Highest reasonable all-time ranking for Kevin Durant?

[AEnigma]

I put Hakeem over Durant, but I disagree that there’s no reasonable case. Just at a very basic level, both players have 2 titles and 1 finals loss, 2 Finals MVPs, 1 regular season MVP, and virtually identical all-NBA selections, so these just can’t be two players in a completely different stratosphere.

They can be when Durant’s two titles came as the second star on the greatest roster in the history of the sport, while Hakeem’s two title casts were among the all-time weakest for a championship team.

To some extent I obviously agree with you, since I said this is part of why I have Hakeem above Durant. But there are reasonable ways of looking at this that are much more charitable to Durant.

For instance, Durant is not the only person to be on a stacked super team. For example, LeBron’s Miami team was no less talented IMO (indeed, LeBron himself thought they’d just easily rattle off 7 titles, because of how talented they were). Neither was the Moses Malone Sixers. Or the Showtime Lakers, etc. And yet none of the stacked teams in history have ever been as dominant as those Warriors teams were.

… Because none of them were 10 SRS teams without the star in question. That is a complete false equivalence, not “charity”.

A charitable reading of that to Durant would be to conclude that this is because he’s an all-time ceiling raiser player—which would be a huge deal. Of course, the counter to that would be that he didn’t have to raise the ceiling much because the Warriors had already gone 73-9. But we obviously have to recognize that, despite that record, they were not even necessarily the best team in the league—as demonstrated by not having won the title and having had serious difficulty even making the finals.

Oh well that changes it. A couple of other teams could play them evenly, therefore, does not really matter that they added a top five player (taken off one of those somewhat even teams).

4 SRS lift for one season is not any sort of historical outlier, no, regardless of dressing that up as “ceiling raising”.

A charitable reading of Durant would also recognize that a huge portion of what made those pre-Durant Warriors quite so successful was that they were extracting the benefits of being significantly ahead of other teams tactically—employing much more of today’s three-ball offense than other teams were, in a way that gave them a huge tactical advantage. That was an advantage that would obviously naturally go away fairly quickly, as other teams quickly adapted to mimic the Warriors’ superior offensive tactics as much as possible. Indeed, the number of threes taken immediately went up a lot after 2016, as did offensive efficiency. The Warriors’ tactical advantage was going away, so there’s reason to believe that the Warriors’ success would’ve diminished a good bit if they’d not gotten Durant. In other words, perhaps the Warriors were a 73-9 team that didn’t win the finals and were likely to be on the decline (due to losing their tactical advantage) with no chance of being anything close to a 73-9 team again. Which would make their utter dominance with Durant more impressive.

Oh if only there were some way for us to determine how the Warriors played without Durant. Guess we will never know!

Meanwhile, the charitable reading of this comparison for Durant would be that Hakeem’s titles came in an artificially way weakened league, because Jordan was temporarily gone (yes, I know Jordan was technically back in 1995, but not really).

Yeah poor Jordan was not really back, because he could only be called that once he again had the league’s best supporting cast.

The idea would be that he was just the lucky beneficiary of the league’s clear best team going into hibernation.

Oh wow the best player in the league was gone for one of those titles. I wonder, how does a once in a lifetime cap spike permitting you to sign with a team paying a two-time MVP less than most all-stars compare? How does it compare to have your toughest competition get taken out by one of the goons on your team?

I think the Rockets’ runs were still difficult (they faced some good teams!), and so I still put a lot of value on Hakeem’s titles, but it wouldn’t be totally unreasonable to somewhat discount titles won where the clear dominant player/team randomly took itself off the board for a couple years.

It would be and is. By that logic, Durant himself ruined one of the other dominant teams in the league to win his titles.

Indeed, Durant actually has a higher total MVP vote share (3.21 vs. 2.61). On its face, it seems like a pretty obviously debatable duo of players, since their resumes are really similar. And people forget that for a large portion of Hakeem’s career, the teams he was leading barely made the playoffs or even missed the playoffs and would typically lose to pretty unremarkable teams in the playoffs (though they did have a fairly flukey run the finals in 1986—definitely a credit to Hakeem), even when Hakeem was totally healthy. Of course, he didn’t have the supporting casts Durant has had

All-time undersell.

How many losses does Durant have where he produced like Hakeem did in 1987 and 1988? What team has Durant beaten while disadvantaged to the extent of Hakeem against the 1986 Lakers? You call it a fluke, but Hakeem regularly beat better teams. Durant did that, what, twice? And that was with much more talented rosters.

Durant has had great series’ where he lost. Take, for instance, a very prominent example of the 2012 Finals, where Durant put up 31 points a game on 65% TS% in the finals. And that’s against a WAY better team than the 1987 SuperSonics and the 1988 Mavericks.

Ah right, I forgot to make the case for Durant, we also need to pretend that the only relevant consideration is their scoring.

In terms of beating a team while disadvantaged, I’d say beating the 2016 Spurs qualifies very highly. That Spurs team had won 67 games and actually had an essentially equal SRS to the 73-9 Warriors (10.38 vs. 10.28). The only teams in the last 50 years with as high a SRS as the 2016 Spurs were the 2017 Warriors, 2016 Warriors, 1997 Bulls, and 1996 Bulls. They were genuinely an all-time great team. And they were healthy. But Durant led his team to victory in 6 games, despite his co-star actually having a bad series. It’s certainly quite possible to argue that that’s as or more impressive than beating the 1986 Lakers, who were great but had an SRS of 6.84.

His co-star was the one drawing the Spurs attention. “Bad series”, Westbrook was the guy creating all the easy looks for Durant!

We know Durant thrives in that environment. The question is what happens when it stops being easy.

And it’s worth going over the types of teams each of these players has lost to in the playoffs. The teams Hakeem lost to in the playoffs include: (1) the 41-41 1985 Jazz led by Adrian Dantley; (2) the 39-43 1987 SuperSonics led by Tom Chambers; (3) the 53-29 1988 Mavericks led by Mark Aguirre (this team was actually pretty solid though); (4) the 47-35 1989 SuperSonics led by Dale Ellis; and (5) no one in 1992 because the Rockets didn’t make the playoffs. They also lost to the 1990 and 1991 Lakers, which was of course a great team, but they lost to them in the first round because the Rockets were only the 8th seed and 6th seed, and the series’ weren’t close. Hakeem’s first 8 seasons in the NBA were actually pretty rough, aside from the one random finals run. They had mediocre regular seasons, followed by middling playoff runs in all the other seasons in that time period. In contrast, Durant has lost in the playoffs 9 times, and on 6 of those occasions it has been to the eventual champions, and two of the others were to the 73-9 Warriors and the finalist 2022 Celtics. The only real black mark that’s comparable to those Rockets’ losses is the 2013 loss to the Grizzlies (and even that team won 56 games). And Durant never had years like Hakeem where he was healthy in the regular season and his team either missed the playoffs or barely made it. Of course, the counterargument to that is that Durant has had more talented teams than Hakeem. But a reasonable person could certainly conclude that actually Russell Westbrook is way overrated and was never remotely successful without Durant. And once you conclude that, suddenly you’re just left with Durant making his teams much more consistently great than Hakeem did.

If only we had some way to discern Westbrook’s value.

So once again we are back to Durant only having an argument if we argue as disingenuously as possible.

(though Ralph Sampson was really good)

In college. The fact Hakeem did not have a better teammate than NBA Sampson until 1995, yet won a title anyway, is why there is no actual comparison here. Durant has never gone anywhere in the postseason without superstar guard play.

Ralph Sampson was more than just good in college. He was an all-star for four straight years—three of them with Hakeem.

And such deserved all-star campaigns!

Is this where we transition to talking about how Hakeem had all-star Otis Thorpe on his team in 1994.

And, again, we are talking about what a charitable reading for Durant from a reasonable person might be.

There is a difference between charity and cozenage. These are not reasonable stances from people committed to the sport, which is the bar here.

And I think that that would be that Russell Westbrook is actually not really a positive.

Baseless. I see this is the consequence of the past two years: the guy who was comparably impactful to Durant is now rewritten as a valueless mooch.

It’s not a conclusion that I’d entirely agree with, but there’s definitely plenty of evidence to support such a conclusion, including playoffs series won by the Thunder where Westbrook was horrible.

If you have no idea how to watch the sport. “Inefficiency = bad!!!!”

And if Westbrook is not actually very helpful, then suddenly Durant didn’t really have much help either for a lot of his career and yet led his teams to be consistently quite good.

Yes, any argument is possible if you untether yourself from pesky burdens like “accuracy” and “correct representation”.

It’s also worth noting that on the back end of his career, Hakeem actually had teams with other superstar players on them, and it didn’t work. And indeed, the failure to win with Drexler and Barkley in at least that first year together (where they weren’t actually particularly old yet and were healthy in the playoffs) is actually genuinely suggestive of Hakeem not being the type of ceiling raiser that Durant arguably was. That team was crazy talented and didn’t even make the finals.

Another very educated and insightful take. Oh if only Hakeem had played better in 1997. If only he had not injured Barkley and made him have potentially the worst series of his career to that point. Durant would never allow that.

so it’s not an apples to apples comparison. But the fact remains that Hakeem wasn’t a consistent title contender throughout his career in the same way that Durant has been. Again, I’d take Hakeem over Durant. And that’s mostly because I think Hakeem’s titles are on the high end of impressiveness while Durant’s are on the low end. But I don’t think it can be right to say Durant has no reasonable case over Hakeem when their career resumes are actually really really similar.

If they are only similar in a wholly superficial sense, then no, it is not a reasonable case. This is literally a ringzzzz argument. Shame on Hakeem for only winning two titles with Kenny Smith and Vernon Maxwell, that to me is minimally different from winning as a free agent addition to a 73-win team.

Again, as detailed above, there’s much more charitable readings of this stuff for Durant.

Charity is when I make up whatever I want to push a bad argument.

think you’re thinking that your view is the only reasonable one. That’s not the case.

It is the case. At no point have you presented a reasonable view here for Durant, or at least in any sense beyond, “A (bad) reason was provided.”

I actually agree with your view in the end, but to say there’s no reasonable case for Durant as compared to a player with a really similar resume is silly IMO.

That is because the résumé is only “similar” if you are looking at nothing more than their basketball-reference headings.

to get to that conclusion, you just have to be very stuck in the idea that your interpretation and valuation of the stuff on those similar resumes is the only reasonable one, and I don’t think that that’s ever going to be right.

I expect people to not be stuck in the idea that superficial similarities are a replacement for comprehensive assessment of the sport. Saying Durant’s résumé is equivalent to Hakeem’s in any meaningful sense is akin to calling Rick Barry’s virtually indistinguishable from Oscar Robertson’s. It is the same type of thought process that has people putting Isiah Thomas above Chris Paul because he has two titles and a Finals MVP. Bad rationale does not carry equal weight.

[HeartBreakKid]

To add onto how silly it is to compare their all nba selections

With LBJ occupying one spot that means Durant's competition for the other spot for most of his career is Carmelo Anthony, Paul George, couple seasons of Blake Griffin, maybe a couple seasons from Kawhi if he played enough games and was respected by the media (which didn't happen until a few years after he became a superstar). Unless I am forgetting someone those are the best forwards of the 10s.

Shaq, Robinson, Ewing, Mourning and Mutumbo are stiffer competition than that, by a lot. Olajuwon was relatively old but still good when those guys were peaking.

[iggymcfrack]

19-20

This is how I feel. I know a lot of people place him higher than that, but I don’t really see the argument. Even in his own era, he was rarely a top 5 player.

He was a top 5 player almost every season he was healthy between 2010-2022 and most of them arent even debatable

I’ll give you 2012-2014. That’s it. LeBron was better every season through 2020. Steph was better every season from 2015 on. Chris Paul was better almost every year until he hit his decline phase. Kawhi was better from 2015 on whenever he was healthy. Giannis and Jokić have been better players since their emergence in 2019 and have hit much higher heights than KD ever reached.

Since KD just gets his own shot without much passing, playmaking, or off-ball movement he has much worse impact numbers than other top players of his era. Here are the players I mentioned by simple career on/off:

Curry +11.3
LeBron +10.8
Jokic +10.6
CP3 +9.6
Giannis +6.6
Kawhi +6.3
Durant +5.7

26 year RAPM has them like this:
1. LeBron +9.1
3. Paul +8.1
6. Jokic +7.2
11. Curry +6.5
13. Giannis +6.4
18. Kawhi +5.7
28. Durant +4.7

[70sFan]

This is how I feel. I know a lot of people place him higher than that, but I don’t really see the argument. Even in his own era, he was rarely a top 5 player.

He was a top 5 player almost every season he was healthy between 2010-2022 and most of them arent even debatable

I’ll give you 2012-2014. That’s it. LeBron was better every season through 2020. Steph was better every season from 2015 on. Chris Paul was better almost every year until he hit his decline phase. Kawhi was better from 2015 on whenever he was healthy. Giannis and Jokić have been better players since their emergence in 2019 and have hit much higher heights than KD ever reached.

Since KD just gets his own shot without much passing, playmaking, or off-ball movement he has much worse impact numbers than other top players of his era. Here are the players I mentioned by simple career on/off:

Curry +11.3
LeBron +10.8
Jokic +10.6
CP3 +9.6
Giannis +6.6
Kawhi +6.3
Durant +5.7

26 year RAPM has them like this:
1. LeBron +9.1
3. Paul +8.1
6. Jokic +7.2
11. Curry +6.5
13. Giannis +6.4
18. Kawhi +5.7
28. Durant +4.7

Could you provide your top 5 for each year from 2016-22 period (excluding 2020)?

[lessthanjake]

They can be when Durant’s two titles came as the second star on the greatest roster in the history of the sport, while Hakeem’s two title casts were among the all-time weakest for a championship team.

To some extent I obviously agree with you, since I said this is part of why I have Hakeem above Durant. But there are reasonable ways of looking at this that are much more charitable to Durant.

For instance, Durant is not the only person to be on a stacked super team. For example, LeBron’s Miami team was no less talented IMO (indeed, LeBron himself thought they’d just easily rattle off 7 titles, because of how talented they were). Neither was the Moses Malone Sixers. Or the Showtime Lakers, etc. And yet none of the stacked teams in history have ever been as dominant as those Warriors teams were.

… Because none of them were 10 SRS teams without the star in question. That is a complete false equivalence, not “charity”.

The Moses Malone Sixers had just lost in the finals the year before Malone went there. The Showtime Lakers made the finals when Kareem was no longer there (not to mention won a title when Kareem was a 41 year old 12 PER role player). Wilt went to a Lakers team that had been making the finals almost every year, to play alongside Jerry West and Elgin Baylor still in their prime. It’s really not unprecedented for there to be teams that are right there as the best or second-best team in the league and having an MVP-level superstar on top of it. It’s happened before, and the result was simply never as dominant. You can try to suggest that it was never as dominant because those other teams were never as good without that star as the Warriors were without Durant. And obviously the win totals (and the title in 2015) are solid evidence for that point. But, as I said, I think there’s a pretty strong case to be made that a lot of those other teams without the additional star were actually as or more talented than the pre-Durant Warriors, and that the Warriors’ success was predicated in large part on exploiting a huge tactical advantage (i.e. using the three-ball in a more modern way—which we now know is just way more effective offense), and that was a tactical advantage that was clearly going to rapidly evaporate after they used it to go 73-9. The Warriors being a 73-9 team in 2016 without Durant really doesn’t mean they would’ve been that level of team in 2017 or 2018, when the rest of the league was naturally catching up quickly to the tactical advantage that was a huge cause of the Warriors being that successful. It’s also the case that talking about their SRS and 73 wins is obviously missing that they did not win the title, and in fact almost lost in the conference finals. They pretty obviously weren’t quite as good as the SRS or wins would suggest.

