Quotatious wrote:Thanks for your post. I was hoping to see you respond to this thread, as you are one of the most open-minded posters here.
Thanks. I'm definitely open to having my mind changed about this, in case there's something you're seeing that I'm not.
Quotatious wrote:First of all, I disagree that Magic and Bird should be ranked a tier above LeBron, offensively. That's probably because I like boxscore numbers more than you do. I look at boxscore metrics and RAPM, on/off etc. as equal sources of knowledge, and I just try to make sense of that combined knowledge. I think all of that is pretty valuable. In this regard, LeBron has a clear edge over Magic and especially Bird. On offense, currently I rank Magic over LeBron, and LeBron over Bird, but to me they are all close. James is the best overall player because of his defense. Offensively, I don't look at LeBron's ball dominance as a drawback, compared to Bird. One can say - "I'll take Bird, because he's better off-ball" - that's fine, he really WAS better off-bal (quite possibly the best ever), but LeBron is better WITH the ball. LBJ's combined scoring and playmaking abilities are almost second to none (plus his ability to draw fouls, which is way better, too).
I do recognize this. However, it's not really that I see an inherent virtue to playing off the ball per se, it's that the specific way Bird went about his business meant that his teams could afford to do more on offense while still getting superstar offensive production from him. This is a big, big deal, and the portability angle is what leads to a lot of people to have him as their offensive GOAT- and I haven't decided whether I agree, but it's a 3 man race for me between he Magic and Nash.
Anyway, it''s not just the simple fact that Bird plays without the ball. I've mentioned before how he was an instantaneous decision maker- when the ball came to him, he either drove, shot, or passed away within a split second. He doesn't do jab steps to set himself up, he doesn't dribble around and wait for a screen, he gets the ball and it's either an instantaneous basket or a pass out. Why is this such a big deal? Because a team has a limited number of resources (possessions, clock time, etc.) and the team that is best able to use those resources is the one that wins. Bird's instantaneous reads mean that on possessions he wasn't scoring the ball kept moving- allowing to make a type of "silent" impact, where he doesn't demand any team resources until he's actually ready to score.
If you were to do a study to determine points per time of possession, there's no question to me Bird is far and away above everyone else. Even on plays where his number is called, if he doesn't immediately have the shot he just passes out. With a 24 second shot clock, this matters. It means that your offense can basically split itself, with a McHale post up or a pick and roll or something while Bird roams the floor looking for separation. Bird is all the benefit of an elite scorer without any of the traditional costs, because he doesn't need the traditional action that superstars need to create shots for themselves.
And since Bird has such a diverse scoring arsenal that any look from the floor is a good one for him, that means the defense is effectively split in half. Bird demands superstar attention while not doing superstar things, which means that teams are no longer guarding just a McHale post up. They are guarding a McHale post up
and Bird sprinting around the court looking for his shot. That's not to say defenses don't pay mind to James or Wade when they don't have the ball in their hands, but the fact that they don't have Bird's combination of shooting, spontaneity, and instant decision making means that they don't have to guard them the same way when they don't have the ball. Bird, on every possession, had to be treated like a superstar, even if he never touched the ball. That has never been true of anyone else, not even Michael Jordan to the same extent.
Quotatious wrote:Peak LeBron and Wade both draw ridiculous amounts of defensive attention because of their athleticism - it was not unusual to see entire defenses collapsing when LeBron and Wade attacked the middle. At one point during his career, Wade pick & roll was arguably the most feared play in basketball. LeBron and Wade have a pretty huge edge over Magic and Bird in terms of athleticism and explosiveness. They don't quite have the same kind of vision (although still pretty good) as Magic and Bird, but they make up for it with athleticism and elite ability to penetrate and draw fouls (drive & kick to shooters is an extremely effective play, when you have good shooters around a superstar of LBJ/Wade caliber, so I'm not sure why you act like it's so inferior to the way Magic/Bird were able to make plays - also, keep in mind how fast-paced and loose defensively the game was, in the 80s, compared to late 2000s - sure, handchecking was allowed in the 80s, but I think its impact on top tier superstar is failry negligible...unless we're talking about Allen Iverson/Tony Parker type players, who rely on speed, quickness and handles - Wade did, too, but he had a huge strength advantage over both AI and TP).
Here's where I stand on this currently: on virtually every possession, there will be higher-efficiency shots to be had than a superstar isolation or high pick looking to score. I think the truly gifted playmakers we've seen have understood and have gone as far as to suppress their own scoring in order to generate these easier looks on a consistent basis. Is it valuable that LeBron can slash into the paint and finish over 3 defenders? absolutely. Is it more valuable than running the same action and instead finding a cutter or shooter? Perhaps, but one is a more consistent source of high-efficiency offense.
Think of it on a per-possession basis. LeBron and Wade are not scoring every time down the floor. On possessions they don't shoot, someone else has to, and given how ball-dominant these two were that means the look their teammates get is dependent on what James or Wade can create. And I think it's pretty reasonable to say that neither are creating anything like the type of looks Magic could on a consistent basis, right?
