Retro Player of the Year Project

[Doctor MJ]

Hey all,

Some of you might have noticed that Manuel's vote from '68-69 was not counted. I'm not going to get into it too much right now, but basically: If you don't go by the criteria I start the project with, then it doesn't make sense to have your vote tallied up with people who are answering a different question than you.

I'd like to ask everyone in the project to re-read my original post in this thread to make sure that they understand the criteria. If you have general questions, you can ask them here. If you have specific questions pertaining to yourself, please PM me.

Thanks,
Doc

[mopper8]

I imagine after an undertaking this long and massive, people will be a little burnt out on Player Comparison Board "projects" for a little while.

That being said, I'd be into re-doing the top-100 or doing an all-time draft at some point in time in the near future, if people think they won't be too caught up in the season to keep apace after this project is done and there everyone had some down time.

I'm spending more time on RealGM than I expected to, mainly on the PC board, mainly because of this project lol.

[Doctor MJ]

I imagine after an undertaking this long and massive, people will be a little burnt out on Player Comparison Board "projects" for a little while.

That being said, I'd be into re-doing the top-100 or doing an all-time draft at some point in time in the near future, if people think they won't be too caught up in the season to keep apace after this project is done and there everyone had some down time.

I'm spending more time on RealGM than I expected to, mainly on the PC board, mainly because of this project lol.

penbeast was actually planning a new Top 100 project before I proposed the RPOY. I know he plans to do one again at some point, but since this project is taking so long beast has had some debate over to wait until next off-season for the next Top 100 project.

As far as all-time drafts, honestly I don't know how it works, but it looks to me like the T & T Game board is where they do that now. If anyone else can explain more about that, that would be great.

Glad that this project is pulling you in, always glad to see your posts mop.

[mopper8]

We had a draft/tourny or even two on here sometime in the 05-07 range. I even thought you were a part of MJ, maybe I misremembered. It seems like it would be especially fun on the heals of this project.

It's like a standard draft, we snaked the order and I forgot how we randomized the order of the draft. Everyone picked players from any era, did nice writeups about them for their pick (with pictures, stats, etc), and then we had a round-robin tournament when we did write-ups on strategy, 5-man units, matchups, etc, and the other owners voted on who they thought would win.

[Optimism Prime]

As much as I'd love to do another project, after this is over and done with, I'm retreating to the relative sanity and quietude of the Rockets board for the rest of the season.

I'm getting kinda burned out, and feel like I don't have much to contribute with how far back we're going--would anyone really miss me if I'm gone at this point?

[mopper8]

As much as I'd love to do another project, after this is over and done with, I'm retreating to the relative sanity and quietude of the Rockets board for the rest of the season.

I'm getting kinda burned out, and feel like I don't have much to contribute with how far back we're going--would anyone really miss me if I'm gone at this point?

YES

I had a feeling that might be the case though. It seems like this stuff would be difficult to do in-season and the offseason can only handle probably one big project :sad face:

[Optimism Prime]

As much as I'd love to do another project, after this is over and done with, I'm retreating to the relative sanity and quietude of the Rockets board for the rest of the season.

I'm getting kinda burned out, and feel like I don't have much to contribute with how far back we're going--would anyone really miss me if I'm gone at this point?

YES

I had a feeling that might be the case though. It seems like this stuff would be difficult to do in-season and the offseason can only handle probably one big project :sad face:

Haha--thanks. It's just difficult, coz I'm out of my league in the earlier years, am busier now, and can't really devote as much time as I'd like... I'll do my best to keep up in a limited function, but I won't be pouring myself into it as much as I did earlier this summer.

[Doctor MJ]

We had a draft/tourny or even two on here sometime in the 05-07 range. I even thought you were a part of MJ, maybe I misremembered. It seems like it would be especially fun on the heals of this project.

It's like a standard draft, we snaked the order and I forgot how we randomized the order of the draft. Everyone picked players from any era, did nice writeups about them for their pick (with pictures, stats, etc), and then we had a round-robin tournament when we did write-ups on strategy, 5-man units, matchups, etc, and the other owners voted on who they thought would win.

Oh I was. I ran the first project. But like you my time here has waxed & wained depending on other things going on in my life, and it looks to me like people are doing the league thing on the T & T board.

I agree with you it'd be fun to do one of those leagues again after this project. I'm going to take a break from running things after this project ends, but if someone else starts something, I'm game to take part.

[Doctor MJ]

Haha--thanks. It's just difficult, coz I'm out of my league in the earlier years, am busier now, and can't really devote as much time as I'd like... I'll do my best to keep up in a limited function, but I won't be pouring myself into it as much as I did earlier this summer.

I really don't want people to be self-conscious about their relative ignorance of the early NBA years. The primary thing is to learn.

With that said, I understand your feeling that if you can't put in enough time, you don't feel comfortable with your votes counting. That's a judgment call for you to make - just know that it's not the case that everyone's looking at you thinking "OP must die!", it's a friendly group here, and none of us is Red Auerbach reincarnated.

