RealGM 2023 Top 100 Project - #4 (Bill Russell)

[70sFan]

Curry is better than Kobe ever was, and has sufficient longevity that it's meaningless to point to that when he's being compared to a blatantly inferior player.

How did you come to that conclusion?

[One_and_Done]

What part don't you get? Curry is one of the offensive GOATs. Kobe isn't. Not much of a comparison tbh.

[70sFan]

What part don't you get? Curry is one of the offensive GOATs. Kobe isn't. Not much of a comparison tbh.

How did you come with the conclusion that:

"it's meaningless to point to that when he's being compared to a blatantly inferior player"

I think it's not pointless at all. I think we need to compare players with comparable career values, even if one player didn't peak as high as the other. That's why Kobe Bryant and Karl Malone should be top 15 candidates easily.

[One_and_Done]

What part don't you get? Curry is one of the offensive GOATs. Kobe isn't. Not much of a comparison tbh.

How did you come with the conclusion that:

"it's meaningless to point to that when he's being compared to a blatantly inferior player"

I think it's not pointless at all. I think we need to compare players with comparable career values, even if one player didn't peak as high as the other. That's why Kobe Bryant and Karl Malone should be top 15 candidates easily.

When 2 players are comparable, then longevity matters. When players are not in the same tier, longevity is largely irrelevant. I would never rank Stockton over D.Rob for example. If you want an even more obvious example, imagine comparing Jamison or Shareef to Bill Walton or Penny based on longevity.

[70sFan]

What part don't you get? Curry is one of the offensive GOATs. Kobe isn't. Not much of a comparison tbh.

How did you come with the conclusion that:

"it's meaningless to point to that when he's being compared to a blatantly inferior player"

I think it's not pointless at all. I think we need to compare players with comparable career values, even if one player didn't peak as high as the other. That's why Kobe Bryant and Karl Malone should be top 15 candidates easily.

When 2 players are comparable, then longevity matters. When players are not in the same tier, longevity is largely irrelevant. I would never rank Stockton over D.Rob for example. If you want an even more obvious example, imagine comparing Jamison or Shareef to Bill Walton or Penny based on longevity.

This is why people create CORP or VORP evaluations that take into account longevity and value of each season. This methodology can be used as a baseline to get the idea of what comparison is reasonable and what is not.

The results I have seen (along with the ones I provided) suggest that Kobe and Curry is a legit comparison, Stockton and Robinson is probably slightly less close and the ones you mentioned are pointless indeed. Now, if you have a different method of evaluating longevity or a different weighing procedure, I am all ears. If your analysis is only about gut feeling, then I am not interested in that.

[One_and_Done]

How about we just don't judge guys on a catch all stat, and apply some common sense as well? I'm a big fan of that approach.

There are no shortage of stats that tell us Curry is one of the GOAT offensive players. Whether you're looking at Ortg, or efficiency stats, etc, Curry is better. He's also a point guard, and shocker he's a better passer too. He's the guy who broke the game, and changes the way basketball is played. Not in gimmick sense, but in a sense that just makes his impact bigger and will continue to do so for like players. Because he shoots 3s super well. Unless people were sleep the last 8 years I'm pretty sure they caught this stuff on TV, as Curry led some of the GOaT teams and greatest offenses of all time.

So Curry is in another tier of player. In the light of that reality, minor longevity advantage (if it even exists) wouldn't matter much to me.

[70sFan]

How about we just don't judge guys on a catch all stat, and apply some common sense as well? I'm a big fan of that approach.

I don't want you to create your list based on "catch all stat", I specifically stated to use it as the entrance to the discussion.

If you think Curry has a better career, that's completely fine. It's far different than saying the comparison is pointless. You probably think the same way about Duncan vs Russell comparison, but it doesn't make it right.

[One_and_Done]

No. I don't even have Russell in the same category of player as TD. The gap between Duncan and Russell is far bigger than between Curry and Kobe.

[70sFan]

No. I don't even have Russell in the same category of player as TD. The gap between Duncan and Russell is far bigger than between Curry and Kobe.

That's your opinion and your opinion isn't the reason to call the comparison pointless. Especially if you don't back up your claims with anything substantial.

It's fair that you don't rate Kobe or Russell highly, but it doesn't mean these comparisons are pointless. Quite the opposite in fact, Duncan vs Russell discussion is very fruitful.

