dygaction wrote:Chicago76 wrote:MiamiBulls wrote:Barkley has zero case for Top 15.
Barkley was unquestionably a negative defender at a position at Power Forward that was critical defensively throughout his prime.
His Defensive Awareness and basic court mapping skills defensively was absolutely terrible; he was very primitive on Defense. He was poor at making rotations, lateral quickness defensively was poor. Barkley functionally couldn't guard anyone with consistent regularity, he was too short to effectively guard traditional PFs and Cs while being too slow footed and heavy set to effectively guard SFs and SGs.
Box score derived metrics vastly understate how poor of a defender Barkley actually was. Box Score metrics tends to think High Defensive Rebounding=Postitive Defender.
Yes. Any argument made for Barkley in the top 15 are pretty comical. Just as a rough tool, VORP isn't terrible as a starting point. Gross up the strike/lockout shortened seasons to 82 games. Take the top 15 seasons of each HOFer who entered pro ball after the merger. I intentionally picked 15 years because Barkley had 15 years of +2 or better VORP. And as you mention, BPM-derived stats roughly as favorable for Barkley as any of his peers due to his lack of D and high defensive rebounding. Ranking of 50+ aggregate VORP guys:
Jordan (116), Stockton (98), Malone (95), Garnett (92), Robinson (84), Duncan (83), Barkley (82), Magic (80), Bryant (79), Bird (77), Shaq (75), Olajuwon (73), Drexler (70), Kidd (68), Pierce (65), Payton (65), Pippen (64), Miller (62), McGrady (57), Allen (56), Iverson (52), Ewing (52).
This metric is custom tailored to Barkley in a limited portion of NBA history and he's 7th. Assume the ranking for Stockton and Malone are in large part due to a symbiotic, system-based arrangement to completely advocate for Barkley. Remove them entirely. Barkley is now 5th. Here's the thing: we need to make defensive adjustments BPM-derived methods miss. Anyone within 5 pts of Barkley playing averagish defense of better vaults ahead of him. Any even above average big within 10 pts of him does too. There are some arguments for players below that, but I'll dismiss them to cast Chuck in the best possible light..
Jordan, Garnett, Robinson, Duncan, Magic, Kobe, Bird, Shaq and Olajuwon are all no-brainers. Barkley is automatically no better than 10th.
And a few of the dozen guys on the list above I'm putting below him have some pretty good arguments as well. For Barkley to be a top 15 player, someone would need a credible argument that Barkley is no worse than 6th among all of the players in history not included in the list above. That would include James. That would include players like Dirk and Wade. That would include all of the more recent players. That would include a list of earlier players--some of whom are locks over Barkley, but all of whom have at least a decent case: Russell, Chamberlain, Oscar, West, Barry, Kareem, Erving, Moses.
There is no reasonable argument for Barkley as a top 15 player. Even excluding post-Lebron era players, there is really only a very narrow argument for Barkley to even be included in the top 20.
What? Just when I found you listed quantitative numbers and was interested in how you adjust those with defense, you came up with your conclusion "are all no-brainers"...
To understand what I did, we need to discuss BPM, VORP and its limitations. BPM is a +/- estimate of player impact from box score data. It's expressed in +/- per 100 possessions while the player is on the court. It was derived from a regression of actual RAPM studies and does an excellent job of capturing offensive value. It is not so great at defense, which we'll get to in a moment. VORP measures player value over a "replacement level player" based upon how long the player is actually on the court. Example: a +5BPM player is roughly 7 pts/100 possessions over replacement (replacement is set at -2). If a player is on the floor for 70% of the time over a season for his team his VORP is 7 pts over replacement x 70% = 4.9.
Back to limitations: BPM/VORP is quite good at giving quality estimates of players on the offensive end because there are a lot of things we can measure (FT draw, FT%, assists, turnovers, FGAs, FG made--2 or 3). There is a pretty good statistical footprint of what occurs on the offensive end for offensive impact via BPM to do a good job of reflecting actual on court offensive impact. On the defensive end, we don't have that luxury. Steals, blocks, defensive rebounds...all of which are at least adjusted by defensive position. Example: 5 defensive rebounds from your PF isn't as good as 5 from your PG because the PF is getting a lot of those by virtue of where he is standing (closer to the basket). Many more of those defensive rebounds will fall to anyone playing PF for that team compared to the PG.
Defensive impact is quite hard to measure. And if you know enough about the players in question via film study/seeing them critically in enough games and how the computation works, it is fairly easy to perform quick (yet conservative) adjustments. Bryant vs. Barkley is a good example. Barkley was not a good defender. He wasn't a good team defender. He'd lose guys and drift lazily. He had a hard time matching the lateral quickness of SFs and he did not have the length against PFs. Charles Barkley was a negative defender. BPM thinks he is quite good because getting defensive rebounds correlates highly to being a good defender. But this wasn't true in Barkley's case. Bryant was not as good as his all-D accolades, but he was a positive defender. At times worthy of all-D recognition, almost always above average, but in a few isolated years below average.
What I did was to assume VORP was only looking at O and apply very conservative adjustments. Bryant +0.5 to 1.0 D (a bit conservative). Barkley -0.5 to -1 D. 1.5 difference. Even if both are on the court only 2/3 of their team's minutes over those 15 seasons, that is a 1 VORP adjustment per season. 15 VORP total. And again, this is a conservative adjustment. This is well within the 2 VORP difference between Barkley and Bryant. And it persists even if you're looking best 5 seasons, best 8 seasons, best 12 seasons, etc.
The serial overestimation of Barkley's defensive via BPM vs. Magic (2 points), Bryant (3 points), Bird (5 points), Shaq (7 points), Olajuwon (9 points) comfortably explains all of these differences. Everything else we have also supports the notion that they were all better than Barkley too. They are no-brainers. When you get down to Drexler, Kidd, Pippen level players with higher VORP disparities, I don't think Barkley has an air tight case vs any of them. A good case for sure, but it's a point I can concede/ignore because I don't need it to disprove Barkley having no case for the Top 15. 9 guys from that period + easily another 6 from history does that for me.
