John Stockton is underrated here

[lessthanjake]

I’m interested in a discussion about John Stockton—who I think people on this particular forum underrate.

It seems to me that the data we have on Stockton looks incredible. There’s a lot of arguments made to undercut that data. And while there’s some truth to some of those arguments, I’m not really convinced by it overall.

Before delving into some of the counterarguments (in subsequent posts, for organization/length purposes), I will first present some of the data we have for Stockton—which pretty uniformly suggests he was an incredible player:

Play-By-Play Era RAPM

We have RAPM for Stockton from 1997 onwards, which encompasses him from ages 34-40. Despite these not being his best years, he looks incredible. Some examples of this:

NBArapm Website

On the NBArapm website, there’s “Pure RAPM” which they say includes playoffs and rubberband and fatigue adjustements. Stockton fares extremely well there. Here’s how Stockton ranks in the league in the various relevant timeframes:

NBArapm 5-year RAPM:
- 1997-2001: 2nd
- 1998-2002: 1st
- 1999-2003: 2nd
NBArapm 4-year RAPM
- 1997-2000: 4th
- 1998-2001: 1st
- 1999-2002: 1st
- 2000-2003: 3rd
NBArapm 3-year RAPM
- 1997-1999: 9th
- 1998-2000: 3rd
- 1999-2001: 1st
- 2000-2002: 1st
- 2001-2003: 5th
NBArapm 2-year RAPM
- 1997-1998: 8th
- 1998-1999: 6th
- 1999-2000: 2nd
- 2000-2001: 1st
- 2001-2002: 2nd
- 2002-2003: 26th

The NBArapm website also has a separate RAPM measure that they call “6Factor” RAPM. I think this one is from Engelmann, whereas the above-described one is developed by the creator of the website. This RAPM only exists from 2000 onwards, so it only captures Stockton aged 37-40. Given that it only actually has 4 years for Stockton, I’ll list below just the timeframes that Stockton fully played in (i.e. no five-year RAPM, since he didn’t play 5 years in any timespan this RAPM includes):

Six-Factor 4-year RAPM
- 2000-2003: 3rd
Six-Factor 3-year RAPM
- 2000-2002: 1st
- 2001-2003: 4th
Six-Factor 2-year RAPM
- 2000-2001: 1st
- 2001-2002: 1st
- 2002-2003: 13th

The Basketball Database

TheBasketballDatabase has a RAPM measure, which they describe as “vanilla RAPM” without any priors. Here’s how Stockton ranks in multi-year spans (not including their one-year version to save space and because multi-year is better for RAPM, but Stockton looks good there too):

TheBasketballDatabase 5-year RAPM
- 1997-2001: 1st
- 1998-2002: 1st
- 1999-2003: 2nd
TheBasketballDatabase 3-year RAPM
- 1997-1999: 5th
- 1998-2000: 3rd
- 1999-2001: 1st
- 2000-2002: 1st
- 2001-2003: 4th

There’s other RAPM measures too, but it’s all pretty consistent with the above—Stockton looks incredible in RAPM, even though he’s quite old in the years of his we have this data for.

Pre-Play-by-Play Partial RAPM and RAPM-like Measures

While we don’t have great pre-play-by-play RAPM data, we do have certain pieces of data that can give us an idea of whether Stockton’s 1997-2003 RAPM data is just a fluke. And that data indicates that it is not:

Squared RAPM

Squared has run partial RAPM for various years in the 1980s and 1990s. He put them together into one historical 1985-1996 RAPM. There’s not a whole lot of Jazz games in that data, so there’s certainly random variance at play (on top of it just being partial data to begin with), but Stockton is ranked 8th by that measure—behind only Jordan, Magic, Robinson, Kareem, Ewing, Hakeem, and Barkley. And the only people he’s behind by a considerable amount are Jordan and Magic. Meanwhile, he’s ahead of some great players, including Shaq, Bird, and Pippen, to name a few.

Quarter-by-Quarter RAPM Approximation

Engelmann ran a RAPM approximation for the 1990s, using quarter-by-quarter minutes and box score data. This is obviously an imprecise measure, though it is based on all game data. In any event, Stockton is ranked 9th in that measure—behind only Jordan, Magic, Bird, Shaq, Robinson, Pippen, Mourning, and Rodman.

FWIW, I will also note that if you took each players’ RAPM approximation and multiplied by their number of possessions (which is also listed in the measure), Stockton’s overall approximate RAPM value in the 1990s is only behind Jordan, Robinson, and Pippen.

In addition, I would point out that the only players ahead of Stockton in *both* the Squared partial RAPM and the Engelmann RAPM approximation are Jordan, Magic, and Robinson.

