Dwight Howard vs Carmelo Anthony

[Grinditout]

Peak to peak

Better build around player

Current NBA

[No-more-rings]

All Dwight pretty easily.

[tsherkin]

Dwight, all of them, no question.

[GSP]

Ill take the top 75er

[dooki667]

Knicks fan but it's superman easy.

[trex_8063]

Dwight comfortably for all (especially peak).

Admittedly turnover-prone, but otherwise an elite-level rebounder, defensive anchor, roll man, and finisher (who as result generates massive interior gravity and puts a ton of foul-pressure on opposing defenses)......

Vs a good [not great] volume scoring (and floor spreading) combo forward who is not a good playmaker and is awful on defense.


Basically we're talking about a guy who is good on one end of the court and elite on the other.......against a guy who is good [maybe even edging toward "very good"] on one end, but awful on the other. No real contest, imo.

[dreamshake]

I thought this was gonna be one of those threads with a twist like "offense only" or "...if Dwight were 3 inches shorter" or something. Because Dwight was way better than Melo.

[Wigginstime]

People forget how short of a window Dwight Howard had. His offense was extremely inept his first few years in the league to the point where the Magic struggled in an extremely weak east. His back effectively went in the 2011-2012 season. Dwight was only 27 when the Kobe/Howard/Gasol combo massively failed.

Basically Dwight had 4 seasons of elite level play. 2008 - 2011 Dwight was clearly a better player during this time than Melo ever was.

Melo was capable of giving you 26/6 every year and carrying a team to the playoffs from 2006 - 2013. Pretty significant difference in longevity.

[HeartBreakKid]

People forget how short of a window Dwight Howard had. His offense was extremely inept his first few years in the league to the point where the Magic struggled in an extremely weak east. His back effectively went in the 2011-2012 season. Dwight was only 27 when the Kobe/Howard/Gasol combo massively failed.

Basically Dwight had 4 seasons of elite level play. 2008 - 2011 Dwight was clearly a better player during this time than Melo ever was.

Melo was capable of giving you 26/6 every year and carrying a team to the playoffs from 2006 - 2013. Pretty significant difference in longevity.

The Nuggets were a good team, they were not "carried". He didn't really carry the Knicks to anything special outside of 2013 also.

Howard was still good in Houston and was likely underrated. Compared to an average Carmelo season they were not negligible.

I dont think anyone forgot that Howard's prime is 5 years, but it's a much higher level than Carmelo. Howard was a legitimate MVP candidate and probably would have won MVP if his team had better seeding.

[TheGOATRises007]

Dwight easily.

Not even close.

[Owly]

People forget how short of a window Dwight Howard had. His offense was extremely inept his first few years in the league to the point where the Magic struggled in an extremely weak east. His back effectively went in the 2011-2012 season. Dwight was only 27 when the Kobe/Howard/Gasol combo massively failed.

Basically Dwight had 4 seasons of elite level play. 2008 - 2011 Dwight was clearly a better player during this time than Melo ever was.

Melo was capable of giving you 26/6 every year and carrying a team to the playoffs from 2006 - 2013. Pretty significant difference in longevity.

So

1) You're including '09 Carmelo. 66 games (2277 minutes) of 19.0 PER, .105 WS/48, 0.5 BPM level play. Even by box composites that ignore his D and some might overvalue scoring ... he's not that special. Even on the raw slashline which is a pretty bad way of evaluating ... he's 22.8ppg, not 26 (at a mildly negative TS%, for -34.3 TS add).

2) On the impact side for the window cited he's +1.1 on-off, for RAPM via goolesites he's +1.5 for 06-11 (72nd over the span) or 0.67 in 97 to 14 RAPM (219th). It is a struggle to suggest he's carrying a team anywhere.

3) It's curious to leave out '14. Impact, certainly on-off, seems to favor that as one year that might do some heavy lifting for averages that included that in the span.

[Wigginstime]

People forget how short of a window Dwight Howard had. His offense was extremely inept his first few years in the league to the point where the Magic struggled in an extremely weak east. His back effectively went in the 2011-2012 season. Dwight was only 27 when the Kobe/Howard/Gasol combo massively failed.

Basically Dwight had 4 seasons of elite level play. 2008 - 2011 Dwight was clearly a better player during this time than Melo ever was.

Melo was capable of giving you 26/6 every year and carrying a team to the playoffs from 2006 - 2013. Pretty significant difference in longevity.

So

1) You're including '09 Carmelo. 66 games (2277 minutes) of 19.0 PER, .105 WS/48, 0.5 BPM level play. Even by box composites that ignore his D and some might overvalue scoring ... he's not that special. Even on the raw slashline which is a pretty bad way of evaluating ... he's 22.8ppg, not 26 (at a mildly negative TS%, for -34.3 TS add).

