Steve Nash says John Stockton is greatest PG of all time

[penbeast0]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/nba/steve-nash-explained-why-john-stockton-is-the-greatest-point-guard-ever-it-s-amazing/ar-AA1JBFd8?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=688a9ee698c14e95902a604797f7bac8&ei=10

[tsherkin]

Kind of empty.

""He's the best point guard of all-time," Nash said of Stockton.

"I mean, not only what he's been able to do at the peak of his career, but how he's been able to play with such consistency and longevity. It's amazing," he pointed out"

I was hoping for something more substantive, since Steve usually has interesting things to say on Mind the Game.

Disappointing.

[penbeast0]

Yeah, not a lot of analysis. The fun takeaway is Marbury saying he learned a lot from Stockton as I've always thought of him as the anti-Stockton of PGs.

[tsherkin]

Yeah, not a lot of analysis. The fun takeaway is Marbury saying he learned a lot from Stockton as I've always thought of him as the anti-Stockton of PGs.

Yeah, that's a weird one. Marbury was an athletic penetrate-and-pitch type of PG, definitely score-first. Feels more like just saying something nice about an NBA legend from him.

[ShotCreator]

He almost certainly had the most career value. He was probably a top 10 guy all-time on CV but most fans are comfortably excluding him because of the lack of an explosive, dominant peak, traditionally speaking anyway.

[Doctor MJ]

Yeah, not a lot of analysis. The fun takeaway is Marbury saying he learned a lot from Stockton as I've always thought of him as the anti-Stockton of PGs.

Next we'll find out Stockton is a time-traveler who went back in time after watching Marbury and learning what not to do.

[1993Playoffs]

There’s just no way he’s better than magic , Curry , Oscar

[penbeast0]

There’s just no way he’s better than magic , Curry , Oscar

Not as a scorer, but as a distributor/playmaker, it's a makeable case. He didn't say Stockton was a better basketball player than magic, just a better point guard which is debatable by itself but at least defensible.

[Ol Roy]

I imagine Nash was influenced by a lot of PGs. He was teammates with Kevin Johnson and Jason Kidd early on, so that's interesting. Magic and IT were gone by the time he arrived, but he certainly watched them on TV. He had a little overlap with Stockton and Price, and as smaller, white PGs who could shoot he probably took from them what he could.

[Special_Puppy]

Based and RAPTOR pilled https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/lebron-or-mj-raptor-picks-the-best-nba-players-of-the-past-40-years/

[migya]

He almost certainly had the most career value. He was probably a top 10 guy all-time on CV but most fans are comfortably excluding him because of the lack of an explosive, dominant peak, traditionally speaking anyway.

Many here the last few years have gone on about these impact stats and values and that doesn't seem to be used with Stockton. His impact was huge.

[Bloodbather]

As a point guard in the traditional sense, he has a case. Most PGs in the GOAT conversation are unorthodox. Magic was a 6'9'' point forward type, Steph is as much of an off-ball scorer as he is an on-ball one which fits the classic description a SG more, West was arguably a SG also.

If you think of the PG as someone who brings the ball up, initiates the offense and mostly guards other guards, which is as far as I can distill it, really, Stockton is up there, especially considering his longevity. Oscar, CP3, Nash, Isiah, and Kidd also fit this description of an orthodox PG.

[Ryoga Hibiki]

Sometimes we must remember that players might mean something different than us, in rankings.
Not right or wrong, but different.
They don't put that mich thought into it, they don't spend a good amount of timing in defining what exactly they are trying to measure.

[tsherkin]

There’s just no way he’s better than magic , Curry , Oscar

Not as a scorer, but as a distributor/playmaker, it's a makeable case. He didn't say Stockton was a better basketball player than magic, just a better point guard which is debatable by itself but at least defensible.

Stockton's an interesting one.