Play-by-Play Era Hybrid Measures

Multi-year RAPM is a good measure and partial/approximate RAPM measures are the best we have prior to the 1997 season, but the data picture also includes single-year box-impact hybrid metrics for the play-by-play era. And Stockton fares well in those too:

EPM

This is a really good hybrid measure, but it only exists from 2001 onwards (ages 38-40 for Stockton). Here’s how Stockton ranks in those years:

- 2001: 1st
- 2002: 4th
- 2003: 6th

DPM

This measure is meant for prospective purposes, so it’s not necessarily the best measure for retrospective analysis, but it does have data going back all the way through 1997. And here’s where Stockton ranks (again, at ages 34-40):

- 1997: 3rd
- 1998: 4th
- 1999: 3rd
- 2000: 3rd
- 2001: 3rd
- 2002: 5th
- 2003: 8th

Impact-Correlated Box Metrics

There’s also various box measures that are designed to correlate well with multi-year RAPM. I think these are an important part of the puzzle here, because if Stockton’s RAPM data was just an artifact of collinearity with Karl Malone, then we would expect his box data to not look nearly as good. If both his RAPM data and his box data suggests he’s very impactful, then explaining it away requires multiple explanations to explain away each of the different types of data. And we see that Stockton’s impact-correlated box data looks great too:

RAPTOR

RAPTOR in the tracking-data era is actually a proper impact metric, but it’s an impact-correlated box metric when you go further back than that. Here’s how Stockton ranked, starting in 1987, which was actually right before he became a star player:

- 1987: 4th
- 1988: 2nd
- 1989: 2nd
- 1990: 2nd
- 1991: 2nd
- 1992: 1st
- 1993: 3rd
- 1994: 2nd
- 1995: 1st
- 1996: 5th
- 1997: 2nd
- 1998: 3rd
- 1999: 2nd
- 2000: 2nd
- 2001: 1st
- 2002: 2nd
- 2003: 8th

Basketball-Reference BPM

Here’s how Stockton ranked in Basketball-Reference’s BPM. It’s not quite as high on him as RAPTOR, but it’s still really great:

- 1987: 8th
- 1988: 3rd
- 1989: 3rd
- 1990: 3rd
- 1991: 5th
- 1992: 3rd
- 1993: 5th
- 1995: 2nd
- 1996: 6th
- 1997: 5th
- 1998: 5th
- 1999: 6th
- 2000: 3rd
- 2001: 4th
- 2002: 9th
- 2003: 10th

Thinking Basketball BPM

Thinking Basketball has its own BPM. Frustratingly, I can’t seem to sort by year, so it’s very difficult to determine Stockton’s exact rank each year. But I can have it tell me his percentile each year in terms of individual years in NBA history, and it was the 93rd percentile in the 1987 season, followed by being the 98th or 99th percentile every year for the next decade except for one (it was only 96th percentile in 1993), followed by being 95th or 96th percentile every year after that until being 93rd percentile in Stockton’s last season. This is very impressive stuff. Just for reference, I went down the list to look for where Stockton ranked in the league that season in one of the 98th percentile years, and it was 3rd that year. So I think this is wholly consistent with the BPM and RAPTOR data listed above.

WOWYR

I don’t think WOWYR is a good measure for someone like Stockton—who barely missed time, and who even had a star teammate who also barely missed time. While the model does have some info to try to at least try to figure out the value of other players on their teams, there’s not much info with which to parse between them. That said, while it’s not worth much in this instance IMO, Stockton is ranked 5th all time in Thinking Basketball’s WOWYR.

WOWY

Stockton did not miss much time, so there’s not much of any WOWY to work with. However, there’s at least a tiny bit of data to look at:

- In 1997-98, Stockton missed 18 games. In those 18 games, the Jazz went 11-7 (50-win pace), with a +2.05 SRS. In the remaining 64 games with Stockton, the Jazz went 51-13 (65-win pace) with a 6.72 SRS. While those both look good, the SRS difference there is probably a better output to look at than the win-pace change, because those 18 games without Stockton were against an abnormally easy set of opponents. A +4.67 SRS WOWY impact is very good! And it’s especially good when this is a 35-year old Stockton, who was playing reduced minutes that year in the games he did play (i.e. his per-game impact was likely smaller than it would’ve been in previous years).
- Stockton also missed 4 games in 1989-90. In those games the Jazz went 2-2, despite three of them being against awful teams that didn’t even win 20 games that season. Their SRS in those games was -4.45, compared to an SRS of +5.30 in the 78 games with Stockton. Obviously this is a really tiny sample size, so it isn’t very meaningful, but still.
- If we put this together, in 22 games without Stockton, the 1990s Jazz had just a 0.87 SRS.

General Note about Longevity/Availability

It goes without saying that Stockton’s longevity and availability as a player weighs in his favor a lot for those who care a lot about accumulated impact. Stockton played in 1504 regular season games in his career. He barely missed any games, and while his minutes weren’t super high in his first several years and last several years, he ranks 10th in NBA history in minutes played. This ends up mattering a lot for accumulated impact/stats. For instance, Stockton’s career BPM is very high (8th all time), but his VORP (which is basically just an accumulated non-rate-stat version of BPM) is 3rd all time. The same sort of thing would be true of non-rate-stat versions of essentially any stat.

