There, voted(again ) I presented a case for Duncan in the last thread and somewhat alluded to one for Russell in my Kareem post. There, I focused on his average, peak, and prime "goodness" as that was a big-question mark. Here, for Russell, just like with Kareem, I will focus on what voters seem to be marking as an advantage for Jordan...
Spoiler:
RK wrote:Even with the high ends and what I feel to be a substantial argument for GOAT peak/prime in Jordan's favor, why I see him as career #3 all-time is due to the meaningful longevity/prime quality and overall longevity aspects. I haven't finalized intel for my pool aside from my Mt. Rushmore / GOAT candidates yet, but James & Jabbar (even Russell) both have more MVP+ level seasons - and better supporting years when factoring in the full body of work.
Ambrose wrote:#1 Michael Jordan
To put it simply, I personally think Jordan is flat out better than anyone else left. There may be a run or two from Russell or Duncan or Wilt that look comparable but nothing like Jordan's stretch of combined individual and team dominance. I also don't think he has the dips or red flags the others have. I love data as much as anyone, (not saying data isn't high on Jordan) but sometimes we do use that in place of simply "proving it" and I think putting anyone else other than Jordan here would be an example of that. However, I'm quite on Russell offensively, so I can see why those who view him higher may disagree.
To go back to my stated criteria from a prior thread, I believe the per season title equity Jordan gives you outweighs the longevity advantage of Duncan, and there is no longevity concern against guys like Russell or Wilt. Nominate: Magic Johnson
trelos6 wrote:Vote: Jordan
His peak is now too hard to pass up, despite limited seasons compared to a few others.
I have him at 8 seasons being the undisputed best player, 10 as an arguable top 3 player, 11 all-nba, 14 as an all star level, and 9 all defensive years.
He edges out Bill Russell and Tim Duncan.
For now I’d have Russell 4, Duncan 5.
Nomination: Shaq
Clyde Frazier wrote:Vote 1 - Michael Jordan Vote 2 - Bill Russell Nominate - Magic Johnson
As more and more seasons pass and the game evolves, it makes sense that Jordan’s assumed status as GOAT would be tested. I'm sticking with him here, but the decision between Kareem and LeBron for #2 has become tougher. While I'm generally a longevity guy, if I feel the body of work is impressive enough without elite longevity (jordan, magic, bird, now curry)
Dr Positivity wrote:Vote #3 - Michael Jordan
Probably a lopsided vote so I won't spend too much energy here. I like players who are by far the best of their generation like Lebron, Kareem and MJ. I don't think anyone has a big enough longevity advantage over him where it's not weighed out by being worse. I value Curry's era more but I rate him as less valuable than MJ for his time period and his star longevity is slightly worse, but I could be talked into nominating him relatively soon.
Nominate: Shaq
Looking through these I see three claims:
-> Jordan peaked higher/was better on average/had a better prime -> Jordan provided more "championship equity" -> Jordan was the "undisputed best player" of his era in a way Bill Russell was not
I will start with the first two, as I think they go hand-in-hand. Do keep in mind, that these are going to be era-relative arguments built on a player's likelihood to lift teams to championships. I do not have any way to convince anyone Russell would have likely been better in 1990 or 2023. Perhaps someone may be persuaded or Duncan(basketball did not peak in the 90's), but for Bill, I will try and justify the following claims: Bill Russell was probably better at his peak Bill Russell was probably better on average It is more likely Bill Russell was the best player of his era than Jordan was the best player of his
First, let's start with a simple assumption: -> All else being equal, a player who wins 11 rings in 13 years probably was better("more likely to win championships") than a player who won 6 in 13 -> All else being equal, a player who wins 8-rings in 8 years probably was better("more likely to win championships") than a player who won 6-rings in 8(or 7) years -> All else being equal, a player who goes 27-2(or 27-1) over a much longer period of time(an entire career) with dramatically different personnel in a league without lower-end expansion fodder... https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KfFmPYlS0Mx00w0hri6LoGASkES3DWfBY25Q8vhHWoA/edit#gid=0 ...is probably better than a player who posts a worse record of 27-3 (or 27-2) over a convenient 7 or 8-year frame while getting to dunk on weaker early round opposition -> All else being equal, a player whose teams are a bigger regular-season outlier(7.0 expected championships vs 2.9 per fp4's calc) and then who overperforms in the playoffs by a bigger margin(11 actual championships vs 6 by basketball reference), probably was better
About now you might be thinking, "shouldn't this line of reasoning Jordan a starting advantage over Duncan?"
All in all, I think then, it can be reasonably argued prime Duncan -> Won at least one(probably three) titles with less -> Led two dominant teams(statistically better with most of the Bulls if you go by standard deviation(more relevant to winning championships than "srs")), one was probably with less -> Led a third team not too far behind in 2005(not sure what "help" is there but there's still no Pippen equivalent) with less -> Beat two teams better or on par with anyone Jordan beat(05 and 07 suns, great in the rs too, great in the rs missing key pieces, greatest offense ever, led by an offensive goat candidate who also led a goat offense in Dallas pre-prime) -> Beat two tougher gauntlets better than any Jordan beat(05, 07) -> Beat, with less, a reigning champion that had posted a top 10 all-time full-strength srs after sweeping the Shaq-Kobe-Payton-Malone Lakers -> Won at least 50 games every season(Jordan managed that once pre-triangle) -> Won in multiple systems(Jordan managed that never) -> Won with completely different 2nd bananas(Jordan managed that never)
I point this out because, even if you just lift Duncan's best two years to be a match for Mike's(and keep the internal scaling), then by Ben Taylor(the guy who put not one, not two, not three, not four, but five MJ years above the season you have at #1), his srs-study-based "career over replacement player" formula outputs Duncan's career as more valuable.
Feel free to dispute any of the excerpts above or the justification offered in the post(As Doc MJ noted, I actually used the BPM wrong formula in my post), but I do think it's fair that when arguing for a player who won less is better than a player who won more, to expect that there is justification that logically arrives at the alleged conclusion.
Here is what I believe has most often been argued for Jordan: -> He is a great offensive player who also plays good defense -> He looks great via conventionally defined "production" -> When he loses his teammates don't look great via conventionally defined "production"(even if they are holding the opponent 5-points below their regular season offensive-rating)
But I have to ask, at least for those who are ascribing to era-relativity(that may not be true for all the posters voting for Jordan, but I believe it has been explicitly noted as part of their criteria for some) or something resembling Championships-over-replacement-player, where they see the logical connection between the above points and Jordan being better than BIll(or Duncan).
The Celtics did not win more 5 more rings than the Bulls on the strength of their offense. And the Bulls were a contention-level team(assuming health) when they lost the strength of Jordan's offense(and defense). By a metric called GOAT-POINTS, "production" sees Hakeem as the true greatest player ever. A couple of years ago, BPM saw Lebron as the undisputed GOAT. There was a measure of "production" which put Dennis Rodman on top at the 90's, and I'm sure some lunatic could just filter down scoring so that Pippen and Lebron came at #1 and #2.
Even if Jordan was the best offensive-player-ever(and I do not think his results or even historically mapping the ways he "produces" correlate with offense-quality supports that), it, alone, would not imply superiority to Bill as an individual force of winning.
Simply put, I think we ought to be careful conflating priors with evidence:
uberhikari wrote:
Heej wrote:
fp4 wrote:What makes any theory or concept useful is explanatory adequacy. In other words, does this theory help us gain a better understanding of some phenomenon by explaining it?
What phenomenon would "great offense and good defense in the 90's is more valuable than goat defense in the 60's" explain? Why couldn't Russell's defense be sufficient in a league without 3-pointers and a less horizontally spaced floor? And what about IQ, a trait that corresponds with suprising(relative to "production") results on both ends over a variety of contexts(Draymond, Magic, Lebron, Nash, Boston KG):
Spoiler:
Doctor MJ wrote:I'd note here in Russell you have an example of someone with an incredibly active basketball imagination once it got turned on - which of course didn't happen until he had time AWAY from coaches - but it's not that I'm saying that his talent on this front was one-of-a-kind and that that was his truly greatest strength. Russell was unusual in such talent surely, but really it was him getting into certain types strategic habits with the reinforcement of a similar mind that caused something of an exponential curve. And of course, the application of that curve was on Russell's body, which was a far greater body talent than what Jones possessed.
I also think Russell elaborate on the horizontal game tellingly in this quote but unfortunately I'm not sure which book it was from:
Beginning in my freshman year, I developed the concept of horizontal and vertical games. I made a distinction between the two that others had not done. The horizontal game meant how I played side to side. The vertical game was how I played up and down. I knew that if I could integrate the two games, our team could win. I would always be in a position to determine where the ball was and where it was going.
What I saw was how much more there was to the game than that. I would lie awake at night and play with numbers. How much time was there in an NBA game? Forty-eight minutes. How many shots were taken in a game? Maybe a hundred and sixty, eighty or so on each side. I calculated the number of seconds each shot took—a second, a second and a half—and then I multiplied by a hundred. Two hundred forty seconds at most—or four minutes. Then add a single extra second for a foul shot missed and then the ball put in play; add another minute at the most. So, five minutes out of forty-eight are actually taken up in the vertical game.
What I'm hoping you're getting a picture of is a young man who started thinking for himself about how he could best help his team win at basketball.
From an innovator's perspective, this is what would put Russell at the very top of my list of all basketball players in history. This archetype of the horizontal & vertical force who intimidated shots like nobody's business but who relied on non-vertical agility to do a whole bunch of other things that were valuable, Russell basically invented it. Not saying no one before had ever done anything like it, but it wasn't what was being taught by coaches.
In Russell's words:
On defense it was considered even worse to leave your feet…The idea was for the defensive player to keep himself between his man and the basket at all times. Prevent lay-ups, keep control, stay on your feet. By jumping you were simply telegraphing to your opponent that you could be faked into the air. Defenses had not begun to adjust to the jump shot.
Russell would be the one, then, who would make that adjustment and have the world take notice, and only after he did that did the coaches begin coaching players to do Russell-type things.
Bill Russell was the best help defender and the best man defender of his time while also possibly sporting the most "ahead of the curve" basketball intelligence of anyone ever to the tune of becoming the nba's only champion-winning player-coach. He also happened to win the most on teams that gained separation almost entirely on defense. Why would we assume the "two-way force" that won half as much was as or more valuable to winning?
One approach has been to say Jordan was the Ultimate Winner:
Spoiler:
iggymcfrack wrote:It's been mentioned a lot of times how the Bulls had the exact same record in playoff series from '91-'98 as the Celtics did from their first title of the Russell dynasty in 1957 to the last in 1969. Well, let's look at that a little more in-depth, but since Jordan wasn't playing in 1994, I'll use 1990 instead and just look at the years Jordan played with Phil Jackson. (Remember, Russell also had a legendary genius coach.)
