Duncan 2003 vs. Dirk 2011, who disrupted the ATG landscape more

[Doctor MJ]

Hmm, alright, I'll start with the basketball side of this

So I actually largely agree with you here. Looking at 2010-2011, the Heat led the league in srs(61-win pace). obliterated their conference(12-3, including a 4-1 win over the 60 win 2011 Bulls), and proceeded to post a +13.7 rating with the big-three in the lineup the following playoffs. If we take the Mavs out of the picture, the Heat were actually fairly dominant from 11-13 with the only real knock(besides their loss to the Mavericks) being an uncomfortably close series against the 2013 Pacers(basically decided by hibbert needing to use the bathroom).

Dirk had considerably more help, and their decisive series was closer, but there's not much to be had here in terms of positive argumentation. That being said...

I've literally never said Dirk was as impressive as Duncan, let alone more so.

This thread is about disruption of ATG landscape, and the impact of the 2011 series on Dirk's legacy is difficult to overstate. If you don't remember the disrespect toward "soft" bigs in the years before this, then let me just assure that it was absolutely massive.

Had the fact that the Heatles had not yet peaked had the same magnitude as the post-peak Lakers, then I expect I'd have either mentioned both or neither (or it slipped my mind and I'd agree I should have mentioned it).

But that's not how I see things, and I'm literally trying to communicate how I see things when I post.

Is there a meaningful difference in impressiveness between defeating an "about to peak" opponent as opposed to "an already peaked' one? Does the apex coming in the future offer some difficulty not present when the apex has already come in the past?

The pre-peak vs post-peak distinction is not the thing to focus on here on here. This is about the Lakers & Heat and how they evolved with time. I use the pre-peak and post-peak description to tell folks like you what to look up on basketball-reference so you can see why the Laker fall-off was such a different thing from the Heatle step-up.

To non-basketball matters

What you're doing instead here is framing the discussion about me - as if I've done something that is somewhere in the spectrum of "structurally wrong" to "latent bias" to "pre-meditated manipulation" that must be addressed publicly in a thread where people are trying to talk about basketball. (You're also doing it in the same thread where someone is actively harassing me, which given the order of the posting, feels like you literally taking the side of the harasser, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt you didn't realize this.)

With all due respect(and I think you know I mean that sincerely), I don't know "harassment" is the right word to use here. While I suppose Enig's "duncan bitterness" does technically fit under "demeaning or embarrassing comment", your own comment about him "bragging" would also fit. But regardless of whether we should apply "harassment"(and its various connotations) to a couple of one-line jabs, saying that other posters are "siding with a harasser" seems over-the-top. I'd guess their reasoning(as mine take-away was similar), was that putting that line about the Lakers without also drawing a comparison to the Heat felt unbalanced.

You need to stop looking at this from a lens of "they both did it" and start looking at it from a lens of how we got to this point. I'm not sure what else to say beyond this point. I already had to really spell this out because you missed it when just using your own reading of the thread, and I already posted a link to the last thread where I looked to take part of the blame and stop the dialogue between myself and the other poster...which he then brought back by starting s**t in this thread.

If you still don't see the problem, you really just need to forget everything you think you know about understanding situations like this and start from scratch, because it's really not that complicated if strip away the assumptions you're making.

But aside of the anti-social vibe of such a framing, there's the very real threat that you're just resisting dealing with correct information if you think it smacks of "bias", and you starting to see "bias" everywhere.

I mean, I'd say you went off-less to make similar claims about there being a general anti-curry bias motivating notes/critiques on your +/- derivation. Like, do remarks like "averages generally go down the longer you play" really serve as a strong indication of an anti-curry bias?.

So you're perception in general seems to be that things were going just peachy, and then I "go off" bothered by something that wasn't a thing. But if you look at my big post (the one with pictures in it), you'll see I barely mentioned Curry in it, but that the conversation afterward became focused on Curry because that's what others focused. If others are the ones really pushing the conversation to talk about Curry, why is it that you perceive that I'm the one who "went off"?

I think the answer is that I'm the one who objected to the direction things were going, and there's a tendency is to first ask, "How might the person who says there is a problem actually be the one with the unreasonable expectations?", or "Maybe that guy is just a hypocrite?", rather than trying to understand what came to pass which then resulted in the frustration boiling over.

