Spoiler:
Overall SRS: My combo-SRS from the regular season and playoffs as discussed in the master thread
Standard Deviations: Standard Deviations of Overall SRS from the league mean.
When I post the roster makeup of the team, I try and do it by playoff minutes. The numbers are age, regular season BPM and Playoff BPM (basketball-reference's BPM is being used here).
So if I say: "C: Vlade Divac (22), +2.3 / +4.3" I mean that Vlade Divac was their center, he was 22, he had a BPM of +2.3 in the regular season and a +4.3 in the playoffs. Yes, BPM misses out on a lot of subtle stuff but I thought it a good quick-hits indicator of the skills of the players.
I also list the playoff players (20+ MPG) in order of OLoad (which is usage that integrates assists) and it has everyone's per game average for minutes, points, rebounds, assists and stocks (steals plus blocks), but all of those (including minutes) are adjusted for pace.
I then cover the three highest players in scoring per 100 (with their true shooting relative to league average) and the three highest players in Assists per 100. I realize that these are arbitrary, but I wanted a quick-hits reference for how these teams' offenses ran.
I then talk about Heliocentrism, Wingmen and Depth. Basically I add up all of the team's VORP (again, basketball-reference) and then figure out what percentage of that VORP comes from the #1 player (Heliocentrism), from the #2 and 3 players combined (Wingmen) and Depth (everyone else). I include the ranking among the top 100 for reference. There are only 82 of these rankings, because 18 teams pre-date BPM/VORP, so I only have 82 to work with. I'm not saying that these are particularly meaningful, I just thought they were cool.
Playoff Offensive Rating: Amount by which your playoff offensive rating exceeds the offensive rating you'd expect given the regular season defensive rating of your playoff opponents. If you would be expected to post a 99 given your opponents but you post a 104, that's graded as +5. This way we can compare across eras.
Playoff Defensive Rating is the same as Offensive Rating, just the opposite.
Playoff SRS: Is SRS measured *only* in the playoffs. Overall SRS is a mix of both playoffs and regular season.
Total SRS Increase Through Playoffs: Basically their Overall SRS minus their Regular Season SRS. This is basically how much better a team did in the playoffs than you'd guess, relative to their regular season performance.
Average Playoff Opponent Offense: The average regular season offensive rating of your playoff opponents.
Average Playoff Opponent Defense: The average regular season defensive rating of your playoff opponents.
Rankings of any kind are out of my list. So if I say that the '91 Lakers had the 42nd best regular season offense, I don't mean "42nd best of All-Time", I mean "42nd best of my Top 100 Teams of All_Time". Which will be pretty comparable, but I want to be clear about this.
I also walk through the playoffs at each round, covering their opponent their SRS (at that time), how many games the series was, the margin of victory (and a "+" is always in the favor of the discussed team; losing a series by +2.0 means that you outscored the other team by two points a game on average despite losing) and for reference I put in an SRS equivalency (beat a +5 SRS team by 5 points a game, that's an equivalent +10 SRS series).
In later entries I also add the Offensive and Defensive Ratings for each playoff series. This is just how well the team did, adjusted by the opponent's regular season average (if you play a team with an average Defensive Rating of 102, and you play them with an offensive rating of 106, you get credited with a +4). Pace for teams below 1973 or so is estimated based on regular season numbers, so it could easily be wrong by some.
In writeups, if I ever say a player shot at "-8%" or something, that means "his true shooting was 8% lower than the league average that year". Any time I say "a player shot" and follow it by a percent, I am *always* using true shooting percentage unless otherwise indicated.
I also have a modern comps section for any teams pre-2011. It's basically me weighting each statistical characteristic and feeding each player's stats into the BackPicks database and choosing the best-rated comp from the list. I might list something like this:
PG: 2017 LeBron James (worse rebounding, better passing, way fewer shots)
What I mean is, "This team's point guard was basically 2017 LeBron James, but make his passing better, make his rebounding worse and make him take way fewer shots).
Anyhow. I don't know how clear any of this will be, so please let me know what does and doesn't work from these writeups. And thanks for reading!
Standard Deviations: Standard Deviations of Overall SRS from the league mean.
When I post the roster makeup of the team, I try and do it by playoff minutes. The numbers are age, regular season BPM and Playoff BPM (basketball-reference's BPM is being used here).
So if I say: "C: Vlade Divac (22), +2.3 / +4.3" I mean that Vlade Divac was their center, he was 22, he had a BPM of +2.3 in the regular season and a +4.3 in the playoffs. Yes, BPM misses out on a lot of subtle stuff but I thought it a good quick-hits indicator of the skills of the players.
I also list the playoff players (20+ MPG) in order of OLoad (which is usage that integrates assists) and it has everyone's per game average for minutes, points, rebounds, assists and stocks (steals plus blocks), but all of those (including minutes) are adjusted for pace.
I then cover the three highest players in scoring per 100 (with their true shooting relative to league average) and the three highest players in Assists per 100. I realize that these are arbitrary, but I wanted a quick-hits reference for how these teams' offenses ran.
I then talk about Heliocentrism, Wingmen and Depth. Basically I add up all of the team's VORP (again, basketball-reference) and then figure out what percentage of that VORP comes from the #1 player (Heliocentrism), from the #2 and 3 players combined (Wingmen) and Depth (everyone else). I include the ranking among the top 100 for reference. There are only 82 of these rankings, because 18 teams pre-date BPM/VORP, so I only have 82 to work with. I'm not saying that these are particularly meaningful, I just thought they were cool.
Playoff Offensive Rating: Amount by which your playoff offensive rating exceeds the offensive rating you'd expect given the regular season defensive rating of your playoff opponents. If you would be expected to post a 99 given your opponents but you post a 104, that's graded as +5. This way we can compare across eras.
Playoff Defensive Rating is the same as Offensive Rating, just the opposite.
Playoff SRS: Is SRS measured *only* in the playoffs. Overall SRS is a mix of both playoffs and regular season.
Total SRS Increase Through Playoffs: Basically their Overall SRS minus their Regular Season SRS. This is basically how much better a team did in the playoffs than you'd guess, relative to their regular season performance.
Average Playoff Opponent Offense: The average regular season offensive rating of your playoff opponents.
Average Playoff Opponent Defense: The average regular season defensive rating of your playoff opponents.
Rankings of any kind are out of my list. So if I say that the '91 Lakers had the 42nd best regular season offense, I don't mean "42nd best of All-Time", I mean "42nd best of my Top 100 Teams of All_Time". Which will be pretty comparable, but I want to be clear about this.
I also walk through the playoffs at each round, covering their opponent their SRS (at that time), how many games the series was, the margin of victory (and a "+" is always in the favor of the discussed team; losing a series by +2.0 means that you outscored the other team by two points a game on average despite losing) and for reference I put in an SRS equivalency (beat a +5 SRS team by 5 points a game, that's an equivalent +10 SRS series).
In later entries I also add the Offensive and Defensive Ratings for each playoff series. This is just how well the team did, adjusted by the opponent's regular season average (if you play a team with an average Defensive Rating of 102, and you play them with an offensive rating of 106, you get credited with a +4). Pace for teams below 1973 or so is estimated based on regular season numbers, so it could easily be wrong by some.
In writeups, if I ever say a player shot at "-8%" or something, that means "his true shooting was 8% lower than the league average that year". Any time I say "a player shot" and follow it by a percent, I am *always* using true shooting percentage unless otherwise indicated.
I also have a modern comps section for any teams pre-2011. It's basically me weighting each statistical characteristic and feeding each player's stats into the BackPicks database and choosing the best-rated comp from the list. I might list something like this:
PG: 2017 LeBron James (worse rebounding, better passing, way fewer shots)
What I mean is, "This team's point guard was basically 2017 LeBron James, but make his passing better, make his rebounding worse and make him take way fewer shots).
Anyhow. I don't know how clear any of this will be, so please let me know what does and doesn't work from these writeups. And thanks for reading!
