Greatest Peaks Project (2022): #18 - 2005-06 Dwyane Wade

[f4p]

Part of the concern with 2017 Kawhi is that small postseason sample though. We are talking like ten and a half games here.

And that would be great if we didn't have a whole bunch of other Kawhi playoffs indicating that he is basically unstoppable. From 2016 to 2021, over 70 games, he averaged 29.0 PER, 0.263 WS48, 10.9 BPM on 62.9 TS%. Those would damn near be a career high playoff run for most of the non-Jordan/Lebron top 10. And that's a 5 year average!

I mean, think of it this way: would 2016 Curry be rated higher if the Thunder made a few extra threes when he was on the bench in Game 7? Part of why he takes a hit is because he did not maintain through the Cavaliers series. It is definitely unfair that Kawhi was hurt, but if Zaza does not undercut him and the Warriors adjust, win in five games, and depress his average, are we celebrating it as an all-time season? Like Proxy said, he is amazing if you could combine multiple versions, and going with those types of hypotheticals is a fine approach… but it is not surprising not everyone takes that approach.

Thus my Tonya Harding comment. The argument is basically that if a goon decides to hurt you, we assume you would have fallen off and penalize you, and literally elevate a guy above you who was a teammate of the aforementioned goon. The last 6 years say stopping Kawhi is practically impossible. And the small amount of evidence we had from Game 1 indicates the Warriors weren't going to be the team that did it (nor does their Finals defense on Lebron indicate they would just stop any perimeter guy/wing if they really focused). We don't really need different versions of Kawhi because what he did in 2017 was insane. If he combined any more skills into his 2017 version, then we'd be talking top 3 peak.

And for what it is worth, the only way I would say Kawhi was “better” than Curry in 2017 would be in the sense he was asked to do more. Per game, I think 2017 Curry was even better than 2015 Curry had Durant not gone to Golden State… but Durant did, so no one really cares lol.

I'm not sure what you mean by people don't care. 2017 Steph was picked as his peak, almost exclusively because of the stats bump he got from Durant. He's never had a statistical playoffs like that in any other year. And playoff Kawhi has far outdistanced playoff Steph basically any year starting with 2016, whether Kawhi was asked to do more than Steph or whether Steph was asked to carry the team like 2016. It seems to be a fairly consistent theme so I guess I don't see the point in assuming that the trend was about to come to an abrupt stop right as it was going full-throttle and basically peaking. I could see if Kawhi played 24 crappy minutes in Game 1 and I was the one arguing he was destined to be great in the next 3 or 4 games. But he had a 25 game score in 24 minutes, which is crazy.

[AEnigma]

Part of the concern with 2017 Kawhi is that small postseason sample though. We are talking like ten and a half games here.

And that would be great if we didn't have a whole bunch of other Kawhi playoffs indicating that he is basically unstoppable. From 2016 to 2021, over 70 games, he averaged 29.0 PER, 0.263 WS48, 10.9 BPM on 62.9 TS%. Those would damn near be a career high playoff run for most of the non-Jordan/Lebron top 10. And that's a 5 year average!

Hence the comment about combining years. You are free to do that, but as I said, it is unsurprising not everyone does, especially when those postseasons variably ended disappointingly on performance (2016 and 2020), ended because of injury ten games in (2017 and 2021), or showed Kawhi degrading as the postseason went on in a way we could not see in any other postseason because he did not make it that far (2019). Like, look at how Kawhi does in round 1. He obliterates teams. And then every second round he drops off somewhat. Then in 2019 he drops further in the third round, and then further still in the Finals.

Thus my Tonya Harding comment. The argument is basically that if a goon decides to hurt you, we assume you would have fallen off and penalize you, and literally elevate a guy above you who was a teammate of the aforementioned goon.

No, we assume nothing. You are assuming it would have continued. Maybe he would have bucked the worrying injury warnings we saw literally one game before. Or maybe he leaves on his own in Game 3, no Zaza involved. We have no way of knowing. That is the point. Smaller sample means lesser certainty.

The last 6 years say stopping Kawhi is practically impossible.

The last six years you basically just needed to wait him out.

And the small amount of evidence we had from Game 1 indicates the Warriors weren't going to be the team that did it (nor does their Finals defense on Lebron indicate they would just stop any perimeter guy/wing if they really focused).

You really want to play the extrapolation game?

Okay, what about 2018 Lebron against the Warriors. Or 2015 Lebron against the Warriors. What about how the 2016 Thunder did against the Warriors. Or what the 2016 Spurs did against the Thunder, to bring it back to Kawhi. Or what the 2012 Spurs did against the Thunder. Or what the 2019 Bucks did against the Raptors. Or what the 2019 Magic did against the Raptors. Or what the 2020 Clippers did against the Nuggets. Or seeing as his name will start to be brought up soon, what McGrady did against the 2003 Pistons.

Good teams (and defences, if we ignore the 2020 Nuggets) adjust. May as well argue 2017 Kawhi was going to sweep the Warriors off that game 1 and then obviously win a title against a Cavaliers team even less capable of guarding them.

We don't really need different versions of Kawhi because what he did in 2017 was insane. If he combined any more skills into his 2017 version, then we'd be talking top 3 peak.

Lol, I mean, if we gave 2017 Kawhi 2021’s passing and said he stayed healthy in a six game loss to the Warriors, I would still not come close to putting that in my top ten. Although of course if he actually swept them, as you seem to believe, then maybe I would reconsider.

This is especially weird because most of your argument seems to be just looking at how amazing he is as a postseason scorer… but you also dismiss Reggie. 2020 Game 7 Kawhi was pretty bad too, you know.

I'm not sure what you mean by people don't care. 2017 Steph was picked as his peak, almost exclusively because of the stats bump he got from Durant.

If you think that then you did not read most of the arguments for him (either this project or last). I find Steph arguments annoying too, but very few people actually used this reasoning.

He's never had a statistical playoffs like that in any other year.

Okay, and if people took that year at face value based off his “statistics”, do you really think he would have slotted in at #12?

And playoff Kawhi has far outdistanced playoff Steph basically any year

2017: Curry wins a(n easy) title. Kawhi struggles with injuries and misses the third round.

2018: Curry wins a title. Kawhi is out for the year.

2019: Kawhi wins the title over Curry, who misses his best teammate and a game and a half of his next best scoring teammate. Many people are more impressed by Curry in that series regardless because of how he performed in an adverse situation. (For what it is worth, yes, I think Kawhi was better overall that postseason, if not necessarily in that series.)

2020: Curry is out for the year. Kawhi chokes against the Nuggets.

2021: Curry loses two play-in games. Kawhi plays eleven games but then misses the rest of the postseason. His team closes out the second round without him and keeps it competitive against the conference 1-seed.

2022: Curry wins the title with his biggest ever offensive load. Kawhi is out for the year.

Not exactly what I would call an advantage for Kawhi, no.

starting with 2016

Lol come on, we watched them play the exact same team to grossly different team and individual results!

whether Kawhi was asked to do more than Steph or whether Steph was asked to carry the team like 2016. It seems to be a fairly consistent theme

It seems to be a fairly consistent theme that Kawhi struggles to complete postseasons.

so I guess I don't see the point in assuming that the trend was about to come to an abrupt stop right as it was going full-throttle and basically peaking.

But that is the thing, it was not. It was full throttle in round 1 before tapering off. Just as in 2016, in 2020, in 2021, and superficially in 2019 (although given quality of competition, I definitely think the 76ers series was better; like I said, that is one of my top two series left on the board along with Wade versus the 2006 Pistons).

I could see if Kawhi played 24 crappy minutes in Game 1 and I was the one arguing he was destined to be great in the next 3 or 4 games. But he had a 25 game score in 24 minutes, which is crazy.

Okay, and if you think that was continuing, maybe you should have voted for him as a top three peak after all. Most of us are much more skeptical.

[No-more-rings]

For Moses getting so many votes, what makes him better than Dirk? Dirk’s offense seems more versatile and scalable to today’s league. Defensively, Moses is no lockdown defender even if he did have an advantage over Dirk.

[AEnigma]

At this point seems mostly narrative reasons. Moses has more votes than Dirk only to the extent that people who would vote for Dirk over Moses are simply not voting for Dirk yet. I would not be too caught up in that disparity yet; neither is winning in the next two counts at least, and probably not in the next three.

[Ron Swanson]

Didn't have Walton on my previous ballot, so it's the same for me:

2005-06 Dwyane Wade: HM: 2008-09, but I'll make the argument for '06 being peak Wade. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I think post-2007 Wade already lost a bit of his explosiveness due to injuries. Probably the quickest 2-guard we had seen since Jordan, I like young Wade's two-way impact more. And going by the numbers, 2006 really was one of the most impressive offensive carry jobs ever both in the RS (+13.3 on/off) and even more so in the playoffs (+21.9).

1975-76 Julius Erving:(HM: 1980-81) Really torn over whether this was too high to put Dr. J, and this will likely be the only ABA season I vote for. But he's one of the few ABA players that didn't suffer any drop-off transitioning to the NBA, so I feel comfortable saying '76 is his peak and would have looked just as good in any league setting. Before Magic, Jordan, and Giannis he was basically the GOAT transition player. All-time postseason run (34/12/5/2/2 on 61% TS) capped off with a legendary Finals stat line (37/14/5) against a Denver team with 3 future hall-of-famers (Issel, Thompson, Jones) makes it hard to scrutinize the competition angle too much.