A charitable reading of that to Durant would be to conclude that this is because he’s an all-time ceiling raiser player—which would be a huge deal. Of course, the counter to that would be that he didn’t have to raise the ceiling much because the Warriors had already gone 73-9. But we obviously have to recognize that, despite that record, they were not even necessarily the best team in the league—as demonstrated by not having won the title and having had serious difficulty even making the finals.

Oh well that changes it. A couple of other teams could play them evenly, therefore, does not really matter that they added a top five player (taken off one of those somewhat even teams).

4 SRS lift for one season is not any sort of historical outlier, no, regardless of dressing that up as “ceiling raising”.

Yes, actually it does change it. The Warriors went from, by your own admission “a couple of other teams could play them evenly” to no one being able to play them even close, including the same team that played them evenly and had won. You may want to think that that should be completely discounted, but the fact is that we actually haven’t really seen that type of ceiling raising before, and it’s not because MVP-level players haven’t been added to a team that only “a couple other teams could play evenly.” That happened exactly with the Moses Malone Sixers, and they were pretty unplayable for one year, and then they crashed out in the first round after that and then got Barkley and still couldn’t do much. We didn’t have the same sort of natural experiment with the Showtime Lakers exactly, but at their height they were quite similar to the very late-1980s, early 1990’s Lakers that won a title and lost in the finals twice, except they also had Kareem still in a part of his career where he was a great player. Heck, the same Cavs team that the Warriors had to face had basically gotten to game 6 of the 2015 finals without Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving (with Love being out almost the whole playoffs, and Irving being out almost all of the last two rounds), and then in 2016 and 2017 essentially added them to the mix. Neither of those guys are MVP-level, but adding two all-NBA guys to a team that was in game 6 of the finals basically without them is still pretty wild. All of these teams did quite well when they were at their fullest level of strength, but they did not dominate the league quite like the Durant Warriors did. There’s a reading of that that just says that that’s because no team was quite as good without a star guy, but another reading is that that’s because no one’s been quite the ceiling raiser that Durant (and Curry, of course) was.

A charitable reading of Durant would also recognize that a huge portion of what made those pre-Durant Warriors quite so successful was that they were extracting the benefits of being significantly ahead of other teams tactically—employing much more of today’s three-ball offense than other teams were, in a way that gave them a huge tactical advantage. That was an advantage that would obviously naturally go away fairly quickly, as other teams quickly adapted to mimic the Warriors’ superior offensive tactics as much as possible. Indeed, the number of threes taken immediately went up a lot after 2016, as did offensive efficiency. The Warriors’ tactical advantage was going away, so there’s reason to believe that the Warriors’ success would’ve diminished a good bit if they’d not gotten Durant. In other words, perhaps the Warriors were a 73-9 team that didn’t win the finals and were likely to be on the decline (due to losing their tactical advantage) with no chance of being anything close to a 73-9 team again. Which would make their utter dominance with Durant more impressive.

Oh if only there were some way for us to determine how the Warriors played without Durant. Guess we will never know!

I don’t think you’re actually reading my point. Are you denying that the 2015 and 2016 Warriors benefited massively from being way ahead of the tactical curve? Are you denying that teams caught on pretty quickly tactically, such that the team couldn’t have extracted that same tactical advantage in the years Durant was there? Have you thought about what conclusion those things might raise?

Meanwhile, the charitable reading of this comparison for Durant would be that Hakeem’s titles came in an artificially way weakened league, because Jordan was temporarily gone (yes, I know Jordan was technically back in 1995, but not really).

Yeah poor Jordan was not really back, because he could only be called that once he again had the league’s best supporting cast.

This is going down a silly rabbit hole, but the point wasn’t that Jordan’s team in 1995 wasn’t good. It was that Jordan came back but only came back at the very very end of the season, so he’d not really been fully back with the team. It was a very makeshift thing.

The idea would be that he was just the lucky beneficiary of the league’s clear best team going into hibernation.

Oh wow the best player in the league was gone for one of those titles. I wonder, how does a once in a lifetime cap spike permitting you to sign with a team paying a two-time MVP less than most all-stars compare? How does it compare to have your toughest competition get taken out by one of the goons on your team?

Perhaps it compares somewhat similarly, and that’s my point!

I think the Rockets’ runs were still difficult (they faced some good teams!), and so I still put a lot of value on Hakeem’s titles, but it wouldn’t be totally unreasonable to somewhat discount titles won where the clear dominant player/team randomly took itself off the board for a couple years.

It would be and is. By that logic, Durant himself ruined one of the other dominant teams in the league to win his titles.

Not sure I understand your point. That Durant took the Thunder off the board so his own titles should be discounted on that basis? That’s some wild logical pretzeling. And is also obviously clearly different from a team taking itself off the board for a two year period surrounding which they won 3 titles immediately before and 3 titles immediately after.

All-time undersell.

How many losses does Durant have where he produced like Hakeem did in 1987 and 1988? What team has Durant beaten while disadvantaged to the extent of Hakeem against the 1986 Lakers? You call it a fluke, but Hakeem regularly beat better teams. Durant did that, what, twice? And that was with much more talented rosters.

Durant has had great series’ where he lost. Take, for instance, a very prominent example of the 2012 Finals, where Durant put up 31 points a game on 65% TS% in the finals. And that’s against a WAY better team than the 1987 SuperSonics and the 1988 Mavericks.

Ah right, I forgot to make the case for Durant, we also need to pretend that the only relevant consideration is their scoring.

Did Durant play badly in that series beyond scoring? No. Durant objectively had a really good series in that 2012 Finals. And so that’s a very good answer to your question of whether Durant had losses in series’ where he played really well. There’s other examples too, of course—such as the 2021 series against Milwaukee.

In terms of beating a team while disadvantaged, I’d say beating the 2016 Spurs qualifies very highly. That Spurs team had won 67 games and actually had an essentially equal SRS to the 73-9 Warriors (10.38 vs. 10.28). The only teams in the last 50 years with as high a SRS as the 2016 Spurs were the 2017 Warriors, 2016 Warriors, 1997 Bulls, and 1996 Bulls. They were genuinely an all-time great team. And they were healthy. But Durant led his team to victory in 6 games, despite his co-star actually having a bad series. It’s certainly quite possible to argue that that’s as or more impressive than beating the 1986 Lakers, who were great but had an SRS of 6.84.

His co-star was the one drawing the Spurs attention. “Bad series”, Westbrook was the guy creating all the easy looks for Durant!

We know Durant thrives in that environment. The question is what happens when it stops being easy.

Please. I get that Westbrook did some good stuff in that series, but a guy who was shooting high volume with a 47.9% TS% and also turned the ball over 4.5 times a game had a bad series. It was obviously not completely catastrophic or they couldn’t have won against such a great team, but please don’t try to suggest that Westbrook was a major reason they won.

And it’s worth going over the types of teams each of these players has lost to in the playoffs. The teams Hakeem lost to in the playoffs include: (1) the 41-41 1985 Jazz led by Adrian Dantley; (2) the 39-43 1987 SuperSonics led by Tom Chambers; (3) the 53-29 1988 Mavericks led by Mark Aguirre (this team was actually pretty solid though); (4) the 47-35 1989 SuperSonics led by Dale Ellis; and (5) no one in 1992 because the Rockets didn’t make the playoffs. They also lost to the 1990 and 1991 Lakers, which was of course a great team, but they lost to them in the first round because the Rockets were only the 8th seed and 6th seed, and the series’ weren’t close. Hakeem’s first 8 seasons in the NBA were actually pretty rough, aside from the one random finals run. They had mediocre regular seasons, followed by middling playoff runs in all the other seasons in that time period. In contrast, Durant has lost in the playoffs 9 times, and on 6 of those occasions it has been to the eventual champions, and two of the others were to the 73-9 Warriors and the finalist 2022 Celtics. The only real black mark that’s comparable to those Rockets’ losses is the 2013 loss to the Grizzlies (and even that team won 56 games). And Durant never had years like Hakeem where he was healthy in the regular season and his team either missed the playoffs or barely made it. Of course, the counterargument to that is that Durant has had more talented teams than Hakeem. But a reasonable person could certainly conclude that actually Russell Westbrook is way overrated and was never remotely successful without Durant. And once you conclude that, suddenly you’re just left with Durant making his teams much more consistently great than Hakeem did.

If only we had some way to discern Westbrook’s value.

So once again we are back to Durant only having an argument if we argue as disingenuously as possible.

Huh? Westbrook has had essentially zero team success without Durant. In his years without Durant, his teams have won the following number of games: 47, 48, 49, 44 (out of 72), 34, 33, and 43 (using the Lakers for last year, and the team was 25-30 before Westbrook left). Here have been the playoff results in order: (1) first-round exit in 5 games; (2) first-round exit in 6 games; (3) first-round exit in 5 games; (4) second-round exit in 5 games; (5) first-round exit in 5 games; (6) missed the playoffs; and (7) first-round exit in 5 games. And he’s played with some really talented guys in that timeframe: Paul George, James Harden, LeBron James, Anthony Davis, Bradley Beal, etc. Along the way in those years, Westbrook’s teams have barely performed better with him on the court than off the court. So yeah, I think we do actually have ways of discerning Westbrook’s value, and the answer really isn’t necessarily high at all.

In college. The fact Hakeem did not have a better teammate than NBA Sampson until 1995, yet won a title anyway, is why there is no actual comparison here. Durant has never gone anywhere in the postseason without superstar guard play.

Ralph Sampson was more than just good in college. He was an all-star for four straight years—three of them with Hakeem.

And such deserved all-star campaigns!

Is this where we transition to talking about how Hakeem had all-star Otis Thorpe on his team in 1994.

And, again, we are talking about what a charitable reading for Durant from a reasonable person might be.

There is a difference between charity and cozenage. These are not reasonable stances from people committed to the sport, which is the bar here.

And I think that that would be that Russell Westbrook is actually not really a positive.

Baseless. I see this is the consequence of the past two years: the guy who was comparably impactful to Durant is now rewritten as a valueless mooch.

I would love for you to explain to me how Russell Westbrook was comparably impactful to Durant. The last couple years aren’t necessarily a reflection of how Russ was in his better years, but it was super obvious back then that Durant was the superior player. Westbrook was always a high-volume, low-scoring-efficiency, high-turnover guy whose presence on the court messed up his team’s spacing. His elite athleticism helped make up for that, and messing up spacing mattered a bit less in earlier years than it does now. But we really were always talking about a guy who had some absolutely enormous negatives to his game, such that his value was always pretty questionable.

It’s not a conclusion that I’d entirely agree with, but there’s definitely plenty of evidence to support such a conclusion, including playoffs series won by the Thunder where Westbrook was horrible.

If you have no idea how to watch the sport. “Inefficiency = bad!!!!”

And if Westbrook is not actually very helpful, then suddenly Durant didn’t really have much help either for a lot of his career and yet led his teams to be consistently quite good.

Yes, any argument is possible if you untether yourself from pesky burdens like “accuracy” and “correct representation”.

Yes, inefficiency is bad. As are lots of turnovers. It doesn’t make someone a box-score-watching robot to recognize that. It’s just a basic fact about the game. Trying to be some basketball hipster that doesn’t care about efficiency is not going to make abysmal scoring efficiency from a volume shooter into something that’s not a massive negative. Did Russ do things that made up for the cripplingly awful shooting (and the many turnovers)? Yes, he did. But I think there’s a perfectly reasonable argument that the other things he did weren’t worth enough that we should consider him to have been some significant value-added player that Durant should’ve won with. There’s a reasonable argument the other way on that too, but the value of Russell Westbrook is certainly a far from settled question.

It’s also worth noting that on the back end of his career, Hakeem actually had teams with other superstar players on them, and it didn’t work. And indeed, the failure to win with Drexler and Barkley in at least that first year together (where they weren’t actually particularly old yet and were healthy in the playoffs) is actually genuinely suggestive of Hakeem not being the type of ceiling raiser that Durant arguably was. That team was crazy talented and didn’t even make the finals.

Another very educated and insightful take. Oh if only Hakeem had played better in 1997. If only he had not injured Barkley and made him have potentially the worst series of his career to that point. Durant would never allow that.

Huh? Barkley had come back from injury like almost a month before the playoffs. And he was okay in the series they lost. Obviously his numbers were not going to be the same as when he was the #1 guy for most of his career, and he didn’t shoot well in that series, but he got to the line a ton (such that his overall scoring wasn’t inefficient) and he rebounded well. And, honestly, a lot of being a ceiling raiser is being someone that great players can play with and *not* have “potentially the worst series of [their] career.” That’s actually the point! This sort of thing indicates that Hakeem was not the type of ceiling raiser that Durant arguably is.

If they are only similar in a wholly superficial sense, then no, it is not a reasonable case. This is literally a ringzzzz argument. Shame on Hakeem for only winning two titles with Kenny Smith and Vernon Maxwell, that to me is minimally different from winning as a free agent addition to a 73-win team.

Again, as detailed above, there’s much more charitable readings of this stuff for Durant.

Charity is when I make up whatever I want to push a bad argument.

think you’re thinking that your view is the only reasonable one. That’s not the case.

It is the case. At no point have you presented a reasonable view here for Durant, or at least in any sense beyond, “A (bad) reason was provided.”

I actually agree with your view in the end, but to say there’s no reasonable case for Durant as compared to a player with a really similar resume is silly IMO.

That is because the résumé is only “similar” if you are looking at nothing more than their basketball-reference headings.

to get to that conclusion, you just have to be very stuck in the idea that your interpretation and valuation of the stuff on those similar resumes is the only reasonable one, and I don’t think that that’s ever going to be right.

I expect people to not be stuck in the idea that superficial similarities are a replacement for comprehensive assessment of the sport. Saying Durant’s résumé is equivalent to Hakeem’s in any meaningful sense is akin to calling Rick Barry’s virtually indistinguishable from Oscar Robertson’s. It is the same type of thought process that has people putting Isiah Thomas above Chris Paul because he has two titles and a Finals MVP. Bad rationale does not carry equal weight.

This is just you essentially saying “If I disagree with something, then it is not reasonable.” That doesn’t make sense in the context of evaluations that inherently rely on subjective judgments about a whole host of things. I’ve already said I put Hakeem above Durant myself. But I am able to conceptualize the fact that someone could disagree with my assessment while still being reasonable. You, however, do not seem to be able to do that.

[Cavsfansince84]

This is just you essentially saying “If I disagree with something, then it is not reasonable.” That doesn’t make sense in the context of evaluations that inherently rely on subjective judgments about a whole host of things. I’ve already said I put Hakeem above Durant myself. But I am able to conceptualize the fact that someone could disagree with my assessment while still being reasonable. You, however, do not seem to be able to do that.

Which is fine though a. I'm not entirely sure what your primary criteria are(this is huge because they can vary extremely widely on here or among fans in general). b. It's not clear by which criteria you could see KD over Hakeem as reasonable and then sort of making a case based on that criteria. This is sort of important imo because while I can generally accept that each person weighs different criteria to varying degrees there's a point in how they are weighed where I don't see it as reasonable for career player comparisons. So maybe you could elaborate on what basis you could see KD over Hakeem as reasonable. I'm not saying its an impossible argument to make but I think it needs to be elaborated on a bit before we could dissect it enough to say it is or is not a reasonable argument.

[lessthanjake]

KD has 6 1st teams and 4 2nd teams to Hakeem's 6 1st's and 3 2nd's but that also leaves out Hakeem's 2x dpoy and 9x all def 1st/2nd teams to KD's 0.

