70sFan wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:Re: Hakeem. In the era I'm talking about, Hakeem has an excellent case for being both the best offensive and defensive player in the NBA. You can certainly argue that his defense was even better when he was younger, but overall, his play with Rudy T seems to me clearly to be his best performance.
I don't think Hakeem has a strong claim for the best offensive player in the league in any of his years. I guess it's the matter of mediocre competition at his peak, but even then I don't see that. Hakeem was the kind of player that was absurdly good at some things, but had clear limitations in very basic offensive skills. He's notably weaker passer than most high volume post players, he doesn't draw a lot of fouls and his off-ball movement is quite mediocre (he has little value outside of occasional midrange jumpers coming off screens). On top of that, his decision making clearly improved under Rudy T, but he never really cleared it enough to say that stopped being his weakness.
Even with the absence of Jordan, was he really better than Barkley, Miller, Shaq? I don't think so.
By the way, wouldn't you say that with such loose criteria you can say the same thing about other bigs like Kareem, Duncan, Wilt or even Garnett?
So on offense, I should be clear that I'm thinking about the '94-95 post-season. Feel free to say some stuff about why that's not a fair sample - that's clearly a concern.
Second, I love that you're bringing up other players for comparison, and in particular I'm glad you're bringing up Reggie Miller, who I don't think most would realize deserves such consideration, but I sure think he does. In my post I said Hakeem had an argument not that it was definitive, and yeah, Miller has an argument for best offensive player basically for the duration of the Jordan Hiatus.
I must say that I'm pretty influenced by the combination of a) Hakeem's volume and b) the Rockets' ORtg.
On (a)
In '94-95, here are the players with the most 30 point playoff games:
1. Olajuwon 16 (in 22 games)
2. Jordan 5 (in 10 games)
(tie) Miller 5 (in 17 games)
(tie) Robinson 5 (in 15 games)
5. Shaq 4 (in 21 games)
Barkley 3 (in 10 games)
So, we're talking about a post-season where Olajuwon was just far more likely to break 30 points on any given night than anyone else.
Let me also note that 16 is the record in NBA history, matched only by Jordan in '91-92, who also played 22 games that year.
Further, the list is largely dominated by perimeter players. For perspective, there are 20 post-seasons in history where players have scored 30+ in 12 or more games (earliest being Baylor in '61-62, 12 in 13 games, which shows why there's going to be a bias toward more recent players who play longer post-seasons). Here are the seasons that make that list as bigs:
1. Olajuwon '94-95 (16 in 22 games)
9. Giannis '20-21 (13 in 21 games)
(tie) Shaq '99-00 (13 in 23 games)
/end
Now, I'd be misleading if I didn't include some other all-time bigs with their top performances by this (very coarse) metric:
Kareem '79-80 (11 in 15 games) (Also in '73-74 in 16 games)
Wilt '61-62 & '63-64 (9 in 12 both times)
Mikan '49-50 (8 in 12)
Of course everyone should consider all sides of this sort of data, along with its weaknesses, but the thing that strikes me here is this:
It's unusual for a player to so reliably score beyond that threshold, and all the more so among bigs. While what I present probably would not convince a Kareem or Wilt supporter that Olajuwon's offense was more impressive, it at least makes clear why he belongs in a certain conversation.
(b)
I always try to look at team success context when evaluating players. When you do this, of course, winning bias is a concern, but that doesn't mean not doing this is without harm.
In particular, something that's been a recurring theme throughout the history of the big man in basketball is a situation where the big man scores a lot, and even scores a lot on high relative efficiency, and yet the team offense is stagnant. (This is literally something the Minneapolis Lakers had to work to figure out, because at first the team got worse when Mikan joined despite him putting up eye-popping numbers.) (I'll add that this is a criticism I have had of the WNBA since I started turning a more critical eye over there.)
And so in '94-95, we have these Rockets. 115.2 ORtg in the playoffs - a higher mark than anyone achieved in the regular season.
Looking at their others against mutual opponents, the Rockets have a massive ORtg edge over those who played against their Western Conference opponents, and a massive edge over all who played the Orlando Magic...except Miller's Indiana Pacers.
Considering more closely the Pacers, let's remember that Miller was the original Steph Curry and Shaq was Shaq. This would not be the first nor the last time a Shaq-defense struggled with a Reggie-offense, and while Reggie deserves a lot of credit for it, I think the matchup edge for Reggie is pretty clear - bigs too big get exploited by outside shooting.
The Rockets of course also had a lot of outside shooting, and that was certainly key to their success...but if you're the Magic, you certainly think you're more prepared for an interior big-oriented offense, and the Dream-centered offense proved quite effective there.
While I do hear the criticisms about Hakeem's passing limitations, those would bother me a lot more if I hadn't seen how well things seemed to thrive once you started embracing spacing around him.
Re: Barkley. I don't want to imply he didn't have a case here, but I do want to point out that teammate Kevin Johnson has a really strong case for being the better offensive performer in those playoffs, and this makes it really hard for me to side with Barkley - arguably the 2nd best offensive player on his own team - as the best offensive player in the entire NBA. Honestly, easy to imagine a universe where KJ scores 48 points in that last game instead of 46 (or Barkley scores 20 instead of 18), and KJ leads the team to a championship, earning him a place in the pantheon he never actually got.
Re: Shaq. It concerns me that the Magic were one of the worse offensive performers against the Rockets relative to the Suns and Jazz. While those other teams were loaded to be sure, so were the Magic. Between Penny, Grant, and a perspective on spacing that like the Rockets was very ahead of its time, to me this was about as good of an offensive supporting cast as Shaq could ask for, and it just doesn't seem like it reached a ceiling up there with the state of the art at the time.
Now as I say all of this, there's an elephant in the room pertaining to how strong the offenses were that post-season, and the fact that I'm championing Olajuwon as an all-around player rather than an offensive player.
You weighed in on your assessment that Olajuwon's defense was noticeably dropping off from the previous year, and I'm not looking to die on that hill.
In the end, what I see with Olajuwon is someone who proved himself extraordinarily capable on both sides of the ball within a duration where it's hard for me to definitively where the apex was. I'm set that Hakeem reached his peak with Rudy T, but narrowing it down beyond that is hard for me.
With all this discussion in mind, and with the way this project works, I'm frankly inclined to look around at what year of Olajuwon's others are picking, and so long as it's a Rudy T year, bending in that direction.