You ask whether "averages generally go down the longer you play" is a strong indication of Anti-Curry bias. No, and since you were not able to quote me word for word on this, you know that I never said this. I might suggest that you should be careful about chopping out nuance given that you jumped into the fray in this conversation hastily and drew problematic conclusions because you missed something that was really simple if you just look at things carefully.

I think folks are starting to overrate Duncan. I might be wrong, and it could be that my discussions with the people I think overrate Duncan might drive me toward emotional clouds...but just remember that I was watching Duncan for years before I started having this sort of interaction pertaining to Duncan. It's really something that came about in the wake of the 2014 champs...which was one of the most enjoyable team seasons ever, and something that certainly has helped everyone major player involved (Duncan, Ginobili, Parker, Kawhi, Pop, Green, Diaw, etc) on any player comparison evaluations I've done since.

But I think it probably hits a bit differently to those who consumed the entirety of the Spurs run largely at once. Here's a telicity - a completed arc - to his career that creates an anchor of meaning. I think we all feel it, but perhaps those of us who can see how it could have been otherwise, as opposed to something inevitable, aren't quite hit with it with the same force.

Eh, I'd say we're well off that(at least in a general sense). Duncan has an impact profile(wowy, AUPM(despite a bpm component), RAPM, ect) that compares favorably to what we have from shaq and jordan, is one of a handful of authors of a "lone-star title", is one of the most accomplished players in history, and is one of the best "off-court" influences we've ever seen(I know you weigh that). Yet, people often seem repulsed by him entering the same conversations we see Shaq, MJ, and Wilt in, largely due to a box-disparity in more offensively slanted in metrics we would expect to rate players who are smaller(steal/block accumulation) and more geared towards the other side of the court(far more of offense is accounted for).

What makes you feel Tim is overrated?

To be perfectly honest I don't want to talk further about this issue in this thread because of how it's being presented.

Remember, I didn't jump into this thread looking to say that Duncan was overrated. Rather it was a poster who crashed the thread to call me biased regarding Duncan who brought that up. Only reason I said anything else on the subject is because I was looking to flesh out the background that led to this point - with the expectation that we could actually get somewhere if got into the nuance of the situation.

Given that posters such as yourself are now seeing me talk about this stuff without any such of how the conversation started, and are using it as a cudgel to blame me for what blew back on me, it doesn't seem productive to continue giving people more words they can take out of context.

I will say though: I've had Duncan rated ahead of Shaq and Wilt for a very, very long time, and this is part of the reason why the allegation that I'm bitter toward Duncan is so strange. Frankly the issue of bitterness here can be better summarized like this:

I'm not bitter about anything that happened on the NBA court, but I'm really frustrated at what I'm dealing with from PC Board posters now. For well over a decade I've successfully had amiable basketball conversations with people who disagree with me drastically on various historical matters...but something has changed in recent years, and that something has basically nothing to do with Duncan or Curry or any other specific player.

[Doctor MJ]

The back and forth is childish and distracting

Not every thread has to have a Winner and a Loser, we can actually just have a productive conversation if we try

Let's just be clear that this is the start of the back and forth:

When Duncan an the Spurs beat the Lakers in '02-03, they did so led by a traditional big, and they beat an underachieving, self-destructing 5-seed, that at best was going to eek out one more title.

Careful, Doc, your Duncan bitterness is showing.

Am I capable of productive conversation? Anyone who has been around on this board for a while knows the answer is yes.

Is a post like AEnigma ever going to lead to earnest dialogue? No, it's not.

Clearly I shouldn't have responded to him, and I won't make that mistake again...

but it's pretty amazing seeing the way people don't seem to care about what he's doing and are using it as a reason to tee off on me, with even a more reasonable person like yourself allocating half the blame to me.

[Doctor MJ]

let's say that Timmeh has never been DoctorMj's "favourite" player over the years (to use an euphemism).I say this with friendliness .

Doesn't feel friendly, and you should know it wouldn't given the context of the thread you're joining.

I suppose I should feel flattered that people keep joining threads simply to comment about how they think I think, but as someone who is on here to grow his own basketball knowledge and to try to build a meaningful base of knowledge that can help others grow, it just makes me feel like people have lost the thread.