2016-17 Kawhi: (HM: 2018-19) Really tough between Kawhi, Kobe, and Chris Paul for the 3rd vote. To be fair, I don't believe the Spurs would have beat the Warriors even with a healthy Kawhi, but it's hard to ignore the numbers he had put up leading up to him exiting Game 1 of the WCF (27/8/4 on 67% TS, 31.5 PER, .314 WS/48). Much like Julius, it helps that we know he was capable of similar postseason runs beyond that (2014, 2019-21), so 2017 gets the nod considering how much better his defense was pre-injury, as well as it being his most complete RS (74 games, 3rd in MVP voting).

[f4p]

Part of the concern with 2017 Kawhi is that small postseason sample though. We are talking like ten and a half games here.

And that would be great if we didn't have a whole bunch of other Kawhi playoffs indicating that he is basically unstoppable. From 2016 to 2021, over 70 games, he averaged 29.0 PER, 0.263 WS48, 10.9 BPM on 62.9 TS%. Those would damn near be a career high playoff run for most of the non-Jordan/Lebron top 10. And that's a 5 year average!

Hence the comment about combining years. You are free to do that, but as I said, it is unsurprising not everyone does, especially when two of those postseasons ended disappointingly on performance (2016 and 2020), ended because of injury ten games in (2017 and 2021), or clearly showed Kawhi degrading as the postseason went on in a way we could not see in any other postseason because he did not make it that far (2019). Like, look at how Kawhi does in round 1. He obliterates teams. And then every second round he drops off somewhat. Then in 2019 he drops further in the third round, and then further still in the Finals.

I'm not combining anything. You act like I'm taking the best aspects of each year or something. I'm pointing out that basically anywhere you look since 2016, Kawhi is putting up playoffs numbers matched by very few people. In other words, we should have fairly high confidence in extrapolation.

And I'm not really sure I buy the dropoff comment. First, it's a sample size of 1. Second, in 2019, his game scores by round were:

21.4
27.0
23.4
23.9

Those are still excellent numbers in the ECF and Finals and higher than Round 1. Round 2 was just legendary. And obviously you would expect some drop-off going to tougher and tougher opponents, including the #1 defense in milwaukee. But the numbers are still great.

Thus my Tonya Harding comment. The argument is basically that if a goon decides to hurt you, we assume you would have fallen off and penalize you, and literally elevate a guy above you who was a teammate of the aforementioned goon.

No, we assume nothing. You are assuming it would have continued. Maybe he would have bucked the worrying injury warnings we saw literally one game before. Or maybe he leaves on his own in Game 3, no Zaza involved. We have no way of knowing. That is the point. Smaller sample means lesser certainty.

The last 6 years say stopping Kawhi is practically impossible.

The last six years you basically just needed to wait him out.

Wait him out for a 29 ppg, 60.6 TS% finals? These are the kinds of numbers few people are putting up with any consistency. Especially not from any group of players who play defense as well as Kawhi.

And the small amount of evidence we had from Game 1 indicates the Warriors weren't going to be the team that did it (nor does their Finals defense on Lebron indicate they would just stop any perimeter guy/wing if they really focused).

You really want to play the extrapolation game?

Okay, what about 2018 Lebron against the Warriors. Or 2015 Lebron against the Warriors. What about how the 2016 Thunder did against the Warriors. Or what the 2016 Spurs did against the Thunder, to bring it back to Kawhi. Or what the 2012 Spurs did against the Thunder. Or what the 2019 Bucks did against the Raptors. Or what the 2019 Magic did against the Raptors. Or what the 2020 Clippers did against the Nuggets. Or seeing as his name will start to be brought up soon, what McGrady did against the 2003 Pistons.

Good teams (and defences, if we ignore the 2020 Nuggets) adjust. May as well argue 2017 Kawhi was going to sweep the Warriors off that game 1 and then obviously win a title against a Cavaliers team even less capable of guarding them.

Yes, I'm totally arguing they were going to sweep the Warriors. I'm sure that's what you think I was saying. Yes, plenty of people have played better in game 1 than the rest of the series. We've also seen Lebron lose a million game 1's and then win. In the 2020 Nuggets series, going by game score Kawhi's series was Game 4, Game 5, Game 1, Game 6, Game 3, Game 2, and Game 7. Pretty random. And to take this back to what started this, it was Kawhi vs Steph. We have mountains of evidence that Kawhi's raises his game and puts up enormous numbers in the playoffs and Steph traditionally falls off in the playoffs. 2017 was actually one of the few times Steph had better numbers, and they still didn't come close to Kawhi.

We don't really need different versions of Kawhi because what he did in 2017 was insane. If he combined any more skills into his 2017 version, then we'd be talking top 3 peak.

Lol, I mean, if we gave 2017 Kawhi 2021’s passing and said he stayed healthy in a six game loss to the Warriors, I would still not come close to putting that in my top ten. Although of course if he actually swept them, as you seem to believe, then maybe I would reconsider.

Seriously? Now I'm just curious. You seem to not value Kawhi at all. I don't even like Kawhi so defending him is annoying, but I can't deny what I've seen. A completely healthy Kawhi, with even better passing than the version of him who was putting up like top 5 playoff numbers (at least by some stats) doesn't even crack your top 10? He's not beating Bird and Magic? With a huge defensive advantage, huge scoring advantage, and per your hypothetical, a great series against the best team ever? He's not in the Hakeem/Duncan tier at that point?

This is especially weird because most of your argument seems to be just looking at how amazing he is as a postseason scorer… but you also dismiss Reggie. 2020 Game 7 Kawhi was pretty bad too, you know.

2020 Game 7 Kawhi is shocking precisely because he is almost the last guy you would expect it from. I mean, on the scale of having bad playoff moments, Kawhi avoids them about as well as anyone ever not named Jordan. Everybody eventually has one. Or two.
Or ten. It's not like that was the first time Reggie wasn't great in a game 7 or in a playoff game.

I'm not sure what you mean by people don't care. 2017 Steph was picked as his peak, almost exclusively because of the stats bump he got from Durant.

If you think that then you did not read most of the arguments for him (either this project or last). I find Steph arguments annoying too, but very few people actually used this reasoning.

"He was better in the playoffs" was basically the main reasoning because people really wanted to pick 2016.

He's never had a statistical playoffs like that in any other year.

Okay, and if people took that year at face value based off his “statistics”, do you really think he would have slotted in at #12?

As in, he would have been higher? I didn't even pick Kawhi top 5 with top 5 numbers so clearly, like almost anybody, I apply some of my own context to the numbers. Like Steph's numbers are obviously held back a little by being outliers from the rest of his career and that outlier happening in his most favorable circumstances.

And playoff Kawhi has far outdistanced playoff Steph basically any year

2017: Curry wins a(n easy) title. Kawhi struggles with injuries and misses the third round.

2018: Curry wins a title. Kawhi is out for the year.

2019: Kawhi wins the title over Curry, who misses his best teammate and a game and a half of his next best scoring teammate. Many people are more impressed by Curry in that series regardless because of how he performed in an adverse situation. (For what it is worth, yes, I think Kawhi was better overall that postseason, if not necessarily in that series.)

2020: Curry is out for the year. Kawhi chokes against the Nuggets.

2021: Curry loses two play-in games. Kawhi plays eleven games but then misses the rest of the postseason. His team closes out the second round without him and keeps it competitive against the conference 1-seed.

2022: Curry wins the title with his biggest ever offensive load. Kawhi is out for the year.

Not exactly what I would call an advantage for Kawhi, no.

Now you're really trying to argue Curry is a better playoff performer than Kawhi? Again, how low do you value Kawhi? I think it's pretty clear the entire basis of what we're talking about is outplaying Curry and only not getting to continue doing that because Curry's teammate hurt Kawhi. The debate is clearly not that Curry is better than Kawhi if Kawhi is hurt. Yes, if Curry plays and Kawhi doesn't, then I suppose Curry edges Kawhi out. But that seems even less relevant to the 2017 debate considering "Kawhi is always hurt" wasn't a thing until "Zaza purposely hurts Kawhi in 2017" was a thing.

In Kawhi's last 5 playoffs, his worst PER of 27.8 beats Curry's career best PER of 27.1. His worst WS48 of 0.228 would tie Curry's 2nd best of his career (2015) and his average would be well above all but Curry's 2017 outlier. And his worst BPM of 9.4 is barely below Curry's career high of 9.7 in 2017. There's just no argument in the world who plays better in the playoffs and it seems weird to penalize someone relative to someone else, when they were taken out on a cheap shot. It would be a huge outlier if Kawhi somehow didn't keep outplaying 2017 Steph. Let's just admit what happened. People wanted Steph high, the 2016 playoffs obviously didn't cut it, so they took the gimme playoff year of 2017, a huge outlier of a playoffs for Steph, and pretended it was an amazing peak.

starting with 2016

Lol come on, we watched them play the exact same team to grossly different team and individual results!

He slightly outplayed Kawhi (20.9 to 18.4 game score) in one particular common opponent series over 5 years. Right before having the worst series of his career.

whether Kawhi was asked to do more than Steph or whether Steph was asked to carry the team like 2016. It seems to be a fairly consistent theme

It seems to be a fairly consistent theme that Kawhi struggles to complete postseasons.

That would be a great point if we were evaluating Kawhi's whole career and his first injury trouble was just him blowing out an ACL.

so I guess I don't see the point in assuming that the trend was about to come to an abrupt stop right as it was going full-throttle and basically peaking.

