RealGM 2023 Top 100 Project - #3 (Michael Jordan)

[AEnigma]

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.

So those playoff runs 2001-05 are the miracle adversity Duncan overcame to have a good career end? Be serious. Their total minutes played including postseasons were even through fifteen seasons. But the difference is that Duncan took those preceding years easy while Hakeem did not — and Hakeem’s postseason load was skewed toward the end of his prime anyway.

Duncan averaged 29.4 minutes a game 2010-12. Hakeem averaged 35.8 minutes a game 1997-99, and their respective team environments were not asking so much more of Duncan when he was on the court to bridge that gap.

Yet again: it is fine to prefer Duncan just because he was more productive at the end. You do not need to invent excuses for that. He took care of his body and the Spurs helped him do so. The Rockets did not help Hakeem do so. That does not mean he had better longevity than he did, but you do not need to fight against all applicable context to justify your preferences.

[One_and_Done]

Spoiler:

If people want to take the position that Hakeem was just flat out underrated by his contemporaries that’s fine. Sometimes players are. I think the stats, the commentary of the time, and my own observations, are aligned in suggesting that in 1993 everything clicked for Hakeem.

so what happened from 86-88? we see him pull off one of the great upsets in league history, in taking down Showtime in 1986.
this wasn't some weak version of the lakers. they were the defending champs. they won the next 2 championships. they were 62-20 and perfectly healthy (afaik) in 1986. and hakeem wasn't just along for the ride. he put up 31/11/4 in a series where he somehow had way more steals (11) than turnovers (7). with the 1st team center in kareem on the other side. he even gives the '86 celtics 2 of their 3 playoffs losses (magic and bird lost 9 playoff games in 1986, and 6 were to hakeem).

he then follows it up with even better per 100 numbers across the board the next season, in a 10 game playoffs that isn't significantly shorter than duncan's 2006 you reference later. and then of course in 1988 he basically shatters all of the playoff box score records in the 1st round. PER of 39 was the record and still is (minimum 50 minutes). WS48 of 0.385 was the record, only eclipsed by 2009 lebron. BPM of 14.5 was the record, only eclipsed by 1991 jordan and 2009 lebron. even if he had followed it up with his worst box series of the next 6 years (1990), he still would have been at 29.8 PER, 0.233 WS48, and 9.2 BPM. in other words, still great. and that's just assuming he plays poorly in the 2nd round for no reason.

all his best playoff numbers are actually from this 3 year span, not 1993-95. so the idea he was a 3 year wonder doesn't make much sense. his loss to the 7th seed as a 6th seed in 1987 will be the last time he's ever upset in the playoffs. and of course, he had already beaten the 3rd seed so his team went further than it was supposed to. the only time his team didn't at least match it's seed in performance was his rookie season. then never again for 17 more years.

Whether he became a better passer as some suggested, or a better leader, or started playing harder/more consistent, that is the opinion many people have. I am one of them, and I think the stats tend to point to that. His regular season numbers take a marked upturn, and his playoffs numbers are consistently better (not “they were always this good if we look only at this limited sample from a weird angle).

1991 and 1992 are probably the easiest things to ding hakeem for. and i think fairly. his regular season numbers take a dip.
although based on 1993, arguably because the coach thought taking the ball from hakeem was a good idea which Rudy T immediately proved devastatingly wrong when he took over. he even misses the playoffs and has a stretch of 25 missed games in 1991 where the rockets go 15-10 without him (though they did go 12-2 right when he got back). similar to kareem's missed playoffs in the 70's, it feels like these 2 years set hakeem's floor low enough that at least some questions can be asked. and keep me from really considering him with the Mount Rushmore Big 4. even the roster was somewhat similar to the championship roster at this point, so we have to ask how much of the improvement was just Rudy T implementing a much better system and why hakeem didn't do more in 1991 and 1992. of course, if hakeem had a Pop in his corner all the time, would he need to wait 9 years for a decent system?

I tend to think improved attitude/leadership/decision making and increased consistency played a part, but I’m open to other explanations. I don’t really care why it happened, only that it did. I think a lot of people forget that Hakeem was seen as a cancer with a bad attitude before 1993, and had been trying to force his way out of town. Obviously by 1995 he was seen as a mature player, who embodied humility and veteran leadership.

people tend to seem like cancers with bad attitudes when they play with less talent than any other great player ever. by expected championships, totaling up hakeem's entire career, he was expected to win.... 0.1 titles. less than carmelo anthony, before you tell me it was only because hakeem wasn't good enough to make it higher.

What I don’t think you can argue is that he was always seen as a top level player, and that he just wasn’t being recognized because of team wins and the like. Here are Hakeem’s MVP finishes from 1985 to 1992:

1985: 12th (behind players including Terry Cummings, Bernard King, Moncrief, Isiah Thomas, Calvin Natt, Alex English, and his own team mate Ralph Sampson)
1986: 4th (behind Bird, Dominique Wilkins whose Hawks only won 1 more game than Houston and Magic)
1987: 7th (behind Magic, Jordan, Bird, McHale (Bird’s sidekick), Wilkins and Barkley; Barkley’s team only won 3 more games than Houston)
1988: 7th (behind Jordan, Bird, Magic, Barkley, Clyde and Wilkins; Barkley’s Sixers won only 36 games, 10 less than Houston, and Wilkins Hawks only won 4 more games).
1989: 5th (behind Magic, Jordan, Karl Malone and Ewing; Karl and Ewing’s teams only won slightly more than Hakeem’s Rockets)
1990: 7th (behind Magic, Barkley, Jordan, Malone, Ewing and rookie David Robinson; Ewing’s Knicks won 4 more games)
1991: 18th (behind a cast of characters that included Barkley, Malone, Clyde, KJ, Wilkins, Terry Porter, Ewing, Stockton, Thomas, Parish, Dumars, and even Kenny Smith, Hakeem’s own team mate!)
1992: N/A (didn’t place; even Barkley placed this year, on 35 win team while demanding a trade and trying to eat his way out of town)

so your contention is guys like barkley and clyde and ewing were better for almost a decade, then hakeem just magically murdered them all in the playoffs when he finally got a competent team around him? doesn't it seem more likely that the guy whose best numbers actually came all the way back in 86-88 was just waiting to get another half decent team around him before resuming his playoff mastery?

I don’t even agree with all those votes`, but it tells you where the public perception of Hakeem was at the time. Being on a bad or mediocre team didn’t stop other lesser players getting votes, so it’s not about Hakeem being out of the spotlight because his team was out of the spotlight. The voters knew who Hakeem was, he’d made the finals in 1986, they had seen him perform on the highest stage. Obviously Hakeem only lost to great teams in the playoffs, except that he lost to the 53 win Aguirre Mavs, the 39 win Sonics led by Xavier McDaniel, the 41 win Dantley Jazz, and the 47 win Sonics led by Dale Ellis, and those were not great teams. He didn’t even make the playoffs in 1992. Then contrast that with what Duncan did with lamentable support casts in 2001-2003.

lamentable supporting casts don't have a top 5 rim protector and the best defensive guard in the game, in an era perfectly suited for those guys to shutdown all the isoball of the era. along with a GOAT-candidate defensive coach to put it all together. those supporting casts may be around the level of hakeem's 1994 cast (well, not 2001, robinson is still too good), and of course hakeem won 58 games and a title with that one.

From 85 to 92 Hakeem’s pp 100 hovered between 27 and 31. From 93 to 96 he scored 33 to 35 pp 100. That’s a substantial increase, and his TS% went higher than it had previously been while he upped his scoring. In the same 1985 to 1992 period he generally had about 3 assists per 100, that climbed to 4.5 assists per 100 the next 4 years. Hakeem’s playoffs are all over the map, but on the whole the per 100 numbers when compared to Duncan’s prime from 98 to 07 suggest Duncan was better.

they're all over the map as in they consistently look great? he's at 26.0 PER, 0.223 WS48, and 7.2 BPM and 58.0 TS%. that's pretty good. duncan's 99-07 is 27.0 PER, 0.227 WS48, 7.6 BPM and 56.0 TS%. so duncan's best stretch is maybe a tiny bit ahead of hakeem's stretch that you label as all over the map and a period you say shows that he wasn't that good for most of his career.

He also did it over a huge sample, whereas some of Hakeem’s crazy numbers come in 1st round losses to meh teams. Hakeem put up huge stats in a 4 game 1st round loss to the Aguirre Mavs in 1988. But it’s 4 games. Against the 1988 Mavs. And they lost.

what do you think hakeem could have done to win that series? he scored 37.5 ppg on 64 TS%. he had 16.8 rpg and 2.8 bpg. and had as many steals as turnovers. and broke a bunch of records. if that's not enough, then why even look at what players do. just check who won the series and tell us that player was the better player

His longest pre 1993 sample is the 1986 finals run, and he does post great numbers on that run. But those numbers are worse than comparable Duncan runs during his prime.

Hakeem 1986 playoffs: 34-15 per 100 on 566 TS%
Duncan 2002 -37-19 per 100 on 550 TS%
Duncan 2003 – 31-19 per 100 on 577 TS%
Duncan 2006 – 37-15 per 100 on 625 TS%

but compare favorably to duncan's 30-15 on 57.3 TS% in his 2nd season.

Duncan’s runs are just better than Hakeem, up until 1993 when Hakeem starts posting postseasons that are comparable to Duncan.

how are they better than 1986 and 1987 and 1988? how is a pretty bad 2004 where duncan blows a 2-0 lead while scoring 17.5 ppg on 38% shooting in the final 4 games better than hakeem? how is getting obliterated by the 2001 lakers, by a far worse MOV than any other lakers opponent, so much better than hakeem? and we still haven't gotten to hakeem winning a title with a 2003 duncan level supporting cast one year and then winning the least likely title against the tougher group of opponents ever the next year. and still having an age 34 playoffs that dwarfs duncan's age 34 playoffs (losing to an 8th seed).

