that the awful supporting cast was a major problem prior to that.
Also, while this is a small issue, I want to note that this part of your post contains a clear factual inaccuracy. You say the following: “their SRS ranged from 1.74 to 5.7 during that time, but tended to be closer to the former than the latter.” The latter clause there is false. In the 1988-1994 timeframe you’re talking about, the Jazz SRS was objectively more often closer to 5.7 than it was to 1.74, and the average was closer to 5.7 as well.
So the starting point is that you would have to argue some explanation for why Stockton and Malone are a singularly unique situation in NBA history. A number of excuses have been offered to try and explain away these outcomes, but they all collapse under the slightest scrutiny.
- Some have argued Stockton and Malone didn’t have enough of a support cast. That doesn’t hold up because a) if you have 2 MVPs on the same team you shouldn’t need much of a support cast to at least be a consistent contender (e.g. who was Shaq and Kobe’s 7th man? Nobody remembers or cares, because it was irrelevant; having superior depth did nothing to allow the Kings/Mavs to overcome the Lakers), and b) the Jazz actually had a very solid support cast. Eaton was a DPOY and all-star who even got some MVP votes. Jeff Malone had his flaws, but was a multiple time all-star who was a decent 3rd best player. Thurl Bailey was a solid player. Hornacek, if anything, was the underrated Jazz support man, not Stockton. He was better than any of the guys I just named. So that argument doesn’t hold up.
I think you have a complete misunderstanding of how much difference a supporting cast can make. The difference between the type of bad role player the Jazz was filled with (something like a -2 impact per 100 possessions player) and a really good role player (something like a +2 or +3 impact per 100 possessions player) is worth a difference of about 2.5-3.0 net rating.
This failure to understand that is made very clear by your own example of the Shaq/Kobe Lakers. Even if we ignore all the other quality role players they had, we can just look at Robert Horry and think about the difference he made. In the late 1990s and early-mid 2000s, the NBArapm website’s 5-year RAPM tells us that Horry tended to have a +3 impact (all the five-year values in that era hover a bit above or below +3). His regular season BPM is a little lower, at +2.2 on average from 1998-2006, but his playoff BPM is a little higher at +3.5. So the data indicates Horry was roughly a +3 impact player. And, in his years on the Lakers, he averaged 25 minutes per game (though closer to 30 MPG in the playoffs). If you replace a -2 player on the Jazz (of which there were many—that was pretty much their average role player) with Horry, you’d expect about a 2.6 higher net rating (because (3-(-2))*(25/48) = 2.6). And if you add that onto the 1988-1994 Jazz’s net ratings, you’d have them averaging a +7 net rating in that timeframe. Which would have made them a very major contender (for reference, the 1988-1991 Lakers averaged a +6.8 net rating). And that’s just the expected effect of changing one of their bad role players into a good role player! The three-peat Lakers actually had plenty of other positive role players. Even if we just changed another -2 role player into just a totally neutral player, suddenly we’re looking at an estimate of a +8 average net rating, and that era’s Jazz would very likely be one of the NBA’s greatest dynasties. And this isn’t even hypothetical with the Jazz, since the moment they actually got even one other good player in their supporting cast (Hornacek—who, to be fair, data suggests was good enough to be worth about as much as the above-described combined effect of Horry + a neutral role player), they averaged a +8.2 net rating over the next four years and put up the highest three-year playoff relative net rating of any non-title-winner in history. So yeah, supporting cast matters quite a lot. We have good reason to believe the Jazz could’ve been one of the NBA’s greatest teams if they’d had a solid supporting cast.
- Others have suggested Stockton wasn’t appreciated by MVP voters because K.Malone “cannibalised” his vote, or that he didn't have enough ppg to get votes… but we have many examples of that not being true, which have been cited. If you were good enough, over a long enough timeline, you should have started to see that reflected in the MVP voting, and it just wasn’t. I also find it hard to buy the idea that a humble, white, all-American, was at a disadvantage when it came to getting love in the media. If anything, you’d think he would have had an advantage at that time.
Not sure what examples you have of MVP votes not being cannibalized on teams with two superstars. It’s pretty obvious that that happens. To the extent there’s any disagreement on which player is the better player, it is just obviously correct that they’ll split votes. But the issue here is more than just that. It’s also that their awful supporting cast led to the team results not being all that great *and* that Karl Malone was a big scorer while Stockton was not. I think you’ll be very hard-pressed to find an example of a player doing great in MVP voting when they’re on a team with another superstar, that superstar scores way more than them, and the rest of the team is awful enough that the team results are good but not super great. We can find examples of someone doing well in MVP voting with one of these factors going against them. But all three? It’s definitely hard to think of any.