But that is the thing, it was not. It was full throttle in round 1 before tapering off. Just as in 2016, in 2020, in 2021, and superficially in 2019 (although given quality of competition, I definitely think the 76ers series was better; like I said, that is one of my top two series left on the board along with Wade versus the 2006 Pistons).

I could see if Kawhi played 24 crappy minutes in Game 1 and I was the one arguing he was destined to be great in the next 3 or 4 games. But he had a 25 game score in 24 minutes, which is crazy.

Okay, and if you think that was continuing, maybe you should have voted for him as a top three peak after all. Most of us are much more skeptical.

I mean I think I started voting him in round #9. I can't help that the rest of the board didn't vote for it and we're here in round #18. And #9 is even my own adjustment for not actually seeing him play it out (kind of similar to maybe 1993 Hakeem being behind 1994 because I actually saw the conference finals and finals). From a pure level of play, I'd have to start thinking of it with Hakeem and Duncan but maybe not quite since they still had so much defensive value.

[f4p]

For Moses getting so many votes, what makes him better than Dirk? Dirk’s offense seems more versatile and scalable to today’s league. Defensively, Moses is no lockdown defender even if he did have an advantage over Dirk.

Why does their game have to be compared to what they would do today? There's nothing inherently special about this era. It's just a set of rules and points of emphasis that have led us to the game we play today. In 10 years, they might decide things are too crazy in terms of 3 point shooting and get rid of the corner 3 and call fouls on wings trying to guard the post like they did for the first 60 years of NBA history and dominant big men might come along and rule the league again, with everybody scrambling to adjust just like they scrambled for the last 10 years with more 3's.

I can't see Dirk going back to the early 80's and bodying and outplaying Kareem head to head so I don't see why I should expect Moses to come outplay Dirk in a spread out era. It seems hard to argue 1983 Moses wasn't better in his era than Dirk was in any season of his career.

[No-more-rings]

Why does their game have to be compared to what they would do today? There's nothing inherently special about this era. It's just a set of rules and points of emphasis that have led us to the game we play today. In 10 years, they might decide things are too crazy in terms of 3 point shooting and get rid of the corner 3 and call fouls on wings trying to guard the post like they did for the first 60 years of NBA history and dominant big men might come along and rule the league again, with everybody scrambling to adjust just like they scrambled for the last 10 years with more 3's.

If you don't weigh how players would do in other eras that's fine, but for me I take it into consideration. Moses had severe limitations on offense, particularly his passing and creation for others. That's was true then and it would be more of an issue today.

I can't see Dirk going back to the early 80's and bodying and outplaying Kareem head to head so I don't see why I should expect Moses to come outplay Dirk in a spread out era. It seems hard to argue 1983 Moses wasn't better in his era than Dirk was in any season of his career.

Eh I mean I think people tend to overstate the importance of one head to head matchup, especially one where Kareem was at the end of or arguably already past his prime.

I'd argue Dirk does better in the 80s than Moses would do in the 2000s or 2010s. If you just weigh how dominant someone is in their own era fine. I'd still disagree with anyone on that take. It's also why we're seeing votes for Mikan which is a little silly. There's no way in terms of actual skill and ability he belongs anywhere near this high. Probably a guy who gets routinely grossly overrated in these all time projects. Like I just have no idea how to even evaluate a guy like him. Him dominating a bunch of skinny 6'5 white guys doesn't make him some goat level force.

I know you didn't vote Mikan, and I don't consider Moses in that way, but I think it's too problematic to just completely disregard how players would do in different environments.

[DraymondGold]

And that would be great if we didn't have a whole bunch of other Kawhi playoffs indicating that he is basically unstoppable. From 2016 to 2021, over 70 games, he averaged 29.0 PER, 0.263 WS48, 10.9 BPM on 62.9 TS%. Those would damn near be a career high playoff run for most of the non-Jordan/Lebron top 10. And that's a 5 year average!

Hence the comment about combining years. You are free to do that, but as I said, it is unsurprising not everyone does, especially when two of those postseasons ended disappointingly on performance (2016 and 2020), ended because of injury ten games in (2017 and 2021), or clearly showed Kawhi degrading as the postseason went on in a way we could not see in any other postseason because he did not make it that far (2019). Like, look at how Kawhi does in round 1. He obliterates teams. And then every second round he drops off somewhat. Then in 2019 he drops further in the third round, and then further still in the Finals.

I'm not combining anything. You act like I'm taking the best aspects of each year or something. I'm pointing out that basically anywhere you look since 2016, Kawhi is putting up playoffs numbers matched by very few people. In other words, we should have fairly high confidence in extrapolation.

And I'm not really sure I buy the dropoff comment. First, it's a sample size of 1. Second, in 2019, his game scores by round were:

21.4
27.0
23.4
23.9

Those are still excellent numbers in the ECF and Finals and higher than Round 1. Round 2 was just legendary. And obviously you would expect some drop-off going to tougher and tougher opponents, including the #1 defense in milwaukee. But the numbers are still great.

Thus my Tonya Harding comment. The argument is basically that if a goon decides to hurt you, we assume you would have fallen off and penalize you, and literally elevate a guy above you who was a teammate of the aforementioned goon.

No, we assume nothing. You are assuming it would have continued. Maybe he would have bucked the worrying injury warnings we saw literally one game before. Or maybe he leaves on his own in Game 3, no Zaza involved. We have no way of knowing. That is the point. Smaller sample means lesser certainty.

The last 6 years say stopping Kawhi is practically impossible.

The last six years you basically just needed to wait him out.

Wait him out for a 29 ppg, 60.6 TS% finals? These are the kinds of numbers few people are putting up with any consistency. Especially not from any group of players who play defense as well as Kawhi.

And the small amount of evidence we had from Game 1 indicates the Warriors weren't going to be the team that did it (nor does their Finals defense on Lebron indicate they would just stop any perimeter guy/wing if they really focused).

You really want to play the extrapolation game?

Okay, what about 2018 Lebron against the Warriors. Or 2015 Lebron against the Warriors. What about how the 2016 Thunder did against the Warriors. Or what the 2016 Spurs did against the Thunder, to bring it back to Kawhi. Or what the 2012 Spurs did against the Thunder. Or what the 2019 Bucks did against the Raptors. Or what the 2019 Magic did against the Raptors. Or what the 2020 Clippers did against the Nuggets. Or seeing as his name will start to be brought up soon, what McGrady did against the 2003 Pistons.

Good teams (and defences, if we ignore the 2020 Nuggets) adjust. May as well argue 2017 Kawhi was going to sweep the Warriors off that game 1 and then obviously win a title against a Cavaliers team even less capable of guarding them.

Yes, I'm totally arguing they were going to sweep the Warriors. I'm sure that's what you think I was saying. Yes, plenty of people have played better in game 1 than the rest of the series. We've also seen Lebron lose a million game 1's and then win. In the 2020 Nuggets series, going by game score Kawhi's series was Game 4, Game 5, Game 1, Game 6, Game 3, Game 2, and Game 7. Pretty random. And to take this back to what started this, it was Kawhi vs Steph. We have mountains of evidence that Kawhi's raises his game and puts up enormous numbers in the playoffs and Steph traditionally falls off in the playoffs. 2017 was actually one of the few times Steph had better numbers, and they still didn't come close to Kawhi.

We don't really need different versions of Kawhi because what he did in 2017 was insane. If he combined any more skills into his 2017 version, then we'd be talking top 3 peak.

Lol, I mean, if we gave 2017 Kawhi 2021’s passing and said he stayed healthy in a six game loss to the Warriors, I would still not come close to putting that in my top ten. Although of course if he actually swept them, as you seem to believe, then maybe I would reconsider.

Seriously? Now I'm just curious. You seem to not value Kawhi at all. I don't even like Kawhi so defending him is annoying, but I can't deny what I've seen. A completely healthy Kawhi, with even better passing than the version of him who was putting up like top 5 playoff numbers (at least by some stats) doesn't even crack your top 10? He's not beating Bird and Magic? With a huge defensive advantage, huge scoring advantage, and per your hypothetical, a great series against the best team ever? He's not in the Hakeem/Duncan tier at that point?

This is especially weird because most of your argument seems to be just looking at how amazing he is as a postseason scorer… but you also dismiss Reggie. 2020 Game 7 Kawhi was pretty bad too, you know.

2020 Game 7 Kawhi is shocking precisely because he is almost the last guy you would expect it from. I mean, on the scale of having bad playoff moments, Kawhi avoids them about as well as anyone ever not named Jordan. Everybody eventually has one. Or two.
Or ten. It's not like that was the first time Reggie wasn't great in a game 7 or in a playoff game.

I'm not sure what you mean by people don't care. 2017 Steph was picked as his peak, almost exclusively because of the stats bump he got from Durant.

If you think that then you did not read most of the arguments for him (either this project or last). I find Steph arguments annoying too, but very few people actually used this reasoning.

"He was better in the playoffs" was basically the main reasoning because people really wanted to pick 2016.

He's never had a statistical playoffs like that in any other year.

Okay, and if people took that year at face value based off his “statistics”, do you really think he would have slotted in at #12?

As in, he would have been higher? I didn't even pick Kawhi top 5 with top 5 numbers so clearly, like almost anybody, I apply some of my own context to the numbers. Like Steph's numbers are obviously held back a little by being outliers from the rest of his career and that outlier happening in his most favorable circumstances.

