tsherkin wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:[quote="For Retro POY, every year you're having to get your head around the entire league. .
I see what you're saying, but it isnt quite that bad. It's more like 5-10 players per year, realistically. There are immense chunks of the league which can be immediately discarded each season. A quick pass will filter things down to a manageable level. No one is gonna look at the Bruce Bowens lr Shane Battiers lf the league in this context. Or the Mark Aguirre's, or Donn Nelsons, you know?
Ah, well I suppose my perspective is that to do it really well, you want to understand the team play of the season first and foremost just like we do when we evaluate play live during the season.
Let me go with something from the ‘45-46 NBL.
You can see by looking at the main bkref page for that season that the two-time defending champ Zollner Pistons had the best regular season record and that their star player Bobby McDermott won another MVP as a big scorer that year.
You’ll also see that the Pistons got upset in the playoffs and that McDermott had very low scoring numbers in that series.
Can you come up with a ranked list just based on that information? Sure.
Might it matter though why it was McDermott had low scoring numbers in that series?
What about the team that upset the Pistons and win the title (Rochester Royals), might it matter if one of their players was primarily responsible for McDermott’s performance?
I think it does, and that the deeper into history you want to be able to go, the more your ability to have a meaningful list is dependent on understanding context.
I don’t mean to be super-elitist here and say people can’t do what I think they need to do, but I do think people need to be expecting to really try to get all this context in their head if they want the project to be done well.
The reason why it’s not natural for this project to get re-done frequently compared to something like a Top 100 list is because there’s nothing new about these old years except possibly new information.
Hence, if it can’t be done better than was done before, why would we want to try replace the original?
Now, in practice, there’s nothing objective about which list will be “better”, and I wouldn’t want people to feel they can’t do this simply because they are insecure about their knowledge. But for anyone in that boat, I’d hope that they’d really be looking to learn all they can.
I ask the forbearance of folks here pertaining to my persnickety perspective here. The reason why I came up with the RPOY way back when was to create a project that allowed us to iteratively walk through the entirety of the history of the NBA in a way that GOAT lists and all-time projects did not, so I’m rather attached to it being a series of season deep dives.
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