Defensive play is not independent of all-NBA selections. All-NBA is not an All-Offensive team. It’s an All-NBA team, and takes both sides of the ball into account. A good part of why Hakeem got those all-NBA selections is because of his defense. Indeed, he was clearly not as good an offensive player as Durant—the reason he made as many all-NBA teams is because of his defense! So it’s not some additional factor that must be considered above and beyond All-NBA selections.

There are double as many All-NBA selections for forwards than centers, so if they have the same amount of selections that likely infers that Hakeem was superior (and he was, by a lot).

You're also comparing media awards to two players who were in different tiers of coverage. Durant is a lot more popular in his era than Olajuwon was (understatement). Durant has been in the center of media since 2010, Olajuwon is largely forgotten between the time he was drafted #1 until he won a title when "Jordan was playing baseball".

There are double as many all-NBA selections for forwards than centers, and there’s also double as many forwards in the NBA than there are centers. I don’t see your point.

The latter point is just wrong. Hakeem was not “largely forgotten.” The “Twin Towers” was marketed a ton. I grew up in that era and Hakeem was one of my top 2 favorite players (alongside Jordan, of course), despite having never been to Houston in my life at that point and not having access to their regular season games. This was because he was talked about a lot. He was plenty prominent. To some extent, the era of social media and whatnot makes *everyone* be more marketed than before, but playing in an era where everyone is marketed more doesn’t make it easier for any individual player to be recognized. And it certainly doesn’t for a player who spent half his career playing in Oklahoma City.

I mean if you're a superstar it is easier to make a forward selection than a center selection. That's pretty obvious. What does there being double the amount of forwards have to do when we are talking about the elite of the NBA? If there are two MVP caliber players who are forwards they can both make the 1st team. If it is an era that has 3 MVP caliber centers then obviously only one can make 1st team. Did Hakeem play in an era that had more than 1 MVP caliber center?

I’m not sure I understand how you aren’t able to see how it is super relevant that there are twice as many forwards as centers. That also is going to typically mean that there’s twice as many really good forwards as there are really good centers!

If you want to just argue that in Hakeem’s era he was competing for all-NBA slots with an idiosyncratically good group of centers, then okay. But Durant has competed for slots with a pretty intense group of players at the forward position: LeBron, Dirk, Duncan, Giannis, Kawhi, etc. Hakeem competed for slots with some great players too, but for a while it was mostly just David Robinson and Patrick Ewing. Later, it was pretty intense competition with Shaq added in there, and early on Hakeem did overlap a bit with an old Kareem and an aging Moses Malone. So Hakeem had plenty of competition too. And it’s fair to point that out. Hakeem’s era had a lot of good centers, so making all-NBA was hard. But it’s not inherently more difficult to make the all-NBA team as a center. In the last 15 years we’ve had the following guys make all-NBA teams at center: Andrew Bogut, Al Horford, Andrew Bynum, Al Jefferson, Tyson Chandler, Joakim Noah, DeAndre Jordan, Andre Drummond, and Marc Gasol. There’s a very very good case to be made that it’s been harder to make all-NBA as a forward than as a center in recent years. It all just depends on what positions happen to be more stacked at a given time.

The Thunder were an incredibly trendy team with their gear everywhere. Durant and Westbrook have been in the center of NBA media for their entire duration. The Thunder were among the leaders in most national games despite being the smallest market. They also played in an era where people can watch their games even if they're not from OKC. Then Durant went to GSW where he was definitely the center...then he went to Brooklyn which he is still relevant albeit for negative reasons. If anything his time in Phoenix has been the most cooled down time in his entire career.


You're seriously comparing the Olajuwon twin tower era which was like 2 seconds to Durant's nearly entire career? Hakeem is definitely forgotten, how many conversations have you had about Hakeem regarding his seasons between 1987-1992? Many people forgot he even went to the NBA finals before 1994. He may as well have played for like 3 seasons the way he is talked about normally.

This is just such an odd comment. Do you want to know why no one is having conversations these days about what Hakeem did between 1987 and 1992? Because there’s basically nothing to talk about! His teams were mediocre and they either failed to make the playoffs, lost to a pretty mediocre team in the playoffs, or barely made the playoffs and then lost easily to a good team. There’s not much to talk about, because it just wasn’t a very good time period for Hakeem! Durant doesn’t have anything like that, because he actually has never had a time period where his team was essentially irrelevant. That’s a good thing in a comparison between these two players!

Also, as a sidenote, the twin tower era wasn’t “2 seconds.” It was three years of Hakeem’s career. If the twin tower era was “2 seconds,” then so was Durant’s time on the Warriors!

I really can't sit here and talk to someone who "lived during Olajuwons era" (which means what, you're like 30 something?) and thinks that he has the same level of prominence as Kevin Durant. Maybe you just don't know how to gage that stuff, but that's honestly just absurd. Durant even (erroneously) gets compared to Lebron James, frequently who is probably the 3rd most famous basketball player of all time. There is a sizeable minority of people who will say Durant is better than James or better than him in a handful of select seasons - Olajuwon never had that type of delusion in comparison with Jordan. People are more likely to say "really, that guy?" than say "Olajuwon was better than Jordan".

Again, I don’t see how you think what you are saying is good for Hakeem in this comparison. What you’re saying here is basically “Durant played in the same era as a top 2 GOAT candidate, and a sizable minority of people thought he was better than that GOAT candidate, while Hakeem played with a top 2 GOAT candidate and no one ever thought he was better.” That’s actually a really good argument in favor of putting Hakeem above Durant all time!

Hakeem Olajuwon being your favorite player when you're not from Houston doesn't mean anything (not even your favorite by your own admission, your favorite is the media Jesus). Paul Pierce was my favorite player and I am not from Boston, that does not mean that he all over New York media for his prime. Are you saying with a straight face that Paul Pierce was covered well in the media before 2008? Favorite player isn't indicative of their media coverage. Durant is a media star the likes that Olajuwon never was, and is more famous than Olajuwon even today.

Hakeem is not talked about nearly with the same prominence as many other top ten all timers outside of serious basketball circles and is often left out of top tens by more wider audiences. Do you think that has nothing to do with how much of a non-story the Rockets were for the majority of his career as well as other commercial factors? (played in a more domestic time, foreign player, not a big personality, a center in a time when perimeter players became the star of the show, didn't play with another star for most his career played in a less popular conference, won his title when the mega star/team of his era was not there).

There are more people who are familiar with Olajuwon playing wtih Chuck and Pippen than say, 88 Olajuwon. You're talking two different ages of media. By the time the NBA got better at covering more teams Olajuwon was already old.

Again, the Rockets being “a non-story . . . for the majority of his career” is actually a major fact that could help someone put Durant over Hakeem!

My point about me liking Hakeem a lot is that I was a pretty young kid and the internet wasn’t a thing and I did not have any connection to Houston, and so for me to really like Hakeem required him to be talked about a lot nationally. He was obviously hyped up, otherwise me as a young kid wouldn’t have ended up really liking him!

More generally, though, Hakeem “is not talked about nearly with the same prominence as many other top ten all timers” because he is not a top ten all-timer. There’s 11 guys that are clearly above him. But, from what I’ve seen, Hakeem is actually the most common guy put at that #12 slot after the pretty rock-solid top 11 (in fact, he’s who I’d have at #12 myself). Indeed, he’s the guy that people decided to latch onto when I said Durant could be as high as #12. Amongst the sort of all-time guys who have won a title and a couple MVPs or a couple titles and an MVP, I’d say Hakeem is talked about the most. I don’t understand this notion you have that Hakeem is somehow disrespected or something by fans.

[iggymcfrack]

He was a top 5 player almost every season he was healthy between 2010-2022 and most of them arent even debatable

I’ll give you 2012-2014. That’s it. LeBron was better every season through 2020. Steph was better every season from 2015 on. Chris Paul was better almost every year until he hit his decline phase. Kawhi was better from 2015 on whenever he was healthy. Giannis and Jokić have been better players since their emergence in 2019 and have hit much higher heights than KD ever reached.

Since KD just gets his own shot without much passing, playmaking, or off-ball movement he has much worse impact numbers than other top players of his era. Here are the players I mentioned by simple career on/off:

Curry +11.3
LeBron +10.8
Jokic +10.6
CP3 +9.6
Giannis +6.6
Kawhi +6.3
Durant +5.7

26 year RAPM has them like this:
1. LeBron +9.1
3. Paul +8.1
6. Jokic +7.2
11. Curry +6.5
13. Giannis +6.4
18. Kawhi +5.7
28. Durant +4.7

Could you provide your top 5 for each year from 2016-22 period (excluding 2020)?

2016: LeBron, Steph, Kawhi, Dray, Westbrook
2017: LeBron, Westbrook, Steph, Kawhi, CP3
2018: LeBron, Harden, AD, Giannis, Oladipo
2019: Kawhi, Giannis, Harden, George, Steph
2021: Giannis, Jokic, Embiid, Steph, Luka
2022: Jokic, Giannis, Steph, Embiid, Tatum

[lessthanjake]

This is just you essentially saying “If I disagree with something, then it is not reasonable.” That doesn’t make sense in the context of evaluations that inherently rely on subjective judgments about a whole host of things. I’ve already said I put Hakeem above Durant myself. But I am able to conceptualize the fact that someone could disagree with my assessment while still being reasonable. You, however, do not seem to be able to do that.

Which is fine though a. I'm not entirely sure what your primary criteria are(this is huge because they can vary extremely widely on here or among fans in general). b. It's not clear by which criteria you could see KD over Hakeem as reasonable and then sort of making a case based on that criteria. This is sort of important imo because while I can generally accept that each person weighs different criteria to varying degrees there's a point in how they are weighed where I don't see it as reasonable for career player comparisons. So maybe you could elaborate on what basis you could see KD over Hakeem as reasonable. I'm not saying its an impossible argument to make but I think it needs to be elaborated on a bit before we could dissect it enough to say it is or is not a reasonable argument.

Well, I’d personally put Hakeem ahead, so this is me making an argument that I think is reasonable but that I don’t ultimately agree with (so to the extent you want to argue with it, my response may well be that I agree):

But I think the case for Durant over Hakeem would center on a few things.

1. Durant and Hakeem both played in an era with a top 2 GOAT candidate. And there were times where people genuinely questioned whether Durant was better than LeBron, while no one questioned whether Hakeem was better than Michael. Maybe that’s just a function of social media being crazy these days or people loving to hate LeBron, but I do think there was a sense of Durant being closer to LeBron than there ever was about Hakeem with Jordan.

2. Relatedly, Durant played on a team with a top 11 player of all time (i.e. Steph), and the conventional wisdom at the time was actually most commonly that Durant was the superior player. It’s not a conclusion I personally ever agreed with, but it certainly does seem like a pretty relevant fact that is hard to ignore with Durant. Durant was on a team with a guy who is usually put above Hakeem all-time, and Durant was widely considered superior. It’s a bit of transitive property mumbo-jumbo, but I think a reasonable person could find this pretty persuasive.

3. There’s the case I’ve been making about Durant as a ceiling raiser. Durant works very well off the ball, which helps make him a fantastic ceiling raiser. We saw that with the Warriors. People downplay the Durant Warriors’ dominance because they were so talented, but I think there’s a good case to be made that there’s been several other similarly talented teams in NBA history and none of them were as utterly dominant as the Warriors. And that reflects very well on Durant’s (and Steph’s) fairly unique abilities as a ceiling raiser. Being able to be a major star on probably the greatest team of all time is no small thing! Hakeem was briefly on a bit of a super team, and it fizzled out fairly disappointingly, so I think it’d be reasonable to conclude he didn’t have the same ceiling raising ability.

4. Hakeem’s ability as a floor raiser is essentially undeniable in light of his two titles—especially the one in 1994 when he didn’t have Drexler. But we also need to see this in the context of the rest of Hakeem’s career. Hakeem spent a substantial portion of his career having his team be mostly irrelevant—failing to make the playoffs, having a mediocre record and then losing in the playoffs to genuinely mediocre teams that lacked any star anywhere near Hakeem’s level, or barely making the playoffs and losing easily to a good team. So we have to see Hakeem’s floor raising ability in that context—he had an amazing title without a real #2, but he also had a whole bunch of years where he couldn’t make his team relevant at all. Durant obviously doesn’t have anything like that 1994 year, but his teams have consistently been really relevant teams that are very good. The obviously counterpoint to that is that he had better teammates than Hakeem did in that era, and in many cases that’s true, but I think one could very reasonably take a view of Russell Westbrook that makes that gap not seem very significant for a lot of those Thunder years.

So, to summarize, I guess I’d articulate the argument in two general ways: First, the way that Durant was compared to top-tier all-time greats by viewers/fans during his era was superior to the way Hakeem was in his era. Second, Durant’s ceiling raising ability was superior, and the gap in their apparent abilities as a floor raiser isn’t all that significant once one digs further into Hakeem’s career.

Again, I could argue against these same points—after all, on balance, I don’t find them persuasive enough to agree with the conclusion! But I think someone could reasonably be persuaded by it.

[OhayoKD]

I put Hakeem over Durant, but I disagree that there’s no reasonable case for Durant. Just at a very basic level, both players have 2 titles and 1 finals loss, 2 Finals MVPs, 1 regular season MVP, and virtually identical all-NBA selections, so these just can’t be two players in a completely different stratosphere. Indeed, Durant actually has a higher total MVP vote share (3.21 vs. 2.61). On its face, it seems like a pretty obviously debatable duo of players, since their resumes are really similar. And people forget that for a large portion of Hakeem’s career, the teams he was leading barely made the playoffs (or even missed the playoffs) and would typically lose to pretty unremarkable teams in the playoffs (though they did have a fairly flukey run the finals in 1986—definitely a credit to Hakeem), even when Hakeem had been totally healthy.

KD has 6 1st teams and 4 2nd teams to Hakeem's 6 1st's and 3 2nd's but that also leaves out Hakeem's 2x dpoy and 9x all def 1st/2nd teams to KD's 0.

Eh, at least in theory, a player's defensive value is baked onto how they rank overall. All-nba "should" be a combination of offensive+defensive assessment

[lessthanjake]

I’ll give you 2012-2014. That’s it. LeBron was better every season through 2020. Steph was better every season from 2015 on. Chris Paul was better almost every year until he hit his decline phase. Kawhi was better from 2015 on whenever he was healthy. Giannis and Jokić have been better players since their emergence in 2019 and have hit much higher heights than KD ever reached.

Since KD just gets his own shot without much passing, playmaking, or off-ball movement he has much worse impact numbers than other top players of his era. Here are the players I mentioned by simple career on/off:

Curry +11.3
LeBron +10.8
Jokic +10.6
CP3 +9.6
Giannis +6.6
Kawhi +6.3
Durant +5.7

26 year RAPM has them like this:
1. LeBron +9.1
3. Paul +8.1
6. Jokic +7.2
11. Curry +6.5
13. Giannis +6.4
18. Kawhi +5.7
28. Durant +4.7

Could you provide your top 5 for each year from 2016-22 period (excluding 2020)?

2016: LeBron, Steph, Kawhi, Dray, Westbrook
2017: LeBron, Westbrook, Steph, Kawhi, CP3
2018: LeBron, Harden, AD, Giannis, Oladipo
2019: Kawhi, Giannis, Harden, George, Steph
2021: Giannis, Jokic, Embiid, Steph, Luka
2022: Jokic, Giannis, Steph, Embiid, Tatum

Come on, man. Victor Oladipo above Kevin Durant? In a year Kevin Durant won Finals MVP? Really?

[AEnigma]

To some extent I obviously agree with you, since I said this is part of why I have Hakeem above Durant. But there are reasonable ways of looking at this that are much more charitable to Durant.