[Doctor MJ]

We are fast approaching a very troubling event, the end of an era where people forget the real reality. Every decade or decade and half can seemingly be sectioned off into an era. The era I'm speaking of is the early to late 00s which brought us some of our greatest players of a generation. Some of the more prominent figures of this generation are Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant, Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, Dirk Nowitzki, Steve Nash, and Jason Kidd. These gentleman have carried a hefty weight on their shoulders and sadly people did not live through and remember their respective greatness. It is the responsibility of posters like DoctorMJ, tsherkin and even myself to remind posters of what happened in the past.

We are approaching 2023 and every player I mentioned is becoming a distant memory as if the sun is setting over a vast and open ocean on the horizon. We've held onto this generation for as long as we could but our grip is getting looser. With their imminent demise fast approaching, we must consider what will follow. A door is about to be slammed shut, filled with doubt and hazy memories of when we were living in days of MySpace and msn and yahoo messenger.

Do we have enough firepower in our back pockets to withstand this blow? Is realgm in good hands with the middling posters of this board? Will the ascent to an entirely new era be a swift one? Will there be harsh repercussion? Will we be swept by a generation of tik tokers and snapchatters posters.

I can not answer this but we can hope for the best. We can and we must succeed for the future depends on it.

I appreciate your support and share your concerns.

The whole thing is fascinating on a certain level. It's not the case that there weren't nasty arguments in the past on boards like this, but I do think that the broader social networking landscape has changed expectations of how people come to conclusions.

There seems to be a tendency to try to "triangulate" to knowledge by using a particular source and then "adjusting for bias" rather than digging into first principles, doing a more thorough job than those who came before, and putting forth an argument that simply stands on its own merits.

I also won't claim to be immune to these issues with those I've been in debate with for many years (and I'm sure others have the same struggles back at me), but the idea of showing up in a context and proceeding to operate primarily by attacking the people who built the context feels different.

[Blame Rasho]

The fact that people don’t get the greenappleness of my posts saddens me.

[falcolombardi]

The fact that people don’t get the greenappleness of my posts saddens me.

What does green appleness mean?

[parsnips33]

The back and forth is childish and distracting

Not every thread has to have a Winner and a Loser, we can actually just have a productive conversation if we try

Let's just be clear that this is the start of the back and forth:

When Duncan an the Spurs beat the Lakers in '02-03, they did so led by a traditional big, and they beat an underachieving, self-destructing 5-seed, that at best was going to eek out one more title.

Careful, Doc, your Duncan bitterness is showing.

Am I capable of productive conversation? Anyone who has been around on this board for a while knows the answer is yes.

Is a post like AEnigma ever going to lead to earnest dialogue? No, it's not.

Clearly I shouldn't have responded to him, and I won't make that mistake again...

but it's pretty amazing seeing the way people don't seem to care about what he's doing and are using it as a reason to tee off on me, with even a more reasonable person like yourself allocating half the blame to me.

I'll just say that I was more trying to be diplomatic than assigning blame. I have no reason to doubt your integrity

I'll leave it at that, in hopes of deescalating things on this thread

[parsnips33]

We are fast approaching a very troubling event, the end of an era where people forget the real reality. Every decade or decade and half can seemingly be sectioned off into an era. The era I'm speaking of is the early to late 00s which brought us some of our greatest players of a generation. Some of the more prominent figures of this generation are Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant, Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, Dirk Nowitzki, Steve Nash, and Jason Kidd. These gentleman have carried a hefty weight on their shoulders and sadly people did not live through and remember their respective greatness. It is the responsibility of posters like DoctorMJ, tsherkin and even myself to remind posters of what happened in the past.

We are approaching 2023 and every player I mentioned is becoming a distant memory as if the sun is setting over a vast and open ocean on the horizon. We've held onto this generation for as long as we could but our grip is getting looser. With their imminent demise fast approaching, we must consider what will follow. A door is about to be slammed shut, filled with doubt and hazy memories of when we were living in days of MySpace and msn and yahoo messenger.

Do we have enough firepower in our back pockets to withstand this blow? Is realgm in good hands with the middling posters of this board? Will the ascent to an entirely new era be a swift one? Will there be harsh repercussion? Will we be swept by a generation of tik tokers and snapchatters posters.