_________________________________

Okay, so the data on Stockton looks incredibly good across the board. Indeed, it’s consistent with him being a real top-tier all-time great. But there’s a lot of skepticism about that, and various arguments are made as to why we should not really believe the data on Stockton. As an initial matter, I want to note that when various forms of data all point in the same direction and it requires multiple different justifications to explain all of it away, we should probably avoid being too eager to assume those explanations are right. After all, the simplest explanation for a player having incredible-looking data across the board is that the player was just extremely good, rather than that there’s a series of different reasons why all that data happens to be misleading about this particular player. But it is at least *possible* that the data is all just biased in Stockton’s favor in different ways, so it seems worth going through some arguments I’ve seen against Stockton.

Since this post is already long, I will do this in subsequent posts—tackling one or two counterarguments per post (and 5 in total).

[lessthanjake]

1. Collinearity with Karl Malone

There’s an argument that Stockton’s great RAPM data is a product of collinearity with Karl Malone. The idea is that they spent a ton of time on the floor together and not much time on the floor without the other one, so RAPM models find it hard to parse which one was having the impact and that it ended up over-crediting Stockton.

As an initial matter, I will note that this argument can sometimes be used in a muddled way by people, where they try to discount *both* Stockton and Malone on this basis—which doesn’t make sense, since collinearity can’t inflate their collective impact beyond what it was, since the total impact is cabined by what the results on the floor were.

In any event, leaving that aside, I do think that collinearity is an issue when it comes to Stockton’s and Malone’s RAPM data. They played a lot of minutes together. That said, the reason Stockton comes out looking better than Malone in RAPM is because they did spend time on the floor without the other. Indeed, from 1997-2003, Stockton spent 2251 minutes without Malone, and Malone spent 6092 minutes without Stockton (the latter being higher primarily because Stockton’s minutes went down significantly after his 1997 injury, and he also missed 18 games). In a single season RAPM (or even a two-year RAPM), I think collinearity could/would be a serious issue with these two. But Stockton looks great over longer-term RAPM, where I think it’s hard to argue that there isn’t enough data with them off the floor from each other for the model to parse their respective impact.

Furthermore, if Stockton’s great RAPM data was just a product of collinearity, then we wouldn’t expect to see the same level of data in other measures. After all, WOWY and box measures don’t have collinearity issues. But in reality, as outlined above, the Jazz didn’t do all that well in games Stockton didn’t play, and Stockton’s impact-correlated box data looks great too. I will also note, on the WOWY issue, that Malone missed 9 games from 1988 through 2003, and the Jazz went 6-3, with +9.08 SRS in those games. And without end-of-season games, that would be 5-2 with a +12.63 SRS. Tiny sample, of course, but it does add at least a bit to the evidence suggesting collinearity is not the architect of Stockton’s great data.

2. The Jazz did better when the focus was on Karl Malone

I’ve seen this argument thrown around here some. The idea is that the Jazz did better in the late 1990s, and that that happened to be when the focus of the offense shifted away from Stockton and towards Malone. It’s true that the Jazz became noticeably better starting in 1995, but I find this to be a pretty weak argument against Stockton.

For one thing, you have to really squint to see the shift away from Stockton and towards Malone. From 1988-1994, Stockton had 21.8 points and 18.3 assists per 100 possessions. From 1995-1998, Stockton had 22.0 points and 16.8 assists per 100 possessions. That’s basically no change at all on Stockton’s end. The only real difference was that his minutes went down a good bit in the 1998 season after he came back from injury, but the improvement of the team had already long-since occurred by then (and I note that, prior to Stockton’s dip in minutes in 1998, it was Malone whose MPG had gone down slightly more in the better-Jazz years compared to 1988-1994). Meanwhile, from 1988-1994, Karl Malone had 35.9 points and 4.0 assists per 100 possessions. From 1995-1998, Malone had 37.8 points and 5.7 assists per 100 possessions. So this was a minor increase in offensive load for Malone, but definitely not a massive one.

Furthermore, the more important thing is that this squint-or-you’ll-miss-it shift in offensive loads is definitely not the most obvious reason for the Jazz’s improvement as a team. Rather, that improvement coincided directly with the Jazz getting Jeff Hornacek, who was easily the best teammate Malone/Stockton ever had. It also coincided with the rest of the supporting cast improving—guys like Bryon Russell and Greg Ostertag were not stars by any means, but they were better-impact players than what the Jazz were working with before that.

[lessthanjake]

3. The Jazz didn’t do well enough in early years for us to think Stockton was great

The idea behind this argument is basically that Stockton and Malone were both in their primes from 1988-1994, and in those years the Jazz were good but not amazing. In those 7 years, they averaged 52 wins, and a 3.8 SRS, and then lost in the first round three times, the second round twice, and the conference finals twice. And while they sometimes lost to really good teams, they also had a loss to the 1989 Warriors. In other words, the Jazz were a good team in that era, but not a great team. I’ve seen people argue that those results aren’t possible if Stockton and Malone were as good as advertised, and use that to make a negative inference against Stockton.

I think this argument really underrates the importance of the quality of a supporting cast. The 1988-1994 Jazz had a very weak supporting cast.

