How many years of Curry over Peak KG?

[f4p]

The fact is Curry is much easier to build around and win your championships, even a dynasty. We know he is shorter and not a high jumper but does not mean he cannot be much better than KG, whose bottom was missing playoffs three years in a row at peak years

i mean curry has missed the playoffs 5 times and 2 of those during peak years. just taking the season off when you're team is going to be bad doesn't somehow mean it didn't happen.

[dygaction]

The fact is Curry is much easier to build around and win your championships, even a dynasty. We know he is shorter and not a high jumper but does not mean he cannot be much better than KG, whose bottom was missing playoffs three years in a row at peak years

i mean curry has missed the playoffs 5 times and 2 of those during peak years. just taking the season off when you're team is going to be bad doesn't somehow mean it didn't happen.

It is how much splash you can make when you healthy. Curry when healthy won 4 rings within the window given to him and KG won once.

[dygaction]

I've seen some folks use the term 'tier 0' to denote a single thing above the rest. In that parlance I could see an argument for Curry as a tier 1 perimeter guy, with the Oscar/Magic/MJ crew, and LeBron tier 0.

MJ should not participate in such meaningless tier ranking. AI can replace him. LeBron can be tier 0.

[dygaction]

Spoiler:

I think Curry is comparable to Magic and can be a better choice for all-time starting PG due to his GOAT shooting, range, and off ball.

The ones you listed all have multiple MVPs and Finals MVPs with far better achievements.
KG is in the same tier as Dirk/Malone/Moses/DRob/Barkley range and you don't have an argument for him to over all 4. Like I said earlier, Giannis and Dream are clearly better two-way bigs than him with more accomplishments.

My commentary was more so linked to the fact that your understanding of "tiers" doesn't seem aligned with what the traditional definition is.

As for Curry being comparable to Magic, KG being less than those other bigs etc...

Curry being comparable to Magic - yeah, there's absolutely a case, so no need to really discuss this further IMO (although I'd argue he is still not a first tier perimeter player, and that tier is presently reserved for LeBron and MJ). I do think that I'd place them in a similar tier in terms of goodness.

KG vs the other bigs - to be honest, I don't really care for the accomplishments nor do I necessarily rank KG ahead of all of them.

However, I'd also like to note that if you're so big on accomplishments, in a thread about peaks, we should note that KG, in 2004, was a nearly unanimous choice for MVP, with only three... interesting votes for Jermaine O'Neal and Peja Stojakovic (who were fine players, but the idea of them being better than KG that year is... laughable). That was in an era with less public pressure/conforming of opinions, since names were less likely to be dragged through the mud for going against popular voting opinion back then.

He was also very close to winning MVP in 2003 despite winning 9 fewer games than Tim Duncan, and this is in the season often regarded as Duncan's peak season. Duncan and Garnett was actually very hotly debated for a while, until people decided to forget that supporting casts matter (and then the debate sparked up again when Garnett left the Wolves, and won DPOY, and the Celtics were phenomenal... funny how that works)!

The above is to demonstrate that even in real time, KG was very highly regarded in his best seasons from a voting/accolade perspective. There's also a litany of statistical information (e.g. RAPM, basically every box score composite) that promotes KG as well as anybody back then, but I'm going to hazard a guess that you've seen it before, and you don't really care.

So yeah, KG at his peak was absolutely an ATG, and arguably, top tier big.

Based on what you say, it is weird that you don't think at least Curry's 2016 season tops KG's peak as 1) Curry got the only unanimous MVP in the league history with peak LeBron/Durant/Harden/CP3; 2) His team got the best record in the league history; 3) his team went deeper in the playoffs despite lost game 7 to LeBron with Draymond drama.

This isn't quite the "gotcha" that you make it out to be. Let's break it down a bit.

Based on what you say, it is weird that you don't think at least Curry's 2016 season tops KG's peak as 1) Curry got the only unanimous MVP in the league history with peak LeBron/Durant/Harden/CP3

I'd note that at multiple junctions in my post -

"KG vs the other bigs - to be honest, I don't really care for the accomplishments nor do I necessarily rank KG ahead of all of them."

"The above is to demonstrate that even in real time, KG was very highly regarded in his best seasons from a voting/accolade perspective. There's also a litany of statistical information (e.g. RAPM, basically every box score composite) that promotes KG as well as anybody back then, but I'm going to hazard a guess that you've seen it before, and you don't really care."

This is in response to things such as "The ones you listed all have multiple MVPs and Finals MVPs with far better achievements" when comparing different big men to KG. So, clearly you're using accolades as a defence for your opinions, which is why I brought up MVP voting as a reference to the tier that KG was considered in. I've noted already that voting/accolades don't really matter to me. If I choose to look at statistics, how's this?

2004 PI RAPM: Garnett ranked 1st in the league with +8.6. Second in the league was +5.6. On off was +20.7, led the league in all of the basketball-reference box score aggregates (PER, BPM, WS) on both a total and rate level. That is absolutely top shelf production, and better "evidence" to me than MVP voting, which KG dominated anyway. He even led the league in total points scored that year with a relative TS of 106, and scoring was his weak point

Curry did get a unanimous MVP vote, and yes, it was deserved. However, there is more openness in voting nowadays, where voters can actually be scrutinised for their choices, which didn't really happen back in the day. Curry deserved the unanimous MVP, but so did KG in 2004, so did LeBron in 2013, so did Shaq in 2000, and without thinking too hard, I'm almost certain Kareem/MJ warranted it in specific seasons. By the same token, was Iguodala quite clearly better than Curry in 2015, since every voter that voted for the Warriors voted for Iggy? Voters often band together in our modern social media era, and they aren't always right.

Is Curry your GOAT peak, out of curiosity? Because if he's not, then using "unanimous MVP voting" against a guy who absolutely should have been (and almost was) unanimous is very nitpicky, and seems to just be used as a tool for deriding KG, rather than actually making an assessment.

His team got the best record in the league history

They did, but basketball is also a team sport. To link to this...

3) his team went deeper in the playoffs despite lost game 7 to LeBron with Draymond drama.

I guess that these are two comparable scenarios. I mean, both teams were shackled by losing their point guard to injury, right? KG lost in the conference finals after Sam Cassell (the team's second best player) injured himself doing a big balls dance, and the Warriors got owned early on when Curry didn't play for most of the first round, and skipped the first 3 games of the second round, right?

Oh wait, the Warriors (without Curry) decimated the Rockets, and were up 2-1 vs the Blazers before Curry returned.

