AEnigma wrote:DonaldSanders wrote:1993Playoffs wrote:Was that a conversation during the season as it was happening? From what I can tell most people had MJ as clearly the best player in the league in 1993 and he wasn’t as his absolute peak anymore
Back then, yes most people considered MJ the best player but it's a bit like LeBron being the best player but other guys got MVP. Several posters around here think MJ is overrated (I personally don't). Almost nobody was talking about Hakeem being a better player than MJ that season, MJ was coming off b2b chips as the Finals MVP.
That is not really true though.
Hakeem was second in MVP voting that year, and I think one could easily argue he lost for primarily superficial reasons. The Suns started the season 21-4, and went 16-2 without KJ; that sets some narratives pretty early. Add in that they earned the league’s top seed, and that Barkley seemed to many to be Team USA’s best player in the summer Olympics (no Hakeem present), and you immediately have a full steam Barkley MVP train without really needing to look at what either player is doing.
Hakeem had a slower start. He and the Rockets were still working to acclimate themselves to Rudy T’s scheme, with similar growing pains to what we saw with the 1990 Bulls. And then like the 1990 Bulls, they as a team, and Hakeem individually, eventually went on a tear. January 8th, they had a losing record at 14-16. Hakeem was averaging 24.7/12.6/2.8/4.1/1.4 on 57.1% efficiency. They then went 41-11 the rest of the way with Hakeem averaging 26.9/13.3/4/4.2/2.1 on 58% efficiency. He was absolutely in the conversation for best in the world in that stretch. Unfortunately, those first couple of months count too, and the Barkley narrative had built up far too much of a lead, and then they lost an overtime game 7 on the road in the second round against their by far worst matchup, so it gets lost in memory.
The Dream didn't get as much talk/respect until he won his first championship, then especially after his 2nd -- but still people knocked him a bit for winning while Jordan was out of the league (which even as a Jordan guy, I think is quite unfair).
92-93 Barkley got MVP but MJ led the league in BPM, VORP, Win Shares, PER and many other stats from 86-87 to 92-93. LeBron had a similar run from 08-09 to 12-13 and won MVP 4 of those years (Jordan won 3 during his stretch, and his 4th in '96). The best player doesn't always win MVP, often it's the "best player on a team with an awesome record" award.
Yes, which is why Barkley won it, but unless you think 1987 Magic was a fraud MVP and worse than Jordan that year too, maybe not everything in player assessment comes down to what VORP and PER and Win Shares.
In terms of the original question, if we're talking about a direct time portal without The Dream getting to acclimate to the league, I think it's unlikely he would be the best player as the league has changed quite a bit. His offense would be slightly less valuable so I have a tough time seeing him as being better than Jokic.
In the regular season he would probably not have a raw value argument over Jokic, no. But when we talk about rankings, most people considered everything. And what has Jokic showed me in the postseason which would make him more trustworthy than Hakeem?
As we discussed in some of the other time machine threads, the biggest efficiency beneficiaries of the modern league have been bigs. So the question is how willing are we to grant Hakeem those big man boosts? Can he become an elite pick and roll finisher next to one of the myriad of star guards we have in the league — all significant steps up from Kenny Smith and past-peak Sleepy Floyd. Does he extend his range somewhat? I think yes, but if you look at Jokic and Embiid, that probably constitutes around three perimetre attempts a game. Does he draw fouls or live at the rim like Embiid or Giannis, no, that was never really his game. Do modern schemes suit his passing, yes, but only in that Embiid sense where you still do not want him actually being a lead creator. Could he play a bit like Davis, maybe, but he never had Davis’s off-ball aptitude. So even if you boost his raw offensive output up a bit on the margins, he is not going to be some wildly valuable offensive piece, no.
Defensively, I still think he would be the best in the league provided we give some accommodations for translation; of any twentieth century big man, I only trust Russell more to fit into modern schemes, so either Hakeem translates or pretty much no old big does. And again, here I am speaking with an eye to the postseason; pretty much no one ever had a defensive value season like 2021 Gobert, so even if I could try to sell some of you on this notion of “peak Gobert + an offensive skillset outside of screening and finishing,” that does not mean he is some inevitable top regular season impact name.
In the postseason, though? Tough to look at how successful Embiid and Draymond have been on the court and see Hakeem topping those marks. His offensive game is more resilient than Embiid’s and Giannis’s, and you probably cannot play 5-out against him the way you can against Gobert without being punished on the inside — nor is he quite as vulnerable to being spaced out either (as someone who thinks that particular flaw in Gobert’s game has been overblown). Couple all that with his high-end endurance, and that profiles to me pretty safely as the league’s most immediately reliable two-way postseason player.There are plenty of question marks, but there is no specific way I think he would explicitly need to adjust or otherwise be unable/unlikely to adjust which would keep him out of that possibility. His individual skillset is still scarce and still valuable. His scoring inelasticity and his rarely paralleled defensive acumen give you a high baseline in essentially any era. The way I see it, if Giannis can be a or the leading candidate for best player, then Hakeem can top that in the postseason. And if we want to argue that Giannis is a fake candidate and only guys like Steph or Luka or healthy Lebron or healthy Davis could qualify, well, then I guess the argument may as well be that no 20th century players have the requisite skillset to be the league leader in this era. And to be clear, I do not think that is an indefensible argument, but then I still see value in taking the position, If not peak Hakeem, then quite probably no one in these time machine exercises.