[ty 4191]

You think West or Oscar are going before Steph Curry?

Hopefully. If everyone hasn't lost their minds!!

[SpreeS]

You think West or Oscar are going before Steph Curry?

Hopefully. If everyone hasn't lost their minds!!

Its what I am talking about - preconception. Curry/West/Oscar/Kobe - could be one of the best discussion in this project.

[lessthanjake]

Hakeem’s number still don’t look all that good there, particularly as it is going to be more difficult to lift a team in raw terms the better they are.

Which is why I specifically have used terms like "is competitive with", "on the level of" than "better than". Hakeem sees more raw lift on worse teams(concentrated, ben's wowy, career wide, 10-year) placing them as peers. Hakeem does potentially gain separation in the playoffs. He also [b[potentially[/b] gains value from all the extra minutes he played. Regardless, he does look very good relative to how he was voted for MVP..

I don’t think that that places Hakeem as a “peer” or shows he was better than how he was voted for MVP. I think the general consensus in the basketball community is that a lift on a worse team is worth nowhere near as much as a similar lift on a better team. This is precisely why it is so rare for MVP to go to a player whose team didn’t win many games. So it’s not a matter of just trying to derive some measure of “lift” and saying that if the raw numbers are similar then the two players are competitive with each other. The lift would need to be *much* higher to be comparable on a lesser team. And I provided numbers earlier on Hakeem’s team in the relevant timeframe that was being talked about regarding MVP votes (i.e. the first 8 years of Hakeem’s career), and the numbers (+1.79 in games Hakeem played and -2.74 in games Hakeem didn’t play) are roughly equivalent to a lift from a 33-win team to a 45-win team. That’s simply not a lift that people generally think is particularly impressive or hugely valuable, unless perhaps it is accompanied by through-the-roof box-score stats that might suggest that WOWY is underrating the player’s influence. But Hakeem did not have through-the-roof box-score stats in those years, typically averaging in the bottom half of the top 10 in the league or just past that in the various common box-score composites.

I just don’t really see the argument for Hakeem having been truly incredible in those years or underrated by MVP voting. The amount his team improved in games he played was okay, but nothing special. The limited play-by-play RAPM data we have (i.e. Squared) is okay, but nothing special. And the box-score stats are pretty good but actually if anything less good than the MVP voting. The evidence just isn’t there in any way IMO. As far as I can tell, beyond talking about playoffs (more on that in a second), the arguments for Hakeem in this era in large part seem to hinge on comparing individual elements of Hakeem’s case to other great players whose weakness in their case is that specific element. So like, for instance, yeah, if you look at just WOWY, Hakeem in that era might have raw numbers that aren’t super far off Jordan’s (though they *are* probably super far off if we consider lift of a lesser team being easier), but that’s the weakest part of Jordan’s case. Obviously, Jordan’s box score stats, as well as his RAPM in the limited data we have, are far better than Hakeem’s. Meanwhile, I think the defense of Hakeem’s relatively lower box-score numbers is to say that box-score doesn’t measure impact, and a player can influence the game a lot with things that don’t end up in the box-score much, like defense. But Hakeem in that era doesn’t have indicators of higher impact in the impact data. So he’s not like a Garnett or Curry or Russell, where you might say that box-score stats are a bit of a relative weakness but it doesn’t catch a lot of their impact—or at least, unlike with those guys, there isn’t great impact data to point to for such an argument. If a guy doesn’t have a case in the impact data *or* in box-score stats for having been a really really top player, then he probably wasn’t one. And that’s especially true when his team simply wasn’t that good when he played (which is suggestive of there not being some huge impact that the available data is missing).

Now, the one point Hakeem does have in that era is that his box-score stats actually were good in the playoffs. But it’s also true that the playoff experience for Hakeem in that era was mostly just losing in the first round, and that there were multiple years where the Rockets lost to pretty mediocre teams that did not have anyone even close to as good as Hakeem. And a big part of his impressive box-score numbers was putting up huge numbers against those mediocre teams. The 1986 Finals run was impressive, and he also put in good stats in some other early-round losses, but I don’t think that that overall playoff resume in those years is *super* impressive, because there’s only so much impressiveness that can come from first-round playoff losses.