Perhaps the fact that basketball is a team game may lend itself to the fact that the Warriors were so dominant, because the Warriors were already a very talented team without Curry, and Curry was playing better than anybody else in the league that season until LeBron turned it on in the playoffs. Perhaps the fact that basketball is a team game is what led the Timberwolves to "underachieve" in the mid 2000s. You do realise that Kareem's team managed to win 66 games in 1971, dominate the playoffs en route to the title in the Bucks third year of existence, and yet Kareem still missed the playoffs twice in his prime, right?!

Or even better...

You know that the Warriors won the title in 2022 featuring a core of Curry, Green and Wiggins, and the same trio missed the playoffs the previous year? It's almost as if the supporting cast matters!

Basically you are saying you don't care accomplishment (meaning winning the championship), and you don't care Curry is the ONLY unanimous MVP as KG's old era missing a few counts could be counted as unanimous. To answer your curiosity, had Curry and Warriors won in 2016, his peak would have been again unanimously #1. Nobody has an argument, Jordan KAJ, or LeBron. A 6'0 GOAT shooter led a team with the least amount of talent to the BEST ever record as a scoring champion, and won a championship from LeBron/Kyrie/Love big 3 after passing KD/WB...

The thing you care - RAPM, basketball-reference box score aggregates (PER, BPM, WS), integration/deratives... are all secondary. BTW, is Jokic a much better player than KG? His aggregates and high orders in the past three years are much better than KG aside from his single-year anomaly.

[Bad Gatorade]

Basically you are saying you don't care accomplishment (meaning winning the championship), and you don't care Curry is the ONLY unanimous MVP as KG's old era missing a few counts could be counted as unanimous.

I value great players that produce a lot for their teams. Winning a championship is the goal of an NBA player (also one that KG accomplished, mind you), but the goodness of a player and whether or not they won a title is not a 1-for-1 relationship.

And I really, really don't care about the unanimous MVP (it only takes 1 person to "spoil" a unanimous MVP, and as we've seen, sometimes those people are flat out incorrect).

To answer your curiosity, had Curry and Warriors won in 2016, his peak would have been again unanimously #1. Nobody has an argument, Jordan KAJ, or LeBron. A 6'0 GOAT shooter led a team with the least amount of talent to the BEST ever record as a scoring champion, and won a championship from LeBron/Kyrie/Love big 3 after passing KD/WB...

Does that count if Curry's team still outplays their opponent in the first/second round due to Curry's injury, and Curry still underwhelmed in the finals? Or do you view basketball as an attempt to "fill" out a job application with as many arbitrary dot point accomplishments as opposed to actually acknowledging that there is a lot of nuance affecting this?

Also, Curry was absolutely amazing that year and I think he should be mentioned in the discussion for the greatest regular seasons ever. I also think KG should be mentioned in that discussion in 2004. I don't think that either of them wins, but they're both on the shortlist. So, it's not really about the Curry vs KG battle for me (although for overall peak + for careers, I do side with KG) but rather that you seem antagonistic that Kevin Garnett can be held in high esteem by others, because he didn't win the big one frequently enough.

The thing you care - RAPM, basketball-reference box score aggregates (PER, BPM, WS), integration/deratives... are all secondary.

... why?

Why on earth would an attempt to isolate an individual's performance be an inferior measure of assessing an individual than using things like "championships/team records" (which assess teams)?

I'd also note that mentioning integration/deratives (derivatives?) with dismay makes me think that you are not a maths person in general, and so any attempts to understand how/why these statistics hold relevance may be held in contempt since tallying accomplishments might be a more simple point of reference.

BTW, is Jokic a much better player than KG? His aggregates and high orders in the past three years are much better than KG aside from his single-year anomaly.

Certainly not much better, because box score aggregates are underwhelming at assessing defence, and whilst Jokic is a serviceable regular season defender, KG often ranks as the #1 defender via RAPM in very large samples. Literally, #1. That being said, Jokic is also much better offensively and is on the GOAT offensive peak shortlist for me, so I'd listen to the argument for his offence being enough.

Also, I'm just going to mention another post. This is on Curry missing the playoffs 2x -

It is how much splash you can make when you healthy. Curry when healthy won 4 rings within the window given to him and KG won once.

I mean, Curry missed the playoffs and Dray/Wiggins were both all stars as comparable players the very next season

I guess we could start looking at how Wiseman and Oubre etc were replaced by much better role players such as GPII and Porter the next season, and how this helped shore up the team considerably...

Or perhaps, we could do the exact same for KG, who in 2006-07 had one of the GOAT level tank commanders in Ricky Davis as his #2 option. Or is that too much nuance?

Are we tallying 4 rings pretending that Kevin Durant didn't join the Warriors, and that guys like David West didn't sign on for vet
minimums shoring up the depth that the Warriors were willing to lose to accommodate KD? Are we ignoring that GS were ridiculously over the cap in recent years, and the fact that in KG's prime years, the Timberwolves were forfeited their first round draft picks for 5 years? Or is that too much nuance?

[dygaction]

Basically you are saying you don't care accomplishment (meaning winning the championship), and you don't care Curry is the ONLY unanimous MVP as KG's old era missing a few counts could be counted as unanimous.

I value great players that produce a lot for their teams. Winning a championship is the goal of an NBA player (also one that KG accomplished, mind you), but the goodness of a player and whether or not they won a title is not a 1-for-1 relationship.

And I really, really don't care about the unanimous MVP (it only takes 1 person to "spoil" a unanimous MVP, and as we've seen, sometimes those people are flat out incorrect).

While maybe you should, or you should find out how many other players jump into this category if you allow 5 or 6 anomaly voters.

To answer your curiosity, had Curry and Warriors won in 2016, his peak would have been again unanimously #1. Nobody has an argument, Jordan KAJ, or LeBron. A 6'0 GOAT shooter led a team with the least amount of talent to the BEST ever record as a scoring champion, and won a championship from LeBron/Kyrie/Love big 3 after passing KD/WB...

Does that count if Curry's team still outplays their opponent in the first/second round due to Curry's injury, and Curry still underwhelmed in the finals? Or do you view basketball as an attempt to "fill" out a job application with as many arbitrary dot point accomplishments as opposed to actually acknowledging that there is a lot of nuance affecting this?

Also, Curry was absolutely amazing that year and I think he should be mentioned in the discussion for the greatest regular seasons ever. I also think KG should be mentioned in that discussion in 2004. I don't think that either of them wins, but they're both on the shortlist. So, it's not really about the Curry vs KG battle for me (although for overall peak + for careers, I do side with KG) but rather that you seem antagonistic that Kevin Garnett can be held in high esteem by others, because he didn't win the big one frequently enough.

That's not true though unless you are talking about this board ONLY. ESPN, the biggest U.S. media had him, a U.S. player, at #21 just a few years behind so many players, including KD/Curry/Dirk (foreign)/Giannis (foreign). You can check my post record, I do have him higher towards high teens.