#15. The 1967 Philadelphia 76ers
Spoiler:
Overall SRS: +11.25, Standard Deviations: +2.06, Won NBA Finals (Preseason X)
PG: Wali Jones, 0.084 / 0.124
SG: Hal Greer, 0.118 / 0.131
SF: Chet Walker, 0.181 / 0.201
PF: Luke Jackson, 0.084 / 0.080
C: Wilt Chamberlain, 0.285 / 0.253
6th: Billy Cunningham, 0.151 / 0.056
Regular Season Metrics:
Regular Season Record: 68-13, Regular Season SRS: +8.50 (15th), Earned the 1 Seed
Regular Season Offensive Rating: +5.4 (25th), Regular Season Defensive Rating: -2.2 (71st)
Shooting Advantage: ?, Possession Advantage: ? shooting possessions per game
Billy Cunningham (SF, 23): 22 MPPG, 26% OLoad, 15 / 6 / 2 on +2.0%
Hal Greer (SG, 30): 31 MPPG, 22% OLoad, 18 / 4 / 3 on +1.7%
Wali Jones (PG, 24): 23 MPPG, 21% OLoad, 11 / 3 / 3 on -0.7%
Chet Walker (SF, 26): 27 MPPG, 20% OLoad, 16 / 7 / 2 on +6.4%
Wilt Chamberlain (C, 30): 37 MPPG, 18% OLoad, 20 / 20 / 6 on +14.4%
Luke Jackson (PF, 25): 24 MPPG, 16% OLoad, 10 / 7 / 1 on -0.6%
Scoring/100: Billy Cunningham (26.9 / +2.0%), Chet Walker (22.7 / +6.4%), Hal Greer (22.3 / +1.7%)
Assists/100: Wilt Chamberlain (6.7), Wali Jones (5.3), Hal Greer (3.8)
Heliocentrism (Win Shares): 36.8% - Wilt
Wingmen: 29.7% - Walker & Greer
Depth: 33.5%
Playoff Metrics:
Playoff Offensive Rating: +5.67 (48th), Playoff Defensive Rating: -5.01 (50th)
Playoff SRS: +13.38 (21st), Total SRS Increase through Playoffs: +2.75 (45th)
Shooting Advantage: +4.7%, Possession Advantage: -3.0 shooting possessions per game
Average Playoff Opponent Offense: +0.76 (85th), Average Playoff Opponent Defense: -2.23 (45th)
Billy Cunningham (SF, 23): 18 MPPG, 30% OLoad, 12 / 5 / 2 on -6.1%
Hal Greer (SG, 30): 37 MPPG, 24% OLoad, 23 / 5 / 4 on -0.6%
Wali Jones (PG, 24): 26 MPPG, 22% OLoad, 14 / 2 / 3 on -0.5%
Chet Walker (SF, 26): 30 MPPG, 20% OLoad, 18 / 6 / 2 on +5.3%
Wilt Chamberlain (C, 30): 39 MPPG, 18% OLoad, 18 / 24 / 7 on +5.3%
Luke Jackson (PF, 25): 30 MPPG, 13% OLoad, 9 / 10 / 2 on -4.3%
Scoring/100: Billy Cunningham (25.9 / -6.1%), Hal Greer (23.6 / -0.6%), Chet Walker (23.1 / +5.3%)
Assists/100: Wilt Chamberlain (7.3), Wali Jones (5.0), Hal Greer (4.5)
Playoff Heliocentrism (Win Shares): 33.9% - Wilt
Playoff Wingmen: 37.5% - Walker & Greer
Playoff Depth: 28.6%
Round 1:
Round 2: Cincinnati Royals (-0.2), won 3-1, by +12.5 points per game (+12.3 SRS eq)
Round 3: Boston Celtics (+6.9), won 4-1, by +10.0 points per game (+16.9 SRS eq)
Round 4: San Francisco Warriors (+5.1), won 4-2, by +6.7 points per game (+11.8 SRS eq)
Offensive / Defensive Ratings from Opposition Regular Season Average
Cincinnati Royals: +1.8 / -8.6
Boston Celtics: +11.5 / -3.5
San Francisco Warriors: +7.6 / 0.0
Shooting Advantage / Possession Advantage per 100 (unadjusted):
Cincinnati Royals: +0.7% / +9.4
Boston Celtics: +6.1% / -4.2
San Francisco Warriors: +6.2% / -8.6
Postseason Usage/Efficiency Change *not* adjusted for Opposition:
Wali Jones: +1.8% / +0.2%
Hal Greer: +1.9% / -2.3%
Chet Walker: +0.1% / -1.1%
Luke Jackson: -3.1% / -3.7%
Wilt Chamberlain: -0.1% / -9.1%
Billy Cunningham: +3.1% / -8.1%
Do you know who Wilt Chamberlain reminds me of? Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice (what’s that, Jane Austen has no place in an NBA-history discussion? I used this angle to get my wife to listen to 15 minutes about Wilt Chamberlain, so let’s have some respect for a miracle). Darcy is the male protagonist of the story (and endgame love interest). The thing about Darcy that’s interesting is that, instead of being a fixed point of masculine perfection that the female lead obsesses over, he actually quite alienates her. Darcy has many extraordinary qualities: he is extremely learned, he works constantly to improve himself, he is compassionate and nurturing to his family and those that depend on him and he is deeply motivated by fairness and justice. Those all sound great right? They are, yet Darcy manages to be quite rude and insulting to Elizabeth Bennet (the female lead), demonstrating callousness and arrogance in many of their interactions. Even when he declares his love for her, he spends maybe two sentences on that sentiment, and then spends the next ten minutes talking about how much her family sucks and how far beneath him she is. Sounds like a romantic dead end; what changes? The point where Elizabeth tells him exactly what a tool she thinks he is (I’m skipping over a lot). She tells him that he has behaved destructively, and that she might have felt bad in refusing him if he had “behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner” (this was a serious burn in 19th century England).
This absolutely blows Darcy away. First, because he’s a super-rich aristocrat who nobody *ever* contradicts. But second, because he works hard to be (and believes himself to be) an extremely moral person and a perfect gentleman. To be rebuked so openly and honestly throws him for a loop. And he spends a lot of time thinking about it. When they reconcile later here is an excerpt of his speech:
“I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice though not in principle . . . I was given good principles but left to follow them in pride and conceit. Unfortunately . . . I was spoilt by my parents, who, though good themselves . . . allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing . . . to think meanly of all the rest of the world, to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own. What I do not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.” (I pruned a lot of the speech.)
So, to recap. Darcy is blessed with looks, principles, brains and wealth. And his parents (scrupulously good people) inadvertently spoil him with love and acclaim. His gifts blossom with effort and grace. And yet his default approach is to celebrate himself, his class and his abilities at the expense of others. And amazingly, he doesn’t see this as wasting his gifts but as appropriate acknowledgement of them. If you are foremost in an aristocracy, is it not natural to the success you have earned? And he would likely have continued that way, had not a harsh voice taught him that the paths he thought were furthering his principles were actually betraying them.
Wilt Chamberlain didn’t start off as a basketball player. Instead he was an excellent track and field athlete. But he grew tall quickly; he was 6 foot at age 10 and 6’11” by the time he got to high school. He was incredibly tall, strong and athletic. Professional basketball had seen tall players before, but rarely athletes of Wilt’s caliber. And in high school? Forget about it. He single-handedly led his team to the local championship game where the other school quadruple-teamed him, and despite his 29 points his team lost 54-42. The next year his team won the local championship, and he scored 32 points in the game and leading his team to an undefeated season. Red Auerbach, seeing the talented youth, had him play one on one against the Most Outstanding Player of the 1953 NCAA Finals, B.H. Born. Chamberlain (as a sophomore) destroyed Born 25-10 and Born would decide not to go into the NBA, reasoning “If there were high school kids that good, I figured I wasn’t going to make it to the pros”. But Born, of course, was wrong. To paraphrase Jaime Lannister, there were no other men like Wilt. There was only Wilt.