Unfortunately for Hakeem, he only did it for about 3 years, and I think Duncan was still better. I’m particularly troubled by the Sonics beating the Rockets in 93 and 96 by pushing the boundaries of the illegal defence rules to mess up Hakeem’s offense.

while the near 100% doubling in 1996 did affect hakeem and maybe give him his worst series ever, can you say who it wouldn't affect? it's not like they just hedged at hakeem and made life a little difficult. it was just straight hard doubles on basically every possession, daring the rockets role players to have an answer. and it's not like the 1996 sonics were a mediocre team that just proved how to stop hakeem with a scheme. they were a 64 win, +7.4 SRS team with a -5.5 defense that finished 2nd. they held stockton to 33 points through the first 5 games of the WCF. they gave jordan easily his worst finals performance. part of why they could double hakeem is they were stupid quick on the perimeter to recover to everything and deep enough to not get tired with seemingly every 6'6 athletic wing in the nba who couldn't shoot on their team.

and it doesn't really seem to apply much in 1993. hakeem averaged 23 ppg on 52% shooting and was getting 4.7 apg as a result of all the doubles. maybe too many turnovers, but this certainly isn't some level of series that duncan never had offensively.

and in 1997, with barkley around to finally give him some help, he averaged 21.7 ppg on 57.5% shooting.

It suggests to me Hakeem, who struggled consistently against the Sonics, would have had a reduced impact in today’s game where there is no illegal D protection, and teams have anti-post defences that are designed to prevent the outlet pass and pressure them in ways that frankly didn’t exist in Hakeem’s day. All Hakeem had to do was hold the ball, and wait for the hard double to come. If it did, easy pass. If not, try to score. These days bigs have to make so many more adjustments and decisions, and be so much better under different types of pressure defences.

joel embiid, hardly an amazing passer, just won mvp. and one of hakeem's biggest strengths was that he didn't hold the ball to wait for the hard double. he is probably tops in nba history in terms of time from when he caught the ball to how quickly he started making a move. oftentimes starting as he landed from the catch. maybe it affects hakeem, but if he grew up around it and got to play in an era where people try to defend the post with small forwards, i'm thinking he'd do fairly well.

But looking at longer samples that adjust for pace, Duncan’s numbers are better anyhow. Take Hakeem’s best 10 year stretch, and compare it to Duncan from 98-07, and per 100 it’s probably going to come out pro-Duncan.

probably? i have hakeem winning playoff box score from age 22-31, with is 1999-2008 for duncan (basically the same as 98-07) and 1985-1994 for hakeem.

I also prefer Duncan’s defence. Hakeem was flasher, getting more blocks. Duncan stopped the blocks from happening in the first place, because the other team wouldn’t go near him a lot of the time. He’s a better man defender for mine too, as highlighted in part by his excellent defense on Shaq in 2002. Hakeem was credited with shutting down Shaq in the 95 finals, but in reality Shaq put up huge numbers, arguably better than Hakeem. Shaq's team wasn’t as good is all.

duncan also had david robinson to guard shaq and certainly wasn't guarding shaq all the time. hakeem's big man help was , uhh, 37 year old charles jones and i guess chucky brown or robert horry. hakeem did probably win a title specifically for having such elite man defense that he destroyed patrick ewing to the tune of a 39 TS% in the finals, one of the worst numbers i've ever heard of for a series.

I'm not going to respond to most of this for a number of reasons, the biggest being that it will sprawl. I'm instead going to focus of getting several concise answers from you.
1) You claim Duncan had D.Rob to help him guard Shaq in 02. It has been explained many times that D.Rob was hurt in 02, and could not have neen guarding Shaq. People have posted video of Duncan guarding Shaq, and pointed to this many times. So why do you continue to say D.Rob helped guard him?
2) You contimue to ascribe much of Duncan's success to D.Rob. You even called him a 'top 5 rim protector' from 01 to 03. If D.Rob is so valuable during these years why did the teams defense get much better the 2 years immediately after he retired? Why did the Spurs go 15-3 in games he missed in 03, and as his role was reduced the team seemed unaffected? You mention Bowen too, who wasn't there in 01 (which is part of why Kobe went off; their wing rotation was lamentable), and didn't play all of 02 either, yet the Spurs were still good on D. It seems like the common denominator was Duncan.
3) It was very much in the press that Hakeem was struggling vs the Sonics due to their pushing the limits of the illegal defence rules. This fact is easy to google. Why are you downplaying something Hakeem's own team attributed to their losses?

On the whole it's clear we just see things differently. You blame Duncan for not holding onto a 2-0 lead against a better team, when for too many series Hakeem never got a lead in the first place. You dismiss Hakeem's losses to superior foes, without blaming Hakeem for not floor raising his team to enough wins thus ensuring an easier 1st round foe. You are dismissive of Hakeem's support casts, but never really explain why they were so bad or were losing to such weak teams prior to 93. I don't think Hakeem's support casts were that bad, comparing them to the worst incarnations of the Spurs anyway, and find blaming team mates for his losses to 500 or sub-500 playoff teams, or just missing the playoffs completely, to be unconvincing. You even blame it on coaching, when Hakeem's coaches included Larry Bird's former coach Bill Fitch and Don Chaney who won COY in that span.

[trex_8063]

Hey all. I just want to say that a number of you have been putting some amazing content into this project so far. The sheer VOLUME of material produced by a few of you (OhayoKD, lessthanjake, One_And_Done, and our facilitator Doctor MJ, to name a few), has been utterly astounding to me. Seriously, good job.

I haven't been able to participate in a manner I might like to, but I am trying to at least read some of the content (though I think I'll be playing catch-up for months/years).


For me, this spot is squarely between Michael Jordan [whom I voted for last thread], and Tim Duncan. Historically, it has been Jordan in the lead. I'll be honest, I'm wavering on that point. Tim Duncan is the game's greatest team leader, imo; and a few of you have had an impact [on me] in terms of persuading me to believe he was even better as a player than I already thought him to be. I'll be posting on him at greater length (though in something of a copy/paste manner) in the next thread, most likely.

I think I'm going to stick with Jordan, if for no other reason than as a strategic choice: while I don't necessarily feel strongly about Jordan > Duncan at this point, I still DO feel strongly regarding Jordan > Russell [his top competition for the spot].

Where Jordan is concerned, I understand why the rhetoric often ends up being rather negative/critical in tone: this is natural because, with him, the jump-point for conversation is the presumption [by the masses] that a Top 100 list doesn't really start until #2.....therefore apposing views will naturally wish to point out the numerous points of data and criteria [and they ARE numerous; anyone who says otherwise is fooling themselves] by which his GOAT-candidacy is more than a little shaky vs some of the other candidates.

This is often perceived as piling it on, "anti-Jordan", etc; in truth, it's just the dynamic which is born from those presumptions I mentioned. No player's career was mythologized to the degree his was; not even Wilt. Consequently, a certain degree of rational de-mystifying things is flatly necessary to get at the truth.

What is that "truth"? Well, that's debatable, at least in terms of his legitimate rank (which also depends upon a person's criteria [which I absolutely think should be up to the individual, rather than having a dictated standardized criteria]).
One aspect of the "truth" that I don't think is legitimately debatable: he's on the short-list of GOAT candidates. REALLY hard to argue him lower than maybe 5th with credibility [*and consistency], imo.

*What I mean is, the criteria which might give Wilt Chamberlain the edge, for example, is likely to DE-emphasize the factors which are necessary to give Bill Russell the edge. By that principle, I don't think there are five players who can squeeze in ahead of him without a lot of shifting of goalposts.
And in particular with criterias that don't place an abundance of evidence on longevity, he'd have to be one of the leading candidates for GOAT.

His statistical profile is near the tip-top of all candidates.

Game analysis looks really great: a versatile, efficient, super-high volume scorer with ultra-elite turnover economy and tremendous playoff resiliency (I believe history has shown this to be valuable in terms of pushing through tough playoff series's), who also has gravity and decent play-making ability, and [at least semi-consistently (took some breaks, like all offensive centerpieces)] was an elite defender at his position. I mean, wow: that's a helluva package (that's what she said).

His impact profile looks fairly great. Fairly great vs his competition for GOAT? Well, not bad; but perhaps not best. THere has been on-going debate in these threads regarding his WOWY profile, and the '93 to '94 change comes to the center of things.

Critics say Jordan left, and the Bulls were still a 55-win team [SRS pegs them more like just 50 wins, fwiw] that went 7 games with the eventual EC champions in the semis.
Few things to bear in mind, however:
1) '93 was a down prime year [sort of like '11 was for Lebron] for Scottie Pippen; while in '94 he bounces back to probably his peak year (it's either that or '92, imo). The exact same thing can be said for Horace Grant.
2) A promising rookie named Toni Kukoc was added in '94.
3) They added Steve Kerr, who was a very nice bench piece.
4) Bill Wennington (decent bench piece) was added.
5) Pete Myers wasn't much, but he could at least play good defense, and he stuck to his role pretty well (he was added in '94).
Some other old vets were fading (Cartwright, Paxson), but otoh BJ Armstrong added about 300 minutes on similar production/efficiency as the year before, and rookie Corie Blount was added (call it a wash).

So it wasn't just "Jordan left and they still did this".
It was "Jordan left, but they added Kukoc and Kerr and Myers and Wennington; and BOTH Pippen and Grant had major bounce-back years......and THEN they did this" ("this" being that they dropped by only 2 wins, but by -3.32 SRS, and got ousted in the 2nd round [instead of winning title]).
jsia...

Another thing that I'll note is that, according to Sansterre's top 100 teams off all-time: FIVE of the top 20 are Jordan's teams (even if I might put an asterisk by the '98 Bulls, for reasons I've expounded on in other places), including TWO of the top four.
One of those top-4 teams [the '91 Bulls] had notably SHALLOW depth on the roster: that team was basically Jordan/Pippen/Grant + misc. And they still managed to finish 4th on Sansterre's list. '91 isn't even the peak of either Pippen or Grant (it is Jordan's consensus peak, though). It speaks volumes for the strength of his peak, imo.


Couple thoughts on Russell....
While Moonbeam's data suggests WS don't even give him his full credit; as a counterpoint I'd note there's some reason to believe turnovers have been over-estimated on bbref for those Celtic teams in creating the pace estimates. Which, in turn, would mean their ORtg is underrated and DRtg is overrated. If we suddenly had the actual play-by-play and found the DRtg's were [on average] about +1 to what is listed there [with ORtg's being +1], how might that change perception for those in his GOAT-camp?

