Top 25 peaks of the 2001-25: #3-#4 Spots

[f4p]

But in the playoffs, the Lakers were historic. 15-1, with a +7.1 rOrtg, -6.6 rDRtg. Kings, Spurs and Blazers were 3 very good teams, and they were all obliterated by the 2001 Lakers. Outlier shooting or not, Shaq was the dominant force at the rim, creating open looks for his team.

with Shaq leading his team to a 15-1 playoff record

Insofar as this matters ... doesn't Shaq's negative on-off take a chunk of the shine off this (especially to the extent one is leaning on it being only 1 loss, rather than say 2, or 3)? Or to my mind, highlight that (both) are more reflections of team (especially with on-off being a small sample).
They're losing 2 games in the minutes with him on the floor (slightly more than the 1 total actual loss).
The total points margins versus Sacramento aren't of the sort typically in line with a sweep (3 wins by 6 points or fewer and Shaq's minutes +3, +2 and +5 ... more typically a bench unit might let one of those slide I think, though granting limited "off" minutes in which to do so).
It's not that he played anything like badly or anything. And I don't think those bench units sustain +14.1 in his off minutes over a larger sample. And the Lakers were superb with him on the court of course.

Overall I think he's playing very well and that he's their best player. It's just if you're going to raise 15-1 and moreso if you're saying he's "leading" them to that ... that on/off is a fly in the ointment that bears mentioning.

It's not a "Shaq is bad" thing, more a 15-1 is almost definitionally a bit a luck/dependent-on-teammates thing, and there's some numbers to support that further here.

so it should probably just be a prima facie case that the guy who led his team to a title the year before with a 30/15 playoffs, is probably leading his team when he puts up another 30/15 playoffs and the team goes 15-1.

but just to drill down. the lakers had something like (don't feel like looking up down to the decimal) a +20 PSRS in the 1st round, +16 PSRS in the 2nd, and second best ever +33 PSRS in the WCF. it feels like quibbling to say a few of the games were close. no one just runs off consistent +15 wins with no close games.

also, shaq's 2001 on/off feels like the inverse of steph's 2017 on/off. shaq's is an enormous outlier in the negative direction, steph's in the positive.

shaq literally has identical 22.9 on/off in 2000 and 22.9 on/off in 2002 and, in their other finals run in 2004, a +25.3 on/off. in the warriors finals runs, steph goes from -4 to +12 with an average of +5.5 compared to the +20 in 2017. but it's treated like part of a continuum instead of the outlier (all his best numbers come from 1 and 2 series runs). considering nothing about shaq's individual play suffered in the playoffs, it seems like a fluke of the lakers weirdly playing +14 basketball without him for the 97 minutes that shaq didn't play in the playoffs.

and as i've written before, it's really just the 4th quarters of games 3 and 4 against the spurs. if those had been mercy ruled after 3 quarters, things would look different. in those games, shaq put up 35/17 and +21 in 35 minutes and 26/10 and +22 in 30 minutes. so, utterly dominant. but in the 18 minutes he sat in the 4th quarters of those 2 games, the lakers outscored the spurs by another 17 points. without those most garbage of garbage minutes, shaq is at something like a +10 for the playoffs and it looks basically in line with the rest of his career (as much as possible with something like on/off).

[tsherkin]

I mean, Odom was a borderline all-star type player, so that's already pretty different from alot of carry jobs right there. If he'd stayed with the Heat with Wade instead of going West and eventually becoming a 6th man, then he'd have made multiple all-star appearances.

Odom was a quality rebounder and large ball-handler who was sometimes a good defender. He was a decent jack-of-all-trades kind of guy, but not a super high-impact player.

Mihm was a decent enough 5 before he got injured, and while Kwame gets alot of hate for being a failure of a #1 pick he too was a decent player.
[/qoute]

Kwame was a decent rebounder and man-on defender in the post for the Lakers, sure. But he wasn't a good team defender and couldn't handle scoring volume of any consequence. Mihm was an injured 10/6 player with no range. He wasn't horrible, but he certainly wasn't a major impact player on the team.

Smush wasn't good, but he's one guy. Cook was a bench player, but he basically played that role with his 19mpg. L.Walton was an ok bench player. Sasha only had 1 good year, and this wasn't it, but he was their 9th man.

The Copium involved here is remarkable. Everyone at the time understood that this was a heavily-limited team. You're trying to re-write history to suit your stance. They had no scoring. Brown couldn't catch a pass to save his life. Their guard play other than Kobe was rough. They were the 15th-ranked D in the league, lacking any kind of major punch (albeit also not being dreadful). Their bench was crap.

I grant you it wasn't a good support cast, but calling it a historical carry job is way too far. Odom alone negates that claim. They also won only 45 games.

That team had no business being the 8th-best O in the league, and it was indeed a remarkable carry job.

[ReggiesKnicks]

You’re free to have your own view on the eye test, for sure. On the team performance front though, they did not do similarly well. Despite Garnett playing more MPG in the playoffs than in the regular season, the 2004 Timberwolves had a relative net rating of +3.8 in the playoffs, after having had a +6.1 net rating in the regular season. The team did worse in the playoffs, while Garnett’s volume and efficiency went down. It seems pretty consistent with Garnett having fallen off a significant amount in the playoffs.

This will be my last thought on this and hopefully my best and clearest.

Garnett's greatness isn't based on his efficiency or scoring volume. His scoring volume and efficiency fluctuated by 3.4 TS% while his turnovers per game fluctuated by 1.6.

Yes, these are declines. But what makes Garnett special is his sheer impact beyond scoring. His scoring is impactful, and was less so in the postseason in 2004, but his overarching impact was still felt to a similar effect as it was in the regular season.

[lessthanjake]

I mean, Odom was a borderline all-star type player, so that's already pretty different from alot of carry jobs right there. If he'd stayed with the Heat with Wade instead of going West and eventually becoming a 6th man, then he'd have made multiple all-star appearances.

Odom was a quality rebounder and large ball-handler who was sometimes a good defender. He was a decent jack-of-all-trades kind of guy, but not a super high-impact player.

Mihm was a decent enough 5 before he got injured, and while Kwame gets alot of hate for being a failure of a #1 pick he too was a decent player.
[/qoute]

Kwame was a decent rebounder and man-on defender in the post for the Lakers, sure. But he wasn't a good team defender and couldn't handle scoring volume of any consequence. Mihm was an injured 10/6 player with no range. He wasn't horrible, but he certainly wasn't a major impact player on the team.

Smush wasn't good, but he's one guy. Cook was a bench player, but he basically played that role with his 19mpg. L.Walton was an ok bench player. Sasha only had 1 good year, and this wasn't it, but he was their 9th man.

The Copium involved here is remarkable. Everyone at the time understood that this was a heavily-limited team. You're trying to re-write history to suit your stance. They had no scoring. Brown couldn't catch a pass to save his life. Their guard play other than Kobe was rough. They were the 15th-ranked D in the league, lacking any kind of major punch (albeit also not being dreadful). Their bench was crap.

I grant you it wasn't a good support cast, but calling it a historical carry job is way too far. Odom alone negates that claim. They also won only 45 games.

That team had no business being the 8th-best O in the league, and it was indeed a remarkable carry job.

While I agree with you on the general point here (i.e. that Kobe carried a very weak team to the playoffs), I think you might be underselling Odom a bit. Odom’s RAPM data actually looks really good. Like, peaking into the top 10 in multi-year RAPM. See here: https://www.nbarapm.com/player/Lamar_Odom. Granted, he had that RAPM peak later than 2006, so there’s a straightforward argument that he wasn’t a super high impact player in 2006. Of course, even with the later RAPM peak, it may well just be a collinearity thing, since his RAPM happens to spike as the team gets really good, without much discernible change in his box data. But I figured I’d just note this, particularly since I was recently a bit shocked when seeing Odom’s RAPM data.