The thing you care - RAPM, basketball-reference box score aggregates (PER, BPM, WS), integration/deratives... are all secondary.

... why?

Why on earth would an attempt to isolate an individual's performance be an inferior measure of assessing an individual than using things like "championships/team records" (which assess teams)?

I'd also note that mentioning integration/deratives (derivatives?) with dismay makes me think that you are not a maths person in general, and so any attempts to understand how/why these statistics hold relevance may be held in contempt since tallying accomplishments might be a more simple point of reference.

I am not against math but think you need to watch the players play to appreciate sports. KG is certainly better than Chris Weber as Weber did not win much but when compared to Curry who is so decorated, you cannot ignore the team success enabled by their best player.

BTW, is Jokic a much better player than KG? His aggregates and high orders in the past three years are much better than KG aside from his single-year anomaly.

Certainly not much better, because box score aggregates are underwhelming at assessing defence, and whilst Jokic is a serviceable regular season defender, KG often ranks as the #1 defender via RAPM in very large samples. Literally, #1. That being said, Jokic is also much better offensively and is on the GOAT offensive peak shortlist for me, so I'd listen to the argument for his offence being enough.

Also, I'm just going to mention another post. This is on Curry missing the playoffs 2x -

It is how much splash you can make when you healthy. Curry when healthy won 4 rings within the window given to him and KG won once.

I mean, Curry missed the playoffs and Dray/Wiggins were both all stars as comparable players the very next season

I guess we could start looking at how Wiseman and Oubre etc were replaced by much better role players such as GPII and Porter the next season, and how this helped shore up the team considerably...

Or perhaps, we could do the exact same for KG, who in 2006-07 had one of the GOAT level tank commanders in Ricky Davis as his #2 option. Or is that too much nuance?

Are we tallying 4 rings pretending that Kevin Durant didn't join the Warriors, and that guys like David West didn't sign on for vet
minimums shoring up the depth that the Warriors were willing to lose to accommodate KD? Are we ignoring that GS were ridiculously over the cap in recent years, and the fact that in KG's prime years, the Timberwolves were forfeited their first round draft picks for 5 years? Or is that too much nuance?

Need to stop here, are we pretending Celtics/KG did not start the Big Three game? He was the biggest beneficiary as otherwise Malone would be forever over KG with better personal achievements and better team achievements.

[MyUniBroDavis]

The fact is Curry is much easier to build around and win your championships, even a dynasty. We know he is shorter and not a high jumper but does not mean he cannot be much better than KG, whose bottom was missing playoffs three years in a row at peak years

i mean curry has missed the playoffs 5 times and 2 of those during peak years. just taking the season off when you're team is going to be bad doesn't somehow mean it didn't happen.

Don’t necessarily agree with bashing KG for it, but this feels a bit unfair, he played 5 games in 2020, and in 2021 they made 8th seed and the reason they weren’t a top 5 seed was cuz he got hurt in a shortened season for a bit.

[Jaivl]

The fact is Curry is much easier to build around and win your championships, even a dynasty. We know he is shorter and not a high jumper but does not mean he cannot be much better than KG, whose bottom was missing playoffs three years in a row at peak years

i mean curry has missed the playoffs 5 times and 2 of those during peak years. just taking the season off when you're team is going to be bad doesn't somehow mean it didn't happen.

Don’t necessarily agree with bashing KG for it, but this feels a bit unfair, he played 5 games in 2020, and in 2021 they made 8th seed and the reason they weren’t a top 5 seed was cuz he got hurt in a shortened season for a bit.

It almost seems like saying "X missed the playoffs!" without further context is extremely dumb...

[Bad Gatorade]

While maybe you should, or you should find out how many other players jump into this category if you allow 5 or 6 anomaly voters.

To be honest, I don’t really have much of an interest in doing so, because MVP voting really only holds stock in terms of telling me how others thought about a player, and not what I think about a player.

I think that there’s some relevance in older eras for a variety of reasons (scarcity of data, not being alive and experiencing things in "real time" etc) but for players that I've watched extensively (which also happen to live in the databall era), I feel like I can make an opinion I'm comfortable with.

We recently had Shaq (who is paid to be on TV discussing basketball) admit he had no idea who Rui Hachimura is, stating he doesn't watch the Bullets/Wizards (lol) and that he only knows the big names. This is a top 10 player ever, and he is paid to talk about basketball. Ergo, media opinions and voting aren't going to influence me, because I don't really think everybody is looking into things the way that people might do, say, on this board (where people will casually post assignment-level essays daily filled with stats and facts, lol). Media folk often flock to hot stories too - think about how, say, Marcus Smart got DPOY due to a sudden media movement last year, when he wasn't on the radar for most of the season.

That's not true though unless you are talking about this board ONLY. ESPN, the biggest U.S. media had him, a U.S. player, at #21 just a few years behind so many players, including KD/Curry/Dirk (foreign)/Giannis (foreign). You can check my post record, I do have him higher towards high teens.

Apologies - I may not have explained this well before. So, the entire purpose behind KG's voting discussion is that he was highly regarded by outlets prior to, say, 2006 or so, because the media seems to have what I consider to be a severe issue regarding winning bias, and they let it pervade their analysis far more than they should.

Duncan v Garnett was a battle until Garnett missed the playoffs. However, much of the basketball analysis that occurs is often very, very simplified. To use an example I mentioned before, think about the 2021 Warriors vs the 2022 Warriors. The big 3 of the team (Curry, Green, Wiggins) was essentially the same. They went from very, very narrowly missing the playoffs to winning the title. They shifted significantly during the 2021 season too, and it was because they had dead end role players (Wiseman and Oubre) being replaced by very, very good ones (GPII, Porter Jr).

This is relevant to Garnett, because Garnett missing the playoffs is sometimes dismissed in favour of "but player X made the playoffs with a team of scrubs!" There are different degrees of scrubs though.

Let's take the teammates Garnett played with in 2005-06, for example. I'll look at the 26 year RAPM dataset produced by Engelmann at the start of the season to showcase my point.

Now, let's sort these guys by minutes and then look at what their RAPM scores were -

#1 teammate Trenton Hassell's RAPM was -4
#2 was Marko Jaric +0.2
#3 was Wally Szczerbiak -0.9 (in 40 games only)
#4 was Ricky Davis -4.6
#5 was Rashad McCants -1.8
#6 was Eddie Griffin at -1.7
#7 was Marcus Banks -3.1
#8 was Mark Blount -3.8
#9 was Troy Hudson -3.2
#10 was Michael Olowokandi -3.5

Marko Jaric (who was a point guard averaging 7.8 points and 3.9 assists) was the only other player registering as a positive out of his top 10 teammates in minutes. Then, we have guys like Hassell, Davis, Banks, Blount, Hudson and Olowokandi all registering scores beneath the "replacement player" level.