Here’s the career BPM of the significant players that were on the team during that era:

- Mark Eaton: -0.2
- Jeff Malone: -1.5
- Thurl Bailey: -0.9
- Darrell Griffith: -1.4
- Bob Hansen: -2.4
- Blue Edwards: -1.6
- Mike Brown: -3.6
- Marc Iavaroni: -3.6
- Delaney Rudd: -3.9
- David Benoit: -2.0

In other words, every single other player on the Jazz in that era had a negative career BPM, and most of them were very negative. This is something you don’t see even from many supporting casts we’d all label as bad. And using career numbers isn’t obscuring these guys being better in the 1988-1994 timeframe. It was closer to the opposite, actually. In their seasons with the Jazz from 1988-1994, the above-listed guys had, in the same order as above, BPMs of: -0.5, -2.4, -0.9, -1.8, -1.6, -1.4, -3.1, -4.0, -3.6, and -3.2.

The Jazz had a genuinely awful supporting cast in those years. And, ultimately, this is really important, because like two-thirds of the minutes a team plays are not minutes of the top two players. If this is the rest of your team, two guys aren’t going to make the team genuinely great. So I really don’t think the results of those early Jazz teams are at all mutually exclusive with Stockton and Malone both being genuinely great players. If you surround two great players with an awful supporting cast, winning 50-55 games and averaging a second-round playoff exit seems like exactly what you’d expect, and actually would only happen if those players are great.

I think one immediate counterargument someone might have is to say that Mark Eaton is the type of player who is underrated by BPM, because it doesn’t quite adequately account for his defense. But Eaton’s prime years didn’t actually overlap a whole lot with this timeframe. Eaton’s defensive prime was over after 1989 (as we can see from no longer being all-defense, his blocks falling off a cliff, and the Jazz’s defense falling off), at which point the fact that he was one of the worst offensive players in NBA history definitely overshadowed his defense, such that he was a solidly negative player.

Still, though, we might say the Jazz had an awful supporting cast in 1988 and 1989 but did at least have one other positive player in those years, because of Eaton. So should Stockton and Malone be criticized for lack of success in those years? Well, let’s look into it.

The 1988 season was Stockton’s first year as a starter, and was both Stockton’s and Malone’s first years as stars. But their rise wasn’t immediate. The Jazz started the season 18-22 (a 37-win pace). They went 29-13 after that (a 57-win pace), and both Stockton and Malone had far better individual stats during that latter half of the season. In other words, they emerged as stars in the second half of the season. In the playoffs, the Jazz proceeded to beat a good Blazers team in the first round, and then take the eventual-champion Lakers to 7 games, in a very close series. It was also a series where Stockton was actually the best player in the series, even over Magic Johnson. So, while we certainly might infer that Stockton and Malone weren’t genuinely great players yet in the first half of the 1987-88 season, they ultimately had the team playing at at a level of top-tier contenders, despite really just having one positive teammate. This doesn’t lead to a negative implication at all, IMO.

So now we get to the 1989 season. The Jazz won 51 games and had a 4.01 SRS. This was good, but not incredible. It’s probably the worst real data point here for them. But we should temper this a bit by realizing that, even though those numbers didn’t look incredible, the Jazz were considered a real title contender by the end of the season, with +500 pre-playoffs title odds. So it can’t actually be said that Malone and Stockton failed to lead a contending team when they had just one positive supporting-cast player. They were objectively considered serious contenders! Of course, what proceeded to happen is the Jazz got swept in the first round by a mediocre Warriors team. But how did that happen? It certainly wasn’t Stockton’s fault. In that series, Stockton averaged 27/14/3, with almost 4 steals per game, and a 60.1% TS%. Besides Stockton and Malone, the rest of the Jazz supporting cast had a 44.4% TS%. And, while Eaton had still been a great defensive player during the season, his defensive decline had definitely begun in the playoffs—where he posted a grand total of just 2 blocks in the series (not 2 blocks per game, but 2 blocks total), and was highly ineffective. So the story of 1989 was basically that Stockton and Malone had an awful supporting cast with one positive player, and they led the team to be considered a serious contender, followed by their supporting cast (including the one positive player) just being monumentally awful in an upset, while Stockton (and to a lesser extent Malone) were great individually. Hard to really fault Stockton much for this, though I guess we might nitpick and say we’d have liked to see more than 51 wins and 4 SRS.

Overall, then, we have Stockton and Malone having uniformly negative teammates from 1988-1994 and dragging them to good results. They had two years where they had even one positive player, and in one of them they led a genuine contending-level team by the time they matured into stars, and in the other year the Jazz were considered contenders and Stockton/Malone played great in the playoffs while their supporting cast monumentally collapsed. Stockton was incredible in both of the series the Jazz lost in those years. I don’t really think taking a negative inference about Stockton from this would be fair.

[lessthanjake]

4. Stockton wasn’t aggressive enough at scoring and/or breaking down defenses

This criticism of Stockton is basically that he didn’t/couldn’t really take matters into his own hands with scoring, and that his passes were often simple passes that didn’t really beat defenders. These are not completely incorrect criticisms, but I’ll address them one-by-one.