For instance, Durant is not the only person to be on a stacked super team. For example, LeBron’s Miami team was no less talented IMO (indeed, LeBron himself thought they’d just easily rattle off 7 titles, because of how talented they were). Neither was the Moses Malone Sixers. Or the Showtime Lakers, etc. And yet none of the stacked teams in history have ever been as dominant as those Warriors teams were.

… Because none of them were 10 SRS teams without the star in question. That is a complete false equivalence, not “charity”.

The Moses Malone Sixers had just lost in the finals the year before Malone went there. The Showtime Lakers made the finals when Kareem was no longer there (not to mention won a title when Kareem was a 41 year old 12 PER role player). Wilt went to a Lakers team that had been making the finals almost every year, to play alongside Jerry West and Elgin Baylor still in their prime.

Fascinating how you seem to pick and choose when SRS matters.

It’s really not unprecedented for there to be teams that are right there as the best or second-best team in the league and having an MVP-level superstar on top of it. It’s happened before, and the result was simply never as dominant.

Because the teams were not as dominant either. The Showtime Lakers were like a .500 team without Magic, or a bit higher at that 1987 peak; they did not even add anyone, so no idea why you feel they are relevant. The 76ers were better than that but still regularly falling short of titles (and built around an older star). The West Lakers gave up multiple strong pieces for Wilt — who dropped off from his 1968 level — and much like the 76ers were mostly known for perpetually falling short.

You can try to suggest that it was never as dominant because those other teams were never as good without that star as the Warriors were without Durant. And obviously the win totals (and the title in 2015) are solid evidence for that point. But, as I said, I think there’s a pretty strong case to be made that a lot of those other teams without the additional star were actually as or more talented than the pre-Durant Warriors, and that the Warriors’ success was predicated in large part on exploiting a huge tactical advantage (i.e. using the three-ball in a more modern way—which we now know is just way more effective offense), and that was a tactical advantage that was clearly going to rapidly evaporate after they used it to go 73-9. The Warriors being a 73-9 team in 2016 without Durant really doesn’t mean they would’ve been that level of team in 2017 or 2018, when the rest of the league was naturally catching up quickly to the tactical advantage that was a huge cause of the Warriors being that successful. It’s also the case that talking about their SRS and 73 wins is obviously missing that they did not win the title, and in fact almost lost in the conference finals. They pretty obviously weren’t quite as good as the SRS or wins would suggest.

They won the title as a 10 SRS team in 2015 and played at a 10 SRS pace when Durant missed time. Stop twisting yourself in knots to justify this terrible take. No title team added an MVP level player basically for free. No team that did was ever sniffing 10 SRS. The fact they failed to repeat when faced with another all-time team is not relevant to either of those points.

A charitable reading of that to Durant would be to conclude that this is because he’s an all-time ceiling raiser player—which would be a huge deal. Of course, the counter to that would be that he didn’t have to raise the ceiling much because the Warriors had already gone 73-9. But we obviously have to recognize that, despite that record, they were not even necessarily the best team in the league—as demonstrated by not having won the title and having had serious difficulty even making the finals.

Oh well that changes it. A couple of other teams could play them evenly, therefore, does not really matter that they added a top five player (taken off one of those somewhat even teams).

4 SRS lift for one season is not any sort of historical outlier, no, regardless of dressing that up as “ceiling raising”.

Yes, actually it does change it. The Warriors went from, by your own admission “a couple of other teams could play them evenly” to no one being able to play them even close, including the same team that played them evenly and had won. You may want to think that that should be completely discounted, but the fact is that we actually haven’t really seen that type of ceiling raising before, and it’s not because MVP-level players haven’t been added to a team that only “a couple other teams could play evenly.” That happened exactly with the Moses Malone Sixers, and they were pretty unplayable for one year, and then they crashed out in the first round after that and then got Barkley and still couldn’t do much.

Because the team aged out… That is the difference. The Warriors and Durant were all in their primes (outside of Iguodala), and their competition was a lot more potent than the 1982 Lakers.

Also, quite literally, yes, it was a one year blip of “no one playing them evenly” anyway.

We didn’t have the same sort of natural experiment with the Showtime Lakers exactly, but at their height they were quite similar to the very late-1980s, early 1990’s Lakers that won a title and lost in the finals twice, except they also had Kareem still in a part of his career where he was a great player.

???? And they had no Worthy and a much worse version of Magic.

Is this some elaborate bit to highlight the absurdity of placing Durant at that level?

Heck, the same Cavs team that the Warriors had to face had basically gotten to game 6 of the 2015 finals without Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving (with Love being out almost the whole playoffs, and Irving being out almost all of the last two rounds), and then in 2016 and 2017 essentially added them to the mix. Neither of those guys are MVP-level, but adding two all-NBA guys to a team that was in game 6 of the finals basically without them is still pretty wild. All of these teams did quite well when they were at their fullest level of strength, but they did not dominate the league quite like the Durant Warriors did. There’s a reading of that that just says that that’s because no team was quite as good without a star guy, but another reading is that that’s because no one’s been quite the ceiling raiser that Durant (and Curry, of course) was.

Congratulations, Durant has cleared the bar of Kyrie and Love.

A charitable reading of Durant would also recognize that a huge portion of what made those pre-Durant Warriors quite so successful was that they were extracting the benefits of being significantly ahead of other teams tactically—employing much more of today’s three-ball offense than other teams were, in a way that gave them a huge tactical advantage. That was an advantage that would obviously naturally go away fairly quickly, as other teams quickly adapted to mimic the Warriors’ superior offensive tactics as much as possible. Indeed, the number of threes taken immediately went up a lot after 2016, as did offensive efficiency. The Warriors’ tactical advantage was going away, so there’s reason to believe that the Warriors’ success would’ve diminished a good bit if they’d not gotten Durant. In other words, perhaps the Warriors were a 73-9 team that didn’t win the finals and were likely to be on the decline (due to losing their tactical advantage) with no chance of being anything close to a 73-9 team again. Which would make their utter dominance with Durant more impressive.

Oh if only there were some way for us to determine how the Warriors played without Durant. Guess we will never know!

I don’t think you’re actually reading my point. Are you denying that the 2015 and 2016 Warriors benefited massively from being way ahead of the tactical curve? Are you denying that teams caught on pretty quickly tactically, such that the team couldn’t have extracted that same tactical advantage in the years Durant was there? Have you thought about what conclusion those things might raise?

I am asking you to provide the slightest shred of support to the notion that they lost that advantage in 2017, and I am also asking you to stop pretending as if Steve Kerr was the one who revealed to the world that three-pointers existed.

You are blatantly not thinking about this and instead just manufacturing any possible angle to push a bad point.

Meanwhile, the charitable reading of this comparison for Durant would be that Hakeem’s titles came in an artificially way weakened league, because Jordan was temporarily gone (yes, I know Jordan was technically back in 1995, but not really).

Yeah poor Jordan was not really back, because he could only be called that once he again had the league’s best supporting cast.

This is going down a silly rabbit hole, but the point wasn’t that Jordan’s team in 1995 wasn’t good. It was that Jordan came back but only came back at the very very end of the season, so he’d not really been fully back with the team. It was a very makeshift thing.

Yeah I bet it was tough for Pippen and Phil to familiarise themselves with his playstyle.

The idea would be that he was just the lucky beneficiary of the league’s clear best team going into hibernation.

Oh wow the best player in the league was gone for one of those titles. I wonder, how does a once in a lifetime cap spike permitting you to sign with a team paying a two-time MVP less than most all-stars compare? How does it compare to have your toughest competition get taken out by one of the goons on your team?

Perhaps it compares somewhat similarly, and that’s my point!

It does not, the latter is comically disproportionate.

I think the Rockets’ runs were still difficult (they faced some good teams!), and so I still put a lot of value on Hakeem’s titles, but it wouldn’t be totally unreasonable to somewhat discount titles won where the clear dominant player/team randomly took itself off the board for a couple years.

It would be and is. By that logic, Durant himself ruined one of the other dominant teams in the league to win his titles.

Not sure I understand your point. That Durant took the Thunder off the board so his own titles should be discounted on that basis? That’s some wild logical pretzeling.

Just trying to keep pace with you.

And is also obviously clearly different from a team taking itself off the board for a two year period surrounding which they won 3 titles immediately before and 3 titles immediately after.

The Bulls did not “take themselves off the board”: their best player left for one postseason and then upon returning found that the loss of their best frontcourt player had become a severe weakness.

But you are right, it is clearly different: one involved a player jumping ship to a historically good roster for essentially no cost, and the other involved one easier than expected Finals matchup because of an absence. The latter is more comparable to, say, an easier than expected conference finals matchup because your teammate injured the best opposing player. Or an easier than expected conference finals matchup because the second-best opposing player got injured. Or an easier than expected finals matchup because the second best player on your previous Finals opponent randomly decided he wanted to lead his own team — and then he and his new best teammate got injured on that new team. That is the comparison. Not facing the toughest conceivable path to a title is par for the course in a league where player absences are routine. It is literally unprecedented for a cap spike to permit the best roster in the league to freely sign an MVP-calibre free agent.

Durant has had great series’ where he lost. Take, for instance, a very prominent example of the 2012 Finals, where Durant put up 31 points a game on 65% TS% in the finals. And that’s against a WAY better team than the 1987 SuperSonics and the 1988 Mavericks.

Ah right, I forgot to make the case for Durant, we also need to pretend that the only relevant consideration is their scoring.

Did Durant play badly in that series beyond scoring? No. Durant objectively had a really good series in that 2012 Finals. And so that’s a very good answer to your question of whether Durant had losses in series’ where he played really well. There’s other examples too, of course—such as the 2021 series against Milwaukee.

I love how you are pushing two series in a fifteen year career as some crowning achievement.

In terms of beating a team while disadvantaged, I’d say beating the 2016 Spurs qualifies very highly. That Spurs team had won 67 games and actually had an essentially equal SRS to the 73-9 Warriors (10.38 vs. 10.28). The only teams in the last 50 years with as high a SRS as the 2016 Spurs were the 2017 Warriors, 2016 Warriors, 1997 Bulls, and 1996 Bulls. They were genuinely an all-time great team. And they were healthy. But Durant led his team to victory in 6 games, despite his co-star actually having a bad series. It’s certainly quite possible to argue that that’s as or more impressive than beating the 1986 Lakers, who were great but had an SRS of 6.84.

His co-star was the one drawing the Spurs attention. “Bad series”, Westbrook was the guy creating all the easy looks for Durant!

We know Durant thrives in that environment. The question is what happens when it stops being easy.

Please. I get that Westbrook did some good stuff in that series, but a guy who was shooting high volume with a 47.9% TS% and also turned the ball over 4.5 times a game had a bad series. It was obviously not completely catastrophic or they couldn’t have won against such a great team, but please don’t try to suggest that Westbrook was a major reason they won.

He was. Lol. Go back and watch that series and look at how the Spurs defend him. Do you think his creation is just inevitable. Do you think his teammates do not benefit from his scoring gravity. Do you think it was a happy accident that the team could only function when Westbrook was on the court?

Maybe the lesson here, as always, ultimately comes down to: “You can support this bad take if all your basketball insight is taken straight from a webpage.”

And it’s worth going over the types of teams each of these players has lost to in the playoffs. The teams Hakeem lost to in the playoffs include: (1) the 41-41 1985 Jazz led by Adrian Dantley; (2) the 39-43 1987 SuperSonics led by Tom Chambers; (3) the 53-29 1988 Mavericks led by Mark Aguirre (this team was actually pretty solid though); (4) the 47-35 1989 SuperSonics led by Dale Ellis; and (5) no one in 1992 because the Rockets didn’t make the playoffs. They also lost to the 1990 and 1991 Lakers, which was of course a great team, but they lost to them in the first round because the Rockets were only the 8th seed and 6th seed, and the series’ weren’t close. Hakeem’s first 8 seasons in the NBA were actually pretty rough, aside from the one random finals run. They had mediocre regular seasons, followed by middling playoff runs in all the other seasons in that time period. In contrast, Durant has lost in the playoffs 9 times, and on 6 of those occasions it has been to the eventual champions, and two of the others were to the 73-9 Warriors and the finalist 2022 Celtics. The only real black mark that’s comparable to those Rockets’ losses is the 2013 loss to the Grizzlies (and even that team won 56 games). And Durant never had years like Hakeem where he was healthy in the regular season and his team either missed the playoffs or barely made it. Of course, the counterargument to that is that Durant has had more talented teams than Hakeem. But a reasonable person could certainly conclude that actually Russell Westbrook is way overrated and was never remotely successful without Durant. And once you conclude that, suddenly you’re just left with Durant making his teams much more consistently great than Hakeem did.

If only we had some way to discern Westbrook’s value.

So once again we are back to Durant only having an argument if we argue as disingenuously as possible.

Huh? Westbrook has had essentially zero team success without Durant. In his years without Durant, his teams have won the following number of games: 47, 48, 49, 44 (out of 72), 34, 33, and 43 (using the Lakers for last year, and the team was 25-30 before Westbrook left). Here have been the playoff results in order: (1) first-round exit in 5 games; (2) first-round exit in 6 games; (3) first-round exit in 5 games; (4) second-round exit in 5 games; (5) first-round exit in 5 games; (6) missed the playoffs; and (7) first-round exit in 5 games. And he’s played with some really talented guys in that timeframe: Paul George, James Harden, LeBron James, Anthony Davis, Bradley Beal, etc.

So this is where we reach the stage where we pretend Westbrook is the same player year to year and therefore it was all Durant making him look good.

Along the way in those years, Westbrook’s teams have barely performed better with him on the court than off the court. So yeah, I think we do actually have ways of discerning Westbrook’s value, and the answer really isn’t necessarily high at all.

Lmfao just shamelessly lying now.

Ralph Sampson was more than just good in college. He was an all-star for four straight years—three of them with Hakeem.

And such deserved all-star campaigns!

Is this where we transition to talking about how Hakeem had all-star Otis Thorpe on his team in 1994.

And, again, we are talking about what a charitable reading for Durant from a reasonable person might be.

There is a difference between charity and cozenage. These are not reasonable stances from people committed to the sport, which is the bar here.

And I think that that would be that Russell Westbrook is actually not really a positive.

Baseless. I see this is the consequence of the past two years: the guy who was comparably impactful to Durant is now rewritten as a valueless mooch.

I would love for you to explain to me how Russell Westbrook was comparably impactful to Durant.

How about you take another look at those on/off metrics and get back to me.

The last couple years aren’t necessarily a reflection of how Russ was in his better years, but it was super obvious back then that Durant was the superior player. Westbrook was always a high-volume, low-scoring-efficiency, high-turnover guy whose presence on the court messed up his team’s spacing. His elite athleticism helped make up for that, and messing up spacing mattered a bit less in earlier years than it does now. But we really were always talking about a guy who had some absolutely enormous negatives to his game, such that his value was always pretty questionable.

All fine theory, but not especially well supported by the reality of his impact.

I am not typically a Westbrook defender, but the fact of the matter is that without playmakers like Westbrook, or Steph, or Harden, Durant has not been good enough to take teams anywhere.

It’s not a conclusion that I’d entirely agree with, but there’s definitely plenty of evidence to support such a conclusion, including playoffs series won by the Thunder where Westbrook was horrible.

If you have no idea how to watch the sport. “Inefficiency = bad!!!!”

And if Westbrook is not actually very helpful, then suddenly Durant didn’t really have much help either for a lot of his career and yet led his teams to be consistently quite good.

Yes, any argument is possible if you untether yourself from pesky burdens like “accuracy” and “correct representation”.