[Cavsfansince84]

so it should probably just be a prima facie case that the guy who led his team to a title the year before with a 30/15 playoffs, is probably leading his team when he puts up another 30/15 playoffs and the team goes 15-1.

but just to drill down. the lakers had something like (don't feel like looking up down to the decimal) a +20 PSRS in the 1st round, +16 PSRS in the 2nd, and second best ever +33 PSRS in the WCF. it feels like quibbling to say a few of the games were close. no one just runs off consistent +15 wins with no close games.

also, shaq's 2001 on/off feels like the inverse of steph's 2017 on/off. shaq's is an enormous outlier in the negative direction, steph's in the positive.

shaq literally has identical 22.9 on/off in 2000 and 22.9 on/off in 2002 and, in their other finals run in 2004, a +25.3 on/off. in the warriors finals runs, steph goes from -4 to +12 with an average of +5.5 compared to the +20 in 2017. but it's treated like part of a continuum instead of the outlier (all his best numbers come from 1 and 2 series runs). considering nothing about shaq's individual play suffered in the playoffs, it seems like a fluke of the lakers weirdly playing +14 basketball without him for the 97 minutes that shaq didn't play in the playoffs.

and as i've written before, it's really just the 4th quarters of games 3 and 4 against the spurs. if those had been mercy ruled after 3 quarters, things would look different. in those games, shaq put up 35/17 and +21 in 35 minutes and 26/10 and +22 in 30 minutes. so, utterly dominant. but in the 18 minutes he sat in the 4th quarters of those 2 games, the lakers outscored the spurs by another 17 points. without those most garbage of garbage minutes, shaq is at something like a +10 for the playoffs and it looks basically in line with the rest of his career (as much as possible with something like on/off).

This is part of the problem with on/off in tiny samples. In garbage time most anything can happen. I think on/off and rapm are still too much of a bottomline/sacrosanct thing on here tbh but to each their own. It's like let's maybe try and look at more than just those two things when evaluating and comparing players.

[ReggiesKnicks]

I mean, Odom was a borderline all-star type player, so that's already pretty different from alot of carry jobs right there. If he'd stayed with the Heat with Wade instead of going West and eventually becoming a 6th man, then he'd have made multiple all-star appearances.

Odom was a quality rebounder and large ball-handler who was sometimes a good defender. He was a decent jack-of-all-trades kind of guy, but not a super high-impact player.

Odom was the type of player whose impact became more pronounced when he was on more talented rosters. It sounds cliché, but for a player who wasn't a good shooter or consistently a high-level defender, there is importance in Odom having a defined role on a championship-caliber team.

Ironically, even if he is a borderline all-star, somewhere between a Top 50-60 player in 2008, that still isn't remarkably high-level help. Looking at the West at the time, Memphis is another team you may say overachieved as the #2 defense in the NBA and winning 49 games. They had a defensive core in Battier/Jones and Miller as a flamethrower off the bench around Pau. The difference between Memphis and the Lakers is that Memphis had exceptional defensive pieces. When you look at their #2 defense, it makes sense. The Lakers being the #8 offense in the NBA is impressive in a historical sense.

That team had no business being the 8th-best O in the league, and it was indeed a remarkable carry job.

I think 2006 LeBron James is a similar caliber player to 2006 Kobe Bryant, and I wouldn't consider 2007 LeBron James in the top six of this discussion.

[f4p]

4. Dwyane Wade (2006)

I was writing up an entry here for 2004 Garnett, and ended up changing my vote mid-post, because I started talking about why I put Garnett above 2006 Wade and I realized I didn’t really buy my own reasoning.

The crux of Wade’s case here is that he had an incredible playoff run, leading the Heat to the title. In my view, that Heat team had little business winning the NBA title. Shaq was still a good player, but he was pretty diminished by the end. Meanwhile, the Heat gave their second-most playoff minutes (and almost as many shots as Shaq) to Antoine Walker—who IMO is arguably the worst consistent starter in NBA history, with just awful impact data, combined with my eye test thinking he was just terrible even back then. Jason Williams, Udonis Haslem, and James Posey ranged from neutral to somewhat negative players IMO. They did benefit from depth, in that their 7th and 8th men were old Gary Payton and old Alonzo Mourning, who were both positive players in the limited minutes they got. Overall, in my view, that team was not really a championship-quality team. And yet Wade led them to a title. I found it shocking at the time, and I still do.

This wasn’t an easy road either. The first two rounds were not against overly difficult opponents, but I wouldn’t say the Kidd/Carter/Jefferson Nets were minnows either. More importantly, the Heat faced the Pistons in the conference finals. This was a team that had won the title in 2004, and had lost a close Game 7 in the Finals in 2005. They had also just had their best regular season, winning 64 games. This was the title favorite. And Wade absolutely torched them, putting up a 68.4% TS% for the series. The Heat then played the 60-win, 6 SRS Mavericks, who had just gotten done beating the Spurs and Suns and looked pretty destined to win the title. And Wade torched them too, carrying the Heat with 35 points a game, including just dominating the last four games that the Heat won after going down 0-2. Basically, Wade dominated two great teams that I don’t think the Heat had any business beating. FWIW, he also had a +22.2 on-off in the playoffs, though I don’t value that much due to the tiny sample size.

So I think 2006 Wade had a playoffs that is on my short list for most impressive title runs by a player. But what about the regular season? Well, it was still really good. He led the league in RAPTOR, and was basically in a tight group of a few players near the top of the league in other metrics. He had a fantastic +15.2 on-off. He definitely wasn’t clearly the best player in the regular season. But he was in the conversation. And when combined with one of the most impressive playoff runs ever, I find it very compelling.

As I mentioned, I was going to put 2004 Garnett here. I certainly think it’d be relatively straightforward to conclude that 2004 Garnett generally had more impact per 100 possessions than 2006 Wade. But Wade was still very impactful, and 2004 Garnett simply did not have the playoff run that 2006 Wade had. So, overall, I just find it difficult to conclude that 2004 Garnett was actually “greater” than 2006 Wade.

The actual question for me is whether 2006 Wade should be even higher. Is 2001 Shaq better than this? I guess my logic here is that Shaq had a slightly better argument for being the league’s best player in the regular season than Wade did, and they both were extremely impressive in the playoffs (with Shaq leading his team to a 15-1 playoff record, while Wade led a team to a title that had no business winning it). That shorthand logic ends up with Shaq a bit ahead. But I struggle with the conclusion that 2001 Shaq’s regular season actually was better than 2006 Wade’s, since the SRS of the two teams was virtually identical and I think Shaq had the better supporting cast. That said, I do look at surrounding years and see Shaq looking better than Wade, and that gives me some info about their individual level in these particular years. So, while I’m not certain 2006 Wade doesn’t deserve to be #3 here, I am not quite ready to do it.

Hey jake! I'm a bit surprised to see 06 Wade already. I'd definitely consider it within uncertainty range of Wade's evaluation, but personally I struggle to get quite that high on Wade. So I guess two questions:

(1) How much of a concern is the sample size and the lesser of regular season pop for Wade vs the competition?
You mention that the 06 Heat had no business winning the title, and that's definitely true. It was definitely an upset, which is credit to Wade!

But in terms of team dominance, they were 93rd in Overall SRS through 2023 (87th through 2021), so a pretty far cry from any form of dominance. Even just taking playoffs alone, they rank 81st through 2021 (lower through 2023). Looking at the playoffs by each round, they were +3.5, +8.9, +12.2, +10.6 in overall SRS (reminder that we expect overall SRS to get higher each round, based on the way it's calculated). So it's really just the last two--three rounds that look any good (Wade's Backpicks BPM also looks worse in the first round). Which is great that they won the two most important rounds of the entire season, and off the back of plenty of Wade heroics too! But it's also starting to rely on smaller and smaller sample sizes for the signal.