And his impact seems more "confined" to an era that some, both because it simply would not be possible for any one player to exert that type of defensive impact in today's league, for example; but also because I'm skeptical he could replicate in an era where there are a greater proportion of players who are near to his "calibre" of athletes.

I know this kind of era portability consideration is a two-way street. For example, I don't think Jordan would be as dominant in the 60s, if raised in that era. But I could easily see Jordan being a Jerry West level player [or more?] in that era. Which is really friggin' good (iirc, both West and Robertson has MORE impressive WOWYR numbers than Russell).
It's also difficult to see Jordan not being a dominant player today, even without the consistent 3pt range. Neither did/does Jimmy Butler or Kobe Bryant. Seeing him as a "better Kobe" in a more modern setting does NOT take much imagination.

Russell, otoh, I'm not 100% confident would be much better than a Rudy Gobert or Bam Adebayo today. DPOY or DPOY candidate, for sure. Elite rebounder and screen-setter, absolutely. How many of such that I've described are the most dominant in the league today?
None.

So all due respect to those in Russell's camp, but I personally feel fairly strongly about Jordan > Russell. So I'm sticking with that pick.


Vote: Michael Jordan
Alternate: Tim Duncan

Nominate: Shaquille O'Neal

[lessthanjake]

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.

Yes definitely semantics. The reason I said semifinals is because technically I think it was called the divisional finals or whatever back then, and I wanted to just be clear I was talking about the round of 4. The conference finals is the semifinals. But yeah, semantics don’t actually matter here, so I don’t think we’re disagreeing in a meaningful way.

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.

Yeah, as I said, it’s a bit of a confounding factor, and there’s no objective way to measure this. My intuition is that the 1960s were likely substantially less talented because basketball was simply nowhere near as popular a sport. You don’t get nearly as much talent in a sport that is substantially less popular. And that’s especially true in a relatively nascent league, where the financial incentives to be a player in the league aren’t nearly as high as they’d later become.

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.

I think that’s somewhat nitpicky. Havlicek and Sam Jones had a pretty substantial amount of overlap where they were great players, because Havlicek was good quite young and Sam Jones had a lot of longevity. Sam Jones made all star games between 1962 and 1968, and made all-NBA teams each year between 1965 and 1967. Havlicek was already making all-NBA starting in 1964.

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.

Yeah, I get that it was easier to make an all-star game back then because the size of the all-star team was similar but there were fewer players in the league. But making 6 all star games is still a lot. In that season, the other 13 teams in the NBA had a grand total of 16 guys who made 6 all-star games in their career, and the Celtics’ fourth best player did it.

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.

I wouldn’t exactly say that having one of the top 10 defenders in the league is the equivalent of 1996 Harper—who only ever got one all-defensive team vote in his entire career (and it wasn’t in 1996). I get that things like all-defensive teams were easier to make back then when there were fewer players in the league, but who knows how many Sanders would’ve made if all-defense had started before 1969, and meanwhile Harper was a good defender that was nowhere even remotely close to making that. And Sanders was putting up more raw numbers than Harper anyways. It’s not the worst comparison I suppose (and peak Ron Harper was a better player IMO), but I don’t really think it’s quite there, and also there’s definitely no comparison with John Paxson (i.e. the PG in the first three-peat).

Definitely disagree very strongly about Nelson vs. Longley. Longley was not a positive contributor to the Bulls. I watched essentially every single one of their games in that era, and he really just wasn’t. He was a good passer, so the triangle was a good system for him, but he was otherwise a weak player. And I’ll note that you can see that the Bulls were better with him off the court, even though he was a starter. Meanwhile, I don’t think we can really paint Don Nelson in even remotely the same way. Don Nelson was actually a super efficient scorer for the era, and just for reference was in the top 20 in the NBA in win shares per 48 minutes on 7 occasions (including 4 times in the top 10—one of which was 5th in the season in question). After the season in question, he proceeded to be 14th in the league in PER the next season. He was a legitimately good player, and I think clearly not in the same stratosphere as Luc Longley—though I’d of course agree that Don Nelson didn’t make the hall of fame based on how good he was as a player.

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.

Yes, but you can create a dynasty with fewer incredible players than most dynasties, when you have Michael Jordan (and, it must be said, Phil Jackson as a coach).

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?

Well, considering one of the other two RealGM top 100 guys I mentioned retired at the same time, I’d say it’s not a surprise they got a lot less good. When the 4th and 56th best player of all time both retire at once, I think we can expect a lot less from the team. And I think a team that is super talented can become not super talented anymore when they lose the 4th and 56th best players of all time.

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.

Sam Jones was in his last year and he did play fewer minutes than usual, but he was producing similarly to before in the minutes he did play (for instance, PER right near his career average). But yeah, I mean the 1969 Celtics was definitely their least good team, but are we really comfortable calling it (or any of the Celtics teams before that) “depleted”? It was still super talented, and I’d absolutely take it over the 1998 Bulls.

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.

I really do think that people need to acknowledge that how a team plays when a star player misses random games is different than when a guy is just out for a long period of time and the team has time to adapt to that. In any event, Russell never really missed substantial time in his career (and the most he missed was 24 games one season, where the Celtics went 16-8). So this argument is really just based on 1994 Bulls vs. 1970 Celtics. And I don’t think it’s a fair comparison, because the Celtics were also missing Sam Jones, not to mention that Bill Russell *also* left as coach so the 1970 Celtics had a first-year coach too (Heinsohn, who turned into a good coach, but first-year coaching isn’t easy and is prone to team underperformance). In contrast, the Bulls didn’t lose anyone major. In fact, outside of losing Jordan, they actually substantially *improved* the roster with the arrival of Toni Kukoc, as well as a few other other good upgrades, like Kerr being much better than an aging John Paxson, and getting some marginal improvements at center (Longley and Wennington were not really good players, but I’m very low on Perdue, and Cartwright was really old, so eating some of their minutes was an improvement). Meanwhile, you had Pippen and Grant right at their very career peaks and you still had Phil Jackson at coach (very different than the Celtics having a first-year coach in 1970). Outside of losing Jordan, the Bulls were actually substantially *improved* (with Kukoc being probably the biggest factor there), while the Celtics had major losses outside of losing Bill Russell the player (i.e. losing Sam Jones and losing Bill Russell the coach for a first-year coach).

In many ways, that 1994 Bulls team was the best the Bulls ever were outside of Jordan. Kukoc was definitely the best fourth-best player the Bulls ever had, but in the second three-peat he was paired with Pippen and Rodman. And while Rodman is superior to Grant all time, he wasn’t actually in his prime on the Bulls (and nor was Pippen by the end), and Pippen and Grant at their very peaks is probably better than Pippen + Rodman ever was. So I think 1994 Pippen + Grant + Kukoc is probably the best three non-Jordan players the Bulls ever put together on one team in the 1990s. And then you think about the PG spot and BJ Armstrong in that brief time period was the best PG they had in the 1990s (early second-three-peat Harper is close but I’d go with mid-1990s BJ over Harper). Kerr was the best backup PG they had in the 1990s. So overall, that was probably their best ever PG situation too. Meanwhile, at center, the Bulls basically never had a good situation, and they did have some injuries at that position that year, but they were basically so deep with all of the entire decade’s worth of centers that year (since they had Perdue, Cartwright, Longley, Wennington, and Williams all on the team) that they at least always had big bodies to throw out there to play hard in short minutes. So I just don’t think it’s fair to compare the 1994 Bulls to the 1970 Celtics, because the Bulls as a team were IMO fairly obviously peaking as a team at that point (leaving Jordan aside of course), while the Celtics were definitely doing the opposite.

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...

KC Jones excelled at defense in a way that I don’t think we can say for Harper and definitely not for 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.

I think I did provide an argument. They had a similar (and probably superior) #2 and #3 players (as evidenced by those players’ rankings by this forum), and were notably deeper beyond that.

[One_and_Done]

My intuition is that the 1960s were likely substantially less talented because basketball was simply nowhere near as popular a sport. You don’t get nearly as much talent in a sport that is substantially less popular. And that’s especially true in a relatively nascent league, where the financial incentives to be a player in the league aren’t nearly as high as they’d later become.

This needs to be capitalised and underlined every time we discuss past eras, especially the 60s and before. Kids are less likely to take up the sport at a young age when it's less clear they can make a living off it.

Today each NBA team is worth a billion dollars or more. There are thousands of academies and programs and coaches all over the world, all more knowledgeable and professional than 99% of basketball in the 60s. Kids who would have slipped through the cracks back then are found, and given training regimes more rigorous than anything that existed in the 60s. The more money a sport is worth, the greater the talent pool. Today a single player earns more money than the whole NBA did for the 50s and 60s combined.

[lessthanjake]

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.

I never said it was a lost cause. But a series loss where Russell played in a lot of the series and his team didn’t do well even when he played can obviously not be equated with a series where Jordan was not even on the team and therefore did not play a single second. Russell was plainly part of his team’s loss and Jordan was not. This should not be a controversial point, and I’m a little shocked that there’d be pushback on this.

[ZeppelinPage]

Couple thoughts on Russell....
While Moonbeam's data suggests WS don't even give him his full credit; as a counterpoint I'd note there's some reason to believe turnovers have been over-estimated on bbref for those Celtic teams in creating the pace estimates. Which, in turn, would mean their ORtg is underrated and DRtg is overrated. If we suddenly had the actual play-by-play and found the DRtg's were [on average] about +1 to what is listed there [with ORtg's being +1], how might that change perception for those in his GOAT-camp?

I agree. There is also reason to believe (strongly, I'd say) that their offensive rebounds are underestimated, which further reduces their possessions and increases their ORtg. Ben Taylor's data, I believe, better takes this into account and alters the perspective on Celtic offenses by giving them a yearly +1 to +2 increase.

Russell, otoh, I'm not 100% confident would be much better than a Rudy Gobert or Bam Adebayo today. DPOY or DPOY candidate, for sure. Elite rebounder and screen-setter, absolutely. How many of such that I've described are the most dominant in the league today?
None.

So all due respect to those in Russell's camp, but I personally feel fairly strongly about Jordan > Russell. So I'm sticking with that pick.

This is closer to where I'm at.

