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What time frame do you prefer to use when discussing peaks? 1-Year. 3-Years? 5 Years? 7-Years? 9-Years?

I think 2-3 years is perfect, unless you deal with injury-prone players.

2-3 years seems good.

Prime is like 5-10 years for me.

I think of peak as 1 year so you can get in the one year wonders; prime I tend to start at 8 years, much less than that is a "short prime" and much longer is "long prime."

1 year. A longer or shorter period is probably driven by something.

Consecutive Seasons Peaks, whether that's 2 years or 3 years.

1 Year Peaks is filled with fluke, unreliable production. 2017 Regular Season Isaiah Thomas looks like a better Offensive player than Kyrie ever was. 2003 Tracy Mcgrady looks like an historic level player when in reality Mcgrady who TS ADD never ranked inside the Top 60 of the league in any season outside of 2003, was just more of a slightly better version of Allen Iverson.

1 year is the definition of peak for me.

It really depends on the player and seasons.

While some can have a one year peak (T-Mac, IT4), others have a 2-3 run of extremely similar stats. I think 3 years is also good for playoffs, as the sample size is smaller, it ends up being around 60 games for 3 years of deep playoff runs.

1 season can be a flukey peak, but still a peak.

Contextually [within discussions] we hear it referred to for meaning anywhere from 1 year to 3-4 years.
When we do Peaks Projects here, we are specifically referring to a player's ONE best season......and thus that is the definition that I go by. And that fits with some players who have one season that is clearly better than any other (e.g. '03 TMac, '11 Rose, '00 Shaq, '16 Draymond, '77 Walton, '76 Dr. J).


For "prime", I don't like to settle on any one number, because I think it varies wildly by player [related to health]. For me, "prime" refers to the period of time a player is playing at their customary high level; not every year a peak, but generally each year within this period is not tremendously far off their peak.

But it can be super short (e.g. like 2 years in the case of Bill Walton), or something like 13 years (in the case of someone like Karl Malone), or even longer (LeBron or Kareem??).
I would say it USUALLY falls somewhere in the neighborhood of AROUND 8 seasons.......but again, highly variable.

Peak is one season.

Prime is very different for different players.

Special_Puppy wrote:What time frame do you prefer to use when discussing peaks? 1-Year. 3-Years? 5 Years? 7-Years? 9-Years?

First of all, in all other sports, and perhaps other venues than Real GM Forums, we call it "prime", rather than "peak" (which is reductive in that most people consider it only 1 single year.

"Prime" is usually 5-10 years (many people choose 6-7 years), because it measures so much more, and ergo is more valid, reliable, and more accurately representative of a player at their absolute best.