After leading his team to yet another championship on the coattails of his dominance, Chamberlain went to play college basketball with the University of Kansas. He chose Kansas because he wanted to play for the great Phog Allen. However, Allen was to retire as the Jayhawks’ coach before the season, potentially depriving Chamberlain of an authority figure that would come to need. And Chamberlain feuded with Fogg’s replacement (this pattern, of finding an authority figure that he respected, only to have that figure leave and for Wilt to have issues with his replacement, would come up again). In his first game with Kansas he scored 52 points and grabbed 31 rebounds, both breaking school records. While at Kansas he also competed at track, winning the high jump in the Big Eight championships three years in a row. But in the title game Wilt would struggle.
Against the University of North Carolina he was always double-teamed *before he got the ball*. As soon as he got the ball a third Tar Heel would swarm over. His team struggled, and they went into the final seconds down by a point. The Jayhawks ran a play for Wilt to get the ball in the post for the last shot, but the pass was intercepted and the Jayhawks lost. Despite the loss Wilt won the Most Outstanding player award for his 23 points and 14 rebounds. Kansas had been a +8 SRS team before him, but in that first year they jumped to +21; the addition of Wilt was worth a 13 point swing for his team. In his junior year the entire NCAA started triple-teaming Wilt regularly, and despite this he averaged 30.1 points a game. But his squad finished short of making the tournament, and Wilt chose to leave college basketball to go professional.
So I want to point out some trends before we talk about the NBA.
First, Wilt was always the best. Always. Not only was he always the best, but he was always the best by a mile. He was 6’11” as a freshman in high school for crap’s sake! And yet he was so athletic and coordinated that he was an extremely competitive track athlete at Kansas. And he had a variety of effective moves, from finger rolls to fadeaways. With his height, length, strength and vertical he was pretty much automatically the best rebounder and best shot-blocker that anybody had ever seen. And with his skill he was an unstoppable scoring force. His addition turned Kansas from a 6-6 team to the 2nd best team in the country. It is impossible to overstate just how much better he was than everyone. And opposing defenses would do anything to stop him. In high school in the championship he was quadruple-teamed. In the NCAA championship game he was double/triple teamed the entire game. In his junior year he was triple teamed almost every game.
You know what’s crazy? He was still scoring 30 a game and his teams still usually won.
The positive spin is this: Wilt was so incredibly dominant that triple-teaming him could only hold him to about 30 points a game.
The negative spin is this: in a situation where Wilt’s teammates were playing 4 on 2 for most of the game, Wilt’s solution was still to keep trying to score.
I cannot imagine that trusting his teammates at all would have been intuitive for Wilt. This isn’t like Jordan at UNC, where he was clearly gifted but on a team of strong players with a senior no-nonsense coach. Wilt’s supremacy turned mediocre teams into the best team in the league. Without Wilt, his teams wouldn’t be anywhere. So it would have been clear that his teammates weren’t remotely close to him; his teammates were just ordinary high-school / college schlubs and Wilt was basically playing real-life NBA Jam. It is telling that nobody tried to stop him from trying to score through triple-teams (they no doubt thought that Wilt going 1 on 3 was more efficient than his teammates going 4 on 2, and they may have been right). And it’s notable that in the final moment of Wilt’s first NCAA championship game that his team lost, not because he missed the shot against three defenders, but because his teammate’s pass to him was intercepted.
Do you see the Darcy parallels? Wilt is given these incredible gifts to help his team win. But in encouraging him to improve and grow (and help his team), his environment basically taught him that the best thing he could do for his team was to ignore them and score as aggressively as he could. Compare this with Russell who only made his High School team through the charity of his coach, and worked his butt off trying to add value to every part of his game. Believing that he would never be a star, Russell worked to be the ultimate role-player and prove himself that way. Both were trying to be the best possible for their team, but their backgrounds had taught them totally different things about how to do that.
In 1960 Wilt joined the Philadelphia Warriors. And he hit the NBA like an offensive lineman cannonballing into a backyard pool. He averaged 38 points a game and 27 rebounds a game, both leading the league, as a rookie (and both of which shattered the prior NBA records). And with his addition the Warriors jumped by 5 SRS. But it was almost all on the *defensive* side of the ball. The Warriors’ offense only bumped by one point per 100. At the end of the season Chamberlain surprised everybody by talking about retiring, frustrated by the double and triple teaming and the numerous hard fouls. He didn’t retire, but it is again telling. There’s a reason that scorers like LeBron and Magic Johnson never got double or triple teamed. If the player being doubled can pass out of it effectively, the double becomes considerably less effective. Even Shaq, rarely accounted a great passer, had a knack for passing out of doubles and repositioning until he could get a one-on-one shot. That Wilt complained about doubles so consistently suggested that, whether because of inclination of inattention, he didn’t pass out of them effectively. And so despite being the best scorer in NBA history to that point, his addition barely improved the offense.
Wilt’s scoring continued to blossom (culminating in his 50 point per game season in 1962), but let the record show that in his time in Philadelphia ‘62 was the only year where the team’s offense was even above average (+0.9 to be specific). He also demonstrated one of his less endearing habits, that he would comprehensively ignore a coach he didn’t like (his background had taught him, correctly, that he was too important to discipline). In ‘63 the Warriors were sold to another group of owners who moved the team from Philadelphia to San Francisco, and multiple players (notably Paul Arizin) retired rather than move. So the Warriors were rough for a year (though the next year he'd play for Alex Hannum, who rejoins this story later). Eventually, in the middle of the 1965 season, Wilt was traded to the new Philadelphia 76ers. The Sixers were a slightly below average team but with a lot of upside, with veteran Hal Greer and a lot of promising young players in Wali Jones, Chet Walker, Luke Jackson and Billy Cunningham. In the last game of the ‘65 playoffs coach Dolph Schayes ran the Warriors’ last play to Hal Greer and not Wilt (fearing Wilt’s poor free throw shooting). But, echoing his team’s loss in the NCAA Finals, the inbounds pass was intercepted and the Warriors were eliminated. In an interview afterwards Wilt lambasted his coach, his players and pretty much everyone involved with the NBA. He had been mocked for years for his inability to win despite his sensational scoring numbers, and yet in the clutch it seemed as though his teammates and coaches kept failing him. His frustration was understandable but its expression not helpful.
In their first full season together the team won 55 games and posted a +4.16 RSRS, losing in the Conference Finals to the Celtics. But the 55 wins conceals the problems the team faced. Wilt’s addition had helped the team’s offense . . . not at all. As in 1960, his addition helped his team’s *defense* (from +0.6 to -3.4). Also, Wilt disliked coach Dolph Schayes, bothered by disrespectful remarks Schayes had made when they had played against each other in the past. Compounding matters, Wilt refused to actually live in Philadelphia. He preferred to live in New York and commute to Philly, which meant that he was only available for training in the afternoons (while the team preferred morning practices). In the Conference Finals Wilt blew off multiple team practices which antagonized his teammates even more. In spite of this, Wilt posted an outstanding series while his teammates struggled.
In other words, the ‘66 Sixers were part of the dysfunctional cycle that characterized many of Wilt’s interactions with his team. Wilt is brought to a team to be the transcendent superstar to lead the team to greatness. Wilt puts up transcendent superstar numbers but feels as though he isn’t appreciated or supported enough (after all, how could he possibly be losing when putting up these numbers *unless* his teammates/coaches are to blame?) and so feuds with his coach and alienates his teammates, which implodes team performance, leading to loss which leads him to become more resentful and the cycle continues.
Sounds like a nightmare. Surely nothing good can be on the horizon for the ‘67 Sixers, right? You’d be forgiven for thinking that. Instead the following all happened the next season:
- Wilt praised his teammates, calling Luke Jackson “the ultimate power forward”, Hal Greer a deadly jumpshooter and Wali Jones an excellent defender and outside scorer;
- Wilt began to take his teammates out to dinner and pick up the tab, since his salary was greater than that of the entire rest of the team;
- Hal Greer spoke of Chamberlain as a leader, saying “You knew in a minute the Big Fella was ready to go . . . and everybody would follow.”