What the hell is that?!

In the "first round exit" years of the Timberwolves, I do think that Garnett had solid enough offensive support, and the team offence was generally great as a result. He did have to deal with guys like Troy Hudson/Szczerbiak/Marbury etc (many woeful defenders), and I think the inability to appreciate (I suppose) the impact of defenders like Troy Hudson on a team leads to people thinking, "why can't Garnett get his team over the hump?" The western conference was a bloodbath, and you're not making it anywhere with defensive support like that.

When Garnett was missing the playoffs though? No lead player should be punished for that. However... Garnett was punished for that, because people become so swept up with narratives of "being the man and leading his team" and all of these other mundane, sweeping assertions, because if a guy like Shaq didn't even know who Rui Hachimura (a top 10 draft pick) was, then who the hell is going to care about Mark Blount and assessing his impact on the Timberwolves? Unfortunately, it's easier to do that than to actually think... wait, maybe the really good player is actually really good, and his teammates are just worse than we thought.

But yeah, Garnett was absolutely revered until he had the worst set of teammates any star player could ever possibly imagine.

I am not against math but think you need to watch the players play to appreciate sports. KG is certainly better than Chris Weber as Weber did not win much but when compared to Curry who is so decorated, you cannot ignore the team success enabled by their best player.

I'm certain that the vast, vast, vast majority of people posting on a basketball related message board are watching the games. The frequent assertion that mathematics and visual analysis cannot coexist is utterly baffling, and generally highly incorrect, IMO.

Garnett isn't great because of his RAPM scores, but his RAPM scores help corroborate his greatness.

On offence, Garnett is one of the best shooting midrange bigs ever (IIRC, he had Dirk-like midrange numbers), one of the best passing bigs in the league, had an excellent post game, was frequently averaging > 20PPG on above league average efficiency, an incredibly smart screener and had an explosive face up drive game. His "weakness" on offence, IMO, was that I felt like his capacity to generate points by banging down low was lesser than some of the other bigs, such as Duncan or Hakeem. I do feel like he didn't have the same capacity to "scale" the way some of the other great big men might, but he was a metronomic force that provided consistently potent offensive impact through both his scoring and passing.

On defence, he reminded me of a lot of Draymond Green... if you turned Draymond Green into a 7 foot, hyper athletic leviathan, that is. Incredibly mobile, incredibly long, incredibly smart and incredibly active. Oh, and he's a 5x defensive rebounding leader too. There are players that are better than Garnett at individual aspects of defence, but there is not an individual aspect of defence that Garnett wasn't excellent at. Even perimeter defence - I don't know if you remember, but Garnett actually entered the league as a SF!

And that is why we're impressed with Garnett. The RAPM scores and everything else merely consolidates what we're seeing, rather than defining it.

Need to stop here, are we pretending Celtics/KG did not start the Big Three game? He was the biggest beneficiary as otherwise Malone would be forever over KG with better personal achievements and better team achievements.

Well, when the Big 3 became a thing, the Celtics won in their first year, no?

The next season, Garnett was injured in the playoffs (and for a chunk of the regular season).

The next season, they lost a game 7 in the finals to the Lakers (a team that won 65 games + the title the previous year, added Ron Artest and faced both a down year from Kobe thanks to playing through injuries + a decent chunk of time missed by Gasol and Bynum en route to 57 games won). Hardly a "bad" result.

Beyond that, the aging team did pretty well losing to the LeBron James led Miami "superteam" in 2011 and 2012 (being the only team to bring the Heat to 7 games en route to their championship). No, they didn't redefine the league, but they were still great and when healthy, were hovering around the apex of the league.

You can say he managed to "benefit" from his "super team", but he also endured 12 years of mismanagement and teammate futility in Minnesota, and the nadir of 2005-07 is a stink that people still can't seem to remove from Garnett.

[therealbig3]

It’s strange, even in the NFL, another sport totally dominated by American media narratives, people will acknowledge that players without rings can be better than players with rings (like even though it’s pretty much unanimous that Brady is the GOAT…which is actually reasonable given his longevity…most people acknowledge that prime vs prime, Rodgers and Mahomes are simply better).

But people have a hard time accepting that in basketball. Like, it’s impossible for LeBron to be a better player than Jordan, or KG to be a better player than Curry (or gasp, Duncan), because he didn’t win as much.

Idk, it’s one of the ways NFL analysts are just better than NBA analysts. They don’t entertain winning bias as much. Like, you don’t see them mindlessly pumping up Eli Manning as being way better than he actually was just because he helped lead two SB wins. Outside of the NY market at least.

[kendogg]

all of them. KG is a role player and curry is a superstar

[70sFan]

all of them. KG is a role player and curry is a superstar

Can we stop calling the best defenders ever role players?

[homecourtloss]

Spoiler:

My commentary was more so linked to the fact that your understanding of "tiers" doesn't seem aligned with what the traditional definition is.

As for Curry being comparable to Magic, KG being less than those other bigs etc...

Curry being comparable to Magic - yeah, there's absolutely a case, so no need to really discuss this further IMO (although I'd argue he is still not a first tier perimeter player, and that tier is presently reserved for LeBron and MJ). I do think that I'd place them in a similar tier in terms of goodness.

KG vs the other bigs - to be honest, I don't really care for the accomplishments nor do I necessarily rank KG ahead of all of them.

However, I'd also like to note that if you're so big on accomplishments, in a thread about peaks, we should note that KG, in 2004, was a nearly unanimous choice for MVP, with only three... interesting votes for Jermaine O'Neal and Peja Stojakovic (who were fine players, but the idea of them being better than KG that year is... laughable). That was in an era with less public pressure/conforming of opinions, since names were less likely to be dragged through the mud for going against popular voting opinion back then.

He was also very close to winning MVP in 2003 despite winning 9 fewer games than Tim Duncan, and this is in the season often regarded as Duncan's peak season. Duncan and Garnett was actually very hotly debated for a while, until people decided to forget that supporting casts matter (and then the debate sparked up again when Garnett left the Wolves, and won DPOY, and the Celtics were phenomenal... funny how that works)!

The above is to demonstrate that even in real time, KG was very highly regarded in his best seasons from a voting/accolade perspective. There's also a litany of statistical information (e.g. RAPM, basically every box score composite) that promotes KG as well as anybody back then, but I'm going to hazard a guess that you've seen it before, and you don't really care.

So yeah, KG at his peak was absolutely an ATG, and arguably, top tier big.