Yes, inefficiency is bad. As are lots of turnovers. It doesn’t make someone a box-score-watching robot to recognize that. It’s just a basic fact about the game. Trying to be some basketball hipster that doesn’t care about efficiency is not going to make abysmal scoring efficiency from a volume shooter into something that’s not a massive negative. Did Russ do things that made up for the cripplingly awful shooting (and the many turnovers)? Yes, he did. But I think there’s a perfectly reasonable argument that the other things he did weren’t worth enough that we should consider him to have been some significant value-added player that Durant should’ve won with.

There is not, and you cannot make it. Westbrook had a hard ceiling to what he could contribute, but what he contributed was a hell of a lot more than any teammate Hakeem ever had.

There’s a reasonable argument the other way on that too, but the value of Russell Westbrook is certainly a far from settled question.

Then it should be easy for you to pull up impact data discrediting his “value”.

It’s also worth noting that on the back end of his career, Hakeem actually had teams with other superstar players on them, and it didn’t work. And indeed, the failure to win with Drexler and Barkley in at least that first year together (where they weren’t actually particularly old yet and were healthy in the playoffs) is actually genuinely suggestive of Hakeem not being the type of ceiling raiser that Durant arguably was. That team was crazy talented and didn’t even make the finals.

Another very educated and insightful take. Oh if only Hakeem had played better in 1997. If only he had not injured Barkley and made him have potentially the worst series of his career to that point. Durant would never allow that.

Huh? Barkley had come back from injury like almost a month before the playoffs. And he was okay in the series they lost.

If Westbrook put up those numbers you would be losing your mind.

Obviously his numbers were not going to be the same as when he was the #1 guy for most of his career, and he didn’t shoot well in that series, but he got to the line a ton (such that his overall scoring wasn’t inefficient) and he rebounded well. And, honestly, a lot of being a ceiling raiser is being someone that great players can play with and *not* have “potentially the worst series of [their] career.” That’s actually the point! This sort of thing indicates that Hakeem was not the type of ceiling raiser that Durant arguably is.

Typically incoherent standards. “Barkley played fine, he got to the line and rebounded. But also if Hakeem were really good then Barkley would have missed fewer shots. That is a condemnation of Hakeem not being a ceiling raiser like Durant, who guaranteed that those next to him scored well. Also, Westbrook is a bum who did not score well and that is on him for not properly taking advantage of Durant’s incredible ceiling raising.”

You talk about “ceiling raising” like some magic spell. Is Durant scoring better than Hakeem? Maybe, but damn high bar to clear. He is certainly not defending better than Hakeem. So apparently the idea is that he through his sheer presence lifted the efficiency of everyone else enough to make up for all defensive loss (because defence famously does not raise ceilings).

If that is your bar for “ceiling raising”, then Westbrook is an all-time ceiling raiser too.

Again, as detailed above, there’s much more charitable readings of this stuff for Durant.

Charity is when I make up whatever I want to push a bad argument.

think you’re thinking that your view is the only reasonable one. That’s not the case.

It is the case. At no point have you presented a reasonable view here for Durant, or at least in any sense beyond, “A (bad) reason was provided.”

I actually agree with your view in the end, but to say there’s no reasonable case for Durant as compared to a player with a really similar resume is silly IMO.

That is because the résumé is only “similar” if you are looking at nothing more than their basketball-reference headings.

to get to that conclusion, you just have to be very stuck in the idea that your interpretation and valuation of the stuff on those similar resumes is the only reasonable one, and I don’t think that that’s ever going to be right.

I expect people to not be stuck in the idea that superficial similarities are a replacement for comprehensive assessment of the sport. Saying Durant’s résumé is equivalent to Hakeem’s in any meaningful sense is akin to calling Rick Barry’s virtually indistinguishable from Oscar Robertson’s. It is the same type of thought process that has people putting Isiah Thomas above Chris Paul because he has two titles and a Finals MVP. Bad rationale does not carry equal weight.

This is just you essentially saying “If I disagree with something, then it is not reasonable.” That doesn’t make sense in the context of evaluations that inherently rely on subjective judgments about a whole host of things.

No, I can disagree with reasonable things. This is not one of those reasonable things — as evidenced by you needing to take the most twisted stances to even attempt a case.

I’ve already said I put Hakeem above Durant myself. But I am able to conceptualize the fact that someone could disagree with my assessment while still being reasonable. You, however, do not seem to be able to do that.

Because your bar for “reasonable” is apparently six feet deep.

[iggymcfrack]

Could you provide your top 5 for each year from 2016-22 period (excluding 2020)?

2016: LeBron, Steph, Kawhi, Dray, Westbrook
2017: LeBron, Westbrook, Steph, Kawhi, CP3
2018: LeBron, Harden, AD, Giannis, Oladipo
2019: Kawhi, Giannis, Harden, George, Steph
2021: Giannis, Jokic, Embiid, Steph, Luka
2022: Jokic, Giannis, Steph, Embiid, Tatum

Come on, man. Victor Oladipo above Kevin Durant? In a year Kevin Durant won Finals MVP? Really?

I just went back to the Retro POY project to see what my ballot was at the time. Oladipo had a really nice season and the analytics loved him. Here’s what I said at the time:

“Oladipo was fantastic on both ends throughout the season, playing some of the best wing defense in the league while carrying Indiana's offense as well. He had an on/off of +14.1 during the season which went all the way up to an insane +19.7 during the playoffs. I'm actually really tempted to swap him with Giannis due to his superior impact stats, but I feel like Giannis has more actual ability to affect the game and his impact is just waiting to be unleashed by the right coaching staff. I'd be very surprised if those impact numbers don't trend sharply up next year.”

Even if we write off Oladipo as a fluke though and take him off the ballot, I’d still have Curry over KD so it wouldn’t put him in the top 5 or anything.

Also, I’m often very confused to as why KD stans always make such a big deal out of the Finals MVPs. Those were some of the least competitive Finals ever. The Warriors were ridiculously overpowered and Cleveland didn’t have a chance in any of them. All KD had to do to win FMVP was have more impressive box numbers than Steph for 4 or 5 games in a series where they’d win easily even if he played like garbage.

[Cavsfansince84]

Well, I’d personally put Hakeem ahead, so this is me making an argument that I think is reasonable but that I don’t ultimately agree with (so to the extent you want to argue with it, my response may well be that I agree):

But I think the case for Durant over Hakeem would center on a few things.

1. Durant and Hakeem both played in an era with a top 2 GOAT candidate. And there were times where people genuinely questioned whether Durant was better than LeBron, while no one questioned whether Hakeem was better than Michael. Maybe that’s just a function of social media being crazy these days, but I do think there was a sense of Durant being closer to LeBron than there ever was about Hakeem with Jordan.

2. Relatedly, Durant played on a team with a top 11 player of all time (i.e. Steph), and the conventional wisdom at the time was actually most commonly that Durant was the superior player. It’s not a conclusion I personally ever agreed with, but it certainly does seem like a pretty relevant fact that is hard to ignore with Durant. Durant was on a team with a guy who is usually put above Hakeem all-time, and Durant was widely considered superior. It’s a bit of transitive property mumbo-jumbo, but I think a reasonable person could find this pretty persuasive.

3. There’s the case I’ve been making about Durant as a ceiling raiser. Durant works very well off the ball, which helps make him a fantastic ceiling raiser. We saw that with the Warriors. People downplay the Warriors’ dominance because they were so talented, but I think there’s a good case to be made that there’s been several other similarly talented teams in NBA history and none of them were as utterly dominant as the Warriors. And that reflects very well on Durant’s (and Steph’s) fairly unique abilities as a ceiling raiser. Being able to be a major star on probably the greatest team of all time is no small thing! Hakeem was briefly on a bit of a super team, and it fizzled out fairly disappointingly, so I think it’d be reasonable to conclude he didn’t have the same ceiling raising ability.

4. Hakeem’s ability as a floor raiser is essentially undeniable in light of his two titles—especially the one in 1994 when he didn’t have Drexler. But we also need to see this in the context of the rest of Hakeem’s career. Hakeem spent a substantial portion of his career having his team be mostly irrelevant—failing to make the playoffs, having a mediocre record and then losing in the playoffs to genuinely mediocre teams that lacked any star anywhere near Hakeem’s level, or barely making the playoffs and losing easily to a good team. So we have to see Hakeem’s floor raising ability in that context—he had an amazing title without a real #2, but he also had a whole bunch of years where he couldn’t make his team relevant at all. Durant obviously doesn’t have anything like that 1994 year, but his teams have consistently been really relevant teams that are very good. The obviously counterpoint to that is that he had better teammates than Hakeem did in that era, and in many cases that’s true, but I think one could very reasonably take a view of Russell Westbrook that makes that gap not seem very significant for a lot of those Thunder years.

So, to summarize, I guess I’d articulate the argument in two general ways: First, the way that Durant was compared to top-tier all-time greats by viewers/fans during his era was superior to the way Hakeem was in his era. Second, Durant’s ceiling raising ability was superior, and the gap in their apparent abilities as a floor raiser isn’t all that significant once one digs further into Hakeem’s career.

Again, I could argue against these same points—after all, on balance, I don’t find them persuasive enough to agree with the conclusion! But I think someone could reasonably be persuaded by it.

Alright, granted I know you didn't quite make as fleshed out of a case as you maybe could have due to not wanting to put too much time into it but based on what you did say:
1. I think a lot of those points don't carry much weight. Re Hakeem relative to MJ and KD to LeBron, KD had higher mvp finishes overall but I think the competition in the 87-93 years was deeper. In the 2010-2014 period it really felt like LeBron and KD were the only real contenders since Wade kept missing so many games and CP3's teams just weren't good enough or he missed games. I don't see this as a real argument for having KD over Hakeem,
2. I don't think KD was commonly seen as superior to Steph at all. I think it was pretty 50/50 and if anything leaned towards Steph since it was seen as his team and he is the one who won b2b mvps and led them to 73 wins.
3. KD as ceiling raiser. He definitely has a case for being a great one since the 2017 Warriors are probably the goat team. I do think Hakeem scales very well though due to his flexibility on offense, ability to stretch the floor some and of course being a goat level defensive anchor. So idk if I'd say KD is a better ceiling raiser tbh. Maybe if he's putting up 35ppg on 70% ts you can make that case. I think the 87-92 Rockets years also have be put into context to some degree regarding decisions his teammates and front office made. Hakeem's blame in their results doesn't rate that high to me.
4. The other factors that I think absolutely have to be addressed are Hakeem's playoff performance level and his durability. I think Hakeem in the playoffs proved himself as a scorer to probably the same level that KD did and that's supposed to be where KD really outshines him. Durability is another thing for which there is no argument other than KD still played in the playoffs some of those years.

So that is why I still don't see a KD>Hakeem argument as reasonable. Its possible that with some metrics a better case could be made but its hard because not all of them are available for pre 2000 guys.

[Jetzger]

Man, time has really been kind to Durant’s 2012 finals performance I guess. I seem to remember most people being largely unimpressed at the time. The scoring numbers are nice, the fact that Westbrook and Harden were the ones putting the pressure on Miami’s defense notwithstanding. But I don’t see how anyone could say he was anything but awful at basically everything else. On offense he was basically just a possession ender, zero impact as a playmaker (nearly twice as many turnovers as assists). He didn’t rebound well (lower rebound % than both his guard mates). And my god the defense. Not even just that he was bad, the effort wasn’t even there half the time. A bunch of instances where he gets lost in no man’s land while his mark gets off an uncontested 3 or open look at the rim off a cut. Or he just stands flat footed and weakly slaps at the ball as Lebron or Chalmers drive right past him. Bunch of bad fouls. Just ugh.

Certainly not the worst performance or anything like that, but objectively good all things considered? Eh. Bad outside of scoring? Absolutely.

[AEnigma]

Defensive play is not independent of all-NBA selections. All-NBA is not an All-Offensive team. It’s an All-NBA team, and takes both sides of the ball into account. A good part of why Hakeem got those all-NBA selections is because of his defense. Indeed, he was clearly not as good an offensive player as Durant—the reason he made as many all-NBA teams is because of his defense! So it’s not some additional factor that must be considered above and beyond All-NBA selections.

There are double as many all-NBA selections for forwards than centers, and there’s also double as many forwards in the NBA than there are centers. I don’t see your point.

The latter point is just wrong. Hakeem was not “largely forgotten.” The “Twin Towers” was marketed a ton. I grew up in that era and Hakeem was one of my top 2 favorite players (alongside Jordan, of course), despite having never been to Houston in my life at that point and not having access to their regular season games. This was because he was talked about a lot. He was plenty prominent. To some extent, the era of social media and whatnot makes *everyone* be more marketed than before, but playing in an era where everyone is marketed more doesn’t make it easier for any individual player to be recognized. And it certainly doesn’t for a player who spent half his career playing in Oklahoma City.

I mean if you're a superstar it is easier to make a forward selection than a center selection. That's pretty obvious. What does there being double the amount of forwards have to do when we are talking about the elite of the NBA? If there are two MVP caliber players who are forwards they can both make the 1st team. If it is an era that has 3 MVP caliber centers then obviously only one can make 1st team. Did Hakeem play in an era that had more than 1 MVP caliber center?

I’m not sure I understand how you aren’t able to see how it is super relevant that there are twice as many forwards as centers. That also is going to typically mean that there’s twice as many really good forwards as there are really good centers!

…
Yeah how about we pretend forward is as historically deep a position as centre. More very genuine argumentation.

The Thunder were an incredibly trendy team with their gear everywhere. Durant and Westbrook have been in the center of NBA media for their entire duration. The Thunder were among the leaders in most national games despite being the smallest market. They also played in an era where people can watch their games even if they're not from OKC. Then Durant went to GSW where he was definitely the center...then he went to Brooklyn which he is still relevant albeit for negative reasons. If anything his time in Phoenix has been the most cooled down time in his entire career.

You're seriously comparing the Olajuwon twin tower era which was like 2 seconds to Durant's nearly entire career? Hakeem is definitely forgotten, how many conversations have you had about Hakeem regarding his seasons between 1987-1992? Many people forgot he even went to the NBA finals before 1994. He may as well have played for like 3 seasons the way he is talked about normally.

This is just such an odd comment. Do you want to know why no one is having conversations these days about what Hakeem did between 1987 and 1992? Because there’s basically nothing to talk about! His teams were mediocre and they either failed to make the playoffs, lost to a pretty mediocre team in the playoffs, or barely made the playoffs and then lost easily to a good team. There’s not much to talk about, because it just wasn’t a very good time period for Hakeem! Durant doesn’t have anything like that, because he actually has never had a time period where his team was essentially irrelevant. That’s a good thing in a comparison between these two players!

No, it is an irrelevant thing in a comparison so long as you are not bothering to consider their respective teams — which you are not.

All the same, Durant and Westbrook have both always been more popular than Hakeem, even when they lose. Pretending otherwise is more what is at this point characteristic disingenuousness.

Also, as a sidenote, the twin tower era wasn’t “2 seconds.” It was three years of Hakeem’s career. If the twin tower era was “2 seconds,” then so was Durant’s time on the Warriors!

Actually shameless.

“Hakeem had a mediocre frontcourt partner for the first two and a half seasons of his career, what more could you ask for as a brand building exercise!”

I really can't sit here and talk to someone who "lived during Olajuwons era" (which means what, you're like 30 something?) and thinks that he has the same level of prominence as Kevin Durant. Maybe you just don't know how to gage that stuff, but that's honestly just absurd. Durant even (erroneously) gets compared to Lebron James, frequently who is probably the 3rd most famous basketball player of all time. There is a sizeable minority of people who will say Durant is better than James or better than him in a handful of select seasons - Olajuwon never had that type of delusion in comparison with Jordan. People are more likely to say "really, that guy?" than say "Olajuwon was better than Jordan".