I find it hard to look at Stockton's playmaking and see it as superior to Magic's in anything but raw volume, especially because of how little he shot and the basic setup in the Utah offense. If you're speaking of breaking down a defense and creating a shot for others, I don't think Stockton comes out ahead there, and I also think that it's hard to separate out the scoring threat from the playmaking because the one enables the other. And the fact that Utah was mostly a fairly pedestrian offense until they got Hornacek (92, peak Malone notwithstanding) kind of reinforces the "big numbers go only so far" element of his game. Then they also enjoyed a little boost from the pulled-in line before crushing it 98 while Stockton missed 18 games (though it IS worth mentioning that they were 11-7 without him that year, and 51-13 with him).

I dunno. "Debatable" is a good word, appropriately respectful to Stockton. It's very clear that Stockton was an extremely good player who filled his role very effectively. It's also clear that Utah didn't have much on O besides him and Karl Malone until the Hornacek trade. Before that, Thurl Bailey, Jeff Malone, Darrell Griffith, so there's a bunch of room to say "yeah, it isn't surprising that their team offenses didn't look that stunning."

But then I look at the 91 Lakers, with no Kareem, with Byron Scott and James Worthy rocking like 53% TS, and Magic still leading them to a +4, 5th-ranked offense and the Finals (which was as good as any pre-Hornacek Utah offense) and a year after leading them to the 1st-ranked offense in their 1st year without Kareem and it raises some interesting questions about how offense is impacted and the relevance of personal scoring (to a given degree) in driving team offense, and all that.

I look at the way Magic created in transition and from the post. The way he created off the drive. I don't really see anything in Stockton's game Magic couldn't do as a playmaker, but a bunch that he could not do. And their volumes weren't that far off, particularly in years where Magic took less than 12 FGA/g once he actually switched over to full-time PG duties post-Norm Nixon.

Either way, a fun conversation. And even back when he was drafted, Stockton was small and generally not considered physically imposing. A "throwback," he was often called. So his performance, his skill, his toughness, all remarkable. His skill was pretty evident relative to his peers, and even today, I can't think of too many people I'd stack against him for one-handed bounce passes, particularly with his off-hand. And he used to be pretty fast end-to-end, which helped make him a real pest in transition. Good post entry passer. Blah blah, really good at lots of stuff, limited by his scoring ability as much as anything else. And so as a team driver, he could go only so far until extra scoring was present. Obviously, xRAPM and similar stats love him. In 98, for example, xRAPM has him at +4.3 on offense, which was behind only Shaq, MJ, and Karl Malone, a hair's width ahead of Reggie. And at least in superficial passing, the with/without record tends to support his critical relevance to Utah's success.

He's a fun one to talk about, and was fun to watch.

EDIT to add, he's a dude who could probably come in and click with today's game no problem. If he had the freedom to take 7 3PA/g at 35-37%, including pull-ups in transition, I think it'd probably extend his scoring game enough to help him be quite effective despite his size. And we see small guards with defensive issues doing just fine. He isn't the shooter we see from Trae, nor was he as adept at getting to the line, but Stockton's ability to navigate and leverage screens remains pretty impressive as a playmaker. And things are even speeding up closer to the levels of when he hit the league, which means more transition playmaking opportunities, which is nice.

[Doctor MJ]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/nba/steve-nash-explained-why-john-stockton-is-the-greatest-point-guard-ever-it-s-amazing/ar-AA1JBFd8?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=688a9ee698c14e95902a604797f7bac8&ei=10

Nice to see players say nice things about others, and to be humble enough to champion others over themselves.

[Doctor MJ]

I imagine Nash was influenced by a lot of PGs. He was teammates with Kevin Johnson and Jason Kidd early on, so that's interesting. Magic and IT were gone by the time he arrived, but he certainly watched them on TV. He had a little overlap with Stockton and Price, and as smaller, white PGs who could shoot he probably took from them what he could.

Well, I think any smart player should look to take inspiration from others, but I have to say that I think Nash's primary role model was hockey's (and Canada's) Wayne Gretzky, and that the inspiration from Gretzky affected how he played all sports of the free-flowing-field type (basketball, hockey, soccer, lacrosse, rugby), all of which he had outstanding success in in high school as a facilitator.

I also think that when we see international players who come to basketball from other sports (like Olajuwon from soccer), we tend to get knew types of innovation that move our game forward.