[Optimism Prime]

Haha--thanks. It's just difficult, coz I'm out of my league in the earlier years, am busier now, and can't really devote as much time as I'd like... I'll do my best to keep up in a limited function, but I won't be pouring myself into it as much as I did earlier this summer.

I really don't want people to be self-conscious about their relative ignorance of the early NBA years. The primary thing is to learn.

With that said, I understand your feeling that if you can't put in enough time, you don't feel comfortable with your votes counting. That's a judgment call for you to make - just know that it's not the case that everyone's looking at you thinking "OP must die!", it's a friendly group here, and none of us is Red Auerbach reincarnated.

Nope, only my arch-rival, Negatron.

[semi-sentient]

Yeah, I'm looking forward to taking a break from it once we're done. I'm just hoping we finish before the season starts so I can take a short vacation from RealGM.

Edit: Negatron... nice.

[mopper8]

Does this project only go back to the advent of the shot-clock (which seems like a wise marker to me)? Or to the birth of the NBA? Or what...?

[Gifted Mind]

Very interesting project going on here. I did something quite similar on a different forum,
http://www.insidehoops.com/forum/showthread.php?t=102569
Best Players in the NBA Year-by-Year

Though it's quite similar, there are some distinct differences. This is Player of the Year, while the other is Best Player of the Year. POY is like MVP but counting regular season and playoffs, which is what was done here. While in my thread, it was just who was the best basketball player in the NBA in that year.

Despite some key differences, there are many similarities in the results. Out of the 42 years posted, 36 of the match mine. With most of the differences once again coming down to the difference between POY and Best Player. One is a little more MVP-like or accomplishment based, the other is just pure basketball.


Nonetheless, even looking at it from a POY aspect, there were a few surprises.

- Main one being Kobe Bryant never finishing #1. I'm sure this probably has been discussed many times already here. He did not win for his spectacular individual season in 2006, or his team-successful seasons from 08-10. The biggest shocker was KG winning it in 2008 over Kobe Bryant.

- Another smaller one that surprises me is Willis Reed not finishing Top 3 despite winning MVP and Finals MVP in a regular season. Granted he might not have deserved one of them, however, not even finishing Top 3 and behind a teammate is quite harsh. I found Walt Frazier overrated here in general. I think one of the problems maybe this goes in reverse-chronological order. This is unnatural and might cause confusion.

- Also I think there might be some Bill Russell overrated coming after seeing him win for 1969. Maybe many are so eager to choose Russell, but remember this is reverse-chronological order. I bet if it had started in the 50s, by 69, with Bill Russell winning so many times already, someone else would have gotten it. In fact, by 69 he was not the player he used to be, and I think Jerry West had a better case for it than Russell. If Jordan defeats a 88 Magic, I don't see why West couldn't defeat a nearly broken down Russell. Maybe if you factor in the coaching aspects, however I think they should be ignored since this is about players.







But overall, spectacular work.

[Gifted Mind]

lol @ MVP equating to best player. fail. and there is no "if" about it. he was the consensus best.

As far as I understand, this is not about "best" player. It's about POY. They are not the same. One is purely related to basketball, the other is more accomplishment based. Taking the accomplishment or POY based approach, Kobe did not deserve it from 05-07. However, I thought he deserved it at least for 2008.

[Doctor MJ]

Does this project only go back to the advent of the shot-clock (which seems like a wise marker to me)? Or to the birth of the NBA? Or what...?

As we get closer to the end of MVP voting, that will be something we'll have to decide.

Options:

1. Go back to end of MVP voting ('56)
2. Go back to merger ('50)
3. Go back to end of b-r.com ('47 for BAA, and do outside research for NBL)

The NBL goes back to the 30s, but I doubt anyone wants to try to figure that out.

I'm inclined to favor going back to the merger.

[Doctor MJ]

Very interesting project going on here. I did something quite similar on a different forum,
http://www.insidehoops.com/forum/showthread.php?t=102569
Best Players in the NBA Year-by-Year

Though it's quite similar, there are some distinct differences. This is Player of the Year, while the other is Best Player of the Year. POY is like MVP but counting regular season and playoffs, which is what was done here. While in my thread, it was just who was the best basketball player in the NBA in that year.

Despite some key differences, there are many similarities in the results. Out of the 42 years posted, 36 of the match mine. With most of the differences once again coming down to the difference between POY and Best Player. One is a little more MVP-like or accomplishment based, the other is just pure basketball.


Nonetheless, even looking at it from a POY aspect, there were a few surprises.

- Main one being Kobe Bryant never finishing #1. I'm sure this probably has been discussed many times already here. He did not win for his spectacular individual season in 2006, or his team-successful seasons from 08-10. The biggest shocker was KG winning it in 2008 over Kobe Bryant.

- Another smaller one that surprises me is Willis Reed not finishing Top 3 despite winning MVP and Finals MVP in a regular season. Granted he might not have deserved one of them, however, not even finishing Top 3 and behind a teammate is quite harsh. I found Walt Frazier overrated here in general. I think one of the problems maybe this goes in reverse-chronological order. This is unnatural and might cause confusion.