Off the cuff (and taking out Curry, Jokic, Shaq who are 1-3 on your ballot), the next guys are (in no order):
-Garnett, Dirk, Chris Paul, Kobe, Durant, Kawhi, Shai, Giannis, Wade
(hard to know exactly where to cut things off, so maybe you drop a few of those and introduce some others -- maybe someone switches in Nash or Harden?)

Of these guys: Wade has one/two great playoffs during his peak, but Kawhi definitely does too and most agree, Dirk definitely does too and most agree Giannis/Durant/Kobe might have great playoffs (though you get a little wider spread on each, with Giannis having some playoff decline/injuries, Durant having his best playoffs often with Curry, Kobe being less of an impact giant). What makes you higher on Wade relative to those other guys?

Taking full-season RAPM (RS + PS) from nbarapm.com (which as far as I can tell, only puts their full-season RAPM values on each player's specific page) to get a sense of their value...

2-year Full-Season rapm:
03–04 Garnett +9.4 [07–08 +8.9, 08–09 +8.9) > 11-12 Dirk +9.0 [10–11 Dirk +6.7] > 16–17 Kawhi +7.4 [20–21 Kawhi +7.3] > 06-07 Wade +6.0 [09–10 +7.5] (not adding everyone because I'm lazy)

3-year Full-Season rapm:
02 – 04 Garnett +9.2 [08-09 +10.6] > 14-16 Chris Paul +8.3 (=16-18 +8.3) > 06-08 Steve Nash +8.0 > 16-18 Kawhi +7.8 [15-17 +7.4] > 10-12 Dirk +7.2 [11-13 +7.7, 09-12 +5.4, 02-04 +7.2] > 20-22 Giannis +6.7 [18-20 +6.5] > 06-08 Kobe +6.0 > 14-16 Durant 5.9 [15-17 +5.6, 19-21 +6.6] > 05-07 Wade +5.6 [08-10 +7.2, 09-11 +5.6]

5-year Full-Season rapm:
14-18 Chris Paul +9.8 > 03-07 Garnett +9.3 [06-10 = 07-11 +10.1] > 07-11 Nash +8.5 [05-09 +8.3] > 06-10 Wade +8.1 [big drop off in surrounding years: 05–09 +6.0] > 14-18 Kawhi +7.5 [17-21 +6.9, 20-24 +7.9] > 19-23 Giannis +7.3 [=18-22 +7.3] > 07-11 Dirk +7.1 [08-12 Dirk +7.1]> 13-17 Durant +6.4 [19-23 Durant +6.4] > 06-10 Kobe +6.0 [04-08 +6.1]

RAPM's not everything, but it does seem like that 06 run is clearly less impactful than some of the other guys we have here (including Garnett, who didn't have the best playoff run in 04, but also didn't have a chance to show his mid-peak playoff performance in 05, 06, or 07). Some of the guys you might cut out for health concerns or playoff drop concerns (e.g. Chris Paul).

But just compared to the 'great single run' guys like 17 Kawhi or 11 Dirk, it's not clear 06 or 09/10 Wade is more impactful than those guys in an rapm sense. And Just looking at the small sample single playoffs, 17 Kawhi for example has a higher playoff EPM than 06 Wade, and I'm not sure if I would weight 06 Wade better on film personally (though haven't watched 06 Wade recently).

(2) Do you have any scalability or fit concerns with Wade compared to someone like Garnett or Dirk or Kawhi? I'm personally a little less clear on how he maintains impact if he doesn't have the ball, e.g. having a clear impact decline in multi-year RAPM whenever we include 2011 in the sample.

Thoughts? Not saying it's impossible to take Wade, just trying to understand what puts him over some of the other great playoff guys. Do you see 06 playoff Wade as a level above 17 Kawhi or 11 Dirk?

so i think this is where it's important to avoid what i'll call, for lack of a better word, "kevin garnett syndrome", where the impact data makes one miss the forest for the trees. i think engelmann 97-24 RAPM has dwade 160th overall. and most RAPM studies have dwade low overall. and yet he was very good in the 2005 playoffs until injured, crushed it in the 2006 playoffs resulting in an insane title with one of the weakest offensive supporting casts ever (actually, i'll just say weakest for a champion in as many years as i care to think back on), dominated the celtics in the 2009 playoffs, and was maybe the best player in the playoffs for a 2011 heat team with lebron. we don't need to wonder whether he was impactful.

unless you think he massively changed his playstyle in 2006 to produce impact for just one year, he was an amazing playoff asset for basically all of his healthy years. and in 2006, we know he threw a team on his back in a way basically only managed by 1994 hakeem, 2003 duncan, 2011 dirk, and some lebron seasons and he won a title doing it. he scored 40 ppg in the last 4 finals games and won it all. if there's something that says he wasn't insanely impactful, you should almost certainly decide that that stat is lying to you. because there simply isn't a world where they win that title without wade just bootstrapping the entire offense in a way only a handful of players ever have shown that they can, especially in terms of just relentless attacking of the basket.

there are going to be a lot of people listed in this project above wade who i absolutely don't think are winning that 2006 finals with their skillset. nash isn't, dirk isn't, kobe probably isn't, steph isn't, i'd say harden isn't but he's not going to be above wade anyway, KG isn't, shai isn't even dreaming of it. and wade is almost certainly matching what they could do more in the opposite direction, even if they're all fairly different.

like, similar to our arguments about steph where you say he was in an amazing situation but then just point to the team results, you can't say dwade was in a weak team situation and then ask about PSRS. why wasn't their PSRS worse is what we should be asking. not why couldn't he get antoine walker to a better PSRS (literally i think 2nd on the team in true shot attempts in the finals, with jason williams 4th i think, which is just wild).


i sometimes get the impression that the great ball dominant guys from history are actually much more important to actual winning than their RAPM will ever indicate. that somehow their playstyle essentially absorbs negative impact from their teammates but usually proves incredibly resilient and important to actual playoff winning, where generation of good attempts against good defenses is at its most valuable, over more aesthetically pleasing players like a cp3 or KG who impact stats love. kobe never looks good in RAPM but went to 3 straight finals and won 2 as an alpha. RAPM doesn't love wade but he pulled a title out of thin air. i bet it wouldn't love hakeem but he did the same in 1994. and it never seems to like luka, even in the playoffs, but then every opponent (until this year) seems like they are just desperately trying everything they can to stop him while he's surprisingly going 7 with the clippers or beating the 64 win suns or getting to the finals.

