Well I'm glad we're not contesting that "you're using box-score weighting to discredit
Micheal Jordan,--a guy who literally has no non-box metric placing him at #1 over merely the last 40-years--", was a wild misrepresentation...
They were 28-win and 53-win at full strength(52-win if you do not filter for games after a mid-season trade). But since you hate that sort of adjustment(even when it is directly relevant to what you are trying to argue) we can just go with
28 without and
50-win with(corroborated by 86 where the Bulls were 27 without by record and 31 win without by srs, 40 win in games Mj played more than 20 minutes). Mind you, this sort of reflexive dismissal of context just makes things worse for Mike...
Correct, though to be specific it is a 22-23 win improvement on a bad team(taking a 40 win team to 65-wins for example would be harder). Furthermore, with an eye to future threads, this is especially disappointing in comparison with
Kareem and
Russell once you account for srs tresholds(assuming you are still worried about championships, how you compare to the best opposition matters alot more than how you compare by raw-score):
(
(1988), Bulls were +3.8 at full strength)
(
(1977), Lakers were +4.9 at full strength)
(
1969, no clue what the Celtics were at full-strength)
In terms of positional replacements Jordan replaced a bad shooting guard in 84. Russell was replaced by a bad center in 1969. For the purposes of what we're using for Kareem(pretending the Lakers didn't lose anything in the trade including their starting center), Kareem's signal should actually be suppressed if we looked at "positional replacement".
retiree-player-coach russell, on a team that would run a tougher gauntlet than any of Jordan's Bulls, saw the celtics drop by 7 points with an otherwise near identical roster(sam jones was a 28 mpg chucker on an average offense) despite hondo improving and a 2-point offensive improvement. (key to note is that this 7-point drop was from a much better league-best lvl team even if u just go by the regular-season)
Kareem, assuming the Lakers lost
nothing when they traded for him in 1975(actually lost 2nd and 5th mpg guys) saw the Lakers jump from -3.95 to .500 to +4.9 with the addition of 29 mpg
Don Chaney and one-off head-coach Jerry West. That is a bigger jump in a league on a team that posted a higher srs in a league where the best teams were +4 to +6.
Simply put, having inflated Jordan's mark beyond reason, retiree-player coach russell looks like an outright peer, and Kareem having given him a lower mark than is reasonable, looks outright better. And with Kareem it is hardly a one-off(will get into that on the next thread). And for Russell while we have much, what we do have all corroborates beyond a 20-game stretch on a much better team as a rookie. Also beyond the numbers Russell won 5 rings with a completely different core than he won his first 6. Jordan only ever won with a specific infrastructure and co-star, Bill only ever lost when hurt.
They are different rosters in that the 88 Bulls were better. I am comfortable giving Jordan an unfair amount of credit, yes. You quite literally just threw out 3-variants of WOWYR, a metric which uses 89 Pippen to assess 91 Pippen as a teammate. This is what "impact" comparisons pre-97 is. You look at the with, you look at the without, and you use your understanding of the game to try and adjust for context and isolate variables. The difference here is I'm using 82-games while WOWYR is using either a handful(overall) or 8 games a season(it is not at all clear what is counted and Ben explicitly makes a distinction between 1994 and "wowy") for one guy and 2.2 games for another(that's bill russell) and THEN decides to make "corrections" based on the 3 games a teammate missed 5 years back or the 70 games another teammate missed 10 years forward. This is why Ben explcitly outlines using "shorter-time periods" as a solution and then uses "shorter-time periods" as the backbone of his impact write-ups.
If you are not willing to deal with uncertainty, you are not going to be able to derive anything beyond the box-score and "intuition" for guys pre-97(with the partial exception of MJ). You pointing to Jordan going 27-2(Russell went 27-1-incomplete) over
a 7-year stretch as opposed to 27-1-incomplete over his whole
career is an example of something I'd say holds "no emperical value". An 82-game sample is pre-data ball is about as valuable as it gets. Even if you don't like what it would suggest.