The Celtics had an average SRS of +6.0 from '57-'69. The Bulls had an average SRS of +7.7 from 1990-1998 excluding 1994. During the Celtics' dynasty run, there were an average of 9.3 teams in the league and during the Bulls' run there were an average of 27.8 teams in the league. This means that during Boston's run, each team's SRS was artificially depressed by 0.7 points per game due to have to facing the Celtics (SRS/(# of teams-1)) while the Bulls opposition was only depressed by 0.3 points per game due to having to face the Bulls. So let's adjust every team the Celtics played in the playoffs up by 0.4 points during that run to give them a higher SRS. Here's how those series went:
Boston Celtics playoff series during Russell years 1957 Def. -0.6 adjusted SRS Syracuse 3-0 1957 Def. +0.1 ASRS St. Louis 4-3 1958 Def. +0.6 ASRS Philly 4-1 1958 Lose to +1.2 ASRS St. Louis 2-4 1959 Def. +4.1 ASRS Syracuse 4-3 1959 Def. -1.0 ASRS Minneapolis 4-0 1960 Def. +3.2 ASRS Philly 4-2 1960 Def. +2.2 ASRS St. Louis 4-3 1961 Def. +2.3 ASRS Syracuse 4-1 1961 Def. +3.4 ASRS St. Louis 4-1 1962 Def. +3.0 Philly 4-3 1962 Def. +2.3 LA Lakers 4-3 1963 Def. +1.6 Cincinnati 4-3 1963 Def. +3.1 LA Lakers 4-2 1964 Def. +4.8 Cincinnati 4-1 1964 Def. +4.8 San Francisco 4-1 1965 Def. +0.3 Philly 4-3 1965 Def. +2.1 LA Lakers 4-1 1966 Def. +1.4 Cincinnati 3-2 1966 Def. +4.5 Philly 4-1 1966 Def. +3.3 LA Lakers 4-3 1967 Def. -2.3 New York 3-1 1967 Lose to +8.9 Philly 1-4 1968 Def. -1.3 Detroit 4-2 1968 Def. +8.4 Philly 4-3 1968 Def. +5.4 LA Lakers 4-2 1969 Def. +5.2 Philly 4-1 1969 Def. +5.9 New York 4-2 1969 Def. +4.2 LA Lakers 4-3
Chicago Bulls playoff series during Jordan/Jackson years 1990 Def. -1.1 SRS Milwaukee 3-1 1990 Def. +4.2 SRS Philly 4-1 1990 Lose to +5.4 SRS Detroit 3-4 1991 Def. -0.4 SRS New York 3-0 1991 Def. -0.4 SRS Philly 4-1 1991 Def. +3.1 SRS Detroit 4-0 1991 Def. +6.7 SRS LA Lakers 4-1 1992 Def. -3.9 Miami 3-0 1992 Def. +3.7 New York 4-3 1992 Def. +5.3 Cleveland 4-2 1992 Def. +6.9 Portland 4-2 1993 Def. -0.7 Atlanta 3-0 1993 Def. +6.3 Cleveland 4-0 1993 Def. +5.9 New York 4-2 1993 Def. +6.3 Phoenix 4-2 1995 Def. +2.9 Charlotte 3-1 1995 Lose to +6.4 Orlando 2-4 1996 Def. +1.5 Miami 3-0 1996 Def. +2.2 New York 4-1 1996 Def. +5.4 Orlando 4-0 1996 Def. +7.4 Seattle 4-2 1997 Def. +1.8 Washington 3-0 1997 Def. +5.5 Atlanta 4-1 1997 Def. +5.6 Miami 4-1 1997 Def. +8.0 Utah 4-2 1998 Def. +1.9 New Jersey 3-0 1998 Def. +2.5 Charlotte 4-1 1998 Def. +6.3 Indiana 4-3 1998 Def. +5.7 Utah 4-2
Overall results
Russell vs. teams with 5+ ASRS: 4-1 series record (.800), 17-12 game record (.586) Jordan vs. teams with 5+ SRS: 13-2 series record (.867), 57-28 game record (.671)
Russell vs. teams with 2-5 ASRS: 14-0 series record (1.000), 56-28 game record (.667) Jordan vs. teams with 2-5 SRS: 6-0 series record (1.000), 23-7 game record (.767)
Russell vs. teams under 2 SRS: 9-1 series record (.900), 35-19 game record (.648) Jordan vs. teams under 2 SRS: 7-0 series record (1.000), 25-2 game record (.926)
Note that Jordan has a better record in individual games against playoff teams with a SRS under 2 than Russell has in series. Also, Jordan has a better game record against the teams with 5+ SRS than Russell does against the teams with SRS under 2. Even if you go back to Jordan's rookie season, he never lost to a team with an SRS under 5 whereas Russell lost to the pitiful 34-38 Hawks in 1957 in a year where no team had a winning record in the Western Division. Obviously, there are other factors at play. Russell dominated more consistently over a variety of ages, but also he did it against much weaker competition with regard to the league as a whole and where the talent level was at, and with Oscar stuck on extremely poor teams all through his prime, he pretty much just had to beat Wilt most years to win those rings. That's why I'm voting for the ultimate winner:
Vote: Michael Jordan
Nominate: Shaquille O' Neal
A few notes -> As noted earlier, the "identical record' bit is a bit disingenuous. Russell is 27-1 in series he was available for. If missed games are a detriment, then Jordan is 27-3. Actually there are alot of issues with this framing(mostly noted at the top). Will add that because of the length(beyond natural aging) Russell had to play alot more regular season games to get to those 11 championships.
-> Raw SRS comparisons are not always relevant to era/league-relative comparisons. At some points srs tresholds are similar. In the 60's they are much lower. I think standard deviation might represent things better, but they're still extrapolated from SRS so it probably only mitigates that discrepancy. (Have also been using psrs to rate playoff opposition but FP4 has reservations about the calculation process)
-> SRS thresholds being lower also do not necessarily mean the league was weaker(see: post-merger 70's, early 2000's where Duncan led 3 Chicago-tier outliers)
-> SRS tresholds being higher also do not necessarily mean the league is stronger(90's)
-> The 1969 Celtics probably beat a better opponent than anyone Jordan has toppled with the Wilt-West Lakers, where what was, when healthy, one of the greatest era-relative teams ever had the best player from the team that pushed the Celtics to 7 in 1968(more on that later). You might note that Wilt is the only star who has ever properly beaten Russell and it required a Sixers team that was excellent without him and Russell to find himself the new coach of his team while carrying an injury. (And yes, I would say that is better evidence for Russell being the clear "best player of his era" than anything present for Jordan)
-> The Celtics also beat the 1969 Knicks who posted a +8 srs(virtually unheard of for any non-boston team up until that point) en route to a championship the following year
-> Subjectively speaking I think losing to a 4x mvp plus a really good cast on what was a big outlier for that era in his first year as a player-coach(injured by the way) is less of a wasted "chance" than Jordan losing to detroit in 90 or orlando in 1995.
A more...uh natural approach is to argue Jordan was disadvantaged in terms of support(which itself would not justify seeing Micheal as better), but even here, I do not think the arguments are strong:
Spoiler:
f4p wrote:
ShaqAttac wrote:
Ambrose wrote:#1 Michael Jordan
To put it simply, I personally think Jordan is flat out better than anyone else left. There may be a run or two from Russell or Duncan or Wilt that look comparable but nothing like Jordan's stretch of combined individual and team dominance. I also don't think he has the dips or red flags the others have. I love data as much as anyone, (not saying data isn't high on Jordan) but sometimes we do use that in place of simply "proving it" and I think putting anyone else other than Jordan here would be an example of that. However, I'm quite on Russell offensively, so I can see why those who view him higher may disagree.
To go back to my stated criteria from a prior thread, I believe the per season title equity Jordan gives you outweighs the longevity advantage of Duncan, and there is no longevity concern against guys like Russell or Wilt. Being the greatest scorer to ever live, who was also postseason resilient, is incredibly valuable, especially when he's also a plus defender, can work off-ball, and playmake for others. I'm curious to see what he would've been able to achieve as a help defender in a different era where they didn't have weird rules, as he had the IQ to accel there as well.
Nominate: Magic Johnson
Do you think Russell had waay more help than MJ then? Because MJ only won with a superteam and 11>6.
certainly on average he had more help. his first season in the league, he missed the first 24 games for the olympics. his team went 16-8. if they had kept up that pace, they would have finished 48-24, 10 wins more than the next best team. that was the team russell got added to. i said duncan had a good start, but it pales in comparison to a runaway best record team. he actually had a negative WOWY that first year because his team went 28-20 (42 win pace) with him, so -6. little wonder that the celtics posted easily the best record for the next 5 or 6 years. and the rest of the league was shockingly mediocre, so russell's megateams were facing <1 and <2 SRS teams constantly.
russell's average SRS differential to his opponent in his 2 losses is actually +1.47. meaning he was a favorite on average in his 2 losses. that's the highest "average loss" differential of anyone i tracked. yes, he was injured in the finals, but the team did go 1-3 in his games and 1-2 if you take out game 6 where he came back and only played 20 minutes. on the flip side, jordan's differential of -5.04 is easily the lowest of anyone i tracked, meaning he was a massive underdog when he lost. besting the 2nd lowest of -3.49 for garnett.
russell also started his career as generally a playoff faller. this partly explains why his teams got taken to 7 games so many times, despite huge win differentials. he also wasn't an underdog in a series until 1967, and he lost.
by mid career though, russell started becoming a playoff riser, his teams do not appear to have the lopsided talent advantage by that point, and he started playing higher SRS teams (though often still not great) and beating them, including a +8 wilt team and 4 teams around +5 to finish it out. so in a way, you could say he validated the early career concerns by showing he could win without a huge supporting cast advantage and could beat good teams and even 1 great one. the counterargument would be that he got lucky he was a playoff underperformer (modestly) on his most talented teams and then overperformed on his less talented teams. in fact, it's probably axiomatic that someone that wins 11 of 13 in a team setting got lucky/fortunate in a lot of ways. if the talent advantage on his teams was flipped from early career to late career, we might see the late 60's celtics go on a 5 or 6 year run of 65-70 win seasons with dominant 0 and 1 loss playoffs sprinkled in. but possibly 3 or 4 missed titles early in russell's career, which might remove some of the veneer of invincibility.
the biggest concern with jordan's case is that he kind of went from huge underdog to huge favorite very quickly. when he lost, it was unreasonable to think he wouldn't lose. when he won, it was often unreasonable to think he wouldn't win. so he didn't necessarily pile up the close series we might like to see. however, i do give big credit to 1993 and 1998. the 1993 bulls were a +6.2 teams that had to basically beat 3 other +6 teams, and went 12-4 against them. the 1998 bulls were a +7.2 team, but the pacers and jazz were +6.3 and +5.7, and with pippen's last 2 finals games being a 2-16 disaster class and a game 6 where he only played 26 minutes, that was the time to get jordan. instead, in game 7 against indiana, he guarded reggie in the 4th and held him to 0 points on 0-1 shooting (wouldn't even let him get the ball), and in game 6 against utah he score 45 points in a glacially slow 76 pace game to drag a tired bulls team to title number 6. basically his "bill russell 1969" moment as far as i'm concerned, to show he could also win when things were not at their best.