2) On the impact side for the window cited he's +1.1 on-off, for RAPM via goolesites he's +1.5 for 06-11 (72nd over the span) or 0.67 in 97 to 14 RAPM (219th). It is a struggle to suggest he's carrying a team anywhere.

3) It's curious to leave out '14. Impact, certainly on-off, seems to favor that as one year that might do some heavy lifting for averages that included that in the span.

Yes i'm including 09 Carmelo that put up 27/6/4 with a 24PER in the playoffs taking the Nuggets to the conference finals and would have got to the championship had Denver not botched the inbounds play two games in a row. I have Nuggets season tickets. So I remember that Melo broke his shooting hand and struggled trying to play with his off hand but returned to his normal self by the playoffs. I'm shocked that you choose to attack 09...

[Owly]

People forget how short of a window Dwight Howard had. His offense was extremely inept his first few years in the league to the point where the Magic struggled in an extremely weak east. His back effectively went in the 2011-2012 season. Dwight was only 27 when the Kobe/Howard/Gasol combo massively failed.

Basically Dwight had 4 seasons of elite level play. 2008 - 2011 Dwight was clearly a better player during this time than Melo ever was.

Melo was capable of giving you 26/6 every year and carrying a team to the playoffs from 2006 - 2013. Pretty significant difference in longevity.

So

1) You're including '09 Carmelo. 66 games (2277 minutes) of 19.0 PER, .105 WS/48, 0.5 BPM level play. Even by box composites that ignore his D and some might overvalue scoring ... he's not that special. Even on the raw slashline which is a pretty bad way of evaluating ... he's 22.8ppg, not 26 (at a mildly negative TS%, for -34.3 TS add).

2) On the impact side for the window cited he's +1.1 on-off, for RAPM via goolesites he's +1.5 for 06-11 (72nd over the span) or 0.67 in 97 to 14 RAPM (219th). It is a struggle to suggest he's carrying a team anywhere.

3) It's curious to leave out '14. Impact, certainly on-off, seems to favor that as one year that might do some heavy lifting for averages that included that in the span.

Yes i'm including 09 Carmelo that put up 27/6/4 with a 24PER in the playoffs taking the Nuggets to the conference finals and would have got to the championship had Denver not botched the inbounds play two games in a row. I have Nuggets season tickets. So I remember that Melo broke his shooting hand and struggled trying to play with his off hand but returned to his normal self by the playoffs. I'm shocked that you choose to attack 09...

By the boxscore at least, it's not a quality year. It's a quality playoffs. If one were going exclusively or even primarily by playoffs it would be a curious decision to start the window with 2006, with a 10.7 PER, -.009 WS/48, -1.5BPM a pretty horrible outing in a small sample. I rather thought its inclusion suggested RS is the core, baseline aspect at least.

And even within this single-playoff sample carrying is inappropriate. Billups's Reference box-composites on average look a little better and fwiw, (small sample, but if one is making a big deal of playoff winning) 2 or 3 rotation players have a better on-off ... he's effective on good team but I don't see anything justifying "carrying".

It also seems odd to to highlight - in your dismissal of Howard - injury grounds but object to dismissing the value added in '09 for Carmelo on injury grounds, or highlighting that he literally wasn't "giving you" the numbers that he was said to have done "every year" nor "carrying a team to the playoffs" when - granting this is an outlier strong impact year - even just focusing on this aspect ... there are other players with a more consistent impact signal that play more than him and seem to have superior impact metrics ('09 googlesites PI RAPM [in this regard weaker priors probably hurt him ... on the other hand this just highlights the lack of evidence of earlier "carrying] has J.R. Smith (23rd, 3.3), Billups (24th, 3.2) and - narrowly - Nene (32nd, 3.0) ahead of Anthony, of the three only Smith plays fewer minutes (by 32 minutes).

Fwiw too, though I'm not sure it matters, regarding inbounding ...
1) games aren't decided on single plays but the accumulation of all play.
2) Inbound plays are part of the game of basketball ... I'm not sure what the point is here
3) So far as I can tell, these turnovers were in games 1 and 3, and therefore not consecutive.
4) From what I've seen, in both instances Denver were already 2 points down. In both instances Denver could not make it the last shot. So they would need to not only get the ball inbounds, but make 2 to tie or 3 to go ahead but then also need to prevent LA scoring to overturn the tie or 1 point deficit. To assume they certainly would have done so on both occasions ("they would have ...") seems ... off the mark.