I can not answer this but we can hope for the best. We can and we must succeed for the future depends on it.

I appreciate your support and share your concerns.

The whole thing is fascinating on a certain level. It's not the case that there weren't nasty arguments in the past on boards like this, but I do think that the broader social networking landscape has changed expectations of how people come to conclusions.

There seems to be a tendency to try to "triangulate" to knowledge by using a particular source and then "adjusting for bias" rather than digging into first principles, doing a more thorough job than those who came before, and putting forth an argument that simply stands on its own merits.

I also won't claim to be immune to these issues with those I've been in debate with for many years (and I'm sure others have the same struggles back at me), but the idea of showing up in a context and proceeding to operate primarily by attacking the people who built the context feels different.

Nailed it on the bolded point. I'm not sure what has lead to this post-modern retreat from the Concrete into the Relative. Rather than debating real phenomena, we only debate perceptions and signifiers.

I've said it before, but RealGM (broadly) prefers Underrated to Good, and I don't think that's a good thing

[Texas Chuck]

I think any time a post spendstime telling others what they think and why, regarding of politely or not it may be worded its an issue. If we are to put forth arguments on their own merits we need to also be careful not to assign motivation to others.

[Blame Rasho]

The fact that people don’t get the greenappleness of my posts saddens me.

What does green appleness mean?

Example…. If I would argue for Tim Duncan.


Tim Duncan, not much more can be said about this master performer. His professionalism, unsurpassed, his fundamentals, unsurpassed. The regal giant stoically stalks his prey as they helplessly wilt under the weight of his enormous impact. The NBA has been truly blessed, as well as the sports world in general, to witness such a phenomenal basketball player conduct himself in such a classy, dignified manner. When his career came to a close, the game will have suffered the most, without him. A true legend, a first class competitor and a professional for all others to look up to.

What makes this basketball machine so relentlessly efficient, a incombustible god of basketball. A titan of hardwood whose deficiencies are nonexistent, whose strengths are impenetrable, whose talents are miraculous, whose skills are so refined, a player of now, then, and ever. This is a man, who has taken a team and transformed them into a basketball army, he was their on court general who gives them commands, they are blessed to serve under a master who has so endlessly perfected his craft and has taken his knowledge and spread it to his followers. He posed a formidable challenge, never giving way, for he decides his fate and his legend only grows larger and larger, as the days pass by. His legacy, his impact, his performances... from this artist, what do they mean to you?

[falcolombardi]

The fact that people don’t get the greenappleness of my posts saddens me.

What does green appleness mean?

Example…. If I would argue for Tim Duncan.


Tim Duncan, not much more can be said about this master performer. His professionalism, unsurpassed, his fundamentals, unsurpassed. The regal giant stoically stalks his prey as they helplessly wilt under the weight of his enormous impact. The NBA has been truly blessed, as well as the sports world in general, to witness such a phenomenal basketball player conduct himself in such a classy, dignified manner. When his career came to a close, the game will have suffered the most, without him. A true legend, a first class competitor and a professional for all others to look up to.

What makes this basketball machine so relentlessly efficient, a incombustible god of basketball. A titan of hardwood whose deficiencies are nonexistent, whose strengths are impenetrable, whose talents are miraculous, whose skills are so refined, a player of now, then, and ever. This is a man, who has taken a team and transformed them into a basketball army, he was their on court general who gives them commands, they are blessed to serve under a master who has so endlessly perfected his craft and has taken his knowledge and spread it to his followers. He posed a formidable challenge, never giving way, for he decides his fate and his legend only grows larger and larger, as the days pass by. His legacy, his impact, his performances... from this artist, what do they mean to you?

So basically applying prolixity in your speech? I got it

[OhayoKD]

Alright, let's start by clearing something up:

You ask whether "averages generally go down the longer you play" is a strong indication of Anti-Curry bias. No, and since you were not able to quote me word for word on this, you know that I never said this. I might suggest that you should be careful about chopping out nuance given that you jumped into the fray in this conversation hastily and drew problematic conclusions because you missed something that was really simple if you just look at things carefully.