A few more: -> Expected SRS only works if you assume Jordan was as or more valuable in the regular-season(what we have mostly suggests the opposite) -> Curiously a 28 game-sample without from Russell's rookie-year is included, but an 82-game sample after he leaves with a similar roster is not. Nor is the career-wide "off"
Another angle is to insist the Bulls were actually not that good with a selective consideration of health:
Spoiler:
lessthanjake wrote:The arguments against him in the prior threads focus a lot on the Bulls doing pretty well without him in 1994, but even there we’re still ultimately talking about a 2.87 SRS team that beat a completely injury-ravaged team in the first round of the playoffs and then lost a close series against a very good team. Even if we ignore the lingering value of that team having learned how to win from their prior years with Jordan, and leave aside the fact that missing a star player for a whole season is entirely different from missing a player for random periods due to injury (the latter will be a situation where the team is not as able to adapt to the player’s absence), the reality is that the 1993-1994 season in no way backs the idea that the Bulls were a contender without Jordan. They were 11th in SRS (maybe a bit higher just while healthy, but we’re comparing to the rest of the league’s numbers and other teams weren’t always healthy either). And the only playoff series they won was against a team that was completely ravaged by injury (the Cavs missing Brad Daugherty, Larry Nance, and Hot Rod Williams). They also managed to play the Knicks very close—which was pretty good, because the Knicks were a genuinely good team—but being 11th in SRS, winning a gimme-putt playoff series, and then losing a 7-game series is not the picture of a real contender
More than a few notes: -> As has been pointed out(and ignored), the Cavs playoff-rotation posted a net-rating of +5.8 without the mentioned pieces. A caveat is that they played below average competition, and to my knowledge no one's calced the SRS. They do about as expected vs playoff-teams going by record(3-5). -> Pippen and Grant, after barely missing any games in 1993 missed a bunch in 1994. Even if the other teams are not always healthy, the Bulls themselves were healthy in 93 when Jordan played with them making the non-health adjusted numbers misleading -> If we account for health and are "consistent" with our approach we find there's plenty that backs up the Jordan-less Bulls as a proper contender, even outside of 1994...
The Bulls Supporting Cast: 94, 95, Jordan's Individual "Production", and the Triangle
Spoiler:
AEnigma wrote:This is an extremely common refrain and the type of thinking that is inevitable when we spend more times looking at name than at real production.
The 1994 Bulls played at a 4.7 SRS pace when healthy, but because we need to portray the Bulls as untalented, we instead need to ignore Pippen and Grant separately missing ten games for the first time in their career. There we need to look past the “55-wins”. And then the following year, when Grant is replaced with Ron Harper and they play at a 3.8 SRS pace before Jordan’s return, well, we look at the win totals painting them as a barely over .500 team. They play like more of 6.5 team with Jordan (3.8 —> 6.5 quite the feat of ceiling raising!), and when Rodman is added to that 6.5 core, Jordan is the one who receives all the credit for that lift.
That last point is a very common trend for Jordan’s teams. 2.74 SRS in 1990, then a massive spike up to 8.57 in 1991. What changed? Jordan played 160 fewer minutes. His TS ADD went down from 315 to 301. His VORP went up 0.2, his win shares went up 1.3, and his PIPM wins went up 1.4… Then the following year the Bulls are even better: 10.07 SRS, rarefied air. But Jordan? TS ADD down to 196. VORP down 1.6, win shares down 2.6, and PIPM wins up 0.5. But of course it is not a super team. 1993, they take a step back to 6.19 SRS. A 4 SRS fall out of nowhere! And contributing to that fall, Jordan’s TS ADD is now down to 124. His win shares are down 0.5, his PIPM wins are down 0.9, and his VORP… is up 1.
So if Jordan is not the one driving these massive swings, I wonder who else possibly could be.
We see elements of this in effect more clearly in 1998, where Pippen misses a large chunk of the season. With Pippen out, the Bulls play at a +6 pace. With Pippen returns, the Bulls play at a +9.5 pace, and this is where I urge readers to remember 1995.
This entire line of thought is another instance of classic Jordan double-speak where we praise Jordan because he lifts teams people claim are less talented teams… but we also call him a “ceiling raiser” because he supposedly fits so much better with the same talent!
The other issue with "Jordan bullied his teammates to greatness" is they did exceptionally well with him entirely absent(55-win full-strength srs, 58-win when when you add the playoffs, 53-win srs without Jordan and Grant in 95) despite a metric-ton of ongoing off-court drama. Why were the Bulls able to fully contend without Jordan with Pippen beefing with management, and Grant and Scottie at each other's throats? Why were they able to fully contend without Jordan with Pippen actively beefing with the guy who management repeatedly tried to replace him with? Why were they still good when Grant left and their best player went and filed a trade-request?
Doc has argued that "leadership is not always linear", but that only leaves "Jordan the great galvanizer" as plausible, not probable. As it happens, the Pre-Jackson Bulls never had a team comparable to Jordan-less Chicago.
And even if you want to put their great success(which was mysteriously absent before jackson entered the fray and limited Jordan's influence)as a byproduct of Jordan, that doesn't really change that Jordan was given far less leeway to "lead" in Chicago than he was in Washington. If "power reveals", does it really make sense to pretend Jordan at his most powerful isn't indicative, but the results when Jordan was at his least powerful were?
Never said anything about "confident", but I don't really have an issue making probabilistic judgments(uncertainity is fine). Main thing about 1971 vs 1991 is -> there is no triangle equivalent(Bulls offense goes from +2.3 to +6.5 between the first and 2nd half of 1990), -> there's no equivalent to the defensive jump(Bulls go from below average at the start of the season to a -3 defense by the 90 playoffs(-5 in the last 2 rounds)).
The Bucks are closer by 1970 with rookie Dandridge than the Bulls get pre-triangle despite Kareem joining a similar team. The Bucks are also still great In 72 in the games Oscar completely misses and unlike 91 where there's no real discernible improvement(Mj's on/off, rapm, defensive tape all looks worse actually)despite facing significantly weaker competition(pistons are way worse defensively and overall in the first two rounds of 1991 compared to 1990).
Kareem's production jumps between 70, 71, and 72 despite worse help(oscar hobbled) and much tougher comp(west+wilt) in 72 vs 71(west hurt). Their full-strength srs also improves iirc. It's also obvious the Bulls were historically loaded when we look at the full-lineup performances in 94 and 95(58-win without Jordan, 52-win without Jordan and Grant), and there's nothing that indicates the same for the Bucks
See the thing about the triangle was it wasn't about getting Jordan to do more. If 90/91 MJ was a better player than 88 or 89 MJ, it wasn't because he was out there impacting the game in more ways. It's because he was more effective in a scaled-down, specialized role. The box-score only tracks the ends of possessions. It does not track Jordan facing way less doubles. It does not track Jordan making less plays at the perimeter than Scottie, nor does it track him being less involved in the full-court presses.
Usage rate measures assists(the pass before a shot) and shots, it does not track who is handling the ball and who is floating off-ball where it's very hard to double because of illegal-d. Jordan was, in a raw sense, doing less. There was a trade-off between effeciency and volume even if you don't put it down to help and competition.
Falcolombardi wrote:So some thinghs here about that +7 number
First that is really weird to use the 93 bulls playoffs improvement as their "real level" cause they improved in the playoffs after coasting. Then not use the 94 bulls playoffs (where they also improved a lot) as their "real level" too
The 94 bulls actually had a +8.9 postseason srs which is almost the same as their 93 seasom +10 post season srs ( +1 difference)
The 94 bulls also missed 20 combined games from their two stars and played a +4.7 srs when healthy in the regular season (+1.5 difference with the 93 bulls with jordan) and in a very generous best case scenario a (+5.3 difference with even the 92 bulls regular season )
If i average the 94 bulls (+4.7 at full strenght in regular season and +8.9 in playoffs) vs the 92 reg season + 93 playoffs combination draymomd used (and please notice i am already picking and choosing the parts that help jordan more) the gap is only 5 points
That is not goat level.
Even by you guys own approach[Draygold and DJoker are the "guys" for context] as it is below other all time greats lift in either absolute terms or in "ceiling raising" situations
I also dont get the "improving a good team is harder" part in relation to kareem, who led a goat level team in the 71 bucks so he was not exactly lacking in "ceiling raising" either compared to jordan while also having better "floor raising" lift as evidenced by their 60~ win pace without oscar in 1972
Or 08/09 garnett who had a similar lift from +3.4 to +9 and he is not even among the goat candidatws short list yet matches jordan here
i could also bring up other cases of lift like 2015 lebron cavs +10 postseason srs with a lot less talent and that the 91 bulls (kirye and love hurt) which strikes me as a even more extreme example of "ceiling raising" considering the floor it came off. Iirc it's +5 if you combine the rs and playoff sample but feel free to take the +4.7
To summarize...
-> with their starting lineup, the 94 Bulls played like a 55-win team in the regular-season, dominated a decent opponent and outscored a New York side, without home-court, that came within a couple of possessions of winning the championship in 6.
-> In 95, health or no health-adjusted they played like a 50+ win team(52-win health adjusted) despite the loss of Grant(who helped the Magic to their first finals).
-> And from the onset of the triangle through to the 1992 regular season, the Bulls defense and offense skyrocketed(with a huge jump within 1990 itself) despite Jordan's own individual numbers, box or non-box, not seeing a similar jump as Jordan scaled down his role on the team.
I could of course say that the "without" from Russell's rookie year is a noisy 28-game sample and thus there is "nothing backing up" Russell's Celtics having excellent help.
But I believe good arguments are internally consistent so I will acknowledge that just like the Jordan-less Bulls, the Celtics were capable of contention without their best player. Here's the difference...
-> Won at least one(probably three) titles with less -> Led two dominant teams(statistically better with most of the Bulls if you go by standard deviation(more relevant to winning championships than "srs")), one was probably with less -> Led a third team not too far behind in 2005(not sure what "help" is there but there's still no Pippen equivalent) with less -> Beat two teams better or on par with anyone Jordan beat(05 and 07 suns, great in the rs too, great in the rs missing key pieces, greatest offense ever, led by an offensive goat candidate who also led a goat offense in Dallas pre-prime) -> Beat two tougher gauntlets better than any Jordan beat(05, 07) -> Beat, with less, a reigning champion that had posted a top 10 all-time full-strength srs after sweeping the Shaq-Kobe-Payton-Malone Lakers -> Won at least 50 games every season(Jordan managed that once pre-triangle) -> Won in multiple systems(Jordan managed that never) -> Won with completely different 2nd bananas(Jordan managed that never)
You see all these points I brought up about Duncan? I can also make similar ones about Russell. After it was
Russell who kept winning that initial "superteam" was depleted, not Jordan Russell who kept winning with different co-stars, not Jordan Russell who won when the league got tougher(Jordan only won after the competition broke down) and Russell who, by the data, won with less
Speaking of. Remember that 82-game sample I mentioned earlier?
What happened to the Celtics with a bad positional replacement(like Chicago had in 84 and 94(Pippen controversially ended up played minutes as a shooting guard)) as they lost a 28mpg role-player and Russell's best teammate "having learned how to win under Bill" significantly improving?
Well let's do a comparison. And while we're at it, why don't we do the Bulls *before Jordan taught them how to win. In fact let's give Jordan, at his statistical apex in 1988, all the credit for the Bulls getting better from when they drafted him. He should beat out the retiree player-coach who doesn't score enough points or isn't "the most productive player in every series he plays in", right?
Spoiler:
OhayoKD wrote: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 mpgDon 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.
And yet, no. Russell is still a match for (emperically)apex Jordan on a much, much[b] better team.
Some other signals
[b]-> WOWYR, which was used to argue for Jordan against Lebron puts Russell's help for his career at 40-wins -> WOWY, which does not make weird corrections such as applying 2nd-year Pippen to 91 MJ's "without", views the Bill-less Celtics as a 35-win cast throughout his career. -> In 1969 Russell missed 5 games and the Celtics were bad -> If we do health-adjustment for 69 and 70, Russell does not merely match Jordan's drop-off, he outright looks more valuable:
Elgee wrote:Tom Sanders, KC Jones and John Havlicek made up an excellent supporting cast of defenders, although Boston lacked a second big man to play next to Russell. When he retired in 1969, along with Sam Jones — who was down to 26 minutes per game by then — the Celtics dropped a whopping 8 points in SRS (from a 59-win full-strength pace to a 36-win one) despite returning the rest of their eight-man rotation.10 So while Boston fielded a strong team around Big Bill, there’s nothing indicating that they could sniff the same heights without him.