*Completely* unrelated to the above, the ‘67 Sixers went on to post the best regular season record and RSRS in the shot clock era to that point. So what in name of Jane Austen/NBA analogies happened? The same thing that happened to Mr. Darcy; he got told off by somebody he respected.
In 1967 they added a new coach, Alex Hannum. Hannum had coached Wilt in San Francisco. He was a crafty psychologist and understood Wilt well. He knew that Wilt, whose basic assumption was that he had more power than the coach and so was beyond reproach, would never respect a passive authority figure. So when Hannum took over he called a locker room meeting and laid it all out there, every issue with the team he saw over the last season. And many of these problems, understandably did not cast Wilt in the best light. So wounding were some of Hannum’s observations that teammates several times had to hold Wilt back to prevent a fistfight. Despite the fact that Wilt could certainly have pounded him into sticky goo Hannum never backed down, which earned Wilt’s respect. Later, when tempers had cooled, Hannum told Wilt that they both wanted to win a title, but that Wilt wasn’t acting in the ways best designed to do that. He needed Wilt to support his teammates, to shoot less and pass more. To take advantage of the attention the defense gave him by setting his teammates up more. And to ‘act like a man’ with more professional conduct. Wilt bought in.
Before we talk about the significance of that and how it affected the team, let’s clear up some misconceptions about Wilt. Given that he put up such insane scoring numbers it would be natural to think that he was taking a shot every time his team brought the ball up. But that wasn’t the case. Using a back-of-envelope formula to estimate the percentage of his team’s shooting possessions that Wilt used, he peaked at 36% in 1962 (the year of 50 points per game) and spent 3.5 seasons above 30%, though 1961 and 1966 both had him in the high 20s. That doesn’t sound crazy high. Compare this to Jordan, who took 40% of his team’s shooting possessions in ‘87, 35% in ‘88 and 34% in ‘91. In other words, Wilt at his most shot-takey shot about as often as Jordan, or a little less. How then did Wilt get 50 points a game? Easy, by playing in an era with many more possessions (so he could get more shots) and by playing the entire game every game. So Wilt, while taking a lot of shots, was hardly a historic ball-hog.
But there’s a little bit more to it than that. There are two ways in which a scorer can freeze out teammates. One is to take too many shots. The other is to be a ‘black hole’, scoring but not passing, taking but not giving. And this allegation against Wilt is entirely justified.
Some context:
Jordan averaged about 4.5 true shooting attempts per assist, though went as high as 5.3 in ‘93 and 7.2 in his insanely high-usage ‘87 season.
Kobe was as bad as 7 TSA per assist in ‘06, but spent ‘08-10 around 5.
Kevin Durant was as bad as 8.6 in his youth (2011) but by 2014 he was down to 4.6.
Noted “Black Hole” Kevin McHale averaged around 7 TSAs per assist during his peak.
Dwight Howard during his peak was around 10.
The worst big scorer I could find was Moses Malone, whose ‘79 through ‘83 put up eye-bleeding numbers between 11.4 and 16.4.
Playoff LeBron in Cleveland was in the mid-Twos
So that’s our frame of reference. Even “ball-hoggy” high usage players like Jordan and Kobe still dish an assist for every 7 shots *at their worst* and more often are around 5. Unskilled finishers can be as high as 10, or even in the low teens like Moses. That’s what we’re looking at.
From 1960 to 1962 Wilt’s rate was 18.6 TSA per assist. Holy balls. So he was taking shots like Jordan, but was passing even less per shot than Moses Malone (and that’s saying something). It is *this* that substantiates accusations against him of playing selfish offense. It’s not that he took too many shots. It’s that if you passed him the ball you’d never see it again. In ‘63 he dropped to 11.9, and in ‘64 (his first year with Alex Hannum in San Fran) he got as low as 6.8. In 1966 he had been as low as 5.8. So his offense had gradually moved from ‘the most epic of black holes’ to passing with about Kevin McHale levels of frequency, which isn’t good but isn’t awful either. In 1967, after his talk with Hannum, his TSA per assist dropped to 2.4, LeBron rates of passing (he used around half the possessions of LeBron, but in terms of what they were likely to do when they got the ball they were similar).
Let’s look at all of his teammates and what this change meant. We are lucky because the Sixers had the exact same Top 6 from ‘66 to ‘68, so we have consistent data here. Here is every player, their ages in those years, their ‘Load’ (this is the Backpicks stat to be clear) and their true shooting relative to league average:
Wali Jones (23-25):
Load: 23.2 -> 28.4 -> 29.3
rTS%: -7.5% -> -0.7% -> -5.2%
So hitting ‘67, Jones suddenly jumps in usage and makes a massive 6.8 point leap in shooting efficiency. The change mostly disappears in ‘68.
Hal Greer (29-31):
Load: 30.8 -> 30.2 -> 31.6
rTS%: +1.7% -> +1.7% -> +3.1%
Greer’s numbers are unchanged.
Chet Walker (25-27):
Load: 25.3 -> 27.9 -> 27.4
rTS%: +2.7% -> +6.4% -> +2.3%
Chet Walker saw a massive 3.7% jump in his age 26 season, but came right back in ‘68.
Luke Jackson (24-26):
Load: 19.9 -> 21.5 -> 20.5
rTS%: -2.8% -> -0.6% -> -2.7%
Luke Jackson saw a 2.2% jump in ‘67, but regressed in ‘68.
Billy Cunningham (22-24):
Load: 31.2 -> 36.1 -> 35.3
rTS%: -1.3% -> +2.0% -> +0.1%
In ‘67 Cunningham’s usage and efficiency both jumped, but in ‘68 he regressed.
Wilt Chamberlain (29-31):
Load: 37 -> 30 -> 32.2
rTS%: +6.0% -> +14.4% -> +5.9%
And Wilt took fewer shots, but made them at an incredibly efficient rate.
The Sixers’ offense exploded in ‘67, jumping from +0.4 to +5.4 with the *exact* same personnel. And every single player (minus Hal Greer) jumped in efficiency (even while increasing their usage). And this is in the exact same season where Wilt increased from Kobe levels of passing to LeBron levels of passing. Do I think that Wilt drove this change?
Yeah. I do. Sure the players were all at the right age for a big step forward. But they all fell off a cliff again in ‘68, indicating that it wasn’t about them. This is the *one* season where the roster can’t shut up about what a great teammate Wilt is, and Wilt transforms from taking 26% of his team’s shots in ‘66 to 17% of his team’s shots in ‘67. Suddenly Wilt was focusing on defending and rebounding, passing when his teammates were open but destroying the opposition if he wasn’t doubled (+14.4% efficiency!?!). Wilt ultimately wanted to win, he’d always wanted to win. But like Mr. Darcy, he’d been led to follow that goal in pride and conceit. And it took Alex Hannum (Elizabeth Bennet in this analogy) to give him a reality check, to show him that the best version of him wasn’t about him at all. It was a lesson Wilt took to like a duck to water . . . for a time.
The Sixers won 68 games and posted a +8.5 RSRS, both leading the league. In the first round they played the average Cincinnati Royals. The Sixers obliterated them by 12.5 points a game. Granted that Oscar averaged a 25/4/11 on +12.4%, but the Sixers owned possession, taking an extra 11 shots a game and Wilt averaged a 28/27/11 (WTF!?!?!?!) on +9.3%. It was an easy matchup but handled well. And in the Conference Finals was the clear other best team in the league, the Boston Celtics.
The Celtics (+6.9) were no joke. They had just won the last hundred league titles, and were looking to make it a hundred and one. The Sixers crushed them, winning 4-1 by ten points a game. They exposed the Celtics’ weak shooting (-4.7% as a team, and even Sam Jones shot -6.9%). Wilt averaged a 22/32/10 on +7.1% while Hal Greer averaged a 29/3/5 on +1.1% and Chet Walker a 21/7/1 on +8.6%. And the Celtics weren’t injured. There was no asterisk here. The Sixers just won. By a lot. This was only the second time in Bill Russell’s career that he had lost in the playoffs, and he was injured for the first. Russell acknowledged that this was his first real loss, and he praised Wilt’s role in the team that had beaten him.