And playoff Kawhi has far outdistanced playoff Steph basically any year

2017: Curry wins a(n easy) title. Kawhi struggles with injuries and misses the third round.

2018: Curry wins a title. Kawhi is out for the year.

2019: Kawhi wins the title over Curry, who misses his best teammate and a game and a half of his next best scoring teammate. Many people are more impressed by Curry in that series regardless because of how he performed in an adverse situation. (For what it is worth, yes, I think Kawhi was better overall that postseason, if not necessarily in that series.)

2020: Curry is out for the year. Kawhi chokes against the Nuggets.

2021: Curry loses two play-in games. Kawhi plays eleven games but then misses the rest of the postseason. His team closes out the second round without him and keeps it competitive against the conference 1-seed.

2022: Curry wins the title with his biggest ever offensive load. Kawhi is out for the year.

Not exactly what I would call an advantage for Kawhi, no.

Now you're really trying to argue Curry is a better playoff performer than Kawhi? Again, how low do you value Kawhi? I think it's pretty clear the entire basis of what we're talking about is outplaying Curry and only not getting to continue doing that because Curry's teammate hurt Kawhi. The debate is clearly not that Curry is better than Kawhi if Kawhi is hurt. Yes, if Curry plays and Kawhi doesn't, then I suppose Curry edges Kawhi out. But that seems even less relevant to the 2017 debate considering "Kawhi is always hurt" wasn't a thing until "Zaza purposely hurts Kawhi in 2017" was a thing.

In Kawhi's last 5 playoffs, his worst PER of 27.8 beats Curry's career best PER of 27.1. His worst WS48 of 0.228 would tie Curry's 2nd best of his career (2015) and his average would be well above all but Curry's 2017 outlier. And his worst BPM of 9.4 is barely below Curry's career high of 9.7 in 2017. There's just no argument in the world who plays better in the playoffs and it seems weird to penalize someone relative to someone else, when they were taken out on a cheap shot. It would be a huge outlier if Kawhi somehow didn't keep outplaying 2017 Steph. Let's just admit what happened. People wanted Steph high, the 2016 playoffs obviously didn't cut it, so they took the gimme playoff year of 2017, a huge outlier of a playoffs for Steph, and pretended it was an amazing peak.

starting with 2016

Lol come on, we watched them play the exact same team to grossly different team and individual results!

He slightly outplayed Kawhi (20.9 to 18.4 game score) in one particular common opponent series over 5 years. Right before having the worst series of his career.

whether Kawhi was asked to do more than Steph or whether Steph was asked to carry the team like 2016. It seems to be a fairly consistent theme

It seems to be a fairly consistent theme that Kawhi struggles to complete postseasons.

That would be a great point if we were evaluating Kawhi's whole career and his first injury trouble was just him blowing out an ACL.

so I guess I don't see the point in assuming that the trend was about to come to an abrupt stop right as it was going full-throttle and basically peaking.

But that is the thing, it was not. It was full throttle in round 1 before tapering off. Just as in 2016, in 2020, in 2021, and superficially in 2019 (although given quality of competition, I definitely think the 76ers series was better; like I said, that is one of my top two series left on the board along with Wade versus the 2006 Pistons).

I could see if Kawhi played 24 crappy minutes in Game 1 and I was the one arguing he was destined to be great in the next 3 or 4 games. But he had a 25 game score in 24 minutes, which is crazy.

Okay, and if you think that was continuing, maybe you should have voted for him as a top three peak after all. Most of us are much more skeptical.

I mean I think I started voting him in round #9. I can't help that the rest of the board didn't vote for it and we're here in round #18. And #9 is even my own adjustment for not actually seeing him play it out (kind of similar to maybe 1993 Hakeem being behind 1994 because I actually saw the conference finals and finals). From a pure level of play, I'd have to start thinking of it with Hakeem and Duncan but maybe not quite since they still had so much defensive value.

Hi f4p, hope you're doing well.

I don't want to get too into the weeds here, but I just wanted to point out the majority of your statistical evidence for Kawhi > Curry in the playoffs (both in 2017 and in general) are PER and WS/48. You also mention GameScore and Basketball Reference's BPM. This seems odd to me... I've mentioned throughout the project that PER is the single least-trusted all-in-one metric among actual NBA analysts / members of NBA organizations. A high PER is also the least correlated all-in-one stat to predict how likely you are to win (i.e. having a high PER contributes less to winning than having high marks in the all-in-one stats). WS isn't much better and neither is GameScore. Basketball Reference's BPM's the best of the bunch, but it's still not as good as actual plus-minus based metrics.

Now it would be one thing if we were looking at old players before, where there's limited stats. But the truth is, we just have better stats than these to look at for recent playoff runs. And in plenty of the more accurate stats, Curry grades out better than Kawhi, including in the 2017 playoffs. I actually linked many of the stats comparing in previous posts in this project.

Here's what I said the last time we discussed this:

Since it will come up more here I assume, I will ask again like I did in thread #7:

For the people picking Steph in 2017, why would he be up here if he wasn't even better than Kawhi in 2017? Kawhi played nearly a full season for once with 74 games, had very good offensive numbers and was extremely good on defense (27.6 PER, 0.264 WS48), and then took all of that to another level in the playoffs. 31.5 PER and 0.314 WS48 on 67.2 TS% in the playoffs, numbers like are rarely seen in nba history (have they been seen?). And we actually got to see him play Steph's team and play a nearly perfect game while trouncing the most talented roster of all time. Normally I would say we have to consider injuries, but that should clearly not be the case when a goon on the other team just takes you out on a dirty play because you are playing too well.

Sorry I missed this! But thanks for raising this question again

The reason why I have 2017 Curry over 2017 Kawhi is pretty simple... he was better than Kawhi in 2017

PER and WS/48 are okay stats to use back in the day, but they're measurably far worse at predicting team success than any of the plus-minus based stats (e.g. AuPM, RAPM, PIPM, BPM, and RPM all are measurably better predictors of current value and future success). Basically nobody who work for NBA teams use PER or WS/48, but there's plenty of reports of actual NBA analysts using plus-minus based stats.

What do the wider spectrum of stats say? 2017 Curry beats 2017 Kawhi in AuPM/game, Postseason AuPM/game, RAPM, playoff PIPM, Fivethirtyeight's RAPTOR +/-, Basketball Index's LEBRON, DARKO [including postseason], ESPN’s RPM, CORP, Backpicks BPM, and Backpicks Playoff BPM. The only stats where Kawhi comes out on top were the two you mentioned: Basketball Reference's BPM and WS/48.

The 2017 Warriors are commonly considered possibly the best team of all time, and I've made statistical and film-based arguments throughout this project that their dominance is predominantly driven by Curry. For example, the Curry-KD dynasty played better than Larry Bird's 86 Celtics and Magic's 87 Lakers with just Curry on and all 3 other all-stars off... while they were worse than the 2022 Cavs with all 3 other all stars on and just Curry off.

As for that one game, I'm pretty hesitant to value 1 half of a basketball game over the army of evidence we have from the entire playoffs and regular season. If we just looked at one half of Game 1 of a series, we might think the 1991 Lakers would beat the 91 Bulls, or that the 2001 76ers would beat the 2001 Lakers, or that the 2022 Celtics would beat the 2022 Warriors. If just one half of a Game 1 can be such a poor predictor of a team's value, why should it be any better for a star player?

Now again, there are stats you can pick that take postseason Kawhi over Curry. But there's clearly plenty of stats (often the more trusted ones) that take 17 postseason Curry. And film analysis that people have done in previous threads have also been favorable to Curry. So it seems like a bit of an oversimplification to just say Kawhi definitively had the "Better regular season, better postseason (and it's not like it's just this postseason), better head to head in the postseason. "

And like others have mentioned, this is with almost 50% of Kawhi's 2017 postseason numbers coming in the first round, which may be giving him a boost.

[AEnigma]

I'm not combining anything. You act like I'm taking the best aspects of each year or something. I'm pointing out that basically anywhere you look since 2016, Kawhi is putting up playoffs numbers matched by very few people. In other words, we should have fairly high confidence in extrapolation.

Yes, his playoff scoring numbers are nearly unparalleled. If we needed to rank off that, this would be a profoundly different list.

And I'm not really sure I buy the dropoff comment. First, it's a sample size of 1. Second, in 2019, his game scores by round were:

21.4
27.0
23.4
23.9

Those are still excellent numbers in the ECF and Finals and higher than Round 1. Round 2 was just legendary. And obviously you would expect some drop-off going to tougher and tougher opponents, including the #1 defense in milwaukee. But the numbers are still great.

Gamescore is not everything, and regardless that Magic series includes the Game 3 illness (stomach flu?) where he could not score at all. Or are you supporting the tOnYa HaRdiNG virus?

Wait him out for a 29 ppg, 60.6 TS% finals?

Against a team bleeding wing depth and rim protection? But yes, quite literally, seeing as that is the only time he actually brought his team there — twice via injury absence, once or twice (depending on whether we include 2016) via underperformance.

These are the kinds of numbers few people are putting up with any consistency.

The types of scoring numbers, yes.

Especially not from any group of players who play defense as well as Kawhi.

2017-21 Kawhi is nowhere near 2016 Kawhi as a defender, and 2016 Kawhi is nowhere near those versions as a scorer.

Yes, I'm totally arguing they were going to sweep the Warriors. I'm sure that's what you think I was saying. Yes, plenty of people have played better in game 1 than the rest of the series. We've also seen Lebron lose a million game 1's and then win.