As to scoring, it seems obviously true that Stockton wasn’t an aggressive scorer. I think he attacked the basket a fair bit more than people acknowledge. After all, in the years we have data for, a very high 34% of his FGA were from within 3 feet (for reference, that number is 35% for LeBron for his career), and prime Stockton actually got to the FT line a healthy amount. While some of this is a product of off-ball cuts, he did attack the basket. That said, he definitely wasn’t a score-first player, and so the volume wasn’t high and he rarely scaled it up. It’s possible he could’ve scaled up his scoring much more, but just was stopped by feeling that his role was as a pass-first PG. Indeed, he was a good shooter. But regardless of the reason, he didn’t do it. I think it’s likely that Stockton could’ve been more impactful if he had looked to score more. But he achieved the impact he achieved while being more of a pass-first guy, and pass-first PGs are an archetype that has proven to be very impactful even leaving aside Stockton’s own numbers. So this by itself doesn’t seem to me like an argument against him being a genuinely great and highly impactful player, as much as an argument that he might’ve left even more impact on the table.

In terms of passing, I think it is generally correct that Stockton’s passing wouldn’t necessarily grade out at the top of OhayoKD-style “DTO” analysis. But Stockton did actually produce plenty of great looks. To illustrate, courtesy of the NBArapm website, we have data on Stockton’s rim assists per 100 possessions in his last three years in the NBA, and it was sky high—it was 7.7, 7.0, and 6.6 in each year respectively. For reference, the quintessential producer of rim assists in that same general era was Steve Nash, and he produced far less in Dallas, and averaged 7.4 rim assists per 100 possessions for the Suns in 2005-2010. Other guys have much lower numbers in this regard. For instance, LeBron averaged about 4.3 rim assists per 100 possessions from 2009-2020, and it was lower than that in the 2000s. So Stockton definitely did create high-quality looks. But he also had a lot of assists borne out of the offensive system, where he got assists off post entry passes or made passes to guys as they got an opening from off-ball screening actions. Being good at post-entry passes can manifestly be highly impactful (and often would probably even be counted as an all-important “DTO”), especially in a post-centric league. Meanwhile, making a timely pass to a teammate right in the teammate’s shooting pocket as they get separation is a highly impactful play even if it would not be quantified as a pass with a “DTO.” Offensive systems with lots of off-ball screening actions are not inherently less effective than heliocentric systems (and especially so in past eras and rulesets, where there was less spacing). Such systems can generate good offense as long as the correct decisions are made at the right time and passes are made accurately. Someone doing that can be just as impactful as someone playing in a system that is more static off the ball and relies on them beating their man. And we know that other fairly conservative system passers, such as Chris Paul, are also highly impactful. So this sort of criticism of Stockton definitely veers towards just being a bias against players who play in certain offensive systems and/or a blind spot regarding how impact is made in those systems.

5. Contemporaneous perception of Stockton wasn’t *that* high

This critique basically amounts to looking at MVP voting, seeing Stockton basically always fall in that 7th-15th range in MVP voting, and drawing an inference on that that he couldn’t have been all that great.

I do think contemporaneous perception has value, but we should be careful to contextualize it and to recognize its blind spots. Stats and impact data tell us that Stockton is a guy who doesn’t score a lot but nevertheless had a ton of impact. That’s exactly the type of player we’d generally expect to be underrated in awards voting (though Nash obviously is perhaps a counterexample on that). Meanwhile, having another major star on your team can put a damper on MVP voting, because people split the credit. Finally, having an awful supporting cast just is really bad in terms of MVP voting, since raw team success is incredibly important. None of those things are a full explanation, but combined I think they give a clear reason why Stockton’s awards voting might underrate him.

[LukaTheGOAT]

Post entry pass merchant

[penbeast0]

As I agree with you, not a surprise that I think you made a very good case. What other pass first point guards other than Nash tend to correlate highly with offensive measures? How do they compare in that sense with Stockton.

You did leave off one criticism. Stockton's opposing PGs had some big offensive series against him, KJ, Derek Harper, etc. I tend to hear that being used to discredit Stockton's defensive impact.

[lessthanjake]

As I agree with you, not a surprise that I think you made a very good case. What other pass first point guards other than Nash tend to correlate highly with offensive measures? How do they compare in that sense with Stockton.

Beyond Nash, the pass-first PGs I was thinking about when I said “pass-first PGs are an archetype that has proven to be very impactful” definitely also included Chris Paul and Magic Johnson. RAPM paints Chris Paul as an extremely impactful offensive player—pretty similar to Stockton. He scored a bit more than Stockton, but was still definitely a pass-first guy, and was pretty conservative in his passing, so there’s definitely similarities. Meanwhile, while we don’t have much impact data on Magic, what we have certainly is consistent with Magic being extremely impactful offensively—though I grant that he was definitely a bit more audacious with his passing than Stockton.