-> For those tempted to put it all to "the Celtics didn't have centers", the Celtics were [b]largely unaffected when Russell's teammates missed time throughout his career:
Elgee wrote:For instance, when his teammates missed time, Boston rarely missed a beat. In 1958, Bob Cousy sat for seven games and the Celtics played far better without him. In ’59 and ’60, Sharman, Cousy and Tom Heinsohn missed a few games each, and the machine kept on ticking. In ’61, Sharman missed 18 games and the Celtics were (again) better without him. In ’62, Cousy missed five and, yes, the Celtics were better without him (portending his retirement years).6
But Russell missed four games in 1962 and Boston’s differential fell by 22 points. Four games is infinitesimally small, but all of these stories point in the same direction. It was only when Russell was hampered by injury (in the 1958 Finals) that the Celtics fell short of a title — the single time a Russell team failed to win in a 12-year span dating back to college.7
This trend would hold throughout most of Russell’s career. In ’66, Sam Jones missed eight games and Boston’s performance didn’t budge. Jones missed 11 more contests in ’69 and the team was about 2 points worse without him. All told, as the roster cycled around Russell, his impact seemed to remain.
Does this all make Russell being more valuable certain?, no. But when you are ranking one player over another, appealing to uncertainty is not justification.
Is Russell absolutely for sure better? No. But, if you value winning championships, I believe it is more likely that Russell is better(era-relative) than Jordan is, and I do not think there's much of a counter-case.
I also said I would justify Russell peaking higher, but honestly at this point, I think I can just offer these earlier assumptions:
(For the purposes of this post, "goat-level" can just be "peak/prime Micheal Jordan")
-> All else being equal, a player with more high-level years has a greater chance of having a higher peak than a player with less high-level years. If a player is "at" the top more often, then they have more chances to fluctuate up and "peak" -> All else being equal, a player who starts off as better has a greater chance of having a higher peak than a player who starts off worse -> All else being equal, a player who ages better has a greater chance of having a higher peak than a player who does not' -> All else being equal, a player with better longevity is also more likely to be better at their best. After all, higher peaks have more room to fall, and the ability to maintain excellence over time is usually indicative of a both versatility and a special sort of mental resilience(Kareem does not win 6-rings if he copies MJ's antics in Washington). -> All else being equal, a player who is generally better, is more likely to be better at their best
In fairness Russell's rookie year looks worse per "without", but pre-nba he was winning ncaa championships with a program that had never made the final in a league where more proffessional players played.
Additionally(and I only realized this mostly done with this post), using full-health with and without, 1969 Russell already looks more valuable than an inflated signal for Micheal(assuming the Bulls improved or maintained as a cast between 84 and 88) when we account for srs-suppression.
If you are looking to be convinced that Bill was clearly the best player of his era. I would ask you to consider how you would feel about Jordan if he retired beating the Reggie-Stockton-Malone Jazz. The data is rather conflicted about Jordan being the best in his perceived prime with certain players(Magic, Drob) consistently advantaged while his draftmate switches between being favored or disfavored depending on the signal before elevating better than Jordan does in the playoffs.
Regardless, I think I've said about all I can think to say so I'll end with this:
If the forest is "winning", then arguing for Jordan over Bill on the basis of "individual production" is missing the forest for the leaves.
A good theory has explanatory power. What phenomenon does "Jordan was more valuable" explain? If you can't think of a satisfactory answer to the question, then perhaps Bill Russell is just better, and we don't need a theory saying otherwise.
lessthanjake wrote: It is pretty well established that RAPM is a noisy stat that is therefore probably better measured in somewhat longer time horizons. As per the data I already provided, Steph is pretty dominant in 5-year spans. We’d expect that dominance to lower as you drill down to smaller and smaller sample sizes that are inherently more statistically random. But that isn’t even really the case (which is telling). Steph is still above LeBron in every 3-year span they have, except for 2012-2015 and 2018-2021. And even in the one-year samples, Steph is ahead every season from 2013-2014 onwards, except for two (and one of those is the 2019-2020 season that Steph barely played in). He’s dominant there no matter what you look at—which is actually pretty remarkable, since consistent domination in a stat even with noisily small sample sizes is pretty unlikely unless someone is just systematically producing much higher numbers in the stat.
so is it noisy when it makes jordan or curry look bad and not noisy when it makes them look ok?
also if i got this right, shotchart says late-peak bron>steph, old bron close to steph and really old bron>steph?
if anything i think that just looks terrible for steph.
Yeah, don't think calling Steph the data-ball king is really defensible. May as well link a breakdown of how second-stint cleveland and Steph stack up by impact signals: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=106319069#p106319069 Worth noting Lebron's sample here is sunk by 2018 where he played every game while Steph missed half the season.
Of course that by itself doesn't necessarily mean Steph can't be voted 5, but Curry doesn't look comparable to Duncan or KG je or cheema's 25-year set despite playing half as many possessions and looks just as poor in the 5-year stuff. Interesting that in 5-years shotcharts specific Lebron does poorly, but 3-year and 1-year would indicate Lebron as the Impact king I think, especially if we follow how 2009/2010 usually grade out relative to Lebron's later years. Perhaps 2014 and 2018 are sinking things as rs nadirs(which "real" impact would support)
That is reliant on one source of RAPM: Cheema. Cheema’s RAPM is the least bullish on Steph, but even there it has him #1 in the league ahead of prime LeBron in two five-year spans (2014-2018 and 2015-2019). And that’s the *worst* RAPM measure we have for Steph! When you combine that with the multiple other sources of RAPM I provided that are substantially more bullish on Steph, along with other hybrid measures like RPM, RAPTOR, etc. that I outlined that are also quite bullish on Steph, you get a picture of prime Steph being the data-ball king in his era, even over prime LeBron. Lots of these measures don’t exist for Duncan’s and Garnett’s era. And, even where we do have data for them too, you can’t really make great comparisons between RAPM scores between players in different seasons, since there’s often season- or time-period specific corrections that are made. So we can’t exactly make a direct comparison between prime Steph and guys from an earlier era like Duncan and Garnett, but the fact of outshining prime LeBron in impact metrics is an *extremely* strong indicator.
And, as for the premise that for NBAshotcharts RAPM data “3-year and 1-year would indicate Lebron as the Impact king,” see my post above in response to ShaqAttac. Steph is ahead of LeBron in 7 out of 9 three-year spans in NBAshotcharts RAPM data, and is ahead of LeBron in all but two of their single-season spans (with one of those two being the 2019-2020 season that Steph didn’t really play in). Steph comes out looking better in NBAshotcharts RAPM no matter what time horizons you look at.
OhayoKD wrote:Lebron contributes more to all the phases of play than Messi does. And he is of course a defensive anchor unlike messi.
ShaqAttac wrote:so is it noisy when it makes jordan or curry look bad and not noisy when it makes them look ok?
also if i got this right, shotchart says late-peak bron>steph, old bron close to steph and really old bron>steph?
if anything i think that just looks terrible for steph.
Yeah, don't think calling Steph the data-ball king is really defensible. May as well link a breakdown of how second-stint cleveland and Steph stack up by impact signals: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=106319069#p106319069 Worth noting Lebron's sample here is sunk by 2018 where he played every game while Steph missed half the season.
Of course that by itself doesn't necessarily mean Steph can't be voted 5, but Curry doesn't look comparable to Duncan or KG je or cheema's 25-year set despite playing half as many possessions and looks just as poor in the 5-year stuff. Interesting that in 5-years shotcharts specific Lebron does poorly, but 3-year and 1-year would indicate Lebron as the Impact king I think, especially if we follow how 2009/2010 usually grade out relative to Lebron's later years. Perhaps 2014 and 2018 are sinking things as rs nadirs(which "real" impact would support)
That is reliant on one source of RAPM: Cheema. Cheema’s RAPM is the least bullish on Steph, but even there it has him #1 in the league ahead of prime LeBron in two five-year spans (2014-2018 and 2015-2019). And that’s the *worst* RAPM measure we have for Steph! When you combine that with the multiple other sources of RAPM I provided that are substantially more bullish on Steph, along with other hybrid measures like RPM, RAPTOR, etc. that I outlined that are also quite bullish on Steph, you get a picture of prime Steph being the data-ball king in his era, even over prime LeBron. Lots of these measures don’t exist for Duncan’s and Garnett’s era. And, even where we do have data for them too, you can’t really make great comparisons between RAPM scores between players in different seasons, since there’s often season- or time-period specific corrections that are made. So we can’t exactly make a direct comparison between prime Steph and guys from an earlier era like Duncan and Garnett, but the fact of outshining prime LeBron in impact metrics is an *extremely* strong indicator.
And, as for the premise that for NBAshotcharts RAPM data “3-year and 1-year would indicate Lebron as the Impact king,” see my post above in response to ShaqAttac. Steph is ahead of LeBron in 7 out of 9 three-year spans in NBAshotcharts RAPM data, and is ahead of LeBron in all but two of their single-season spans (with one of those two being the 2019-2020 season that Steph didn’t really play in). Steph comes out looking better in NBAshotcharts RAPM no matter what time horizons you look at.
Steph only gaining significant separation in years which correlate with most players retirement would support Lebron as better, especially when we know nba-shots charts leaves out Lebron's best looking "impact" years. There's also a minutes played advantage, playoff elevation and then real-world signals a responsible RAPM user should be checking. 15-17 Lebron matching 15-17 Steph in the regular season taken at face-value is already pretty damning for Steph and real-world-impact from those 3-years suggest that's not off.
By RPM(which tests as more predictive and stable than RAPTOR because it directly inputs RAPM), Lebron leads the league in wins added from every year from 2005 to 2010 and then is back to leading the league in 2012 and 2013. Steph gets his time to shine after Lebron's prime but Lebron is close to him in 2017 and 2016, ahead of him in 2018 and ahead of again in 2023. It also suffers from the same issue as RAPM where it will artificially curve outliers. As it doesn't cover most of Duncan and KG's primes it doesn't help Steph there(though college-age lebron beating out late-prime duncan is impressive) and he still looks much worse than Lebron.
I have no clue about RAPTOR and I do not care, but feel free to list the stuff if you want to. I saw luka post that 2009 lebron is still loved but it's lower on lebron and bigs in general iirc(designed by someone who thought kawhi was the best defender in 2019 lol).
There are still box-priors in all of these(and they all curve down outliers/misattribute value if players hit certain value tresholds) so I would keep that in mind. But I think LEBRON and RPM and EPM are fine if you also are referencing real-world stuff(lineup-ratings wowy, ect)
I don’t really feel the need to go through all this, because there’s a lot of obviously motivated reasoning going on here that I don’t think many people would find persuasive on its face, but just a few minor things:
OhayoKD wrote: -> All else being equal, a player who goes 27-2(or 27-1) over a much longer period of time(an entire career) with dramatically different personnel in a league without lower-end expansion fodder...