[Cavsfansince84]

so i think this is where it's important to avoid what i'll call, for lack of a better word, "kevin garnett syndrome", where the impact data makes one miss the forest for the trees. i think engelmann 97-24 RAPM has dwade 160th overall. and most RAPM studies have dwade low overall. and yet he was very good in the 2005 playoffs until injured, crushed it in the 2006 playoffs resulting in an insane title with one of the weakest offensive supporting casts ever (actually, i'll just say weakest for a champion in as many years as i care to think back on), dominated the celtics in the 2009 playoffs, and was maybe the best player in the playoffs for a 2011 heat team with lebron. we don't need to wonder whether he was impactful.

unless you think he massively changed his playstyle in 2006 to produce impact for just one year, he was an amazing playoff asset for basically all of his healthy years. and in 2006, we know he threw a team on his back in a way basically only managed by 1994 hakeem, 2003 duncan, 2011 dirk, and some lebron seasons and he won a title doing it. he scored 40 ppg in the last 4 finals games and won it all. if there's something that says he wasn't insanely impactful, you should almost certainly decide that that stat is lying to you. because there simply isn't a world where they win that title without wade just bootstrapping the entire offense in a way only a handful of players ever have shown that they can, especially in terms of just relentless attacking of the basket.

there are going to be a lot of people listed in this project above wade who i absolutely don't think are winning that 2006 finals with their skillset. nash isn't, dirk isn't, kobe probably isn't, steph isn't, i'd say harden isn't but he's not going to be above wade anyway, KG isn't, shai isn't even dreaming of it. and wade is almost certainly matching what they could do more in the opposite direction, even if they're all fairly different.

like, similar to our arguments about steph where you say he was in an amazing situation but then just point to the team results, you can't say dwade was in a weak team situation and then ask about PSRS. why wasn't their PSRS worse is what we should be asking. not why couldn't he get antoine walker to a better PSRS (literally i think 2nd on the team in true shot attempts in the finals, with jason williams 4th i think, which is just wild).

i sometimes get the impression that the great ball dominant guys from history are actually much more important to actual winning than their RAPM will ever indicate. that somehow their playstyle essentially absorbs negative impact from their teammates but usually proves incredibly resilient and important to actual playoff winning, where generation of good attempts against good defenses is at its most valuable, over more aesthetically pleasing players like a cp3 or KG who impact stats love. kobe never looks good in RAPM but went to 3 straight finals and won 2 as an alpha. RAPM doesn't love wade but he pulled a title out of thin air. i bet it wouldn't love hakeem but he did the same in 1994. and it never seems to like luka, even in the playoffs, but then every opponent (until this year) seems like they are just desperately trying everything they can to stop him while he's surprisingly going 7 with the clippers or beating the 64 win suns or getting to the finals.

Not that I'm in 100% agreement but the general gist of what you say I agree with. It's like someone on the floor has to know where the team is going and how to get there. With CP3 he knows how to play optimal stat based bb but I am not sure he actually knows how to get a team to a title on top of his body not being able to get there either. Wade in 06 at least knew the way there and got it done. Which all the stat based stuff regarding his regular season isn't going to capture. Otoh re Wade's 06 run I don't really like how he was allowed to wear body armor and then starts getting 16ftapg in the finals after avging 9 in the previous 3 rds. It felt a bit contrived to me. So I'm not super high on his 06 season and also think 09/10 are his actual peak years which is the other can of worms with peaks trying to piece together what a player's peak actually was. It's easier to rank a guy higher when a top 3 rs also happened with a title or strong playoff run. Which is partly why I rank 01 Shaq over Steph.

[f4p]

i'm continuing this from the last thread since these guys are still on the ballot.

Just in a nutshell: It's unrealistic to have positive +/-, and thus I believe high RAPM, when you're a big minute guy on the losing team in the series. As such, I believe there's likely a kind of "winning vs losing bias" thing wherein players lead teams with first & second round exits are going to see their RAPM hurt on average even if they don't actually underperform relative to perception.

Alright so heading over to Cheema's study from 1997-2021 career Postseason RAPM, the top guys from #1 to Shaq:

1. LeBron James +5.875 (don't assume this scale is the same as nbarapm study)
2. Draymond Green +5.483
3. Manu Ginobili +5.169
4. Kevin Garnett +4.767
5. Tim Duncan +4.289
6. Steph Curry +4.117
7. James Harden +4.106
8. Shaquille O'Neal +3.932

Shouldn't stuff like this force people to be higher on #19 peak harden? He's basically tied with Steph and duncan while being the only non-KG guy who wasn't on a dynasty, which you say above tends to make it tough to look good in these measures, like we see with Manu and green.

Well, I can only speak for myself, and for myself I'm not coming in with any assumption of where Harden should be.

But I would also note that you just singled out the measure I posted where Harden looks best - so there are other perspectives that look worse - and we are talking about a career measure here rather than a peak/prime measure. We should remember Harden's best Playoff RAPM span almost certainly has a significant OKC component, and while I'm not looking to knock his time in OKC at all - I thought he was severely underrated - this likely means that around the time of his MVP he probably wouldn't rank quite as high as this study suggests.

On this note, I'm going to take data from a source I'm really cautious about using because a) playoff RAPM is fraught with issues, b) single post-season RAPM data all the more so, and c) I don't know anything about who the source actually is, but it's what we have and it's relevant here:

Single-season RS & PS RAPM studies on Github

So for Harden, in the playoffs, this is where this source rates Harden, fwiw:

OKC
'09-10: +0.3665 (50th & below Durant, Westbrook)
'10-11: +1.9783 (6th & above them)
'11-12: +2.7003 (3rd & above them)

Houston
'12-13: -.5004 (negative)
'13-14: -.0815 (negative)
'14-15: +0.2547 (67th)
'15-16: -1.4063 (negative)
'16-17: +0.6537 (37th)
'17-18: +1.6445 (8th)
'18-19: +1.1475 (26th)

That's as far as their studies go, and we should note that the Cheema study goes two more years which could have helped some. In neither case is it factoring in the last 4 years.

i mean someone like steph has most of his best on/off numbers (can't speak to this github RAPM stuff) from non-title years. also, aren't the numbers you posted the kind of thing that should lower our confidence in these numbers? so james harden was best in his 2nd and 3rd year in the league as a 21 and 22 year old (i'll just get ahead of anyone saying we can't use this to rank players even though we do all the time)? he was maybe a positive in an mvp caliber 2015 season with very nice box score numbers and a very good playoffs until game 5 against the warriors? the 2019 rockets somehow got carried to a dominant first round and neck and neck series with the steph/KD warriors with the 26th best player who wasn't really that impactful? harden wasn't even a positive player 2014 or 2016 and the 2017 rockets would have been just fine without the guys who accounted for the 2nd most points in history? but 2012 james harden would have wrecked shop? feels like it's way to "value you in your role" oriented to mean basically anything.

edit: 2013 and 2014 being negative also just seems really weird. harden's box score numbers fell off hard but his on/off those years was +30 and +16. given that the other numbers largely follow harden's raw on/off, kind of hard to imagine how +30 and +16 can flip to a negative.

...cut for brevity...

So I'll probably always talk more about RS RAPM data than PS RAPM data even as I acknowledge that legacy is determined primarily from the post-season. And this definitely leaves room for the possibility of a player being much less or much more effective in the playoffs relative to rivals than RS RAPM would indicate, and once again drives us back to the final step of analysis not being following stats but explaining how we come to differ in assessment from them.

so then we're at the point of the playoffs being given enormous weight for a player's legacy, moreso than any other sport, but then primarily using a measure that can't be trusted for the playoffs. i know you acknowledged it's an issue, but it seems to be a really big issue.

Here's where I'll also say that I'm quite cautious about trying to normalize for fit when doing player evaluation. I want to note the degree of synergy between the teammates, and I do recognize that some of that is out of the player's hands, but I also want to credit players for actively seeking to learn to fit around the teammates they have, and doing that historically well as has happened with Curry & Green is something I see as a major positive.

so i think this is where i tend to disagree most with you, and this is a general PC board thing also but i know you didn't want a general conversation. i think y'all tend to credit people in great situations as having created those situations as opposed to a sports career involving a ton of luck in how things work out. whereas i view the magic/duncan/curry types as basically being born rich and then getting credit for being good with money. you view things like fitting well with your teammates as something actively created by being a smart basketball player or, what is really implied, by just being a good person who likes to fit in to help his teammates, as opposed to largely a completely random process created by a small sample size thing like a sports career where your franchise only has so many chances to fit players around you and if they knock it out of the park like golden state well, great for you, and if they don't, like KG in minnesota, then oh well.

like it's not like anyone can look at draymond and steph curry's games and skillsets and somehow conclude that steph just actively built himself to fit into that (or that draymond did either), unless we're arguing that steph really wanted to keep playing like mark jackson wanted and just acquiesced to steve kerr's model because he just realized it was better for the team. they just have remarkably well-fitting skills, as does klay with them. pippen fits great next to jordan. kareem fits well with magic. lebron doesn't fit great next to wade because they are identical. it's okay to just say people have inherent skills and sometimes they don't line up with the limited number of people a team can acquire for them as teammates. now, someone like lebron, who has fit in like 10 different situations, gives us more confidence that he can fit in a lot of situation. but a lot of the situations i mentioned above are basically career-long situations which don't really tell us anything about the players outside of that one situation.



