AEnigma wrote:f4p wrote:i think tim duncan's longevity is overrated. he was the first load managed superstar and certainly got at least a year's worth of benefit from that over his contemporaries. not only that, but then most of his career numbers tend to be quoted as per minute or per possession type numbers. basically meaning duncan gets to have his cake and eat it too. looking great on a per minute basis without playing the extra minutes, then getting talked up for the extra years that were a result of the reduced minutes.
but probably even more than that, i think he just benefited from having his best supporting casts when he was at his oldest. if the spurs had followed the trajectory they were seemingly following from 2008 to 2010 (and even the first round of 2011), when people though the dynasty was over, i think duncan gets viewed much differently. instead they add a bunch of great role players and kawhi (and then even aldridge), basically meaning duncan never had to worry about doing anything he couldn't do.
we didn't watch him get old, effectively. where we see the great 25/10 guy still asked to be the great 25/10 guy and he can't any more. where he's asked to play big minutes because the rest of the roster is also aging out (or left due to contracts getting expensive). where he still has to come back from injuries as fast as possible to save the team and then ends up playing the rest of the season hurt.
none of that happened for duncan. need to reduce minutes? fine, we'll still win 60. need to take a few extra days with that injury? fine, we'll still win 60. need to take a game off here or there when the schedule gets a little compacted? fine, we'll still win 60.
he could show up, play great interior defense, get a few dump off passes for layups, take a few choice post-up mismatches while the rest of the team ran the offense, and then he'd look great for providing defensive value with an easy 9 point, 11 rebound game in 28 minutes while the spurs destroyed some mediocre team. i suspect many players would appear to have more longevity if they could focus only on the things that make them great and that they can still do as they get older, with no stress and strain from playing through injuries or playing all 82 games.
You are receiving a bunch of +1s, but you have not actually bothered to compare him to anybody as a means of supporting this take.
that's a fair take, but it's probably more about how i feel duncan is qualitatively described as an older player than the idea he doesn't have a large quantity of good seasons.
Take out the usual top four. Take out Wilt too because it was common back then to retire earlier and he was still a top three centre when he retired. Bird injured himself independently of any basketball load. Magic got HIV and was essentially blackballed, so I understand not applying much of a longevity “penalty” to him but he is similarly irrelevant to this Duncan criticism.
That leaves Shaq, Hakeem, and Kobe — and fortunately all three played in 1999 so we do not even need to do much lockout fiddling here.
so i'll just say i was mostly thinking of hakeem. it's a good bet if i talk about duncan on here, i'm probably really talking about hakeem. i agree with shaq and kobe. shaq's longevity gets underrated by the public because people forget he basically shot out of the gate with the best age 20 and age 21 seasons in nba history and racked up 13 20/10 seasons because of it (most ever, even beating kareem), but he kind of fell off a cliff in the mid-2000's, reaching "should alonzo mourning be starting?" status by 2006. and kobe was a replacement player after the achilles, though i probably should give him credit for pushing so far at such an advanced age which probably led to the injury.
Turning to Hakeem (and you know where I stand on Hakeem). High minute starter for fifteen years! From 1985 to 1999, he averaged 37.4 minutes per game, appeared in 1075 games, and played 40000 minutes. Wow. On the other hand, Duncan from 1998 to 2012 averaged 35.4 minutes a game, appeared in 1111 games, and played 43500 minutes.
hmm, what is the 43500 number? he's at 39,400 regular season minutes by 2012. were you going to 2014 (17 seasons), which is 43600? hakeem is about 1000 minutes ahead after year 15, but if we added in playoffs, duncan would be about 1000 ahead, but functionally tied either way.
Hakeem of course dropped off hard after that and became a pure bench player for the next three seasons, whereas Duncan had three more productive seasons as a lower minute starter before settling into his own part-time role in his final season.
maybe you mean part-time, but hakeem started 55 out of 58 in his 2nd to last season and only came off the bench for 16 games the year before because of injuries (only played 44 games). even his last season he started 60% of the time. but yes, he certainly left his prime behind. but let's come back to that 2nd to last season later.
So again, where is all that extra “rest” to explain why Duncan was so much more productive at the tail end? Two minutes a game extended over 1100 games is a lot… yet Duncan still played more overall despite losing games to a second lockout season and having many more deep playoff runs (excluded from this analysis) than Hakeem did.
well, they basically tied in minutes through year 15.
I am not opposed to someone taking the position that 1985-99 Hakeem was better than 1998-2012 Duncan by enough that they do not really care that Duncan had better longevity after that. However, your contention seems to be that Hakeem could have showcased that type of longevity, and that does not seem tenable.
so yes, that's probably part of the problem. hakeem's age 31-34 seasons are 1994 to 1997 and duncan's are 2008 to 2011. hakeem massively beats out duncan in these seasons, both from an individual production perspective and a team results perspective. hakeem won 2 titles and made a WCF with a great playoff run at 34, while this is basically when people wondered if the spurs dynasty was over, with duncan struggling to shoot in the 2008 playoffs, then the spurs losing in the first round, then getting swept in the 2nd round and then losing to an 8th seed in 2011 (!), with duncan looking bad. and yet often it feels as if people treat duncan as if he was even with hakeem at age 34 and then passed him up (understanding that the world is a big place and different people make different arguments, i'm just going with what i think i commonly see). maybe someone would have 20's duncan over 20's hakeem but i think 31-34 is certainly surpassing any difference from their 20's so duncan has catching up to do. and then the question is how much of the difference in post-age 34 duncan is really a difference in the players or just a difference in the team situations.