Talking about “expansion fodder” is misleading when it does not acknowledge that the league expanded as the game got substantially more popular and more centralized at the professional level. I don’t think there’s good reason to think that an average team in the 1960s had more talent than the average team in the 1990s, despite there being fewer teams. In fact, I think most people would think the opposite. And if the average team wasn’t more talented, then those semifinals against definitionally median teams weren’t more difficult than a first-round matchup for the Bulls (it’s against about the 50th percentile team either way).
To the extent you’re talking about literal expansion teams that were bad because they just started as franchises, I’d note that that’s an out of place argument when talking about playoff record, as you are here. The Bulls weren’t facing bad expansion teams in their 27-2 playoff run, since those teams don’t make the playoffs. And I’d also note that the size of the league almost doubled in Russell’s time in the league, so he had more than his share of beating up on new teams.
...is probably better than a player who posts a worse record of 27-3 (or 27-2) over a convenient 7 or 8-year frame while getting to dunk on weaker early round opposition
Again, as I’ve pointed out a bunch of times, a semifinal opponent in an 8-team league is not really conceptually different from a round of 16 opponent in a league with almost 30 teams. You’re talking about roughly median teams either way. The league was so small in Russell’s era that the semifinals were the “weaker early round opposition.”
-> Led two dominant teams(statistically better with most of the Bulls if you go by standard deviation(more relevant to winning championships than "srs")), one was probably with less
This idea that standard deviations above the mean is more important than something like SRS is basically just nonsense. Again, as I’ve explained to you, if you had an 8-team league, where one team wins 60% of their games, two teams win 45% of their games, and the rest win 50% of their games, that team that won only 60% of their games would be 2.5 standard deviations above the mean. Which would be similar to a 66-win team in an era like today. Would we think that that 60% winning-percentage team would have a better chance of winning the title than a 66-win team (assuming an equal sized league)? Of course not. Teams with the best records in sports/leagues with more parity (i.e. a league with a small standard deviation interval) are not more likely to win championships than teams with the best records in sports/leagues with less parity. We see that very demonstrably in baseball, where the best teams win about 60% of their games, and are routinely upset in the playoffs despite playing best-of-7 series’. If the best teams only beat average teams like 60% of the time, then the chances of them losing a playoff series is much higher than if the best teams beat average teams more like 80% of the time or something. It’s just a basic fact of probability. There’s less of an absolute gap between the teams, and that’s what’s important. You are just wanting to use standard deviations to data-manipulate your way into suggesting that Duncan’s teams (or, at various times, I believe you’ve argued this for Russell’s or Kareem’s) were as dominant in the regular season as Jordan’s in the 1990’s, when they simply demonstrably were not.
A few notes -> As noted earlier, the "identical record' bit is a bit disingenuous. Russell is 27-1 in series he was available for. If missed games are a detriment, then Jordan is 27-3. Actually there are alot of issues with this framing(all the issues at the top). Will add that because of the length(beyond natural aging) Russell had to play alot more regular season games to get to those 11 championships.
This is some really wild stuff. Russell literally played in 4 of the games in the series loss you’re trying to discount, and the Celtics went 1-3 in those games. You’re comparing that to series’ in which Jordan literally did not play a single second? It’s nonsense. (And, of course, it is an even richer bout of fact-twisting when we realize that getting to Jordan being “27-3” requires you to count a series loss in a series he didn’t play a second of against him but *not* count a series win that he didn’t play a second of in that same year. Of course, neither should count, but there’s plainly no reasonable heuristic by which 27-3 exists, and yet that’s somehow what you’ve come to. And I think you should take a step back and wonder why you’re getting to nonsense conclusions like this and consider whether in your fervor to put LeBron above Jordan you’ve not gone overboard into complete bias-ridden fiction-land regarding Jordan).
-> SRS thresholds being lower also do not necessarily mean the league was weaker(see: post-merger 70's, early 2000's where Duncan led 3 Chicago-tier outliers)
-> SRS tresholds being higher also do not necessarily mean the league is stronger(90's)
Yes, that is right. A team with an SRS number in one era isn’t necessarily equal to a team with the same SRS number in another era. But, here, the player whose opponents had lower SRS also played in an older league that could generally be agreed to be weaker since the sport was nowhere near as popular or organized professionally. If anything, a team with a given SRS in the 1990’s would be superior to a team with an equal SRS in the 1950s or 1960s.
Relatedly, if we assume eras have equal average talent—which is probably a very favorable assumption when comparing the 1950s/1960s and the 1980s/1990s—then higher SRS opponents will be tougher to beat, since a higher-SRS team in a league with an equal average talent pool will presumably be a more talented team.
You can only get to a conclusion that lower SRS teams in the 1960s were as strong as higher SRS teams in the 1990s if you genuinely think the average talent level in the NBA in the 1960s was higher than in the 1990s…which I think would be a pretty wild conclusion.
More than a few notes: -> As has been pointed out(and ignored), the Cavs playoff-rotation posted a net-rating of +5.8 without the mentioned pieces. A caveat is that they played below average competition, and to my knowledge no one's calced the SRS. They do about as expected vs playoff-teams going by record(3-5).
This is literally 100% nonsense. You say the Cavaliers’ “playoff rotation” had a +5.8 net rating in games “without the mentioned pieces.” That is false. As I mentioned already, in those 1993-1994 playoffs, the Cavaliers did not have Brad Daugherty, Larry Nance, or Hot Rod Williams—all starters and major pieces for them. And there was *not even one* single regular season game that year in which they were missing all of those players, so any claim about what net rating their “playoff rotation” had “without the mentioned pieces” is just 100% fiction, because their team was so ravaged in the playoffs that there literally was not a single game “without the mentioned pieces” before they played the Bulls in the playoffs.
-> Pippen and Grant, after barely missing any games in 1993 missed a bunch in 1994. Even if the other teams are not always healthy, the Bulls themselves were healthy in 93 when Jordan played with them making the non-health adjusted numbers misleading
Yes, they were healthy when Jordan played with them in 1993. They also completely destroyed the opposition in the playoffs in 1993 and lost in the second round in 1994. Enormous difference. And when Jordan did not have a healthy team in 1998, he still led the team to 62 wins and won the title. The Bulls were not a real contender in 1993-1994, and I suspect you weren’t watching basketball back then if you think they were. Being 11th in the league in SRS, beating a completely ravaged team in the first round, and then losing a close series to a team that lost in the finals is not the resume of a significant contender, and no one thought they were. For reference for what it’s worth, they went into the next season with the 9th highest betting odds to win the title—tied with the Golden State Warriors. People knew they were still a good team, but they were definitely not a top-tier contender. Meanwhile, with Jordan they were a dominant, inevitable buzzsaw.
Russell who kept winning that initial "superteam" was depleted, not Jordan
Jordan dominated with two different groups. Pippen is the only other common denominator. They weren’t super teams anyways, but as a factual matter they were two wildly different rosters.
Furthermore, you talk about Russell winning when an initial superteam was “depleted,” with the implication that he won at some point with a less talented group. But Bill Russell literally never played on a team that had less than 6 Hall of Famers in it, and even that was just one year—the rest were 7-9 Hall of Famer teams. The idea that his team was ever “depleted” is just crazy.
A good theory has explanatory power. What phenomenon does "Jordan was more valuable" explain? If you can't think of a satisfactory answer to the question, then perhaps Bill Russell is just better, and we don't need a theory saying otherwise.
It explains Jordan being both incredibly individually dominant and incredibly dominant with his team, in an era that was stronger than Russell’s and that involved more than two playoff rounds while being on teams much less stacked with a bajillion hall of famers.
OhayoKD wrote:Lebron contributes more to all the phases of play than Messi does. And he is of course a defensive anchor unlike messi.
OhayoKD wrote:Steph only gaining significant separation in years which correlate with most players retirement would support Lebron as better, especially when we know nba-shots charts leaves out Lebron's best looking "impact" years. There's also a minutes played advantage, playoff elevation and then real-world signals a responsible RAPM user should be checking. 15-17 Lebron matching 15-17 Steph in the regular season taken at face-value is already pretty damning for Steph and real-world-impact from those 3-years suggest that's not off.
Are we going to really be saying that timeframes in there that Steph is ahead in are not in LeBron’s prime? 2013-2018 isn’t LeBron’s prime? He was 29-33 years old! It’s just factually true that Steph is above LeBron in a ton of impact metrics during LeBron’s prime. Of course, LeBron has such a long prime that LeBron has prime years before Steph got going. But that doesn’t negate the fact that Steph surpassed LeBron in a ton of impact metrics while LeBron was still in his prime.
As for playoff elevation, you’ll notice that, in my post, I provided a multitude of metrics that were playoff-only, as well as regular season + playoff. Steph came out looking good in those too—though the separation over LeBron is not so stark anymore.
I’d be curious what “real-world signals” you’re talking about, because I’d say winning 4 titles and making 6 finals, leading your team to a record-breaking 207 regular-season games in three seasons, winning a couple MVPs (and being voted above LeBron in a few years he didn’t win it, by the way), winning a title with one of the least talented title-winning teams in memory (in 2022), having teams basically completely single-cover Kevin Durant in the playoffs because they’re so afraid of you, having someone’s case for #1 of all time strongly rest on having beaten you, having better on-off in the regular season and playoffs than LeBron James, having probably the greatest team ever (the KD Warriors) only be about a .500 regular season team in games you don’t play and have a negative net rating in regular season and playoffs in minutes you’re off the court, and being the clear greatest shooter ever in a game that is all about shooting are all some mega-strong “real world” signals. It’s not like these impact metrics are telling us something that doesn’t make perfect sense.
By RPM(which tests as more predictive and stable than RAPTOR because it directly inputs RAPM), Lebron leads the league in wins added from every year from 2005 to 2010 and then is back to leading the league in 2012 and 2013. Steph gets his time to shine after Lebron's prime but Lebron is close to him in 2017 and 2016, ahead of him in 2018 and ahead of again in 2023. It also suffers from the same issue as RAPM where it will artificially curve outliers. As it doesn't cover most of Duncan and KG's primes it doesn't help Steph there(though college-age lebron beating out late-prime duncan is impressive) and he still looks much worse than Lebron.
What are you defining as LeBron’s prime? This feels like you’re trying to artificially lower the length of LeBron’s prime in order to downplay the point about Curry. I don’t think anyone would suggest LeBron wasn’t in his prime in 2013-2018. Heck, I think most would say he was still in his prime into the 2020-2021 season! But definitely LeBron was in his prime during years where Steph is consistently ahead of him in a ton of these metrics. If your point is that LeBron was also great in these metrics in years before Steph had come into the picture, then I agree! I’ve already said I don’t put Steph above LeBron overall, and that LeBron’s freakish longevity is why. But the fact is that Steph did come into his prime during the latter half or so of LeBron’s prime and proceed to outdo him overall in the impact metrics we have. I’m not making this point to denigrate LeBron or say that Steph should be placed above LeBron. Rather, the point is to use LeBron as a reference point—surely someone that can do that during LeBron James’ prime is someone we need to be considering very soon here! How many players that are left after we get through the next two (which will presumably be Jordan and Russell) do you think could outstrip prime LeBron in tons of metrics like this?
