Retro Player of the Year 2006-07 UPDATE — Tim Duncan

[AEnigma]

General Project Discussion Thread

Discussion and Results from the 2010 Project

In this thread we'll discuss and vote on the top 5 players and the top 3 offensive and defensive players of 2006-07.

Player of the Year (POY)(5) — most accomplished overall player of that season
Offensive Player of the Year (OPOY)(3) — most accomplished offensive player of that season
Defensive Player of the Year (DPOY)(3) — most accomplished defensive player of that season

Voting will close sometime after 10:00AM PST on Saturday, January 18th. I have no issue keeping it open so long as discussion is strong, but please try to vote within the first three days.

Valid ballots must provide an explanation for your choices that gives us a window into how you thought and why you came to the decisions you did. You can vote for any of the three awards — although they must be complete votes — but I will only tally votes for an award when there are at least five valid ballots submitted for it.

Remember, your votes must be based on THIS season. This is intended to give wide wiggle room for personal philosophies while still providing a boundary to make sure the award can be said to mean something. You can factor things like degree of difficulty as defined by you, but what you can't do is ignore how the player actually played on the floor this season in favor of what he might have done if only...

You may change your vote, but if you do, edit your original post rather than writing, "hey, ignore my last post, this is my real post until I change my mind again.” I similarly ask that ballots be kept in one post rather than making one post for Player of the Year, one post for Offensive Player of the Year, and/or one post for Defensive Player of the Year. If you want to provide your reasoning that way for the sake of discussion, fine, but please keep the official votes themselves in one aggregated post. Finally, for ease of tallying, I prefer for you to place your votes at the beginning of your balloting post, with some formatting that makes them stand out. I will not discount votes which fail to follow these requests, but I am certainly more likely to overlook them.

Contrarian votes can be and have been sincere, but they look a lot more sincere when you take the time to fully present your reasoning rather than transparently pretend nothing is amiss.

Vote sincerely. Do not move a player down in your voting to give another player an advantage. I would encourage every voter to give some explanations while they do their voting - but particularly if you have a top 5 that deviates strongly with the norm and you haven't expressed your thoughts on it earlier in the thread. If I'm not satisfied, I may ask you for more of an explanation - and it may come to actually booting people out of the project.

The rules here are that you've got to use the same type of thinking for all 5 votes. I understand putting more thought into #1 than #5, but I don't want PJ Brown votes. Voters do Brown type votes to give a guy an honorable mention. Makes sense if people only care about who finishes 1st, but I've been clear that I want to measure more than that. I've been trying to encourage literal "honorable mentions" to serve that purpose, and I'd ask that people use that as the way they honor guys who did something special but who aren't actually a top 5 guy that year.

There is a significant difference between a properly justified and internally consistent contrarian vote, and a vote whose purpose is to undermine the project itself. Ballots which threaten to do the latter and derail project discussion via blatant vote manipulation are liable to be tossed. If it happens twice, the offending poster will be removed from the project.

Current Voter List

Spoiler:

[lessthanjake]

As POY cases go for superstars that won a title, I think Duncan 2007 is on the weaker end. Which is often the case when a superstar wins a title near the end of their prime. He wasn’t quite as good as he was at his peak. He was still up there amongst the best few players in the NBA, but definitely more of an in-the-mix guy rather than one with a clear cut case for being the league’s best player. He also had a very good playoffs, but it wasn’t anything historically great and he struggled some offensively in the Finals and in the first round (though he was really good defensively in the Suns series—which probably was actually the most difficult/important one that year).

So it’s the type of year where I think it would’ve been *possible* for another player to take the #1 spot, despite one of the league’s best players winning the title while playing well in the playoffs. However, it’d still take something great to overcome Duncan, and I just don’t see it from anyone this year. Dirk was better than Duncan in the RS in my opinion, but he was bad in a first-round upset. Kobe was great that year and did really well to get an awful team to the playoffs, but his team lost in the first round, with him doing well but nothing crazy. LeBron was already one of the league’s best few players at this point and did make the Finals (including upsetting the now-Ben-Wallace-less Pistons), but it was actually one of his weaker regular seasons and he had a very rough Finals. Nash led the Suns to great offensive heights but not as high as in 2005, and the Suns went out in the second round with him not being quite as good in the playoffs as he’d been in 2005. The circumstances of the Suns going out is definitely controversial and it was a very close series but there’s a limit to how good Nash’s POY case can be when the only team the Suns beat in the playoffs was the awful-besides-Kobe Lakers. Meanwhile, Garnett is sitting there as a player who was still really good, but his team only won 32 regular season games, so he’s not actually a serious threat for the top spot.