...cut for brevity...

Fine to knock a season in this context for health, but from a perspective of trying to dismiss the '16-17 PS run as something unearned because of Durant's presence, I think we know we wouldn't be so prone to do this if Curry had simply been able to be enough better to have the team end up 4-3 in the finals rather than 3-4, and while the bragging rights are huge there in the context of putting LeBron over Steph... why exactly should we put Step below other guys for losing to LeBron, when we expect everyone would lose to LeBron?

This is what I mean by kids gloves. Yes, LeBron is amazing and maybe had his best series ever, or maybe anybody's best series ever. But the warriors lost because steph was real bad. Full stop. The scoring champion averaged 22 ppg and had more turnovers than assists for the series and went 6/19 in a nail biter game 7 against a team with no elite perimeter defenders that regularly had 35 year old richard jefferson and kevin love playing forward minutes.

It doesn't get talked about like 2011 LeBron, but it's arguably even more of a thrown away title. Like the Heat needed to win 2 more games, the warriors just needed to score more than 0 points in the final 5 minutes of the series.

So, let me acknowledge that the mere fact that it was LeBron's team that Steph's team lost to doesn't mean Steph should be above criticism in non-LeBron debates.

But let me also point out that you're zeroing in on what you perceive as Steph's greatest failure to evaluate him as a player, and this is something that I try to avoid, just as I try to avoid getting overly infatuated with runs that seem "perfect" as if the player's lack of perfection in any other years is about that player getting a tier worse.

So in the '15-16 Finals, Steph has worse numbers than in the '14-15 Finals. Does that mean he generally got worse at basketball from one year to the next? I think all would say "No", and would also note that Curry clearly improved from '14-15 to '15-16 looking at the entirety of the season. So what does it mean that Curry was worse in the '15-16 series?

i'm not trying to evaluate steph based on the 2016 finals. and again, nothing i'm saying isn't that he's been an awesome player. just that he's more "next tier" than "1st tier". if we're going off of "team results based on team talent" and box production (great but nothing first tier) and playoff resiliency (lower tier). i suspect where we would most disagree is the warriors overall talent, but i see a team that was #1 in defense in 2015, #2 in 2017, #1 in the playoffs (when they actually tried), and #1 in 2022. with a klay or klay and KD around to help with the offense.

if i was evaluating on the 2016 finals, he would obviously be much, much lower (or not in this project). i'm arguing this board is doing the opposite with 2017. if we went by the box, steph's 2017 playoff numbers are probably as far away from his second best season than just about any top 20 all time player. by raw on/off, it's 8 points higher than any finals run (2019) and over 10 points higher than any other. and people are essentially taking this outlier on/off (which i'm assuming translates into the RAPM mostly) as evidence that somehow the amazing 2017 warriors (and yes, they were amazing, maybe the best ever) were a steph curry creation when we have plenty of data that A) draymond is massively impactful during this entire warriors run and is probably taking up a susbtantial part of the warriors +11 net rating and B) that the warriors playoff net rating spiked after adding KD and dropped right after he got injured, down to even a negative net rating in the 2019 finals so it seems likely that KD (who led the 2018 team in on/off) is probably a susbstantial part of the overall story, as you would expect from a team with a prime MVP and peak DPOY "supporting" cast.

so if we somehow have a noisy on/off that spikes for 2017 steph in a way it doesn't for any other year, it would feel like people are overly indexing to it when the surrounding data doesn't tell the same story and especially the surrounding data in the 2 nearest years in 2016 and 2018. nor do the warriors amazing team results, matched overall by the 1996 bulls (a team with 3 stars but two of them fairly old with 33 year old jordan and 35 year old rodman), and in the playoffs by the 1991 bulls (a team with only 2 peak stars) and the 2001 lakers (a team with only 2 peak stars), necessarily seem to indicate that with so much overall talent on the warriors that they must have had a guy with an outsized peak above your more standard 2006 wade, 2001 shaq, or really even 2008/2009 kobe type team.

[f4p]

Not that I'm in 100% agreement but the general gist of what you say I agree with. It's like someone on the floor has to know where the team is going and how to get there. With CP3 he knows how to play optimal stat based bb but I am not sure he actually knows how to get a team to a title on top of his body not being able to get there either. Wade in 06 at least knew the way there and got it done. Which all the stat based stuff regarding his regular season isn't going to capture. Otoh re Wade's 06 run I don't really like how he was allowed to wear body armor and then starts getting 16ftapg in the finals after avging 9 in the previous 3 rds. It felt a bit contrived to me. So I'm not super high on his 06 season and also think 09/10 are his actual peak years which is the other can of worms with peaks trying to piece together what a player's peak actually was. It's easier to rank a guy higher when a top 3 rs also happened with a title or strong playoff run. Which is partly why I rank 01 Shaq over Steph.

i mean yeah, i didn't like shaq and was rooting against the heat, so i was fairly furious about all the calls wade got, although i will say i watched game 4 one time recently and the calls weren't really that crazy, but i think game 5 is the really bad game. but at the end of the day, the calls are the calls. i have to go with what the nba and the refs say was how the game played out.

[tsherkin]

Odom was the type of player whose impact became more pronounced when he was on more talented rosters. It sounds cliché, but for a player who wasn't a good shooter or consistently a high-level defender, there is importance in Odom having a defined role on a championship-caliber team.

I absolutely agree with all of that. It's less relevant on the 06 team, but his value was far more pronounced during the Finals runs, 100%.

While I agree with you on the general point here (i.e. that Kobe carried a very weak team to the playoffs), I think you might be underselling Odom a bit. Odom’s RAPM data actually looks really good. Like, peaking into the top 10 in multi-year RAPM. See here: https://www.nbarapm.com/player/Lamar_Odom. Granted, he had that RAPM peak later than 2006, so there’s a straightforward argument that he wasn’t a super high impact player in 2006. Of course, even with the later RAPM peak, it may well just be a collinearity thing, since his RAPM happens to spike as the team gets really good, without much discernible change in his box data. But I figured I’d just note this, particularly since I was recently a bit shocked when seeing Odom’s RAPM data.

Yes, I was confining my argument to 06, and I agree with ReggiesKnicks in the sense that his value increased as the team's quality around him improved. He couldn't handle significant scoring responsibility and he wasn't a defensive anchor, but he worked a lot better inside a structured system with specific responsibilities, so his value increased considerably. That makes plenty of sense to me.

[One_and_Done]

What are we even discussing here? Austin Rivers is called a better player than Pat Connaughton. Old Jeff Green is more valued than old Horace Grant and Ron Harper. Will Barton is called a good starter. BPM is trashed without knowing what it is (and I actually don't value boxscore estimates much, but I actually know what they are). Kwame Brown, one of the worst starters in the league for a decade, is somehow a reason the team should win more than 45 games.

All of that of course isn't backed up by anything. All of that isn't even vibe-based discussion, it's all dictated to presuppositions. I am still waiting for explaination what makes Austin Rivers a solid 6th man, the guy should never play in the league with all respect to him.

