OhayoKD wrote:Because MJ is your #1 and one of the 4 players you can't see Duncan above. So when you list a bunch of stuff that applies harder to Jordan, referencing MJ makes sense. It also helps that we just had a whole big drama because people voted duncan over mj while others stated they were considering duncan over jordan. In fact I suspect that drama was what started this thread...
ok, but i wasn't involved in that. not every comment tangentially implying the presence of jordan is a deep thought about jordan.
The GOAT coach who didn't pick up 5 rings after he retired and didn't see his team skyrocket within the span of a season simply on the implementation of a scheme? Very interesting Russell is the member of the top 4 you think is vulnerable here. Your list of quibbles with Duncan probably applies more strongly to another guy who also only ended up winning half as much.
i never said jordan didn't have a good situation. but it started in like year 7, not year 1, and he basically batted 1.000 after that. also, i said "a GOAT", as in one of the GOAT's, not "the" GOAT. are we really arguing pop wasn't one of the greatest ever?
We are arguing that Duncan did not have an unfair advantage with Popovich relative to most all-time greats including the guy whose even better coaching situation(again, schematic shift -> team gets exponentially better over the course of a season) has not prohibited him from a literal #1 rating.
i never said it was unfair. re-read my post. i said he played for the most contenders. that doesn't mean he played for 19 unfair teams. merely that he had good coaching and good teammates for 19 years, more than anyone else. others had good situation the whole time but simply didn't play that long, others did play that long and did not have good coaching and teammates the whole time. duncan played forever and had good situations the whole time. i don't think this is controversial. the whole world praises the spurs coaching and organization.
Duncan also didn't always have a "good"(what an understatement)situation. The difference is Duncan found a way to win when the deck wasn't stacked(and it was never that stacked in his prime). And when he wasn't winning, he was always, as you say, "contending".
i don't know how to argue against this? what is a "good" situation in your opinion? like kevin garnett would have sacrificed a litter of puppies every season to get what tim duncan had. how much better does it need to be to be "good"? like his worst teams seem to trough at "david robinson is old but still protects the rim at an elite level, he has a DPOY perimeter candidate who leads the league in 3P% in bowen, and he has early ginobili and not very good parker, plus some other nice 3&D guys". that's pretty nice for the worst situation of your career.
and let's say we agree, duncan didn't have stacked teams. ok, who did he ever beat? beating shaq and kobe in 2003 seems to do a lot of the heavy lifting for duncan's legacy. but it was the worst kobe/shaq team from 2000-2004, only winning 50 games. with robert horry literally not making a 3 in the spurs series (0-18). the other victory over the lakers was before kobe was kobe. in 2005 he got nice but hardly legendary suns and pistons team. 2007 the mavs got knocked out so it was basically the suspended suns and no one else. once the gasol/odom/bynum lakers and heatles rose up, the spurs stopped winning. then they snuck one in when wade and bosh were shells of themselves and before the rise of the warriors. i never really thought of it like that. the spurs are kind of like the default option on a computer before you install the better one that you want. they just kind of always hung around until there was an ebb in the competition and then they pounced.
What a creative way to say the Spurs drafted 3 good players for Duncan to play with. 3 good players who were barely even factors for Duncan's first two titles. Again, there's a guy this line of attack applies much more strongly to, and you have him at the very top.
it was a creative way to point out how a team can overhaul itself with no rebuilding, thus why most people don't play on 19 straight contenders because teams ebb and flow as guys age, their contracts get expensive, and you have to eventually reload and retool. simply spawning a few hall of fa...umm, elite guards onto your team right as things were going to get dicey helps you not ever have to retool. because every team has a low 1st and low 2nd (at least) at their disposal at any given moment. but most teams are lucky to turn that into a single rotation player, much less great players. usually you have to make trades and mortgage the future or suffer for a few years while you build up cap space or high picks. the spurs skipped that. all i said was duncan played for the most contenders ever, a fact you did not dispute, and laid out how that came to be.
The Bulls and Celtics never rebuilt. Lebron mostly skipped the rebuilding phase. The only guy this applies to in any meaningful capacity is Kareem who got to dry his tears with Magic Johnson giving him service.
the bulls and lebron never rebuilt, but they spent like 7 years building. lebron basically just wasted his chances until he went to miami. and even then he only got 3 years at each stop before the roster construction flaws started to show. flaws that show up when you've wasted 7 years and are trying to fasttrack your way to 6 titles like jordan.