So why are we acting as if that first half means much of anything.

In the 2020 Nuggets series, going by game score Kawhi's series was Game 4, Game 5, Game 1, Game 6, Game 3, Game 2, and Game 7. Pretty random.

I did not say he necessarily broke down as the series went on (e.g. Chris Paul), I said he has no real evidence of maintaining play through later rounds — the one time he played more than that, he was visibly limping and slowing… but that does not show up in the game score.

And to take this back to what started this, it was Kawhi vs Steph. We have mountains of evidence that Kawhi's raises his game and puts up enormous numbers in the playoffs and Steph traditionally falls off in the playoffs. 2017 was actually one of the few times Steph had better numbers, and they still didn't come close to Kawhi.

… Based on scoring.

We don't really need different versions of Kawhi because what he did in 2017 was insane. If he combined any more skills into his 2017 version, then we'd be talking top 3 peak.

Lol, I mean, if we gave 2017 Kawhi 2021’s passing and said he stayed healthy in a six game loss to the Warriors, I would still not come close to putting that in my top ten. Although of course if he actually swept them, as you seem to believe, then maybe I would reconsider.

Seriously? Now I'm just curious. You seem to not value Kawhi at all. I don't even like Kawhi so defending him is annoying, but I can't deny what I've seen. A completely healthy Kawhi, with even better passing than the version of him who was putting up like top 5 playoff numbers (at least by some stats) doesn't even crack your top 10? He's not beating Bird and Magic? With a huge defensive advantage, huge scoring advantage, and per your hypothetical, a great series against the best team ever? He's not in the Hakeem/Duncan tier at that point?

No, because basketball is more than scoring efficacy.

The funny thing is, I actually am a Kawhi fan. He was one of my three favourite players before he went to the Clippers, and even on the Clippers, I like him more than most. I like him more than any player I am voting ahead of him except Duncan and Hakeem. That does not mean I need to pretend he is something he is not just because he scores well.

2020 Game 7 Kawhi is shocking precisely because he is almost the last guy you would expect it from.

Because of what at that point was a seven series sample?

I mean, on the scale of having bad playoff moments, Kawhi avoids them about as well as anyone ever not named Jordan. Everybody eventually has one. Or two.

Jordan had plenty, but like everyone in the top twelve, he could contribute outside of his bad scoring games.

If you think that then you did not read most of the arguments for him (either this project or last). I find Steph arguments annoying too, but very few people actually used this reasoning.

"He was better in the playoffs" was basically the main reasoning because people really wanted to pick 2016.

And he was. For reasons that were illustrated well outside of just “Durant makes it easy”.

He's never had a statistical playoffs like that in any other year.

Okay, and if people took that year at face value based off his “statistics”, do you really think he would have slotted in at #12?

As in, he would have been higher? I didn't even pick Kawhi top 5 with top 5 numbers so clearly, like almost anybody, I apply some of my own context to the numbers.

Lmao, “so clearly”. Such restraint, not voting Kawhi top five!

Now you're really trying to argue Curry is a better playoff performer than Kawhi? Again, how low do you value Kawhi? I think it's pretty clear the entire basis of what we're talking about is outplaying Curry and only not getting to continue doing that because Curry's teammate hurt Kawhi. The debate is clearly not that Curry is better than Kawhi if Kawhi is hurt. Yes, if Curry plays and Kawhi doesn't, then I suppose Curry edges Kawhi out. But that seems even less relevant to the 2017 debate considering "Kawhi is always hurt" wasn't a thing until "Zaza purposely hurts Kawhi in 2017" was a thing.

In Kawhi's last 5 playoffs, his worst PER of 27.8 beats Curry's career best PER of 27.1. His worst WS48 of 0.228 would tie Curry's 2nd best of his career (2015) and his average would be well above all but Curry's 2017 outlier. And his worst BPM of 9.4 is barely below Curry's career high of 9.7 in 2017. There's just no argument in the world who plays better in the playoffs and it seems weird to penalize someone relative to someone else, when they were taken out on a cheap shot. It would be a huge outlier if Kawhi somehow didn't keep outplaying 2017 Steph.

I too like to look at basketball reference’s boxscore and call it a day.

Let's just admit what happened. People wanted Steph high, the 2016 playoffs obviously didn't cut it, so they took the gimme playoff year of 2017, a huge outlier of a playoffs for Steph, and pretended it was an amazing peak.

It seems to be a fairly consistent theme that Kawhi struggles to complete postseasons.

That would be a great point if we were evaluating Kawhi's whole career and his first injury trouble was just him blowing out an ACL.

His first postseason injury trouble was when he missed the game immediately preceding that Game 1. The Zaza injury exacerbated a preexisting condition — or do you think that injury was just so bad that it spontaneously created a degenerative knee condition that would permanently cap his ability to play heavy regular season minutes?

Maybe you should have voted for him as a top three peak after all. Most of us are much more skeptical.

I mean I think I started voting him in round #9. I can't help that the rest of the board didn't vote for it and we're here in round #18. And #9 is even my own adjustment for not actually seeing him play it out (kind of similar to maybe 1993 Hakeem being behind 1994 because I actually saw the conference finals and finals). From a pure level of play, I'd have to start thinking of it with Hakeem and Duncan but maybe not quite since they still had so much defensive value.

Gee, how weird. Probably not worth looking into why no one else joined you on that hill, though; obviously no one else properly appreciates the sheer indisputable brilliance of his game.

[No-more-rings]

Woo, glad Walton finally made it. Still a sad fall, but at least the guys who moved ahead were on either side of the era extremes.

Changing my vote and vote reasoning in light of some recent posts that made better arguments than what I was using.

1. Kobe Bryant a.) 2008 b.) 2009


2. Dwyane Wade a.) 2009 b.) 2006
Incredible athlete capable of lifting weak teams to the postseason (questionable for Davis and Kawhi with their traditionally lightened regular season loads) and decent teams to contention through elite scoring volume, strong creation, and versatile defence. His series against the 2006 Pistons is one of the most impressive remaining (Kawhi against the 2019 76ers is the other main contender), and although his fit limitations keep below Kobe for me, I am confident a contender could be built around him in any era.

Do you see Kobe vs Wade as basically a tossup, or do you see a clear edge for Kobe?

[AEnigma]

Do you see Kobe vs Wade as basically a tossup, or do you see a clear edge for Kobe?

Uhhhhh both lol. I see a clear edge for Kobe in terms of ease of championship roster construction, which is why I am voting him higher, but I see their personal peaks (i.e. what they actually did independent of roster theory) as basically a toss-up, which is why I am reluctant to move Wade much lower.

[f4p]

I don't want to get too into the weeds here, but I just wanted to point out the majority of your statistical evidence for Kawhi > Curry in the playoffs (both in 2017 and in general) are PER and WS/48. You also mention GameScore and Basketball Reference's BPM. This seems odd to me... I've mentioned throughout the project that PER is the single least-trusted all-in-one metric among actual NBA analysts / members of NBA organizations.

It seems odd I didn't just jump on the plus/minus bandwagon?

A high PER is also the least correlated all-in-one stat to predict how likely you are to win (i.e. having a high PER contributes less to winning than having high marks in the all-in-one stats). WS isn't much better and neither is GameScore. Basketball Reference's BPM's the best of the bunch, but it's still not as good as actual plus-minus based metrics.

And as I've mentioned before, PER seems to do quite well with high volume offensive guys (and WS48 and BPM for the most part). Here are the top 5 prime (age 22-35) playoff PER's:

1. Jordan
2. Lebron
3. Shaq
4. Hakeem
5. Duncan

That seems like a pretty great list. Since we have no plus/minus data for Russell and he doesn't do well in these stats, he will just have to remain an enigma who we value for other reasons.

Here is the best playoff on/off plus/minus apparently:

1. 1998-2001 David Robinson

Oof. Also, since I've seen it posted a few times in the Peaks thread, someone has shown DRob's AuPM from 1994 was the highest in the league. OK, Robinson was great. But who was 2nd? Kevin Willis. 4th? Nate McMillan. Or perhaps it was vice versa. Either way, that's not a good look for these supposedly great statistics. They seem to lack the ability to avoid crazy results such as the ones I've just mentioned. Sure, they get explained away with collinearity or something else that suggests the results that make sense are good and the ones that don't make sense must be due to something else, when theoretically they are supposed to get rid of all the problems of the other stats and just give us who has the most impact. But then they say Kevin Willis is 2nd best in 1994? When do I count the result, when do I ignore it?

On the other hand, the box score has been pretty good to us for the best of the best (which is who we are discussing). Can it explain why Bruce Bowen is good? Not really, so if we had a best defenders project, I probably wouldn't rely any on PER. Can it explain why Michael Jordan and Lebron and Duncan and Hakeem are good? And can it suss out the major drops of Karl Malone and David Robinson in the postseason? Seems to. PER even loves our very own Steph Curry in the regular season, so it doesn't seem to miss anything with him.

And that's the other thing I've mentioned, because it doesn't suffer the small sample size problem of plus/minus, it gives us a good way to compare regular season to postseason. I can't be sure Kawhi is better than Steph in the postseason (though he is), but I can be very confident that he steps up in the playoffs and Steph steps down. And if I suspect they are of similar regular season quality (at least when Kawhi plays), I can feel much more confident Kawhi is better in the playoffs, even in an absolute sense. Because I can see the numbers change based on a fairly apples-to-apples regular season to postseason comparison (can never be perfect with different opponents).