Based on what you say, it is weird that you don't think at least Curry's 2016 season tops KG's peak as 1) Curry got the only unanimous MVP in the league history with peak LeBron/Durant/Harden/CP3; 2) His team got the best record in the league history; 3) his team went deeper in the playoffs despite lost game 7 to LeBron with Draymond drama.

This isn't quite the "gotcha" that you make it out to be. Let's break it down a bit.

Based on what you say, it is weird that you don't think at least Curry's 2016 season tops KG's peak as 1) Curry got the only unanimous MVP in the league history with peak LeBron/Durant/Harden/CP3

I'd note that at multiple junctions in my post -

"KG vs the other bigs - to be honest, I don't really care for the accomplishments nor do I necessarily rank KG ahead of all of them."

"The above is to demonstrate that even in real time, KG was very highly regarded in his best seasons from a voting/accolade perspective. There's also a litany of statistical information (e.g. RAPM, basically every box score composite) that promotes KG as well as anybody back then, but I'm going to hazard a guess that you've seen it before, and you don't really care."

This is in response to things such as "The ones you listed all have multiple MVPs and Finals MVPs with far better achievements" when comparing different big men to KG. So, clearly you're using accolades as a defence for your opinions, which is why I brought up MVP voting as a reference to the tier that KG was considered in. I've noted already that voting/accolades don't really matter to me. If I choose to look at statistics, how's this?

2004 PI RAPM: Garnett ranked 1st in the league with +8.6. Second in the league was +5.6. On off was +20.7, led the league in all of the basketball-reference box score aggregates (PER, BPM, WS) on both a total and rate level. That is absolutely top shelf production, and better "evidence" to me than MVP voting, which KG dominated anyway. He even led the league in total points scored that year with a relative TS of 106, and scoring was his weak point

Curry did get a unanimous MVP vote, and yes, it was deserved. However, there is more openness in voting nowadays, where voters can actually be scrutinised for their choices, which didn't really happen back in the day. Curry deserved the unanimous MVP, but so did KG in 2004, so did LeBron in 2013, so did Shaq in 2000, and without thinking too hard, I'm almost certain Kareem/MJ warranted it in specific seasons. By the same token, was Iguodala quite clearly better than Curry in 2015, since every voter that voted for the Warriors voted for Iggy? Voters often band together in our modern social media era, and they aren't always right.

Is Curry your GOAT peak, out of curiosity? Because if he's not, then using "unanimous MVP voting" against a guy who absolutely should have been (and almost was) unanimous is very nitpicky, and seems to just be used as a tool for deriding KG, rather than actually making an assessment.

His team got the best record in the league history

They did, but basketball is also a team sport. To link to this...

3) his team went deeper in the playoffs despite lost game 7 to LeBron with Draymond drama.

I guess that these are two comparable scenarios. I mean, both teams were shackled by losing their point guard to injury, right? KG lost in the conference finals after Sam Cassell (the team's second best player) injured himself doing a big balls dance, and the Warriors got owned early on when Curry didn't play for most of the first round, and skipped the first 3 games of the second round, right?

Oh wait, the Warriors (without Curry) decimated the Rockets, and were up 2-1 vs the Blazers before Curry returned.

Perhaps the fact that basketball is a team game may lend itself to the fact that the Warriors were so dominant, because the Warriors were already a very talented team without Curry, and Curry was playing better than anybody else in the league that season until LeBron turned it on in the playoffs. Perhaps the fact that basketball is a team game is what led the Timberwolves to "underachieve" in the mid 2000s. You do realise that Kareem's team managed to win 66 games in 1971, dominate the playoffs en route to the title in the Bucks third year of existence, and yet Kareem still missed the playoffs twice in his prime, right?!

Or even better...

You know that the Warriors won the title in 2022 featuring a core of Curry, Green and Wiggins, and the same trio missed the playoffs the previous year? It's almost as if the supporting cast matters!

Basically you are saying you don't care accomplishment (meaning winning the championship), and you don't care Curry is the ONLY unanimous MVP as KG's old era missing a few counts could be counted as unanimous. To answer your curiosity, had Curry and Warriors won in 2016, his peak would have been again unanimously #1. Nobody has an argument, Jordan KAJ, or LeBron. A 6'0 GOAT shooter led a team with the least amount of talent to the BEST ever record as a scoring champion, and won a championship from LeBron/Kyrie/Love big 3 after passing KD/WB...

The thing you care - RAPM, basketball-reference box score aggregates (PER, BPM, WS), integration/deratives... are all secondary. BTW, is Jokic a much better player than KG? His aggregates and high orders in the past three years are much better than KG aside from his single-year anomaly.

Brother, you picked the wrong poster to mischaracterize/misrepresent the posts This guy posts like 5 times a month and only gold.

[homecourtloss]

all of them. KG is a role player and curry is a superstar

KG a role player? How do you define “role players”?

It’s strange, even in the NFL, another sport totally dominated by American media narratives, people will acknowledge that players without rings can be better than players with rings (like even though it’s pretty much unanimous that Brady is the GOAT…which is actually reasonable given his longevity…most people acknowledge that prime vs prime, Rodgers and Mahomes are simply better).

But people have a hard time accepting that in basketball. Like, it’s impossible for LeBron to be a better player than Jordan, or KG to be a better player than Curry (or gasp, Duncan), because he didn’t win as much.

Idk, it’s one of the ways NFL analysts are just better than NBA analysts. They don’t entertain winning bias as much. Like, you don’t see them mindlessly pumping up Eli Manning as being way better than he actually was just because he helped lead two SB wins. Outside of the NY market at least.

For whatever reason, the NBA produces archetypal truths protected by former players and an old guard media group that prevents the archetypal narratives ever to be deviated from. While analysts in baseball, for example, have gotten extremely sophisticated in using the data a size, i.e., some of the very same data used by teams to win and construct teams, or in football discuss the evolution of the game, the NBA doesn’t promote such analysis.

Maybe it’s because it’s a sport that’s so removed from a “regular person’s” imagination of actually playing at a high level since most of the players have to meet a certain physical qualification that appeals to authority hold more sway and these appeals come from former players OR journalists in their late 40s or early 50s producing hagiographic material based on in-the-moment nostalgia about players/a league/a brand of basketball that apparently cannot be surpassed.

[dygaction]

It’s strange, even in the NFL, another sport totally dominated by American media narratives, people will acknowledge that players without rings can be better than players with rings (like even though it’s pretty much unanimous that Brady is the GOAT…which is actually reasonable given his longevity…most people acknowledge that prime vs prime, Rodgers and Mahomes are simply better).

But people have a hard time accepting that in basketball. Like, it’s impossible for LeBron to be a better player than Jordan, or KG to be a better player than Curry (or gasp, Duncan), because he didn’t win as much.