Basically, I don’t think this was Duncan’s best season, and there’s some non-title-winning seasons from players that I think would go above what Duncan did this year, but I don’t think any such case exists in this year itself.

[One_and_Done]

This is going to be Duncan at #1 for me fairly easily. 2 to 5 is tougher. It was a bit of a down year for top 5 guys.

1. Duncan
2. Lebron
3. Nash
4. KG
5. Kobe

Duncan continued to be the best player in the league, and this year he had a better season overall than 06. The Spurs win the title and it's largely driven by Duncan. This is the last year of Duncan's prime, and the last year I'll be voting him #1. Duncan wasn't as good as he was in 03 or 04, but he does enough to finish #1 against this field of players. Really strong playoff performance too.

Lebron getting that Cavs team to the finals was an incredible carry job. Definitely not something Nash or KG could have done. Lebron isn't at his best yet, but he's getting there. I suspect he'd be my #1 for the following 9 years.

Nash and KG bring up the next 2 spots, for much the same reasons as in the previous threads. Nash was the best offensive player in the NBA, driving the best offense. If not for a superior Spurs team, the Suns win the title and he's the main reason why. KG was basically the same player as in previous years, his supporting cast just sucked. Tough to blame that on him.

Iffy about the Kobe vote, but Dirk had a pretty bad playoffs so tough to put him ahead. Wade missed a chunk of the season too.

[trelos6]

OPOY

1.Steve Nash. 19.8 pp75, +11.3 rTS%. Team rOrtg of +7.5. Best playmaker and passer in the league. 19.2, + 3% in playoffs. He was good in the playoffs, the Suns just couldn’t stop Duncan.

2.Dirk Nowitzki. 27.3 pp75 on +6.4 rTS%. Team rOrtg of +4.9. Playoffs? What playoffs?

3.Gilbert Arenas. 27.4 pp75 on +2.4 rTS%. Team rOrtg +3.7. Top 5 playmaker in the league. Barely beats out Lebron.


DPOY

1.Tim Duncan. 94 DRtg. Best defender on the second best defense.

2.Ben Wallace. Is now a Bull. Bulls have best DRtg in regular season.

3.Kevin Garnett. I wanted to give it to a Rocket. But there were too many options. So I fall back to old reliable. KG was still great, and it’s his final year without good teammates.

POY

1.Tim Duncan. 23.6 pp75 on +3.8 rTS%. Upped volume slightly in playoffs, on worse efficiency. Defense was still elite. Team rOrtg of +2.8. +2.78 OPIPM, +4.2 DPIPM, +6.98 PIPM. 21.12 Wins Added.

2.Steve Nash. +5.26 OPIPM, -0.9 DPIPM, +4.36 PIPM. 13.57 Wins Added. Great offensive engine.

3.Kobe Bryant. 29.8 pp75 on +3.9 rTS%. Team rOrtg of +2.2. Good playmaking season. Scored ok in playoffs, slight drop in efficiency.

4.Dirk Nowitzki. +5.02 OPIPM, +0.04 DPIPM, +5.07 PIPM, 14.88 Wins Added. Yes, he was upset in round 1, and he shot horribly. But still a great regular season.

5.Lebron James. +3.62 OPIPM, +1.76 DPIPM, +5.39 PIPM. 21.18 Wins Added. 26.5 pp75 on +1.1 rTS%. Volume and efficiency both go down in playoffs. Team rOrtg of -0.9. Growing as a playmaker and passer. Improved defensively.

[AEnigma]

Defensive Player of the Year

1. Tim Duncan
2. Ben Wallace
3. Shane Battier

No Bruce Bowen cannibalising here. Duncan was the best defender on a championship winning top two defence, and unlike Ben, he was still in prime form. I am fine defaulting to Ben as the runner-up, but the narrow first place defensive finish for the Bulls is misleading for those unaware that the Bulls were a top five defence before he arrived. As a regular season, it was nothing impressive by Ben’s standards… but in the postseason, no other candidate for this spot stood out the way Ben consistently did.