Again, I don’t see how you think what you are saying is good for Hakeem in this comparison. What you’re saying here is basically “Durant played in the same era as a top 2 GOAT candidate, and a sizable minority of people thought he was better than that GOAT candidate, while Hakeem played with a top 2 GOAT candidate and no one ever thought he was better.” That’s actually a really good argument in favor of putting Hakeem above Durant all time!

Hakeem has a much easier case to have been more valuable than Jordan than Durant does to have been more valuable than Lebron, but here we come back to you assessing players by popularity and raw offensive production.

Hakeem Olajuwon being your favorite player when you're not from Houston doesn't mean anything (not even your favorite by your own admission, your favorite is the media Jesus). Paul Pierce was my favorite player and I am not from Boston, that does not mean that he all over New York media for his prime. Are you saying with a straight face that Paul Pierce was covered well in the media before 2008? Favorite player isn't indicative of their media coverage. Durant is a media star the likes that Olajuwon never was, and is more famous than Olajuwon even today.

Hakeem is not talked about nearly with the same prominence as many other top ten all timers outside of serious basketball circles and is often left out of top tens by more wider audiences. Do you think that has nothing to do with how much of a non-story the Rockets were for the majority of his career as well as other commercial factors? (played in a more domestic time, foreign player, not a big personality, a center in a time when perimeter players became the star of the show, didn't play with another star for most his career played in a less popular conference, won his title when the mega star/team of his era was not there).

There are more people who are familiar with Olajuwon playing wtih Chuck and Pippen than say, 88 Olajuwon. You're talking two different ages of media. By the time the NBA got better at covering more teams Olajuwon was already old.

Again, the Rockets being “a non-story . . . for the majority of his career” is actually a major fact that could help someone put Durant over Hakeem!

HAKEEM DOES NOT CONTROL HIS TEAM.

More generally, though, Hakeem “is not talked about nearly with the same prominence as many other top ten all timers” because he is not a top ten all-timer. There’s 11 guys that are clearly above him. But, from what I’ve seen, Hakeem is actually the most common guy put at that #12 slot after the pretty rock-solid top 11 (in fact, he’s who I’d have at #12 myself). Indeed, he’s the guy that people decided to latch onto when I said Durant could be as high as #12. Amongst the sort of all-time guys who have won a title and a couple MVPs or a couple titles and an MVP, I’d say Hakeem is talked about the most. I don’t understand this notion you have that Hakeem is somehow disrespected or something by fans.

He is disrespected because people like you will come in and say there are eleven players clearly better. There are not. You conflate team success with individual quality, so you condemn Hakeem for only winning two titles with by far the worst year-to-year casts of anyone in that group. And because he did that as the best defensive player since Russell rather than as a primarily offensive star, no one who views the sport superficially thinks any more about him.

I think the case for Durant over Hakeem would center on a few things.

1. Durant and Hakeem both played in an era with a top 2 GOAT candidate. And there were times where people genuinely questioned whether Durant was better than LeBron, while no one questioned whether Hakeem was better than Michael. Maybe that’s just a function of social media being crazy these days or people loving to hate LeBron, but I do think there was a sense of Durant being closer to LeBron than there ever was about Hakeem with Jordan.

Literally only tenable if all you are doing is judging by points per game or rings.

2. Relatedly, Durant played on a team with a top 11 player of all time (i.e. Steph), and the conventional wisdom at the time was actually most commonly that Durant was the superior player.

Wisdom by people who cannot assess the sport is not wisdom, but this is an excellent accompaniment to your prior point. “Highest ppg = best player, that is just conventional wisdom!”

It’s not a conclusion I personally ever agreed with, but it certainly does seem like a pretty relevant fact that is hard to ignore with Durant.

Relevant to a total fallacy.

Durant was on a team with a guy who is usually put above Hakeem all-time,

By whom, more ring-counters?

and Durant was widely considered superior. It’s a bit of transitive property mumbo-jumbo, but I think a reasonable person could find this pretty persuasive.

None of the people you are describing have been reasonable.

3. There’s the case I’ve been making about Durant as a ceiling raiser. Durant works very well off the ball, which helps make him a fantastic ceiling raiser. We saw that with the Warriors. People downplay the Durant Warriors’ dominance because they were so talented, but I think there’s a good case to be made that there’s been several other similarly talented teams in NBA history and none of them were as utterly dominant as the Warriors.

There is no case. He joined a 10 SRS championship team and made them overwhelmingly dominant for a year, wowwwww, imagine how few players could have done that.

And that reflects very well on Durant’s (and Steph’s) fairly unique abilities as a ceiling raiser. Being able to be a major star on probably the greatest team of all time is no small thing! Hakeem was briefly on a bit of a super team, and it fizzled out fairly disappointingly, so I think it’d be reasonable to conclude he didn’t have the same ceiling raising ability.

Yes, old Barkley and Drexler is very much an equivalent supporting cast. Could have probably won 70 games but for Hakeem pushing then down.

4. Hakeem’s ability as a floor raiser is essentially undeniable in light of his two titles—especially the one in 1994 when he didn’t have Drexler. But we also need to see this in the context of the rest of Hakeem’s career. Hakeem spent a substantial portion of his career having his team be mostly irrelevant—failing to make the playoffs, having a mediocre record and then losing in the playoffs to genuinely mediocre teams that lacked any star anywhere near Hakeem’s level, or barely making the playoffs and losing easily to a good team. So we have to see Hakeem’s floor raising ability in that context—he had an amazing title without a real #2, but he also had a whole bunch of years where he couldn’t make his team relevant at all. Durant obviously doesn’t have anything like that 1994 year, but his teams have consistently been really relevant teams that are very good. The obviously counterpoint to that is that he had better teammates than Hakeem did in that era, and in many cases that’s true, but I think one could very reasonably take a view of Russell Westbrook that makes that gap not seem very significant for a lot of those Thunder years.

You are a deeply unserious person.

Since you love “conventional wisdom” so much: Westbrook was a multi-time all-NBA player who finished fourth in MVP voting in 2015, fourth in MVP voting in 2016 (ahead of Durant…), and first in 2017. Durant had the worst postseason of his career when he had to play without Westbrook in 2013, but secretly Westbrook was also a poison on the team and brought that group down to the Kenny Smith / Vernon Maxwell / Otis Thorpe tier of support.

Beyond the pale.

So, to summarize, I guess I’d articulate the argument in two general ways: First, the way that Durant was compared to top-tier all-time greats by viewers/fans during his era was superior to the way Hakeem was in his era.

Which, on top of being blatantly untrue, has nothing to do with actual basketball ability or impact.

Second, Durant’s ceiling raising ability was superior,

* When one equates mid-30s Barkley and Drexler to a 10 SRS team that for one season was elevated by 4 SRS points

and the gap in their apparent abilities as a floor raiser isn’t all that significant once one digs further into Hakeem’s career.

* When one penalises Hakeem for having bad teams and pretends Westbrook was a legitimately cancerous force despite all possible indications to the contrary.

Again, I could argue against these same points—after all, on balance, I don’t find them persuasive enough to agree with the conclusion! But I think someone could reasonably be persuaded by it.

By the same standards, someone could also “reasonably” be persuaded that dinosaurs did not exist.

[HeartBreakKid]

If only Hakeem had the foresight to join the Bulls in free agency. Then again, with his omega stacked team of rookie Sam Cassell and Kenny the Jet Smith who could blame him for not leaving?

[lessthanjake]

… Because none of them were 10 SRS teams without the star in question. That is a complete false equivalence, not “charity”.

The Moses Malone Sixers had just lost in the finals the year before Malone went there. The Showtime Lakers made the finals when Kareem was no longer there (not to mention won a title when Kareem was a 41 year old 12 PER role player). Wilt went to a Lakers team that had been making the finals almost every year, to play alongside Jerry West and Elgin Baylor still in their prime.

Fascinating how you seem to pick and choose when SRS matters.

It’s really not unprecedented for there to be teams that are right there as the best or second-best team in the league and having an MVP-level superstar on top of it. It’s happened before, and the result was simply never as dominant.

Because the teams were not as dominant either.[/b] The Showtime Lakers were like a .500 team without Magic, or a bit higher at that 1987 peak; they did not even add anyone, so no idea why you feel they are relevant. The 76ers were better than that but still regularly falling short of titles (and built around an older star). The West Lakers gave up multiple strong pieces for Wilt — who dropped off from his 1968 level — and much like the 76ers were mostly known for perpetually falling short.

You can try to suggest that it was never as dominant because those other teams were never as good without that star as the Warriors were without Durant. And obviously the win totals (and the title in 2015) are solid evidence for that point. But, as I said, I think there’s a pretty strong case to be made that a lot of those other teams without the additional star were actually as or more talented than the pre-Durant Warriors, and that the Warriors’ success was predicated in large part on exploiting a huge tactical advantage (i.e. using the three-ball in a more modern way—which we now know is just way more effective offense), and that was a tactical advantage that was clearly going to rapidly evaporate after they used it to go 73-9. The Warriors being a 73-9 team in 2016 without Durant really doesn’t mean they would’ve been that level of team in 2017 or 2018, when the rest of the league was naturally catching up quickly to the tactical advantage that was a huge cause of the Warriors being that successful. It’s also the case that talking about their SRS and 73 wins is obviously missing that they did not win the title, and in fact almost lost in the conference finals. They pretty obviously weren’t quite as good as the SRS or wins would suggest.

They won the title as a 10 SRS team in 2015 and played at a 10 SRS pace when Durant missed time. Stop twisting yourself in knots to justify this terrible take. No title team added an MVP level player basically for free. No team that did was ever sniffing 10 SRS. The fact they failed to repeat when faced with [i]another all-time team is not relevant to either of those points.

Oh well that changes it. A couple of other teams could play them evenly, therefore, does not really matter that they added a top five player (taken off one of those somewhat even teams).

4 SRS lift for one season is not any sort of historical outlier, no, regardless of dressing that up as “ceiling raising”.

Yes, actually it does change it. The Warriors went from, by your own admission “a couple of other teams could play them evenly” to no one being able to play them even close, including the same team that played them evenly and had won. You may want to think that that should be completely discounted, but the fact is that we actually haven’t really seen that type of ceiling raising before, and it’s not because MVP-level players haven’t been added to a team that only “a couple other teams could play evenly.” That happened exactly with the Moses Malone Sixers, and they were pretty unplayable for one year, and then they crashed out in the first round after that and then got Barkley and still couldn’t do much.

Because the team aged out… That is the difference. The Warriors and Durant were all in their primes (outside of Iguodala), and their competition was a lot more potent than the 1982 Lakers.

Also, quite literally, yes, it was a one year blip of “no one playing them evenly” anyway.

We didn’t have the same sort of natural experiment with the Showtime Lakers exactly, but at their height they were quite similar to the very late-1980s, early 1990’s Lakers that won a title and lost in the finals twice, except they also had Kareem still in a part of his career where he was a great player.

???? And they had no Worthy and a much worse version of Magic.

Is this some elaborate bit to highlight the absurdity of placing Durant at that level?

Heck, the same Cavs team that the Warriors had to face had basically gotten to game 6 of the 2015 finals without Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving (with Love being out almost the whole playoffs, and Irving being out almost all of the last two rounds), and then in 2016 and 2017 essentially added them to the mix. Neither of those guys are MVP-level, but adding two all-NBA guys to a team that was in game 6 of the finals basically without them is still pretty wild. All of these teams did quite well when they were at their fullest level of strength, but they did not dominate the league quite like the Durant Warriors did. There’s a reading of that that just says that that’s because no team was quite as good without a star guy, but another reading is that that’s because no one’s been quite the ceiling raiser that Durant (and Curry, of course) was.

Congratulations, Durant has cleared the bar of Kyrie and Love.

Oh if only there were some way for us to determine how the Warriors played without Durant. Guess we will never know!

I don’t think you’re actually reading my point. Are you denying that the 2015 and 2016 Warriors benefited massively from being way ahead of the tactical curve? Are you denying that teams caught on pretty quickly tactically, such that the team couldn’t have extracted that same tactical advantage in the years Durant was there? Have you thought about what conclusion those things might raise?

I am asking you to provide the slightest shred of support to the notion that they lost that advantage in 2017, and I am also asking you to stop pretending as if Steve Kerr was the one who revealed to that three-pointers existed.

You are blatantly not thinking about this and instead just manufacturing any possible angle to push a bad point.

Yeah poor Jordan was not really back, because he could only be called that once he again had the league’s best supporting cast.

This is going down a silly rabbit hole, but the point wasn’t that Jordan’s team in 1995 wasn’t good. It was that Jordan came back but only came back at the very very end of the season, so he’d not really been fully back with the team. It was a very makeshift thing.

Yeah I bet it was tough for Pippen and Phil to familiarise themselves with his playstyle.

Oh wow the best player in the league was gone for one of those titles. I wonder, how does a once in a lifetime cap spike permitting you to sign with a team paying a two-time MVP less than most all-stars compare? How does it compare to have your toughest competition get taken out by one of the goons on your team?

Perhaps it compares somewhat similarly, and that’s my point!

It does not, the latter is comically disproportionate.

It would be and is. By that logic, Durant himself ruined one of the other dominant teams in the league to win his titles.

Not sure I understand your point. That Durant took the Thunder off the board so his own titles should be discounted on that basis? That’s some wild logical pretzeling.

Just trying to keep pace with you.

And is also obviously clearly different from a team taking itself off the board for a two year period surrounding which they won 3 titles immediately before and 3 titles immediately after.

The Bulls did not “take themselves off the board”: their best player left for one postseason and then upon returning found that the loss of their best frontcourt player had become a severe weakness.

But you are right, it is clearly different: one involved a player jumping ship to a historically good roster for essentially no cost, and the other involved one easier than expected Finals matchup because of an absence. The latter is more comparable to, say, an easier than expected conference finals matchup because your teammate injured the best opposing player. Or an easier than expected conference finals matchup because the second-best opposing player got injured. Or an easier than expected finals matchup because the second best player on your previous Finals opponent randomly decided he wanted to lead his own team — and then he and his new best teammate got injured on that new team. That is the comparison. Not facing the toughest conceivable path to a title is par for the course in a league where player absences are routine. It is literally unprecedented for a cap spike to permit the best roster in the league to freely sign an MVP-calibre free agent.

Ah right, I forgot to make the case for Durant, we also need to pretend that the only relevant consideration is their scoring.

Did Durant play badly in that series beyond scoring? No. Durant objectively had a really good series in that 2012 Finals. And so that’s a very good answer to your question of whether Durant had losses in series’ where he played really well. There’s other examples too, of course—such as the 2021 series against Milwaukee.

I love how you are pushing two series in a fifteen year career as some crowning achievement.

His co-star was the one drawing the Spurs attention. “Bad series”, Westbrook was the guy creating all the easy looks for Durant!

We know Durant thrives in that environment. The question is what happens when it stops being easy.

Please. I get that Westbrook did some good stuff in that series, but a guy who was shooting high volume with a 47.9% TS% and also turned the ball over 4.5 times a game had a bad series. It was obviously not completely catastrophic or they couldn’t have won against such a great team, but please don’t try to suggest that Westbrook was a major reason they won.

He was. Lol. Go back and watch that series and look at how the Spurs defend him. Do you think his creation is just inevitable. Do you think his teammates do not benefit from his scoring gravity. Do you think it was a happy accident that the team could only function when Westbrook was on the court?

