Post#7 » by scrabbarista » Fri Sep 1, 2017 12:26 am
36. Isiah Thomas
37. [Yes, 20 spots higher than he finished in 2014] Elvin Hayes
I. Isiah Thomas is the only player left who was the best player on two championship teams. It could be argued he was also a rolled ankle away from holding that distinction for three championship teams.
[Same as in the last few threads,] here are some excerpts of mine from an old thread on Isiah Thomas:
Isiah is not overrated, unless someone is rating him in the top 20. The simple version - which obviously the media and public at large prefer - is that he was the best player on two championship teams, as well as the best or second best on a team that probably lost a third Finals because he twisted his ankle. He was also the best player on an NCAA champ. Only Jordan, Bird, and Magic made more All-NBA teams in the 80's. All of this is hard to dispute.
The more complex version hinges first and foremost on his elevating his play in the postseason. The post containing his all-time rankings in postseason improvement over the regular season should not be casually glossed over. The vast majority of players decrease their productivity in the playoffs, while the elite of the elite consistently increase it. Thomas' increases are historically high.
Secondly, the complex version states that he led and orchestrated top offenses for nearly his entire career, rather than relied on great defenses. There were four or five seasons when his team's OR even exceeded its DR.
A third point in the complex version is that Thomas was the galvanizing/uniting/driving leader behind the Pistons for all of the 80's. To illustrate, a player from the '88 team team has stated on record that when he and his teammates saw Isiah's heroic fourth quarter performance in game 6 of the 1988 Finals, they finally understood the depth of his determination, and they knew that even if he couldn't contribute in game 7 (he couldn't), they would come back the following year and win it all. Anyone who was paying close attention in 2014 should understand that the Spurs didn't win that year simply because of their system or their talent. The system was perfected and the talent was maximized over the course of nearly one hundred games because of the collective determination and focus that sprang from the agony of Ray Allen's miraculous shot in game 6 of the '13 Finals. Isiah's ankle injury in '88 played the same role as Allen's corner three in '13. If Isiah hadn't had the character, will, and desire that enabled him to excel on virtually one leg, his teammates might have lost a measure of confidence in their leader, and we might be looking at extra championships for Magic, Michael, or Clyde Drexler.
The people who say, "Show me where it says "character," "will," or "desire" on the stat sheet!" and accuse others of being simple-minded or narrative-dominated in their thinking are in fact the ones who fail to see the subtleties in the difference between winning and losing. No one person sees all the subtleties, but we must acknowledge their existence. As an example, when Dwight Howard, in a particularly tense moment in the playoffs, calls out his teammates even when they're doing their best, simply because he thinks he's looked bad on a particular possession, team cohesiveness is damaged as those players realize Dwight cares more about his own image than building up his teammates for the sake of collective success. Then Dwight leaves the court in the next timeout, and those players, still on the court, are trying to regain the focus and flow that Dwight's outburst cost them. Their play diminishes slightly, and Dwight's on/off numbers go up - or the quality of his "supporting cast" appears weaker. The stat sheet is lying - every part of it except the win/loss column. A hundred related scenarios occur in every game, and more occur on the practice court and in the locker room. More can occur in comments made to the media. Heck, this type of stuff has probably even happened in strip clubs.
A person who tries to sell you on a player based solely on stats without a narrative context is like someone who'll tell you he has a great marriage because he lasts a long time in bed with his wife - and then tells you exactly how long, down to the second.
I'm not one to echo Vince Lombardi's "winning is the only thing" quote. (That, too, would ignore context.) Karl Malone, in my opinion, had twice as good of a career as Isiah Thomas. But Thomas is a top 25 player [Top 28 now] because winning is the one "stat" that tells us what all the other stats never could. Winning is a coordinate on an imaginary graph: where a player's talent meets his daily determination to maximize it.
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"I don't know man, I can't really get behind motivation and leadership being this huge of a factor into deciding who is greater. But we'll get to that."
I just can't help but what wonder what kind of life experiences a person has had so say something like "motivation and leadership are not huge factors in deciding who is greater." Like, have you ever had a job? Ever worked with other people? Maybe on a project with a bad leader? Or a great one? Ever notice the difference between the two - the difference in the results produced? Ever tried hard? Ever slacked off? Ever noticed the difference in the results between the two?
