penbeast0 wrote:As long as you can explain away Detroit's decade of miserable defense with Lanier and how they improved with guys like Otto Moore (Zaid Aziz) and Kent Benson maybe you can convince me that Lanier's a decent defensive center and I'll support you.
As for 1969, Unseld took a last place in the East team and made it the best team in the league with his rebounding, defense, and passing . . . while Gus Johnson missed HALF THE SEASON with injury and there were no other really significant additions. Thats better than Wilt/Baylor/West Lakers, better than Oscar/Lucas Royals, better than the Bellamy/Reed/Frazier Knicks . . . there are guys who had statistically fancier seasons (mainly Elvin Hayes) but Unseld did exactly what Nash did when Amare was injured -- took a team everyone counted out and with his leadership made it a winner (only to an even bigger extent) despite not scoring a lot.
The Bullets didn't continue to overachieve in the playoffs where Russell wrote the story we all remember of that season but MVP is a regular season award and Unseld was not just the consensus choice but the right one. Look at the other candidates team impact, look at what the Bullets did compared to 68, then tell me it's ridiculous.
He may have been a glorified role player but so is Steve Nash and he's going on our list this round.
The whole point about Johnson is that they were +5.5 team before his injury and a +1.8 team after (and it was the opp ppg that suffered). Sorry if I find it hard to believe Unseld wins the MVP on a +1.8 team...and the narrative was heavily driven by finding a Russell-type impact player that was providing value outside of scoring. And you can't completely ignore that Monroe, like 99.9% of players ever, probably improved in his second year (Jack Marin looked good to me from the limited stuff I've seen too, 3rd year guy). Overlooking the growth of young key players would be like crediting Oklahoma City's improvement to James Harden.
As for Lanier, I'm almost done with his major in/out runs...and fortunately he provided a really nice amount of missed games every year.
In 1977 the opp ppg didn't change much with him out. That team was +1.8 in DRtg. In 1978, on a team that +0.6 in DRtg, Detroit gave up 117.2 ppg without Lanier and just 108.3 with him. Coupled with what I see on film, that looks like a decent defensive center.