...
What do the wider spectrum of stats say? 2017 Curry beats 2017 Kawhi in AuPM/game, Postseason AuPM/game, RAPM, playoff PIPM, Fivethirtyeight's RAPTOR +/-, Basketball Index's LEBRON, DARKO [including postseason], ESPN’s RPM, CORP, Backpicks BPM, and Backpicks Playoff BPM. The only stats where Kawhi comes out on top were the two you mentioned: Basketball Reference's BPM and WS/48.

I'm noticing a lot of "PM" in those acronyms. They are all basically doing the same thing. So I'm not surprised the person who leads one would lead all the others. Especially when those stats love that player, often a bit irrationally as we have seen in Steph's dominance of those stats even when having subpar regular seasons.

The 2017 Warriors are commonly considered possibly the best team of all time, and I've made statistical and film-based arguments throughout this project that their dominance is predominantly driven by Curry. For example, the Curry-KD dynasty played better than Larry Bird's 86 Celtics and Magic's 87 Lakers with just Curry on and all 3 other all-stars off... while they were worse than the 2022 Cavs with all 3 other all stars on and just Curry off.

And again, this just isn't believable. I don't know what KD's plus/minus was in terms of points, but it was +1 wins and -8 losses in the playoffs. You can't go in the parking lot after game 7 and call KD, then go out to the Hampton's to recruit KD, then turn an epic finals loss into one of the more dominant playoff runs ever after you get KD and then pull a Bob Meyers at the championship parade and be like "Actually KD, we're not even sure we needed you" (or whatever BS thing he said). And blame him every time things aren't going perfectly for the next 3 years. And you certainly can't do it after KD gets hurt and you lose 4-1 in the finals without him (no sneaky credit for that KD win) and probably wouldn't have won the 2nd round without him. The '86 Celtics and '87 Lakers aren't losing to the '19 Raptors. The big picture says KD was very important.

As for that one game, I'm pretty hesitant to value 1 half of a basketball game over the army of evidence we have from the entire playoffs and regular season. If we just looked at one half of Game 1 of a series, we might think the 1991 Lakers would beat the 91 Bulls, or that the 2001 76ers would beat the 2001 Lakers, or that the 2022 Celtics would beat the 2022 Warriors. If just one half of a Game 1 can be such a poor predictor of a team's value, why should it be any better for a star player?

I mean I'd love more than one half myself, but we know why we don't have more than one half. It was also a pretty stark one half, which is why it's harder to dismiss. It was 78-55 with Kawhi being downright amazing. Sure, I doubt Kawhi plays exactly that well the whole series, but I don't know why he's not putting up an amazing series and why the Warriors would just suddenly smoke the Spurs.

And like others have mentioned, this is with almost 50% of Kawhi's 2017 postseason numbers coming in the first round, which may be giving him a boost.

I mean it was against the #7 defense so not exactly chumps. And 25% of Steph's playoffs come from the Spurs series. The series where the #1 Spurs defense suddenly wasn't nearly as good as they had been. Where not only Steph, but Durant put up the best TS% series of their entire careers, at the same time, both over 70%. Seems like their stats directly benefited from the Zaza situation.

[f4p]

Why does their game have to be compared to what they would do today? There's nothing inherently special about this era. It's just a set of rules and points of emphasis that have led us to the game we play today. In 10 years, they might decide things are too crazy in terms of 3 point shooting and get rid of the corner 3 and call fouls on wings trying to guard the post like they did for the first 60 years of NBA history and dominant big men might come along and rule the league again, with everybody scrambling to adjust just like they scrambled for the last 10 years with more 3's.

If you don't weigh how players would do in other eras that's fine, but for me I take it into consideration. Moses had severe limitations on offense, particularly his passing and creation for others. That's was true then and it would be more of an issue today.

It's fine to take other eras into account (though I don't do it much), but your comment just asked about today's game. At the very least, it would seem to have to go both directions. And he might not have been great at passing, but we're still talking about a guy who averaged 31 ppg one season, which I believe hasn't been surpassed by a big since.

I can't see Dirk going back to the early 80's and bodying and outplaying Kareem head to head so I don't see why I should expect Moses to come outplay Dirk in a spread out era. It seems hard to argue 1983 Moses wasn't better in his era than Dirk was in any season of his career.

Eh I mean I think people tend to overstate the importance of one head to head matchup, especially one where Kareem was at the end of or arguably already past his prime.

But it wasn't one. It was two. He beat the defending champion Lakers in 1981, with Kareem as defending MVP, while outplaying Kareem, and then beat the defending champion Lakers in 1982. And even after beating the Lakers in 1981, he still put up 28/12 and 27/15 to make the Finals. That's a finals appearance with a 40-42 team and then two year later, a championship with one of the most dominant teams ever. Sandwiched around a 31/15 season. These seem like pretty amazing individual and team results.

I'd argue Dirk does better in the 80s than Moses would do in the 2000s or 2010s. If you just weigh how dominant someone is in their own era fine. I'd still disagree with anyone on that take. It's also why we're seeing votes for Mikan which is a little silly. There's no way in terms of actual skill and ability he belongs anywhere near this high. Probably a guy who gets routinely grossly overrated in these all time projects. Like I just have no idea how to even evaluate a guy like him. Him dominating a bunch of skinny 6'5 white guys doesn't make him some goat level force.

I know you didn't vote Mikan, and I don't consider Moses in that way, but I think it's too problematic to just completely disregard how players would do in different environments.

The further we go in time, the deeper the league gets. That's true. In some senses, it always gets harder to stand out. On the other hand, in the NBA in particular the heliocentrism and focus on stars (even someone off-ball like Steph) has arguably helped counteract some of that. Offenses seemed a lot more egalitarian (in a way that I think was stupid) back in the day, making it harder to rack up per possession type numbers even if pace and minutes helped rack up bigger totals sometimes.

[AEnigma]

1983/84 Bernard King: 18 playoff games, eliminated by eventual champion both years. Averaged 31 points per 75 possessions on +8.5 relative efficiency, 8.2 BPM, .232 WS/48, 26.6 PER. In the 1984/85 regular seasons, he finished first team all-NBA and averaged 29.5 points per 75 possessions on +6 relative efficiency before going down with what was nearly a career ending leg injury.

Top 25 peak???

[f4p]

2017-21 Kawhi is nowhere near 2016 Kawhi as a defender, and 2016 Kawhi is nowhere near those versions as a scorer.

and? he still significantly above most anybody else we are talking about as wings. was he not a huge part of shutting down giannis in 2019?

So why are we acting as if that first half means much of anything.

why are we acting like it means nothing? it's not like Kawhi shot 8 for 9 on 3's or something. he was just methodical Kawhi doing what he wanted and the Spurs defense was looking great.

the one time he played more than that, he was visibly limping and slowing… but that does not show up in the game score.

while winning a lone superstar title with fantastic numbers. it's not quite Hakeem/Duncan, but 2019 Kawhi is certainly up there with 2011 Dirk, who everybody loves. And Dirk's worst series was also the Finals.

The types of scoring numbers, yes.

… Based on scoring.

No, because basketball is more than scoring efficacy.

not just because he scores well.

where is this "scoring" thing coming from? i mentioned ppg i think one time in all of this. Are PER, WS48, and BPM just scoring measures? Because I'm pretty sure they are not.

You realize 2017 Steph actually outscored Kawhi in the playoffs, right? 28.1 to 27.7? Even if you wanted to go by per 100, Kawhi's advantage in scoring would be the lowest of any of the numbers I've been quoting:

Scoring Per 100: 39.8 to 38.0 = +4.7%
PER: 31.5 to 27.1 = +16.2%
WS48: 0.314 to 0.272 = 15.4%
BPM: 14.2 to 9.7 = 46.4%

This is anything but a scoring argument.

I too like to look at basketball reference’s boxscore and call it a day.

ahh yes, dumb dumb no use PIPM and AuPM and EPM. how dare he use the same numbers that are also dominated by basically everybody in the top 10 of this project.

Jordan in '91 is 32.0 PER, 0.333 WS48, 14.6 BPM to Kawhi's 31.5 PER, 0.314 WS48, 14.2 BPM. What's magic about Kawhi that he can seemingly put up peak Jordan numbers but it's not really because he's playing insanely well? Or why do these numbers seem to just accidentally paint the Jordan as the best, which this board apparently agrees with through whatever method they used to come to their decision, if they have no meaning?

Maybe you should have voted for him as a top three peak after all. Most of us are much more skeptical.

I mean I think I started voting him in round #9. I can't help that the rest of the board didn't vote for it and we're here in round #18. And #9 is even my own adjustment for not actually seeing him play it out (kind of similar to maybe 1993 Hakeem being behind 1994 because I actually saw the conference finals and finals). From a pure level of play, I'd have to start thinking of it with Hakeem and Duncan but maybe not quite since they still had so much defensive value.

Gee, how weird. Probably not worth looking into why no one else joined you on that hill, though; obviously no one else properly appreciates the sheer indisputable brilliance of his game.[/quote]

is that how it works in these projects? we're all just supposed to make sure our votes line up with everyone else? seems to me most of this board would be laughed out of most basketball discussions in the world if they revealed what they really thought of kevin garnett, but i don't think anyone wants this board to be the same way. if someone is holding kawhi down in this project for any reason other than quantitative, then i would question that quite a bit. qualitatively, there is basically nothing else he could have done. dominant regular season, top 5 in many ways (in terms of unique players) postseason, kicked as much ass as he could have been expected to until he was hurt while putting up peak Jordan numbers.