Maybe the lesson here, as always, ultimately comes down to: “You can support this bad take if all your basketball insight is taken straight from a webpage.”

If only we had some way to discern Westbrook’s value.

So once again we are back to Durant only having an argument if we argue as disingenuously as possible.

Huh? Westbrook has had essentially zero team success without Durant. In his years without Durant, his teams have won the following number of games: 47, 48, 49, 44 (out of 72), 34, 33, and 43 (using the Lakers for last year, and the team was 25-30 before Westbrook left). Here have been the playoff results in order: (1) first-round exit in 5 games; (2) first-round exit in 6 games; (3) first-round exit in 5 games; (4) second-round exit in 5 games; (5) first-round exit in 5 games; (6) missed the playoffs; and (7) first-round exit in 5 games. And he’s played with some really talented guys in that timeframe: Paul George, James Harden, LeBron James, Anthony Davis, Bradley Beal, etc.

So this is where we reach the stage where we pretend Westbrook is the same player year to year and therefore it was all Durant making him look good.

Along the way in those years, Westbrook’s teams have barely performed better with him on the court than off the court. So yeah, I think we do actually have ways of discerning Westbrook’s value, and the answer really isn’t necessarily high at all.

Lmfao just shamelessly lying now.

And such deserved all-star campaigns!

Is this where we transition to talking about how Hakeem had all-star Otis Thorpe on his team in 1994.


There is a difference between charity and cozenage. These are not reasonable stances from people committed to the sport, which is the bar here.


Baseless. I see this is the consequence of the past two years: the guy who was comparably impactful to Durant is now rewritten as a valueless mooch.

I would love for you to explain to me how Russell Westbrook was comparably impactful to Durant.

How about you take another look at those on/off metrics and get back to me.

The last couple years aren’t necessarily a reflection of how Russ was in his better years, but it was super obvious back then that Durant was the superior player. Westbrook was always a high-volume, low-scoring-efficiency, high-turnover guy whose presence on the court messed up his team’s spacing. His elite athleticism helped make up for that, and messing up spacing mattered a bit less in earlier years than it does now. But we really were always talking about a guy who had some absolutely enormous negatives to his game, such that his value was always pretty questionable.

All fine theory, but not especially well supported by the reality of his impact.

I am not if anything a Westbrook critic, but the fact of the matter is that without playmakers like Westbrook, or Steph, or Harden, Durant has not been good enough to take teams anywhere.

If you have no idea how to watch the sport. “Inefficiency = bad!!!!”


Yes, any argument is possible if you untether yourself from pesky burdens like “accuracy” and “correct representation”.

Yes, inefficiency is bad. As are lots of turnovers. It doesn’t make someone a box-score-watching robot to recognize that. It’s just a basic fact about the game. Trying to be some basketball hipster that doesn’t care about efficiency is not going to make abysmal scoring efficiency from a volume shooter into something that’s not a massive negative. Did Russ do things that made up for the cripplingly awful shooting (and the many turnovers)? Yes, he did. But I think there’s a perfectly reasonable argument that the other things he did weren’t worth enough that we should consider him to have been some significant value-added player that Durant should’ve won with.

There is not, and you cannot make it. Westbrook had a hard ceiling to what he could contribute, but what he contributed was a hell of a lot more than any teammate Hakeem ever had.

There’s a reasonable argument the other way on that too, but the value of Russell Westbrook is certainly a far from settled question.

Then it should be easy for you to pull up impact data discrediting his “value”.

Another very educated and insightful take. Oh if only Hakeem had played better in 1997. If only he had not injured Barkley and made him have potentially the worst series of his career to that point. Durant would never allow that.

Huh? Barkley had come back from injury like almost a month before the playoffs. And he was okay in the series they lost.

If Westbrook put up those numbers you would be losing your mind.

Obviously his numbers were not going to be the same as when he was the #1 guy for most of his career, and he didn’t shoot well in that series, but he got to the line a ton (such that his overall scoring wasn’t inefficient) and he rebounded well. And, honestly, a lot of being a ceiling raiser is being someone that great players can play with and *not* have “potentially the worst series of [their] career.” That’s actually the point! This sort of thing indicates that Hakeem was not the type of ceiling raiser that Durant arguably is.

Typically incoherent standards. “Barkley played fine, he got to the line and rebounded. But also if Hakeem were really good then Barkley would have missed fewer shots. That is a condemnation of Hakeem not being a ceiling raiser like Durant, who guaranteed that those next to him scored well. Also, Westbrook is a bum who did not score well and that is on him for not properly taking advantage of Durant’s incredible ceiling raising.”

You talk about “ceiling raising” like some magic spell. Is Durant scoring better than Hakeem? Maybe, but damn high bar to clear. He is certainly not defending better than Hakeem. So apparently the idea is that he through his sheer presence lifted the efficiency of everyone else enough to make up for all defensive loss (because defence famously does not raise ceilings).

If that is your bar for “ceiling raising”, then Westbrook is an all-time ceiling raiser too.

Charity is when I make up whatever I want to push a bad argument.


It is the case. At no point have you presented a reasonable view here for Durant, or at least in any sense beyond, “A (bad) reason was provided.”


That is because the résumé is only “similar” if you are looking at nothing more than their basketball-reference headings.


I expect people to not be stuck in the idea that superficial similarities are a replacement for comprehensive assessment of the sport. Saying Durant’s résumé is equivalent to Hakeem’s in any meaningful sense is akin to calling Rick Barry’s virtually indistinguishable from Oscar Robertson’s. It is the same type of thought process that has people putting Isiah Thomas above Chris Paul because he has two titles and a Finals MVP. Bad rationale does not carry equal weight.

This is just you essentially saying “If I disagree with something, then it is not reasonable.” That doesn’t make sense in the context of evaluations that inherently rely on subjective judgments about a whole host of things.

No, I can disagree with reasonable things. This is not one of those reasonable things — as evidenced by you needing to take the most twisted stances to even attempt a case.

I’ve already said I put Hakeem above Durant myself. But I am able to conceptualize the fact that someone could disagree with my assessment while still being reasonable. You, however, do not seem to be able to do that.

Because your bar for “reasonable” is apparently six feet deep.

I don’t have time to respond to all this, and a lot of this is just going around in circles on an issue I don’t really care very much about (after all, I literally put Hakeem above Durant all time—we’re genuinely arguing over my view of what someone else could reasonably think).

But I’ll just note a few quick things that seem worth responding to:

I am asking you to provide the slightest shred of support to the notion that they lost that advantage in 2017, and I am also asking you to stop pretending as if Steve Kerr was the one who revealed to that three-pointers existed.

You are blatantly not thinking about this and instead just manufacturing any possible angle to push a bad point.

The number of three pointers shot in the league went up a good deal in 2017 and again in 2018, and the league’s offensive efficiency went up a significant amount. The Warriors went from shooting 7.5 more threes per game than the league average in 2016 to shooting 4.2 more threes per game than the league average in 2017, and were right at the league average on 2018. That demonstrates the point pretty well, but you could also see it just watching the games—after 2016, teams borrowed tons of stuff from the Warriors offense.

I love how you are pushing two series in a fifteen year career as some crowning achievement.

No. You actually *asked* for examples of Durant having series’ where he played great in a loss. I guess you thought it was a rhetorical question and the answer was that they don’t exist, but I simply pointed out that they do. Me answering your question with an answer is not some suggestion that the answer to your question amounts to a “crowning achievement.” Come on.

So this is where we reach the stage where we pretend Westbrook is the same player year to year and therefore it was all Durant making him look good.

Are you suggesting that it’s categorically wrong to look at how Westbrook did after Durant left in order to help infer how important he was to the Thunder’s success? That’s just silly. Obviously it is relevant. And it’s pretty obvious that the sample of years included there include some of Westbrook’s peak years. Prime Westbrook existed without Durant and the results were mediocre. That’s just objective fact.

Lmfao just shamelessly lying now.

Okay, so let’s look at what you are calling “shamelessly lying.” I said the following: “in those years, Westbrook’s teams have barely performed better with him on the court than off the court.” The phrase “in those years,” was very clearly referring to the years after Durant left, because I’d just gotten finished listing his team’s results in those years.

Now, let’s consider whether that was a lie, or whether you’re being an overly aggressive internet warrior so quick to insult that you can’t even get your facts straight.

For this, we’ll turn to basketball reference. In the years I was referring to, what was Westbrook’s regular season on-off number? It was +4.1. And, while this is definitely a noisy, low-sample-size stat, what was his playoff on-off number in those years? It was +0.6. Given those numbers—which are not very high—it it obviously not a lie to say that Westbrook’s teams barely performed better with him on the court. I guess you could argue that +4.1 shouldn’t be classified as “barely,” but it’s certainly low for a star player. Honestly, this response from you makes it pretty clear that you’re not talking in good faith or trying to be a remotely pleasant human being. I’d urge you to think about that a bit, and perhaps try to not act like this.

How about you take another look at those on/off metrics and get back to me.

Huh? From 2009-2010 through 2015-2016, Durant had an on-off of +7.4, and Westbrook had an on-off of +3.1. Westbrook’s on-off in the playoffs in those years was actually a bit higher (+9.0 vs. +5.1), but that’s a really low sample size of minutes (for instance, the “off” numbers for Durant in all those years is a grand total of a measly 608 minutes), and is heavily influenced by the fact that it was typically Durant that spent more time being the lone guy leading bench unit in the playoffs. Indeed, you you can look at who the 7th and 8th men in those Thunder teams played the most playoff minutes with, and it’s pretty consistent that it’s more minutes with Durant than Westbrook. And, given the difference in regular season on-off—where there’s a much more significant higher sample size of minutes—I’m not sure what point you thought would be shown here.

Then it should be easy for you to pull up impact data discrediting his “value”.

Without Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook has had virtually zero team success in the NBA, despite playing with some really great players. He had zero 50-win seasons. He’s only made it out of the first round once without Durant. And the one series his teams have ever won without Kevin Durant was a series he didn’t even play in most of. His regular season on-off is only +3.6. The primary case you have for there being “impact data” that suggests Westbrook is of high value is him having a +6.6 playoff on-off. But playoff on-off is a super noisy stat with low sample sizes, and +6.6 isn’t some wildly high number anyways. It’s actually kind of hard to support an argument for Westbrook as a high value guy. His teams have been subpar except with Durant, and the data doesn’t paint him as some super high impact guy either. Granted, Durant doesn’t grade out super high in on-off either, but he’s been on actually relevant teams in non-Westbrook years, while the reverse is not the case even though Westbrook has had great teammates.

I’m perhaps being a bit harsh on Westbrook, but I think this is important, because it seems obvious to me that a reasonable Durant > Hakeem opinion would probably require one to see Westbrook in as negative a light as is reasonably possible. And, honestly, I think there’s a reasonable case for a pretty negative view of Westbrook. He’s an incredibly flawed player who has not been able to be successfully integrated on teams with a bunch of the era’s best players.

If Westbrook put up those numbers you would be losing your mind.

Barkley’s TS% in that series was 57.1%. That’s against a team that gave up a 53.4% TS% that year. So, as compared to his opponent, Barkley had a TS+ of 107.

Here are Westbrook’s TS+ as compared to the opponent’s TS% given up in the series’ the Thunder lost with Durant and Westbrook:

2016 vs. Warriors: 98
2014 vs. Spurs: 105
2012 vs. Heat: 97
2011 vs. Mavs: 91
2010 vs. Lakers: 109

Even though that was an abnormally bad shooting series from Barkley, Westbrook usually scored way less efficiently in the Thunder series losses than Barkley did in that series.

To the extent you’re talking about raw numbers, please remember that Barkley was playing in a three-star team—which Westbrook never did (Harden was eventually a star, but wasn’t given shot volume or minutes like one on the Thunder). Obviously, playing on a three-star team has a big effect on raw numbers. Westbrook was getting over 20 shots a game in the playoffs on those Thunder teams, while Barkley got just over 12 shots a game in the playoffs that year with the Rockets. So I’d certainly hope Westbrook wouldn’t put up the same numbers!

You talk about “ceiling raising” like some magic spell. Is Durant scoring better than Hakeem? Maybe, but damn high bar to clear. He is certainly not defending better than Hakeem. So apparently the idea is that he through his sheer presence lifted the efficiency of everyone else enough to make up for all defensive loss (because defence famously does not raise ceilings).

No, it’s the fact that guys who can generate their offense without needing the ball are typically better ceiling raisers than guys that need the ball, because someone who can do their work off the ball allows another star to do their work on the ball at the same time. The defense has to defend two stars doing their stuff at once, rather than just having to defend them while they take turns. That’s a huge force multiplier that makes the team exponentially harder to defend. The fact that Durant and Steph both didn’t need the ball is a HUGE part of why those Warriors teams were so dominant. A guy like Hakeem can’t provide that kind of ceiling raising. To an extent, Hakeem’s defense would lend itself to ceiling raising—since he could get big value on defense without needing the ball on offense—but it isn’t the same kind of force multiplier as having two major stars doing their thing at once on offense.

[lessthanjake]

I mean if you're a superstar it is easier to make a forward selection than a center selection. That's pretty obvious. What does there being double the amount of forwards have to do when we are talking about the elite of the NBA? If there are two MVP caliber players who are forwards they can both make the 1st team. If it is an era that has 3 MVP caliber centers then obviously only one can make 1st team. Did Hakeem play in an era that had more than 1 MVP caliber center?

I’m not sure I understand how you aren’t able to see how it is super relevant that there are twice as many forwards as centers. That also is going to typically mean that there’s twice as many really good forwards as there are really good centers!

…
Yeah how about we pretend forward is as historically deep a position as centre. More very genuine argumentation.

The Thunder were an incredibly trendy team with their gear everywhere. Durant and Westbrook have been in the center of NBA media for their entire duration. The Thunder were among the leaders in most national games despite being the smallest market. They also played in an era where people can watch their games even if they're not from OKC. Then Durant went to GSW where he was definitely the center...then he went to Brooklyn which he is still relevant albeit for negative reasons. If anything his time in Phoenix has been the most cooled down time in his entire career.

You're seriously comparing the Olajuwon twin tower era which was like 2 seconds to Durant's nearly entire career? Hakeem is definitely forgotten, how many conversations have you had about Hakeem regarding his seasons between 1987-1992? Many people forgot he even went to the NBA finals before 1994. He may as well have played for like 3 seasons the way he is talked about normally.

This is just such an odd comment. Do you want to know why no one is having conversations these days about what Hakeem did between 1987 and 1992? Because there’s basically nothing to talk about! His teams were mediocre and they either failed to make the playoffs, lost to a pretty mediocre team in the playoffs, or barely made the playoffs and then lost easily to a good team. There’s not much to talk about, because it just wasn’t a very good time period for Hakeem! Durant doesn’t have anything like that, because he actually has never had a time period where his team was essentially irrelevant. That’s a good thing in a comparison between these two players!

No, it is an irrelevant thing in a comparison so long as you are not bothering to consider their respective teams — which you are not.

All the same, Durant and Westbrook have both always been more popular than Hakeem, even when they lose. Pretending otherwise is more what is at this point characteristic disingenuousness.

Also, as a sidenote, the twin tower era wasn’t “2 seconds.” It was three years of Hakeem’s career. If the twin tower era was “2 seconds,” then so was Durant’s time on the Warriors!

Actually shameless.

“Hakeem had a mediocre frontcourt partner for the first two and a half seasons of his career, what more could you ask for as a brand building exercise!”