A week ago, I was asked to tone down my tendency to "quote people word for word" when disputes about discourse broke out. The idea was that posting "receipts" from other threads would escalate conflict/derailment. This is why I have stuck to simply referencing the discussion there as opposed to directly quoting it. Since you seem to want specific citations, I'll now oblige. Here is you presuming that the commentary on the +/- thing you did was motivated by anti-curry sentiment:

You're in this thread now because of data I've shared on a topic someone else started...and you're annoyed because this data made Curry look particularly good because in past you already saw other data that made Curry look good and with that quota fulfilled, you'd like to see only analyses that tell some other story.

I will emphasize though: What bothers me isn't the fact that people think people other than Curry deserve credit for the team success of the Warriors, but that people really still look at Curry from a lens where they think whatever the data says, Curry needs to get rounded down because he has glaringly more help than other superstars.

For context, here was the actual issue they had with the analysis you were using:

I do not think raw +/- does anything more valuable than what we commonly use as “on-court rating”; in the abstract, raw +/- is raw on-court rating without any adjustment for possessions or minutes (which I know Ben Taylor has confusingly fiddled with before)

Unless I missed something, you never actually addressed this criticism. Regardless, one does not need to have a bias against pro-curry data to have this issue and you never really went about demonstrating that Enig was being inconsistent with their logic here.

I would say you then "went off" here:

And this gets me back into that feeling of whether it really still makes sense for me to post on these boards - and on the internet more broadly. More and more of the analysis I do tend to be for an audience of one, which is pretty sad to be honest. I'm a teacher who likes to share knowledge, but increasingly I find that knowledge shared on the internet isn't something people are looking to learn from unless it fits with what they already believe they know.

Rather, the frustration comes from having to deal with the "you should have" crowd who didn't do anything like this themselves, along with the "stop it with your agenda!" crowd who are looking to have reasons not to learn from what I'm posting because of my personal imperfections rather than based on what was actually said. Simply put, I don't consider these to be constructive ways to learn through conversation in basically any domain, and unfortunately, at this point in my life, I tend to see red when I'm hit with too much of it.

Most of the "crowd" went out of their way to compliment you and thank you for your work, but that didn't stop you from implying they were motivated by a desire to not have their priors challenged. Ironically, jumping to such a takeaway when civilly presented notes were given on your work may be a hint that you yourself were "looking".

It's also a weird approach when you're making commentary like this:

There seems to be a tendency to try to "triangulate" to knowledge by using a particular source and then "adjusting for bias" rather than digging into first principles, doing a more thorough job than those who came before, and putting forth an argument that simply stands on its own merits.

I also won't claim to be immune to these issues with those I've been in debate with for many years (and I'm sure others have the same struggles back at me), but the idea of showing up in a context and proceeding to operate primarily by attacking the people who built the context feels different.

In the +/- thread you brought up, you spent a bunch of time not addressing arguments on their merits, instead focusing on what motives might be leading to the creation of those arguments. We have an example from this thread too...

Correct me if I'm off, but isn't this a text-book non-sequitur? Your memory was never the focus here. It was the idea that a poster's previous posts can color how newer posts are perceived. FWIW, I typically try to address what people say as if it was in a vacuum(though I have slipped on that front at different points), but both you and Enig seem to like to reference post-history to comment on the motivations underlying posts(you did this in the +/- thread most recently). I don't have an issue with that approach per-say, but this seems like a natural extension of that.

Take a step back here.

I'm not calling his post a non-sequitur because non-sequitor is a great sin.

So we're clear, this is a non-sequitur. I made no claim or comment on whether non-sequiturs are "sins". I bring this up because you've now repeatedly presented your own reading of this discussion as some sort of fact where people who disagree must be "missing" something.

But if you want to present your account of events as accurate, accuracy is important. I assure you, I had read every post in the thread before my first response and have done so multiple times in preparation for this one.

The comment you referenced as a non-sequitur, was not actually a "non-sequitur". All of this...

Better question is how you managed to interpret “some of us remember posts made outside a singular thread” as a brag.

...addresses this:

Why would you brag about having a long memory if you're just searching old posts?

For stated above, the "memory" bit was a non-sequitur. It had no relevance to what
you replied to.

You need to stop looking at this from a lens of "they both did it" and start looking at it from a lens of how we got to this point. I'm not sure what else to say beyond this point. I already had to really spell this out because you missed it when just using your own reading of the thread

You seem to be working off the assumption that I'm not aware Enig took a dig when Enigma's own account of events acknowledges this:

I encourage any readers to take this as something “made clear” rather than a response to any specific instance of petulance.

