LA Bird wrote:All pioneers of the game and MVP point guards but in terms of their value as players, who is Cousy closer to? In the last RealGM list, Oscar was ranked 14, Cousy 63, and Davies/McDermott out of the top 100. Both Oscar and Davies have one season where they overlapped with Cousy on All NBA 1st team. McDermott never played in the NBA but he won four straight NBL MVPs in 1943-46 right before Davies so he played in a similar era too.
Sidenote: There were so many Bobs back then - McDermott, Davies, Cousy, Kurland, Feerick, Wanzer, Pettit. I can't remember a single Bob in the NBA in recent years besides Varejao's nickname of Sideshow Bob.
Love the thread. Okay so let's first distinguish:
You're asking about value/GOAT rankings rather than playstyle, but I actually want to get into both.
So on GOAT rankings:
I would rank Oscar way ahead of the other 3, which technically answers your question, but I'd be remiss if I didn't also say that I rank Davies ahead of Cousy.
I think you can definitely argue that Cousy's peak performance (early in his career) deserves to be ranked ahead of Davies, but even that's not so clear. Cousy peaked at around age 25, and when Davies was 25 he was in World War II. At age 26 I would consider Davies to have been the best offensive player in the professional world.
The big differentiator for me then is the fact that Cousy's style became extremely inefficient as he aged whereas Davies did not. Davies had a positive TS Add all the way to the end at age 35. Cousy on the other hand was never all that efficient and fell to major negative TS Add while still in his 20s. Yes the defensive focus of the Celtics played a role in this, but so did Cousy's tendency to chuck. Davies acted as an excellent volume scorer early in his career, but was one of those point guards who seemed to have an excellent sense of what was actually an efficient shot, and scaled down his volume gracefully as he aged.
Regarding McDermott: So much here depends here on how you evaluate scale of accomplishment relative to the difficulty of the competition. McDermott was absolutely the top pro of the World War II era...during which most able-bodied men of pro basketball playing age were in the military.
In '45-46, when the boys (including Davies) come home from war, McDermott leads the best regular season team by record, but he gets stifled badly in the matchup against Davies' Royals because of the tough defense of Davies' teammate Al Cervi, and really after that McDermott exits the conversation of best pro in the game. Note that while McDermott is 32 at that time and thus was possibly "past his prime", Cervi was 29 and would continue to be seen as a dominant man defender until at least 33. So we're not really talking about McDermott getting surpassed by the next generation so much as the NBL being able to consolidate all the best white talent in the land after World War II, and once that happened, McDermott looked less impressive.
I'll also note that the player who was considered the greatest talent of the era - Hank Luisetti both in between McDermott & Cervi - never played in the pros. He played some AAU ball - where you had a cushy job that paid the bills at a time when the actual pro leagues couldn't pay that much - and then he went off to World War II. Ned Irish, the king of Madison Square Garden and the original owner of the New York Knicks, is said to have been making plans to sign Luisetti when he came back and have him be the star of his team. Instead, Luisetti caught an illness in the military that ended up forcing him to retire.
All this to say that while McDermott technically dominated the pros in a fashion more complete than any of these other guys, the pro leagues really didn't have a monopoly on even the best white talent until after the war...and since McDermott's reign ends when the boys come home, I struggle to make the case for him over any of these other guys.
So my GOAT ranking of these 4 would be:
1. Oscar Robertson
2. Bob Davies
3. Bob Cousy
4. Bobby McDermott
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What about stylistically?
Well first, McDermott was totally different from the rest. The other 3 guys were playmakers first and foremost, while McDermott was the GOAT set shot shooter. McDermott's range went well past the modern 3-point line, which is certainly impressive, but as a 6'0" guy whose didn't use a jump-shot, it's easy to see why his game may not scale as the game got filled with bigger players who could jump higher. Cervi, the McDermott-killer, was only 5'11" (albeit with very long arms), so you could imagine what taller guys would be able to do.
Realistically if McDermott were going to survive in future eras he'd need to change his shot dynamics. Maybe he could, and maybe one could conclude that he did everything he needed to in his own era so there's no reason to criticize, but aside from the fact that he did get stifled by his contemporaries when they came back to war, there's also the matter that Luisetti was demonstrating much more modern shot taking in a taller, more athletic frame back in college in the '30s. Even in McDermott's heyday, he wasn't the perimeter scorer the basketball world was most excited by.
Between the 3-point guards, what's interesting here is that Davies & Cousy - both heavily influenced by Luisetti who was also an incredible ballhandler and passer - were very similar in their tendency to attack in transition, whereas Oscar was the slow-it-down control guy.
This eventually led to the conflict between Cousy & Oscar when Cousy coached Oscar. Cousy kept trying to get Oscar to attack faster, and he eventually traded Oscar away because he wouldn't do it. Cousy's time as a coach would be regarded as a humiliating failure and not just by others, but by Cousy himself.
Funny thing though: As much as Cousy seemed to coach as if he never understood that it was the Celtic defense that was really the value-add rather than the offense he led...the guy he effectively handed the reins to after Oscar - Tiny Archibald - really did lead a more effective ORtg than Oscar did. Take that for what you will.