Where would ‘97 MJ rank today?

[penbeast0]

Also, this

Watch on YouTube

Great video. I've been making these arguments for years (and losing them when coaching, lol) but they are really clearly laid out here.

[70sFan]

91-93 Jordan in the PS

IA 34.5 pts per 75 (rTS% of 5%)

PER-29.5
WS/48-0.267
Backpicks BPM-9.8

72-74 Kareem in the PS

IA

24.7 pts per 75 (rTS% of 3%)

PER-24.5
WS/48-0.209
Backpicks BPM-6.3

Whose to say the difference in defensive value is largue as the difference in scoring and playmaking value?

I am, or at least it should be considered. Kareem was top tier defender, while Jordan was only a good guard which didn't have much imapct all around.

[Mazter]

mystic has something of a point here. Something changed in 98. Jordan shot 12% better inside 3 feet on a higher proportion (+4.1%) of his shots (and same raw FGA/g) that year. It works out to approximately an extra shot per game (~ +0.95 FGA/g) and about +1.1 FGM per game with the increase in FG%.

And then in Washington, he shot better from 0-3 than he did in 97, albeit on something like half volume. He was taking about 2.7 FGA/g in that first season back with the Wizards, but shooting 61.5% from 0-3 feet while taking a shade over 22 FGA/g overall. So, considerably reduced volume in close. Dropped down to 18.6 FGA/g in his second season, 61.4%, but 2.6 FGA/g (13.8% vs 12.2% proportion from 0-3).

Food for thought. Something changed, and quite noticeably. His FTr improved noticeably. But his mid-range jumper dropped off, he lost a quality 3 from his arsenal as the 3pt line pulled back in, but as mystic noted, he was doing a lot better in tight than he had in 97. Which is interesting.

EDIT: That said, that was 98 Jordan, not 97 Jordan, so the relevance goes only so far.

For me it's not about what Jordan did. It's about the perception of Jordan relative to his peers. The perception is that he is, was and would be head and shoulders above everyone else. That perception lived in the 90's because of the lack of information. It's what his legacy is build upon. PPG, SPG, RPG, APG, FG%, thats what was most relevant in the 90's and before. In today's game it wouldn't.

Getting back to the FG% from 0-3 feet, the whole league went from 55.2% to 62.8% from 1997 to 1998, and Jordan just went along with it. Ok, he shot 64.4% in 1998. But Rice and Eddie Jones did 67%, Finley 65.2, Hill 65.4, Payton 64.1 and Person even 75.2%. So really, 64.4 within 3 feet was good, but nothing more than that. And good is not going to wow anyone in todays league. And if his midrange wouldn't wow either today, where is he going to make up for it. His FT wasn't wow, his 3-point wasn't wow...yeah, on character, mentality, trash talking and everything else maybe. But if you cant put your money where your mouth is...

[mysticOscar]

mystic has something of a point here. Something changed in 98. Jordan shot 12% better inside 3 feet on a higher proportion (+4.1%) of his shots (and same raw FGA/g) that year. It works out to approximately an extra shot per game (~ +0.95 FGA/g) and about +1.1 FGM per game with the increase in FG%.

And then in Washington, he shot better from 0-3 than he did in 97, albeit on something like half volume. He was taking about 2.7 FGA/g in that first season back with the Wizards, but shooting 61.5% from 0-3 feet while taking a shade over 22 FGA/g overall. So, considerably reduced volume in close. Dropped down to 18.6 FGA/g in his second season, 61.4%, but 2.6 FGA/g (13.8% vs 12.2% proportion from 0-3).

Food for thought. Something changed, and quite noticeably. His FTr improved noticeably. But his mid-range jumper dropped off, he lost a quality 3 from his arsenal as the 3pt line pulled back in, but as mystic noted, he was doing a lot better in tight than he had in 97. Which is interesting.

EDIT: That said, that was 98 Jordan, not 97 Jordan, so the relevance goes only so far.

For me it's not about what Jordan did. It's about the perception of Jordan relative to his peers. The perception is that he is, was and would be head and shoulders above everyone else. That perception lived in the 90's because of the lack of information. It's what his legacy is build upon. PPG, SPG, RPG, APG, FG%, thats what was most relevant in the 90's and before. In today's game it wouldn't.

Getting back to the FG% from 0-3 feet, the whole league went from 55.2% to 62.8% from 1997 to 1998, and Jordan just went along with it. Ok, he shot 64.4% in 1998. But Rice and Eddie Jones did 67%, Finley 65.2, Hill 65.4, Payton 64.1 and Person even 75.2%. So really, 64.4 within 3 feet was good, but nothing more than that. And good is not going to wow anyone in todays league. And if his midrange wouldn't wow either today, where is he going to make up for it. His FT wasn't wow, his 3-point wasn't wow...yeah, on character, mentality, trash talking and everything else maybe. But if you cant put your money where your mouth is...

I really don't know why it's so hard to grasp and why you have to slip in strawman into your arguments.

You showing 34/35 year old MJ can keep up with efficiency within 3 feet in the rim with younger peers just proves my point.

I never said he was head and shoulders above everyone else in '97 in scoring within 3 feet from the basket.

He was head and shoulders above everyone in particular other perimeter peers because of the high usage and effeciency he was able to garner.

He just did so many things well. Yes he relied on his mid range a lot in '97, but why does it matter if it was working and it was winning games?

But to suggest he couldn't score close to the basket, thanks to your stats he was as efficient at it as the top younger peers in that area of the basket when he had to ADAPT since his shot wasn't falling as efficiently.

Now there's a reason why I bolded the word adapt...because for some reason in your great analytical mind, you dont seem to think that MJ would adapt for whatever reason today to take advantage of the greater scoring opportunities that is obviously more available today.

I mean MJ had a wide range of scoring options in his arsenal, was as nimble scoring near the basket as great perimeter players in his era (thanks to your great stats which implies this), was able to dribble around tight spaces, had great moves to evade defenders, had a very effective shot to keep defenders honest etc..

And at this stage, he has played in the more open faster pace lanes in the early to mid 80s to the grind out half court sets in the 90s and topped the scoring board in both decades....but for some reason MJ just can't adapt in the most perimeter friendly environment in the history of this league.

Look keep believing what you will even if it defys common sense....just don't resort to "your just an MJ fanatic that think that he can walk on water' angle

[f4p]

And these strategies (as well as schemes) can include slanting lineups towards offense or defense, which is another reason to look at teams holistically rather than isolate one end of the floor. If we use that as our frame, this gap in "team rating" basically vanishes, and Jordan's teams aren't operating at a lower level without him. The bulls posted a +11 O in the 94 playoffs without Jordan(and +8 vs the league best knicks), are we now going to pretend that the offense/defensive split flipping means jordan didn't carry their offense that much? At the end of the day, winning is winning.

it's hard to keep track of all the cross-conversation going on, but afaik we were only talking about offense and jordan's translation and it led to questions about the warriors vs bulls relative ORtg's. therefore, i talked about offense.

Moreover, letting your priors inform your interpretation of the data can get you into trouble

isn't that what our beloved PI RAPM does?

especially in a cross-era comparison where box-stuff is depressed in one league and skyrocketing in another. Thus far your analysis hasn't really touched on curry's capacity as a creator, fairly relevant if you're basing your evaluations of offensive talent largely on scoring output:

we were talking about the rORtg of the warriors and bulls. i assume curry's creation shows up in the warriors ORtg somewhere.

i'd probably say the bulls are more offensively talented, but we're not talking about equal results.

But we are, you just find the offense to defense distribution weird.

conversation was about offense. their rORtg's were not close.

From what I understand it's actually the other way around. Pure box aggregates like PER and the like still do the worst(predictivity and flexibility), however you split it, but box-heavy impact metrics are better able to account for role players due to stability while less box-based metrics like PIPM, AUPM, On/Off, and RAPM do better with stars because they can better account for defense.

seems very hard to believe. dudes like PJ tucker and shane battier with pitiful box numbers but big impact are being less well evaluated than extreme defensive guys like hakeem and duncan who still do very well by box numbers (because they just do so much stuff that it can't be ignored)?

Why would you compare hakeem with pj tucker?

i don't know, why would you? i've made the point many times that i like the box metrics much more for the big time box guys and don't use it for the tucker's of the world. isn't the point of the impact metrics that we actually can compare hakeem to pj tucker?

The most predictive metrics are epm and rpm

is this espn's rpm or a different rpm? the one that says steph is the best player every year (well, except when it's kyle lowry)?

Same one I think:

so the one where curry wins every year despite never ending the year being seen as the best player? that's the one that's doing a bang up job?

what are the correlations between all of these stats and winning? something tells me we're not quite at R^2=1.0 on even the best stats, which leaves wide room for interpretation. and how much are they helped with "priors", which basically just means guessing the answer first and then being happy when the final answer looks like the guess.