[tsherkin]

Well, I think any smart player should look to take inspiration from others, but I have to say that I think Nash's primary role model was hockey's (and Canada's) Wayne Gretzky, and that the inspiration from Gretzky affected how he played all sports of the free-flowing-field type (basketball, hockey, soccer, lacrosse, rugby), all of which he had outstanding success in in high school as a facilitator.

I also think that when we see international players who come to basketball from other sports (like Olajuwon from soccer), we tend to get knew types of innovation that move our game forward.

Based on how he's spoken in the past (including on a recent Mind the Game podcast), that seems most likely. His style was quite a bit different than Stockton's.

[BusywithBball]

Stockton was great but I see no path he was better than Magic.

[Doctor MJ]

He almost certainly had the most career value. He was probably a top 10 guy all-time on CV but most fans are comfortably excluding him because of the lack of an explosive, dominant peak, traditionally speaking anyway.

Many here the last few years have gone on about these impact stats and values and that doesn't seem to be used with Stockton. His impact was huge.

Well to be clear, those of us who have been paying close attention to +/- stats since they started being available online, Stockton's intriguing numbers were one of the biggest drivers of curiosity for getting access to earlier seasons.

If memory serves, for a good while we only had data going back to '01-02, and that gradually propagated backwards to '96-97 because that's when the NBA first kept league-wide play-by-play stats. We then got access to the raw +/- data for all teams going back to '93-94 and the 76ers back to '76-77, but beyond that, any data we've gotten have been labors of love of current people with the most ambitious project being what Squared2020 is doing on his site. (Though shout out to ElGee for going all in on game-by-game WOWY into the deep past over a decade ago.)

So with that in mind, I'll say what my perspective on this has been - which isn't consensus, but has come from conversations with others:

The initial 2000s +/- data we had painted a picture of Stockton having far more RAPM-style "impact" than teammate Malone, and raised a clear set of questions relating to what we'd see if we had access to earlier data.

However, the fact that Stockton at the time was playing way less minutes than Malone is why I put impact in quotes above, not to discredit it, but just note that regression isn't going to account for a situation where Star A in limited minutes gets to play with Star B, but Star B has to play a lot without Star A. Star A in such circumstances will absolutely have better RAPM numbers, but this doesn't mean that he's necessarily adding more value than the guy fighting the good fight paying big minutes while the other guys rests.

Thus, what many of us wanted to see was a) how did the Jazz +/- data look specifically in their two finals years, and b) how did the Jazz +/- data look going back at least since the Jazz became the S&M gang in the late '80s.

Additionally, just from a real basketball perspective, there's the matter that because Stockton & Malone play different roles with different levels of defensive attention, it was very possible that their respective viabilities to add value in those roles fell off at very different rates. Volume scorers add value directly often by having decent efficiency (rather than great) multiplied by that massive volume, which means that sometimes even a small decrease in their efficiency can take them from major positive impact to outright negative impact. By contrast, a pass-first point guard who minimizes risk effectively can remain a net positive offensive player indefinitely.

This then to say, we wanted to see what prime Malone's data actually said both because of his role, and because it just didn't make logical sense to not think he was super-valuable when he was playing big minutes on those finals teams.

What do we now see? Well, I'll start of with just the raw +/- which I think is a great starting point - though others disagree. Here are the team leaders for the S&M Jazz in raw +/- going back to '93-94 (though pre-96-97 we don't have playoff data):

'02-03: Greg Ostertag
'01-02: Andrei Kirilenko
'00-01: John Stockton
'99-00: John Stockton
'98-99: Karl Malone
'97-98: Karl Malone
'96-97: Karl Malone
'95-96: John Stockton
'94-95: Karl Malone
'93-94: Karl Malone

So then I'll say, I'm afraid that from a S vs M perspective, this data to me told a story that contemporary thought from the '90s was correct to elevate Malone as the MVP candidate over Stockton, and I'd really hate to try to convince people that Stockton was actually the team's MVP in their finals years regardless of what RAPM data tells us. Analytically we know that a coach's lineup staggering can make the MVP have a lesser raw +/- so this data isn't the end-all be-all, but from a question of whether Stockton's massive impact edge over Malone in the '00s continued back to when they were a contending team, it didn't.