He was invaluable with his ability to rebound and rim protect in an era where defense was king. But I'm not really factoring in winning as much, which I view as a more of a team stat. From my standpoint, he's a fantastic player that, with the right team around him, can anchor a championship defense and gain possessions for his team to score. He was definitely the most important player on his team, and definitely in the conversation for greatest defensive player ever, but not on my radar for GOAT.

[f4p]

Nomination of Steph Curry

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.

well, weak in the context of the guys we are talking about. and more specifically, weak in the sense of resilience. i think that's hard to dispute. certainly on an individual stats level. and at the very least, i don't see the warriors having lived up to their regular season dominance in the playoffs to some degree. their 73-9 team lost 9 games in the playoffs and is one of the few +10 teams to not win a title. and when they have exceeded their regular season, it's arguably only in years where they have very obviously not given a crap about the regular season (2018 and 2019 where they somehow didn't even win 60 games) or they missed a huge amount of games in the regular season before not missing a single game in the playoffs (2022). in other words, when the situation was perfectly set up for them to outperform.

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.

ok, but i feel like this is saying it was a finals just short of the brilliance of lebron. but it was a bad finals. 22.6 ppg, 4.9 rpg, 3.7 apg on 4.3 turnovers per game, 13.1 game score. that's just a bad finals. even if it wasn't after the greatest offensive regular season ever. and his team was still 1 minute away from winning it all, even with lebron maybe having his greatest series ever. that's quite a margin of error. and that margin seems to apply to other parts of curry's career.

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.

well, yes, they have been dominant. but with very talented teams. that fit extremely well together. not something everyone else gets, even when they have talented teammates. and as is seen, draymond is literally the leader, having managed to get one more than curry.

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.

i would say he needs his individual numbers to not fall off significantly in 2015, only to arguably be saved by injury, and very significantly (historically so) in 2016 and 2018, only to be saved by injury again in 2018, and also not survive the 2nd round in 2019 with horrible play, for me to think that his margin of error for playoff success isn't extremely high and that he isn't being boosted by having an elite defense and draymond around him. for all of kobe's problems, he seems to have been able to maintain his regular season play better, and either he or hakeem is arguably the best at "actual vs expected" championships, with kobe managing to finish 2nd not only in raw delta but also in percentage delta.

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.

i realize we shouldn't throw things away just because it gives results we don't like, but i do think curry finishing first every year, in every situation, even when his own play falters, is at least somewhat problematic. no different than watching david robinson or chris paul look so amazing by various box and impact metrics where it seems they clearly don't live up to it. i bring up 2022 where curry had a down season for a reason. the idea that curry has off-ball value is obvious. but part of his value is also that he makes a lot of shots at extremely high efficiency. it's not as if he ups his "intangibles" and off-ball impact to perfectly offset poor shooting, then decreases his intangibles and off-ball impact when he's shooting well. if the numbers can't even tell me he had a poor year when he clearly did and had people asking "what happened to steph's shot?" all season long, then another 2nd or 3rd place finish isn't going to mean as much after a while. and all those 1st place finishes, when there wouldn't have been a single year that ended with people calling steph the best in the world after the playoffs, brings us back to the resilience argument.

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.

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.

well, i would say draymond consistently beating curry in playoff on-court +/- and on-off +/- certainly gives him a good chance at accounting for a non-insignificant chunk of steph's value. and vice versa, steph is the other half of draymond's amulet and helps draymond's value. that's the benefit of fitting together. you say fit is an achievement, but does it really seem to apply to steph and draymond? if i knew i had either of them and was going to build another player in a lab to play with them, i would end up building steph for draymond and draymond for steph. steph is the greatest off-ball player ever, whose biggest offensive requirement would be an extremely high IQ player to make all the reads and mind meld with him to get him the ball where he needs it. after all, you can't be off-ball without relying on your teammates to do the on-ball work. well draymond just happens to not only be a point-forward, but an elite point-forward. an elite point-forward who doesn't even want to shoot, which obviously helps with team chemistry. and now that we've got the offense sorted, we go to the other end where draymond is his generation's greatest defender, one who also seems to get even better in the playoffs. it literally could not work out better.

and then just to make it better, the warriors essentially replicate a mini-version of this with klay and iggy. klay plays the exact offensive game you would want next to steph so that you can run the same offense with both and iggy is another very good, high IQ point-forward to run a complicated offense, one who doesn't demand touches, and then goes to the other end and is a generational wing defender. and for the cherry on top, klay also plays good defense, which most shooters like him don't do. and all of this, as the nba was moving toward the exact type of games these guys play.

and then for 3 years, the one tiny thing they might not have in great iso scoring, they filled that need with one of the greatest iso scorers ever, who also could provide length and rim protection. and the big 4 were all between like 27-30 years old during their run, so great fit and perfect prime overlap. this is an abundance of riches the likes of which we may never seen again in talent, age, and fit.

now, if all of that had gone a perfect 5 for 5 in the playoffs, with no 2016 finals collapse, if they didn't arguably luck out with a perfectly-timed (if seemingly inevitable) cp3 injury to win in 2018, or if they had won without KD in 2019, i might have to concede and put steph higher.

even 2022 tries to get written as some underdog story for steph. but he was on the team with the highest payroll in the league with all of the payroll healthy for the playoffs. an owner willing to pay $25M plus huge luxury tax for someone like andrew wiggins. do you want wiggins as your franchise player? of course not. do you want his elite athleticism along with 17 ppg scoring (without caring if he gets the ball) to be your 4th best starter if money is no option? of course yes. on top of poole going crazy in the playoffs. on top of still having the #1 defense in the league courtesy of draymond once again. with klay still around? that seems like a fairly loaded team in a post-superteam world. though i won't deny curry played very well in the finals this time.

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.

do they really get to have their cake and eat it, too, though? curry already took a year off in his prime just because the team didn't look good so they could try to tank and artificially build up the team. now he gets another year off from responsibility in his prime to build the team for the future? would that other greats were just picking and choosing when to carry a team.

i would have more sympathy if the warriors had an amazing offense and missed the playoffs. but, in fact, they had the #4 ranked defense in 2021. curry is an offensive weapon par excellence, so i would imagine making the playoffs is not a great threshold if we know the defense is very good. but they finished #20 in offense and missed. are there reasons for that? sure, but seemingly no more convincing reasons than their are reasons for why the warriors looked so good for so many years.

2 missed playoffs in your prime hurts kareem's story. it seems like it has to hurt steph's (2020 was looking even more disastrous than 2021 so there's not much reason to think the warriors are doing any better than maybe battling for the 8th seed). and i might have more sympathy to that if he wasn't the leader in the clubhouse for missed playoffs (in this range of players). he missed 5 times by his age 33 season. even a guy in a horrible situation like garnett only missed 4, and he had an age 19 and 20 season while curry started at 21, not making the playoffs until he was 24, which goes back to longevity.

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.

true, it's not easy to win a title. but i think my biggest argument is in how the credit is distributed. even look at klay, the weakest of the big 4. he misses 2 years and the warriors don't even make the playoffs. he comes back and they win it all. steph has never made the playoffs without klay. same with KD. the warriors go from 9 playoff losses to the most dominant playoff run ever, but we've spent the last 6 years bombarded with "but look at the warriors plus/minus with only steph on the court" type stats trying to pretend KD was irrelevant. sorry, but "we got way better after adding a new guy, but it wasn't really the new guy, it was everyone else" is the type of thing that makes me doubt all the impact stuff, at least in its ability to go from the line-up specific world where that data lives to the overall big picture results.

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.

i was actually really just referring to that thread on here about players and how they did versus various levels of playoff defenses - all-time (-7), elite (-4 to -7), good (-2 to -4), average (+2 to -2), bad (+2 or worse). when i did it for steph, before the boston series, i had him with no all-time defenses faced and only one elite defense. except that elite defense was the 2017 spurs. who not only stopped being elite after kawhi got hurt, but it literally resulted in a series where both steph and KD simultaneous had their best ever TS% series. looking at it again, i see i did it for 2015-2019 and technically the 2013 spurs creep above elite at -4.2, but steph's numbers weren't good in that series so i think i was trying to be nice to him at the time. now if someone wants to say the 2019 raptors count, i won't disagree, but of the 22 players from that thread and that i added to my spreadsheet (basically all top 20 or 30 guys), steph had the 3rd easiest average defense faced at -0.9 (this was before 2022 so maybe it changed a little). he has had a knack for not playing great defenses.

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.

well, i am probably more of a resiliency guy than most of this project and steph is certainly not great in terms of individual numbers falling off in the playoffs, in ways that would probably be viewed more problematically if his team hadn't survived several of those drops due to other things like defense.

[OhayoKD]

This is becoming a head-ache...

Hmmm

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.

They lost game 2 by 3 points with Russell leaving early. This Russell:

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.

You are comparing a 13-year career record against a favorable 8-year stretch thereby avoiding Jordan's considerably worse Bulls-record(also 13-years) of 30-7, and even then, you can only force equality by giving Russell a loss in a series he did not have a chance to see through while simultaneously giving Jordan a pass for voluntarily denying himself an opportunity to win. But sure, absolutely not "motivated reasoning".

Pro-tip: Making a shtick out of dismissing every piece of inconvenient evidence or analysis as "obviously nonsense" and "manipulated data" might be more convincing if you aren't constantly manipulating data towards desired conclusions.

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.

No offense, but I'm not planning to just go along with the "bottom lines" from someone who spams 1-year github rapm and past top 100 votes to justify their takes. If you're not going to justify that claim you should probably just move on.

They were still a good team. The type of team that might make the second round, but not a significant contender.

Oor they win a few more games with Pippen and Grant healthy, beat the Knicks with home-court, take out a weaker Pacers side, and then find a way past Hakeem with the "winning" Jordan taught them(though curiously he himself was not-winning before or after Phil).