In the NBA Finals the Sixers faced +5.1 San Francisco Warriors. Though clearly worse than the Celtics, the Warriors were a challenging matchup. They had center Nate Thurmond who, though not a strong scorer, was accounted by many to be the best defender of opposing centers in the league (unless that was Chamberlain himself). Thurmond did what Russell had not, which is to limit Wilt. Wilt averaged a 18/29/7 on +0.4%, a shadow of his numbers in the other series. But the rest of his team picked up the slack, Greer averaged a 26/8/6 on -2.9% and Chet Walker averaged a 23/9/3 on +4.8%. Most importantly, the Sixers’ defense really shut down the Warriors’ offense. Rick Barry’s impressive 41/9/3 was bought with -3.4% shooting and only one Warrior at all shot above league average. The Sixers didn’t blow them out, but prevailed in six by 6.7 points a game.
The Sixers had won a championship. It would be the only time in the 60s that a team besides the Celtics won. And they did it in grand fashion, by blowing out the Celtics by 10 points a game. Wilt had embraced playing as part of a team and that act had turned the Sixers into overwhelming champions.
11 | 76ers
10 |
9 |
8 |
7 |
6 |
5 | Celtics
4 | Warriors
3 |
2 |
1 |
0 | Hawks
-0 |
-1 | Royals, Lakers
-2 | Knicks
-3 |
-4 | Pistons
-5 | Bulls, Bullets
-6 |
-7 |
-8 |
-9 |
-10|
1967 is accounted a pretty non-competitive year (on par with 2016 or so). The league had just an expansion team (which doesn't sound like much, but going from 9 to 10 is like adding 3 teams in a 30-team league). Really, there were only three good teams in the entire league. There were no truly garbage teams, just a steady diet of badness. Only the Sixers, Celtics and Warriors were any good. And the Sixers were way, way, way ahead of everyone else (have smoked the other two good teams in the league will do that).
I’ll be honest. I am a lot more scandalized by this ranking than by the ‘72 Lakers’. The Lakers played a lot of tough teams, but (with the exception of the Bulls) didn’t look particularly good in their wins. In contrast, the Sixers completely vaporized the Celtics. The ‘67 Sixers were *by far* the most dominant team in the 60s. Not close. If I was making the list subjectively they’d make the Top 10 easily and I wouldn’t hesitate.
It’s easy to see why the formula likes them. Their regular season was very strong and their PSRS was outstanding. They played the other best teams in the league and beat them decisively. But the formula only puts them at 15th. Why? I’d love to say that adding a round of playoffs would help them, but it wouldn’t by much (if I added a five-game series at the same PSRS it’d bump them to 13th). I can’t say that they should have gotten a first-round to beat a weak team, as in ‘67 they let 8 of the 10 teams into the playoffs, so their first round matchup was plenty weak. So what gives?
I can speculate. Their regular season, though excellent, wasn’t quite as good as some (they’re only 9th of the top 15 teams in RSRS) and the same with their playoffs (11th of 15 in PSRS). I don’t really know; maybe I disproportionately like this team. But I do.
When people point to Chamberlain’s 1962 season as evidence of his greatness it illustrates a strong disagreement on what greatness means. For them they’re either celebrating his individual achievements (which are incredible) or his incredible capacity (that he was capable of such things). For me, greatness is about helping your team. Wilt was great, but nowhere near as much as his individual stats suggested. But in 1967 Wilt blossomed into his most devastating form, an amazing defender and rebounder, who either set his teammates up or finished with incredible efficiency, whichever the defense allowed. ‘67 Wilt is one of the greatest seasons ever by any player, and it’s *that* player who should be in the GOAT conversation. Alas that he only played for one year.
Because in Pride and Prejudice, they can simply cut at the end of the reconciliation. In reality, Chamberlain started feuding with the owner of the 76ers, focused obsessively with assists as his new *individual* goal, his team suffered from injuries in the playoffs and they underperformed and Hannum left the team to move out west and Wilt got traded to the Lakers. Alas.
PG: Wali Jones, 0.084 / 0.124
SG: Hal Greer, 0.118 / 0.131
SF: Chet Walker, 0.181 / 0.201
PF: Luke Jackson, 0.084 / 0.080
C: Wilt Chamberlain, 0.285 / 0.253
6th: Billy Cunningham, 0.151 / 0.056
Regular Season Metrics:
Regular Season Record: 68-13, Regular Season SRS: +8.50 (15th), Earned the 1 Seed
Regular Season Offensive Rating: +5.4 (25th), Regular Season Defensive Rating: -2.2 (71st)
Shooting Advantage: ?, Possession Advantage: ? shooting possessions per game
Billy Cunningham (SF, 23): 22 MPPG, 26% OLoad, 15 / 6 / 2 on +2.0%
Hal Greer (SG, 30): 31 MPPG, 22% OLoad, 18 / 4 / 3 on +1.7%
Wali Jones (PG, 24): 23 MPPG, 21% OLoad, 11 / 3 / 3 on -0.7%
Chet Walker (SF, 26): 27 MPPG, 20% OLoad, 16 / 7 / 2 on +6.4%
Wilt Chamberlain (C, 30): 37 MPPG, 18% OLoad, 20 / 20 / 6 on +14.4%
Luke Jackson (PF, 25): 24 MPPG, 16% OLoad, 10 / 7 / 1 on -0.6%
Scoring/100: Billy Cunningham (26.9 / +2.0%), Chet Walker (22.7 / +6.4%), Hal Greer (22.3 / +1.7%)
Assists/100: Wilt Chamberlain (6.7), Wali Jones (5.3), Hal Greer (3.8)
Heliocentrism (Win Shares): 36.8% - Wilt
Wingmen: 29.7% - Walker & Greer
Depth: 33.5%
Playoff Metrics:
Playoff Offensive Rating: +5.67 (48th), Playoff Defensive Rating: -5.01 (50th)
Playoff SRS: +13.38 (21st), Total SRS Increase through Playoffs: +2.75 (45th)
Shooting Advantage: +4.7%, Possession Advantage: -3.0 shooting possessions per game
Average Playoff Opponent Offense: +0.76 (85th), Average Playoff Opponent Defense: -2.23 (45th)
Billy Cunningham (SF, 23): 18 MPPG, 30% OLoad, 12 / 5 / 2 on -6.1%
Hal Greer (SG, 30): 37 MPPG, 24% OLoad, 23 / 5 / 4 on -0.6%
Wali Jones (PG, 24): 26 MPPG, 22% OLoad, 14 / 2 / 3 on -0.5%
Chet Walker (SF, 26): 30 MPPG, 20% OLoad, 18 / 6 / 2 on +5.3%
Wilt Chamberlain (C, 30): 39 MPPG, 18% OLoad, 18 / 24 / 7 on +5.3%
Luke Jackson (PF, 25): 30 MPPG, 13% OLoad, 9 / 10 / 2 on -4.3%
Scoring/100: Billy Cunningham (25.9 / -6.1%), Hal Greer (23.6 / -0.6%), Chet Walker (23.1 / +5.3%)
Assists/100: Wilt Chamberlain (7.3), Wali Jones (5.0), Hal Greer (4.5)
Playoff Heliocentrism (Win Shares): 33.9% - Wilt
Playoff Wingmen: 37.5% - Walker & Greer
Playoff Depth: 28.6%
Round 1:
Round 2: Cincinnati Royals (-0.2), won 3-1, by +12.5 points per game (+12.3 SRS eq)
Round 3: Boston Celtics (+6.9), won 4-1, by +10.0 points per game (+16.9 SRS eq)
Round 4: San Francisco Warriors (+5.1), won 4-2, by +6.7 points per game (+11.8 SRS eq)
Offensive / Defensive Ratings from Opposition Regular Season Average
Cincinnati Royals: +1.8 / -8.6
Boston Celtics: +11.5 / -3.5
San Francisco Warriors: +7.6 / 0.0
Shooting Advantage / Possession Advantage per 100 (unadjusted):
Cincinnati Royals: +0.7% / +9.4
Boston Celtics: +6.1% / -4.2
San Francisco Warriors: +6.2% / -8.6
Postseason Usage/Efficiency Change *not* adjusted for Opposition:
Wali Jones: +1.8% / +0.2%
Hal Greer: +1.9% / -2.3%
Chet Walker: +0.1% / -1.1%
Luke Jackson: -3.1% / -3.7%
Wilt Chamberlain: -0.1% / -9.1%
Billy Cunningham: +3.1% / -8.1%
Do you know who Wilt Chamberlain reminds me of? Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice (what’s that, Jane Austen has no place in an NBA-history discussion? I used this angle to get my wife to listen to 15 minutes about Wilt Chamberlain, so let’s have some respect for a miracle). Darcy is the male protagonist of the story (and endgame love interest). The thing about Darcy that’s interesting is that, instead of being a fixed point of masculine perfection that the female lead obsesses over, he actually quite alienates her. Darcy has many extraordinary qualities: he is extremely learned, he works constantly to improve himself, he is compassionate and nurturing to his family and those that depend on him and he is deeply motivated by fairness and justice. Those all sound great right? They are, yet Darcy manages to be quite rude and insulting to Elizabeth Bennet (the female lead), demonstrating callousness and arrogance in many of their interactions. Even when he declares his love for her, he spends maybe two sentences on that sentiment, and then spends the next ten minutes talking about how much her family sucks and how far beneath him she is. Sounds like a romantic dead end; what changes? The point where Elizabeth tells him exactly what a tool she thinks he is (I’m skipping over a lot). She tells him that he has behaved destructively, and that she might have felt bad in refusing him if he had “behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner” (this was a serious burn in 19th century England).