And again, plenty of this is because of Tim Duncan's own choices:trex_8063 wrote:Well, backtrack to 2012, it is documented that Duncan voluntarily took a pay-cut to enable the Spurs to sign Diaw, Green, and Mills to the contracts they were asking for.But it seems Tim had a hand in that too: he voluntarily took a pay cut in ‘15 (and I think ‘14 as well) to allow the Spurs the cap space to acquire his replacement LaMarcus Aldridge, as well as re-signing Kawhi Leonard.
In essence, he was sacrificing for a team he would not even be part of; just looking out for the future after he was gone.
good for him, but isn't that kind of backing up my claim that they were stacked? if you are taking pay cuts to get more and more talent?
He supposedly took “team friendly” contracts at other points along the way. And indeed we can see that in his 19 playing years he earned more than $53M less than Shaquille O’Neal did [in 19 years], nearly $90M less than Kobe Bryant did [in 20 years], and $105M less than Kevin Garnett did [in 21 years, also mostly for a small market team].
Wanna guess which guy did the opposite, threatening to leave for a team that came within a game of a championship?
i mean shaq and garnett were i believe grandfathered into the old max so that was just kind of inertia. assuming the guy who threatened to leave was jordan, duncan literally almost left the spurs in 2000, and he already had a championship! he was in shangri-la and was still window shopping. also, duncan did make $150M more than jordan, with jordan only finally getting paid in '97 and '98. it's not like duncan played for free in his prime.
how many playoffs would you say pippen was better than 2005 manu? hell, how many was kobe? and of course, it's not that manu was the greatest, but per minute he was pretty damn amazing, and i'm pretty sure he was an impact beast so i'm not sure why you're downplaying him. throw on a tony parker, some good 3&D guys and a mid-2000's nba where the 2004 pistons and janky-looking 2006 heat could pick up titles and i'm not sure sure why i'm supposed to think the spurs weren't supposed to win a lot. hell, robert horry arguably saved the 2005 title with his crazy 4th/OT performance in game 5.
For Pippen? 91, 92 and 94-97 all have cases. Kobe literally turned into Jordan in 01, and 02's pretty easy to take as well. Manu was an impact beast per-minuite. He was never a true superstar. Contrary to how you frame these conversations, I like to apply context to what I'm using and look at the forest as opposed to whatever isolated leaves(cough gamescore dumps cough) suit a specific narrative.
you tend to attach meaning to things i never said and then tell me i took things out of context. for example, me specifically saying manu was amazing "per minute" and then you emphasizing "per minute" and acting like i said otherwise. also, manu wasn't exactly playing 15 mpg off the bench, he was up in the low 30's for quite a few spurs playoffs. amazing impact for 33 mpg could trump less stellar impact for 40 mpg, depending on who we are talking about. also, the 2005 playoffs are another example of duncan losing the box score battle to a teammate, AND being a negative on/off guy WHILE the other guy is spectacular in on/off (2014 also applies). manu was actually spectacular in on/off from his first year. posting "on" numbers between 10-16 and on/off's between 18-25. much like robinson was between 18-35 on/off for his first 4 years with duncan. these are good people to play with. like i don't see how so much of duncan's case can be the incredible impact/lift he gives, but then we aren't going to give credit to guys like robinson and ginobili for demonstrating incredible impact, even if it's 33 mpg instead of 40 mpg. again, i don't think that's controversial.
and there it is. the popovich was only good because of duncan argument. the tim duncan version of the ridiculous "pippen was only good because jordan made him good" argument. where the player isn't lucky to be in a great situation, but somehow created it out of sheer will.
The question is whether Duncan's "great situation" was special relative to other greats we're comparing him to. Since Kevin Garnett is not the comparison, the answer is no.
and again, re-read what i said. i didn't say his "per year" situation was beyond all others. i simply said no one has been on good situations and then had that extend to an entire 19 year career. i clearly mention that having auerbach, jackson, kerr, whoever, is also a good situation. you seem to be stuck on me apparently saying somewhere that duncan had better coaches and better teammates than anyone else each step of the way when i never did, merely that he had good situation for a really long time, which no one else did. just like some people have similar primes but one is longer, some organizations are similarly good but one keeps it up for longer.
duncan wasn't a kobe or jordan who, for better or worse, were going to run things.