I can't force you to see things how I see them, but I watched last night's Game 2 and I saw a Cavs team that was more motivated than the Warriors team. It was obvious that Lebron and Dellavadova were working harder than anyone on the court - and this lead to multiple key offensive rebounds, not to mention loose balls that were saved or tipped - even one of which could have been the difference in the game. I'm not implying that actually making shots is irrelevant or that some of the things I've mentioned don't show up in the box score - that's a straw man - I'm just saying some things exist outside of the box score. The game is much more subtle and complex than the numbers alone can account for.
"Elevating play in the postseason is a great thing, but it's relevant only so far as to what level that increase actually leads to. If you're starting from a much smaller base than someone who doesn't improve as much, does it really matter if your increase is bigger if you still end up below them? The fact that the vast majority of players don't improve is irrelevant, because we aren't comparing Isiah to the vast majority of players here."
I agree with you. Only the end results matter in evaluating someone's greatness. I've just seen others on these boards highlight improvements and drops in playoff performance so many times that I guess it thought it might be relevant to this discussion.
Lest you be confused by my saying only the end results matter, then going on about process and narrative, my point in writing about process and narrative has never been that either is grounds for my rankings. They emphatically are not - my list is at least 99% results-driven. It depends almost exclusively on results that any objective observer could agree actually happened. The point I've been trying to make is that team success is one such result. Process and narrative only come into the discussion when they become useful in explaining why team success can be attributed to great players' actions that don't appear in the box score.
"Well, I wouldn't exactly call them great. Outside of the 1st place finish in 84, the Pistons while Isiah was an all-star level player were never a top 5 offense. And the defense being below average might have something to do with Isiah himself no? And the Pistons didn't make the conference finals until 87, the year their defense first replaced the offense as the better unit. So until the Pistons began "relying" on great defenses, they had basically no postseason success."
Perhaps they weren't great offenses. At least not plural. At least not when he was an "All-Star level player." As to below average defenses having something to do with Isiah, would you say the same about the Clippers defense and Chris Paul? It's generally acknowledged that point guard is the position that can have the least impact on a team's defense. Still, I happen to think all five players are important on both sides of the ball, so yes, he had something to do with it, and he also had something to do with the "great defenses" that came after. My original intent was just to dispel the myth that he never led a great offense.
"I can't get behind this. There's really no way to tell how much, if any at all, the drive of a player impacts the players around him. It's impossible, and always will be."
There's only one way: did the team do enough to get the job done? This is the same way leaders are evaluated in every walk of life.
"Saying Ray Allen's shot was the basis of the Spur's title run the next year is just so out there. It'd be like me saying the reason Duncan became a hall of fame player was because of the hurricane that destroyed the olympic swimming pool in his hometown that forced him to focus on basketball."
No, it's more like Duncan himself saying, "Me and my community were so devastated by that hurricane that I decided to do everything in my power to rise above it and make millions of dollars playing basketball to show that neither me nor my community could be bowed by the whims of fate." What you say has nothing to do with it. That's why I pointed out that a Pistons player actually said Isiah's determination drove them the entire following year. The Spurs players have said they were hoping to face the Heat. You can bet that desire was there from the moment game 7 of the '13 Finals ended, and you can bet the Spurs would not have been quite as focused against another team in the Finals. (They still would have won, obviously. They were too good by that time.) I never meant to imply that without Allen's shot, the Spurs don't win the championship. I did mean to imply, though, that it was a factor. Probably a very big factor.
"Every event is connected in the journey, as you say. But the way you tell it, it was Isiah's game 6 performance that was the most important moment of their 89 title run. That's ridiculous. It'd be way down on the list, waaaaaaaaaaay behind the level of play of the individual Pistons players during the actual season, which is what everyone else is using as the primary evaluator to make their all time list. Changes in confidence play a part, but not anywhere near THAT much. Having confidence in your leader isn't suddenly going to change you from a run of the mill playoff team into a champion. If I were to evaluate the 89 Pistons, I'd say their title was due to the emergence of Rodman and Dumars and the trade of Dantley making their team better and more cohesive, the way the rest of the Pistons played, the Celtics getting worse, the Lakers being injured, any amount of refereeing and injury randomness, how their other playoff opponents played, general randomness that's associated with all competitive sports (shots not falling etc.) and a whole bunch of other stuff. I can't see how looking at Isiah's leadership is going to come even close to having the impact those things do."