This absolutely blows Darcy away. First, because he’s a super-rich aristocrat who nobody *ever* contradicts. But second, because he works hard to be (and believes himself to be) an extremely moral person and a perfect gentleman. To be rebuked so openly and honestly throws him for a loop. And he spends a lot of time thinking about it. When they reconcile later here is an excerpt of his speech:
“I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice though not in principle . . . I was given good principles but left to follow them in pride and conceit. Unfortunately . . . I was spoilt by my parents, who, though good themselves . . . allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing . . . to think meanly of all the rest of the world, to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own. What I do not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.” (I pruned a lot of the speech.)
So, to recap. Darcy is blessed with looks, principles, brains and wealth. And his parents (scrupulously good people) inadvertently spoil him with love and acclaim. His gifts blossom with effort and grace. And yet his default approach is to celebrate himself, his class and his abilities at the expense of others. And amazingly, he doesn’t see this as wasting his gifts but as appropriate acknowledgement of them. If you are foremost in an aristocracy, is it not natural to the success you have earned? And he would likely have continued that way, had not a harsh voice taught him that the paths he thought were furthering his principles were actually betraying them.
Wilt Chamberlain didn’t start off as a basketball player. Instead he was an excellent track and field athlete. But he grew tall quickly; he was 6 foot at age 10 and 6’11” by the time he got to high school. He was incredibly tall, strong and athletic. Professional basketball had seen tall players before, but rarely athletes of Wilt’s caliber. And in high school? Forget about it. He single-handedly led his team to the local championship game where the other school quadruple-teamed him, and despite his 29 points his team lost 54-42. The next year his team won the local championship, and he scored 32 points in the game and leading his team to an undefeated season. Red Auerbach, seeing the talented youth, had him play one on one against the Most Outstanding Player of the 1953 NCAA Finals, B.H. Born. Chamberlain (as a sophomore) destroyed Born 25-10 and Born would decide not to go into the NBA, reasoning “If there were high school kids that good, I figured I wasn’t going to make it to the pros”. But Born, of course, was wrong. To paraphrase Jaime Lannister, there were no other men like Wilt. There was only Wilt.
After leading his team to yet another championship on the coattails of his dominance, Chamberlain went to play college basketball with the University of Kansas. He chose Kansas because he wanted to play for the great Phog Allen. However, Allen was to retire as the Jayhawks’ coach before the season, potentially depriving Chamberlain of an authority figure that would come to need. And Chamberlain feuded with Fogg’s replacement (this pattern, of finding an authority figure that he respected, only to have that figure leave and for Wilt to have issues with his replacement, would come up again). In his first game with Kansas he scored 52 points and grabbed 31 rebounds, both breaking school records. While at Kansas he also competed at track, winning the high jump in the Big Eight championships three years in a row. But in the title game Wilt would struggle.
Against the University of North Carolina he was always double-teamed *before he got the ball*. As soon as he got the ball a third Tar Heel would swarm over. His team struggled, and they went into the final seconds down by a point. The Jayhawks ran a play for Wilt to get the ball in the post for the last shot, but the pass was intercepted and the Jayhawks lost. Despite the loss Wilt won the Most Outstanding player award for his 23 points and 14 rebounds. Kansas had been a +8 SRS team before him, but in that first year they jumped to +21; the addition of Wilt was worth a 13 point swing for his team. In his junior year the entire NCAA started triple-teaming Wilt regularly, and despite this he averaged 30.1 points a game. But his squad finished short of making the tournament, and Wilt chose to leave college basketball to go professional.
So I want to point out some trends before we talk about the NBA.
First, Wilt was always the best. Always. Not only was he always the best, but he was always the best by a mile. He was 6’11” as a freshman in high school for crap’s sake! And yet he was so athletic and coordinated that he was an extremely competitive track athlete at Kansas. And he had a variety of effective moves, from finger rolls to fadeaways. With his height, length, strength and vertical he was pretty much automatically the best rebounder and best shot-blocker that anybody had ever seen. And with his skill he was an unstoppable scoring force. His addition turned Kansas from a 6-6 team to the 2nd best team in the country. It is impossible to overstate just how much better he was than everyone. And opposing defenses would do anything to stop him. In high school in the championship he was quadruple-teamed. In the NCAA championship game he was double/triple teamed the entire game. In his junior year he was triple teamed almost every game.
You know what’s crazy? He was still scoring 30 a game and his teams still usually won.
The positive spin is this: Wilt was so incredibly dominant that triple-teaming him could only hold him to about 30 points a game.
The negative spin is this: in a situation where Wilt’s teammates were playing 4 on 2 for most of the game, Wilt’s solution was still to keep trying to score.
I cannot imagine that trusting his teammates at all would have been intuitive for Wilt. This isn’t like Jordan at UNC, where he was clearly gifted but on a team of strong players with a senior no-nonsense coach. Wilt’s supremacy turned mediocre teams into the best team in the league. Without Wilt, his teams wouldn’t be anywhere. So it would have been clear that his teammates weren’t remotely close to him; his teammates were just ordinary high-school / college schlubs and Wilt was basically playing real-life NBA Jam. It is telling that nobody tried to stop him from trying to score through triple-teams (they no doubt thought that Wilt going 1 on 3 was more efficient than his teammates going 4 on 2, and they may have been right). And it’s notable that in the final moment of Wilt’s first NCAA championship game that his team lost, not because he missed the shot against three defenders, but because his teammate’s pass to him was intercepted.
Do you see the Darcy parallels? Wilt is given these incredible gifts to help his team win. But in encouraging him to improve and grow (and help his team), his environment basically taught him that the best thing he could do for his team was to ignore them and score as aggressively as he could. Compare this with Russell who only made his High School team through the charity of his coach, and worked his butt off trying to add value to every part of his game. Believing that he would never be a star, Russell worked to be the ultimate role-player and prove himself that way. Both were trying to be the best possible for their team, but their backgrounds had taught them totally different things about how to do that.