And I think we can also look at pass-first guys that were a tier or two below superstars and see some surprising impact from them. For instance, if we go to the NBArapm website, we see Mike Conley peaking at 7th in five-year ORAPM, and having two other spans in the top 10, and a bunch of other spans in the top 15. While this is below the type of impact Stockton had, it’s consistent with pass-first PGs being more impactful than one might generally expect.

These days, the best example of a pass-first PG is probably Haliburton, and he’s having a lot of success, and in the three years since he emerged as a real star in 2023, he’s actually been 3rd in ORAPM, according to the NBArapm website—which is pretty surprisingly high IMO.

There are some pass-first PGs that don’t necessarily have amazing impact numbers. Jason Kidd’s impact numbers look pretty good, but not incredible. Rajon Rondo’s impact numbers don’t look good at all. But I think an important factor there is that those guys were bad shooters (Kidd became a pretty good one eventually, but after his prime), and having the ball be very often in the hands of a bad shooter is not a good thing. Stockton was a good shooter, which puts him more in the camp with the guys I’ve talked about above.

You did leave off one criticism. Stockton's opposing PGs had some big offensive series against him, KJ, Derek Harper, etc. I tend to hear that being used to discredit Stockton's defensive impact.

I have two main reactions to that criticism:

1. In general, I tend to think people overrate analysis that rests on how an opposing player a guy guarded did offensively. When you account for the fact that players switch and their minutes don’t entirely overlap, the relevant player will inevitably have spent a large portion of the relevant games guarded by other people. And even when primarily guarded by the guy in question, defense is a team game—an opposing player can be guarded pretty well by their primary defender, but if rotations or help defense is messed up then the guy will probably do well.

2. Stockton’s main role as a defender was as a disruptor. I think he was very effective at that, and I’m a big proponent of the value of perimeter disruption. Even aside from the obvious benefit of forcing turnovers, I think a very disruptive defender really deters the other team from even trying high-value actions in the first place. But, of course, being a disruptive defender has trade offs, and one of them is that you’ll sometimes be leaving your man to try to make a play. Because of this, even if the disruption is a real net positive overall, we might expect Stockton’s opposing number to do relatively well individually.

Post entry pass merchant

Not sure if serious, but I think post entry passes are much more valuable than people tend to give them credit for. Of course, really good over-the-top entry passes can basically just create an easy bucket on their own. But it’s still seriously impactful to be very good at more basic entry passes. Teams without someone who is really good at this can genuinely find it difficult to get the ball to a star player (or player with a mismatch) in the post. And even if they can eventually get it there, there’s a big benefit to being able to do it quickly, as opposed to wasting the shot clock trying to size up the pass while your teammate may lose their good positioning or have to leave the paint to avoid a three-second violation. I’d say we saw some of the issues that can come with having players who are deficient in this regard recently in the OKC/Denver series.

[falcolombardi]

If stockton (peak) is underated what about guys like kevin johnson or terry porter who arguably had comparable value and may have outplayed him in head to head series?

Stockton is a very good player but the raw assist/steals records overstate his impact im both ends if anythingh.

[lessthanjake]

If stockton (peak) is underated what about guys like kevin johnson or terry porter who arguably had comparable value and may have outplayed him in head to head series?

Those were very good players (albeit I should note that the box data and limited impact data we have on them definitely isn’t as good as Stockton’s). They may well be underrated too! In fact, I would say Terry Porter almost certainly *is* underrated, even though he’s not as good as Stockton. But I don’t think we should index much on “outplaying [someone] in head to head series.” The one time Stockton faced Magic Johnson, he outplayed Magic in the series, but Stockton is not a better player than Magic. There’s no reason to drill down into tiny sample sizes to decide someone isn’t as good as the larger samples tell us he is.

Stockton is a very good player but the raw assist/steals records overstate his impact im both ends if anythingh.

See, the problem I have with this type of argument is that it’s not at all consistent with RAPM. If Stockton’s box stats overstated his impact, we would expect his RAPM to not be all that great. Instead, it’s incredibly good. What we have with Stockton is a guy whose RAPM data suggests he’s highly impactful, and whose box data indicates that as well. There’s arguments to undermine each of those facts—most prominently, collinearity with the RAPM data, and his-assists-weren’t-difficult with the box stats—but the need to deploy separate arguments to explain away two major types of data that both point in the same direction definitely makes me very skeptical of the conclusion.

[Cavsfansince84]

I'm sort of curious what conclusions the op draws from all the data that is in his post. I am someone who liked the Jazz back in the 90's and has Stockton roughly 25th all time but I'm just wondering what the op thinks is going on with all these metrics. Do you think Stockton was a top 5 player most years? Do you think he should be seen as top 20 all time? Is it possible that rapm(in all of its derivatives) is semi grossly misused on this site? I think over reliance on any stat or metric is a somewhat flawed way to go about forming any opinion.

[lessthanjake]

I'm sort of curious what conclusions the op draws from all the data that is in his post. I am someone who liked the Jazz back in the 90's and has Stockton roughly 25th all time but I'm just wondering what the op thinks is going on with all these metrics. Do you think Stockton was a top 5 player most years? Do you think he should be seen as top 20 all time? Is it possible that rapm(in all of its derivatives) is semi grossly misused on this site? I think over reliance on any stat or metric is a somewhat flawed way to go about forming any opinion.