Here is the entire relevant chain, seeing as in the interest of good faith it would be irresponsible and inconsiderate to try to manipulate the discussion otherwise:

I know you like to operate with a presumption that people may act as though posts occur in a vacuum, but some of us have longer memories of those uh prior-informed “fixations”.

Very interesting that someone who joined RealGM would brag about having a long memory to someone who has been here since 2005.

would you brag about having a long memory if you're just searching old posts?

Better question is how you managed to interpret “some of us remember posts made outside a singular thread” as a brag.

And for context from Page 1: Poster #2 downplayed the impressiveness of the 2003 Spurs run in much the way they have in the past tried to downplay the importance of Duncan to that team and to the Spurs in general. I made a one-line joke about how that came across, and then when Poster #2 tried to portray the phrasing as neutral, I explained what specifically I thought was the objectionable portion before, as we see at the top of that chain, explaining that these types of coded posts do not exist in a vacuum.

With that prelude established, we see Poster #2 take a comment about how posts do not occur in a vacuum and ascribe to it “bragging,” and then as a non-sequitur talk about how obviously the person who has been on the forum for a long time would have the best memory. To me, that seems grossly disconnected with anything “good faith”, but hey, everyone has their own definition. I point out length of time here is disconnected with ability to know what people have written, and Poster #2 again imputes a “bragging” label onto me, at which point I ask how any of this constitutes a brag.

So much for “non-sequiturs” and interest in “good faith” interactions. Personally, I recognise forums as a place where stances are likely to receive pushback, and I personally make it a point to justify and defend my stances when challenged rather than lament how no one properly appreciates them, but again, everyone seems to have their own definition of what constitutes productive basketball discussion, and I recognise there is no universal definition of how that is best developed.

Funny thing is, I agree Dirk’s 2011 is the better answer to the original thread question, which is of course not who performed better or had less support. The difference is I have no particular desire to take subtle digs at Duncan or the 2003 Spurs to defend that stance, and when in other contexts I do offer those subtle digs, it is with the knowledge that someone may end up highlighting or questioning or pushing back against them. In fact, I personally am not sure how I could spend eighteen years on a forum and still not expect pushback on any such posts I make, but like I said, everyone is different…

I'd guess the reason people aren't taking your side is because they dispute the significance of this one-liner. Considering that
1) It's pretty mild(yes that's subjective)
2) The post it digs at offers unbalanced analysis(you make a point regarding one player's opponents without offering a comparison to the other(and yes, in a comparison, that's kind of important) giving it a degree of merit imo(overshooting often incites stronger engagement and this is something both you and enig frequently take advantage of)
3) As seen above, you have taken bigger(and honestly "wilder") swings
4) You took bigger(and "wilder") swings at enigma in a thread you directly referenced as "proof" of his hostility
5) I don't really mind their being some heat in conversation.
It seems you think a line was crossed by Enig's comment, but I really don't. Moreover if there was a line crossed, you probably crossed it by a larger margin.

Regardless though, as long as what transpires is accurately represented, various readers have the opportunity to come to their own interpretations based on what actually happened. When things aren't represented properly, the opposite happens. In this case you describing Enigma's post as a non-sequitur was inaccurate, so I offered a correction with "soft" language so you wouldn't interpret it as an attack('you're wrong"). However, it seems you took stuff like "correct me if I'm wrong" as an indication I was out of the loop, so

and I already posted a link to the last thread where I looked to take part of the blame and stop the dialogue between myself and the other poster...which he then brought back by starting s**t in this thread.

You claimed you were antagonized on the thread, and then linked me to this:

I think it is an odd move to complain about “obvious” caveats when you make pretty definitive statements about what you think the metric and the use of the metric indicates about the strength of Curry’s support

Personally, I don't see this as antagonizing. Moreover, looking at the part where you "take responsibility"...

But clearly my tone has been a problem in this thread, as is yours - both of us not for the first time - so I think it's best to call it a day. My apologies for not responding to the rest of your post, but I read enough to know that further response on my part would not have been productive.