like if the 2008-2010 trend had just continued and the spurs didn't add kawhi/green/mills/splitter/diaw, an unbelievable group of role players and even an eventual star, to their aging hall of fame core. i think we see more memphis series. where duncan needs to go in the phone booth and put on his cape to save the team in non-ideal circumstances, which he certainly could do when younger, and he simply can't do it. instead he got to massively reduce his offensive role and focus on defense, which he could still do.
and maybe that's my biggest break with others. the narrative seems to often become something like "well, duncan's value was really always mostly on the defensive end, and he was still great defensively, so even if he reduced his offensive load, he's still basically 90% of duncan" whereas i think the offensive giant of the early/mid-2000s was carrying the spurs in a valuable way and there's no way older duncan could still do that (arguably all the way back to 2007). so i think he just got to relax and fit into a role that an older player can still play.
i know you included 1998 in hakeem's prime, but a lot probably don't (so again i'm arguing against general things i've seen), and i look at something like the 1st round in 1998. rockets playing #1 seed jazz who would go on to star in The Last Dance after sweeping the WCF. the rockets almost won that series. with barkley injured and not even starting. and drexler retiring after the series after an abominable 1-13 from the field, 4-10 from the line final game and 31/19 shooting splits for the series. so how did we almost win? because the rockets had a -9 rDRtg. with matt maloney, matt bullard, checked-out drexler and kevin willis as the other starters. IOW, on the back of hakeem still providing unbelievable defensive lift against the #1 offense. so why doesn't hakeem get the duncan treatment for this series? well, because hakeem took 20 FGA/gm on an atrocious 45 TS% and we could see he was no longer hakeem. should he have taken 20 FGA/gm? apparently. because drexler and willis took the 2nd and 3rd most shots and combined for 35% FG. barkley only took 23 shots with his injury. the top 5 shooters after hakeem were at 35.7% FG and 24.2% 3P. so basically, after hakeem got through anchoring a -9 defense, he was still asked, after a season of injuries, to basically go be 1995 hakeem on offense. how much better does he look if manu and parker and diaw are running the offense and the rockets knock off a great jazz team with hakeem still putting up a -9 defense? when duncan does that, he's amazing at an old age. when hakeem does it, we just notice that he's old.
1999 hakeem almost goes 20/10 in a lockout season where he plays all 50 games, but then he get obliterated by prime/almost peak shaq in the playoffs and so again doesn't get the appearance of being good like 2013 duncan, who got to face a bunch of defensive centers who couldn't score and, even when duncan himself couldn't score against them, his loaded team just picked up the slack. and why did hakeem guard shaq? because the rockets basically had hakeem and antoine carr (18 PF's per 36 for the series) to guard shaq. even prime duncan wasn't guarding shaq and if he did, maybe only in the 4th quarter. hakeem got a double barrel dose as a 36 year old, pretty much certain destruction for any 36 year old in history.
so i guess i'm more arguing with the people who think the separation started after 1997 for hakeem, whereas i think it was almost all team construction until at least after 1999 for hakeem.
and even then, i look at hakeem's age 38 season. would it be fair to say that was better than duncan's age 39 season (his last)? basically tied in WS48 and BPM, hakeem has one of the few 20+ PER seasons for a 38 year old at that point in history. hakeem plays a pretty perfect old man role with francis and mobley (who certainly are no manu/parker) and the rockets win a surprise 45 games starting matt bullard and walt williams. duncan was horrendous in the playoffs in 2016 so that didn't add anything. if hakeem at 38 could outdo duncan at 39, i think it's at least possible that turning a few 35 minute games into 30 minute games, a few 40 minute playoff games into 35 minute games, missing a few back to backs (instead of playing back-to-back-to-backs in the lockout season as a 36 year old) could have removed enough wear and tear to maybe buy hakeem another season and maybe keep him even at 37 or 38***. maybe a healthier 2000 season. obviously speculation, but certainly things that went in duncan's favor didn't also go in someone like hakeem's favor.
***comparing them at the same ages throughout their careers seems fair. i think it's fair to say that duncan starting his career 13 years after hakeem already gives duncan a little longevity advantage, just as any more recent player has over basically any older player. i've usually done 15 years = 1 year longevity but others probably have their own number. on the other hand, based on when BBRef does their age cutoff, hakeem tends to look older than duncan because his birthday is just before the cutoff and duncan's is a few months after. so the effects probably cancel out and we can compare age X to age X for both players.
I have said it before, but longevity has become something of a red herring in this community. Playing more is good, sure, but we are not talking about a Stockton figure who just churns out good second option years and then apparently ends up in a bunch of people’s top twenty-five. Duncan has great longevity, but he also has an eleven-year prime which can stack up to pretty much anyone. It is when we start quibbling over how Hakeem and Shaq (or Wilt or Magic) might have the advantage with 12 or 13-year primes, or how Hakeem had a more strenuous and impressive year 14 and 15, that people are going to want to highlight how Duncan is top three for years 16 to 18. You can be individually lower on the value of longevity (and I know you are) without pretending that it was all some product of Duncan playing a couple of minutes less during his twilight years, because nothing in the career arc of Hakeem or Shaq suggests that was what they needed to replicate 2014-16 Duncan.
yeah, that's fair to say it wasn't just the 2 or 3 fewer minutes (though obviously it helps or the spurs wouldn't have done it), but more that duncan basically never got stressed by his role while someone like hakeem was basically ridden until it was time for the glue factory. and that i think the difference in a duncan who could consistently give you 25-30 in a big playoff game was a lot different than the older duncan who couldn't and that the spurs having such an amazing supporting cast that was still ripping off 60 win seasons simply makes it look like the difference between older duncan and younger duncan isn't that large.