I really can't sit here and talk to someone who "lived during Olajuwons era" (which means what, you're like 30 something?) and thinks that he has the same level of prominence as Kevin Durant. Maybe you just don't know how to gage that stuff, but that's honestly just absurd. Durant even (erroneously) gets compared to Lebron James, frequently who is probably the 3rd most famous basketball player of all time. There is a sizeable minority of people who will say Durant is better than James or better than him in a handful of select seasons - Olajuwon never had that type of delusion in comparison with Jordan. People are more likely to say "really, that guy?" than say "Olajuwon was better than Jordan".

Again, I don’t see how you think what you are saying is good for Hakeem in this comparison. What you’re saying here is basically “Durant played in the same era as a top 2 GOAT candidate, and a sizable minority of people thought he was better than that GOAT candidate, while Hakeem played with a top 2 GOAT candidate and no one ever thought he was better.” That’s actually a really good argument in favor of putting Hakeem above Durant all time!

Hakeem has a much easier case to have been more valuable than Jordan than Durant does to have been more valuable than Lebron, but here we come back to you assessing players by popularity and raw offensive production.

Hakeem Olajuwon being your favorite player when you're not from Houston doesn't mean anything (not even your favorite by your own admission, your favorite is the media Jesus). Paul Pierce was my favorite player and I am not from Boston, that does not mean that he all over New York media for his prime. Are you saying with a straight face that Paul Pierce was covered well in the media before 2008? Favorite player isn't indicative of their media coverage. Durant is a media star the likes that Olajuwon never was, and is more famous than Olajuwon even today.

Hakeem is not talked about nearly with the same prominence as many other top ten all timers outside of serious basketball circles and is often left out of top tens by more wider audiences. Do you think that has nothing to do with how much of a non-story the Rockets were for the majority of his career as well as other commercial factors? (played in a more domestic time, foreign player, not a big personality, a center in a time when perimeter players became the star of the show, didn't play with another star for most his career played in a less popular conference, won his title when the mega star/team of his era was not there).

There are more people who are familiar with Olajuwon playing wtih Chuck and Pippen than say, 88 Olajuwon. You're talking two different ages of media. By the time the NBA got better at covering more teams Olajuwon was already old.

Again, the Rockets being “a non-story . . . for the majority of his career” is actually a major fact that could help someone put Durant over Hakeem!

HAKEEM DOES NOT CONTROL HIS TEAM.

More generally, though, Hakeem “is not talked about nearly with the same prominence as many other top ten all timers” because he is not a top ten all-timer. There’s 11 guys that are clearly above him. But, from what I’ve seen, Hakeem is actually the most common guy put at that #12 slot after the pretty rock-solid top 11 (in fact, he’s who I’d have at #12 myself). Indeed, he’s the guy that people decided to latch onto when I said Durant could be as high as #12. Amongst the sort of all-time guys who have won a title and a couple MVPs or a couple titles and an MVP, I’d say Hakeem is talked about the most. I don’t understand this notion you have that Hakeem is somehow disrespected or something by fans.

He is disrespected because people like you will come in and say there are eleven players clearly better. There are not. You conflate team success with individual quality, so you condemn Hakeem for only winning two titles with by far the worst year-to-year casts of anyone in that group. And because he did that as the best defensive player since Russell rather than as a primarily offensive star, no one who views the sport superficially thinks any more about him.

I think the case for Durant over Hakeem would center on a few things.

1. Durant and Hakeem both played in an era with a top 2 GOAT candidate. And there were times where people genuinely questioned whether Durant was better than LeBron, while no one questioned whether Hakeem was better than Michael. Maybe that’s just a function of social media being crazy these days or people loving to hate LeBron, but I do think there was a sense of Durant being closer to LeBron than there ever was about Hakeem with Jordan.

Literally only tenable if all you are doing is judging by points per game or rings.

2. Relatedly, Durant played on a team with a top 11 player of all time (i.e. Steph), and the conventional wisdom at the time was actually most commonly that Durant was the superior player.

Wisdom by people who cannot assess the sport is not wisdom, but this is an excellent accompaniment to your prior point. “Highest ppg = best player, that is just conventional wisdom!”

It’s not a conclusion I personally ever agreed with, but it certainly does seem like a pretty relevant fact that is hard to ignore with Durant.

Relevant to a total fallacy.

Durant was on a team with a guy who is usually put above Hakeem all-time,

By whom, more ring-counters?

and Durant was widely considered superior. It’s a bit of transitive property mumbo-jumbo, but I think a reasonable person could find this pretty persuasive.

None of the people you are describing have been reasonable.

3. There’s the case I’ve been making about Durant as a ceiling raiser. Durant works very well off the ball, which helps make him a fantastic ceiling raiser. We saw that with the Warriors. People downplay the Durant Warriors’ dominance because they were so talented, but I think there’s a good case to be made that there’s been several other similarly talented teams in NBA history and none of them were as utterly dominant as the Warriors.

There is no case. He joined a 10 SRS championship team and made them overwhelmingly dominant for a year, wowwwww, imagine how few players could have done that.

And that reflects very well on Durant’s (and Steph’s) fairly unique abilities as a ceiling raiser. Being able to be a major star on probably the greatest team of all time is no small thing! Hakeem was briefly on a bit of a super team, and it fizzled out fairly disappointingly, so I think it’d be reasonable to conclude he didn’t have the same ceiling raising ability.

Yes, old Barkley and Drexler is very much an equivalent supporting cast. Could have probably won 70 games but for Hakeem pushing then down.

4. Hakeem’s ability as a floor raiser is essentially undeniable in light of his two titles—especially the one in 1994 when he didn’t have Drexler. But we also need to see this in the context of the rest of Hakeem’s career. Hakeem spent a substantial portion of his career having his team be mostly irrelevant—failing to make the playoffs, having a mediocre record and then losing in the playoffs to genuinely mediocre teams that lacked any star anywhere near Hakeem’s level, or barely making the playoffs and losing easily to a good team. So we have to see Hakeem’s floor raising ability in that context—he had an amazing title without a real #2, but he also had a whole bunch of years where he couldn’t make his team relevant at all. Durant obviously doesn’t have anything like that 1994 year, but his teams have consistently been really relevant teams that are very good. The obviously counterpoint to that is that he had better teammates than Hakeem did in that era, and in many cases that’s true, but I think one could very reasonably take a view of Russell Westbrook that makes that gap not seem very significant for a lot of those Thunder years.

You are a deeply unserious person.

Since you love “conventional wisdom” so much: Westbrook was a multi-time all-NBA player who finished fourth in MVP voting in 2015, fourth in MVP voting in 2016 (ahead of Durant…), and first in 2017. Durant had the worst postseason of his career when he had to play without Westbrook in 2013, but secretly Westbrook was also a poison on the team and brought that group down to the Kenny Smith / Vernon Maxwell / Otis Thorpe tier of support.

Beyond the pale.

So, to summarize, I guess I’d articulate the argument in two general ways: First, the way that Durant was compared to top-tier all-time greats by viewers/fans during his era was superior to the way Hakeem was in his era.

Which has nothing to do with actual basketball ability or impact.

Second, Durant’s ceiling raising ability was superior,

* When one equates mid-30s Barkley and Drexler to a 10 SRS team that for one season was elevated by 4 SRS points

and the gap in their apparent abilities as a floor raiser isn’t all that significant once one digs further into Hakeem’s career.

* When one penalises Hakeem for having bad teams and pretends Westbrook was a legitimately cancerous force despite all possible indications to the contrary.

Again, I could argue against these same points—after all, on balance, I don’t find them persuasive enough to agree with the conclusion! But I think someone could reasonably be persuaded by it.

By the same standards, someone could also “reasonably” be persuaded that dinosaurs did not exist.

Okay, I’m done responding to you. You are clearly a toxic poster who needs to take a real look in the mirror and consider the fact that you behave in a deeply unpleasant, personally insulting, and anti-social manner—all over a discussion about basketball. I hope you’re only like this on the internet, but if you repeatedly personally insult someone over a meaningless basketball topic, I shudder to think how you act to people when something genuinely important or frustrating occurs in your life. But maybe you’re just a terrible person on the internet. Hopefully. Either way there is no reason to engage further with someone like you. And there’s certainly no reason to do so when the underlying conversation is literally premised upon me arguing a hypothetical that I expressly do not even agree with. Which, by the way, makes your behavior even more ridiculous—you are engaging in persistent personal insults against someone merely for suggesting that it might be possible for another person to reasonably believe something you disagree with. If you can’t control yourself in that kind of essentially purely academic exercise—where the person you are talking to has expressly stated that they ultimately actually agree with your conclusion—then there may be something deeply wrong with you. Or maybe you’re just having a bad day. I don’t know. But I do know that I’m done responding to you.

[lessthanjake]

Well, I’d personally put Hakeem ahead, so this is me making an argument that I think is reasonable but that I don’t ultimately agree with (so to the extent you want to argue with it, my response may well be that I agree):

But I think the case for Durant over Hakeem would center on a few things.

1. Durant and Hakeem both played in an era with a top 2 GOAT candidate. And there were times where people genuinely questioned whether Durant was better than LeBron, while no one questioned whether Hakeem was better than Michael. Maybe that’s just a function of social media being crazy these days, but I do think there was a sense of Durant being closer to LeBron than there ever was about Hakeem with Jordan.

2. Relatedly, Durant played on a team with a top 11 player of all time (i.e. Steph), and the conventional wisdom at the time was actually most commonly that Durant was the superior player. It’s not a conclusion I personally ever agreed with, but it certainly does seem like a pretty relevant fact that is hard to ignore with Durant. Durant was on a team with a guy who is usually put above Hakeem all-time, and Durant was widely considered superior. It’s a bit of transitive property mumbo-jumbo, but I think a reasonable person could find this pretty persuasive.

3. There’s the case I’ve been making about Durant as a ceiling raiser. Durant works very well off the ball, which helps make him a fantastic ceiling raiser. We saw that with the Warriors. People downplay the Warriors’ dominance because they were so talented, but I think there’s a good case to be made that there’s been several other similarly talented teams in NBA history and none of them were as utterly dominant as the Warriors. And that reflects very well on Durant’s (and Steph’s) fairly unique abilities as a ceiling raiser. Being able to be a major star on probably the greatest team of all time is no small thing! Hakeem was briefly on a bit of a super team, and it fizzled out fairly disappointingly, so I think it’d be reasonable to conclude he didn’t have the same ceiling raising ability.

4. Hakeem’s ability as a floor raiser is essentially undeniable in light of his two titles—especially the one in 1994 when he didn’t have Drexler. But we also need to see this in the context of the rest of Hakeem’s career. Hakeem spent a substantial portion of his career having his team be mostly irrelevant—failing to make the playoffs, having a mediocre record and then losing in the playoffs to genuinely mediocre teams that lacked any star anywhere near Hakeem’s level, or barely making the playoffs and losing easily to a good team. So we have to see Hakeem’s floor raising ability in that context—he had an amazing title without a real #2, but he also had a whole bunch of years where he couldn’t make his team relevant at all. Durant obviously doesn’t have anything like that 1994 year, but his teams have consistently been really relevant teams that are very good. The obviously counterpoint to that is that he had better teammates than Hakeem did in that era, and in many cases that’s true, but I think one could very reasonably take a view of Russell Westbrook that makes that gap not seem very significant for a lot of those Thunder years.

So, to summarize, I guess I’d articulate the argument in two general ways: First, the way that Durant was compared to top-tier all-time greats by viewers/fans during his era was superior to the way Hakeem was in his era. Second, Durant’s ceiling raising ability was superior, and the gap in their apparent abilities as a floor raiser isn’t all that significant once one digs further into Hakeem’s career.

Again, I could argue against these same points—after all, on balance, I don’t find them persuasive enough to agree with the conclusion! But I think someone could reasonably be persuaded by it.

Alright, granted I know you didn't quite make as fleshed out of a case as you maybe could have due to not wanting to put too much time into it but based on what you did say:
1. I think a lot of those points don't carry much weight. Re Hakeem relative to MJ and KD to LeBron, KD had higher mvp finishes overall but I think the competition in the 87-93 years was deeper. In the 2010-2014 period it really felt like LeBron and KD were the only real contenders since Wade kept missing so many games and CP3's teams just weren't good enough or he missed games. I don't see this as a real argument for having KD over Hakeem,
2. I don't think KD was commonly seen as superior to Steph at all. I think it was pretty 50/50 and if anything leaned towards Steph since it was seen as his team and he is the one who won b2b mvps and led them to 73 wins.
3. KD as ceiling raiser. He definitely has a case for being a great one since the 2017 Warriors are probably the goat team. I do think Hakeem scales very well though due to his flexibility on offense, ability to stretch the floor some and of course being a goat level defensive anchor. So idk if I'd say KD is a better ceiling raiser tbh. Maybe if he's putting up 35ppg on 70% ts you can make that case. I think the 87-92 Rockets years also have be put into context to some degree regarding decisions his teammates and front office made. Hakeem's blame in their results doesn't rate that high to me.
4. The other factors that I think absolutely have to be addressed are Hakeem's playoff performance level and his durability. I think Hakeem in the playoffs proved himself as a scorer to probably the same level that KD did and that's supposed to be where KD really outshines him. Durability is another thing for which there is no argument other than KD still played in the playoffs some of those years.

So that is why I still don't see a KD>Hakeem argument as reasonable. Its possible that with some metrics a better case could be made but its hard because not all of them are available for pre 2000 guys.

I don’t necessarily disagree with this stuff, but I’m not sure all of it is really on point. For instance:

1. The 2010-2014 time period wasn’t the only time period people genuinely entertained the notion that Durant might be superior to LeBron. It happened in the Warriors years too. I never agreed with it. But it was definitely out there as a minority view in a way that it never was with Hakeem and MJ. I think a lot of that is social media + irrational LeBron hatred, but not everyone would see that the same way as I do.

2. You must be talking and listening to different people than me, because, it was definitely the consensus view amongst the people I talk to, as well as sports media that I saw, that Durant was the “best player” on the Warriors, over Curry. Again, I never agreed with that sentiment *at all*, but in my experience it was *definitely* the majority view. And even if it was “pretty 50/50,” I’d say that Durant being pretty 50/50 with a guy that’s typically put above Hakeem all-time could make a reasonable person think Durant should be put above Hakeem. Again, it’s transitive property mumbo-jumbo, but not completely unreasonable, especially when all-time rankings inherently must end up involving some silly cross-era comparisons.

4. Durability is definitely a fair point in this comparison, but I’d caution that we’re not actually at the end of Durant’s career yet. So far, Durant has not been as durable as Hakeem was up to Durant’s age. But Hakeem was not an elite player after the age that Durant was this past season. If Durant remains an elite player for a few more years, then I think he’d have extra longevity that could definitely counteract the durability point. But we don’t really know if that will happen, since Durant’s career isn’t over. And I hesitate to penalize active players for anything surrounding how many games they played, since it’s just a moving target.

And yeah, there’s not a lot of metrics we can really use here. Hakeem’s on-off metrics look really bad, but the data only exists for the tail end of his career, so I don’t think that that’s meaningful at all. Durant has a bit higher regular season PER, but Hakeem has a bit higher playoff PER, and neither of them is way above the other in either one. Durant’s win shares per 48 minutes is actually a good bit higher (0.215 vs. 0.177), as is Durant’s BPM a good deal higher (6.8 vs. 4.6). Durant has a higher career VORP too. Those numbers are all virtually even in the playoffs. So, overall, the advanced stats do actually probably lean a bit in Durant’s direction, which is another argument in his favor. That said, just as Durant may play longer and vitiate some of the durability arguments, Durant playing longer will probably also lower some of these stats for him—since they’re on a per-minute production basis. At the very least, though, I don’t think advanced stats would support a position that it’d be totally unreasonable to put Durant ahead of Hakeem.