OhayoKD wrote:Lebron contributes more to all the phases of play than Messi does. And he is of course a defensive anchor unlike messi.
f4p wrote:one thing i never really see brought up with russell and wilt is the sheer number of possessions they got in their average game.
not in terms of their raw stats or anything, but the extra impact that allows for. if you are better than other people, you want more possessions to apply your impact.
and this isn't the same as some other era-relative boosts. we can debate if the 60's being a decade of atrocious shooting made bill russell's inside defensive impact higher in a way it never would have been again later in nba history, but the extra possessions are just a background fact of life no one else ever got to take advantage of. you can't IQ or scheme your way to changing how the entire league works.
wilt was famously an ironman, but bill russell played 48 minutes in over 2/3 of his career playoffs games. he played 40 minutes in 88% of them. averaged 45.4 mpg.
the average FGA and FTA during bill's run seems is about 102 and 36. that's about 118 possessions per game by FGA+0.44*FTA. the only thing missing is adding TOV and subtracting ORB. but at no point in history have turnovers been lower than ORB, and the first year they were tracked (1974), the differential was the largest at about 6. all video evidence i've seen suggest the 60's would have been similarly lopsided with turnovers. so there was likely on the order of more than 120 possessions. in games where bill and wilt were playing almost every minute.
compare that to someone like duncan, who if we just go with his first 10 years, played 40 mpg in the playoffs in a league with a 94.2 pace. i get russell having 45% more playoff possessions per game. so he's almost getting 1.5 games worth of impact compared to a game for a modern player. that's a huge effect on helping your team win. and not one any modern player can possibly be expected to change, as plenty of guys back then were playing huge minutes and the whole league was playing at a tremendous pace. it's basically just a 50% era boost for great players. and should be accounted for.
I think this is an interesting thing to bring up, but I'm not sure I agree with your assessment.
Let's start by putting minutes to the side, because obviously more minutes definitely does mean more potential for impact.
If we're just talking about pace, then you can certainly talk about it having an effect on the raw points per game impact of players, but since it's true of the entire league, this shouldn't translate into having more "games worth of impact", because games themselves would have more possessions.
Further, most +/- stats have pacing built into them. I'm one of the few who specifically looks at non-pace related stuff, and when I reference it, I call it "raw +/-" precisely because otherwise I'd expect people to expect I meant a per-possession number.
All this to say then that while I'm not opposed to considering where pacing differences between eras can skew the picture, I don't think what you're referencing here is something that generally being viewed from a skewed perspective.
If you disagree with this, please do elaborate further because clearly I'm confused about something.
This is some really wild stuff. Russell literally played in 4 of the games
He got injured in game 3 and then came back to play 20 minutes in game 6. "Motivated reasoning" though.
That said...
-> +5.8 is from seventeen games with Mark price and no lance or daughtery past the injury. A source that shall not be named did not track the hot-rod injury but that's my bad for not vetting. That still leaves them outscoring the knicks, playing at a 55-win pace in the regular season with health and a 52-win pace in 95 without Grant. Will note, my misstep for future reference but that still looks to me like a contention-level team. Still no real justification offered for disregarding their better "non-health adjusted" srs in 95, the Knicks series, or what they were doing when healthy in 1994.
-> Duncan did not play in an 8-team league, and your hypothetical makes assumptions about distribution. SRS is also not equivalent to "win/loss %"(it is derived from M.O.V) so the baseball analogy does not hold up.
-> Newly added teams are consistently weaker. This is true-across sports(and actually makes sense in a way you equating record with differential does not)
-> I'm glad you like the word "dominance", but as long as your interpretation is simply "what produces high gamescore" I don't think I much care.
f4p wrote:one thing i never really see brought up with russell and wilt is the sheer number of possessions they got in their average game.
not in terms of their raw stats or anything, but the extra impact that allows for. if you are better than other people, you want more possessions to apply your impact.
and this isn't the same as some other era-relative boosts. we can debate if the 60's being a decade of atrocious shooting made bill russell's inside defensive impact higher in a way it never would have been again later in nba history, but the extra possessions are just a background fact of life no one else ever got to take advantage of. you can't IQ or scheme your way to changing how the entire league works.
wilt was famously an ironman, but bill russell played 48 minutes in over 2/3 of his career playoffs games. he played 40 minutes in 88% of them. averaged 45.4 mpg.
the average FGA and FTA during bill's run seems is about 102 and 36. that's about 118 possessions per game by FGA+0.44*FTA. the only thing missing is adding TOV and subtracting ORB. but at no point in history have turnovers been lower than ORB, and the first year they were tracked (1974), the differential was the largest at about 6. all video evidence i've seen suggest the 60's would have been similarly lopsided with turnovers. so there was likely on the order of more than 120 possessions. in games where bill and wilt were playing almost every minute.
compare that to someone like duncan, who if we just go with his first 10 years, played 40 mpg in the playoffs in a league with a 94.2 pace. i get russell having 45% more playoff possessions per game. so he's almost getting 1.5 games worth of impact compared to a game for a modern player. that's a huge effect on helping your team win. and not one any modern player can possibly be expected to change, as plenty of guys back then were playing huge minutes and the whole league was playing at a tremendous pace. it's basically just a 50% era boost for great players. and should be accounted for.
That’s actually a really good point, I think. The chances of the better team winning goes up the higher the pace, because it’s just a higher sample size of possessions, which makes each individual game be less statistically random in outcome. Russell played in an era with about 120-130 pace, and later eras (including Jordan’s) tended to have more like 90-100 pace. This actually genuinely would’ve made it a bit easier for the guy on the best team to consistently win in Russell’s era than in another era.
I had a similar thought come to mind but I think we need to be careful:
Given a mean outcome with a given level of variance for a particular type of event, greater sample has the effect of decreasing the variance in outcome.
In basketball though, you don't get more possessions by insisting the games are played longer. You get them by pushing the pace by offensive and defensive strategies, and those strategies themselves come with differing levels of variance. If a given strategy thus pushes pace while increasing variance - which is indeed what "pace & space" does - then it may optimize your mean outcome while actively hurting your floor.
Still, while I think the main value of pushing the pace is always about attacking before the defense is at full strength, I can see the logic that a faster pace will lead to greater sample, which will be one factor in reducing variance of outcome.
lessthanjake wrote:Again, as I’ve pointed out a bunch of times, a semifinal opponent in an 8-team league is not really conceptually different from a round of 16 opponent in a league with almost 30 teams. You’re talking about roughly median teams either way. The league was so small in Russell’s era that the semifinals were the “weaker early round opposition.”
Russell teams didn't play semi-finals before 1966 though.
This idea that standard deviations above the mean is more important than something like SRS is basically just nonsense.
It's not nonsense, it's looking at this problem from different perspective. It's not surprising that the league didn't see any all-time dominant RS teams before the expansion started, smaller league makes statistically harder to reach bugger outliers than bigger league from statistical perspective.
Furthermore, you talk about Russell winning when an initial superteam was “depleted,” with the implication that he won at some point with a less talented group. But Bill Russell literally never played on a team that had less than 6 Hall of Famers in it, and even that was just one year—the rest were 7-9 Hall of Famer teams. The idea that his team was ever “depleted” is just crazy.
What do you know about these "6 Hall of Famers"?
It explains Jordan being both incredibly individually dominant and incredibly dominant with his team, in an era that was stronger than Russell’s and that involved more than two playoff rounds while being on teams much less stacked with a bajillion hall of famers.
What evidences do you have that Celtics were much more stacked than Bulls?
This is some really wild stuff. Russell literally played in 4 of the games
He got injured in game 3 and then came back to play20 minutes in game 6. "Motivated reasoning" though.
Yes, and they were also 1-2 if you don’t include game 6. The point is that it’s obviously nonsense to compare the Bulls losing in 1994 with the Celtics losing in 1958. Michael Jordan was not on the 1994 Bulls. Russell was on the 1958 Celtics, played in more than half the series, and they did not do well in the games he played. These are not comparable.
That said...
-> +5.8 is from seventeen games with Mark price and no lance or daughtery past the injury. A source that shall not be named did not track the hot-rod injury but that's my bad for not vetting. That still leaves them outscoring the knicks, playing at a 55-win pace in the regular season with health and a 52-win pace in 95 without Grant. Will note, my misstep for future reference but that still looks to me like a contention-level team. Still no real justification offered for disregarding their better "non-health adjusted" srs in 95, the Knicks series, or what they were doing when healthy in 1994.
The bottom line is that the Bulls were not a significant contender without Jordan. They were still a good team. The type of team that might make the second round, but not a significant contender. And no one really saw them that way. Jordan made them into an unstoppable buzzsaw. That’s an enormous difference. And of course that’s not even getting into the fact that it’s unlikely that Bulls team without Jordan would’ve been as good if they’d not had the experience of winning three titles before that—which never would’ve happened without Jordan.
-> Duncan did not play in an 8-team league, and your hypothetical makes assumptions about distribution. SRS is also not equivalent to "win/loss %"(it is derived from M.O.V) so the baseball analogy does not hold up.
The point isn’t about how many teams there are. It was just a stylized example. And yes, of course SRS isn’t about win-loss (I used a win-loss example because I’d calculated standard deviation for that example in a prior discussion already). But the point is about parity. You’re basically saying that teams that are as many standard deviations above the mean are just as good as each other and just as likely to win the title, even if one has substantially better SRS. The only way that a team with lower SRS wouldn’t have a standard-deviation disadvantage too is if there’s more parity in the league (i.e. a lower standard deviation). So you’re basically inherently saying that doing well in a league with more parity of outcomes between teams is just as good as doing even better in a league with less parity of outcomes. And my point is that that’s just objectively not true. In sports where the best teams don’t dominate the average team by as much or as often, individual games or series’ will always be more random—i.e. higher likelihood of upsets. Baseball is a very good example of that. And the bottom line is that trying to use standard deviations to act like players led teams to just as impressive/dominant of records as Jordan’s Bulls is just silly.
-> Newly added teams are consistently weaker. This is true-across sports(and actually makes sense in a way you equating record with differential does not)
Yes, newly added teams are consistently weaker. But you were talking about Jordan’s 27-2 playoff series record in the 1990s. And he wasn’t playing weak newly-added teams in the *playoffs.* So it doesn’t do anything to help the argument you were making.
Of course, if you wanted to talk about expansion teams being relevant to regular season records, then that’s more valid, but then you’d also have to contend with the fact that the league got 75% bigger during Russell’s career, and got 26% bigger during Jordan’s career. Russell had the opportunity to beat up on plenty of expansion teams.
As a sidenote, I also wouldn’t really equate expansion with a less difficult league if comparing across vastly different eras like this. When talking about going from one year to the next year with expansion teams, then I think it’s fair to say that it is easier to get a good record than the year before, because the talent pool hasn’t taken some big jump in one year and now you have more teams. The average team is now of less talent than the year before. But the same logic doesn’t really hold if you’re comparing across decades. For instance, if the 1995-1996 NBA was more diluted talent-wise than the 1994-1995 NBA, that doesn’t tell us whether the 1995-1996 NBA was more diluted talent-wise than the 1960s NBA, and I think most of us would probably conclude that it wasn’t.
OhayoKD wrote:Lebron contributes more to all the phases of play than Messi does. And he is of course a defensive anchor unlike messi.
lessthanjake wrote:Again, as I’ve pointed out a bunch of times, a semifinal opponent in an 8-team league is not really conceptually different from a round of 16 opponent in a league with almost 30 teams. You’re talking about roughly median teams either way. The league was so small in Russell’s era that the semifinals were the “weaker early round opposition.”
Russell teams didn't play semi-finals before 1966 though.
This idea that standard deviations above the mean is more important than something like SRS is basically just nonsense.
It's not nonsense, it's looking at this problem from different perspective. It's not surprising that the league didn't see any all-time dominant RS teams before the expansion started, smaller league makes statistically harder to reach bugger outliers than bigger league from statistical perspective.