[LukaTheGOAT]

Hence the comment about combining years. You are free to do that, but as I said, it is unsurprising not everyone does, especially when two of those postseasons ended disappointingly on performance (2016 and 2020), ended because of injury ten games in (2017 and 2021), or clearly showed Kawhi degrading as the postseason went on in a way we could not see in any other postseason because he did not make it that far (2019). Like, look at how Kawhi does in round 1. He obliterates teams. And then every second round he drops off somewhat. Then in 2019 he drops further in the third round, and then further still in the Finals.

I'm not combining anything. You act like I'm taking the best aspects of each year or something. I'm pointing out that basically anywhere you look since 2016, Kawhi is putting up playoffs numbers matched by very few people. In other words, we should have fairly high confidence in extrapolation.

And I'm not really sure I buy the dropoff comment. First, it's a sample size of 1. Second, in 2019, his game scores by round were:

21.4
27.0
23.4
23.9

Those are still excellent numbers in the ECF and Finals and higher than Round 1. Round 2 was just legendary. And obviously you would expect some drop-off going to tougher and tougher opponents, including the #1 defense in milwaukee. But the numbers are still great.

No, we assume nothing. You are assuming it would have continued. Maybe he would have bucked the worrying injury warnings we saw literally one game before. Or maybe he leaves on his own in Game 3, no Zaza involved. We have no way of knowing. That is the point. Smaller sample means lesser certainty.


The last six years you basically just needed to wait him out.

Wait him out for a 29 ppg, 60.6 TS% finals? These are the kinds of numbers few people are putting up with any consistency. Especially not from any group of players who play defense as well as Kawhi.

You really want to play the extrapolation game?

Okay, what about 2018 Lebron against the Warriors. Or 2015 Lebron against the Warriors. What about how the 2016 Thunder did against the Warriors. Or what the 2016 Spurs did against the Thunder, to bring it back to Kawhi. Or what the 2012 Spurs did against the Thunder. Or what the 2019 Bucks did against the Raptors. Or what the 2019 Magic did against the Raptors. Or what the 2020 Clippers did against the Nuggets. Or seeing as his name will start to be brought up soon, what McGrady did against the 2003 Pistons.

Good teams (and defences, if we ignore the 2020 Nuggets) adjust. May as well argue 2017 Kawhi was going to sweep the Warriors off that game 1 and then obviously win a title against a Cavaliers team even less capable of guarding them.

Yes, I'm totally arguing they were going to sweep the Warriors. I'm sure that's what you think I was saying. Yes, plenty of people have played better in game 1 than the rest of the series. We've also seen Lebron lose a million game 1's and then win. In the 2020 Nuggets series, going by game score Kawhi's series was Game 4, Game 5, Game 1, Game 6, Game 3, Game 2, and Game 7. Pretty random. And to take this back to what started this, it was Kawhi vs Steph. We have mountains of evidence that Kawhi's raises his game and puts up enormous numbers in the playoffs and Steph traditionally falls off in the playoffs. 2017 was actually one of the few times Steph had better numbers, and they still didn't come close to Kawhi.

Lol, I mean, if we gave 2017 Kawhi 2021’s passing and said he stayed healthy in a six game loss to the Warriors, I would still not come close to putting that in my top ten. Although of course if he actually swept them, as you seem to believe, then maybe I would reconsider.

Seriously? Now I'm just curious. You seem to not value Kawhi at all. I don't even like Kawhi so defending him is annoying, but I can't deny what I've seen. A completely healthy Kawhi, with even better passing than the version of him who was putting up like top 5 playoff numbers (at least by some stats) doesn't even crack your top 10? He's not beating Bird and Magic? With a huge defensive advantage, huge scoring advantage, and per your hypothetical, a great series against the best team ever? He's not in the Hakeem/Duncan tier at that point?

This is especially weird because most of your argument seems to be just looking at how amazing he is as a postseason scorer… but you also dismiss Reggie. 2020 Game 7 Kawhi was pretty bad too, you know.

2020 Game 7 Kawhi is shocking precisely because he is almost the last guy you would expect it from. I mean, on the scale of having bad playoff moments, Kawhi avoids them about as well as anyone ever not named Jordan. Everybody eventually has one. Or two.
Or ten. It's not like that was the first time Reggie wasn't great in a game 7 or in a playoff game.

If you think that then you did not read most of the arguments for him (either this project or last). I find Steph arguments annoying too, but very few people actually used this reasoning.

"He was better in the playoffs" was basically the main reasoning because people really wanted to pick 2016.

Okay, and if people took that year at face value based off his “statistics”, do you really think he would have slotted in at #12?

As in, he would have been higher? I didn't even pick Kawhi top 5 with top 5 numbers so clearly, like almost anybody, I apply some of my own context to the numbers. Like Steph's numbers are obviously held back a little by being outliers from the rest of his career and that outlier happening in his most favorable circumstances.

2017: Curry wins a(n easy) title. Kawhi struggles with injuries and misses the third round.

2018: Curry wins a title. Kawhi is out for the year.

2019: Kawhi wins the title over Curry, who misses his best teammate and a game and a half of his next best scoring teammate. Many people are more impressed by Curry in that series regardless because of how he performed in an adverse situation. (For what it is worth, yes, I think Kawhi was better overall that postseason, if not necessarily in that series.)

2020: Curry is out for the year. Kawhi chokes against the Nuggets.

2021: Curry loses two play-in games. Kawhi plays eleven games but then misses the rest of the postseason. His team closes out the second round without him and keeps it competitive against the conference 1-seed.

2022: Curry wins the title with his biggest ever offensive load. Kawhi is out for the year.

Not exactly what I would call an advantage for Kawhi, no.

Now you're really trying to argue Curry is a better playoff performer than Kawhi? Again, how low do you value Kawhi? I think it's pretty clear the entire basis of what we're talking about is outplaying Curry and only not getting to continue doing that because Curry's teammate hurt Kawhi. The debate is clearly not that Curry is better than Kawhi if Kawhi is hurt. Yes, if Curry plays and Kawhi doesn't, then I suppose Curry edges Kawhi out. But that seems even less relevant to the 2017 debate considering "Kawhi is always hurt" wasn't a thing until "Zaza purposely hurts Kawhi in 2017" was a thing.

In Kawhi's last 5 playoffs, his worst PER of 27.8 beats Curry's career best PER of 27.1. His worst WS48 of 0.228 would tie Curry's 2nd best of his career (2015) and his average would be well above all but Curry's 2017 outlier. And his worst BPM of 9.4 is barely below Curry's career high of 9.7 in 2017. There's just no argument in the world who plays better in the playoffs and it seems weird to penalize someone relative to someone else, when they were taken out on a cheap shot. It would be a huge outlier if Kawhi somehow didn't keep outplaying 2017 Steph. Let's just admit what happened. People wanted Steph high, the 2016 playoffs obviously didn't cut it, so they took the gimme playoff year of 2017, a huge outlier of a playoffs for Steph, and pretended it was an amazing peak.

Lol come on, we watched them play the exact same team to grossly different team and individual results!

He slightly outplayed Kawhi (20.9 to 18.4 game score) in one particular common opponent series over 5 years. Right before having the worst series of his career.

It seems to be a fairly consistent theme that Kawhi struggles to complete postseasons.

That would be a great point if we were evaluating Kawhi's whole career and his first injury trouble was just him blowing out an ACL.

But that is the thing, it was not. It was full throttle in round 1 before tapering off. Just as in 2016, in 2020, in 2021, and superficially in 2019 (although given quality of competition, I definitely think the 76ers series was better; like I said, that is one of my top two series left on the board along with Wade versus the 2006 Pistons).


Okay, and if you think that was continuing, maybe you should have voted for him as a top three peak after all. Most of us are much more skeptical.

I mean I think I started voting him in round #9. I can't help that the rest of the board didn't vote for it and we're here in round #18. And #9 is even my own adjustment for not actually seeing him play it out (kind of similar to maybe 1993 Hakeem being behind 1994 because I actually saw the conference finals and finals). From a pure level of play, I'd have to start thinking of it with Hakeem and Duncan but maybe not quite since they still had so much defensive value.

Hi f4p, hope you're doing well.

I don't want to get too into the weeds here, but I just wanted to point out the majority of your statistical evidence for Kawhi > Curry in the playoffs (both in 2017 and in general) are PER and WS/48. You also mention GameScore and Basketball Reference's BPM. This seems odd to me... I've mentioned throughout the project that PER is the single least-trusted all-in-one metric among actual NBA analysts / members of NBA organizations. A high PER is also the least correlated all-in-one stat to predict how likely you are to win (i.e. having a high PER contributes less to winning than having high marks in the all-in-one stats). WS isn't much better and neither is GameScore. Basketball Reference's BPM's the best of the bunch, but it's still not as good as actual plus-minus based metrics.

Now it would be one thing if we were looking at old players before, where there's limited stats. But the truth is, we just have better stats than these to look at for recent playoff runs. And in plenty of the more accurate stats, Curry grades out better than Kawhi, including in the 2017 playoffs. I actually linked many of the stats comparing in previous posts in this project.