"help" also seems like an odd angle when you chide giannis for not beating good enough teams. Giannis, whether you go by accolades, name-value, or actually looking at how well the cast performs isolated from their superstar, has never had as much help as jordan(and to a lesser extent curry) has had when they experienced success.

and giannis hasn't accomplished anything near what jordan did when jordan had really good help. giannis won a hospital ring by the skin of his teeth against a ridiculously injured nets team and still needed overtime game 7 to barely win. and had embarrassing playoff losses on massive SRS/win% teams in 2019 and 2020. jordan has had a 15-2, 15-3, 15-4 and 15-4 playoff run.

He did in the regular season. And sure, nearly losing to the injured nets is rough, but the Bulls do something pretty similar in 92 and 93 vs the knicks and at least in 93, even from a box-perspective, Jordan slipped up.

not sure '93 belongs in there. in '92, the 67 win bulls barely beating the knicks is definitely weird, though they did do the traditional game 7 blowout when a heavy underdog mysteriously pushes a series to game 7. '93 has arguably the best example of jordan not being amazing in a big game, when he went 3-18 in game 3 with the knicks ahead 2-0. however, it was a weird game where the bulls basically jumped all over the knicks with jordan not shooting well, but jordan racked up ft's (16/17 from the line) and racked up assists to the tune of 11 (though they seemed to be more rondo assists than lebron assists) and it's hard to say how much he "failed" when the game was basically over like 15 minutes in.

as for the series, we're talking about a 32/7/6 series with a 24.4 game score in a crazy slow 86 paced series in a series where his team had a +12.7 ORtg. that's not really in the conversation for 2019/20 giannis.

and maybe that's where we differ. i put a lot of value on high leverage, could decide a potential title type performances and lower value on what you did in the average game or series or in blowouts or series that were easily won. if the best we can knock jordan with is "he let 1 series in a 5 title run stretch from 1991 to 1997 get to game 7" or "he sort of shot poorly" while winning by 20 in a big game 3, that's just very low on the bad playoff moments scale. i don't get the impression this board puts much different stock in different situations, but i do. bumbling around when you're up 3-0 and making your averages look bad before eventually winning a series everyone knows is over (1996 finals) just doesn't move me much. i guess without good play from his teammates it could have turned into a disaster, but that's the nice thing about giving yourself 4 chances. collapsing in the final 4 games of a series you were up 2-0 in and game 3 went to OT, when your team was #1 in SRS, that moves me (2019 ECF).

Classifying 2019 as embarrassing also seems off to me. The Raptors were basically a 60 win team + kawhi leonard + marc gasol(who was able to anchor a 60 win team and atg defense after kawhi's absence)+ nick nurse(best coach in the league?).

i am definitely lower on the raptors than you are. they were a 5.5 SRS team, hardly legendary. the season before they were 7.3 and got absolutely embarrassed by lebron's worst 2nd cleveland team, a lebron team that got pushed to game 7 (and outscored by 40) against the indiana pacers and pushed to game 7 by the celtics. and the raptors were coming off years of embarrassing playoff performances. nick nurse helps, but that was a team and fanbase that had come to expect playoff failure, that doesn't just go away. switching derozan for kawhi is obviously big, but i think it just put them in the rockets/bucks/KD-less warriors conversation. if you tell everyone you should be the mvp, you might wanna beat 20.5 ppg on 48 TS% in the final 4 games while you get reverse swept.

Regardless it seems like a similar outcome to me as the 1990 bulls losing to the pistons.

except jordan was a -2.7 SRS underdog and giannis was a +2.5 SRS favorite. and jordan still put up 32/7/6 (apparently that's what he put up in every series) and got to game 7, where he somehow put up 31/9/8 in a game where his team scored 74 points, with jordan scoring or assisting on 79% of the bulls' buckets.

but the idea that Jordan is just this different calibre of player doesn't seem accurate to me, and I'm not seeing why the gap is so big that the various concerns various people brought up (and a more talented field), couldn't bridge the gap here. Let alone when you're taking 1997 Jordan who struggled in the playoffs anyway.

well, my first post in this thread specifically did not say 1997 jordan was better than giannis. i said jokic and giannis had good arguments to be over him (and maybe luka) and noted that i would be more comfortable with that assertion if giannis didn't fall off in the playoffs and if jokic's team ever got a stop in the playoffs (i would take giannis/jokic in the regular season). i actually picked "top 5" and not "definitely the best". so if you think i am definitely arguing 1997 jordan over, then you are arguing with the wrong person. it was more the absurd jayson tatum comparisons that got me going, especially as i don't have tatum even in the top 7 right now.

good point about jackson. jordan certainly did not lack for a good situation after a pitiful first few years. but jordan also made the most of it, would be my main argument. he ripped off 67/69/72 win regular seasons (with 61 and 62 thrown in) and 15-2, 15-3, 15-4 and 15-4 playoffs. he got a good situation and could hardly have made more out of it. no blown winnable series. no blown series leads. dominant overall W/L runs. no bad performances where his team carried him instead of the other way around. just...inevitability.

Okay now this seems pretty rose-tinted. Setting aside that your analysis thus far has basically just been offense-only, off the top of my head 93 and 96 both count imo. I think 1996 in paticular is a very big dodge. What's the difference between 96 and 2016 besides Curry having an injury and Pippen not getting suspended for game 6? Jordan is a more consistent playoff performer than curry or giannis. But while neither Giannis or Curry have done enough to really dispute this consistency claim, it does become an exercise in rewarding Jordan for playing less when you use this as some cudgel against say, Kareem or Lebron.

if i am rose tinted, you are trying very hard to hold anything from '93 or '96 against jordan. again, at best jordan's 3-18 against the '93 knicks is about as good as you are going to do. if that had been a more competitive game and jordan just kept bricking down the stretch as pippen and company carried the offense, i would see it as a much better knock against jordan. or if jordan hadn't still managed 22 points and 11 assists. i mean we're grading on the curve of nba history, not perfection. having a sort of bad efficiency but still putting up volume stats in a blowout win as your team storms back from 0-2 down to win 4-2 is simply not a failure on the level of other greats.

and '96 is much different than curry. for one, jordan is a 18.5 game score vs curry's very low 13.1, despite the fact the pace was 10% slower for jordan (and before i hear minutes played, jordan basically played the same mpg as lebron so i guess curry should have stayed on the court more). jordan simply played better than curry, even with his last 3 games not being great. jordan got himself to 3-0 with a 31/5/5, 59 TS% start to the series and 15-1 in the playoffs on the back of a 72 win season and then the bulls clearly let off the gas and jordan didn't play as well. but they still won in 6. as much i would have relished the bulls blowing a 3-0 lead in the finals (how different would jordan's legacy be?), i don't think anyone watching ever really thought it was going to happen. could have blown a 3-0 lead and did blow a 3-1 lead while playing terribly are two different things.

You're working of a 4 game sample for 2020 and even if we take that sample and combine it with 2021, Curry's WOWY looks great(20 without, 45 with).

yeah, i don't think we should combine a 2020 season where the warriors were clearly tanking after curry's first injury (a 6 week injury accidentally turned into a season long injury? who just throws away a prime year of a top 20 player to tank for a top pick? wiseman sucking so far seems like karma for that BS).

For what its worth, taking your 86 sample, you get the most impressive looking lift at 32 win
lift. But when we consider that is easier to lift worse teams than better ones, even taking that pretty small sample(which srs disagrees with), I'm not sure I'm more impressed with 86 Jordan(pre-prime) over prime curry stuff(40 to 60, or 50 to 70). Jordan playing in the other games also distorts things and srs disagrees pretty strongly:

with an overall improvement of nearly 4 points per game. In his second season, he missed a significant chunk of time after breaking his foot, then logged fewer than 20 minutes in each of his first six games back. Excluding those sub-20 minute games, the Bulls played 15 contests with Jordan at a 40-win pace (-0.3 SRS) that year.

Note tho, the off is boosted by half a game Jordan so i'd probably hedge at like 30 wins(86 srs completely without puts him there I think)? Or we can just defer to 84(82 game sample goes brr).

i mean i think it just shows the limitations of all of this stuff and why we're always probably going to interpret and see whatever it is that we value. '86 jordan might have 32 win lift and '95 jordan might have 20 win lift, despite the fact he was injured in '86 and just back from an 18 month retirement in '95. but '93 jordan apparently has no lift given that the '94 bulls amazingly won 55 games and got to game 7 of the 2nd round. when james harden got traded from the rockets, they immediately won 6 games in a row, proving harden was a cancer and destroying the locker room. Two games later, they embarked upon a 20 game losing streak, proving that actually they just sucked. the exact time when you pop in to these different ups and down for teams makes a huge difference. i think it was you pointing out hakeem had amazing WOWY numbers in that hakeem GOAT thread. but then you have '91 where hakeem misses 25 games and the rockets go 15-10 while replacing him with larry smith, who could rebound like crazy but shot the ball with his hands about as well as hakeem could have with his feet. what does any of it mean when the samples are so small? when teams sometimes turn it on and off because the regular season is weird and often not that important (or you get a team like the '94 bulls who were probably more motivated to prove themselves without jordan than they would have been if they were just a random team with the same players).

it all seems very team and time and circumstance dependent and hard to get any real grasp on. is the team that falls apart without their star just bad or too dependent on the star? is the team that succeeds without their star a well built, resilient team or the star just has too much help?

