Elton Brand vs Chris Webber
Posted: Wed Aug 28, 2019 6:55 pm
Prime vs prime (not length, just how good they were), who was better?
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Doctor MJ wrote:I’d go with Brand.
Webber had more potential, and you could argue he filled enough of it he should get the nod, but when Sac was good we were asking whether they really needed Webber playing the primacy he did and when he got hurt and they were largely fine, that hurt his stature.
I think Webber with some subtle tweaks to his game could have been a tier higher.
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pillwenney wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:I’d go with Brand.
Webber had more potential, and you could argue he filled enough of it he should get the nod, but when Sac was good we were asking whether they really needed Webber playing the primacy he did and when he got hurt and they were largely fine, that hurt his stature.
I think Webber with some subtle tweaks to his game could have been a tier higher.
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Not sure it's right to penalize Webber for playing with a lot of talent including most importantly another all-time elite passing big who could be the fulcrum of the offense. That doesn't change Webber's elite ability in that respect.
pillwenney wrote:
Not sure it's right to penalize Webber for playing with a lot of talent including most importantly another all-time elite passing big who could be the fulcrum of the offense. That doesn't change Webber's elite ability in that respect.
penbeast0 wrote:pillwenney wrote:
Not sure it's right to penalize Webber for playing with a lot of talent including most importantly another all-time elite passing big who could be the fulcrum of the offense. That doesn't change Webber's elite ability in that respect.
Well, in Washington, no one else on the front line was much of a passer and again, Webber racked up stats without producing great impact. And he came across as immature and selfish. Team asked him to move to center to play Juwan Howard and Rasheed Wallace at PF to improve the team, he refused. His stengths (great athleticism, ability to make spectacular passes) were the same, so were his weaknesses (dislike of physical contact leading to mediocre efficiency and post defense, poor practice habits) and while the team was one of the highest paid in the league, it never won a single playoff game in his tenure. As the team star, he is the face of that failure though, of course, not the only cause.
To me, he's always that player even with later success in Sacramento so I may not be an unbiased judge but add Webber's history of freezing in the clutch and I take peak Brand if he's healthy.
SHAQ32 wrote:
Offensively speaking, Webber's supporting cast in Washington doesn't compare to what he had in Sacramento. Divac, Peja, Bibby, Chrstie.. Bobby Jackson. That is a lot of talent.
penbeast0 wrote:SHAQ32 wrote:
Offensively speaking, Webber's supporting cast in Washington doesn't compare to what he had in Sacramento. Divac, Peja, Bibby, Chrstie.. Bobby Jackson. That is a lot of talent.
To be fair, he should have had more success in Washington with a supporting cast of Rod Strickland, Cal Chaeney, Juwan Howard (admittedly playing out of position at SF but a former efficient 20ppg player in his prime), Webber, and whoever was at center (choose from defensive minded Charles Jones or a young Ben Wallace, Georghe Muresan, or Rasheed Wallace who they traded for Strickland though after Webber publicly announced he refused to play center, Rasheed came out and announced the same thing). That's a pretty talented team too, just didn't mesh which is a bit of a slam at the primary playmakers (Webber and Strickland).
Doctor MJ wrote:pillwenney wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:I’d go with Brand.
Webber had more potential, and you could argue he filled enough of it he should get the nod, but when Sac was good we were asking whether they really needed Webber playing the primacy he did and when he got hurt and they were largely fine, that hurt his stature.
I think Webber with some subtle tweaks to his game could have been a tier higher.
Sent from my iPhone using RealGM Forums
Not sure it's right to penalize Webber for playing with a lot of talent including most importantly another all-time elite passing big who could be the fulcrum of the offense. That doesn't change Webber's elite ability in that respect.
Webber played as a volume shooting big man with mediocre-to-bad efficiency. Guys like that basically don't exist any more because it was the wrong way to play even then. It's one thing to say his impact was minimized because he happened to have another great passing big on his team, and another thing to pretend that he was playing in a way that was at all close to optimal.
This is one of these things where if I see massive impact, I tend to cut a guy some slack. Rick Barry should have played differently than he did to max out his impact, but he was clearly being groomed to volume score and was clearly hugely impactful leading a championship team where he played all the meaningful minutes and everyone else acted as a satellite to him.
This is why I talk about looking to see what would happen when Webber was out, because his reputation had skyrocketed in Sac precisely because he was seen as "the star" on a team without other stars. We then saw that he didn't impact the game like a big-time alpha did, and when you combine that with playing in something of a unipolar way with poor portability that raised red flags at the time, to me he ended up bouncing around the league as a has-been at an age when he should have still been a guy his franchise swore by.
To be clear, that doesn't mean I think that Brand was way better than him. To me it's pretty close even with Webber's issues.
pillwenney wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:pillwenney wrote:
Not sure it's right to penalize Webber for playing with a lot of talent including most importantly another all-time elite passing big who could be the fulcrum of the offense. That doesn't change Webber's elite ability in that respect.
Webber played as a volume shooting big man with mediocre-to-bad efficiency. Guys like that basically don't exist any more because it was the wrong way to play even then. It's one thing to say his impact was minimized because he happened to have another great passing big on his team, and another thing to pretend that he was playing in a way that was at all close to optimal.
This is one of these things where if I see massive impact, I tend to cut a guy some slack. Rick Barry should have played differently than he did to max out his impact, but he was clearly being groomed to volume score and was clearly hugely impactful leading a championship team where he played all the meaningful minutes and everyone else acted as a satellite to him.
This is why I talk about looking to see what would happen when Webber was out, because his reputation had skyrocketed in Sac precisely because he was seen as "the star" on a team without other stars. We then saw that he didn't impact the game like a big-time alpha did, and when you combine that with playing in something of a unipolar way with poor portability that raised red flags at the time, to me he ended up bouncing around the league as a has-been at an age when he should have still been a guy his franchise swore by.
To be clear, that doesn't mean I think that Brand was way better than him. To me it's pretty close even with Webber's issues.
I've never bought this argument that Webber "should have played differently" (in the sense that people generally mean which is fewer jumpers and more drives and post-ups).
The offense functioned as it did because the bigs played out on the floor and were both all time elite passers for their positions. Without that element, you're talking about a completely different team, and one that very possibly is worse over all offensively, even if it means Webber himself is more efficient. The offense called for the bigs playing less efficiently to maximize the efficiency of the wings and guards. The team would not have faired as well without him if they didn't literally have two all-time elite passing bigs. The team was very reliant on an elite ability of his: that ability just happened to be passing. It's not the conventional way to measure stars, but it led to him being a fulcrum of an elite offense.
And I find it extremely disingenuous to criticize his late career as a function of his "issues." It was very simply and clearly an issue of his knee getting wrecked.