I think if we were talking about top 20 all time, then you’re talking about players who all either have data that looks this good or who have so much team success that they’d go above Stockton for me despite having worse data (i.e. someone like Kobe). So I don’t think this data really screams out that he must be top 20. Someone who cares more about longevity than I do and/or weighs titles less than I do in ranking players’ greatness definitely might conclude otherwise, though, since I don’t think the data we have on Stockton would be out of place in the top 20. So yeah, I think your ranking of Stockton around 25th all time wouldn’t be the type of opinion on him that I’d consider to be seriously underrating him, though I think it’s definitely possible to rank him higher.

As for the point about RAPM, I certainly agree that reliance on any one particular stat or metric is a flawed way to form an opinion. I actually make that point often on here. But I think an important thing here is that it’s not just RAPM with Stockton. The box data on Stockton looks similarly good. And I also presented WOWY data that looks very good (though obviously the amount of data there is very limited for Stockton). He also looks great in different formulations of the same types of data (i.e. for instance, his great RAPM data isn’t limited to just one version of RAPM). I wouldn’t have made this post if there was only one stat/metric that looked great. It’s the fact that there’s a wide array of different metrics and data types that all point in the same direction.

[One_and_Done]

No, he's incredibly overrated. He wouldn't even be an all-star today.

[Cavsfansince84]

See, the problem I have with this type of argument is that it’s not at all consistent with RAPM. If Stockton’s box stats overstated his impact, we would expect his RAPM to not be all that great. Instead, it’s incredibly good. What we have with Stockton is a guy whose RAPM data suggests he’s highly impactful, and whose box data indicates that as well. There’s arguments to undermine each of those facts—most prominently, collinearity with the RAPM data, and his-assists-weren’t-difficult with the box stats—but the need to deploy separate arguments to explain away two major types of data that both point in the same direction definitely makes me very skeptical of the conclusion.

idk about this argument you just made. This idea that if both rapm and box score data agree then any added context is just thrown out or something. Its very much possible imo for a guy to be high in both rapm and box score and not necessarily above guys who are below him in both stats. More so since there are many forms of rapm floating around. That's still a very narrow form of grading a player imo. I think if anything it raises eyebrows about the metric when 38-40 year old Stockton rates that highly. Context is our friend and sometimes its like we want to form an opinion that is backed up by some metric(s) and then act like all context which goes against it is just irrational defense of something. That happens a lot on this board. So to me part of this is Stockton playing for so many years in the same system with the same coach and with a guy like Malone that its going to inflate a lot of metrics in his favor. Not that much but its going to be baked into it to some degree.

[lessthanjake]

See, the problem I have with this type of argument is that it’s not at all consistent with RAPM. If Stockton’s box stats overstated his impact, we would expect his RAPM to not be all that great. Instead, it’s incredibly good. What we have with Stockton is a guy whose RAPM data suggests he’s highly impactful, and whose box data indicates that as well. There’s arguments to undermine each of those facts—most prominently, collinearity with the RAPM data, and his-assists-weren’t-difficult with the box stats—but the need to deploy separate arguments to explain away two major types of data that both point in the same direction definitely makes me very skeptical of the conclusion.

idk about this argument you just made. This idea that if both rapm and box score data agree then any added context is just thrown out or something. Its very much possible imo for a guy to be high in both rapm and box score and not necessarily above guys who are below him in both stats. More so since there are many forms of rapm floating around. That's still a very narrow form of grading a player imo. I think if anything it raises eyebrows about the metric when 38-40 year old Stockton rates that highly. Context is our friend and sometimes its like we want to form an opinion that is backed up by some metric(s) and then act like all context which goes against it is just irrational defense of something. That happens a lot on this board. So to me part of this is Stockton playing for so many years in the same system with the same coach and with a guy like Malone that its going to inflate a lot metrics in his favor.

Well I certainly wouldn’t say I “throw out” “any added context.” Indeed, the post you’re responding to specifically said that there’s people I’d put above Stockton “despite [them] having worse data.” And my posts to start this thread go through a whole host of arguments that people make that either are aimed at asserting that that data is inflated or arguments that go beyond the data. I’ve addressed context at quite a bit of length already in this thread. But that is not mutually exclusive with having a baseline assumption that when RAPM and RAPM-like measures agree with box measures and the various different versions of those data types generally agree with each other, then they’re probably right and that we should have some skepticism of a web of arguments deployed against it all. I’d be the first to say that data is not perfect—I’ve said that countless times on these forums—so it is possible for RAPM and box stats to both be wrong in the same direction. It’s definitely not the most likely thing though. It should be seen as a pretty heavy lift to argue that that’s what’s happening, and I’ve tried to engage in this thread with several of the arguments that are aimed at suggesting that.