Generally though, all these signals(with support from the aupm/on-off/rapm stuff) sends me towards to a similar estimation, 20ish win regular season lift on a random team which elevates to 25-30ish win lift in his best playoffs. Very good, but not an outlier for top 10 candidates in the rs(consistency/playoff elevation is special tho), and not anything to make me think he blows away a Giannis or Curry even if he rightly ranks higher for consistency, replication, and resiliency. I think playoff elevation brings him to top 5 but I can't see him bridging the defensive advantage lebron and kareem sport at their best, nor do I think anyone has any business being compared to Russell(and by extension wilt? in an era-relative frame). Also think Duncan and Hakeem have legitimate peak cases(hakeem has a legit prime/accum., duncan legit accum./peak) but i'd lean jordan over duncan due to a longer prime and over hakeem due to resume.

and we just differ. jordan is clearly, clearly better than curry if we're now talking careers and not just 1997. and i probably rooted against both equally. the box score and playoff gap can only be so large before the conversation doesn't even need to be had. if giannis is giannis for another decade and is winning titles as his team's best offensive and defensive player, he can start being in top 5 conversations. not sure how no one can be compared to russell, unless everyone is only being compared based on the 1960's when you could have the worst team offense in the league and yet paint protection was still so wildly important that you could be a dynasty.

You can time-machine Russell if you want(and let's be real, you're not making a jordan over russell case if you don't), but he who time-machines must be prepared to get time-machined. If Russell is not the undisputed GOAT(or at least best prime), then all of this is fair game.

what if we averaged everyone over all of nba history? as in, you get time machined to every season and have your value averaged over all years. impossible to do, but would be my preferred method. russell's chart of relative value vs year is probably a slowly declining relative value line from his time to the present. most guys would probably have peak relative value in their own time (thus, why we think of them as being so good) and might be a little bumpy as the game changes over time. i wonder whose relative value line is the flattest? lebron?

Regardless, I don't understand why you keep brining up players who aren't in the top 10 and how they have good numbers. Like, that's the point. Good numbers does not make you a top 10 player. The numbers MJ get doesn't determine how good he'll be.

yes. i am simply pointing out that all of the "jordan might be able to score 30 if we're being generous" talk (from throughout this thread) seems weird when guys no one likes like bradley beal can do it. 10 time scoring champion michael jordan is not finishing like 3 points behind the scoring leader.

[mysticOscar]

Also, this

Watch on YouTube

Thanks for pointing out this channel. Managed to finally sit down and watch some of his other vids. Probably the most analytical nba YT channel around.

Also cool how he tracked and watched all MJ playoff games on this vid

Watch on YouTube

Wish he discussed more about MJs off ball abilities and the triangle...but only so much he can fit in 1 video....perhaps on another future video

[LukaTheGOAT]

Look, I don't really understand the back and forth about the first 3-peat Bulls since this should be about Jordan'97. And the talent in shootingh between both seasons is staggering. Just for a difference in point of view, here the midrange efficiency between 1997 and 2023:

Code: Select all

   PLAYER             TEAM   AGE   FG%   Season
1   Kevin Durant       BKN   34   57.3   2023
2   D'Angelo Russell   MIN   26   57.1   2023
3   Bradley Beal       WAS   29   54.9   2023
4   Jaylen Brown       BOS   26   54.1   2023
5   Kyrie Irving       BKN   30   53.2   2023
6   Stephen Curry      GSW   34   51.6   2023
7   Kawhi Leonard      LAC   31   50.9   2023
8   Glen Rice          CHH   30   50.4   1997
9   DeMar DeRozan      CHI   33   49.0   2023
10  Michael Jordan     CHI   34   48.9   1997
11  Cade Cunningham    DET   21   48.2   2023


Read on Twitter

[AEnigma]

i am simply pointing out that all of the "jordan might be able to score 30 if we're being generous" talk (from throughout this thread) seems weird when guys no one likes like bradley beal can do it. 10 time scoring champion michael jordan is not finishing like 3 points behind the scoring leader.

And who exactly was doing or saying that?

[ty 4191]

.........

[ty 4191]

Moving this to the 93' MJ Thread.

[ty 4191]

Look, I don't really understand the back and forth about the first 3-peat Bulls since this should be about Jordan'97. And the talent in shootingh between both seasons is staggering. Just for a difference in point of view, here the midrange efficiency between 1997 and 2023:

Code: Select all

   PLAYER             TEAM   AGE   FG%   Season
1   Kevin Durant       BKN   34   57.3   2023
2   D'Angelo Russell   MIN   26   57.1   2023
3   Bradley Beal       WAS   29   54.9   2023
4   Jaylen Brown       BOS   26   54.1   2023
5   Kyrie Irving       BKN   30   53.2   2023
6   Stephen Curry      GSW   34   51.6   2023
7   Kawhi Leonard      LAC   31   50.9   2023
8   Glen Rice          CHH   30   50.4   1997
9   DeMar DeRozan      CHI   33   49.0   2023
10  Michael Jordan     CHI   34   48.9   1997
11  Cade Cunningham    DET   21   48.2   2023


Read on Twitter

It would seem that 1 season has too much statistical noise. Too small a sample size to reliably determine who the best midrange shooter is and has been.

What exact distances would you use for midrange? I've seen multiple (varying) definitions.

[LukaTheGOAT]

Look, I don't really understand the back and forth about the first 3-peat Bulls since this should be about Jordan'97. And the talent in shootingh between both seasons is staggering. Just for a difference in point of view, here the midrange efficiency between 1997 and 2023:

Code: Select all

   PLAYER             TEAM   AGE   FG%   Season
1   Kevin Durant       BKN   34   57.3   2023
2   D'Angelo Russell   MIN   26   57.1   2023
3   Bradley Beal       WAS   29   54.9   2023
4   Jaylen Brown       BOS   26   54.1   2023
5   Kyrie Irving       BKN   30   53.2   2023
6   Stephen Curry      GSW   34   51.6   2023
7   Kawhi Leonard      LAC   31   50.9   2023
8   Glen Rice          CHH   30   50.4   1997
9   DeMar DeRozan      CHI   33   49.0   2023
10  Michael Jordan     CHI   34   48.9   1997
11  Cade Cunningham    DET   21   48.2   2023


Read on Twitter

It would seem that 1 season has too much statistical noise. Too small a sample size to reliably determine who the best midrange shooter is and has been.

What exact distances would you use for midrange? I've seen multiple (varying) definitions.

I really don't have a good answer. I actually think if you include the short-midrange, Jokic is maybe the GOAT midrange shooter (and still might be even if you don't).

Like I've heard some people refer to like 3 to the free-throw line as "in-between game." I don't have strong opinions either way tbh, just encourage people to specify if they can.

[ty 4191]

I really don't have a good answer. I actually think if you include the short-midrange, Jokic is maybe the GOAT midrange shooter (and still might be even if you don't).

Like I've heard some people refer to like 3 to the free-throw line as "in-between game." I don't have strong opinions either way tbh, just encourage people to specify if they can.

Let's say it's 15-22 feet. Does that work for midrange?

[Mazter]

Read on Twitter

I used the midrange definition of NBA.com, all shots outside the paint but inside the arc. Cut off was the 50 players with most attempts out of both seasons (100 players total) . The article seems to use any jumper inside the arc, and a cut off of 10 2P jumpers per game seems a bit too harsh, especially for this era. This season there are just 3 players to average 10 2P jumpers per game.

[tsherkin]

For me it's not about what Jordan did. It's about the perception of Jordan relative to his peers. The perception is that he is, was and would be head and shoulders above everyone else. That perception lived in the 90's because of the lack of information. It's what his legacy is build upon. PPG, SPG, RPG, APG, FG%, thats what was most relevant in the 90's and before. In today's game it wouldn't.

To be fair to MJ, he led the league in OBPM 9 times. He lives at the top of Ben Taylor's 3-year peaks for his BPM. Even in 97, he was pretty efficient relative to league average despite remaining a volume scorer and his per-possession offensive value was high (atop that league-leading BPM) due to that and his excellent ball protection. He was top 15 in raw FG% 3 times and 16th one more time beyond that. Like, especially for pre-92 MJ, he pretty well earned what was going on and not just because of raw box score stats. And that's not even hitting the playoffs yet. Jordan was The Beans in his career and it wasn't just about perception and lack of contemporary analytical information.

It's just that I think people equate 91 Jordan and 97 Jordan, as if they were the same guy, capable of the same things, able to exploit the same truths of the contemporary league. Yeah, if you look at someone like Old Harden, he's rocking 21.8 ppg on 58.9% TS with a .411 FTr as a 33 year-old, shooting 61.4% from 0-3 as of this moment. He's also an 87% FT shooter and cranking out 7.3 3PA/g at 37.1%. From there, you can compare relative athleticism, playstyle and other things to sort of see what you're likely to have managed from MJ. I think it's very clear that he would be a very good player in today's league. But he was also pretty fixed in what he did: volume scoring, and there's only so much that his raw scoring efficiency would improve (particularly and specifically in his 97 form), and that limits his total efficacy in the league. It's very frustrating to watch people just assume things about MJ's game, particularly with a lot of the good stuff AEnigma is laying down about relative efficiency, even with a lot of favorable assumptions from outside of Jordan's actual 97 performance.