Part of why I haven't bothered replying to you much lately is misrepresentative stuff like this; at least 2 of the first 3 statements you made are factually inaccurate. Also no, Kwame was not 'one of the worst starters for a decade', no more than your hyperbolic claim that '45 year old Ron Harper would be better than Austin Rivers' was valid.

I also do know what BPM is. The reason I focussed on plus minus type stats is they are regarded as the most 'factual' of these 'all in one' type numbers that I don't like. I mentioned win-shares too, which also wasn't brought up. I just don't think we should ve using any of these catch all stats as more than a data point that might be wrong, and often is, but which also might hint at some broad trends.

To remind people yet again; many of the statements I am making have been caveated with 'if player X was one of the greatest peaks of all-time'. Austin Rivers as your 6th man is definitely a handicap. Austin Rivers as the 6th man of a 48 win team which is supposedly led by one of the top 3 peak players of all-time, when the team also has A.Gordon, is not really a valid handicap. I personally wouldn't want Monte or Barton starting for my team, as I said, but as I said they were plausible starters, just as Jeff Green is a 'decent rotation player'.

If Jokic was leading that team to 58 wins, it'd be impressive. 48 not so much. Similarly, Kobe in 06 didn't have a very good team around him... but they also only won 45 games, and the team wasn't all bad. Also if Kobe's lift was truly elite then we would have seen it in the previous season, when the support cast was a decent bit stronger.

[lessthanjake]

So I'll probably always talk more about RS RAPM data than PS RAPM data even as I acknowledge that legacy is determined primarily from the post-season. And this definitely leaves room for the possibility of a player being much less or much more effective in the playoffs relative to rivals than RS RAPM would indicate, and once again drives us back to the final step of analysis not being following stats but explaining how we come to differ in assessment from them.

so then we're at the point of the playoffs being given enormous weight for a player's legacy, moreso than any other sport, but then primarily using a measure that can't be trusted for the playoffs. i know you acknowledged it's an issue, but it seems to be a really big issue.

Yep, the gold standard stat for evaluating regular season data (i.e. multi-season RAPM) is simply not very useful when applied to the playoffs. It is a big issue, because the playoffs are super important. But the answer isn’t to rely on RAPM in a situation where it clearly doesn’t have the sample size to be useful, nor is the answer to say that RAPM isn’t useful in the playoffs so we shouldn’t use it in the regular season. The reality is just that we have a larger number of viable tools to evaluate the regular season than we do to evaluate the playoffs. It is what it is.

Here's where I'll also say that I'm quite cautious about trying to normalize for fit when doing player evaluation. I want to note the degree of synergy between the teammates, and I do recognize that some of that is out of the player's hands, but I also want to credit players for actively seeking to learn to fit around the teammates they have, and doing that historically well as has happened with Curry & Green is something I see as a major positive.

so i think this is where i tend to disagree most with you, and this is a general PC board thing also but i know you didn't want a general conversation. i think y'all tend to credit people in great situations as having created those situations as opposed to a sports career involving a ton of luck in how things work out. whereas i view the magic/duncan/curry types as basically being born rich and then getting credit for being good with money. you view things like fitting well with your teammates as something actively created by being a smart basketball player or, what is really implied, by just being a good person who likes to fit in to help his teammates, as opposed to largely a completely random process created by a small sample size thing like a sports career where your franchise only has so many chances to fit players around you and if they knock it out of the park like golden state well, great for you, and if they don't, like KG in minnesota, then oh well.

like it's not like anyone can look at draymond and steph curry's games and skillsets and somehow conclude that steph just actively built himself to fit into that (or that draymond did either), unless we're arguing that steph really wanted to keep playing like mark jackson wanted and just acquiesced to steve kerr's model because he just realized it was better for the team. they just have remarkably well-fitting skills, as does klay with them. pippen fits great next to jordan. kareem fits well with magic. lebron doesn't fit great next to wade because they are identical. it's okay to just say people have inherent skills and sometimes they don't line up with the limited number of people a team can acquire for them as teammates. now, someone like lebron, who has fit in like 10 different situations, gives us more confidence that he can fit in a lot of situation. but a lot of the situations i mentioned above are basically career-long situations which don't really tell us anything about the players outside of that one situation.

So I’ve said this before when you’ve made this exact same argument, but I think the examples you use really undercut the point you’re trying to make—at least as applied to the player you’re trying to make the point about. You say that “lebron doesn’t fit great next to wade because they are identical.” And I think that’s basically right. But then you say that Klay has “remarkably well-fitting skills” with Steph, despite the fact that Steph and Klay have really similar skill sets. If one guy doesn’t fit well with someone who has a similar skill set as him, while another guy fits “remarkably well” with someone with a similar skill set as him, then that strongly suggests that the latter guy is easier to fit with. It’s definitely easier to build a well-fitting team around a guy if you don’t need to avoid players with similar skill sets.

i'm not trying to evaluate steph based on the 2016 finals. and again, nothing i'm saying isn't that he's been an awesome player. just that he's more "next tier" than "1st tier". if we're going off of "team results based on team talent" and box production (great but nothing first tier) and playoff resiliency (lower tier). i suspect where we would most disagree is the warriors overall talent, but i see a team that was #1 in defense in 2015, #2 in 2017, #1 in the playoffs (when they actually tried), and #1 in 2022. with a klay or klay and KD around to help with the offense.

if i was evaluating on the 2016 finals, he would obviously be much, much lower (or not in this project). i'm arguing this board is doing the opposite with 2017. if we went by the box, steph's 2017 playoff numbers are probably as far away from his second best season than just about any top 20 all time player. by raw on/off, it's 8 points higher than any finals run (2019) and over 10 points higher than any other. and people are essentially taking this outlier on/off (which i'm assuming translates into the RAPM mostly) as evidence that somehow the amazing 2017 warriors (and yes, they were amazing, maybe the best ever) were a steph curry creation when we have plenty of data that A) draymond is massively impactful during this entire warriors run and is probably taking up a susbtantial part of the warriors +11 net rating and B) that the warriors playoff net rating spiked after adding KD and dropped right after he got injured, down to even a negative net rating in the 2019 finals so it seems likely that KD (who led the 2018 team in on/off) is probably a susbstantial part of the overall story, as you would expect from a team with a prime MVP and peak DPOY "supporting" cast.

so if we somehow have a noisy on/off that spikes for 2017 steph in a way it doesn't for any other year, it would feel like people are overly indexing to it when the surrounding data doesn't tell the same story and especially the surrounding data in the 2 nearest years in 2016 and 2018. nor do the warriors amazing team results, matched overall by the 1996 bulls (a team with 3 stars but two of them fairly old with 33 year old jordan and 35 year old rodman), and in the playoffs by the 1991 bulls (a team with only 2 peak stars) and the 2001 lakers (a team with only 2 peak stars), necessarily seem to indicate that with so much overall talent on the warriors that they must have had a guy with an outsized peak above your more standard 2006 wade, 2001 shaq, or really even 2008/2009 kobe type team.

I feel like this is kind of beating on a straw man. I don’t think anyone is really materially basing their opinion of 2017 Steph on Steph’s playoff on-off that year. Single-year playoff on-off is really random, and pointing to the years around it not being as high in on-off basically is just pointing to noise. Overall, Steph has a really high +12.0 on-off in his playoff career. So when we actually look at a playoff sample that is approaching decent sized, the on-off data indicates Steph is a really impactful player. Indeed, his career playoff on-off is actually even *higher* than his career regular-season on-off (and that’s true even if we only start the RS data at the year of his first playoffs). Trying to cherry pick out specific small sample data points within that to act like playoff on-off data doesn’t have Steph looking really good seems like it’s clearly just picking out noisy data points where the noise happens to go in the direction you want it to. Granted, the same would be true if someone was really pushing Steph’s 2017 playoff on-off data as a major point, but I don’t see people doing that. The reality is that we can’t zero in to a specific year (or even a small number of specific years) and get meaningful playoff on-off data. What we can do is look at career data to get an okay-sized sample (and even then, only really for certain players with a lot of playoff experience), and when we do that for Steph the on-off data looks great for him.