With Battier playing around 3000 minutes and leading a top three defence despite Yao missing half the season, he earns the distinction of top non-big. Also telling how the Grizzlies completely collapsed upon his exit. The other main contender here for me was Camby, but nothing about his season was impressive enough to excuse the worse impact metrics, worse team defence, worse postseason defensive performance, significantly fewer minutes played… And them Garnett again held back by total irrelevance.

Offensive Player of the Year

1. Steve Nash
2. Lebron James
3. Dirk Nowitzki

Everything from 2005/06 still applies to Nash, and I assess this as his peak season.

I discuss Lebron in subsequent posts throughout this thread, but short of it is that while he may not have been a top three contender for this ballot in the regular season, because Dirk and Kobe (the only other players I would confidently mark as more offensively impactful in the regular season) were easy first round exits, I would rather acknowledge the best offensive player in the conference and the one who brought a moribund offensive cast to the Finals. And then Dirk’s regular season was sufficiently impressive to make up for the fact that Kobe performed better than he did in a five-game postseason loss.

Also considered Kobe Bryant (great regular season), Baron Davis (great postseason but a lot of missed time in the regular season), and Deron Williams (great conference finals).

Player of the Year

1. Tim Duncan
2. Steve Nash
3. Lebron James
4. Dirk Nowitzki
5. Kobe Bryant

In 2005 I had Nash and Duncan as my top two, and I said they would again be my top two in 2007. Both had better individual seasons this year (in my opinion), but Duncan gained more comparatively by playing more and being more clearly his team’s top postseason performer, while Nash had an earlier exit and a less accomplished regular season. Accordingly, Duncan secures the top spot.

Lebron was far and away the most impressive player in his conference, and with Dirk falling flat in the postseason and Kobe generally irrelevant (and Garnett even more irrelevant), he is able to climb up to third. This is still early prime, but flashes of what he would soon become are in that legendary Pistons series. Finals was rough but far more impressive than the box score would suggest; I would take it over most Larry Bird series, as a point of comparison, and there is a reason all the Spurs were deeply impressed despite the sweep.

I do not think Dirk was demonstrably “better” than Duncan and Nash were in the regular season, but the goal is to win, and clearing the Suns by 6 wins with a less facially impressive cast (in contrast to 2006) earned Dirk a deserving MVP… but because the goal is to win, he also needs to be penalised for a historic first round upset. Yes, the Warriors were a terrible matchup, and yes, they had Dirk’s old hall-of-fame coach, and yes, at full health the Warriors were a pretty good team. However, the 2007 Mavericks remain the only team with a .775 win percentage to be eliminated in the first round (1947 Capitols had a bye), and that inherently undermines most of Dirk’s regular season achievement.

Less impressed by this Kobe season compared to last year, but cannot find it in me to take someone like Baron Davis over him (or over Dirk, despite the egregious upset loss).

[falcolombardi]

OPOY

1-nash no brainer, i have wrote a lot about nash before as a once in a generation talent (shooting, passing, handles, motor all being near percentile 100) only -limited- by lack of size or atletism but it was more so a issue defensively

2- lebron. I dont think his offense is yet so resilient that i normally would get him above prime kobe/dirk yet....but dirk had a unusually bad performance in a huge upset loss specifically caused by a (underated) team finding a way to disrupt him and kobe was a 1st round exit and didnt have the gaudy scoring numbers of previous year as a silver lining achievement

Lebron individually and the cavs collectively led a less impressive offense than in 2006, but had a really good playoffs run with a offense that went as far as 21 years old lebron could take it (it stopped at spurs atg defense)

3- dirk. Incredible regular season achievement leading a so-so roster to a crazy record on the back of game breaking (for that era even mpre so) offensive mismatch dirk put on team defenses

HM:kobe. He didnt get upset the way dirk did but still went as far as nowitsky did with a worse reg season

DPOY
1- duncan. Not necesarrily his best individual year. But an average prime duncan year goes a long way when paired with team overall and defensive greatness

2- ben wallace. Prefer garnett overall but ben led a impressive bulls defense this year

3- garnett. Wanted to reward a bettee unit (battier has been mentioned as a very worthy pick) but is hard for me to not go with an atg defensive big compared to a great wing