I am also starting to suspect you don't actually understand the data you've been throwing around despite your insistence that you do. Let me be very clear here, the metric Jordan scores best relative to Lebron is "AUPM", a box-on/off hybrid, which combines "BPM" with "on/off"(raw impact). This is what BPM assumes:
IOW, Jordan
still looks generally worse in a stat which assumes his blocks are
more valuable than Duncan's. BPM also thinks Jordan is a DPOY-candidate.
If you think that is representative of what Jordan is as a defender, then I'm curious how you explain the following points:
-> The Bulls were unaffected by Jordan's departure defensively in 1994
-> The Bulls defense was average before Jordan came, got good with Oakley, and became average with Oakley
-> The Bulls defense got better when Pippen gained primacy, going from below average from 89 and the start of 90 to -0.9 for the season, -3 for the playoffs, and
-5 against the Pistons
-> The Bulls defense got better when Jordan's own defensive activity dropped per the tracking of falco, 70's, ben, blocked
-> In nearly 30-years of databall, guards have consistently been the least valuable defenders
"Box-score weightings" as they are commonly done do not hurt Micheal. If anything they inflate him, and as we just saw with JE did, if anyone wanted to compose a metric which tanked jordan to "not even bitw candidate when all his competition fell off", it would be easy enough to do. PER literally used Jordan as an acid-test. RAPTOR(which is just a box-metric for the time period in question tbf) was designed by someone who thought Kawhi Leonard was the best player in the 2019 playoffs.
Free of those sorts of priors, Jordan's emperical portfolio dramatically weakens. By the unbiased "winning" you were seeking, Jordan does not actually get to definitively claim himself as the best player of his era. Even with WOWYR, Magic is advantaged, as he is in wowy. So is David Robinson. Hakeem, Magic, and Drob are all advantaged with extended(small sample) wowy. Concentrated samples also still favor his his contemporaries.
That is what the least "limited' data says. And any claim that starts with "the data in totality" should account for that.
"Why didn't you give Jordan an even more unfair advantage?"Jordan was there in 89 and 90. The triangle was not. By looking at 88, we can isolate Jordan from the team-wide shift that saw the Bulls skyrocket overnight. Jordan is already operating with an unreasonable advantage in this comparison. Why would I make it more unreasonsable?
Not if you want to produce the best team-level defensive outcomes, no. But that is not the same as "situational impact". Jordan offers value as a weakside helper. How often does he get to do that with Bill Russell on the court? Your argument centers on the concept of diminishing returns. Where did the returns diminish?
I would love to hear the rationale for Anthony Davis not fitting "really well" with Lebron when both posted crazy situational impact as they led the best(by your approach of evenly weighting the rs and playoffs) team of the last 5 years and the only team to follow up a 60-win pace rs with a dominant ass postseason(higher if for common sense purposes look at games with lebron or lebron and davis) since the 2017 Warriors. They did that with outlier-low spacing for a modern champion(Lebron as a shooter makes that look better than it was), and a playoff rotation that featured the likes of Dwight Howard and Rojon Rondo.
Lebron has had 3 chances to pick teams to win championships, he has won with all those picks. He was not calculating which teammates would give him the best situational impact, but which off the
available choices gave him good prospects of winning. If you think he should have picked differently based on the knowledge available at the time, then we can cover that, but that is not 1:1 with his ability to "synergize" with co-stars which he did phenomanally the 1-year he and his "Pippen" were healthy in year 17.
He also did quite good with a similar player in Wade. So good in fact, that you've resorted to throwing in minutes without Lebron and/or without Lebron's co-stars to show
Lebron can't fit with co-stars.
That" is what I would call a "bad use of statistics."
https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=1836300&hilit=greats+vs+playoff+defensesJordan's still a better offensive player thanks to the ball-handling I think(though Kareem fared extremely well in 77 with limited help there), but Kareem is a much better defender and that would not be reflected in the "crazy statistical dominance" you reference. It may be reflected in the "stats" above.
I'd also say that I think the difference between Kareem and Jordan on offense was more of one of extent than of kind while the defensive discrepancy is more fundamental but I'll save that for thread #2 I guess.
I think this makes your point perfectly, even though your post and my post were much more nuanced than what this poster is describing them as.