[lessthanjake]

Not that I'm in 100% agreement but the general gist of what you say I agree with. It's like someone on the floor has to know where the team is going and how to get there. With CP3 he knows how to play optimal stat based bb but I am not sure he actually knows how to get a team to a title on top of his body not being able to get there either. Wade in 06 at least knew the way there and got it done. Which all the stat based stuff regarding his regular season isn't going to capture. Otoh re Wade's 06 run I don't really like how he was allowed to wear body armor and then starts getting 16ftapg in the finals after avging 9 in the previous 3 rds. It felt a bit contrived to me. So I'm not super high on his 06 season and also think 09/10 are his actual peak years which is the other can of worms with peaks trying to piece together what a player's peak actually was. It's easier to rank a guy higher when a top 3 rs also happened with a title or strong playoff run. Which is partly why I rank 01 Shaq over Steph.

i mean yeah, i didn't like shaq and was rooting against the heat, so i was fairly furious about all the calls wade got, although i will say i watched game 4 one time recently and the calls weren't really that crazy, but i think game 5 is the really bad game. but at the end of the day, the calls are the calls. i have to go with what the nba and the refs say was how the game played out.

I think this gets to a key point that makes 2006 Wade underrated. A lot of people simply thought at the time that he benefited from BS calls or even downright rigging by the NBA, so they basically don’t regard his playoff run with the same reverence they’d give it without those complaints/theories. At the time, I was rooting very hard against the Heat. I really appreciated that the Mavs had defeated my hated Spurs and wanted them to win the title, and I felt like the Heat really just weren’t good enough to be a worthy champion. So I will say that, at the time, I got mad at how much Wade got to the FT line. But I just think that we should take what happened as given and not let nitpicking about calls by referees make us not give Wade his flowers. I also think if we go back and look at it, Wade was getting to the line a lot in large part because he was relentless at attacking the basket and had a very good pump fake.

[Jaivl]

If Jokic was leading that team to 58 wins, it'd be impressive. 48 not so much.

In the last 25 years, we haven't seen anybody do so. We have seen people do a bit more with a bit better cast (02 Duncan, 07 James, a number of KG seasons) or do a bit less with a similar or a bit worse cast (05 KG, 09 Wade, 21 Curry), but never more with a similar cast.

[One_and_Done]

If Jokic was leading that team to 58 wins, it'd be impressive. 48 not so much.

In the last 25 years, we haven't seen anybody do so. We have seen people do a bit more with a bit better cast (02 Duncan, 07 James, a number of KG seasons) or do a bit less with a similar or a bit worse cast (05 KG, 09 Wade, 21 Curry), but never more with a similar cast.

I don't agree, but leaving that aside there seems to be quite strong proof that a team of decentrole players was a 60 win team with peak Shaq, which is why the 00-04 Lakers in particular was focussed on (and why some of 70sFans responses, where he didn't even seem to know who had played what year or at what level, were so insufficient).

[Peregrine01]

Not that I'm in 100% agreement but the general gist of what you say I agree with. It's like someone on the floor has to know where the team is going and how to get there. With CP3 he knows how to play optimal stat based bb but I am not sure he actually knows how to get a team to a title on top of his body not being able to get there either. Wade in 06 at least knew the way there and got it done. Which all the stat based stuff regarding his regular season isn't going to capture. Otoh re Wade's 06 run I don't really like how he was allowed to wear body armor and then starts getting 16ftapg in the finals after avging 9 in the previous 3 rds. It felt a bit contrived to me. So I'm not super high on his 06 season and also think 09/10 are his actual peak years which is the other can of worms with peaks trying to piece together what a player's peak actually was. It's easier to rank a guy higher when a top 3 rs also happened with a title or strong playoff run. Which is partly why I rank 01 Shaq over Steph.

i mean yeah, i didn't like shaq and was rooting against the heat, so i was fairly furious about all the calls wade got, although i will say i watched game 4 one time recently and the calls weren't really that crazy, but i think game 5 is the really bad game. but at the end of the day, the calls are the calls. i have to go with what the nba and the refs say was how the game played out.

I think this gets to a key point that makes 2006 Wade underrated. A lot of people simply thought at the time that he benefited from BS calls or even downright rigging by the NBA, so they basically don’t regard his playoff run with the same reverence they’d give it without those complaints/theories. At the time, I was rooting very hard against the Heat. I really appreciated that the Mavs had defeated my hated Spurs and wanted them to win the title, and I felt like the Heat really just weren’t good enough to be a worthy champion. So I will say that, at the time, I got mad at how much Wade got to the FT line. But I just think that we should take what happened as given and not let nitpicking about calls by referees make us not give Wade his flowers. I also think if we go back and look at it, Wade was getting to the line a lot in large part because he was relentless at attacking the basket and had a very good pump fake.

I thought that Wade was at his slashing best in 2006. Just relentless.

It's also useful to provide some perspective on how much of an outlier FT series it was. He averaged 16 FT attempts per game...a level that not even Shaq reached in any playoff series and Shaq was being intentionally fouled. This included over 20 a game in the three games that the Heat won by 3 points or less.

[eminence]

I'm voting Shaq #2 here (to Steph).

But somehow Shaq only won 60 games 3 times in his prime despite playing with a lot better players than 'decent roleplayers'. None of them in the eligible timeframe (96/98/00).

[Doctor MJ]

So yeah, I think it’s pretty straightforward to conclude that Garnett was not as good in the 2004 playoffs as he was in the 2004 regular season, and that Wade was significantly better in the 2006 playoffs than Garnett was in the 2004 playoffs. The question is just whether Garnett being the more impactful regular season player overcomes that, for purposes of the “greatness” of the year. As I mentioned in my voting post, I initially started writing my voting post intending to argue exactly that, but then I realized while writing it that I didn’t buy it. Wade’s substantially better playoffs and the fact that he dragged a team to a title that I think had no business winning it simply weighs more highly to me.

So you & Reggie are having a good conversation and I apologize for jumping in and just responding to this.

When you say "pretty straightforward to conclude that Garnett was not as good in the 2004 playoffs as he was in the 2004 regular season" - forgetting the specific context of the debate with Wade - it makes me nervous.

If it's straight forward to conclude Garnett was worse in the playoffs, we should be able to explain the why & how by means more specific than all-in-ones, right?

If we just look at the traditional box score for KG in '03-04:

RS: 24.2 PPG, 13.9 RPG, 5.0 APG 1.5 SPG 2.2 BPG
PS: 24.3 PPG, 14.6 RPG, 5.1 APG 1.3 SPG 2.3 BPG

Just looking at that, it certainly isn't straight forward that he was worse.

And going by the simple +/-:

RS: On +9.8, On-Off +20.7
PS: On +2.5, On-Off +26.7

So, less separation from the other team when he's on that in the RS, but the small sample size of the On-Off only favors him more.

So what's left? Pretty much just efficiency, right? His TS% drops from 54.7 to 51.3, his TOV% rises from 10.5 to 14.9.

Now, efficiency is important don't get me wrong, but I do think we need to be careful when we talk about a player "getting worse in the playoffs" based on situations where his team actually relied upon him even more in the playoffs. Remember, it's not just that Garnett played even more with higher playmaking primacy in the playoffs against tougher competition, it's that Cassell gets hurt and drops off, and does so specifically when they go up against their toughest competition - he played 64 minutes against the Lakers while Garnett played 264.