Now, from what I've seen, Squared2020's tracking from earlier than this looks quite good for Stockton, so we'll see what more is revealed with the blood, sweat & tears of guys like Squared.

Additionally, some have pushed back saying that we shouldn't necessarily focus on the best Jazz years to evaluate who the better player was between S & M. Logically, it's possible for one guy (Malone) to be more impactful with the right supporting cast acquisitions (most notably Hornacek), but for the other guy to be more impactful in most situations. I personally still tend to focus on the best years of a core to analyze the core, but I'll concede, this isn't an undebatable thing.

Final thing I'm going to speak to is what more specific data tells us about where Stockton's impact was coming from in those later years. If we go to nbarapm.com and look at the 4y RAPM that the player view defaults too, here's a list of some of the great guards with the best span we have for them:

Chris Paul (2015-2018) Off: 6.4, Def: 2.7, Tot: 9.1
Steve Nash (2005-2008) Off: 9.3, Def: -0.6, Tot: 8.8
John Stockton (1998-2001) Off: 4.7, Def: 3.6, Tot: 8.3
Jason Kidd (2002-2005) Off: 4.3, Def: 1.5, Tot: 5.9

I'll emphasize up front that we shouldn't lose site of the fact that Stockton being up there at all, so far ahead of peak Kidd, is incredibly impressive and I don't mean to imply otherwise.

But the defense is extremely high for any point guard, and we're talking about Stockton age 35 to 38 being compared with overall peak Paul & Kidd, and this raises a big concern for me when judging actual playing ability:

Do we really think that any player in the back half of his 30s couldn't have been exploited by opposing offenses if they were in a contested playoff series? I'm afraid I'm skeptical.

To be clear, I think Stockton was a great defensive point guard for his age his whole career, so this isn't mean to be a general-Stockton skepticism, but I'm afraid when I see data like this, it makes me think what regular season offenses just weren't geared toward using Stockton's age against him.

To some degree, this remains a truth today - it's only in the playoffs where opponents really focus in trying to find any and all weaknesses on your team - but there's also the whole Illegal Defense rules that basically defined Stockton's entire career, because even after the 2001 rule change, we didn't really see seriously see offensive adjustments until D'Antoni's Suns in 2004, by which time Stockton was retired.

Thing is, so long as the offense is built around manipulating the Illegal Defense rule, every defender who wasn't guarding the offenses alpha got to basically hang out outside of that action rather than being targeted themselves, and I'd say that was a boon for point guards on defense in no small part because very few teams used score-first point guards at the time.

By contrast, in the time since, offensive strategy has emphasized spacing & targeting through switches, and it's largely just become a truth that anyone with limitations in rapid deceleration (and re-acceleration) is going to need help when they are facing a super-agile ballhandler, and realistically, anyone in their 30s is going to be more limited than they were in their 20s.

This doesn't mean I think old man Stockton "would get played off the court because of defense" to be clear, because the fact that basically everyone needs help to defend against elite drivers in a spaced-out game, but it does mean that when I see Stockton's defense at this age being the thing that's helping him make up for not being an ultra-outlier on offense relative to other floor generals, I still have concerns as to limitations compared to what a face-value read of the data appears to say.

As I say all of this, I should always note that the overall RAPM is generally the thing to focus on above ORAPM & DRAPM specifically because ORAPM & DRAPM can get skewed based on a coach's lineup choices. As such, it's possible that weird lineup choices were causing old Stockton's DRAPM to get inflated at the cost of his ORAPM. If that's the case, then we shouldn't be taking Stockton's DRAPM at face value.

But what I'd maintain is that if old Stockton's overall value was built on having actual defensive impact, it would be my basketball assessment that this overrates what we'd expect from him when targeted as we'd expect him to have to deal with today. He's far from alone in this regard, but we're discussing him because he was such an outlier generally, and when I see the offensive vs defensive splits, it's the defense where he looks like the true outlier relative to guard-norms, and for the reasons I've given above, I think that warrants some consideration.

[penbeast0]

I know Karl Malone had serious issues and Stockton is an anti-vaccer but do you really want to be calling them "the S&M gang?"