...every negative of other players...
notice, i said better or worse. there is easily a universe where a pushover coach runs the spurs and the results are not the same because everyone is waiting for someone to be the vocal leader. we even see this with the draymond/steph dynamic. draymond is almost certainly the voice the team needs, even if he's not the most calm/reasoned fella in the world and steph is a go with the flow type. we also have plenty of stories of mj's legendary intensity making everyone feel like they had to raise their game. like most things in life, there are trade-offs.
I will accept you dodging d-rob as a concession that "spurs won 59 games with peak d-rob and a completely different coach" wasn't particularly relevant.
i don't know what that means, but if you don't think being a #1 pick and joining a team that's spent the last decade winning 55+ is better than being drafted to a 17 win team, i don't know what to say.
Now why don't you compare their minutes played.
i did, did you just cut it out or not read it? i said duncan wins for playing more minutes. that doesn't change robinson being unbelievably good while still playing plenty of minutes, again not just some 15 mpg bench guy.
That sounds to me like a guy who did super well in a very specific role. Remember. the comparisons here are Pippen, Magic, and Kobe Bryant. Maybe if the second best dudes were Rodman or Worthy, you'd have a point.
that sounds like what i've consistently said about pretty much every player that gets the outlier APM/AuPM/whatever-PM numbers people love to quote here. that it seems to be highly team/role specific. why doesn't that apply to the duncan's and curry's of the world when they look so good? one spurs big tears up the APM charts and then the very next spurs big does it as well? and you don't have '98-'01 robinson over pippen? i would take his impact, especially his rim protection in a world that didn't know where the 3 point line was, any day over pippen. i don't think they are even close at their peaks and i don't think '98-'01 robinson is far enough away from his peak. it's not like pippen was an offensive maestro. if you watch an old bulls playoff game, there's always that inevitable moment when the "4-15" or "6-17" graphic flashes on the screen for pippen. or even game 4 rockets/lakers, which i just put myself through, with a solid "6-23" game.
and given the peaks project, most people would seemingly take robinson over quite a few kobe years that aren't 2001.
Forest. Trees. It's not Quantum Physics. Jordan was +2.2 in 1992. Lebron got on/off'd by Dereck Fisher in 2016, and the Bulls posted a nice postseason o-rating with Pete Myers instead of your GOAT.
good, so you agree on/off can be noisy and capricious. i never said duncan wasn't important. merely that it's hard to paint him as carrying sad-sack david robinson when robinson is breaking the APM charts.
This is why you look at things in totality as opposed to cherrypicking point a or b. Jordan has crossed +20 twice over his whole playoff career. Lebron has never done it 3 times in a row. Duncan had some help(to go along with a 20-win base) and the spurs dominated. Duncan had "nice sparks" in 03 and the Spurs won 60 games before snagging a title. Just because there were points where Duncan had great help(and let's be real, 1999 is a stretch given the comparisons we're making) does not mean it was always so.
hmm, totality, never considered it. please stop taking everything i say to be about broader topics than whatever i referenced. referencing 1999 means i'm talking about 1999, not duncan's whole career. although as mentioned, duncan has 3 title runs with negative on/off and a superior box score teammate who ALSO had amazing on/off numbers. i feel like this helps with my general "duncan had some pretty good teammates" case. which is not a "duncan sucks, his teammates carried him" case.
Using the fact Duncan always led very good teams against him is nonsensical. Those teams stayed very good when the cast was weaker, when the teammates were different, and when the league was different. It is the ultimate evidence of consistency and you're trying to spin it as a negative. Just absurd.
i'm trying to spin it as he had an amazing organization for 19 straight years, which is unmatched. how are you discounting this? again, within their own careers, we can see players who go from missing the playoffs to championship the very next year. in the equation:
Star + teammates = win total
the "star" part of that equation only gets you so far. duncan compared to hakeem or kareem or bird or jordan isn't swinging teams by 20-30 wins compared to those guys. i suspect we're operating in the low single digits in win differentials even between the best and worst of those guys, maybe slightly more if it's a real peak season for one guy and real trough season for another. you don't win 55+ every single year just because you have tim duncan. put kevin garnett on the spurs and duncan on the wolves, and i don't have the wolves ripping off a bunch of titles. maybe they make a 2nd round occasionally compared to garnett, maybe the spurs only win 4, but you are making it out like the spurs were contenders independent of the surrounding talent and just got there because duncan is so nice and coachable and can elevate mediocre talent, which doesn't seem to be something we see in any other situation in nba history. you need a good amount of coaching and teammate talent to be a contender.