Furthermore, you talk about Russell winning when an initial superteam was “depleted,” with the implication that he won at some point with a less talented group. But Bill Russell literally never played on a team that had less than 6 Hall of Famers in it, and even that was just one year—the rest were 7-9 Hall of Famer teams. The idea that his team was ever “depleted” is just crazy.
What do you know about these "6 Hall of Famers"?
It explains Jordan being both incredibly individually dominant and incredibly dominant with his team, in an era that was stronger than Russell’s and that involved more than two playoff rounds while being on teams much less stacked with a bajillion hall of famers.
What evidences do you have that Celtics were much more stacked than Bulls?
lessthanjake wrote:Again, as I’ve pointed out a bunch of times, a semifinal opponent in an 8-team league is not really conceptually different from a round of 16 opponent in a league with almost 30 teams. You’re talking about roughly median teams either way. The league was so small in Russell’s era that the semifinals were the “weaker early round opposition.”
Russell teams didn't play semi-finals before 1966 though.
Huh? I’m confused as to what you mean here. The Celtics played only 2 playoff rounds in the vast majority of those years. That first round they played was definitionally the semifinals. And, when it was only in a 8 or 9 team league, the semifinals essentially include half the teams—which makes it conceptually equivalent to the first-round now.
This idea that standard deviations above the mean is more important than something like SRS is basically just nonsense.
It's not nonsense, it's looking at this problem from different perspective. It's not surprising that the league didn't see any all-time dominant RS teams before the expansion started, smaller league makes statistically harder to reach bugger outliers than bigger league from statistical perspective.
Yeah, I get that, but the point being made was specifically that having a lower SRS (or win total) but being as many standard deviations above the mean in a league with more parity makes you just as likely to win a championship. And that’s just not true. You might be able to fashion an argument that it’s just as *impressive* in some sense, but it’s not just as good from the perspective of chances of winning the title (all other things being equal). Top teams in leagues/sports with more parity are not as likely to win championships as top teams in leagues/sports with less parity (again, assuming all other things are equal—obviously other things come into play here, such as whether playoffs are single-game or series’, etc.).
And even on the separate question about what is more impressive in some sense, the point being made was applying this logic even to Tim Duncan’s Spurs, who did not play in a less-expanded league (the opposite actually). The argument that Duncan’s Spurs were as dominant a team as Jordan’s Bulls despite having worse records and lesser SRS, because of some argument about standard deviations is pretty obviously just motivated reasoning. If one wants to make a similar point about Russell’s Celtics, then that starts getting a bit less silly, but there’s also so many other confounding factors there—including probably most importantly how high we think the talent level in the 1960s really was. After all, dominating an 8-team league in the 1960s may well not be more difficult than dominating a 27-team league with expansion teams in the 1990s, given the vast difference in popularity of the game and the pretty nascent stage that the NBA was in. Anyways, the whole argument (and the conclusions it was purportedly getting to) just strikes me as someone starting at their conclusion and trying to figure out some way to get there.
What do you know about these "6 Hall of Famers"?
Well, the year they only had 6 hall of famers, those hall of famers included Russell, as well as the guys that got #34 and #56 in the last RealGM top 100 project (Havlicek and Sam Jones). And then it included 6-time all-star Bailey Howell. And then it included hall of famer Tom Sanders—who was on the all-defensive team that season—as well as Don Nelson who was a good player but perhaps more in the hall of fame for coaching and for being along for the ride on the Celtics. Of course, there’s an element to which some guys on those Celtics made the hall of fame because they won. But they also had a lot of incredible players. And when the roster with the least hall-of-famers still had the #34 and #56 players of all time, a 6-time all star, and an all-defensive guy, along with other good players (Don Nelson, rookie Don Chaney, etc.), then I think it’s safe to say that the team was never even remotely “depleted.”
What evidences do you have that Celtics were much more stacked than Bulls?
See above. Even in their least stacked year, the last Real GM top 100 classifies Havlicek + Sam Jones as being superior to Pippen + Grant or Pippen + Rodman. And there was no one else on the Bulls as good as Bailey Howell (a 6-time all star), nor did the Bulls have another guy who was all-defensive team like Tom Sanders. And that’s not even getting to those Celtics having previously had guys like Cousy (a guy who won MVP in those years and was top 8 in MVP voting 7 times in those championship years), Heinsohn, KC Jones, etc. There was turnover on the team and not all those hall of famers were truly great players, but the talent on those Celtics teams was always outrageously high.
OhayoKD wrote:Lebron contributes more to all the phases of play than Messi does. And he is of course a defensive anchor unlike messi.
He does not make my top 4, but I want to nominate Steph Curry—who I think needs to start being discussed soon in this project.
i'm not sure how is he beating hakeem, shaq, duncan, or magic. all guys with longevity advantage, even magic. and big time playoff performers vs the decliner that is steph. and it's hard to say he's really got an argument over wilt. and personally i think kobe is just way too far ahead on longevity while being fairly playoff resilient. and i would think this board is going to pick KG ahead.
I have to say I think this notion of Curry being a weak playoff performer really concerns me. We're talking about a guy with incredible team playoff success where none of us have actually seen his team lose very often, and we're talking about a guy with a career playoff average with 27 PPG on 60+% TS.
I think it's critical for folks to remember that so much of this has its foundation in the 2016 Finals, which has then been used again and again in LeBron vs Curry debates - which is fine, but since LeBron was already voted in at #1, that's a problematic thing to shape our assessment when considering Curry with everyone else.
I also think that when we bring up guys where we have +/- data on and want to talk about longevity, we should get clear just what an outlier the Warriors have been on this front.
If we look at "Post-Season Centuries", ahem, post-seasons with a raw +/- in the triple digits, here's what we've got going back to '96-97:
Draymond Green 6 LeBron James 6 Steph Curry 5 Chauncey Billups 4 Tim Duncan 4 Danny Green 4 Manu Ginobili 3 Kyrie Irving 3 Kawhi Leonard 3 Klay Thompson 3 Ray Allen 2 Giannis Antetokounmpo 2 Kobe Bryant 2 Mario Chalmers 2 Kevin Durant 2 Joel Embiid 2 Derek Fisher 2 Rick Fox 2 Dirk Nowitzki 2 Kevin Garnett 2 Richard Hamilton 2 Andre Iguodala 2 Michael Jordan 2 (only 2 years we have data for) Kevin Love 2 Khris Middleton 2 Shaquille O'Neal 2 Scottie Pippen 2 (only 2 years we have data for) Tayshaun Prince 2 Dwyane Wade 2 Rasheed Wallace 2
What we can see here is that if we're talking about ultra-successful playoff team dominance with guys in this era, it's really about a) LeBron and b) Golden State. Now, team game, and we can have conversations about the credit those around Curry deserve, but I think we need to recognize that we've already seen a rarely-ever-seen sustained dominance in the playoffs by a team built around Curry which really isn't matched by those we might think achieved something similar based on counting chips.
Of course I'm not saying that only these years should count when doing our holistic assessments - I've said I'm not ready to put Curry over Duncan for example - but seriously, how many more ultra dominant runs does Curry need to be the foundation of before he's seen as being as "resilient" in the playoffs as Kobe? Negative 3? When we get to this point, I think we need to consider how out notions of a guy as a player performer have been manufactured.
f4p wrote:steph has always been a data ball darling. but sometimes it gets a little ridiculous. a stat like RPM thinks he was the best basically every year, no matter what was going on. like are we really supposed to take seriously him being first in 2019? or why would he be 3rd in 2022 when he had a very down regular season, maybe the worst since he was a rookie or at least since he was an all-star. if a stat becomes performance-independent, then i'm not sure how much we can trust it.
So, I'd suggest coming at this differently.
Your word of "trust" I think speaks to a certain approach where you're trying to determine what metrics you can trust to help you in your assessment, and if you don't trust something enough, then you'd logically take it off your mental spreadsheet. That probably sells short the entirety of your process, but to the degree "statistical trustworthiness" is central to your analysis, I'd argue that that's effectively what you're doing...and I think it's what many if not most people do.
Whereas, I'd advocate for an approach where we ask: What would explain this piece of data? In small sample, noise is obviously an option, but in large sample, it stops being so.
So then, the data has told us quite definitively that Golden State correlates massively based on Curry's presence even when normalized for his teammates. What is causing this? Regardless of how that qualitative answer fits into a GOAT debate, the need for a causal explanation is there, and writing off a metric as distrustworthy not because of its variance but because of its LACK of variance in result in a given situation, is problematic.
And of course, folks have given all sorts of explanations for what is going on to the point where it gets mocked. The term "gravity" has been used so much that people roll their eyes as if it's trying to add an achievement for Curry out of nowhere instead of it being a term used to try to explain the data we've had for the better part of a decade now.
So yeah, I'm afraid that when I look at all this, I don't see a reason to be suspect of Curry's impact. Rather I see a new phenomena that messes with our ability to visually recognize it, for a variety of reasons.
f4p wrote:then of course there's the draymond problem, where he shares such a huge majority of his minutes with another impact god that it's hard to know who's helping who and how much is just that they are an incredible fit, and steph would never look this good in other circumstances. similar in some ways to duncan playing next to ginobili while ginobili is tearing up the impact metrics. and then finally, lots of regular season things like steph. but he falls off quite a bit in the playoffs. outside of 2017 and 2022, his numbers fall hard. and team performance is hard to reconcile with the impact numbers when you see his 67 win team almost lose the finals to an injured lebron team, even having to switch up their starting lineup to make it through the finals. or his 73-9 team lose 9 games just in the playoffs. or his 2018 team that seemed invincible almost lose to the rockets with steph's number taking a big dip. or why he can be so impactful and play with draymond but not even make the playoffs in 2021.
I think the Curry-Green pairing does offer a particularly challenging phenomenon when trying to evaluate individual player impact, and as I've said in the past, I've literally considered many times whether I should rank Green's performance in a given year ahead of Curry's. Curry keeps coming out on top for me, but I want to make sure I'm not doing that simply because Curry's the guy who the basketball world sees as the star.
Re: who's helping who? I do think we should note that one of these guys is a star offensive player and the other is a star defensive player. I see people talk sometimes as if Green would be nothing without Curry and I just shake my head wondering how they think Curry's making Green look like a great defender in their eyes. This to say then, that I think regressed +/- data does a pretty solid job in distinguishing direction of each guy's impact. It can't ever be completely separated of course, but that's how it goes in team sports.
Re: just incredible fit. I would argue that we should not be trying to normalize fit away when evaluating achievement. It would be worthwhile to try to identify the synergistic impact of a given player pairing beyond their individual goodness, but aside from the fact that we'd still not be able to draw a clear line of demarcation, there's also a matter that fit-optimization over time is what good coaches and teammates are supposed to do. Thus trying to act like achieving this isn't an "achievement" is, imho, just not right.
Re: Similar to Duncan & Ginobili. Totally. ftr, I have both Ginobili & Green in my Top 50 and think they are drastically underrated by most.
Re: not make playoffs in 2021. I mean, this just happened and it was clear what was happening at the time. The team began the year emphasizing their "2 timelines" approach where it was less about optimizing Curry-Green, and more about training up Wiseman & Oubre to play Kerr-ball. People tend to talk as if a given player has a goodness level, and thus that if a superstar is "really great" he should be able to win with pretty much any teammate. Aside from the general over-simplicity of this, it has to be understood that it's a very, very different thing to get by with a not-great player as your flat-tire that you're dragging along by doing stuff without him, compared to actually trying to involve him in hopes of helping him improve.