Idk, it’s one of the ways NFL analysts are just better than NBA analysts. They don’t entertain winning bias as much. Like, you don’t see them mindlessly pumping up Eli Manning as being way better than he actually was just because he helped lead two SB wins. Outside of the NY market at least.

Such lazy analysis, I will give you counterpart. It's strange, even in current NBA, after what we see from Magic, Jordan, Curry, people still have a hard time acknowledging shorter players who do not jump as high can be better players than 7' good leapers.

Even in NFL, analysts are going to be hard challenged to discredit Tom Brady. Don't know what you see, but to me Manning gets plenty of pumps.

[dygaction]

Spoiler:

This isn't quite the "gotcha" that you make it out to be. Let's break it down a bit.



I'd note that at multiple junctions in my post -

"KG vs the other bigs - to be honest, I don't really care for the accomplishments nor do I necessarily rank KG ahead of all of them."

"The above is to demonstrate that even in real time, KG was very highly regarded in his best seasons from a voting/accolade perspective. There's also a litany of statistical information (e.g. RAPM, basically every box score composite) that promotes KG as well as anybody back then, but I'm going to hazard a guess that you've seen it before, and you don't really care."

This is in response to things such as "The ones you listed all have multiple MVPs and Finals MVPs with far better achievements" when comparing different big men to KG. So, clearly you're using accolades as a defence for your opinions, which is why I brought up MVP voting as a reference to the tier that KG was considered in. I've noted already that voting/accolades don't really matter to me. If I choose to look at statistics, how's this?

2004 PI RAPM: Garnett ranked 1st in the league with +8.6. Second in the league was +5.6. On off was +20.7, led the league in all of the basketball-reference box score aggregates (PER, BPM, WS) on both a total and rate level. That is absolutely top shelf production, and better "evidence" to me than MVP voting, which KG dominated anyway. He even led the league in total points scored that year with a relative TS of 106, and scoring was his weak point

Curry did get a unanimous MVP vote, and yes, it was deserved. However, there is more openness in voting nowadays, where voters can actually be scrutinised for their choices, which didn't really happen back in the day. Curry deserved the unanimous MVP, but so did KG in 2004, so did LeBron in 2013, so did Shaq in 2000, and without thinking too hard, I'm almost certain Kareem/MJ warranted it in specific seasons. By the same token, was Iguodala quite clearly better than Curry in 2015, since every voter that voted for the Warriors voted for Iggy? Voters often band together in our modern social media era, and they aren't always right.

Is Curry your GOAT peak, out of curiosity? Because if he's not, then using "unanimous MVP voting" against a guy who absolutely should have been (and almost was) unanimous is very nitpicky, and seems to just be used as a tool for deriding KG, rather than actually making an assessment.



They did, but basketball is also a team sport. To link to this...



I guess that these are two comparable scenarios. I mean, both teams were shackled by losing their point guard to injury, right? KG lost in the conference finals after Sam Cassell (the team's second best player) injured himself doing a big balls dance, and the Warriors got owned early on when Curry didn't play for most of the first round, and skipped the first 3 games of the second round, right?

Oh wait, the Warriors (without Curry) decimated the Rockets, and were up 2-1 vs the Blazers before Curry returned.

Perhaps the fact that basketball is a team game may lend itself to the fact that the Warriors were so dominant, because the Warriors were already a very talented team without Curry, and Curry was playing better than anybody else in the league that season until LeBron turned it on in the playoffs. Perhaps the fact that basketball is a team game is what led the Timberwolves to "underachieve" in the mid 2000s. You do realise that Kareem's team managed to win 66 games in 1971, dominate the playoffs en route to the title in the Bucks third year of existence, and yet Kareem still missed the playoffs twice in his prime, right?!

Or even better...

You know that the Warriors won the title in 2022 featuring a core of Curry, Green and Wiggins, and the same trio missed the playoffs the previous year? It's almost as if the supporting cast matters!

Basically you are saying you don't care accomplishment (meaning winning the championship), and you don't care Curry is the ONLY unanimous MVP as KG's old era missing a few counts could be counted as unanimous. To answer your curiosity, had Curry and Warriors won in 2016, his peak would have been again unanimously #1. Nobody has an argument, Jordan KAJ, or LeBron. A 6'0 GOAT shooter led a team with the least amount of talent to the BEST ever record as a scoring champion, and won a championship from LeBron/Kyrie/Love big 3 after passing KD/WB...

The thing you care - RAPM, basketball-reference box score aggregates (PER, BPM, WS), integration/deratives... are all secondary. BTW, is Jokic a much better player than KG? His aggregates and high orders in the past three years are much better than KG aside from his single-year anomaly.

Brother, you picked the wrong poster to mischaracterize/misrepresent the posts This guy posts like 5 times a month and only gold.

Yeah, nice way to attack and drive away other posters, quench discussions, and make this a KG fan club. btw, is there a threshold as to how many times a month you need to post ?

[dygaction]

While maybe you should, or you should find out how many other players jump into this category if you allow 5 or 6 anomaly voters.

To be honest, I don’t really have much of an interest in doing so, because MVP voting really only holds stock in terms of telling me how others thought about a player, and not what I think about a player.

I think that there’s some relevance in older eras for a variety of reasons (scarcity of data, not being alive and experiencing things in "real time" etc) but for players that I've watched extensively (which also happen to live in the databall era), I feel like I can make an opinion I'm comfortable with.

We recently had Shaq (who is paid to be on TV discussing basketball) admit he had no idea who Rui Hachimura is, stating he doesn't watch the Bullets/Wizards (lol) and that he only knows the big names. This is a top 10 player ever, and he is paid to talk about basketball. Ergo, media opinions and voting aren't going to influence me, because I don't really think everybody is looking into things the way that people might do, say, on this board (where people will casually post assignment-level essays daily filled with stats and facts, lol). Media folk often flock to hot stories too - think about how, say, Marcus Smart got DPOY due to a sudden media movement last year, when he wasn't on the radar for most of the season.

That's not true though unless you are talking about this board ONLY. ESPN, the biggest U.S. media had him, a U.S. player, at #21 just a few years behind so many players, including KD/Curry/Dirk (foreign)/Giannis (foreign). You can check my post record, I do have him higher towards high teens.

Apologies - I may not have explained this well before. So, the entire purpose behind KG's voting discussion is that he was highly regarded by outlets prior to, say, 2006 or so, because the media seems to have what I consider to be a severe issue regarding winning bias, and they let it pervade their analysis far more than they should.