Here's what I said the last time we discussed this:

Since it will come up more here I assume, I will ask again like I did in thread #7:

For the people picking Steph in 2017, why would he be up here if he wasn't even better than Kawhi in 2017? Kawhi played nearly a full season for once with 74 games, had very good offensive numbers and was extremely good on defense (27.6 PER, 0.264 WS48), and then took all of that to another level in the playoffs. 31.5 PER and 0.314 WS48 on 67.2 TS% in the playoffs, numbers like are rarely seen in nba history (have they been seen?). And we actually got to see him play Steph's team and play a nearly perfect game while trouncing the most talented roster of all time. Normally I would say we have to consider injuries, but that should clearly not be the case when a goon on the other team just takes you out on a dirty play because you are playing too well.

Sorry I missed this! But thanks for raising this question again

The reason why I have 2017 Curry over 2017 Kawhi is pretty simple... he was better than Kawhi in 2017

PER and WS/48 are okay stats to use back in the day, but they're measurably far worse at predicting team success than any of the plus-minus based stats (e.g. AuPM, RAPM, PIPM, BPM, and RPM all are measurably better predictors of current value and future success). Basically nobody who work for NBA teams use PER or WS/48, but there's plenty of reports of actual NBA analysts using plus-minus based stats.

What do the wider spectrum of stats say? 2017 Curry beats 2017 Kawhi in AuPM/game, Postseason AuPM/game, RAPM, playoff PIPM, Fivethirtyeight's RAPTOR +/-, Basketball Index's LEBRON, DARKO [including postseason], ESPN’s RPM, CORP, Backpicks BPM, and Backpicks Playoff BPM. The only stats where Kawhi comes out on top were the two you mentioned: Basketball Reference's BPM and WS/48.

The 2017 Warriors are commonly considered possibly the best team of all time, and I've made statistical and film-based arguments throughout this project that their dominance is predominantly driven by Curry. For example, the Curry-KD dynasty played better than Larry Bird's 86 Celtics and Magic's 87 Lakers with just Curry on and all 3 other all-stars off... while they were worse than the 2022 Cavs with all 3 other all stars on and just Curry off.

As for that one game, I'm pretty hesitant to value 1 half of a basketball game over the army of evidence we have from the entire playoffs and regular season. If we just looked at one half of Game 1 of a series, we might think the 1991 Lakers would beat the 91 Bulls, or that the 2001 76ers would beat the 2001 Lakers, or that the 2022 Celtics would beat the 2022 Warriors. If just one half of a Game 1 can be such a poor predictor of a team's value, why should it be any better for a star player?

Now again, there are stats you can pick that take postseason Kawhi over Curry. But there's clearly plenty of stats (often the more trusted ones) that take 17 postseason Curry. And film analysis that people have done in previous threads have also been favorable to Curry. So it seems like a bit of an oversimplification to just say Kawhi definitively had the "Better regular season, better postseason (and it's not like it's just this postseason), better head to head in the postseason. "

And like others have mentioned, this is with almost 50% of Kawhi's 2017 postseason numbers coming in the first round, which may be giving him a boost.

Not to be a stickler, but Kawhi rates out higher than Curry in PS RAPTOR and PS PIPM in 2017.

Also this stat doesn't encompass the whole PS, but as of May 4, Kawhi was pretty well clear of everyone

Read on Twitter

The difference in PS AuPM can be explained by it being regressed with RS on/off stuff, which helps stabilization but does introduce a bit of bias toward RS performance that other single season plus-minus metrics don't.

[No-more-rings]

But it wasn't one. It was two. He beat the defending champion Lakers in 1981, with Kareem as defending MVP, while outplaying Kareem, and then beat the defending champion Lakers in 1982. And even after beating the Lakers in 1981, he still put up 28/12 and 27/15 to make the Finals. That's a finals appearance with a 40-42 team and then two year later, a championship with one of the most dominant teams ever. Sandwiched around a 31/15 season. These seem like pretty amazing individual and team results.

I forgot about the 81 series...but sure I mean he was a 3 time mvp for a reason. I think the last time I made a goat list I put Moses like 19th or 20th. Those were his peak years and I don't think it'd be all that crazy to call him a better player than Kareem was between 81-83, in fact our POY threads would agree with it. Not necessarily because he outplayed him, but probably he had a higher motor at that stage in their careers.

Anyway, I don't think those sort of things are good arguments really. I can say something to the effect of "Dirk dropped 37/15 on prime Duncan on the road to close the series out", or the old "Dirk beat the Miami big 3 with no other stars on his team". I just wouldn't use those kind of arguments If I was making a pro-Dirk case.

When it comes to Dirk vs Moses in particular, Dirk is very likely the better offensive anchor given what we've seen from some of his teams. You can disagree, but that's why we're here.

Moses very well may get voted ahead though. It would be a stark change from the last 3 projects though.

2012: Dirk +6 spots ahead
2015: Dirk +7 spots ahead
2019: Dirk +3 spots ahead

Hmm, well I guess they were closer in the last one than I recalled.

As it stands, I don't know where I'd have him exactly. There's still a lot of other interesting comparisons, I'm doubtful I'd have him over Durant either, but Moses is an interesting player for sure.

[AEnigma]

2017-21 Kawhi is nowhere near 2016 Kawhi as a defender, and 2016 Kawhi is nowhere near those versions as a scorer.

and? he still significantly above most anybody else we are talking about as wings. was he not a huge part of shutting down giannis in 2019?

With elite backline help, yes. If you want to say he has a defensive advantage over most non-bigs being discussed, that is fine. If you want to say that defensive advantage puts him over or right next to Magic and Steph, okay, but those two are working with a much larger sample.

So why are we acting as if that first half means much of anything.

why are we acting like it means nothing? it's not like Kawhi shot 8 for 9 on 3's or something. he was just methodical Kawhi doing what he wanted and the Spurs defense was looking great.

It means as much as any strong half does.

The types of scoring numbers, yes.

… Based on scoring.

No, because basketball is more than scoring efficacy.

not just because he scores well.

where is this "scoring" thing coming from? i mentioned ppg i think one time in all of this. Are PER, WS48, and BPM just scoring measures? Because I'm pretty sure they are not.

You realize 2017 Steph actually outscored Kawhi in the playoffs, right? 28.1 to 27.7? Even if you wanted to go by per 100, Kawhi's advantage in scoring would be the lowest of any of the numbers I've been quoting:

Scoring Per 100: 39.8 to 38.0 = +4.7%
PER: 31.5 to 27.1 = +16.2%
WS48: 0.314 to 0.272 = 15.4%
BPM: 14.2 to 9.7 = 46.4%

This is anything but a scoring argument.

Alright, sure, it is also a rebounding argument.

I too like to look at basketball reference’s boxscore and call it a day.

ahh yes, dumb dumb no use PIPM and AuPM and EPM. how dare he use the same numbers that are also dominated by basically everybody in the top 10 of this project.

Jordan in '91 is 32.0 PER, 0.333 WS48, 14.6 BPM to Kawhi's 31.5 PER, 0.314 WS48, 14.2 BPM. What's magic about Kawhi that he can seemingly put up peak Jordan numbers but it's not really because he's playing insanely well? Or why do these numbers seem to just accidentally paint the Jordan as the best, which this board apparently agrees with through whatever method they used to come to their decision, if they have no meaning?

Just because those metrics have decent enough correlation — which mind you is true for basically any metric, it is tough to find one that Jordan and Lebron do not dominate in some capacity… — does not mean they are a replacement for further analysis or cannot be improved upon with better data than what is seen in the box score.

And that is before even going into how different eras affect box score production.

I mean I think I started voting him in round #9. I can't help that the rest of the board didn't vote for it and we're here in round #18. And #9 is even my own adjustment for not actually seeing him play it out (kind of similar to maybe 1993 Hakeem being behind 1994 because I actually saw the conference finals and finals). From a pure level of play, I'd have to start thinking of it with Hakeem and Duncan but maybe not quite since they still had so much defensive value.

Gee, how weird. Probably not worth looking into why no one else joined you on that hill, though; obviously no one else properly appreciates the sheer indisputable brilliance of his game.

is that how it works in these projects? we're all just supposed to make sure our votes line up with everyone else? seems to me most of this board would be laughed out of most basketball discussions in the world if they revealed what they really thought of kevin garnett, but i don't think anyone wants this board to be the same way. if someone is holding kawhi down in this project for any reason other than quantitative, then i would question that quite a bit. qualitatively, there is basically nothing else he could have done. dominant regular season, top 5 in many ways (in terms of unique players) postseason, kicked as much ass as he could have been expected to until he was hurt while putting up peak Jordan numbers.

You are not “supposed” to do much of anything, but ideally you would try to understand and promote commentary of a player going beyond whether his box score numbers look nice.

Jordan is a capable passer and elite team playmaker who drove several of the all-time best offences. How is Kawhi the same? You talk about not zeroing in on scoring, but as a wing that is basically what it comes down to unless you are legitimately arguing his rebounds and stocks give him close to big man defensive value in these years.

[No-more-rings]

So it appears that the heavy favorites for the next several spots are Wade, Kobe, Dr J, Drob, Moses and Kawhi in some order.

Forecasting some names that have either not been talked about, or haven't picked up major steam yet.

Durant, Cp3, Nash, Patrick Ewing, Dirk, Harden, Barkley, Tracy McGrady, Westbrook(?)

Would anyone mind listing how they'd rank those above players? Not expecting anything real long or in depth, just trying to get an idea of how the panel may lean on some players.