penbeast0 wrote:trelos6 wrote:Peaks:
Kemp, Nance, Blake, Amar’e, LJ
Career
Nance, Kemp, Blake, Amar’e, LJ
Think OP asked for prime though.
A tangent but a generic "prime" is probably less clear, specific and therefore less useful than career or peak (though career may have some of these issues depending on interpretation, but also may not).
- without a time marker ... are we talking average or value accumulated. The former biases pro-short primes, I would argue unfairly.
- if "prime" a relative or absolute standard. LeBron James has always been absolute terms good. I'd argue we should neither (a) bring down his average prime to punish him versus shorter primes, nor (b) pretend his lesser years are without value in accumulative terms even if they'll make less of a difference in a big "pile" of accumulated long-term value.
I think you need something like cumulative value, best 5 (or whatever number) years (not necessarily consecutive) prime - or best in-prime total accumulated value (though for that I'm not entirely sure I see the virtue in cutting out non-prime years) to get a fair playing field.
I'd also marginally argue with the LJ timeline you offered at least as oversimplified, we get two years of explosive LJ, two (or one) years of diminished and adjusting LJ, '96 as a comeback and arguably his most productive in '96 as more skilled in terms of passing, shooting the shortened 3, savvy with drawing fouls. And then a combination of further disintegration of the body, bad fit, reduced primacy or whatever we may think mean he's not so significant in NY. That is to say ... the injuries did limit him ... and maybe change his career arc (though probably always overrated as a high pick, big minutes so high boxscore, would-be franchise player but not really, somewhat iconic team ...) but I'd argue they limited him before his peak (though I assume they got worse and did so after as well).