Duncan v Garnett was a battle until Garnett missed the playoffs. However, much of the basketball analysis that occurs is often very, very simplified. To use an example I mentioned before, think about the 2021 Warriors vs the 2022 Warriors. The big 3 of the team (Curry, Green, Wiggins) was essentially the same. They went from very, very narrowly missing the playoffs to winning the title. They shifted significantly during the 2021 season too, and it was because they had dead end role players (Wiseman and Oubre) being replaced by very, very good ones (GPII, Porter Jr).

This is relevant to Garnett, because Garnett missing the playoffs is sometimes dismissed in favour of "but player X made the playoffs with a team of scrubs!" There are different degrees of scrubs though.

Let's take the teammates Garnett played with in 2005-06, for example. I'll look at the 26 year RAPM dataset produced by Engelmann at the start of the season to showcase my point.

Now, let's sort these guys by minutes and then look at what their RAPM scores were -

#1 teammate Trenton Hassell's RAPM was -4
#2 was Marko Jaric +0.2
#3 was Wally Szczerbiak -0.9 (in 40 games only)
#4 was Ricky Davis -4.6
#5 was Rashad McCants -1.8
#6 was Eddie Griffin at -1.7
#7 was Marcus Banks -3.1
#8 was Mark Blount -3.8
#9 was Troy Hudson -3.2
#10 was Michael Olowokandi -3.5

Marko Jaric (who was a point guard averaging 7.8 points and 3.9 assists) was the only other player registering as a positive out of his top 10 teammates in minutes. Then, we have guys like Hassell, Davis, Banks, Blount, Hudson and Olowokandi all registering scores beneath the "replacement player" level.

What the hell is that?!

In the "first round exit" years of the Timberwolves, I do think that Garnett had solid enough offensive support, and the team offence was generally great as a result. He did have to deal with guys like Troy Hudson/Szczerbiak/Marbury etc (many woeful defenders), and I think the inability to appreciate (I suppose) the impact of defenders like Troy Hudson on a team leads to people thinking, "why can't Garnett get his team over the hump?" The western conference was a bloodbath, and you're not making it anywhere with defensive support like that.

When Garnett was missing the playoffs though? No lead player should be punished for that. However... Garnett was punished for that, because people become so swept up with narratives of "being the man and leading his team" and all of these other mundane, sweeping assertions, because if a guy like Shaq didn't even know who Rui Hachimura (a top 10 draft pick) was, then who the hell is going to care about Mark Blount and assessing his impact on the Timberwolves? Unfortunately, it's easier to do that than to actually think... wait, maybe the really good player is actually really good, and his teammates are just worse than we thought.

But yeah, Garnett was absolutely revered until he had the worst set of teammates any star player could ever possibly imagine.

I am not against math but think you need to watch the players play to appreciate sports. KG is certainly better than Chris Weber as Weber did not win much but when compared to Curry who is so decorated, you cannot ignore the team success enabled by their best player.

I'm certain that the vast, vast, vast majority of people posting on a basketball related message board are watching the games. The frequent assertion that mathematics and visual analysis cannot coexist is utterly baffling, and generally highly incorrect, IMO.

Garnett isn't great because of his RAPM scores, but his RAPM scores help corroborate his greatness.

On offence, Garnett is one of the best shooting midrange bigs ever (IIRC, he had Dirk-like midrange numbers), one of the best passing bigs in the league, had an excellent post game, was frequently averaging > 20PPG on above league average efficiency, an incredibly smart screener and had an explosive face up drive game. His "weakness" on offence, IMO, was that I felt like his capacity to generate points by banging down low was lesser than some of the other bigs, such as Duncan or Hakeem. I do feel like he didn't have the same capacity to "scale" the way some of the other great big men might, but he was a metronomic force that provided consistently potent offensive impact through both his scoring and passing.

On defence, he reminded me of a lot of Draymond Green... if you turned Draymond Green into a 7 foot, hyper athletic leviathan, that is. Incredibly mobile, incredibly long, incredibly smart and incredibly active. Oh, and he's a 5x defensive rebounding leader too. There are players that are better than Garnett at individual aspects of defence, but there is not an individual aspect of defence that Garnett wasn't excellent at. Even perimeter defence - I don't know if you remember, but Garnett actually entered the league as a SF!

And that is why we're impressed with Garnett. The RAPM scores and everything else merely consolidates what we're seeing, rather than defining it.

Need to stop here, are we pretending Celtics/KG did not start the Big Three game? He was the biggest beneficiary as otherwise Malone would be forever over KG with better personal achievements and better team achievements.

Well, when the Big 3 became a thing, the Celtics won in their first year, no?

The next season, Garnett was injured in the playoffs (and for a chunk of the regular season).

The next season, they lost a game 7 in the finals to the Lakers (a team that won 65 games + the title the previous year, added Ron Artest and faced both a down year from Kobe thanks to playing through injuries + a decent chunk of time missed by Gasol and Bynum en route to 57 games won). Hardly a "bad" result.

Beyond that, the aging team did pretty well losing to the LeBron James led Miami "superteam" in 2011 and 2012 (being the only team to bring the Heat to 7 games en route to their championship). No, they didn't redefine the league, but they were still great and when healthy, were hovering around the apex of the league.

You can say he managed to "benefit" from his "super team", but he also endured 12 years of mismanagement and teammate futility in Minnesota, and the nadir of 2005-07 is a stink that people still can't seem to remove from Garnett.

I agree most of your argument towards KG even though some of them are not as accurate. For example:
1. He was often comapred to Duncan but ESPN 2005 best PF ranking had him #6 where Duncan was clear #1. Maybe the comparison was more like Kobe to MJ, or when Trae got into ECF two years ago he was compared to Curry.
1. Duncan
2. Malone
3. Barkley
4. McHale
5. Pettit
6. Garnett
7. Hayes
8. Debusschere
9. B. Williams
10. Nowitzki
2. I always think KG was one of the best defenders, but his shortcomings in offense was given an easy pass from your analysis

On offence, Garnett is one of the best shooting midrange bigs ever (IIRC, he had Dirk-like midrange numbers), one of the best passing bigs in the league, had an excellent post game, was frequently averaging > 20PPG on above league average efficiency, an incredibly smart screener and had an explosive face up drive game. His "weakness" on offence, IMO, was that I felt like his capacity to generate points by banging down low was lesser than some of the other bigs, such as Duncan or Hakeem. I do feel like he didn't have the same capacity to "scale" the way some of the other great big men might, but he was a metronomic force that provided consistently potent offensive impact through both his scoring and passing.

Dirk had much higher scoring volume and efficiency inside paint and outside of 3, that's what separated them. His post and face up drive game often turned into mid- or long-range fade aways that did not require double team or convert to good efficiency. That's why he struggled in scale up in playoffs or use the offense to help open teammates.