And how's Garnett's efficiency without any all-star level help (because let's be real, Spree & Wally weren't that) in that series compared to Kobe playing with Shaq, Malone, Payton & co? Basically the same (Kobe .519, Garnett .518).

To be clear, I say none of this looking to assert that Garnett was the level of scorer of Kobe or Wade, or even as good of an offensive player, but if we're talking about a guy being the primary scorer & facilitator on a team with much less talent, and he's still score about as efficiently as his opponent for whom scoring is his THING, how exactly are we thinking Garnett disappointed compared to the regular season?

Finally as I say all of this, I do think it's fine to say that the Timberwolves offensive scheme was problematic and destined to not scale as well as other schemes. We should remember, for example, that this was a team who was 27th in 3PA while playing in a league where even being #1 in 3PA was literally a sub-optimal scheme by a good margin knowing what we know now.

This then to say: It's entirely possible that if you just gave Minny a coach with Pop's level of awareness (let alone the awareness levels of a competent 2025 coach) and turned their long twos into 3's, we're talking about a team that wins the chip, and if that had happened, would any of us really see Garnett as being worse in the playoffs? Unlikely I think.

These are not unfair points, but just a few things I’d note in response:

1. The difference in efficiency is pretty significant IMO. He went down to a negative rTS%, and the increase in turnovers was pretty significant. This sort of thing is definitely enough to move a player down a tier in terms of how well they played.

2. You use per-game averages, but Garnett played over 4 more MPG in the playoffs than in the regular season. So, for instance, while the PPG in regular season and playoffs was basically the same, his points per 100 possessions went from 33.2 to 29.9. So his per-possession output went down and his efficiency also went down. And now I think we’re definitely starting to see something that moves a player down significantly (and we also are likely seeing a lot of what ended up causing the downturn in the box and impact data I cited). Granted, he should get credit for the fact that he played big minutes in the playoffs. That does mitigate some of his downturn in per-possession quality from regular season to playoffs. But Wade played a lot of playoff minutes too, so this isn’t much of a mitigating factor in a comparison between 2004 Garnett and 2006 Wade in the playoffs.

3. You make a comparison with Kobe’s efficiency in the Lakers series. And I understand why you did. But Kobe did not have a good 2004 playoffs. I definitely don’t think “scored with 2004 playoff Kobe efficiency” is a positive factor in a comparison with 2006 Wade. And, even leaving that aside, Kobe was facing a slightly better defense and one that gave up a notably lower regular season TS% (of course, that is in significant part a reflection of Garnett’s great defense, so credit to him for that). Kobe actually had a +3% rTS% in that series, while Garnett had an essentially exactly 0 rTS%. Having a notably lower rTS% than Kobe in a series that was in one of his least efficient playoffs is not great IMO.

4. I think you’re probably right that the Timberwolves could’ve potentially done better if they’d done things differently schematically. Of course, we could probably say that about every team in the NBA back then. And, in any event, for rankings like this, I tend to at least try not to focus much on speculation and hypotheticals, in favor of what actually happened. To some degree, speculation/hypotheticals are unavoidable, so I am not categorically opposed to them, but if my conclusion is that 2006 Wade had a greater season than 2004 Garnett but that 2004 Garnett was theoretically capable of having a greater season than 2006 Wade was capable of, then I will still put 2006 Wade ahead.

5. Just to briefly go down the speculation/hypothetical road, I don’t think I agree that we’d necessarily see 2004 Garnett as being just as good in the playoffs as 2006 Wade if the Timberwolves had won the title. I think it really depends on how well he actually played. I have 2006 Wade as being better in the playoffs than most superstars in their title runs. He was magnificent, and most superstars who win a title aren’t quite that good IMO. Garnett would’ve had to be genuinely very special in the playoffs for me to think he was as good as 2006 Wade. Maybe he’d have to have been that good for the Timberwolves to win a title, but I’m not sure that’s actually true if we are giving them a significant schematic upgrade.

I appreciate the back & forth. Responding to your points:

1. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the statement that a drop in 3% TS from RS to PS is something we should see as a major drop off. I'll grant that Wade's change looks better, but from a perspective Garnett effectively dropping something like a tier because of it, I dunno man.

I'll also say that when you say he dropped to negative rTS, you're just comparing him to the regular season average TS, right? Because Garnett is still above playoff average TS in 2004.

We should also note that this is 2004 we're talking about, so while Minny having a PS Ortg of 101.9 sounds owful, it was actually good relative to other playoff teams that year.

So for example, Minny loses a series largely without one of their only 2 all-star level players with an ORtg of 104.0
The prior round, the Spurs lost to the same team while achieving an ORtg of only 95.2.

Now, leading a better offense than the Spurs doesn't make you a tippy top tier offensive player, but if what we're asking is instead about whether we should be dropping Garnett a tier because he only led an offense that was 8.5 points better than the Spurs seems a bit harsh.

2. More MPG means less production per minute in this case. That's true, and I'm not trying to suggest that there aren't stats that Garnett goes down by so much as I'm focusing on the "played worse in the playoffs" statement. If you're just seeing your stats go down a little bit against the tougher defense of the playoffs, to me this isn't really "playing worse". Fine to celebrate the rare players who seem to be an exception to the rule, but if a guy is largely doing what was reasonable to expect him to do in the playoffs, then we shouldn't be looking to classify that as a disappointing drop off.

3. Re: "but Kobe didn't have a good 2004 playoffs". My immediate thought here is:

Kobe was in his prime in the 2004 playoffs and roughly healthy, so what we see from him represents a reasonable Kobe-level of play.

Meaning, this whole thing where we imagine players are getting tiers better or tiers worse from RS to PS from season to season within their prime is, I think, largely a trap we fall into. The reality is that the players were the players, and while some seasons end up looking narratively immaculate and some don't, that doesn't mean that it was primarily about the player becoming fundamentally better or worse.

Now as I say that, I recognize that 2004 was an odd year for the Lakers and its certainly not a coincidence that Kobe scored less that year than, say, in 2006. I'm not trying to argue that 2004 was Kobe's best season, but any idea of "but that wasn't Good Kobe" smacks of bit of that perfectionist bias I've been alluding to.

4. Re: Talking through bad schemes involves speculation, but to avoid here.

So let me make a few distinctions here:

a) It's one thing to talk about scheme issues to elevate a player who otherwise looks unremarkable, and another thing to talk about scheme issues as another reason to be cautious about small sample size theater changing our regular season assessment dramatically.

So from my perspective, I'm using a conservative approach here not overreacting to individual playoff data in a way that would lead me to say the player was a worse player in the playoffs simply because he was dealing with a greater degree of difficulty.

b) While I allude to all the schemes back then being problematic, they weren't equally so, and it's generally pretty simple to identify who the most obsolete offenses coaches were, because their teams shot the least 3's. There's much more to offense than 3's of course, but if you were a particularly anti-3 coach in an era where no coach's team shot enough 3's, then your players were unlucky to be saddled with you.

5. Re: title wouldn't necessarily make opinion of Garnett higher. Well and of course, it shouldn't in theory, but I think we all tend to anchor ourselves on types of winning bias we don't even realize.

The idea that there were major issues with a Garnett-led offense in Minny but not a Duncan-led offense in SA is, I would say, precisely that. We're talking about to incompetent offenses by modern standards whose gap in effectiveness at the time wasn't even necessarily that clear, so why do people immediately start talking about Duncan's volume scoring when doing those comparisons?

I think it's the chips.

So what I try to do to find against the natural bias we all have is essentially:

Ask how champs could have been better, and ask how losers maybe got unlucky.

[eminence]

I don't think I'll be quite voting Wade yet, but I like his inclusion in discussion. It really was a great PO run and I need to think more about he/SGA/Kobe/Harden and really the whole tier-after-Curry guards from this era.