...you take responsibility for the tone, not the substance. Considering some of the "substance" here involved direct shots(at least by the standard where Enigma's initial post here was a "shot") at Enig, the "crowd", and society as a whole, it would seem something comparatively milquetoast like "hey, you're biased vs a player" should be well within bounds.

To basketball...

Hmm, alright, I'll start with the basketball side of this

So I actually largely agree with you here. Looking at 2010-2011, the Heat led the league in srs(61-win pace). obliterated their conference(12-3, including a 4-1 win over the 60 win 2011 Bulls), and proceeded to post a +13.7 rating with the big-three in the lineup the following playoffs. If we take the Mavs out of the picture, the Heat were actually fairly dominant from 11-13 with the only real knock(besides their loss to the Mavericks) being an uncomfortably close series against the 2013 Pacers(basically decided by hibbert needing to use the bathroom).

Dirk had considerably more help, and their decisive series was closer, but there's not much to be had here in terms of positive argumentation. That being said...

I've literally never said Dirk was as impressive as Duncan, let alone more so.

This thread is about disruption of ATG landscape, and the impact of the 2011 series on Dirk's legacy is difficult to overstate. If you don't remember the disrespect toward "soft" bigs in the years before this, then let me just assure that it was absolutely massive.

You just quoted a section of my post where I expressed agreement with your position and provided additional empirical support. I never said you preferred Dirk to Duncan, so I'm confused why that clarification is what you're responding with.

Is there a meaningful difference in impressiveness between defeating an "about to peak" opponent as opposed to "an already peaked' one? Does the apex coming in the future offer some difficulty not present when the apex has already come in the past?

The pre-peak vs post-peak distinction is not the thing to focus on here on here. This is about the Lakers & Heat and how they evolved with time. I use the pre-peak and post-peak description to tell folks like you what to look up on basketball-reference so you can see why the Laker fall-off was such a different thing from the Heatle step-up.

Eh, the height they reached 2 years removed seems less relevant to me than 1 year removed or the year in question, but sure. I don't think the gap between apex and what they were at the time of defeat is really the thing to focus on. Ultimately we want the latter, not the former, right? Regardless, we are in agreement the Heatles were a stronger opponent.

Eh, I'd say we're well off that(at least in a general sense). Duncan has an impact profile(wowy, AUPM(despite a bpm component), RAPM, ect) that compares favorably to what we have from shaq and jordan, is one of a handful of authors of a "lone-star title", is one of the most accomplished players in history, and is one of the best "off-court" influences we've ever seen(I know you weigh that). Yet, people often seem repulsed by him entering the same conversations we see Shaq, MJ, and Wilt in, largely due to a box-disparity in more offensively slanted in metrics we would expect to rate players who are smaller(steal/block accumulation) and more geared towards the other side of the court(far more of offense is accounted for).

What makes you feel Tim is overrated?

To be perfectly honest I don't want to talk further about this issue in this thread because of how it's being presented.

[/quote]
Fair enough.

[NO-KG-AI]

The fact that people don’t get the greenappleness of my posts saddens me.

Aww man. He was the shtick poster that all the ones on the GB now wish they could be, but instead are just lame and boring trolls instead. Guys like KarateDiop want that kind of rep so badly that it hurts.

For well over a decade I've successfully had amiable basketball conversations with people who disagree with me drastically on various historical matters...but something has changed in recent years, and that something has basically nothing to do with Duncan or Curry or any other specific player.

Maybe we're just getting old, but it sure does feel this way. Part of it is guys assigning words or meanings that you didn't say, and trying to force you to defend an argument that you didn't make, because they either can't read, or because they are biased, think that you're coming from a place of bias so you must have an ulterior motive for posting something as well.

I'm glad that most of us that have been here since the early to mid 2000's were all here from that phase till now. Basketball strategy and best practices changed a lot over those years, and what a great player is and how to evaluate also changed a lot. It was cool to see the game be looked at through different lenses, and it was also cool to see open minded folks change their views or grow their knowledge and come around, and it was also good to see who was going to just dig their heels in and never change if the new data didn't support their preconceived notions.

It kind of feels like threads are a war of attrition now to see who can wear the other guy out in an argument with the most words and things to respond to that have nothing to do with anything you actually say, and if they get the last word in, they feel like they won because you don't feel like responding to a bunch of bs you didn't bring up.