A couple somewhat analogous examples that popped into my head. In 1982, the Lakers won 57 games with an 4.37 SRS and had Kareem and Magic, with Kareem being their bigger scorer (albeit not as big of a difference as with Malone and Stockton). Magic finished 8th in MVP voting. In 1993, the Bulls won 57 games and Jordan scored way more than Pippen, and Pippen failed to get a single MVP vote. If you’re the lower-scoring superstar on a two-superstar team that didn’t have a good enough team to do super well, then it’s extremely unlikely that you’ll finish high in MVP voting. Of course, I’m sure you’d posit that the team didn’t do super well because Stockton wasn’t actually that good, but that’s a separate argument addressed elsewhere.
- Others have bemoaned the tough teams Stockton (sometimes) had to play, like the 1988 Lakers. That is not a point in Stockton’s favour. If his impact was really that big, the Jazz should have won enough games that they didn’t need to play the Lakers early in the (at the time weak) Western Conference. It’s the same bad argument Hakeem fans make, trying to write off his playoff failures by pointing to the (sometimes) strong opposition, when really if Hakeem was so impactful then he should have led them to enough RS wins that they never play that team in the 1st round to begin with.
This is a dumb point that you have made before and I’m not sure why you keep making. The first time you made the point, you claimed that the Jazz faced the Lakers in the first round, and I pointed out that that was false, and now you continue to make the same argument and just are vague about when they faced the Lakers. Facing a good team in the second round is pretty standard fare. In that particular season, we might say that if the Jazz had managed to win a handful more games (which they likely would’ve done, except that they were only emerging as stars in the second half of the year—they certainly won at a #2 seed pace in the second-half the season), they’d have faced the Lakers in the conference finals instead, but they’d still have faced the Lakers either way, so it’s hard to see what your point is.
The fact is that, in Stockton’s/Malone’s first year as stars, the 1988 Jazz faced the 1988 Lakers and almost beat them. There’s really nothing you can say to make that look bad.
- Another oft cited excuse is that in this series or that series Stockton still posted high volume stats, so it wasn’t his fault. This is another flawed argument. If Lebron & Wade, or Shaq & Kobe, other (actual) instances of top 5 players being paired together, had gotten swept in the 1st round in their primes by a 43 win team, do you think anyone would care that “they had good counting stats”? Of course not. When your stats don’t translate to impact, they are meaningless. That result would have been an unmitigated disaster for those guys, and it should be seen that way for Stockton and Malone too. We can see in today’s game, where it’s harder for a single perimeter defender to have an impact, how huge guys like Caruso and Nesmith have been in limiting other team’s star players. Yet Stockton, playing in the handchecking iso-ball era, could apparently do nothing to slow down freaking Mitch Richmond and Chris Mullin. It’s a terrible look, and others have noted the other series where guys like Terry Porter were just torching Stockton and clowning him. But we’re supposed to ignore this, because some talking head had some quote about what a great defender Stockton was. I’ll take the results over the hyperbolic comments of players thanks.
We’ve been over this before and it’s just a silly argument. You’re referring to the 1989 series against the Warriors. Stockton was great in that series. A video of a full game of that series was posted to a prior thread where we recently discussed this, so it was there for all to see. You did not actually review the game at all, but if you had then you’d have seen Stockton playing a great game and his team still losing. And why was that? Well, his teammates shot a 44% TS% for the series and his DPOY-but-awful-offensive-player Eaton had already severely regressed defensively and put up essentially no resistance defensively.
The idea that Stockton must not have had good impact in the series because the team did badly is just absurdly reductionist. And that’s especially true when a video of one of the games was posted and you have nothing to say about it, while others have watched it fully and reviewed it and come to the opposite of your conclusion. Sometimes a player plays great while a bunch of other players on his team are horrible. That’ll tend to happen when you have an awful supporting cast, like the Jazz did.
Would LeBron/Wade and Shaq/Kobe get criticized if they lost in similar circumstances? Yeah. But, first of all, neither Karl Malone nor John Stockton is LeBron or Shaq, and this thread is not suggesting they are. And, second of all, if those guys had had supporting casts as bad as the Jazz, then you can be rest assured people would point it out (and validly so). People certainly freely blame the current era’s Lakers’ failings on the supporting cast being bad.
Really, the revisionist movement to crown Stockton as a “secret” MVP seems to be driven by 2 things:
i) Advanced stats, and
ii) His longevity
I’ll start with the latter first. For I guess understandable reasons, some fans are impressed by career accomplishments, and there are few “bigger” career accomplishments than Stockton’s assist record. The thing is, that’s based on longevity. It does not actually tell us who the best passer was (certainly not Stockton FYI). It just tells you he played for a long time, and was healthy, and yes that has value… but you don’t win titles by having your all-star guard stay healthy a lot. You win titles by having genuine top end talent driving your team, which Stockton was not. Obviously any player who puts up 15.4ppg & 13.4apg is an unbelievable player, except that player is Kevin Porter, and no Kevin Porter was not an unbelievable player. Nobody looks at Mark Jackson, who has over 10,000 assists, and thinks he was some sort of legendary player because of that fact. Neither was Stockton, with his questionable, homecooked assist record (though whether there was homecooking of the stats or not doesn’t really matter).Andre Miller is 12th all-time in assists, and he was not even a particularly good player. He just played for a long time. Nobody sensible trying to win a title would prefer 19 years of a solid all-star type player to 10 years of a genuine top 5 player, because your window to win is when you have the latter.