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.*

And where exactly did those extra playoff teams come from? I am winning at a 100% clip over a comparable stretch(8-years), and now I get to play two-rounds against what are, all else equal, weaker opponents. My "record" shoots up. Just because there are now more teams to gain "separation" against does not make the top-level teams materially better relative to the Celtics and If "best record" is the goal, an expanded playoff field means more wins when you are dominant. With all the series Russell played the ceiling was at 29 so he needed to go virtually perfect over 13-years to match or exceed a 8-year stretch for Michea

What? The effects of expansion were stronger during Jordan's championships than Duncan's. There were multiple strong-draft-classes at the very end of the 90's and 3 of the four expansion teams were introduced before Mike's championships. So very strange how out of nowhere you saw hyper-dominant SRS teams as the league expanded. The top team's during the Bull's second-three peat would be inflated relative to the top teams during most of Duncan's chips. That's literally why Sans used standard deviation. The only non-expansion era +10srs team in history was the Warriors.

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.

It's a confounding factor if you are breaking era-relativity, but the top of my post specifically framed everything as era-relative. Of course "talent" did not peak in the 90's...

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.”

Yes, 26 mpg Sam Jones was better than prime Horace Grant. Even if I did take your appeal to consensus at face-value, that does not necessitate "none" of the Russell's 11 championship winners were "depleted". Hondo was yet to peak and Jones was at the end of the rope in 69. And naturally you do not address that the Celtics generally kept on chugging along when these "incredible teammates" missed time.

but naturally the objective of this top 100 is to take the rankings of the last top 100 at face value regardless of what evidence or analysis is offered. Unless of course it's unsourced 1-year RAPM in which case let's vote "impact king" Steph top 5. Not motivated reasoning at all.

I really do think that people need to acknowledge that how a team plays when a star player misses random games is different than when a guy is just out for a long period of time and the team has time to adapt to that. In any event, Russell never really missed substantial time in his career (and the most he missed was 24 games one season, where the Celtics went 16-8). So this argument is really just based on 1994 Bulls vs. 1970 Celtics.

I think you need to stop trying to argue against the weakest projections of what people are saying and also stop trying to act like things you can't actually support are "obvious"(EX: the Bulls were "peaking" when Pippen filed a trade-request and their best players were beefing after three straight title runs). We have Bill Russell's teams not being affected by all these amazing players leaving whether it's planned or in the middle of the year. And we have a likely inflated signal of 1988 and we have the metric you were using for Jordan despite all the noise and assumptions weighed against you checking a list and assuming that the arcs of all the players on that list coincided in a manner convenient for your claim.

[ShaqAttac]

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.

So those playoff runs 2001-05 are the miracle adversity Duncan overcame to have a good career end? Be serious. Their total minutes played — including postseasons were even through fifteen seasons. But the difference is that Duncan took those preceding years easy while Hakeem did not — and Hakeem’s postseason load was skewed toward the end of his prime anyway.

Duncan averaged 29.4 minutes a game 2010-12. Hakeem averaged 35.8 minutes a game 1997-99, and their respective team environments were not asking so much more of Duncan when he was on the court to bridge that gap.

Yet again: it is fine to prefer Duncan just because he was more productive at the end. You do not need to invent excuses for that. He took care of his body and the Spurs helped him do so. The Rockets did not help Hakeem do so. That does not mean he had better longevity than he did, but you do not need to fight against all applicable context to justify your preferences.

tbh if u have duncan 1, hakeem seems like a p natural 2

[lessthanjake]

You are comparing a 13-year career record against a favorable 8-year stretch thereby avoiding Jordan's considerably worse Bulls-record(also 13-years) of 30-7, and even then, you can only force equality by giving Russell a loss in a series he did not have a chance to see through. But sure, absolutely not "motivated reasoning".

Why did Jordan have as many playoff series in 7 playoffs as Russell had in a 13-year career? And does the answer to that question perhaps suggest to you that it was substantially harder to win the title in Jordan’s era? And also, if you expand out to Jordan being 30-7 or whatever, does that include any series where Jordan’s team was anywhere near as good as any of Russell’s teams were?

No offense, but I'm not planning to just go along with the "bottom lines" from someone who spams 1-year github rapm and past top 100 votes to justify their takes. If you're not going to justify that claim you should probably just move on.

To reduce the post I made with an absolute load of data from a ton of sources—an endeavor that actually took quite a while to compile—to just “spams 1-year github rapm” I think exposes that you’re not discussing in good faith.

Oor they win a few more games with Pippen and Grant healthy, beat the Knicks with home-court, take out a weaker Pacers side, and then find a way past Hakeem with the "winning" Jordan taught them(though curiously he himself was not-winning before or after Phil).

But they didn’t do that. And no one thought that they would. You see, I think there’s a disconnect here because it is fairly obvious to me that you did not actually watch the 1990’s Bulls, while I lived in Chicago that entire time and watched virtually every game in that era, both with Jordan and during his retirement. It is just absolutely the case that the 1994 Bulls were basically just a fun team that was not a major contender, while the Jordan teams were just all-conquering, unbeatable buzzsaws. The difference was enormous, and it’s just perplexing to see someone twist themselves in a pretzel to try to suggest otherwise.

And where exactly did those extra playoff teams come from? I am winning at a 100% clip over a comparable stretch(8-years), and now I get to play two-rounds against what are, all else equal, weaker opponents. My "record" shoots up. Just because there are now more teams to gain "separation" against does not make the top-level teams materially better relative to the Celtics and If "best record" is the goal, an expanded playoff field means more wins when you are dominant. With all the series Russell played the ceiling was at 29 so he needed to go virtually perfect over 13-years to match or exceed a 8-year stretch for Michea

Again, the Russell Celtics usually played two playoff rounds, and the first round was a round that like half the teams made (4 out of 8 or 4 out of 9). It was similar to the first round now. Even the finals back then is arguably more conceptually similar to the conference finals now, when looking at the opponent’s percentile in the league. The average percentile of team faced by Jordan in the playoffs is simply not worse. And so to think that Russell faced harder opponents on average you’d genuinely have to think that teams in the 1950s and 1960s were on average more talented than in the 1990s—which, despite league expansion, I think would be a pretty wild claim given the state of basketball and its popularity and financial return in the 1950s/1960s compared to the 1990s.

What? The effects of expansion were stronger during Jordan's championships than Duncan's. There were multiple strong-draft-classes at the very end of the 90's and 3 of the four expansion teams were introduced before Mike's championships. So very strange how out of nowhere you saw hyper-dominant SRS teams as the league expanded. The top team's during the Bull's second-three peat would be inflated relative to the top teams during most of Duncan's chips. That's literally why Sans used standard deviation. The only non-expansion era +10srs team in history was the Warriors.

Ya know, the funny thing about this is that the games against the expansion teams in 1995-1996 didn’t actually help the Bulls. The recent expansion teams were the Raptors and Grizzlies. They actually lost a game to the Raptors, so they went 5-1 against the expansion teams—which means that their winning percentage against non-expansion teams was higher than against the expansion teams. And their average margin of victory in those games (7.67) was substantially below their average margin of victory overall (12.3). Considering the strength of schedule piece of SRS would hammer them for those games, it’s actually the case that playing those expansion teams in 1995-1996 *reduced* the Bulls’ SRS by a good bit.

Similar story in 1996-1997. The Bulls again dropped a game to the Raptors. They went 5-1 against the expansion teams—which again was actually a lower winning percentage than against non-expansion teams. Their average margin of victory in those games (12.0) was slightly higher than their average margin of victory overall (10.8), but considering the strength of schedule piece of SRS, it’s pretty obvious again that the games against the games against the expansion teams actually *reduced* the Bulls’ SRS that season.

The 1991-1992 season is the other Bulls season with a 10+ SRS, and it’s not as close to any recent expansion, so you don’t really hear the expansion argument used with regards to that team. But the most recent expansion teams at that point were the Magic and Timberwolves, and the Bulls went 5-1 against them with 14.2 average margin of victory. They had a 10.4 average margin of victory overall, but again the strength of schedule component would make these games against those teams lower the Bulls’ SRS that year.

So you can talk about expansion, but factually speaking, playing expansion teams didn’t help the Bulls’ SRS in those 10+ SRS years. It actually lowered their SRS!

Yes, 26 mpg Sam Jones was better than prime Horace Grant. Even if I did take your appeal to consensus at face-value, that does not necessitate "none" of the Russell's 11 championship winners were "depleted". Hondo was yet to peak and Jones was at the end of the rope in 69. And naturally you do not address that the Celtics generally kept on chugging along when these "incredible teammates" missed time.

but naturally the objective of this top 100 is to take the rankings of the last top 100 at face value regardless of what evidence or analysis is offered. Unless of course it's unsourced 1-year RAPM in which case let's vote "impact king" Steph top 5. Not motivated reasoning at all.(will drop the steph stuff for the purposes of this thread I think)

The idea that the Russell Celtics were ever “depleted” is really just silly. I don’t know how you can argue it.

You can say “Hondo was yet to peak” but the man made all-NBA second team that year, which was already the fourth such selection in his career. He was already extremely good. And if you want to get more specific and talk about exact best years, then it’s probably relevant that Pippen definitely wasn’t at his peak in 1991 or 1998 and had a down year in 1993, and that he actually really peaked around 1994-1996, which only included one full year with Jordan (a 72-win season) and includes the year Jordan wasn’t there at all.

As for the Celtics “chugging along” when incredible teammates missed time, did it ever occur to you that one major benefit of having teams with 6 to 9 hall of famers is that it’s easy to not skip much of a beat when someone misses time with injury? Just plug their minutes with more minutes for other hall of famers! The Celtics rarely did have a very good backup center though, so they usually couldn’t do that when Russell missed time. But they had a good backup center in two short periods: First with Arnie Risen in 1956-1957 and 1957-1958 and then with Wayne Embry in 1966-1967 and 1967-1968. And, not coincidentally, they actually went 18-13 in games Russell missed in those years. How the Celtics fared in Russell’s absence looked similar to other Celtics when the guy replacing him as a starter was also a hall of famer!

I think you need to stop trying to argue against the weakest projections of what people are saying and also stop trying to act like things you can't actually support are "obvious"(EX: the Bulls were "peaking" when Pippen filed a trade-request and their best players were beefing after three straight title runs). We have Bill Russell's teams not being affected by all these amazing players leaving whether it's planned or in the middle of the year. And we have a likely inflated signal of 1988 and we have the metric you were using for Jordan despite all the noise and assumptions weighed against you checking a list and assuming that the arcs of all the players on that list coincided in a manner convenient for your claim.