[LukaTheGOAT]

I really don't have a good answer. I actually think if you include the short-midrange, Jokic is maybe the GOAT midrange shooter (and still might be even if you don't).

Like I've heard some people refer to like 3 to the free-throw line as "in-between game." I don't have strong opinions either way tbh, just encourage people to specify if they can.

Let's say it's 15-22 feet. Does that work for midrange?

That would also work.

[OhayoKD]

Oh wow did this take long. Hopefully I didn't **** up the formatting again

And these strategies (as well as schemes) can include slanting lineups towards offense or defense, which is another reason to look at teams holistically rather than isolate one end of the floor. If we use that as our frame, this gap in "team rating" basically vanishes, and Jordan's teams aren't operating at a lower level without him. The bulls posted a +11 O in the 94 playoffs without Jordan(and +8 vs the league best knicks), are we now going to pretend that the offense/defensive split flipping means jordan didn't carry their offense that much? At the end of the day, winning is winning.

it's hard to keep track of all the cross-conversation going on, but afaik we were only talking about offense and jordan's translation and it led to questions about the warriors vs bulls relative ORtg's. therefore, i talked about offense.

So you think Curry's defense is what's generating similar holistic results(similar team success on, similar team success off)? You compared individual players using o-rating, not the difference in o-rating when the two entered or left the court, but their team's o-rating overall. These teams have similar rs success with their stars and have similar success without. Why is it important that one's team is leaning more on defense while the other is leaning more on offense?

Moreover, letting your priors inform your interpretation of the data can get you into trouble

isn't that what our beloved PI RAPM does?

The "beloved RAPM" i've repeatedly argued against being weighed too heavily... I use RAPM as a supplement. You seem to have more faith in less predictive AND flexible metrics on the basis that... Curry being the best regular season player a bunch is absurd.

especially in a cross-era comparison where box-stuff is depressed in one league and skyrocketing in another. Thus far your analysis hasn't really touched on curry's capacity as a creator, fairly relevant if you're basing your evaluations of offensive talent largely on scoring output:

we were talking about the rORtg of the warriors and bulls. i assume curry's creation shows up in the warriors ORtg somewhere.

It would show up in the gap between when he's on vs when he's off the court...which is similar to the gap we see with MJ throughout their primes. It would also inflate talent perception if you're relying heavily on scoring-talent to determine that, which doesn't get into teams being slanted towards d or o schematically (which is why, again, fixating on o-rating is questionable).

seems very hard to believe. dudes like PJ tucker and shane battier with pitiful box numbers but big impact are being less well evaluated than extreme defensive guys like hakeem and duncan who still do very well by box numbers (because they just do so much stuff that it can't be ignored)?

Why would you compare hakeem with pj tucker?

i don't know, why would you? i've made the point many times that i like the box metrics much more for the big time box guys?

Which I addressed directly?

The idea is that players who are racking up steals and blocks are going to be treated by box-metrics like dpoy-level defensive contributors, which is why your jordan's, kobe's and curry's look much better relative to other all-time greats when you focus on the box and less so when you focus on how the team defense correlates with their presence. One of the things bigger defensive players do is generate opportunities for smaller to rack up steals and blocks in the first place(https://www.reddit.com/r/nbadiscussion/comments/ktyynk/oc_the_secular_lebron_james_the_case_for_the_king/):

I think the big thing to consider here, is that the specific metrics you are choosing here[bpm/per/ws/48/gamescore(which is really just PER not adjusted for possessions)], consistently rate primary paint protectors low relative to their raw impact signals, or less offense-skewed data. Steph Curry and Jordan look as good as anyone in say PER(at least in the regular season), but Lebron and Duncan score higher in RAPM, on/off, and AUPM, and then when we go to raw impact, Hakeem, Russell, and Kareem all look as good or better. Considering that Jordan has the least discernable defensive imapct of anyone we've talked about in this thread, relying heavily on box-stuff and dismissing everything else seems questionable.

There is no granular statistic for the above that gets factored into PER, BPM, or RAPTOR(no plus minus data pre-1997). There is no granular statistic(at least one incoperated in these metrics) for when a player gets blown by and gives up a lay-up because they reached for a steal(recall Jordan was in the 17th percentile for defensive errors). When Rudy Gobert is able to prevent potential layups 3 times in one possession, if he isn't getting a hand to the ball, he isn't getting his credit. Plus-Minus can capture this(aritifical caps aside), WOWY can capture this(relevant when we're talking about outliers). Metrics which capture all this are going to tell you more about a player's defensive value(and whatever other non-scoring factors we consider like...off-ball creation) than box-stuff. Thus...

PER sees someone leading the league in steals and assumes they're the best defender in the league, plus-minus sees that there's not that much correlation between what that someone is doing, and what his team is doing, and adjusts accordingly.

How does PG Tucker help us assess the veracity of "box-stats are the most accurate with big box-score players"?

is this espn's rpm or a different rpm? the one that says steph is the best player every year (well, except when it's kyle lowry)?

Same one I think:

so the one where curry wins every year despite never ending the year being seen as the best player? that's the one that's doing a bang up job?

Curry often ends up seen as the best regular season player which is what RPM would be measuring. More specifically(you like hyperbole ig), it rated him as the best regular season player in 2021, 2019, 2017, 2016, and 2015, years where he(except for 2019) produced prime mj-level rs lift going by on/off, wowy, or apm/apm derivatives. Even box-aggregates agree sometimes. Cherrypicking a single data point to argue against a stat is pretty questionable practice, but even this "data-point" doesn't really help you since "curry best rs player" is not a fringe take and in most of the relevant years was actually the popular take.

Is the rationale here that stats that challenge your priors must be less accurate than those that reinforce them? If the most predictive and flexible data consistently disagrees with you, maybe the problem here is your priors?

Like look bro, if you want to pick nits, here's the stated methodology...

Team Adjusted Net Ratings were used in the analysis which were adjusted for strength of schedule (home-court advantage and strength of opponents faced). These ratings were predicted in the analysis based on player metric values from the previous season and prediction errors were assessed.

A measure of roster continuity was used in further analysis to compare metrics in the context of changing rosters for a more accurate assessment. Continuity was calculated using the method outlined by Ken Pomeroy which is the sum of the minimum percent of minutes played out of both seasons for each team. This controls for a differing number of minutes played for each team-season given overtime periods and truncated seasons (lockout and postponed seasons).

Feel free to vet the article yourself...
https://dunksandthrees.com/blog/metric-comparison

...but it starting to feel like you're looking for reasons to keep using stuff like PER(which game-score is a unadjusted extension of). All the articles doing this comp have those metrics grading out as the worst. Maybe there's some big math thing I'm missing here, but thus far "box-stats do the best job grading box-heavy players" isn't something you've really offered any sort of support for, and I think the work has been done to demonstrate those metrics underrate primary paint protectors vs guards(theoretically the same logic should apply to non-pass creation but I haven't actually done my homework there so I won't push it). Like unless you genuinely think leading the league in steals makes you hakeem, you probably shouldn't be using this stuff.

like bro you're claiming media bias with curry getting top 3 mvp on an 8th seed when mj(and durant) got runner ups on 8th seeds, because, like you are now, the media honed in on the box-stuff as opposed to winning. What do you think was the decider in 1985 ROY voting? The Bulls going less than .500? The reasoning is the same as it was with Curry in 2021, guards rack up numbers, even on the defensive end(steals=defense!). Whether those numbers correlate with team success and/or analysis that isolates the individual from team success is secondary. Curry benefits from it, but players like Durant(still love ya, i promise) and Jordan are probably bigger beneficiaries as the numbers insulate them from scrutiny for when they weren't winning. Speaking of which...

and giannis hasn't accomplished anything near what jordan did when jordan had really good help. giannis won a hospital ring by the skin of his teeth against a ridiculously injured nets team and still needed overtime game 7 to barely win. and had embarrassing playoff losses on massive SRS/win% teams in 2019 and 2020. jordan has had a 15-2, 15-3, 15-4 and 15-4 playoff run.

He did in the regular season. And sure, nearly losing to the injured nets is rough, but the Bulls do something pretty similar in 92 and 93 vs the knicks and at least in 93, even from a box-perspective, Jordan slipped up.

not sure '93 belongs in there. in '92, the 67 win bulls barely beating the knicks is definitely weird, though they did do the traditional game 7 blowout when a heavy underdog mysteriously pushes a series to game 7. '93 has arguably the best example of jordan not being amazing in a big game, when he went 3-18 in game 3 with the knicks ahead 2-0. however, it was a weird game where the bulls basically jumped all over the knicks with jordan not shooting well, but jordan racked up ft's (16/17 from the line) and racked up assists to the tune of 11 (though they seemed to be more rondo assists than lebron assists) and it's hard to say how much he "failed" when the game was basically over like 15 minutes in.

as for the series, we're talking about a 32/7/6 series with a 24.4 game score in a crazy slow 86 paced series in a series where his team had a +12.7 ORtg. that's not really in the conversation for 2019/20 giannis.