This is mostly a straw man. You’re reducing Stockton’s longevity to the assists record. The value of his longevity is in the fact that he had high impact for a large number of years. The other guys you mention here (Mark Jackson and Andre Miller) did not have nearly the impact Stockton did, and we can see that by perusing essentially any available data. If they’d had Stockton’s impact, then they’d be all-time great players too!
The second thing is that advanced stats which were developed after Stockton retired now paint him as having been this incredible player… but we know there are many reasons advanced stats can be wrong. Statisticians will tell you them, and I don’t propose to go into all the reasons now, but the overemphasis on this (based on a small sample, because we only have stats for the end of Stockton’s career) is misguided in my view. All the evidence above shows that it’s likely a distortion, for any of the myriad of reasons that tends to happen (bad replacements, random noise, wonky line-ups, etc).
As an initial matter, the data from the end of Stockton’s career isn’t really “small sample.” We have RAPM data for 7 years of his career. That’s a lot of data! More than enough to have samples typically thought to be large enough for RAPM purposes.
We also have more than just impact data from the end of Stockton’s career. The data we have beyond that is limited, but we have Squared’s 1985-1996 RAPM and Engelmann’s quarter-by-quarter RAPM approximation for the 1990s. I’ve also mentioned some other pieces of data that are smaller sample (WOWYR, on-off vs. the Sixers, etc.). It all looks really good for Stockton. And that’s actually despite the fact that there’s reason to believe that the Squared data has significant sampling bias against Stockton (the Jazz games in the sample were way worse than the Jazz’s results overall). We also have various forms of impact-correlated box data. Again, it all looks really good for Stockton.
This is not an example of one piece of data portraying Stockton well. What’s actually the case is that there’s a wide array of advanced data—including different forms of data, and different versions of each form of data, from different time periods of Stockton’s career—and it all paints a very consistent picture of Stockton being elite. To suggest that some handwaving arguments about how you think the Jazz should’ve done better shows that this enormous amount of data is a “distortion” is silly.
The coffin in the nail for Stockton is that at the end of his career, when he was no longer in his prime, his role and minutes decreased between 97 and 98. Stockton played 64 games instead of 82, and his minute load dropped from over 35 to 29mpg… and the team was largely unaffected. They went from 64 wins to 62, even though his replacements were horrible. Unfortunately, that is basically the only year in Stockton’s 19 year career when he missed games, so it’s all we can point to… but it’s pretty telling, and confirms much of what the evidence above suggests.
Again, I question whether you read my OPs. As I pointed out in my OP, the Jazz actually did significantly less well when Stockton missed time in the 1997-98 season. Indeed, they only had a +2 SRS in those games, while having almost a +7 SRS in the games he played. They won at a 65-win pace with Stockton and a 50-win pace without Stockton. Considering that Stockton only played 29 MPG that season, that WOWY is suggestive of Stockton having a +7.73 impact per 48 minutes (4.67*(48/29)=7.73), which would likely be closer to +8.5 impact per 100 possessions (since the pace in that era was well below 100). That’s actually very consistent with the RAPM data we have for Stockton. Indeed, if anything, it’s actually better! So this would seem to be more like the nail in the coffin for your argument, rather than vice versa!
I’d also note that, as I pointed out in my OP, Stockton also missed a few games in 1989-1990, and the Jazz had a +9.75 higher SRS in the games Stockton played that year than they did in the few games Stockton missed. Obviously the sample there is small, but it is adds to the pile of data that looks great for Stockton.
Then you look at Stockton’s skillset. He can’t create off the dribble, or generate his own offense very well, which in today’s game would be fatal. He hit 3s at a good clip, but back then nobody was guarding them properly. In today’s game, the entire defensive scheme is geared towards taking away the 3pt shot. Stockton benefitted a lot from playing in a weaker league, against weaker opponents than he would today, with an offensive and defensive dynamic that should have greatly favoured him. Today lead guards are expected to run the offense and be the point of attack on offense, which Stockton can’t really do due to the limitations I noted above. In Stockton’s day the point guard would dribble the ball up and pound it into the ground until they had a good entry pass. Today everything is different.
This is all just speculative stuff that you say about essentially every past player except for ones that you idiosyncratically decide that you like. Your arguments about how players would translate to “today’s game” are generally awful arguments and people continuously tell you that across many threads. Fortunately, though, this thread is not actually about how someone would translate to “today’s game.” That is inherently a speculative exercise that I am not interested in here. In the context of the era he actually played in (i.e. outside the land of complete subjective speculation), Stockton’s skillset obviously was quite good, since he was able to have elite impact in his era.