3. KG is great, and being a for sure top 20 ATG is GREAT, but to me he lacked what needed to be legendary. Legendary is you do/achieve things that you are not supposed to do/achieve. KG brought below average teams to playoffs, lost to higher seeds, missed playoffs when the supporting cast sucked, and lost the WCF when a teammate injured... Those were in line with a great player. Legendary performance is when people give a player the excuse or way out but the player defeats the odds and deliver instead. Think about Brady's last championship with a new team/coach, LeBron defeating 73 win Warriors, Giannis finals after his leg injury...

Again, I am not saying KG was not great. Curry just had better years. To me there are several players you can switch with 04 KG to have a similar year (58 win, 2nd in the league, 61w Pacers and 5 teams with 55win or above), but no one else in history can bring the 16 GSW to 73 wins.

[MyUniBroDavis]

I I’d take 2017 Curry pretty easily personally

2015-2016-2018-2019 being low on those years isn’t too much of a stretch tho, and I feel 2022 Curry gets overhyped because the Celtics dropped on him

Currys weird because contextually literally the only thing that mattered from 2017-2019 was the postseason and 2017 stands out so much in that regard.

2016’s issue was his injury made his postseason trash lol

[megarover]

Off the top of my head probably 2-4 years

[Bad Gatorade]

I agree most of your argument towards KG even though some of them are not as accurate. For example:
1. He was often comapred to Duncan but ESPN 2005 best PF ranking had him #6 where Duncan was clear #1. Maybe the comparison was more like Kobe to MJ, or when Trae got into ECF two years ago he was compared to Curry.
1. Duncan
2. Malone
3. Barkley
4. McHale
5. Pettit
6. Garnett
7. Hayes
8. Debusschere
9. B. Williams
10. Nowitzki
2. I always think KG was one of the best defenders, but his shortcomings in offense was given an easy pass from your analysis

Firstly, I'd note that a 2005 list (when Duncan was just Finals MVP and KG just missed the playoffs) is likely to have some form of recency bias, and there is definitely a tendency for players who just won a title to be propped up prematurely (and the opposite can also hold true too). Seeing Buck (I'm assuming) Williams above Nowitzki makes me think the list values longevity, at which point, there's no way that Duncan should rank above Malone.

In terms of how they were perceived during the season, there was absolutely a genuine competition up until 2004. Sometimes, I don't think these are warranted (cough, Paul and Williams, cough) but there's enough evidence out there that forges a very strong argument for Garnett.

FWIW, from 2002-06, we have a sample of Garnett solely in Minnesota that places him 3rd to Dirk/Ray Allen in ORAPM across that 5 year span. Yup, above Nash, Kobe, T-Mac etc. I think this does overrate him, because I do think that the better shot creators can scale up their offence in a way that Garnett didn't. So yeah, I don't know how "short" his offensive shortcomings truly were back in that time, although yeah, I do think that the raw, commonly distributed numbers might mask them.

(minor side note - I do think that Minnesota's sheer teammate defensive futility actually underrates him on defence in this time span too but that's a different discussion altogether)

Dirk had much higher scoring volume and efficiency inside paint and outside of 3, that's what separated them. His post and face up drive game often turned into mid- or long-range fade aways that did not require double team or convert to good efficiency. That's why he struggled in scale up in playoffs or use the offense to help open teammates.

So, from 2001-07 (aka Minnesota Garnett for when we have play by play courtesy of pbpstats.com) -

Garnett / Dirk
-----------------
At Rim: 66.2 vs 63.5
Short Midrange: 45.7 vs 43.0
Long Midrange: 43.9 vs 46.4

In terms of frequency:
24.3 vs 18.8
34.0 vs 17.6
37.5 vs 41.9

Obviously, Dirk is the far better 3 point and FT shooter.

Looking at the two, Garnett actually had the fairly clear advantage within, say, 15 or so feet, and Dirk the clear advantage outside of that. Dirk was a better foul drawer (14.5 vs 12.9% of shots had a drawn foul) and was also more reliable from technical free throws. Garnett was actually a very accurate shooter from basically anywhere within the arc, but he was less of a shot creator than Dirk. Not that Garnett was bad at it, mind you, but Dirk was excellent at it. Even with Garnett's superior passing, I do consider Dirk the better offensive player, and I think most people will.

I do think that Garnett (in Minnesota) was a more productive and effective offensive player than most people remember, however.

3. KG is great, and being a for sure top 20 ATG is GREAT, but to me he lacked what needed to be legendary. Legendary is you do/achieve things that you are not supposed to do/achieve. KG brought below average teams to playoffs, lost to higher seeds, missed playoffs when the supporting cast sucked, and lost the WCF when a teammate injured... Those were in line with a great player. Legendary performance is when people give a player the excuse or way out but the player defeats the odds and deliver instead. Think about Brady's last championship with a new team/coach, LeBron defeating 73 win Warriors, Giannis finals after his leg injury...

I guess this is where our values disagree, and I think that part of it was that KG's prime was mostly spent in the western conference bloodbath. He quite arguably never had his "legendary" moment (I think his turnaround in Boston was quite arguably there, but if you don't feel that way, sure) but playing in the west made it a lot harder when the entire conference was basically run by the Lakers and Spurs for a while... and then we had other teams like Dallas and Sacramento play at a really high level too.

Think about most of the big names known as "chokers" since the turn of the century - CP3, Harden, Durant (pre-GSW), Russ, Garnett, Dirk (up until 2011, that is). There's a common trait of all of those players, and it's that all of those players spent their primes in the western conference back when it was at its peak.

Again, I am not saying KG was not great. Curry just had better years. To me there are several players you can switch with 04 KG to have a similar year (58 win, 2nd in the league, 61w Pacers and 5 teams with 55win or above), but no one else in history can bring the 16 GSW to 73 wins.

Golden State was electric in 2016. I think that the 73 wins does inflate them, but that team was great.

Curry was amazing, and the clear MVP. Dray was a top 10 guy for me that year, Klay was excellent. Iggy was an all star a few years prior and relished being in a "smaller" role. I credit quite a few things to that team winning 73 (being "ahead of the curve" in terms of accepting 3 point barrages, unabashed confidence from a great start, incredible health and hey, even a bit of pot luck). Curry was absolutely the biggest part of that, sure. But I do think there was a lot that went into that perfect storm.

Whether or not we can "replace" Curry with anybody is a different story, and ditto for Garnett, but I do think that both players had ATG regular seasons. I mean, perhaps if 2008 Garnett was replaced by 2004 Garnett (who played more games + was a better player), perhaps they hit 73 wins!

Or heck, just replace Trenton Hassell and Michael Olowokandi in 2004 with good players and hey, who knows what happens!