...again, you're tunnelling on the offense. Jordan is a better offensive player, that was never in dispute, but he also has never replicated this:

Yet, despite his offensive numbers collapsing, the bucks played the Raptors close to a tie(van vleet baby swings the series basically) with the raptors fg% dropping by 8 points when Giannis was on the court, the bucks posting a -9 playoff defense, and Kawhi(who had great numbers otherwise) seeing his numbers plummet to giannis's level when they shared the court.

Your srs total isn't accounting for Gasol(raps defense immediately improves with his acqusition and then escalates to -8(nigh unprecedented territory) in the ensuing playoffs, the 2020 rs, and the the 2020 ps(only dropping back when gasol leaves), nick nurse(massive improvement over dwane casey) and kawhi going from coasting to playing like a top 3 player itw. The raptors were a 60 win team plus a near conference finalist without Kawhi the following year. You dont think adding a top 3 player to that makes for a legitimate playoff powerhouse? Slag Giannis's offense, but also give his defense its due. People hype up brook lopez but the bucks were still the best rim protecting team in the league without brolo and they are vastly worse in terms of rim-protection in brook-no giannis vs giannis-nobrook(at least in 2019/2020). The "srs favorite" stat is just punishing Giannis for trying in the regular season while the raptors coasted. Again, going by expectations is going to end up penalizing better rs play. Giannis won more in the 2019 rs than Jordan did in the 1990 rs. Why are we holding that against him? Were the bucks unfairly loaded in a way that the data or wowy would miss?

and maybe that's where we differ. i put a lot of value on high leverage, could decide a potential title type performances and lower value on what you did in the average game or series or in blowouts or series that were easily won. if the best we can knock jordan with is "he let 1 series in a 5 title run stretch from 1991 to 1997 get to game 7" or "he sort of shot poorly" while winning by 20 in a big game 3, that's just very low on the bad playoff moments scale. i don't get the impression this board puts much different stock in different situations, but i do. bumbling around when you're up 3-0 and making your averages look bad before eventually winning a series everyone knows is over (1996 finals) just doesn't move me much. i guess without good play from his teammates it could have turned into a disaster, but that's the nice thing about giving yourself 4 chances. collapsing in the final 4 games of a series you were up 2-0 in and game 3 went to OT, when your team was #1 in SRS, that moves me (2019 ECF).

Classifying 2019 as embarrassing also seems off to me. The Raptors were basically a 60 win team + kawhi leonard + marc gasol(who was able to anchor a 60 win team and atg defense after kawhi's absence)+ nick nurse(best coach in the league?).

I mean, I feel like you're ascribing the label of "high-leverage" post-hoc. Is a game which decides if you go 3-0 down or if you blow a 3 game lead really not "high-leverage". Like 3-0 to 3-3 is probably the biggest collapse in the history of basketball and Jordan was aided greatly there with his support. Even in 91, whatever you make of how competitive the 4th quarter was(this has been discussed at length but i dont want to open too many tangents), Jordan didn't play very good through a game+3 quarters and the bulls beat the pistons anyway in game 1 and were comfortably ahead in game 2. As it is, I am not disputing that Jordan is a better playoff performer than giannis or curry, but you're basically dismissing 2 mess-ups because his team was good enough to survive them while simulateuously positing he was "clearly" more reliable than players with vastly longer "primes"(who thus had much more opportunity to mess up). Like if we do this year to year instead of "shorter prime vs longer prime" 95 isn't very far down and(relative to help as opposed to expectations) was worse than "black-marks" like 1974 or 2011. All together you are
-> relying on data which posits Jordan was an all-time big level defender because of steals per game(ignoring all the other more predictive data which sees jordan as good not great on that end)
-> dismissing bad performances where his teammates elevated the bulls to victory anyway
-> dismissing weak seasons as "not prime" even though they show up as soon as other player's "black marks" if you broke things down year by year

Don't you think that sort of lense will skew heavily in MJ's favor?

I think its probably worth noting that Jordan generally saw all his stuff drop-off significantly in games 4-7 as opposed to games 1-3. If alot of these series are ending quickly because the team is too good(and we have close to nothing(that includes box-heavy stuff) it was because he was significantly ahead of everyone else ever), there's reason to think Jordan messing up less(relative to top ten-all timers at least) is a matter of opportunity as opposed to an inherent quality he has as a basketball player.

but the idea that Jordan is just this different calibre of player doesn't seem accurate to me, and I'm not seeing why the gap is so big that the various concerns various people brought up (and a more talented field), couldn't bridge the gap here. Let alone when you're taking 1997 Jordan who struggled in the playoffs anyway.

well, my first post in this thread specifically did not say 1997 jordan was better than giannis. i said jokic and giannis had good arguments to be over him (and maybe luka) and noted that i would be more comfortable with that assertion if giannis didn't fall off in the playoffs and if jokic's team ever got a stop in the playoffs (i would take giannis/jokic in the regular season). i actually picked "top 5" and not "definitely the best". so if you think i am definitely arguing 1997 jordan over, then you are arguing with the wrong person. it was more the absurd jayson tatum comparisons that got me going, especially as i don't have tatum even in the top 7 right now.

Okay, but you also said:

i'm only to the end of page 1, but some people really think the best player in the world in 1997 wouldn't be top 5 in 2022? and several more are calling top 5 a close call.

I have Jordan as top 5 in 2022(top 3 actually). Maybe I'm biased, but me(and enig) are taking the "high" view on MJ in this thread. But regardless of our biases or position, "jordan is better than this not top 5 player" does not help you with "jordan is a top 5 player". It's simply a bad argument and the Tatum comparison is another variant of it. The logic does not actually lead to the conclusion people posting this want it to. I have no position on what Jordan's raw ppg would be right now(and frankly I don't really care).

You're working of a 4 game sample for 2020 and even if we take that sample and combine it with 2021, Curry's WOWY looks great(20 without, 45 with).

yeah, i don't think we should combine a 2020 season where the warriors were clearly tanking after curry's first injury (a 6 week injury accidentally turned into a season long injury? who just throws away a prime year of a top 20 player to tank for a top pick? wiseman sucking so far seems like karma for that BS).

But the 2021 warriors without curry were as bad as the 2020 warriors without curry. Also you can hate the strat, but it culmanated in an unexpected title so...

Youngins got to play and then the youngins elevated to cement the Warrior's legacy. Not a bad trade-off all in all.

For what its worth, taking your 86 sample, you get the most impressive looking lift at 32 win
lift. But when we consider that is easier to lift worse teams than better ones, even taking that pretty small sample(which srs disagrees with), I'm not sure I'm more impressed with 86 Jordan(pre-prime) over prime curry stuff(40 to 60, or 50 to 70). Jordan playing in the other games also distorts things and srs disagrees pretty strongly:

Note tho, the off is boosted by half a game Jordan so i'd probably hedge at like 30 wins(86 srs completely without puts him there I think)? Or we can just defer to 84(82 game sample goes brr).

i think it was you pointing out hakeem had amazing WOWY numbers in that hakeem GOAT thread. but then you have '91 where hakeem misses 25 games and the rockets go 15-10 while replacing him with larry smith, who could rebound like crazy but shot the ball with his hands about as well as hakeem could have with his feet. what does any of it mean when the samples are so small?

I think you mean to say "noisy" here. WOWY is the biggest possible sample, and, specifcally, 82 games of without is the biggest thing there is. Yes there's room for interpretation but even the high-end estimate i acknowledged doesn't really put jordan on a different level from curry in the rs). You also might notice that the sample I'm weighing the highest is the full 82 games we have of the Bulls without Jordan in 1984 and even there I am taking a high-end guess by assuming the Bulls did not improve in any sort of way(besides jordan) from 1984 to 1988.

The "best we can knock" him for is that even with the most favorable interpretations of cast limitations, Jordan was unable to win as much as some of the all-timers you are elevating him above when they had similar casts.(keep in mind with russell you have to map it to championships/championship prob since srs was depressed in his era). And the reason we look at "without" is because all the individual factors you are focused on are already baked in with a bunch of other factors you're missing. Contextualizing noise is hard, but that's not a good excuse not to try. You probably know way more about the 90's than I do, so why don't you apply that knowledge to contextualize the data instead of dismissing it al-together? You should be able to do a much, much better version of this than I can. I've only really watched the 88-91 playoffs thoroughly. I had no idea Jordan's assists in 93 were "rondo" style. You have so much knowledge, I just think it might be worthwhile to apply it a little more rigorously.

Don't run from the math! Elevate it! Offer the tidbits of context everyone is missing. You and enig are basically historians, and historians should be using(and understanding the limitations/strengths of) every tool available.

You can time-machine Russell if you want(and let's be real, you're not making a jordan over russell case if you don't), but he who time-machines must be prepared to get time-machined. If Russell is not the undisputed GOAT(or at least best prime), then all of this is fair game.

what if we averaged everyone over all of nba history? as in, you get time machined to every season and have your value averaged over all years. impossible to do, but would be my preferred method. russell's chart of relative value vs year is probably a slowly declining relative value line from his time to the present. most guys would probably have peak relative value in their own time (thus, why we think of them as being so good) and might be a little bumpy as the game changes over time. i wonder whose relative value line is the flattest? lebron?

