Player A has 5 better seasons than Player B’s best season. When is Player B > Player A all-time reasonable?

[ceiling raiser]

This is a bit more abstractly framed than it needs to be, but have been thinking about this recently given the Kobe/Curry thread.

I don’t want to make this a Kobe thread specifically, but if a you view someone as having five or more seasons better than another guy’s best season, when does this position make sense?

Stockton is probably a good example. Robinson almost certainly has five better seasons, but the all-time comparison is debatable.

If 5 years isn’t the sweet spot, I wonder what number is. In practice, not in theory. Certainly 20 would be given nobody has had a longer career, but what about 10?

[MyUniBroDavis]

This is a bit more abstractly framed than it needs to be, but have been thinking about this recently given the Kobe/Curry thread.

I don’t want to make this a Kobe thread specifically, but if a you view someone as having five or more seasons better than another guy’s best season, when does this position make sense?

Stockton is probably a good example. Robinson almost certainly has five better seasons, but the all-time comparison is debatable.

If 5 years isn’t the sweet spot, I wonder what number is. In practice, not in theory. Certainly 20 would be given nobody has had a longer career, but what about 10?

It comes down to either a huge gap in longevity or achievements probably for a lot of people

[Owly]

This is a bit more abstractly framed than it needs to be, but have been thinking about this recently given the Kobe/Curry thread.

I don’t want to make this a Kobe thread specifically, but if a you view someone as having five or more seasons better than another guy’s best season, when does this position make sense?

Stockton is probably a good example. Robinson almost certainly has five better seasons, but the all-time comparison is debatable.

If 5 years isn’t the sweet spot, I wonder what number is. In practice, not in theory. Certainly 20 would be given nobody has had a longer career, but what about 10?

I think it's too abstract. Of course we don't all use the same scale for or tools in rating players and don't concur on how good each season was, nor what we are ranking within a season ... even so ...

It's just too abstract as it is. If one guy has ten "20.1" seasons and the next has twenty "20.0" seasons, the second player is clearly better (fwiw, I'm thinking PER type scale [just scale - we can imagine a perfectly accurate measure], here just as something simple and where people aren't calibrated to different scales as I might guess people may be for impact). The degree would matter (though as above making it more concrete isn't simple).

I suppose it doesn't matter as much if you're talking "in practice" and you're looking for a number where "nobody" surpasses anybody with that number of the top ranked seasons between the pair. Stockton might make sense as consideration for a longevity monster at a pretty consistent standard except with differing interpretations of incomplete impact data and perhaps perceptions of his playoff performance [I could be persuaded high on Stockton's upside].

But more conceptually I don't think it makes sense to have a hard and fast rule (that something hasn't happened doesn't mean that it won't).

[TheLand13]

This is a bit more abstractly framed than it needs to be, but have been thinking about this recently given the Kobe/Curry thread.

I don’t want to make this a Kobe thread specifically, but if a you view someone as having five or more seasons better than another guy’s best season, when does this position make sense?

Stockton is probably a good example. Robinson almost certainly has five better seasons, but the all-time comparison is debatable.

If 5 years isn’t the sweet spot, I wonder what number is. In practice, not in theory. Certainly 20 would be given nobody has had a longer career, but what about 10?

It all depends on what types of players we're talking about here.

Assuming player A in this case is Curry and B is Kobe, it all comes down to whether or not you personally think Curry has that many superior seasons.

Me? I personally find Kobe to have been incredibly overrated, despite having a great deal of respect for the aspects of his game that were great. The issue is that he had major flaws as a player that not only were exploitable, but outright cost him entire playoff series (and even cost him an NBA finals). These weren't just one off issues that were eventually resolved (like the ones that cost LeBron the 2011 Finals or even the 2007 Finals to that extent). They stuck with Kobe for the remainder of his career, saved only by the fact that he eventually got a really great team built around him that fit him perfectly and ultimately saved him in 2010.

So in the end, I don't think it really matters how many superior seasons Curry had per say. Even disregarding that for a moment, there's a lot of things that just ultimately favor Curry and make him the easy choice here.

[LukaTheGOAT]

I mean examples of this might be Karl Malone and some guys ranked behind him:

Jerry West (I have West higher, but Malone perhaps more frequently gets ranked higher).

Stephen Curry

Chris Paul

Kevin Durant

You don't have to agree with all these examples, but I am just attempting to frame my point. Another example might be ironically, his teammate John Stockton, versus some other guys who are behind him on all-time rankings lists:

Giannis Antetokounmpo

James Harden