I say that things are obvious because, unlike you, I actually watched the 1990’s Bulls—virtually every game—and I am well aware of who was playing well and when. I am not “checking a list and assuming that the arcs of all the players on that list coincided.” You may be arguing from a position of having not watched the team and trying to manipulate data to fit the arguments/conclusions you want to make, but that’s not the position I’m discussing this from and you shouldn’t assume it is. You’re discussing with someone who almost never missed a Bulls game in the 1990s. It might behoove you to step back for a moment and question whether there might actually be something to learn here from someone with more knowledge than you.

As for “Bill Russell’s teams not being affected by all these amazing players leaving,” it helps when amazing players leaving are replaced with more amazing players such that your team never goes below 7 hall of famers until it has 6 in your last season.

[homecourtloss]

I wouldn’t exactly say that having one of the top 10 defenders in the league is the equivalent of 1996 Harper—who only ever got one all-defensive team vote in his entire career (and it wasn’t in 1996). I get that things like all-defensive teams were easier to make back then when there were fewer players in the league, but who knows how many Sanders would’ve made if all-defense had started before 1969, and meanwhile Harper was a good defender that was nowhere even remotely close to making that. And Sanders was putting up more raw numbers than Harper anyways. It’s not the worst comparison I suppose (and peak Ron Harper was a better player IMO), but I don’t really think it’s quite there, and also there’s definitely no comparison with John Paxson (i.e. the PG in the first three-peat).

Definitely disagree very strongly about Nelson vs. Longley. Longley was not a positive contributor to the Bulls. I watched essentially every single one of their games in that era, and he really just wasn’t. He was a good passer, so the triangle was a good system for him, but he was otherwise a weak player. And I’ll note that you can see that the Bulls were better with him off the court, even though he was a starter.

I just wanted to make a few quick points to some of the comments here.

I’m not going to argue that Harper was a better overall career defender relative to his league than Sanders was to his, but all defensive teams aren’t a very good measure of who is a very good defender. Ron Harper had a top 20 RAPM in a partial sample in 1996, almost his entire value coming on defense, the second highest DRAPM for heavy minutes players behind only Patrick Ewing’s DRAPM. You mentioned that you watched almost every single minute of these Bulls, so I’m sure you’ll remember that he was their point of attack defender, relinquished all offensive duties that he had in the past, and concentrated completely on defense, and he did a tremendous job. An approximated regressed 1996 RAPM from the +/- data available had Harper’s 1996 as a top 15 RAPM player,

As for Luc Longley, overall he wasn’t a very impressive player, but I do want to mention that in the partial sample RAPM for 1996 he was a strong plus player in 1996 and in the regressed approximation RAPM, he actually has a top 30 RAPM. Phil Jackson actually made it a point to go to him in game one of the NBA finals and then he had another especially strong game in game three as he was their second leading score. Overall in these Finals he averaged 12 points a game on the highest true shooting percentage of anyone on the Bulls, with many of those shots coming on post moves using both hands, and averaged 2 blocks as well.

In many ways, that 1994 Bulls team was the best the Bulls ever were outside of Jordan. Kukoc was definitely the best fourth-best player the Bulls ever had, but in the second three-peat he was paired with Pippen and Rodman. And while Rodman is superior to Grant all time, he wasn’t actually in his prime on the Bulls (and nor was Pippen by the end), and Pippen and Grant at their very peaks is probably better than Pippen + Rodman ever was. So I think 1994 Pippen + Grant + Kukoc is probably the best three non-Jordan players the Bulls ever put together on one team in the 1990s.

I agree that 1996 or 1997 or 1998 Rodman wasn’t as good as Grant was in 1994, but it’s reasonably close. Additionally, we also have to give Grant credit for how good he was in the 1991 to 1993 as well, that’s often handwaived away, when making the case for Jordan. Perhaps he was not as good as he was in 1994 and 1995, but then again, why wasn’t the absence of Jordan’s gravity/play making affecting Grant in 1994, 1995 and 1996.

I disagree that the 1994 team was the best team outside of Jordan. 1996’s 4th best player was Rodman who was better than Kukoc was in 1994. Additionally, Tony Kukoc in 1996 was one of the best Impact players in the NBA let alone on the Bulls. If you put 1996 Toni Kukoč on the 1994 Chicago Bulls, there’s a pretty good chance that team wins 58-60 games and has a real good shot at the NBA finals. Their fifth best player in 1996 was Ron Harper, a defensive menace in 1996. Lastly, 1994 had a heavily negative player in Pete Myers who played over 2000 minutes, whereas the 1996 Bulls had Randy Brown, a negative who only played 1300 minutes.

[homecourtloss]

Critics say Jordan left, and the Bulls were still a 55-win team [SRS pegs them more like just 50 wins, fwiw] that went 7 games with the eventual EC champions in the semis.
Few things to bear in mind, however:
1) '93 was a down prime year [sort of like '11 was for Lebron] for Scottie Pippen; while in '94 he bounces back to probably his peak year (it's either that or '92, imo). The exact same thing can be said for Horace Grant.

Not sure this is in any way supportive of Jordan here. League wide TS dropped from 53.6% to 52.8% from 1993 to 1994 but Pippen’s jumped significantly from 51% to 54.4% while Grant’s remained stable. Both of their TOV% dropped slightly while their respective OBMs jumped tremendously with added offensive responsibilities. All of this was with 2000 minutes of Pete Myers being an awful offensive player yet both of Pippen and Grant did as well as they did in “bounce back years.”

2) A promising rookie named Toni Kukoc was added in '94.

He was definitely promising, but he was basically a neutral player in 1994 though he showed great promise in the playoffs. He was at least a tier and a half or more advanced in 1996, though, in which he top 10 impact player,.

3) They added Steve Kerr, who was a very nice bench piece.

Kerr definitely had a good year

4) Bill Wennington (decent bench piece) was added.

His best year was probably 1994 though most of his minutes overlap with Pippen’s. Interesting that Scottie Pippen got the most out of him this year compared to any of his other years though that could be due to many things.

5) Pete Myers wasn't much, but he could at least play good defense, and he stuck to his role pretty well (he was added in '94).

No, Myers was by far their worst player who played significant minutes. Bulls Were 6.3 points per 100 possessions better with him off the court, by far the best they were with any off the players off the court. He was a terrible offensive player and not that good of a defender either

Some other old vets were fading (Cartwright, Paxson), but otoh BJ Armstrong added about 300 minutes on similar production/efficiency as the year before, and rookie Corie Blount was added (call it a wash).

So it wasn't just "Jordan left and they still did this".
It was "Jordan left, but they added Kukoc and Kerr and Myers and Wennington; and BOTH Pippen and Grant had major bounce-back years......and THEN they did this" ("this" being that they dropped by only 2 wins, but by -3.32 SRS, and got ousted in the 2nd round [instead of winning title]).

Basically, it was, though. It was primarily a team driven by Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant who had bounce back years when Jordan left, players who were there in 1991, 1992, and 1993, players who were really good. Horace grant would go on to show in 1995 and 1996 that he was a really, really good player and contributed immensely to that first three peat. When you are comparing to other GOAT players, and what happened to their respective teams when they left, the team, being as successful as the Chicago Bulls were, led by two players who were there when Jordan peaked, definitely becomes a point of contention. The net additions of the players that they had including a negative player in Pete Myers who played 2000 minutes and another negative player in Bill Wennington for most of his career shouldn’t have been enough to make the bulls team as competitive as it was after losing a GOAT engine in Jordan, but yet it was, which brings into question just how good Jordan’s teammates were in the first place.

This team did better in the playoffs than what being “ousted in the second round” suggests. The Chicago Bulls outscored the New York Knicks over seven games and were a very controversial game five call away from perhaps winning a series against the eventual NBA finals runner-up that lost basically a 50-50 Finals.

Look at how well they performed offensively in the two playoff series. The 1994 series against the Cavs so the bulls have the fourth highest relative offensive rating for a series from playoff series played between 1985 and 1998. The offense against the all-time great 1994 Knicks defense held up admirably well and actually did better than what the 1992 and 1996 juggernaut Chicago teams did.

Bulls’ rORtg in playoff series

1991 vs. Pistons, +17.0
1992 vs. Heat, +15.8
1996 vs. Heat, +15.2
1994 vs. Cavs, +13.6
1993 vs. Knicks, +12.7
1997 vs. Hawks, +12.6
1998 vs. Pacers, +12.6
1996 vs. Magic, +11.9
1991 vs. Sixers, +10.8
1993 vs. Hawks, +10.8
1998 vs. Nets, +10.8
1997 vs. Bullets, +10.8
1991 vs. Lakers, +10.7
1993 vs. Cavs, +10.4
1990 vs. Bucks, +10.0
1996 vs. Sonics, +9.2
1991 vs. Knicks, +8.8
1994 vs. Knicks, +8.5
1989 vs. Knicks, +8.3
1990 vs. Sixers, +8.3
1992 vs. Knicks, +7.0
…several other series
1996 vs. Knicks, +1.7

Only negative ones
1989 vs. Pistons, -1.6
1990 vs. Pistons, -2.1
1988 vs. Pistons, -9.5

And the other thing here is that the coach, Phil Jackson, got as much out of role players as any coach ever, perhaps, as he was able to replicate the same success with the Lakers with their role players. So if we’re going to give credit to that coaching for helping this team, stay successful 1994 then we also have to give credit to the coaching in the series that they won.

[AEnigma]

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.

I never said it was a lost cause.

No, you just objected to the characterisation of it as an absentee loss because well he played three and a half games and was losing.

But a series loss where Russell played in a lot of the series and his team didn’t do well even when he played can obviously not be equated with a series where Jordan was not even on the team and therefore did not play a single second. Russell was plainly part of his team’s loss and Jordan was not. This should not be a controversial point, and I’m a little shocked that there’d be pushback on this.

Were the Bulls paying Jordan’s salary that year?

I am shocked that there is apparently pushback against the idea that only being present for part of a series loss is less condemnable than being present for none of it.

But par for the course I suppose. Jordan’s case pathologically needs to be a matter of him being the best. 6 needs to be greater than 11. A supporting cast that looks like a top quartile team without you needs to be worse than a cast that ends up looking like a bottom quartile one. Having a regular season SRS three points clear of the next best team on three occasions needs to be better than doing so on six occasions. Being theoretically maybe a conceivably comparable impact standout if we squint needs to put you on the same impact level of a clear and repeatedly demonstrated standout. Or in the tidiest summary, no matter what, if it is inconvenient to this image of an infallible Jordan, lesser separation from the pack needs to be reframed as better than greater separation.