Let's look at this in mathematical terms. If LeBron plays 40 minutes, it's likely his team will have around 75 possessions with him on the floor. How many scoring attempts does he actually take? For the most part, around 25. So even for one of the best scorers ever, he's only actually scoring on 33% of the team's possessions while he's on the floor. The other 66% involve his teammates shooting. Now LeBron is great at creating looks for teammates, but he's not as good as Magic and he doesn't do it with anywhere near the consistency of Magic. So how much better of a playmaker does Magic have to be before the impact he has starts to outweigh LeBron's scoring? On a per-possession basis, are you really comfortable saying James' scoring+playmaking combined is worth more than Magic doing his playmaking thing every single possession? If Magic is, say, a 20% better playmaker, doesn't that add up to way more offensive value than what James brings?
Again I tend to think of basketball in some sense as cost-benefit. LeBron (and Wade, who has become a bit of an afterthought in this conversation
) use a great deal of team resources to create scoring opportunities for themselves, which are just less efficient than other types of looks the offense could be getting. meanwhile, Magic is consistently creating higher value shots for his team, even though he's not taking them himself. This is why assist is probably the worst box score stat- the type of shot generated doesn't factor in.
And I'll admit I do a bit of deferring to authority on this front- I have never seen smarter basketball players than Magic and Nash. And it strikes me that both guys had incredible scoring skillsets, and yet neither ever, at any point in their career, took it upon themselves to volume score. This has to mean something. Magic had plenty of 40 point games, hell Nash almost dropped 50 in the playoffs, and yet both of these guys who I consider true geniuses (and I don't take that word lightly) felt it was better that they be selective about shooting and instead looked to generate more efficient shots at the team level. And, not coincidentally, the best offenses we've ever seen were invariably led by these two. Again, this has to mean something.
A little exposition: I genuinely believe that Magic was capable of Wade-level scoring if that became the focus of his game. I have similar beliefs about nash.
I think people generally have a subconscious bias where they believe that playmakers become playmakers because they are 'limited' in their ability to score. My belief runs directly counter; I believe that scorers don't become playmakers because they're 'limited' in being able to see the possibilities opened up by the less direct but more effective playmaking route. I think the fact that the two greatest playmakers ever led the two greatest offensive dynasties ever should be very important to the view one takes of the sport.
Quotatious wrote:Wade not being as good as LeBron defensively is true, but he was just a borderline elite perimeter defender, too. What's admirable about 2009 Wade, to me, is that he played fairly consistent defense, despite his ridiculous offensive usage (that's the difference between peak Wade and T-Mac/Kobe, in my opinion).
Agree 100%. It's just that to me his defense isn't good enough to make up the gap in offensive efficacy.
Quotatious wrote:As you know, I tend to value elite volume scorers a lot, especially if they are such highly effective playmakers as Wade was, to go along with it. Wade's AST/TOV% ratio was amazing (40.3% AST is pretty much point guard territory, and he had only 11.6% TOV, so +3.47 ratio - Bird's career-high was 28.9% AST in 1990, with slightly higher TOV% than '09 Wade). Magic's AST/TOV% ratio was clearly worse, too. Then, Wade's peak OBPM was higher than Magic's and Bird's peaks, too. His OWS weren't that much lower. Wade's peak PER is clearly higher, too. I'm not a huge fan of BPM, it has some pretty weird results, at times (and I'm not a big fan of taking boxscore numbers at face value), but that's still some food for thought, and I'm certainly not someone willing to dismiss it.
Well, Wade's case begins with boxscore numbers, but it doesn't end on it. He's a beast in RAPM, not even that far behind LeBron in '09, and his team had 111.3 ORtg with him on the floor, 100.1 without him. That's absolutely huge impact any way you look at it (he had even more impressive non-boxscore offensive stats in 2010, but I prefer 2009 as his peak because his defense seemed to be better, and he also had slightly better boxscore numbers - like I said, I value boxscore and non-boxscore info equally).
Now, we obviously don't have the same stats for Magic and Bird, but I'm really skeptical if their offensive impact was that much higher. It may've been higher (it probably was, especially Magic's, but not by a very sizeable margin), but Wade is still better on the other side of the ball, on D.
Impact has to be scalable though. Even if Bird and Magic and Wade would have comparable RAPM numbers, the fact that Bird/Magic are having those numbers on GOAT offensive teams points to them just being straight up better at offense than Wade.
To put it more bluntly: Replace Wade with Bird on the 2011-14 Heat and they're the GOAT offensive team in my book. Similarly, replace James with Magic and you get the same result. What happened with the Heat those seasons is very salient here.
Quotatious wrote:I want to make something clear - I DO NOT rank Wade's peak ahead of Magic's and BIrd's (Bird at 9, Magic at 10, Wade at 16, but it's obviously subject to change), I just wanted to see what some of the more open-minded posters (you being near the top of the list) have to say about it.
It's a pretty enjoyable debate for me, so thanks for the reply.
Cool. As you know I'm never married to my beliefs so if you'd like to share your thoughts on what I've posted above please do. It's a good topic, definitely worth a closer look, and I've enjoyed the discussion as well.