This is a great question! I will say I think Russell's curve may not be as sharp as many think. I think me and 70's offer a reasonable case for him being in contention as the best player in the 90's I think(giving him some of the favorable assumptions we give to MJ):

This question sort of intrigues me so I figured I'd tackle this. As 70's seems to avoid any sort of "era-strength penalties" I figure, we can offer Bill the same olive branch and project Bill with a best-case and worst-case scenario. I think with Bill the best analog to use here is Hakeem. He's a player with league-best or close to league best rs value throughout his prime, an elite playoff elevator, pulled off arguably the era's most impressive upset(86 lakers), and is one of the handful of players to pull off a "one-star" title. Jordan is of a similar calibre but Bill and Jordan diverge so much stylistically that its difficult to use MJ as a base. This is not rigorous but i'm going to say Hakeem was something like a +3.5 defender and a +3.5 attacker while Bill, in-era was a +1000 defender(not by srs but by championship probability ) and a nuetral attacker. If someone wants to argue he was more of a positive(+1) i'm open to hearing it.

Bill Russell vs Hakeem
So taking Russell out of his era I think here are the advantages Hakeem has defensively:
-> better at stripping balls
-> a bit more agile
Russell's advantages:
-> straight up better athleticism, jumping, ect
-> by extension better rim protection
-> smarter, more positionally sound
-> Better defensive playmaking

Using the frame we're applying with Jordan, Russell is probably a significantly better rim protector and i see the other aspects cancelling out so I can see giving Russell a +1-+1.5 advantage here to set him at +4.5 or +5.

Now, as unibro posits, you could argue "defense is as good as the attack they face", so maybe its generous of me to assume he doesn't lose out in terms of switchability/help as he's facing better attackers, but we aren't applying that sort of logic to Jordan's offense or defense, so for the sake of this exercise I am going to discount that.

With offense i'm going to apply the precept that scarcity is value and highlight Russell's potential as an offensive rebounder. In the 90's offensive rebounding was a very big deal. Something the Bulls would exploit very well with the likes of cartwright, grant and then... Rodman. Russell is a better jumper than rodman and much taller. Rodman was able to provide a lot of value to the Bulls from what we have, helping elevate them from 50 wins(srs, 42 by record)+rusty mj to 72 wins(fwiw by a 40 game wowy sample he was pulling of "kd on the warriors lift" ) and showing up as a clear clear positive on offense(+1?). My question here is how good Bill's "touch" is. If we assume it's good, then Bill should be able to offer better or similar value to rodman via rebounding(and passing to an extent). If we take him to be a +1 or +2 attacker we get a "best case" range that goes from +5.5 to +7. If his touch isn't good enough and he provides no value whatsoever on that end, we get to +4.5-+5.

Best case then is: +7, argument for for most valuable in the league along-side MJ and Hakeem
Worst case then is: +4.5, suped up dikembe, still a superstar if not in the "best player" conversation
My guess is something like +6-+6.5, not quite the best, but up there and maybe P O R T gives him a case?

I also think Bill will have an advantage as the most "scalable" player as almost all his value is derived from defense and offensive rebounding which both work extremely well with most superstars. On the other hand, I suspect Hakeem's scoring may make his value fluctuate less on a variety of lower-end casts(and for my money he does have a good case as the best floor-raiser of that era).

Now there are some of favorable assumptions I'm making to establish this range, but as 70's is doing the same with Jordan, and most of the people itt seem to want to give some benefit of the doubt, I think this framework is consistent with the spirit of this discussion.

Put him on the hawks, and maybe they establish a dynasty? Would love to know what you think

I think you did a great job overall. I may not agree with Hakeem being more agile than Russell (at least with defensive movement), but it doesn't matter on the bigger scale. I agree that Russell would be a bit better than Hakeem defensively overall.

I think it would be hard to take peak Russell (not 1969 version, take that in mind) to the 1990s and believe he'd be a clear negative on offense. Russell was a very good offensive rebounder (not on Rodman level) which was extremely valuable back then. He was also athletic freak who could run transition offense by himself. He wasn't a liability in terms of his own offense as well - he could play in the post, spot up and beat defenders off the dribble and also shoot open jumpshots. I doubt he was very efficient on most of these shots, but he could do something when he had to. He also drew fouls quite well. Unlike other defensive minded bigs from the 1990s (Mutombo, Mourning, even Ewing), Russell was a fine passer as well and that makes him far more scalable.

I mean, the worst scenario I could see for him is being slightly better than peak Mourning - better defensively, different strengths offensively. At best, I see him as potentially the best player in the league.

Imagine 1962 Russell in more offense friendly environment, he could become a 18 pp75 scorer on decent enough efficiency, while being good passer, elite rebounder and very active off-ball player. Combine that with his GOAT-level defense and you come up with someone competing with Hakeem and Jordan for the MVPs.

I guess I should also mention that I am considering changing my rankings to a combination of the question you asked and era-relative stuff, though for now im sticking era-relative.

This question is also part of why I'm higher on curry than others. Yes he(and most) takes a hit with no three-point line, but post that? If curry shows up in 1990 and is hitting 10+ 3's a game(and the defenses are even less equipped to stop it then), there's probably nothing that can stop whatever team he's on from winning a title that season. Maybe adjustments/rule changes are made to stop him the next year, but no team has the output to match that.

On the other hand, imo, the best way to stop a guy who scores and creates a bunch via interior gravity is to hedge so that the angles are narrower(couldn't do that to a similar extent with illegal d). We've touched on why spacing isn't inherently beneficial(remember, its about relative production, not raw production), and I think falco did a good job showing Jordan wasn't really a great passing helio(supported by passer rating and ben taylor's film-tracking(a guy who sees jordan as the #1 peak)):

29:40 another good and correct pass that i would expect my ball handler to almost always be able to make in that situation (having the scoring pressure or athletism to create the opening is a different question)as is not exactly that small of a window

is a precise pass quickly delivered but not exactly passing through a narrow corridor of arms, is the kind of good and correct read that is the expected baseline of a modern heliocentric star to be seen as a great passer. Pause at 29:39 and see that the closest rival arms in the ball path is the guard running -behind- jordan who is in no good position/angle to challenge the passing angle even

Jordan obviously stops his momentum while the chasing guard doesnt so it looks like a tighter window it was

32:57 kinda tricky to evaluate. On one side jordan went for the ultra tough shot but then he managed to pass in the air to keep the play moving

If you think he did it on purpose to draw the defense attention it would be a impressive pass but it honestly seems more like a mistake that his athletism and hand size let him solve along some luck that there was a teammate in the right spot for a bailout kick out

Either way it was a score created by jordan scoring pressur more than great vision or anticipation (unless we think he had planed a 3d chess move to pass in the air from the start)

33:53 nice awareness to notice the cutting player getting in position for a pass, easily a good and correct pass but you overstate a fair bit the "3 player wall" im fromt of him a fair bit.

Good but not -great- pass as he recognizes his teammate (again, right in fromt of his field of vision) moving into scoring position and delivers an accurate pass to him.

All of these are good passes, correct reads.(even the bailout pass in the air once he got himself there) but neither is remarkable, they are 6's, 7's maybe one or two 8's. But not the 9's and 10's that the best passers do with relative frequency

Jordan was an all time scorer with huge scoring pressure om defenses and athletism so he could create these "6's and 7's" and maybe some "8's, the kind of assist profile i would expect of an average nba ball handler guard if the average nba guard could score and create off his scoring threat at industrial quantities like jordan

But modern star helios are expected to do those highlight "9's and 10's" assists too, make those though lob passes consistently and not prioritize their own "good enough scoring options" at the expense of better shots for teammates

I'm hardly an expert on all this, especially compared to many of the people posting on these forums, but I think the case for Jordan being worse era-translated isn't unreasonable. I appreciate you being willing to engage me in good-faith tho, even if me views are a bit "radical"

[tsherkin]

I have Jordan as top 5 in 2022(top 3 actually).

As someone who has mostly posted this thread on the side of "let's take a second and breathe" regarding MJ, this doesn't seem an outlandish notion to me.

His raw efficiency and his relative efficiency had come down relative to his prime. His passing output had changed as Pippen matured and he moved more off-ball, but his ball protection went hyper nuts, so even while his TS% wasn't astonishing (nor his rTS) anymore, his ORTG was pretty good and he was still a league-leading OBPM guy and at a rate which would still be quite good. A 59-60% TS version of 97 Jordan isn't unreasonable, which has him at +2-+3% rTS with solid defense. That's a pretty good player. Not a helio guy pulling Luka-level nonsense, but he'd be in his mid-30s, so that's reasonable. And at 30+ ppg, of which there are still 'only' 7 guys in the league, that's pretty good. Puts him in a conversation with the Tatums and Durants of the league. Jordan knew what type of player he wanted to be, so barring major personality shift, he'd still be that guy who wanted to score an absolute ton. Didn't really have the stuff to go full helio anymore, and preferred not to because it's better to move the ball around anyway. We know this. He learned this. But he was very good at what he did. It just wouldn't be quite as amazing in today's league because there's just more high-end talent than during the latter half of the 90s, which should surprise no one.