There is little to argue if someone votes Jordan because they are personally more impressed by being the best player on 6 title teams in the 1990s than by being the best player on 11 title teams across the 1950s and 1960s. There is little to argue if someone votes Jordan because he was the best player on what they see as four of the best ten or so teams in league history and that is how they assess “greatness”. There is even little to argue if someone votes Jordan because well he leads all players in MVP shares per year and to them that seems like the best way to objectively assess “dominance”. Where we run into trouble is twisting his case to be better than the cases that should favour other players.

Stuff like, “Ah, well, the Celtics had multiple all-stars and hall-of-famers and Top 75/100-ers,” as if the same were not perpetually true of their opponents. The 1957/58 Hawks had four hall-of-famers, then added an 8-time all-star in 1960, then added another hall-of-famer in Lenny Wilkens in 1961. Oh, and those first two years they were coached by the guy I think was the best coach of the era. The 1959 Lakers had three hall-of-famers, that same 8-time all-star, and a recent all-NBA player. The 1960/62 Warriors had four hall-of-famers. And this was the easy era. By the time Bill left, he had a 3-1* record against Bob Pettit (#25 in the last top 100), a 3-0 record against Oscar Robertson (#14 in the last top 100), a 6-0 record against Elgin Baylor (#33 in the last top 100), a 6-0 record against Jerry West (#13 in the last top 100), a 5-0 record against the pair of them, and a 7-1 record against Wilt Chamberlain (#6 in the last top 100).

He closed his career by serving as a player-coach and:

- coming back 3-1 on the road against a 76ers team stronger than any team ever beaten by Jordan;
- winning the title over a Lakers team that had generated an even higher MoV when West played than the MoV of those 76ers;
- and then repeating as champions by winning three road series (only matched by the 1995 Rockets), including against the Wilt/West/Baylor super-team (three 10-time all-NBA players!) and a Knicks team that with DeBusschere had been even better than those 1968 76ers and Lakers teams (so yet another opponent better than any beaten by Jordan).

Maybe it is easy to inflate players never watched and only judged by their collection of accolades. Or maybe those Celtics teams really were a sustained version of the 2014 Spurs where everyone contributed at incredible levels and multiple guys deserve top 50 discussion that for whatever reason never manifests.
…
But ultimately that just ends up wrapping around into a better argument for Duncan at this spot anyway.

Vote: Bill Russell
Nominate: George Mikan

[One_and_Done]

It is a better argument for Duncan, but you still voted for Russell.

I'm with the Russell skeptics like Jake and Rex. Russell wouldn't be getting talked about as a top 10 all-timer if he played today, and that matters. I certainly won't be voting for either Wilt or Russell top 10, or Mikan at all.

[AEnigma]

It is a better argument for Duncan, but you still voted for Russell.

I'm with the Russell skeptics like Jake and Rex. Russell wouldn't be getting talked about as a top 10 all-timer if he played today, and that matters. I certainly won't be voting for either Wilt or Russell top 10, or Mikan at all.

You do understand most people do not craft these lists based on who they think would thrive today (or alternatively, in a random NBA year)… right? Taken literally, a lot of our ballots might quickly look more like Iggy’s; are you really sure someone like Shaq could be better than Jokic in today’s game?

If that were my approach, my list would probably look a lot more like Eminence’s. And I respect Eminence’s commitment to that approach, but there is good reason a lot of us are invested in first acknowledging the players who could claim to be their league’s best player for 10+ seasons. It is why at this point the top four will probably always remain as this top four, even if the order may change depending on the base. I can say the history of the league suggests Duncan and Hakeem and Wilt all likely would have thrived more in a random year on a random team than Jordan could have, but the reality is that the harshest reasonable Jordan assessment marks him as his league’s best player as many times as a generous reasonable Duncan assessment. I respect you for voting how you are, just as I respect anyone voting for Hakeem here, or Garnett, but those votes will always be a minority at #3 or #4 because not enough people are wholly willing to remove that idea of “greatness” from their rankings at the top just because the players dominated a more rudimentary league.

[LukaTheGOAT]

Nomination of Steph Curry

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.

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.

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.

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.

Resilience has to do with how a player in the PS compares to their RS selves.

I am pretty sure if you ran a poll of whose offensive prime run in the PS is preferable: Curry or Kobe, Curry would come out on top. I don't think it is controversial to say Curry is better in the PS than Kobe. However, Curry is starting from higher highs in the RS, and perhaps dropping a bit in impact. While, Kobe is starting from much greater lows, and then improving during his 06-10 run, hence the idea of Kobe being resilient, as he gotten better against the better defenses.

[70sFan]

I don't have enough time to write a post with convincing arguments (I am abroad for the full week), but it's shocking to me that after all these years people came back to the idea of Russell's Celtics being uterrly stacked and counting HoF teammates in Boston squads. Overall, the level of discussion is high as always, but this particular thing is a big downgrade from what we achieved as a community in this regard.

[lessthanjake]

well, weak in the context of the guys we are talking about. and more specifically, weak in the sense of resilience. i think that's hard to dispute. certainly on an individual stats level. and at the very least, i don't see the warriors having lived up to their regular season dominance in the playoffs to some degree. their 73-9 team lost 9 games in the playoffs and is one of the few +10 teams to not win a title. and when they have exceeded their regular season, it's arguably only in years where they have very obviously not given a crap about the regular season (2018 and 2019 where they somehow didn't even win 60 games) or they missed a huge amount of games in the regular season before not missing a single game in the playoffs (2022). in other words, when the situation was perfectly set up for them to outperform.

Don’t you think you’re artificially limiting what seasons you’re considering? Like you’re not considering 2018, 2019, or 2022 because you think there’s factors to explain their overperformance of the regular season. But of course if you take out 3 of a guy’s finals runs where his team overperformed, then his team might on average underperform in the playoffs! Even then, though, the Warriors didn’t underperform in the 2017 playoffs—as good as they were in the regular season, they were even better in the playoffs. And they actually overperformed SRS in 2013—beating a Nuggets team with a 4 SRS advantage. It also can’t really be about the 2015 playoffs, since they won the title while only dropping 5 playoff games and having a massive +10.2 net rating in the playoffs. So what is the notion of Warriors not living up to regular season dominance in the playoffs based on? It seems like it’s basically just a conclusion based completely on the 2016 playoffs. Beyond the fact that that’s just one year, should we really penalize Steph for his team underperforming in the playoffs one year (in a year where he got injured in the playoffs)? And is it fair to massively penalize him for the team’s underperformance of an incredible regular season when he was such a huge driver of the regular season being so good—would you feel better about Steph as a player if he’d simply played less well in that 2016 regular season and the Warriors had won a lot fewer games and lost in the finals? And would that make sense?

ok, but i feel like this is saying it was a finals just short of the brilliance of lebron. but it was a bad finals. 22.6 ppg, 4.9 rpg, 3.7 apg on 4.3 turnovers per game, 13.1 game score. that's just a bad finals. even if it wasn't after the greatest offensive regular season ever. and his team was still 1 minute away from winning it all, even with lebron maybe having his greatest series ever. that's quite a margin of error. and that margin seems to apply to other parts of curry's career.

I actually think that this response underscores how good Steph is. 23/5/4 on 58% TS% is actually not “a bad finals,” and especially not for someone who was injured during the playoffs and who has so much impact that doesn’t get on the scoresheet (i.e., gravity). It was definitely a weak showing compared to how Steph had played in the regular season, and it’s not the sort of series Michael Jordan would have. But the players we will be considering soon have things worse than that or at least similar. Magic Johnson has the 1983 Finals disaster-class. Duncan was pretty rough in the 2005 Finals (which, I’ll note, his team didn’t just come close to winning but actually in fact won). Hakeem had a rough series when they lost in the 1996 WCF as two-time defending champions. Heck, even guys already voted have things as bad or worse. LeBron’s 2011 finals was definitely worse. Kareem was really rough in the 1973 upset loss to the Warriors. The Lakers won the 1982 Finals even with Kareem not doing much (and this was when he was still not very old). Etc. If a guy’s low point is 23/5/4 on 58% TS% when he’s had an amazing regular season but got injured in the playoffs, then I tend to think that actually reflects well on the player.

well, yes, they have been dominant. but with very talented teams. that fit extremely well together. not something everyone else gets, even when they have talented teammates. and as is seen, draymond is literally the leader, having managed to get one more than curry.

…

that's the benefit of fitting together. you say fit is an achievement, but does it really seem to apply to steph and draymond? if i knew i had either of them and was going to build another player in a lab to play with them, i would end up building steph for draymond and draymond for steph. steph is the greatest off-ball player ever, whose biggest offensive requirement would be an extremely high IQ player to make all the reads and mind meld with him to get him the ball where he needs it. after all, you can't be off-ball without relying on your teammates to do the on-ball work. well draymond just happens to not only be a point-forward, but an elite point-forward. an elite point-forward who doesn't even want to shoot, which obviously helps with team chemistry. and now that we've got the offense sorted, we go to the other end where draymond is his generation's greatest defender, one who also seems to get even better in the playoffs. it literally could not work out better.

…

To some degree it’s surely right that it’s great for Steph that he’s played with guys that he fits well with. But I do think it’s telling that virtually everyone seems to fit well with him. Draymond is a great fit. Klay is a great fit. Durant was a great fit. Iguodala was a great fit. Wiggins hadn’t been a good fit with anything in the NBA, and he suddenly becomes a good fit with Steph. It’s genuinely part of the greatness of Steph that he’s easy to fit well with. Are you good on the ball? Great, Steph doesn’t need the ball that much, so you can maximize yourself despite playing with a massive star. Are you good off the ball? Great, the team can use plays for Steph for you too, and Steph’s gravity will also get you easy baskets on cuts. Are you a great passer? Great, you can use that really effectively on the short roll to take advantage of teams doubling Steph miles from the basket. Are you a great shooter? Great, you’ll be left open a ton due to Steph’s gravity and will be able to rack up tons of shots without even needing to create your own shot. Are you not a good shooter at all? That’s okay, because Steph creates so much space that the team can run good offense even with multiple non-shooters on the floor. Are you offensively limited but great defensively? That’s okay, Steph is so good offensively that the team can take advantage of your defensive prowess while relying on Steph to paper over any offensive limitations. Are you a big-bodied big man that isn’t overly skilled but can do the dirty work well? Great, you’ll get lots of value setting off-ball screens for Steph.