In 1960 Wilt joined the Philadelphia Warriors. And he hit the NBA like an offensive lineman cannonballing into a backyard pool. He averaged 38 points a game and 27 rebounds a game, both leading the league, as a rookie (and both of which shattered the prior NBA records). And with his addition the Warriors jumped by 5 SRS. But it was almost all on the *defensive* side of the ball. The Warriors’ offense only bumped by one point per 100. At the end of the season Chamberlain surprised everybody by talking about retiring, frustrated by the double and triple teaming and the numerous hard fouls. He didn’t retire, but it is again telling. There’s a reason that scorers like LeBron and Magic Johnson never got double or triple teamed. If the player being doubled can pass out of it effectively, the double becomes considerably less effective. Even Shaq, rarely accounted a great passer, had a knack for passing out of doubles and repositioning until he could get a one-on-one shot. That Wilt complained about doubles so consistently suggested that, whether because of inclination of inattention, he didn’t pass out of them effectively. And so despite being the best scorer in NBA history to that point, his addition barely improved the offense.
Wilt’s scoring continued to blossom (culminating in his 50 point per game season in 1962), but let the record show that in his time in Philadelphia ‘62 was the only year where the team’s offense was even above average (+0.9 to be specific). He also demonstrated one of his less endearing habits, that he would comprehensively ignore a coach he didn’t like (his background had taught him, correctly, that he was too important to discipline). In ‘63 the Warriors were sold to another group of owners who moved the team from Philadelphia to San Francisco, and multiple players (notably Paul Arizin) retired rather than move. So the Warriors were rough for a year (though the next year he'd play for Alex Hannum, who rejoins this story later). Eventually, in the middle of the 1965 season, Wilt was traded to the new Philadelphia 76ers. The Sixers were a slightly below average team but with a lot of upside, with veteran Hal Greer and a lot of promising young players in Wali Jones, Chet Walker, Luke Jackson and Billy Cunningham. In the last game of the ‘65 playoffs coach Dolph Schayes ran the Warriors’ last play to Hal Greer and not Wilt (fearing Wilt’s poor free throw shooting). But, echoing his team’s loss in the NCAA Finals, the inbounds pass was intercepted and the Warriors were eliminated. In an interview afterwards Wilt lambasted his coach, his players and pretty much everyone involved with the NBA. He had been mocked for years for his inability to win despite his sensational scoring numbers, and yet in the clutch it seemed as though his teammates and coaches kept failing him. His frustration was understandable but its expression not helpful.
In their first full season together the team won 55 games and posted a +4.16 RSRS, losing in the Conference Finals to the Celtics. But the 55 wins conceals the problems the team faced. Wilt’s addition had helped the team’s offense . . . not at all. As in 1960, his addition helped his team’s *defense* (from +0.6 to -3.4). Also, Wilt disliked coach Dolph Schayes, bothered by disrespectful remarks Schayes had made when they had played against each other in the past. Compounding matters, Wilt refused to actually live in Philadelphia. He preferred to live in New York and commute to Philly, which meant that he was only available for training in the afternoons (while the team preferred morning practices). In the Conference Finals Wilt blew off multiple team practices which antagonized his teammates even more. In spite of this, Wilt posted an outstanding series while his teammates struggled.
In other words, the ‘66 Sixers were part of the dysfunctional cycle that characterized many of Wilt’s interactions with his team. Wilt is brought to a team to be the transcendent superstar to lead the team to greatness. Wilt puts up transcendent superstar numbers but feels as though he isn’t appreciated or supported enough (after all, how could he possibly be losing when putting up these numbers *unless* his teammates/coaches are to blame?) and so feuds with his coach and alienates his teammates, which implodes team performance, leading to loss which leads him to become more resentful and the cycle continues.
Sounds like a nightmare. Surely nothing good can be on the horizon for the ‘67 Sixers, right? You’d be forgiven for thinking that. Instead the following all happened the next season:
- Wilt praised his teammates, calling Luke Jackson “the ultimate power forward”, Hal Greer a deadly jumpshooter and Wali Jones an excellent defender and outside scorer;
- Wilt began to take his teammates out to dinner and pick up the tab, since his salary was greater than that of the entire rest of the team;
- Hal Greer spoke of Chamberlain as a leader, saying “You knew in a minute the Big Fella was ready to go . . . and everybody would follow.”
*Completely* unrelated to the above, the ‘67 Sixers went on to post the best regular season record and RSRS in the shot clock era to that point. So what in name of Jane Austen/NBA analogies happened? The same thing that happened to Mr. Darcy; he got told off by somebody he respected.
In 1967 they added a new coach, Alex Hannum. Hannum had coached Wilt in San Francisco. He was a crafty psychologist and understood Wilt well. He knew that Wilt, whose basic assumption was that he had more power than the coach and so was beyond reproach, would never respect a passive authority figure. So when Hannum took over he called a locker room meeting and laid it all out there, every issue with the team he saw over the last season. And many of these problems, understandably did not cast Wilt in the best light. So wounding were some of Hannum’s observations that teammates several times had to hold Wilt back to prevent a fistfight. Despite the fact that Wilt could certainly have pounded him into sticky goo Hannum never backed down, which earned Wilt’s respect. Later, when tempers had cooled, Hannum told Wilt that they both wanted to win a title, but that Wilt wasn’t acting in the ways best designed to do that. He needed Wilt to support his teammates, to shoot less and pass more. To take advantage of the attention the defense gave him by setting his teammates up more. And to ‘act like a man’ with more professional conduct. Wilt bought in.
Before we talk about the significance of that and how it affected the team, let’s clear up some misconceptions about Wilt. Given that he put up such insane scoring numbers it would be natural to think that he was taking a shot every time his team brought the ball up. But that wasn’t the case. Using a back-of-envelope formula to estimate the percentage of his team’s shooting possessions that Wilt used, he peaked at 36% in 1962 (the year of 50 points per game) and spent 3.5 seasons above 30%, though 1961 and 1966 both had him in the high 20s. That doesn’t sound crazy high. Compare this to Jordan, who took 40% of his team’s shooting possessions in ‘87, 35% in ‘88 and 34% in ‘91. In other words, Wilt at his most shot-takey shot about as often as Jordan, or a little less. How then did Wilt get 50 points a game? Easy, by playing in an era with many more possessions (so he could get more shots) and by playing the entire game every game. So Wilt, while taking a lot of shots, was hardly a historic ball-hog.
But there’s a little bit more to it than that. There are two ways in which a scorer can freeze out teammates. One is to take too many shots. The other is to be a ‘black hole’, scoring but not passing, taking but not giving. And this allegation against Wilt is entirely justified.
Some context:
Jordan averaged about 4.5 true shooting attempts per assist, though went as high as 5.3 in ‘93 and 7.2 in his insanely high-usage ‘87 season.
Kobe was as bad as 7 TSA per assist in ‘06, but spent ‘08-10 around 5.
Kevin Durant was as bad as 8.6 in his youth (2011) but by 2014 he was down to 4.6.
Noted “Black Hole” Kevin McHale averaged around 7 TSAs per assist during his peak.
Dwight Howard during his peak was around 10.
The worst big scorer I could find was Moses Malone, whose ‘79 through ‘83 put up eye-bleeding numbers between 11.4 and 16.4.
Playoff LeBron in Cleveland was in the mid-Twos
So that’s our frame of reference. Even “ball-hoggy” high usage players like Jordan and Kobe still dish an assist for every 7 shots *at their worst* and more often are around 5. Unskilled finishers can be as high as 10, or even in the low teens like Moses. That’s what we’re looking at.
From 1960 to 1962 Wilt’s rate was 18.6 TSA per assist. Holy balls. So he was taking shots like Jordan, but was passing even less per shot than Moses Malone (and that’s saying something). It is *this* that substantiates accusations against him of playing selfish offense. It’s not that he took too many shots. It’s that if you passed him the ball you’d never see it again. In ‘63 he dropped to 11.9, and in ‘64 (his first year with Alex Hannum in San Fran) he got as low as 6.8. In 1966 he had been as low as 5.8. So his offense had gradually moved from ‘the most epic of black holes’ to passing with about Kevin McHale levels of frequency, which isn’t good but isn’t awful either. In 1967, after his talk with Hannum, his TSA per assist dropped to 2.4, LeBron rates of passing (he used around half the possessions of LeBron, but in terms of what they were likely to do when they got the ball they were similar).