Again, it wasn't the way I told it. If it was just me making up a story, it would lose a lot of credence. It's there in the Bad Boys documentary. The players felt that way. Everything you mention was undoubtedly a factor. Just as in life, when a team has to work together on any common goal or project, everything that happens is a factor, and dozens of individual occurrences might each be the difference between success and failure. Many of these might be random. But what is the unifying concept throughout? The way the group responds to these occurrences. And what drives these responses? Leadership.
Again, I'm not saying that that previous paragraph explains why I rate Isiah where I do. What explains why I rate him where I do is the simple fact that he lead his teams to ultimate victory and near-ultimate victory four times in his career, three in the NBA and one in college. That previous paragraph was just to say that leadership is a real thing and it exists and it makes a difference in outcomes.
"First off, I don't really see anyone having an attitude like that. And I don't get the comparison to Dwight, because I don't think anyone here is calling Dwight a top 25 player either. And if Dwight's teammates are really that affected by a random "you guys suck" comment (and making an assumption that this has any impact on their play at all is a BIG assumption), they probably shouldn't be in the NBA in the first place. NBA players are getting heckled by fans, the media, and their teams ALL the time."
Correct, Dwight is not a top 25 player, but he may have more talent than Isiah. Most would probably say he does. Which is exactly my point. Talented players are often separated by "intangibles." Stating that human beings are affected by random "you suck" comments is not an assumption. It's common knowledge. And these random "you suck" comments tend to be more affecting when they come from people close to us or people on a higher level than us, and when they happen in public - all of which would describe Dwight in relation to someone like Ariza or Brewer, calling guys out on TV in the playoffs
I don't know how to save this and I need to go to work soon, but when you're talking about players getting heckled: a straw man. Dwight didn't heckle anybody in my example. Also, the fans and media are not in positions of leadership or in intimate relationships with the players. Also, there is a difference between making fun of someone and calling them out - and as I said, there is a difference in whether it is done to save Dwight's own face or to build up the cohesion of the team. Human relationships.
"The people you'd be comparing Isiah to if you think he's top 25 are guys like the usual suspects (MJ, Magic, Bird, Russell, Duncan, Kareem etc.) or more guys like Dirk, KG, Havlicek, Baylor, Barkley, Wade etc. Are we somehow going to argue that Isiah is a better leader than them? Or had more determination than them? How would we even go about that? We already have too much to look at with their respective basketball abilities and the circumstances in which they displayed those abilities."
We'd go about it by looking at wins. Determination, etc., do not appear on my ATG list. Winning does. If we're talking about how I evaluate players, then we're talking about stats, wins, and consensus - nothing else.
"Determination, like I said with the playoff thing earlier, is only relevant in how it affects your ability to play basketball. It's the starting from the lower base thing again. When compared with a guy who never meets his potential (like, say, Shaq) does it matter that Isiah had more determination if even with that determination Shaq was still in another stratosphere as a player?"
No, it doesn't matter. Shaq is higher than Isiah because he produced better results.
"Winning is a coordinate on a graph where a player's talent meets his daily determination to maximize it... AND where said player's teammates' talent meets their daily drive, AND where said player's opponents' talent meets their daily drive, AND where said player's coaches abilities to manage said talent, AND how lucky your team gets with injuries, AND how lucky your opponents get with injuries, AND how lucky your team gets with refereeing, AND a whole bunch of other things."
True, all of that factors in, but all of that also factors in to every other stat besides winning. So why would we decide other stats are more relevant than winning in evaluating players? Winning is the goal of the game. To ignore it or even minimize it is something I have a hard time understanding.
"The common thing here is talent. The talent and ability is the most important thing. And Isiah just didn't have enough talent and ability to be ranked where the consensus has him. The winning was just as much or more due to those other factors as it was to Isiah himself."
Talent Is Overrated. It's a good book. Check it out. As for Isiah's responsibility or lack thereof in his team's successes, I take the position that people often create their own opportunities and luck: when we consistently find a person in successful positions, in spite of all the other factors that might have been at play, the common thread is the person himself. I therefore give credit to that person.
All human life on the earth is like grass, and all human glory is like a flower in a field. The grass dries up and its flower falls off, but the Lord’s word endures forever.