Bottom line is that it’s hard to think of a template of a good player that *wouldn’t* fit well with Steph Curry. Steph’s teams have always seemed to be as much or more than the sum of their parts, in large part because there’s few strengths that other players can’t maximize value from alongside Steph, and he’s able to paper over quite a lot of weaknesses, particularly on the offensive end. So I just don’t think it’s as simple as saying Steph is lucky to have a great fit. Part of his greatness is that he’s a player that’s easy to fit with!

i would say he needs his individual numbers to not fall off significantly in 2015, only to arguably be saved by injury, and very significantly (historically so) in 2016 and 2018, only to be saved by injury again in 2018, and also not survive the 2nd round in 2019 with horrible play, for me to think that his margin of error for playoff success isn't extremely high and that he isn't being boosted by having an elite defense and draymond around him. for all of kobe's problems, he seems to have been able to maintain his regular season play better, and either he or hakeem is arguably the best at "actual vs expected" championships, with kobe managing to finish 2nd not only in raw delta but also in percentage delta.

I think you could say this sort of thing about virtually everyone. Most teams that win a title had some serious luck along the way—injuries to great players on other teams, upsets resulting in facing relatively weak teams, etc. It’s just how things go, and if we discounted every title for that sort of reason, then there’d be very few titles we’d put value on.

I also don’t think “actual vs. expected championships” is all that helpful, since it can just penalize a guy for being better than other guys in the regular season. If Steph leads a team to a 73-win season by being a supernova in the regular season, and then he loses in the finals while not playing as well as in the regular season, is that worse than if he’d played less well and only led the team to a 55-win season, and then he loses in the finals playing the same? The latter would be better from an “actual vs. expected championships” standpoint, but it isn’t *actually* better. Steph led his teams to the most regular season wins in a three-year span in the history of the NBA. He’s a huge cause of his team’s number of expected championships being really high! He shouldn’t be penalized for it! Other players who didn’t do as much in the regular season may show more “playoff resilience,” but in most cases they’re just resilient in staying at a lower level!

i realize we shouldn't throw things away just because it gives results we don't like, but i do think curry finishing first every year, in every situation, even when his own play falters, is at least somewhat problematic. no different than watching david robinson or chris paul look so amazing by various box and impact metrics where it seems they clearly don't live up to it. i bring up 2022 where curry had a down season for a reason. the idea that curry has off-ball value is obvious. but part of his value is also that he makes a lot of shots at extremely high efficiency. it's not as if he ups his "intangibles" and off-ball impact to perfectly offset poor shooting, then decreases his intangibles and off-ball impact when he's shooting well. if the numbers can't even tell me he had a poor year when he clearly did and had people asking "what happened to steph's shot?" all season long, then another 2nd or 3rd place finish isn't going to mean as much after a while. and all those 1st place finishes, when there wouldn't have been a single year that ended with people calling steph the best in the world after the playoffs, brings us back to the resilience argument.

I don’t think that that’s factually right though: It *did* show up in the data. In 2021-2022, Steph had easily his lowest Offensive RPM since 2012-2013. Similarly, NBAshotcharts had Steph’s offensive RAPM in 2021-2022 at its lowest level since 2012-2013. Steph’s Offensive RAPTOR in 2021-2022 was the lowest they have on record. Advanced metrics definitely did capture a decrease in offensive value in that season. His overall numbers were just still really good, because his baseline level of offensive impact was so high (such that even his lowest offensive impact is still really good) and a lot of the metrics detected a better-than-normal defensive impact (which makes sense since he was widely considered to have gotten better defensively that year, partly from bulking up). So I don’t think this is a reason to discount these metrics at all—if anything, I think this discussion should validate them to you.

even 2022 tries to get written as some underdog story for steph. but he was on the team with the highest payroll in the league with all of the payroll healthy for the playoffs. an owner willing to pay $25M plus huge luxury tax for someone like andrew wiggins. do you want wiggins as your franchise player? of course not. do you want his elite athleticism along with 17 ppg scoring (without caring if he gets the ball) to be your 4th best starter if money is no option? of course yes. on top of poole going crazy in the playoffs. on top of still having the #1 defense in the league courtesy of draymond once again. with klay still around? that seems like a fairly loaded team in a post-superteam world. though i won't deny curry played very well in the finals this time.

I think talking about the payroll is obscuring the fact that the payroll was basically just filled with bad contracts. Klay was the second-highest-paid guy on the team and he wasn’t there most of the season and was rough when he did come back (and had a negative on-off in both regular season and playoffs—massively so in the playoffs). Wiggins was the third-highest-paid guy on the team, but his contract was considered an albatross contract when the Warriors got him, not some high-value player. Their fifth-highest-paid guy was James Wiseman, who did not play the entire year. Their sixth-highest paid guy was Jonathan Kuminga, who basically only got like 35 minutes of garbage time in the entire last two rounds of the playoffs. So I think it’s reaching to look to the payroll and conclude that it means the 2022 Warriors were actually really great. They weren’t. That really was a floor-raising title.

i would have more sympathy if the warriors had an amazing offense and missed the playoffs. but, in fact, they had the #4 ranked defense in 2021. curry is an offensive weapon par excellence, so i would imagine making the playoffs is not a great threshold if we know the defense is very good. but they finished #20 in offense and missed. are there reasons for that? sure, but seemingly no more convincing reasons than their are reasons for why the warriors looked so good for so many years.

2 missed playoffs in your prime hurts kareem's story. it seems like it has to hurt steph's (2020 was looking even more disastrous than 2021 so there's not much reason to think the warriors are doing any better than maybe battling for the 8th seed). and i might have more sympathy to that if he wasn't the leader in the clubhouse for missed playoffs (in this range of players). he missed 5 times by his age 33 season. even a guy in a horrible situation like garnett only missed 4, and he had an age 19 and 20 season while curry started at 21, not making the playoffs until he was 24, which goes back to longevity.

The Warriors had a good offense when Steph was on the court that year. They also won at a 48-win pace when Steph played. Again, if one of the biggest knocks against a guy is his value in a season where he was #3 in MVP voting, then that’s an incredible signal that he should be very highly ranked all time!

As for the defense and offense thing, I think we have to recognize that defense and offense are not independent in the NBA. And what the Warriors have often chosen to do with Steph is to stack defense-minded lineups around him, knowing that his presence can salvage what would otherwise be unplayably bad offensive lineups. In that season, the Warriors were really frequently putting out lineups that had Steph and two or three of the following: Draymond, Looney, Wiseman, Oubre, etc. It’s very little shooting, especially in this era, where having 2 or 3 non-shooters on the court is a huge problem offensively. They did it even worse that year since they just had even less shooting in general, but they do it even now. Those Draymond/Looney lineups are really good defensively, but they’re only really good because Steph’s so good offensively that he can make that a playable offensive lineup. For instance, in the last three regular seasons + playoffs, Draymond/Looney lineups with Steph are +14.9 with great 121.7 offensive efficiency, but Draymond/Looney lineups without Steph are -3.2 with a bad 110.7 offensive efficiency. Steph allows the Warriors to stack defensive players onto the court while still having a functioning offense! Not to mention that their offense is horrible when he’s off the court. So I don’t think it makes sense to suggest that the Warriors having a great defense that year has nothing to do with Steph or that them having a mediocre offense was his fault. The reality is that they had good offenses with him on the court despite running really defensive lineups that helped their defense be great, and then their offense collapsed with him off the floor.

true, it's not easy to win a title. but i think my biggest argument is in how the credit is distributed. even look at klay, the weakest of the big 4. he misses 2 years and the warriors don't even make the playoffs. he comes back and they win it all. steph has never made the playoffs without klay. same with KD. the warriors go from 9 playoff losses to the most dominant playoff run ever, but we've spent the last 6 years bombarded with "but look at the warriors plus/minus with only steph on the court" type stats trying to pretend KD was irrelevant. sorry, but "we got way better after adding a new guy, but it wasn't really the new guy, it was everyone else" is the type of thing that makes me doubt all the impact stuff, at least in its ability to go from the line-up specific world where that data lives to the overall big picture results.

The Warriors were 30-9 that season before Klay came back. They finished 53-29, and Klay had a -2.9 on-off. A good bit of that slide had to do with injuries, but the team was clearly elite without Klay. And then in the playoffs, Klay had a -11.7 on-off. I think the most reasonable conclusion is that the Warriors winning the title when Klay came back was correlation not causation.

[lessthanjake]

I don't have enough time to write a post with convincing arguments (I am abroad for the full week), but it's shocking to me that after all these years people came back to the idea of Russell's Celtics being uterrly stacked and counting HoF teammates in Boston squads. Overall, the level of discussion is high as always, but this particular thing is a big downgrade from what we achieved as a community in this regard.

This is obviously referring to me, but I think you’re missing that I freely acknowledged that some of those hall of famers are basically just in the hall of fame for being along for the ride. My point is that they were really talented teams even when we take a totally sober view of some of those hall of famers. A team with Bill Russell, John Havlicek, Sam Jones, Bailey Howell, Tom Sanders, Don Nelson, etc. is an objectively very talented team, and one doesn’t need to blindly rate players on hall of fame induction in order to come to that conclusion. And that’s probably the least talented team of the bunch! I understand bristling at the shorthand of talking about hall-of-famers since there’s some hall of famers amongst those Celtics teams that might be very overrated by that shorthand, but I don’t think that contextualizing that should lead us to a conclusion that Russell’s teams weren’t really talented and certainly not that they were “depleted,” which was the specific claim I was contesting. Russell always had a very talented team, and I think it’d be genuinely odd for someone to suggest otherwise. I think one could make the argument that they occasionally faced similarly talented teams. Perhaps the 1969 Lakers or 1967 Sixers were even more talented! But those Celtics were always quite strong.