As I’ve said, I think a very good comparison for Hakeem in that era is Luka Doncic so far. A player who puts up good stats but not the best in the league, whose impact-metric data doesn’t look all that great even while he plays on a fairly middling team, who puts up big stats in the playoffs but usually loses early except one overachieving run where they beat a much better team, and who ultimately ends up placing in the latter half of the top 10 in MVP voting. And I do think that if we got 8 years into Luka’s career and he was still like this, it’d be fair to say that people would be very surprised to hear that he’d later be considered for top 5 all time.

[AEnigma]

The only way that theory survives even the slightest scrutiny is if you assume Hakeem took a massive leap around 1992/93 right as the rest of the Rockets roster collapsed.

1985-91 Rockets with Hakeem: +2 net rating
1984-91 Rockets without Hakeem: -2.1 net rating

1992-97 Rockets with Hakeem: +3.5 net rating
1992-97 Rockets without Hakeem: -6.3 net rating

People who understand player development rightly recognise that is in fact not what happened, but anyone who sincerely believes Hakeem went from a +4 regular season player to a +10 one in a span of an offseason, before factoring in playoff elevation, should probably also be pushing Hakeem as a top three or two or one sustained peak, and on that basis alone he would merit reentry into this fringe top five discussion.

For whatever reason, that is not what is happening here.

[rk2023]

Hopefully. If everyone hasn't lost their minds!!

Its what I am talking about - preconception. Curry/West/Oscar/Kobe - could be one of the best discussion in this project.

Second this notion. All in the 10-15 range across the four players, though I certainly feel solid with my current ordering of them career wise.

[iggymcfrack]

The only way that theory survives even the slightest scrutiny is if you assume Hakeem took a massive leap around 1992/93 right as the rest of the Rockets roster collapsed.

1985-91 Rockets with Hakeem: +2 net rating
1984-91 Rockets without Hakeem: -2.1 net rating

1992-97 Rockets with Hakeem: +3.5 net rating
1992-97 Rockets without Hakeem: -6.3 net rating

People who understand player development rightly recognise that is in fact not what happened, but anyone who sincerely believes Hakeem went from a +4 regular season player to a +10 one in a span of an offseason, before factoring in playoff elevation, should probably also be pushing Hakeem as a top three or two or one sustained peak, and on that basis alone he would merit reentry into this fringe top five discussion.

For whatever reason, that is not what is happening here.

To be fair, after LeBron at 1, I think Jordan, Jokic, KG, Shaq, Duncan, and Hakeem are all pretty close for the #2 spot and all have good arguments. I don’t see a lot of differentiation. Maybe even throw Kareem in there too.

[OhayoKD]

Hakeem’s number still don’t look all that good there, particularly as it is going to be more difficult to lift a team in raw terms the better they are.

Which is why I specifically have used terms like "is competitive with", "on the level of" than "better than". Hakeem sees more raw lift on worse teams(concentrated, ben's wowy, career wide, 10-year) placing them as peers. Hakeem does potentially gain separation in the playoffs. He also [b[potentially[/b] gains value from all the extra minutes he played. Regardless, he does look very good relative to how he was voted for MVP..

I don’t think that that places Hakeem as a “peer” or shows he was better than how he was voted for MVP. I think the general consensus in the basketball community is that a lift on a worse team is worth nowhere near as much as a similar lift on a better team.

For MVP-voting, sure. In terms of actual "value" or "goodness", no. It does not need to be "much" higher, which is part of why using mvp-voting as a proxy for player-goodness questionable here. Not sure it matters too much how your interpretation of his "production" stacks up to offensively slanted contemporaries when the rockets defense spikes by 2-points with rookie Hakeem as the team jumps from bad to good. Hakeem's "production" looks fine compared to players of a similar profile(which happens to have the best track-record of overall success and "lift" across nba-history), and frankly without questionably justified priors, nearing 5-point lift on a decent team marks a player who easily sorts into the top-10. It actually was enough for Ralph Sampson to get 10th despite being on the 84 rockets and minimally shifting his raw "production" and Jordan didn't even need to have a winning-record to finish 6th. In-fact he would also win less in 1987 despite Hakeem's team coking up and his co-star(previously voted higher than Hakeem) missing half-season and end up finishing 2nd on the MVP ballot. Apply that theory of "you need to be worth much more on a worse team" and the votes here look even worse.