[f4p]

Oh wow did this take long. Hopefully I didn't **** up the formatting again

it's hard to keep track of all the cross-conversation going on, but afaik we were only talking about offense and jordan's translation and it led to questions about the warriors vs bulls relative ORtg's. therefore, i talked about offense.

So you think Curry's defense is what's generating similar holistic results(similar team success on, similar team success off)? You compared individual players using o-rating, not the difference in o-rating when the two entered or left the court, but their team's o-rating overall. These teams have similar rs success with their stars and have similar success without. Why is it important that one's team is leaning more on defense while the other is leaning more on offense?

are we not comparing 1997 jordan to 2023 curry? isn't that how this all started, with me saying 1997 jordan isn't behind 2023 curry? the OG point at the beginning of this was the team offensive rating for the bulls was much higher (by 7.3 vs league average). there is no similar result for curry's defense to make up for, as the 1997 bulls are miles better than the current 2023 warriors (i suspect they will be just fine when everyone is playing and healthy at the end of the year) and this isn't a career comparison. we're comparing a 69 win team to a 0.500 team. so there's nothing that needs to be accounted for to make them equal. in their overall careers, i would say steph has played with more talent (that fits amazingly well) to get to the similar regular season results. steph is presumably close in regular season offense to jordan (though quite a ways back in the playoffs), and behind in regular season defense, whatever it means for PG's/SG's.

You seem to have more faith in less predictive AND flexible metrics on the basis that... Curry being the best regular season player a bunch is absurd.

i think they all are probably not super predictive, writ large, across the entire league. i suspect on/off stuff that you like is going to win out on the whole in prediction simply because it is literally using the score from the game (based on lineups) to be predictive. a bit like shattering a vase and then looking at the pieces to say "i think this was some sort of a vase". it might understand it was some sort of vase but is still going to be a struggle where i think the error bars (i.e. who actually gets the credit from the lineups) probably exceed the differences we are talking about when we are at the levels of players we are talking about. i don't know what the PER's of the world is like in this analogy, but my read of what seems to end up with people winning rings and playoff series is that the box metrics are not guiding us that wrongly. in simplest terms "player (or group of players) with better numbers beats player (or group of players) with worse numbers" doesn't seem entirely incorrect and explains a lot of nba history. now if all we had were raw pts/reb/ast, maybe i would change my tune. but with adjustments for pace and minutes and efficiency and all that stuff, i simply am not moved that the box score is super wrong or that extra "predictiveness" in things that are basically designed to have some predictiveness built in, means that much.

Curry often ends up seen as the best regular season player which is what RPM would be measuring. More specifically(you like hyperbole ig), it rated him as the best regular season player in 2021, 2019, 2017, 2016, and 2015, years where he(except for 2019) produced prime mj-level rs lift going by on/off, wowy, or apm/apm derivatives. Even box-aggregates agree sometimes. Cherrypicking a single data point to argue against a stat is pretty questionable practice, but even this "data-point" doesn't really help you since "curry best rs player" is not a fringe take and in most of the relevant years was actually the popular take.

it was far from the popular take. and you need to include 2018 in the list as "1st place" was kyle lowry, which puts steph 1st amongst anyone we would take seriously (van vleet finishing 3rd tells us RPM had troubles with the raptors).

2018, harden winning MVP and 65 games. steph was the best? and let's not forget lebron, who was about to have an ATG playoff run, coming in 31st. and alec peters and davis bertans with strong 6th and 7th finishes.

2019? with giannis and harden having historic seasons and steph's numbers falling across the board and the loaded warriors winning only 57 games (iirc). really, steph was the best? lebron somehow actually jumped to 2nd in an injury plagued season where his team missed the playoffs for the first time in forever.

2021, with jokic and giannis having unbelievable seasons but finished 5th and 6th, well behind steph. and our good friends lowry and van vleet finishing 12th and 13th for a negative SRS team.

2017, when any reasonable take would be that steph backed way off in the regular season, seen not only in his box numbers being way worse than 2016 and even quite a bit below the follow-up season in 2018. where a 73 win team added KD and only won 67? with westbrook having a massive season (15th). with harden being amazing (9th). with many thinking kawhi was better than both (23rd).

2016 certainly makes sense. except you see he beat 2nd place lebron by almost 30%. ok, maybe that seems reasonable to some. but he beats 3rd place (durant) by 75%!

in 2015, a competitive MVP race in the popular world, he beats 2nd place chris paul by a mindblowing 60%! and doubled up mvp runner up james harden in 6th, but didn't quite double up kyle korver in 4th (i.e. RPM guessed the hawks were a vase, but decided kyle korver was the dominant player).

even 2014, only cp3 stopped him from winning again as he was 2nd in just a nice all-star level season.

you see how it seems a little weird when a guy doesn't just win a stat, but laps the field in his best years, even when one year just seemed like a run of the mill mvp, and then keeps winning even when backing way off in the regular season and isn't even mentioned in mvp races? it's like RPM is just playing a prank on us.

"oh, hey RPM."
"hey, wanna know who the best player was this year?"
"lemme guess, it was steph?"
"nope, not this time."
"are you just tricking me?"
"no, go ahead, guess."
"oh, it was giannis, putting up monster per minute numbers for the #1 SRS team and playing huge defense?"
"nope."
"harden, averaging a historic 36 ppg and getting his team back to a good record while doing it?"
"nope."
"it wasn't kyle lowry again was it?"
"nope."
"was it just steph, RPM?"
"yep. hehehe."

kyle lowry (not korver) also finished top 5 for 4 straight years. do i like lowry? do i think he has impact beyond the box score? yes to both. do i think this is an example of my contention that some of these stats just seem to play favorites (due to roster construction, not giving enough credit to their teammates, etc). yes i do. the raptors have good MOV/SRS and kyle lowry got more credit than i think anyone would say is reasonable. same reasoning with steph, if he's just going to win every year no matter what. hell, he was 8th in 2020! in 5 terrible games where the warriors also looked terrible.

Is the rationale here that stats that challenge your priors must be less accurate than those that reinforce them?

i like being challenged. but i suspect we all agree more with stats that reinforce our priors. i don't think it's a shock that the steph fan loves the EPM's and RPM's of the world. it would be weird if we didn't. if i thought carmelo anthony was empty calories and lebron had impact and stats kept coming out saying carmelo was having huge impact and lebron wasn't, i probably wouldn't believe those stats. if stats kept telling me bradley beal was the player i should be praising instead of steph, i probably wouldn't believe those stats. things can only deviate so much from what we all watch and think and correlate to winning in our own minds before we have less belief in those things, even if we want to be open to them.

...but it starting to feel like you're looking for reasons to keep using stuff like PER(which game-score is a unadjusted extension of). All the articles doing this comp have those metrics grading out as the worst.

again, i think they all have error bars that if we used any single stat in isolation, it would be tough to take much of anything from them. and i've explained it here before in other threads why i like the box metrics quite a bit.

i like that the box metrics have a steadiness to them from season to season. player peaks seem to result in box peaks. down years seem to result in down box years. career arcs seem well traced as far i can tell. which makes much more sense from a human body "you improve, plateau, peak 1 or 2 years, then decline" perspective than some of the plus/minus numbers seem to do.

i like that i feel like i can confidently use them in the playoffs because they don't need the sample size of plus/minus numbers.

i also think they make good RS to PS comparison tools because of that steadiness and low sample size requirement.

i like that they have much less of a "black box" feel to them than the plus/minus numbers. i can at least tell you why a box metric is wrong if i think it is.

i like that we have them for basically all of nba history instead of some stats where we go back like 10 years and could never use them to compare to older players.

i think they are a good jumping off tool. i'm not going to automatically see a 29 PER and 28 PER and consider my work done on who is better, but a 29 vs 24 is going to give me a lot of confidence i'm looking at different qualities of players. whereas with impact metrics, jokic vs giannis or steph vs KD could be a 50% difference and that doesn't give me any confidence when we start dealing with even smaller differences (and makes me question why there is such a large difference if it's not just team fit and team construction-based).

i think they aren't nearly as broken as you think they are for guys who actually fill up the box score. when i see prime (age 22-35) playoff PER go (in order) jordan, lebron, shaq, hakeem, duncan, i think damn, that's pretty good and lines up a lot with what i think (and i suspect what a lot of people in here think. bill russell, as ever, remains impossible to deal with as he doesn't do box score stuff and has no plus/minus and only gives us some clunky WOWY).

i think this place is far too willing to throw away huge box numbers and rely on impact when it comes to someone like luka.

i don't know what to say. give me a PER, WS48, and BPM and i feel like i usually get about 90% of the way to the truth based on everything that seems to have won games over NBA history. give me EPM and RPM and i have to filter out 3 bertans and alec peters before i get started and then try to see if i know why one guy is not just better, but like 50% better than this other guy when i think they are really close.