[Special_Puppy]

I'm sort of curious what conclusions the op draws from all the data that is in his post. I am someone who liked the Jazz back in the 90's and has Stockton roughly 25th all time but I'm just wondering what the op thinks is going on with all these metrics. Do you think Stockton was a top 5 player most years? Do you think he should be seen as top 20 all time? Is it possible that rapm(in all of its derivatives) is semi grossly misused on this site? I think over reliance on any stat or metric is a somewhat flawed way to go about forming any opinion.

OP cited several different metrics

[TheGOATRises007]

No, he's incredibly overrated. He wouldn't even be an all-star today.

Do you ever post non-hyperbolic absolute statements?

[Cavsfansince84]

I'm sort of curious what conclusions the op draws from all the data that is in his post. I am someone who liked the Jazz back in the 90's and has Stockton roughly 25th all time but I'm just wondering what the op thinks is going on with all these metrics. Do you think Stockton was a top 5 player most years? Do you think he should be seen as top 20 all time? Is it possible that rapm(in all of its derivatives) is semi grossly misused on this site? I think over reliance on any stat or metric is a somewhat flawed way to go about forming any opinion.

OP cited several different metrics

I'd still like to know what conclusions the op is drawing from it all. That would be a good starting point to any discussion imo regarding how over or underrated Stockton is as a player.

[Cavsfansince84]

Well I certainly wouldn’t say I “throw out” “any added context.” Indeed, the post you’re responding to specifically said that there’s people I’d put above Stockton “despite [them] having worse data.” And my posts to start this thread go through a whole host of arguments that people make that either are aimed at asserting that that data is inflated or arguments that go beyond the data. I’ve addressed context at quite a bit of length already in this thread. But that is not mutually exclusive with having a baseline assumption that when RAPM and RAPM-like measures agree with box measures and the various different versions of those data types generally agree with each other, then they’re probably right and that we should have some skepticism of a web of arguments deployed against it all. I’d be the first to say that data is not perfect—I’ve said that countless times on these forums—so it is possible for RAPM and box stats to both be wrong in the same direction. It’s definitely not the most likely thing though. It should be seen as a pretty heavy lift to argue that that’s what’s happening, and I’ve tried to engage in this thread with several of the arguments that are aimed at suggesting that.

Ok but I was mainly referring to how those things see Stockton as what? A top 3-4 player in the league in his late 30's? That's what I am looking for you to tell us what you think this data you listed is saying about him. I'm not here to try and discredit Stockton. I just would like to know how you view this data. Do you think Stockton was a top 5 player in the league in like 98-2001? I just would like to know how much stock you are placing in this data.

[Ol Roy]

No, he's incredibly overrated. He wouldn't even be an all-star today.

Do you ever post non-hyperbolic absolute statements?

The formula is:

1. Post hyperbolic statement.
2. Someone engages the claim.
3. A debate ensues over league quality and cross-era translation.
4. The original topic is lost in the shuffle and the discussion dies.

It's like a thread virus. This subforum would be much healthier if this charade were disallowed, because it is totally contrary and detrimental to actual "player comparison" and individual player analysis.

[lessthanjake]

Well I certainly wouldn’t say I “throw out” “any added context.” Indeed, the post you’re responding to specifically said that there’s people I’d put above Stockton “despite [them] having worse data.” And my posts to start this thread go through a whole host of arguments that people make that either are aimed at asserting that that data is inflated or arguments that go beyond the data. I’ve addressed context at quite a bit of length already in this thread. But that is not mutually exclusive with having a baseline assumption that when RAPM and RAPM-like measures agree with box measures and the various different versions of those data types generally agree with each other, then they’re probably right and that we should have some skepticism of a web of arguments deployed against it all. I’d be the first to say that data is not perfect—I’ve said that countless times on these forums—so it is possible for RAPM and box stats to both be wrong in the same direction. It’s definitely not the most likely thing though. It should be seen as a pretty heavy lift to argue that that’s what’s happening, and I’ve tried to engage in this thread with several of the arguments that are aimed at suggesting that.

Ok but I was mainly referring to how those things see Stockton as what? A top 3-4 player in the league in his late 30's? That's what I am looking for you to tell us what you think this data you listed is saying about him. I'm not here to try and discredit Stockton. I just would like to know how you view this data. Do you think Stockton was a top 5 player in the league in like 98-2001? I just would like to know how much stock you are placing in this data.

I think Stockton may well have been at that level of impact at that point. But that wouldn’t have really made him a top 3-4 player in the league, because by that age he wasn’t playing high minutes (was typically just below 30 minutes a game). Because of that, his per-game impact would be ranked lower than what he’d be ranked by measures that are looking at impact per possession. By that age, I’m sure he needed to play lower minutes in order to keep having that high level of impact, so if he had scaled up his minutes then presumably the per-possession impact would’ve gone down (or he might’ve needed to skip games to get rest, which wasn’t something he did). But it’s not at all tough to imagine that a guy who could have top 3-4 type of per-possession impact in sub-30-minutes-a-game as an old player would’ve been having that same type of per-possession impact in the higher minutes he played when he was younger. And, of course, as I’ve detailed in the OP, the box data and limited impact data we have from Stockton’s younger years is supportive of that being the case.