The rest is you not using stats properly imo but we've covered this before so we can table it.

[70sFan]

Hakeem’s number still don’t look all that good there, particularly as it is going to be more difficult to lift a team in raw terms the better they are.

Which is why I specifically have used terms like "is competitive with", "on the level of" than "better than". Hakeem sees more raw lift on worse teams(concentrated, ben's wowy, career wide, 10-year) placing them as peers. Hakeem does potentially gain separation in the playoffs. He also [b[potentially[/b] gains value from all the extra minutes he played. Regardless, he does look very good relative to how he was voted for MVP..

I don’t think that that places Hakeem as a “peer” or shows he was better than how he was voted for MVP. I think the general consensus in the basketball community is that a lift on a worse team is worth nowhere near as much as a similar lift on a better team. This is precisely why it is so rare for MVP to go to a player whose team didn’t win many games. So it’s not a matter of just trying to derive some measure of “lift” and saying that if the raw numbers are similar then the two players are competitive with each other. The lift would need to be *much* higher to be comparable on a lesser team. And I provided numbers earlier on Hakeem’s team in the relevant timeframe that was being talked about regarding MVP votes (i.e. the first 8 years of Hakeem’s career), and the numbers (+1.79 in games Hakeem played and -2.74 in games Hakeem didn’t play) are roughly equivalent to a lift from a 33-win team to a 45-win team. That’s simply not a lift that people generally think is particularly impressive or hugely valuable, unless perhaps it is accompanied by through-the-roof box-score stats that might suggest that WOWY is underrating the player’s influence. But Hakeem did not have through-the-roof box-score stats in those years, typically averaging in the bottom half of the top 10 in the league or just past that in the various common box-score composites.

I just don’t really see the argument for Hakeem having been truly incredible in those years or underrated by MVP voting. The amount his team improved in games he played was okay, but nothing special. The limited play-by-play RAPM data we have (i.e. Squared) is okay, but nothing special. And the box-score stats are pretty good but actually if anything less good than the MVP voting. The evidence just isn’t there in any way IMO. As far as I can tell, beyond talking about playoffs (more on that in a second), the arguments for Hakeem in this era in large part seem to hinge on comparing individual elements of Hakeem’s case to other great players whose weakness in their case is that specific element. So like, for instance, yeah, if you look at just WOWY, Hakeem in that era might have raw numbers that aren’t super far off Jordan’s (though they *are* probably super far off if we consider lift of a lesser team being easier), but that’s the weakest part of Jordan’s case. Obviously, Jordan’s box score stats, as well as his RAPM in the limited data we have, are far better than Hakeem’s. Meanwhile, I think the defense of Hakeem’s relatively lower box-score numbers is to say that box-score doesn’t measure impact, and a player can influence the game a lot with things that don’t end up in the box-score much, like defense. But Hakeem in that era doesn’t have indicators of higher impact in the impact data. So he’s not like a Garnett or Curry or Russell, where you might say that box-score stats are a bit of a relative weakness but it doesn’t catch a lot of their impact—or at least, unlike with those guys, there isn’t great impact data to point to for such an argument. If a guy doesn’t have a case in the impact data *or* in box-score stats for having been a really really top player, then he probably wasn’t one. And that’s especially true when his team simply wasn’t that good when he played (which is suggestive of there not being some huge impact that the available data is missing).

Now, the one point Hakeem does have in that era is that his box-score stats actually were good in the playoffs. But it’s also true that the playoff experience for Hakeem in that era was mostly just losing in the first round, and that there were multiple years where the Rockets lost to pretty mediocre teams that did not have anyone even close to as good as Hakeem. And a big part of his impressive box-score numbers was putting up huge numbers against those mediocre teams. The 1986 Finals run was impressive, and he also put in good stats in some other early-round losses, but I don’t think that that overall playoff resume in those years is *super* impressive, because there’s only so much impressiveness that can come from first-round playoff losses.