Let’s look at all of his teammates and what this change meant. We are lucky because the Sixers had the exact same Top 6 from ‘66 to ‘68, so we have consistent data here. Here is every player, their ages in those years, their ‘Load’ (this is the Backpicks stat to be clear) and their true shooting relative to league average:
Wali Jones (23-25):
Load: 23.2 -> 28.4 -> 29.3
rTS%: -7.5% -> -0.7% -> -5.2%
So hitting ‘67, Jones suddenly jumps in usage and makes a massive 6.8 point leap in shooting efficiency. The change mostly disappears in ‘68.
Hal Greer (29-31):
Load: 30.8 -> 30.2 -> 31.6
rTS%: +1.7% -> +1.7% -> +3.1%
Greer’s numbers are unchanged.
Chet Walker (25-27):
Load: 25.3 -> 27.9 -> 27.4
rTS%: +2.7% -> +6.4% -> +2.3%
Chet Walker saw a massive 3.7% jump in his age 26 season, but came right back in ‘68.
Luke Jackson (24-26):
Load: 19.9 -> 21.5 -> 20.5
rTS%: -2.8% -> -0.6% -> -2.7%
Luke Jackson saw a 2.2% jump in ‘67, but regressed in ‘68.
Billy Cunningham (22-24):
Load: 31.2 -> 36.1 -> 35.3
rTS%: -1.3% -> +2.0% -> +0.1%
In ‘67 Cunningham’s usage and efficiency both jumped, but in ‘68 he regressed.
Wilt Chamberlain (29-31):
Load: 37 -> 30 -> 32.2
rTS%: +6.0% -> +14.4% -> +5.9%
And Wilt took fewer shots, but made them at an incredibly efficient rate.
The Sixers’ offense exploded in ‘67, jumping from +0.4 to +5.4 with the *exact* same personnel. And every single player (minus Hal Greer) jumped in efficiency (even while increasing their usage). And this is in the exact same season where Wilt increased from Kobe levels of passing to LeBron levels of passing. Do I think that Wilt drove this change?
Yeah. I do. Sure the players were all at the right age for a big step forward. But they all fell off a cliff again in ‘68, indicating that it wasn’t about them. This is the *one* season where the roster can’t shut up about what a great teammate Wilt is, and Wilt transforms from taking 26% of his team’s shots in ‘66 to 17% of his team’s shots in ‘67. Suddenly Wilt was focusing on defending and rebounding, passing when his teammates were open but destroying the opposition if he wasn’t doubled (+14.4% efficiency!?!). Wilt ultimately wanted to win, he’d always wanted to win. But like Mr. Darcy, he’d been led to follow that goal in pride and conceit. And it took Alex Hannum (Elizabeth Bennet in this analogy) to give him a reality check, to show him that the best version of him wasn’t about him at all. It was a lesson Wilt took to like a duck to water . . . for a time.
The Sixers won 68 games and posted a +8.5 RSRS, both leading the league. In the first round they played the average Cincinnati Royals. The Sixers obliterated them by 12.5 points a game. Granted that Oscar averaged a 25/4/11 on +12.4%, but the Sixers owned possession, taking an extra 11 shots a game and Wilt averaged a 28/27/11 (WTF!?!?!?!) on +9.3%. It was an easy matchup but handled well. And in the Conference Finals was the clear other best team in the league, the Boston Celtics.
The Celtics (+6.9) were no joke. They had just won the last hundred league titles, and were looking to make it a hundred and one. The Sixers crushed them, winning 4-1 by ten points a game. They exposed the Celtics’ weak shooting (-4.7% as a team, and even Sam Jones shot -6.9%). Wilt averaged a 22/32/10 on +7.1% while Hal Greer averaged a 29/3/5 on +1.1% and Chet Walker a 21/7/1 on +8.6%. And the Celtics weren’t injured. There was no asterisk here. The Sixers just won. By a lot. This was only the second time in Bill Russell’s career that he had lost in the playoffs, and he was injured for the first. Russell acknowledged that this was his first real loss, and he praised Wilt’s role in the team that had beaten him.
In the NBA Finals the Sixers faced +5.1 San Francisco Warriors. Though clearly worse than the Celtics, the Warriors were a challenging matchup. They had center Nate Thurmond who, though not a strong scorer, was accounted by many to be the best defender of opposing centers in the league (unless that was Chamberlain himself). Thurmond did what Russell had not, which is to limit Wilt. Wilt averaged a 18/29/7 on +0.4%, a shadow of his numbers in the other series. But the rest of his team picked up the slack, Greer averaged a 26/8/6 on -2.9% and Chet Walker averaged a 23/9/3 on +4.8%. Most importantly, the Sixers’ defense really shut down the Warriors’ offense. Rick Barry’s impressive 41/9/3 was bought with -3.4% shooting and only one Warrior at all shot above league average. The Sixers didn’t blow them out, but prevailed in six by 6.7 points a game.
The Sixers had won a championship. It would be the only time in the 60s that a team besides the Celtics won. And they did it in grand fashion, by blowing out the Celtics by 10 points a game. Wilt had embraced playing as part of a team and that act had turned the Sixers into overwhelming champions.
11 | 76ers
10 |
9 |
8 |
7 |
6 |
5 | Celtics
4 | Warriors
3 |
2 |
1 |
0 | Hawks
-0 |
-1 | Royals, Lakers
-2 | Knicks
-3 |
-4 | Pistons
-5 | Bulls, Bullets
-6 |
-7 |
-8 |
-9 |
-10|
1967 is accounted a pretty non-competitive year (on par with 2016 or so). The league had just an expansion team (which doesn't sound like much, but going from 9 to 10 is like adding 3 teams in a 30-team league). Really, there were only three good teams in the entire league. There were no truly garbage teams, just a steady diet of badness. Only the Sixers, Celtics and Warriors were any good. And the Sixers were way, way, way ahead of everyone else (have smoked the other two good teams in the league will do that).
I’ll be honest. I am a lot more scandalized by this ranking than by the ‘72 Lakers’. The Lakers played a lot of tough teams, but (with the exception of the Bulls) didn’t look particularly good in their wins. In contrast, the Sixers completely vaporized the Celtics. The ‘67 Sixers were *by far* the most dominant team in the 60s. Not close. If I was making the list subjectively they’d make the Top 10 easily and I wouldn’t hesitate.
It’s easy to see why the formula likes them. Their regular season was very strong and their PSRS was outstanding. They played the other best teams in the league and beat them decisively. But the formula only puts them at 15th. Why? I’d love to say that adding a round of playoffs would help them, but it wouldn’t by much (if I added a five-game series at the same PSRS it’d bump them to 13th). I can’t say that they should have gotten a first-round to beat a weak team, as in ‘67 they let 8 of the 10 teams into the playoffs, so their first round matchup was plenty weak. So what gives?
I can speculate. Their regular season, though excellent, wasn’t quite as good as some (they’re only 9th of the top 15 teams in RSRS) and the same with their playoffs (11th of 15 in PSRS). I don’t really know; maybe I disproportionately like this team. But I do.
When people point to Chamberlain’s 1962 season as evidence of his greatness it illustrates a strong disagreement on what greatness means. For them they’re either celebrating his individual achievements (which are incredible) or his incredible capacity (that he was capable of such things). For me, greatness is about helping your team. Wilt was great, but nowhere near as much as his individual stats suggested. But in 1967 Wilt blossomed into his most devastating form, an amazing defender and rebounder, who either set his teammates up or finished with incredible efficiency, whichever the defense allowed. ‘67 Wilt is one of the greatest seasons ever by any player, and it’s *that* player who should be in the GOAT conversation. Alas that he only played for one year.
Because in Pride and Prejudice, they can simply cut at the end of the reconciliation. In reality, Chamberlain started feuding with the owner of the 76ers, focused obsessively with assists as his new *individual* goal, his team suffered from injuries in the playoffs and they underperformed and Hannum left the team to move out west and Wilt got traded to the Lakers. Alas.
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