HM: shane battier is a good call based on his team performance

POY

1-duncan. Most likely best player in the league and won a ring, relatively average level 1st place poy winner here

2- nash, incredible player and may be above lebron if he just switched conferences with lebron (he got closer to beating spurs) i am unsure how to evaluate his defekse compared to 2007 lebron but my instint is that it is not enough yet to overcome nash offensive advantage at his peak vs a pre prime lebron

3- lebron. The playoffs run was great, the reg season less so but still was a top of the top player there

4- dirk, fwiw he was still the regular season best player and there are not that many superstars with impressive playoff runs or play

5- kobe almost by default as he and garnett are (and wade if he was healthy) the only superstar level players who can claim the 5th spot left and kg was saddled in a loterry team

[Djoker]

With all due respect, how is Lebron getting #2 in OPOY this year? The Cavs had a -0.9 rORtg in the RS then -2.8 rORtg in the PS. The Cavs got to the Finals more thanks to their defense (and some soft East competition) not Lebron's offensive mastery.

[Homer38]

With all due respect, how is Lebron getting #2 in OPOY this year? The Cavs had a -0.9 rORtg in the RS then -2.8 rORtg in the PS. The Cavs got to the Finals more thanks to their defense (and some soft East competition) not Lebron's offensive mastery.

The cavs had a complete garbage supporting cast on offense that year...THey could not score with LeBron on the bench.

99.9 offensive rating with LBJ on the bench,3 points less that the pacers,the worst offense in the NBA in 2007.The difference was even bigger in the playoffs

[AEnigma]

Interesting comment two threads removed from caring deeply about the offensive strength of Nash’s supporting cast.

[One_and_Done]

Interesting comment 1 thread removed from telling us Wade was POY, because he apparently was the reason the Mavs had such a drop in Ortg. Maybe he needed to be DPOY last year too.

[AEnigma]

Interesting comment 1 thread removed from telling us Wade was POY, because he apparently was the reason the Mavs had such a drop in Ortg. Maybe he needed to be DPOY last year too.

Can you quote where I said he was responsible for the drop in Ortg?

[One_and_Done]

Interesting comment 1 thread removed from telling us Wade was POY, because he apparently was the reason the Mavs had such a drop in Ortg. Maybe he needed to be DPOY last year too.

Can you quote where I said he was responsible for the drop in Ortg?

Never said you did. If the Mavs play at the same offensive level vs the Heat as in the first 3 rounds or RS, do the Heat win?

[AEnigma]

Interesting comment 1 thread removed from telling us Wade was POY, because he apparently was the reason the Mavs had such a drop in Ortg. Maybe he needed to be DPOY last year too.

Can you quote where I said he was responsible for the drop in Ortg?

Never said you did. If the Mavs play at the same offensive level vs the Heat as in the first 3 rounds or RS, do the Heat win?

I do not know, I am here to vote based on what actually happened, and what happened is that Wade won a title with consecutive spectacular performances upsetting a 64-win Pistons core (which had won the conference the previous two years) and upsetting the 60-win western conference winning Mavericks.

[penbeast0]

Best record in the league was Dallas with Dirk being voted the MVP but a shocking 1st round loss to GSW. The other two top teams were Phoenix still rocking the Nash, Marion, Amare trio with extra shooters on the side to the best offense in the league and NBA champion San Antonio countering with Duncan, Manu, and Tony Parker as the West was considerably stronger than the East.

Other contenders include best in the East Detroit (Billups, Hamilton) despite losing Ben Wallace and Rasheed declining, Houston with Tmac and half a season (plus playoffs) of Yao Ming, Utah (Carlos Boozer and Deron WIlliams), eastern finalist Cleveland with LeBron, Chicago (now with Ben Wallace and the best Drtg in the league), and Toronto (Chris Bosh).

Marcus Camby got DPOY in a widely questioned decision, Kobe led in scoring, Garnett in rebounding, Nash in assists. Box score compilation stats had Dirk as the best player with two 1sts and 2 2nds of the 4 major compilation stats with DWade having the top PER (LeBron not top 5) and LeBron the top VORP (Wade not in top 5).

PLAYER OF THE YEAR
1. Tim Duncan
2. Dirk Nowitzki
3. Steve Nash
4. LeBron James
5. Chauncey Billups

[One_and_Done]

Can you quote where I said he was responsible for the drop in Ortg?

