DavidStern wrote:So we have two options:
1. two years from his GOAT season Wilt was negative on offense by 4-5 ortg pts (!), because of his clash witch coach
or
2. 51 games sample from 68 isn't representative enough to judge quality of Lakers offense with West.
I really don't know how you and Elgee so easily believe in option no 1.
Very strange the way you're attempting to boil it down here:
You're implying you believe the answer is #2, which implies that you're deciding what is and is not adequate sample size on the fly in order to make yourself not feel weird. (Apologies if you're really just trying to say you're not sure, it felt to me like when I read it you were going beyond that.)
If someone's going to say they think 51 games not enough but 82 games is enough, to me that's close enough in the order of magnitude that there's no reasonable way to say that without all sorts of deep statistical analysis.
I think what really hammers this home is the fact that if you take the Lakers' full 82 games that year, it's one of the top 2 offenses of the 60s. That right there, we're not talking about a team that's strictly might have been. This is a huge offensive accomplishment that on its own deserves analysis as to what caused the break through.
The shock when you get down deep into it is that it's a tale of two seasons. One with West, one without, and the former is so good that even with the latter, their combination is arguably the greatest offense of the 60s.
More generally here, what we're dealing with here is what I've called before the Matilda Complex (after the children's story): Basically, when the truth is too far removed from preconception, the truth gets rejected. When the truth and the preconception are closer, it's easy for people to leap to the truth, but when things are too far away from each other, it essentially forces people to conclude that one of the two sources is completely without merit, and they are unlikely to believe their preconception can possibly have no merit, so the new source is rejected without consideration.
This happens with Wilt over and over again.
You can't believe that Wilt could possibly have a huge negative effect, but it's actually pretty easy to understand when you consider that players can't "feel" these effects unless they are big enough that the team's record becomes a huge problem.
To the extent Wilt could even feel anything at all in a negative way, it would feel like shooting it in the wrong basket obviously. it also wouldn't be so much that the team was clearly missing potential but rather a confusion as to why what they were doing wasn't taking the giant step forward that they hoped.
And what we're talking about here, for lack of a more well known term, are systems. After floating at a certain levels for years, the Lakers when healthy finally took that next step when they tried a completely new offense (which is a pretty typical reason why you'd see such a major jump, and precisely the reason you'd expect when a team doesn't add stars like in '68). The new system involved all 5 players reading and reacting together to pinball the ball to the open man.
So what happens when you get a new star who refuses to play pinball? Well the system is going to break down. Not break down to levels where the offense is terrible because with the 3 stars they had, the offense was going to still be pretty good. But that breakthrough they made that finally made the Baylor-West duo make sense, that went away.
So it's not hard to believe at all: Someone had a good idea, and someone else didn't like it. The guy who didn't like it is keeping the good idea from truly getting implemented, and so he's being counterproductive.
Let me also remind that we already know with Wilt that it's not like he was producing great offenses everywhere he went. This disappointing Laker offense was still the 2nd best offense Wilt had ever been on. Typical Wilt offenses are downright mediocre, so most definitely Wilt's not going to sense that there's something wrong with the Laker offense. He hadn't been able to sense the problems with much worse offenses, which is why such a drastic solution was needed by Hannum in Philly.
Here's where I'll segue one more time and talk about how big of a deal I think "homing instinct" is in sports. There are just some players who have a sense for the right way to get through the maze, and while there's a spectrum of abilities on this front, I think that most players, like most viewers, would have no idea if they were winning without looking at the scoreboard. This sense for what feels more right that let's certain guys travel upstream toward the optimal even when the scales are so incredibly subtle is absolutely invaluable to any player who is tasked with running a team offense, or a defense for that matter.
Wilt being utterly tone deaf on this front meant that it was not only possible, but pretty much a given that sometimes he'd actually end up sending his team up a path that was significantly less beneficial to what could have been.