As I’ve said, I think a very good comparison for Hakeem in that era is Luka Doncic so far. A player who puts up good stats but not the best in the league, whose impact-metric data doesn’t look all that great even while he plays on a fairly middling team, who puts up big stats in the playoffs but usually loses early except one overachieving run where they beat a much better team, and who ultimately ends up placing in the latter half of the top 10 in MVP voting. And I do think that if we got 8 years into Luka’s career and he was still like this, it’d be fair to say that people would be very surprised to hear that he’d later be considered for top 5 all time.

I wonder, where would you rank Hakeem then? How does he compare to the rest of the top bigs left?

[lessthanjake]

How did you come with the conclusion that:

"it's meaningless to point to that when he's being compared to a blatantly inferior player"

I think it's not pointless at all. I think we need to compare players with comparable career values, even if one player didn't peak as high as the other. That's why Kobe Bryant and Karl Malone should be top 15 candidates easily.

When 2 players are comparable, then longevity matters. When players are not in the same tier, longevity is largely irrelevant. I would never rank Stockton over D.Rob for example. If you want an even more obvious example, imagine comparing Jamison or Shareef to Bill Walton or Penny based on longevity.

This is why people create CORP or VORP evaluations that take into account longevity and value of each season. This methodology can be used as a baseline to get the idea of what comparison is reasonable and what is not.

The results I have seen (along with the ones I provided) suggest that Kobe and Curry is a legit comparison, Stockton and Robinson is probably slightly less close and the ones you mentioned are pointless indeed. Now, if you have a different method of evaluating longevity or a different weighing procedure, I am all ears. If your analysis is only about gut feeling, then I am not interested in that.

Isn’t CORP basically not really a metric at all, and basically just layering subjective evaluations onto a philosophical heuristic? Like, in theory, CORP is actually a valid way to think about things that balances weighing peak/prime and longevity, so I do tend to think it’s a very helpful heuristic for thinking about things. But what that method spits out is going to just be dependent on pretty subjective valuations of how much a player increases the chances to win a championship. It’s not a precise metric, but rather just a way of thinking about things. For example, I could very easily come to a conclusion that Steph Curry has already added more by a CORP methodology than Kobe did—in fact, I do think that that’s the case. But, of course, you could use the same heuristic and come to the opposite conclusion.

[OhayoKD]

When 2 players are comparable, then longevity matters. When players are not in the same tier, longevity is largely irrelevant. I would never rank Stockton over D.Rob for example. If you want an even more obvious example, imagine comparing Jamison or Shareef to Bill Walton or Penny based on longevity.

This is why people create CORP or VORP evaluations that take into account longevity and value of each season. This methodology can be used as a baseline to get the idea of what comparison is reasonable and what is not.

The results I have seen (along with the ones I provided) suggest that Kobe and Curry is a legit comparison, Stockton and Robinson is probably slightly less close and the ones you mentioned are pointless indeed. Now, if you have a different method of evaluating longevity or a different weighing procedure, I am all ears. If your analysis is only about gut feeling, then I am not interested in that.

Isn’t CORP basically not really a metric at all, and basically just layering subjective evaluations onto a philosophical heuristic? Like, in theory, CORP is actually a valid way to think about things that balances weighing peak/prime and longevity, so I do tend to think it’s a very helpful heuristic for thinking about things. But what that method spits out is going to just be dependent on pretty subjective valuations of how much a player increases the chances to win a championship. It’s not a precise metric, but rather just a way of thinking about things. For example, I could very easily come to a conclusion that Steph Curry has already added more by a CORP methodology than Kobe did—in fact, I do think that that’s the case. But, of course, you could use the same heuristic and come to the opposite conclusion.

The inputs are. The formula(where the longetvity/peak weightings come from) theoretically should not be(srs-to championship studies were the basis though I am not well versed on the specifics).

[Doctor MJ]

Induction vote:

Russell - 12 (AEnigma, f4p, rk, ltj, Samurai, hcl, trelos, beast, eminence, ljspeelman, ShaqA, Doc)
Duncan - 7 (trex, OaD, Dr P, ceoofk, iggy, Dooley, Ambrose)

Russell wins.



Nomination vote:

Garnett - 5 (AEnigma, trelos, iggy, eminence, ljspeelman)
Magic - 8 (trex, f4p, rk, OaD, Samurai, beast, Doc, Ambrose)
Curry - 3 (ltj, Dr P, Dooley)
Kobe - 1 (ceoofk)
Mikan - 1 (ShaqA)

Magic wins.