Ah, but I'm sure you have various seasons engineered in much easier contexts above it. How many players can say they won 62 games and a championship with "nice sparks"? Duncan leading contenders is bad because duncan always had a great infrastructure!! Except all the times he didn't.
i do? i'd have it battling with '94 hakeem around like the 4th highest peak with kareem.
You mean besides him playing under the same coach, with the same co-star, with the same type of tertiary pieces, in the same system for the vast majority of his prime?(and crucially, for all of his rings). As you've admitted, those 2 "main-teammates" weren't actually all that relevant to his first two rings. And unlike the Bulls, Duncan's spurs contended playing a wide variety of styles in very different iterations of the league.
the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. jordan got a crap team and then one stable run. we'll never know if he could do it in another way because he had no realistic chance to contend in any other iteration. i watched hakeem win on a defense-first team and then one year later win on a heavy offense, small ball team. i've watched lebron go around playing for all sorts of teams. duncan's spurs slowly morphing over 20 years doesn't seem that out of line with what other greats could do.
You just listed a 62 win team with the greatest offense ever(anchored by an arguable offensive GOAT), Peak(or close) Wade+ A superstar, and one of the best full-strength teams ever(with arguably the greatest ever post-russell defense)? Shaq-Kobe lakers also weren't a thing apparently. Nor were the Heatles, the Westbrook-KD thunder(paired with Ibaka and, at one point, an about to shine Harden).
i guess i don't understand how to debate with you. duncan with prime ginobili and parker and still very good bruce bowen playing arguably the best perimeter defense is just barely rising to the level of a good situation. but nash + "doesn't get any credit on this board" amare is amazing, wade + "2006 shaq who i have seen get very little credit on this board, and probably rightfully so, especially in the finals" is amazing. the 2006 heat played antoine walker the 2nd most minutes in the playoffs. let's not call that amazing. plus duncan didn't beat them. is the "one of the best full-strength teams ever" the 2005 pistons (since that's the version the spurs played)? they were 54-28 and 3.3 SRS and their starters basically didn't miss any games. and the spurs didn't actually win when the heatles and thunder were around at their best. they got the worn out remnants of the heatles and were 1-2 against the thunder overall.
And the universe conspired to save the Bulls from Hakeem. Is this the part where we throw random hypotheticals and hope they stick?
if i start saying the rockets were amazing for winning in the days of jordan's bulls, then please throw that back in my face.
I also have no clue what you're talking about regarding competition because Duncan faced much stiffer opposition including multiple superteams he faced and beat as the best, or arguable best player. Duncan did not play in an especially favorable situation for his prime. But he led 19 contenders(your count, not mine) anyway, and helped anchor one of the most successful teams ever both with what he did on and off the court.
i see him beating the worst shaq/kobe lakers and being part of a ridiculously deep team that beat the washed up Heatles. i'm trying to be fair here, but which superteams am i missing that he beat? certainly none from 1998-2002 i can think of as he lost to the 2001/2002 lakers. none from 2004-2013 that i can think of, as he lost to the 2006 mavs, and the spurs were kind of down from 2008-2011. the +9 SRS thunder would have been a good candidate but the westbrook injury ruined the matchup. 2015-2016 lost to the clippers and and thunder.
as a broader note, if you're going to be in the "duncan is better than jordan" business, it may help to be less indignant when everyone else has not figured out what is so obvious to you. you're in the most duncan friendly corner of the internet and it's a tough go of an argument even here. if you really want the basketball discourse to move that way, you should gird yourself and practice patience because it's going to be a long haul. the same long haul that slowly moved bill russell up, even amongst casuals, from "he can't even score, i have him like 15th" to "damn, he really won a lot and his teammates weren't just all legit hall of famers, maybe he's top 5". the same long haul that has slowly chipped away at wilt and moved us from "50 ppg, how is he not the GOAT?" to "maybe he should have won more". the same in-progress long haul that has moved hakeem up among the cognoscenti but is still going on among the casuals. the same long haul that has slowly started to move larry bird down the list, as people dig into his playoffs more.
but one does not simply walk up and say "larry bird sucked, didn't you realize?!" you sprinkle in mentions of the 1988 conference finals where he shot 35%. you get a few shots in about how larry bird got a lot of shots out in his first 4 playoffs, with only a 50 TS%. you mention all the home court losses. and slowly but surely, the inception starts to work. the 1984-think creeps in and suddenly they realize they knew larry bird was overrated all along, and it's everybody else who needs to catch up and they spread the gospel!