- Also I think there might be some Bill Russell overrated coming after seeing him win for 1969. Maybe many are so eager to choose Russell, but remember this is reverse-chronological order. I bet if it had started in the 50s, by 69, with Bill Russell winning so many times already, someone else would have gotten it. In fact, by 69 he was not the player he used to be, and I think Jerry West had a better case for it than Russell. If Jordan defeats a 88 Magic, I don't see why West couldn't defeat a nearly broken down Russell. Maybe if you factor in the coaching aspects, however I think they should be ignored since this is about players.

But overall, spectacular work.

Your linked analysis is very interesting, as our your observations about how things have gone here.

Re: the distinction between the two criteria. You were very polite about the difference, but when you talk about your approach as "pure basketball", and thus implying that our approach is impure, I don't agree with that characterization, so I'd like to give my rationale for why the project was done this way. Forgive me if I come off antagonistic, it's not my intent.

To me what makes someone a good basketball player is their ability to help their team win. So if a player has a season where he looks good by individual metrics, but he doesn't really help his team, he's not playing well.

I think the "best player" approach is something that becomes most beneficial when doing all-time rankings, where a player's complete capabilities and history can be assessed holistically. A player having a year where he's still clearly in his prime, but for whatever reason it isn't helping his team may have very little impact when making such judgments. I see the purpose of this project not as a highly quantified substitute for qualitative ranking but as a means to force us all to really understand what happened all throughout these players' careers.

Re: the surprises.

-No POYs for Kobe. Yeah, that surprised me too. I voted him #1 in '07-08. I stand by that vote, but the arguments put forth for Garnett that year and generally were quite good. I'm still trying to get a handle on exactly how good I think Garnett was. There's a part of me that increasingly feels that he was actually the best player over the course of the 00s - but I'm not yet sold enough for that to be my gun-to-the-head opinion.

-Reed & Frazier. If there is a bias here, I'd say it's 2-fold: 1) We've got several intelligent posters here from the era that have been arguing vehemently for years that Frazier was the true star of the Knicks, 2) This group tends to embrace advanced stats, and when you look at the advanced stats, Frazier typically looks better than Reed. My own take is that there may be a little too much swing in Frazier's direction here, and I had Reed 3 & Frazier 4 in '69-70, but the idea that Reed got too much credit and Frazier not enough seems very clearly true.

-Russell in '69. You talk about "who would have gotten it", that's not something we're trying to consider. We're trying to assess who should have gotten it with the retrospective omniscience we're privy to. In retrospect we know that Russell in '69 was good enough that his team won the title, but won only 34 games the next year without him, and that the great defensive dynasty of the Celtics was still in force in '69, but completely dissipated the following year. That's some great value added right there, and he's going up against other candidates who it's quite questionable whether they were contributing an at all comparable lift, so it's not surprising at all he was a strong candidate.

I'll add that years like that one are part of the reason I like this approach, because it's easy at first glance to conclude a player whose volume stats go down has had a major falloff, but when you look closely at Russell that year, it's not so clear cut.

Thank you for the kind words, and I'm hoping to see more of your thoughts.

[ElGee]

Does this project only go back to the advent of the shot-clock (which seems like a wise marker to me)? Or to the birth of the NBA? Or what...?

My vote is for 54 or 56. I don't think I'd feel comfortable going back before then unless there was a mountain of research presented in each thread...

[Doctor MJ]

Does this project only go back to the advent of the shot-clock (which seems like a wise marker to me)? Or to the birth of the NBA? Or what...?

My vote is for 54 or 56. I don't think I'd feel comfortable going back before then unless there was a mountain of research presented in each thread...

I understand that thinking. I'd like to go a bit further because we can get through Pettit and a few other guys whole careers, and I'd really like to get a handle on Mikan, Johnston, and a few others. I'm not going to force the issue though if people don't agree.

[mopper8]

Does this project only go back to the advent of the shot-clock (which seems like a wise marker to me)? Or to the birth of the NBA? Or what...?

My vote is for 54 or 56. I don't think I'd feel comfortable going back before then unless there was a mountain of research presented in each thread...

Well, 54-55 was when they adopted the shot-clock IIRC, and I think is generally considered an act that "saved the NBA" so to speak (I think Bob Cousy used those words specifically actually). So in that sense, I think rather than saving the NBA, I think you could call that the birth of modern basketball. I'm not a voter so I don't know how much people care about what I think on this topic, but I would go back no further than 54-55 personally in this project. That's assuming you have enough information that you feel comfortable going back even that far, but assuming you do, that makes the most sense to me.

[mopper8]

I understand that thinking. I'd like to go a bit further because we can get through Pettit and a few other guys whole careers, and I'd really like to get a handle on Mikan, Johnston, and a few others. I'm not going to force the issue though if people don't agree.

This is true. It does seem unfair to penalize someone for playing through the advent of the shot-clock (Cousy, e.g., would be denied 4 years of all-NBA 1st team performance, albeit in a much smaller league), and you might not be getting a full read on some of the early greats. That is a drawback.