Further, the statement of "couldn't make the playoffs in 2021" is something that made a lot more sense before the team won the title the next year with the same 3 best players (Curry, Green, Wiggins). I get that the team got Klay Thompson back, but that Klay wasn't the Klay of old.
I think the lessons to be learned about the Warriors' differing results in those two years are myriad, but I think the general takeaway is that if you're using it to try to knock the guys who led the team to the title, then you're looking the wrong way. It's hard to win a championship, and so whenever you do it, you're clearly doing some extraordinary stuff.
f4p wrote:hopefully i get a chance to finish my playoff resiliency spreadsheet, but you have years like 2016 and 2018 where steph makes the finals (and even wins one of them) while having some of the largest drop-offs ever for top 50-ish players who make the finals. 2016 is the worst drop out of 178 playoffs i looked at. 2018 is 8th worst, even with 2 of his 3 opponents being terrible defenses (2022 boston is the only really elite defense he's ever faced in the playoffs, although he did do well). he combines large statistical drops with winning series as a huge favorite (4th easiest out of 41) and losing as a small underdog (8th easiest out of 41).
So, looking at this, which to be clear is full of reasonable stuff to look at, I'm struck in particular to the point I've bolded.
You say Curry's only ever faced one "really elite defense in the playoffs". That's interesting given that Curry's team's been to 6 finals while playing in the conference that's typically been considered the stronger conference, during the strongest era of basketball based on apples-to-apples comparisons at least since the 3-point line has been added.
The implication of a statement like this is that Curry's "had it easy" compared to those who you would compare him against, but unless you're doing this to advocate for one of his contemporaries against him, you're literally saying that the representative from this time period that would beat the earlier time periods should be knocked compared to players of those earlier time periods.
Now, Curry's not my choice as a Nominee yet - I'm still rolling with my pick from the '80s in Magic - so I'm certainly not saying Curry should get the nod over everyone else simply because he's done what he's done in recent times, but while I think there's a place to give the nod to earlier players based on the degree of their contemporary dominance, I get worried when we start talking as if a guy who has had such profound team success in the playoffs is an extremely problematic playoff player.
lessthanjake wrote:Huh? I’m confused as to what you mean here. The Celtics played only 2 playoff rounds in the vast majority of those years. That first round they played was definitionally the semifinals. And, when it was only in a 8 or 9 team league, the semifinals essentially include half the teams—which makes it conceptually equivalent to the first-round now.
I guess it's semantics, but these were conference finals, not semi-finals.
Yeah, I get that, but the point being made was specifically that having a lower SRS (or win total) but being as many standard deviations above the mean in a league with more parity makes you just as likely to win a championship. And that’s just not true. You might be able to fashion an argument that it’s just as *impressive* in some sense, but it’s not just as good from the perspective of chances of winning the title (all other things being equal). Top teams in leagues/sports with more parity are not as likely to win championships as top teams in leagues/sports with less parity (again, assuming all other things are equal—obviously other things come into play here, such as whether playoffs are single-game or series’, etc.).
Sure, which is why I'd never use such a definitive language you guys use in this discussion.
And even on the separate question about what is more impressive in some sense, the point being made was applying this logic even to Tim Duncan’s Spurs, who did not play in a less-expanded league (the opposite actually).
That wouldn't by my argument, but Duncan Spurs played in an era when expansion had lesser effect - due to a rapid rise of international players. The league was basically 30-teams sized for Duncan's whole career and the talent pool became significantly larger.
If one wants to make a similar point about Russell’s Celtics, then that starts getting a bit less silly, but there’s also so many other confounding factors there—including probably most importantly how high we think the talent level in the 1960s really was. After all, dominating an 8-team league in the 1960s may well not be more difficult than dominating a 27-team league with expansion teams in the 1990s, given the vast difference in popularity of the game and the pretty nascent stage that the NBA was in.
I don't think the talent pool increased massively from the late 1960s to the early 1990s to be honest, but it's not the discussion I want to have right now.
Anyways, the whole argument (and the conclusions it was purportedly getting to) just strikes me as someone starting at their conclusion and trying to figure out some way to get there.
That's possible, though to be honest I feel a lot of that when I read posts trying to make Russell accomplishments less impressive in comparison to Jordan...
Well, the year they only had 6 hall of famers, those hall of famers included Russell, as well as the guys that got #34 and #56 in the last RealGM top 100 project (Havlicek and Sam Jones).
True, but Havlicek and Jones didn't peak at the same time (Havlicek peaked after Russell retired), while Pippen and Grant did (Rodman did not, at least not after 1996). Havlicek earned his spot for top 40 mostly because of his 1970s career. Then there's the case of competition. Russell faced teams with more stars, because the league was smaller.
And then it included 6-time all-star Bailey Howell.
All-star in the 1960s doesn't mean the same as now. Plenty of teams had 3 all-stars in their rosters throughout that decade.
And then it included hall of famer Tom Sanders—who was on the all-defensive team that season—as well as Don Nelson who was a good player but perhaps more in the hall of fame for coaching and for being along for the ride on the Celtics.
Not probably, definitely. Nelson was a solid guy off the bench, but he was a roleplayer. Nobody raves about Longley, who was a better player than Nelson.
About 1969 Sanders - equivalent of 1996 Harper, nothing to be amazed.
Of course, there’s an element to which some guys on those Celtics made the hall of fame because they won. But they also had a lot of incredible players.
Sure, but Jordan also played with incredible players. You don't create a dynasty without incredible players.
And when the roster with the least hall-of-famers still had the #34 and #56 players of all time, a 6-time all star, and an all-defensive guy, along with other good players (Don Nelson, rookie Don Chaney, etc.), then I think it’s safe to say that the team was never even remotely “depleted.”
Are you aware what happened with them when Russell retired?
See above. Even in their least stacked year, the last Real GM top 100 classifies Havlicek + Sam Jones as being superior to Pippen + Grant or Pippen + Rodman. And there was no one else on the Bulls as good as Bailey Howell (a 6-time all star), nor did the Bulls have another guy who was all-defensive team like Tom Sanders.
I'd comfortably take all first peat and at least first two teams from second peat over 1969 Celtics team. You don't take into account the fact that Sam Jones was in his last year and he was greatly diminished. You don't take into account that Sanders also got old. You just read names without providing any context.
We also know how the Bulls played without Jordan in comparison to the Celtics without Russell and the results indicate that Bulls were quite a bit more talented than the Celtics.
And that’s not even getting to those Celtics having previously had guys like Cousy (a guy who won MVP in those years and was top 8 in MVP voting 7 times in those championship years), Heinsohn, KC Jones, etc.
Yeah, but Celtics won 5 rings after Cousy retired and they didn't miss a bit when Heinsohn retired either (finishing with 3 rings in 4 years).
If you mention KC Jones, don't forget to mention legends like Harper or Kerr...
There was turnover on the team and not all those hall of famers were truly great players, but the talent on those Celtics teams was always outrageously high.
So were Bulls, you didn't provide any arguments why Celtics were much more talented though.
1957 Celtics: down 1-2 against the Hawks (+16 point differential) but win the series anyway
1962 Celtics: down 1-2 and eventually 2-3 against the Lakers (+5 point differential through three games) but win the series anyway
1963 Celtics: down 1-2 against the Royals (+15 point differential) but win the series anyway
1966 Celtics: down 1-2 against the Royals again (-3 point differential!) but win the series anyway
1968 Celtics: down 1-2 against the Pistons (-14 point differential!!) but win the series anyway, then are down 1-2 and eventually 1-3 against the 76ers (-8 point differential through three games) but win the series anyway
1969 Celtics: down 1-2 and eventually 2-3 against the Lakers (-2 point differential through three games) but win the series anyway
Russell literally never lost a 1-2 series where he played five games. I wonder if there could be any “motivated reasoning” to portraying it as some lost cause effort that in 1958 he was down 1-2 to the Hawks exactly like the prior year, with a better team and larger point differential through three games, and therefore probably would have lost anyway.
So the playoffs is much more balanced. The problem is even that is misleading, because Duncan is doing that over a much bigger sample. Most of Hakeem's games happen during the 93-95 peak period. Then there's the context. Duncan is doing all this while carrying his team to lofty heights beyond the talent he has. Most of Hakeem's seasons in this stretch are poor seasons in comparison, and include plenty of padding in 1st round losses to weak foes.
Hakeem's big advantage is supposed to be the stats, but when looking at the context and adjusting for pace they don't look so great v.s Duncan.
hmmm. i was planning to vote hakeem but this is a p good point. how does duncan and hakeem longetvity comp?
Duncan had more longevity. He was an all-nba 1st teamer as a rookie, and then in his 16th year in the league he was still an all-nba 1st teamer. Hakeem was long washed up after 16 years. Duncan added alot of career value after his 98-07 prime. He was likely the Spurs MVP during their 2014 title run, even if it was an ensemble effort. Plus Duncan did all this while playing a preposterous number of playoff minutes which Hakeem never did. It would be tough to argue Hakeen had comparable longevity.
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
One_and_Done wrote:Duncan had more longevity. He was an all-nba 1st teamer as a rookie, and then in his 16th year in the league he was still an all-nba 1st teamer. Hakeem was long waahed up after 16 years. Duncan added alot of career value after his 98-07 prime. He was likely the Spurs MVP during their 2014 title run, even if it was an ensemble effort. Plus Duncan did all this while playing a preposterous number of playoff minutes which Hakeem never did. It would be tough to argue Hakeen had comparable longevity.
Through their fifteenth seasons they had played basically the exact same total minutes. Obviously 2013-16 Duncan added significantly more value than 2000-02 Hakeem, and if that is the basis for your preference, so be it, but f4p has a point that Duncan had much better load managing to get him there. Once again, you do not need to attack Hakeem with superficialities or extreme positions to prefer Duncan.
And for what it is worth, yeah, I would prefer 1985-99 Hakeem to 1998-2012 Duncan. By enough to cover Duncan’s advantage after that? Maybe not, but certainly by enough for it to be a conversation.
Any load managing later in his career is more than offset by the preposterous amount of extra playoff minutes Duncan accumulated over his career which Hakeem simply did not. We have no way to know Hakeem could have had even the longevity he did if he played all those extra minutes, and we certainly can't assume it for him as it never happened.
Duncan's 47k+ minuted is bolstered by an extra 9k+ playoff minutes. In contrast Hakeem had less than 50k minutes even including the playoffs. That's a substantial difference, especially when you consider the level Duncan was still performing in at the back end of his career, in a league where much more was demanded of your body that the leagues Hakeem played in. The back end of Hakeem's career was basically irrelevant.
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
It looks like MJ's got this one - four vote lead going into the last hours. As such, I'll not write a lot, but I do want to bring up once more the question I raised in my last post:
OldSchoolNoBull wrote:Regarding Jordan/Russell
[...]
The only thing I might think about is the fact that the playoffs were so much shorter for most of Russell's run.
Here are the number of games Russell played in the playoffs in each of his championship runs:
Jordan averaged 19 games per run. Russell averaged 13.
Using Jordan's average of 19, 11 championship runs would've required 213 playoff games, 66 more - the better part of a full season's worth more - than the 147 Russell played.
I'm just raising the question of whether or not Russell would've won eleven championships if he'd had to play full playoff schedules all those years.
But maybe even asking that question breaks era-relativity. I don't know.
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