Maybe there's some big math thing I'm missing here, but thus far "box-stats do the best job grading box-heavy players" isn't something you've really offered any sort of support for,

and kyle lowry leading the league in RPM is probably not something anyone is going to be able to support either. i don't think we're ever going to have a perfect number. which is why we probably all "ad hoc" it at some points. if i only liked box numbers, i wouldn't have bill russell 4th all time. i turn to different logic for him. if i valued longevity the same way in every instance, i wouldn't have jordan 1st and would probably be higher on duncan. if ben taylor only looked at the 4 numbers he put at the beginning of everyone's "backpicks top 40" list (numbers he presumably likes), he wouldn't have been so high on hakeem, who was pretty low on all of them. i suspect we will all value what we value, factor in new information as best we can, probably be more resistant to new information if it doesn't conform to our priors but maybe will be worn down over time into thinking we really should move in that direction if we see it lining up more with what we think is reality. hell, at one point PER and WS48 were state of the art and no one wanted to listen to them because we had points and rebounds to look at and who knew what these "advanced" stats were anyway (advanced apparently as in they involved a tiny bit of math).

I mean, I feel like you're ascribing the label of "high-leverage" post-hoc. Is a game which decides if you go 3-0 down or if you blow a 3 game lead really not "high-leverage". Like 3-0 to 3-3 is probably the biggest collapse in the history of basketball and Jordan was aided greatly there with his support.

perhaps i am. maybe there is no way not to. but people relax when they are up 3-0 (1996 finals). what you do when you are up 20 immediately (game 3 knicks 1993) is harder to use against someone, even if it wasn't a great game. either by luck or steadiness, MJ didn't reach a lot of "break glass in case of emergency" moments and when he did, he usually didn't suck. even something like game 7 against the pacers where, at age 35, he guarded reggie in the 4th and held him to 1 shot attempt and 0 points. on the other hand, being up 2-0 and then losing 4-2 means you either had a lot of "break glass" moments and didn't respond or were way too confident until it was too late and then didn't respond to the singular "break glass" moment. maybe MJ was just confident he'd never see a game 7 in 1996 and since he was right, i guess it doesn't matter, even if that seems like a post-hoc analysis. when you tell me "i always had it" when you win, it's simply much harder to argue with than after you lose. maybe that's unfair to everyone else.

but you're basically dismissing 2 mess-ups because his team was good enough to survive them while simulateuously positing he was "clearly" more reliable than players with vastly longer "primes"(who thus had much more opportunity to mess up). Like if we do this year to year instead of "shorter prime vs longer prime" 95 isn't very far down and(relative to help as opposed to expectations) was worse than "black-marks" like 1974 or 2011. All together you are
-> relying on data which posits Jordan was an all-time big level defender because of steals per game(ignoring all the other more predictive data which sees jordan as good not great on that end)
-> dismissing bad performances where his teammates elevated the bulls to victory anyway
-> dismissing weak seasons as "not prime" even though they show up as soon as other player's "black marks" if you broke things down year by year

you could play the jordan simulation 100 times and i don't think you are getting the 2011 finals. that's what i mean by "steady". nothing in his distribution of performances tells us that was within a reasonable number of standard deviations to actually happen. nothing tells us jordan was dipping low enough to reach the lows of some other guys, even if he "only" played about 70% of the playoff games of the very longest careers (and more games and years than some other top 10 guys).

I think its probably worth noting that Jordan generally saw all his stuff drop-off significantly in games 4-7 as opposed to games 1-3. If alot of these series are ending quickly because the team is too good(and we have close to nothing(that includes box-heavy stuff) it was because he was significantly ahead of everyone else ever), there's reason to think Jordan messing up less(relative to top ten-all timers at least) is a matter of opportunity as opposed to an inherent quality he has as a basketball player.

maybe so. definitely worth thinking about in him getting worse as a series goes on while someone like lebron improves. but there's also something to be said for just winning game 1 instead of inexplicably losing it a lot like lebron. jordan only played 3 game 7's and has 4 playoffs runs with less than 4 losses. at the very least, i would say this goes back to my "consistency" point and never letting off the gas as i think some of the other guys in great situations their whole careers could have done more to avoid game 7's and/or long series against seemingly overmatched opponents.

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But the 2021 warriors without curry were as bad as the 2020 warriors without curry. Also you can hate the strat, but it culmanated in an unexpected title so...

Youngins got to play and then the youngins elevated to cement the Warrior's legacy. Not a bad trade-off all in all.

i'm insulting the strat more from the perspective of it being weak sauce. top 20 all-time guy just takes a year off. hey, things have been so great with our talent and infinite payroll, we can just chunk a season away. peasants like damian lillard, james harden, lebron james, and everyone else not in a perfect situation who actually try in the regular season are crazy for not just relaxing like we do when it looks like we'll only be a 7th or 8th seed. who wants a tough playoff struggle and possible first or second round loss when you can just get a high draft pick? silly gooses. we'll be back in 2 years to win and pat ourselves on the back for all the things that we've overcome.

You probably know way more about the 90's than I do, so why don't you apply that knowledge to contextualize the data instead of dismissing it al-together? You should be able to do a much, much better version of this than I can. I've only really watched the 88-91 playoffs thoroughly. I had no idea Jordan's assists in 93 were "rondo" style. You have so much knowledge, I just think it might be worthwhile to apply it a little more rigorously.

i think they were rondo style because i watched the game a few months ago, not necessarily because i've memorized nba history (i have been watching the rockets since about '89 or '90 and the nba more generally probably since more like '92/'93-ish). if youtube had every game ever, i'd probably watch it all day. i like to watch games where greats aren't "great" because watching the 45/20 games just means they look like superman. i only noted they were rondo-like because i hadn't noticed him do a lot and suddenly he had something like 7 assists so i assume quite a few were just "throw it to guy who happens to shoot quickly and hits 18 footer" and not "drive and draw double team and kick it to open teammate" type assists (could be wrong, certainly wasn't tracking anything).

With offense i'm going to apply the precept that scarcity is value and highlight Russell's potential as an offensive rebounder.

i can't respond to everything (sorry) but has anyone done any tracking on russell and how much of his rebounding was offensive vs defensive? i've always assumed he grabbed a lot but his lack of any 40 point scoring games makes me wonder. an athletic freak that far ahead of his time who had 40+ rebound games seems like he should have had some bigger scoring games just by tip-ins and layups after grabbing 15 offensive rebounds (who was going to block him?). i still think in a general sense, whether the curve is shallow or steep, russell's relative value is declining mostly monotonically, as the 90's wouldn't use him as a rim runner and the modern game would but would also take his defense too far away from the basket. i suspect he would still be a lot to deal with at any point.

This question is also part of why I'm higher on curry than others. Yes he(and most) takes a hit with no three-point line, but post that? If curry shows up in 1990 and is hitting 10+ 3's a game(and the defenses are even less equipped to stop it then), there's probably nothing that can stop whatever team he's on from winning a title that season. Maybe adjustments/rule changes are made to stop him the next year, but no team has the output to match that.

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yes, if he stepped out of a time machine, he would be like an alien and unstoppable. until rick mahorn got tired of it and forearm shivered him. but several weeks later when steph recovered, he would go back to dominating. but that's not really a fair argument i don't think. if he grew up back then, he'd just be steph curry who shoots more 3's than everyone else and it would be like 4 or 5 a game but he would need to make sure to get it to the big man for some post-ups, even if that big man was a scrub. and we'd wonder why his defense wasn't so good when no one could come help early like in a zone world. there's only so far you can break the mold. hell, steph had the greenest of green lights in a 3-point-happy world and until 2016 never even took more than 8 3's a game. and was still getting "you can't win shooting 3's" talk until 2015.

[70sFan]

i can't respond to everything (sorry) but has anyone done any tracking on russell and how much of his rebounding was offensive vs defensive?

Small sample, but trex did it:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1XMWrm7NOYomTY0Md6YE6l99ER2e7uHzu7vgfStCEBn0/htmlview#

Based on this, 24% of Russe rebounds came from offensive end.

i've always assumed he grabbed a lot but his lack of any 40 point scoring games makes me wonder. an athletic freak that far ahead of his time who had 40+ rebound games seems like he should have had some bigger scoring games just by tip-ins and layups after grabbing 15 offensive rebounds (who was going to block him?).

I think that's the problem with people looking at the 1960s NBA in a wrong way. The league was already full of freak athletes back then. Players like Walter Dukes or Gene Wiley could easily block him inside. Russell was one of the most athletic players ever, but it doesn't mean that he could just dominate with sheer athleticism on offense, basketball doesn't work that way.

i still think in a general sense, whether the curve is shallow or steep, russell's relative value is declining mostly monotonically, as the 90's wouldn't use him as a rim runner and the modern game would but would also take his defense too far away from the basket. i suspect he would still be a lot to deal with at any point.

I see no reason to believe that Russell's defensive impact would be largely reduced by the 1990s offenses. Dikembe Mutombo was one of the most impactful players in the league without Russell's quickness, motor and mobility.