Never said you did. If the Mavs play at the same offensive level vs the Heat as in the first 3 rounds or RS, do the Heat win?

I do not know, I am here to vote based on what actually happened, and what happened is that Wade won a title with consecutive spectacular performances upsetting a 64-win Pistons core (which had won the conference the previous two years) and upsetting the 60-win western conference winning Mavericks.

Why you won seems awfully relevant to what actually happened.

[Djoker]

With all due respect, how is Lebron getting #2 in OPOY this year? The Cavs had a -0.9 rORtg in the RS then -2.8 rORtg in the PS. The Cavs got to the Finals more thanks to their defense (and some soft East competition) not Lebron's offensive mastery.

The cavs had a complete garbage supporting cast on offense that year...THey could not score with LeBron on the bench.

99.9 offensive rating with LBJ on the bench,3 points less that the pacers,the worst offense in the NBA in 2007.The difference was even bigger in the playoffs

No one is expecting them to be like a +7 rORtg offense or something...

They had a negative rORtg in both the RS and the PS which is just horrible. By the way, with Lebron ON, they were still just +1.2 rORtg in the RS and -1.5 rORtg in the PS. Still really bad in the playoffs.

[AEnigma]

So why did you vote 1988 Jordan as OPoY above 1988 Magic when he led a mere +1.0 regular season offence and a bad -2.6 postseason offence?

[AEnigma]

Never said you did. If the Mavs play at the same offensive level vs the Heat as in the first 3 rounds or RS, do the Heat win?

I do not know, I am here to vote based on what actually happened, and what happened is that Wade won a title with consecutive spectacular performances upsetting a 64-win Pistons core (which had won the conference the previous two years) and upsetting the 60-win western conference winning Mavericks.

Why you won seems awfully relevant to what actually happened.

It is, but not in the way you use it where what actually happened no longer matters because any failings/successes that do not correspond with your internal player rankings are automatically attributed to teammates.

[lessthanjake]

Never said you did. If the Mavs play at the same offensive level vs the Heat as in the first 3 rounds or RS, do the Heat win?

I do not know, I am here to vote based on what actually happened, and what happened is that Wade won a title with consecutive spectacular performances upsetting a 64-win Pistons core (which had won the conference the previous two years) and upsetting the 60-win western conference winning Mavericks.

Why you won seems awfully relevant to what actually happened.

Two things:

1. Does it occur to you that different series are played differently and some just have much more intense defense from both sides (whether due to officiating, tactical decisions by the coaches, the focus of the players shifting due to matchup differences, etc.)? This seems pretty obvious to me from having watched lots of playoff basketball. Some series are just grinds, while others definitely are not. In the context of a Finals series in which both teams struggled far more offensively than they had in prior rounds—despite having faced stronger regular season defenses in those prior rounds—it seems obvious that that’s a huge part of what’s going on here. And that’s consistent with my recollection as well. So it really doesn’t seem fair to suggest the Mavs simply “choked” and use that as an excuse to give Wade less credit, when the evidence for the Mavs choking is really just that the series as a whole had a very grindy tenor.

2. Leaving aside the above point, if the Mavs scored as well as they had scored in prior rounds and everything else was held constant, then obviously the Mavs would’ve won. But why are you holding everything constant? Why aren’t you also assuming that the Heat supporting cast scores as well as they had scored in prior rounds? If that were the case, there’s a pretty good chance the Heat still win in this hypothetical, because of how well Wade did! You seem to just want to be creating a skewed hypothetical world and then to use that fictional reality to downplay someone who had a better POY case than Duncan. Meanwhile, back to what happened in reality, if underperforming prior rounds offensively amounts to “choking,” then both the Mavs and the Heat supporting cast “choked,” which basically cancels out, and we are still left with Wade rising above the fray and winning the Finals for his team.

[One_and_Done]

The Mavs lost in large part because they scored poorly. If they score well, they likely win. Wade was not the reason they scored poorly. Seems relevant.

It is an odd approach to dismiss Lebron this year, because they 'won with D', then credit Wade last year when they also won with D (or just bad shooting from Dallas). I'm sure Lebron had alot more to do with Cleveland's D this year than Wade helped the Heat on D.