it's late so maybe it won't count but this will be my voting post:
OldSchoolNoBull wrote:
OhayoKD wrote:
Would appreciate a link to what data from JE you're using.
I am aware of two sources with data that covers Duncan and Shaq's primes. Cheema's which(overall) favors Duncan by a rather large margin whether you use career-wide or 5-year sets, and JE's which favors Duncan by a smaller-margin per possession for their career(1997-2022) and by a much larger margin if you zero in on 2001-2014.
assuming we can agree that the "Overall" score is more important, shouldn't we be looking at what the offense and defense add up to?
I am getting the data from a spreadsheet file on my hard drive; unfortunately I cannot remember where I downloaded it from, and despite spending a while looking tonight, I cannot find it online. I am reasonably sure it's JE though - it is single-year prior-informed RS+PO RAPMs for every player 1996-2019.
If you really want it, I suppose I could upload the file somewhere.
Alright, so looking at this data, keeping in mind we are trying to assess the defense and the offense(not merely the distribution towards one end), this set you have has Duncan posting 3 of the 4 scores between him and shaq and the best overall(that bits not that important but still). JE's other data puts Duncan ahead for career and even more ahead over a narrower frame that captures "prime". Fixating on DRAPM here feels like you're missing the forest for the trees. Setting aside that APM o/d distribution can be wonky, the data from JE consistently favors Duncan just like the data from Cheema does regardless of time-frame.
I also don't really think you should be using ts add as a proxy for offensive impact as it only captures scoring. I would say Duncan and Shaq were closer as creators than they were as scorers which is another reason the offensive gap might be smaller than the defensive gap as the data you're using suggests it is. And the extended playoff-data from Cheema does not suggest this gap was bridged.
Shaq also does not have a robust track-record of leading decent playoff or rs defenses(lakers defense was actually better without him over an extended sample), which opens the possibility there's a misallocation of credit here. Will also point out that JE's data also strongly favors Garnett with Cheema's corraborating for the regular season and the playoffs.
One and Done has explained this pretty well, but, Duncan the playoff faller(and shaq the playoff riser) doesn't really hold up nearly as well when you adjust for basic context like... ...games missed
In 2002 for example the Lakers are better in the rs when shaq plays than the Spurs are so at this point we are basically punishing Duncan for playing every game while Shaq did not. In my mind playing every game for back to back seasons should boost our evaluation of a year. Perhaps Duncan would have been even better in the playoffs had he taken off games.
As I've noted, if we use the box-score to internally scale, Duncan sees significant across-board elevation while shaq does not. As has also been noted despite Shaq's regular season teams being underrated because of his health, Shaq is batting .500 with his teams rising or falling. If we use AUPM which combines box with impact(and i would guess should skew shaq):
Duncan's real-world signals are also very impressive in a way shaq's only really are if you look at 2000 and disregard the playoff drop-off. Duncan is obviously a much better leader, and while the "playing in different situations" point is interesting, Duncan has actually won multiple titles with completely different sets of teammates on teams that played very differently from each other. And when he isn't winning, he's competing, regardless of support or situation. With an impact portfolio that suggests perhaps he should have been voted a round or two earlier, a track-record of team success that is nigh unrivalled, excellent off-court intangibles, and the player profil/skillset we should expect for a guy being voted this high or higher, I'm going to vote
DUNCAN
In second I will vote
Hakeem
By impact, Hakeem has a fringe-top 10 rs profile paired with unrivalled playoff-elevation(maybe with the exception of our voted #1) which is pretty similar to what we have for a guy who was voted #3(worse playoff elevatioin, but more confidence in the rs due to data availability I suppose). Hakeem also is very similar to my #4 in terms of skill-set and "production", and also produced and impacted as he did in a terrible situation where his teammates started coking out by year two. I had him as the 5th greatest player ever so it seems natural that I should vote him at least 6th on this ballot.
I will, again, nominate
Garnett A top-tier impact profile, an incredibly versatile skillset, and honestly, for all the losing, when he had a chance in the playoffs he did really well in 2004(possibly better than the likes of shaq or bird have ever done), and then capitalized post-prime when he was finally given good support.
Will probably want to get into how I think single-year impact should be compared emperically later, but i'll save that for later posts.
WIll note I'm not really sure I see much of a case for Bird here beyond going gaga for his unreplicated rookie rs signal. On the front of team-success he is less accomplished than Steph, he is not clearly advantaged in terms of impact vs anyone left, he is has significant weaknesses in his game on both ends of the floor, and he has the profile of a guy I would expect to translate poorly across eras(can't really gain separation from defenders athletically, slow-footed yet not notably big or strong, was an era-best shooter on very low volume, not a great ball-handler, ect).
Frankly, I think KG and Steph have much stronger cases. We are harsh on the first two for their playoff hiccups, but I think much of what can be argued against them can also be argued against Bird:
Spoiler:
90sAllDecade wrote:Also if you value Colt's opinon, he also lists Birds many playoff failures.
Larry Bird's Long List of Playoff Failures
1980- Averaged a .511 TS% in the postseason. In game 5 vs. the Sixers, he shot poorly, 5-19 with just 12 points, as the Celtics lost the game. His man (Dr. J) averaged 25 PPG in this series. His team loses in 5 games despite having HCA and winning 61 games. Had a 18.3 PER in the postseason
1981- Has a .532 TS% in the postseason. He had a bad finals where he averaged just 15 PPG on .419 shooting and .460 TS%.
1982- PPG average dropped from 22.9 PPG to 17.8 PPG. He has an embarrassing .474 TS% in the playoffs. He averaged a pedestrian 18.3 PPG against the Sixers. Averages 17 PPG in the final 2 games of the series. The Celtics lose again with HCA. The Celtics won 63 games and had the #1 SRS in the league. Has a 17.9 PER in the postseason.
1983- The Celtics get swept by the Bucks. The Celtics win 56 games and had the #2 SRS in the league and lose again with HCA. Bird plays awful again. .478 TS%. His PPG average drops 2 PPG in the playoffs. Bird missed a game in the series but that game happened to be the closest one (Celtics lose by 4). In the 3 other games, the Celtics lose by 14.3 PPG with Bird on the court.
1984- Great playoffs. Averaged 27-14-4 in the Finals and had a .607 TS% in the playoffs. First great playoff of his career. Celtics win the title over the Lakers.
1985- Celtics make the finals, but Bird's numbers drop in the playoffs. His PPG drops by 2.8 PPG, Reb by 1.2 Reb, and AST by 0.7 AST. Had an average .536 TS% in the postseason. Bird plays even worse in the finals. His PPG dropped 4.9 PPG, his Reb 1.7 Reb, and AST by 1.6 AST in the finals compared to his regular season average. His Finals TS% is just .527. Not only that, but Celtics finish with 63 wins and lose once again with HCA a constant theme in Bird's career. This is the first time in Celtics history they lost in the finals with HCA.
1986- Great year. His best year ever. Wins the title. .615 TS% in the postseason and amazing finals.
1987- I think this is his most admirable playoffs up until the finals. The Celtics were quite banged up this year. Averaged 27-10-7 in the postseason with .577 TS%. Though his numbers in the finals dropped off once again. His PPG was 3.9 PPG down from the regular season, AST down by 2.1 AST and his TS% was just .534. In game 6, Bird scored just 16 points on 6-16 (.375) shooting. In the final 3 games of this series, Bird averaged just 20 PPG on .377 shooting and .492 TS% with 3.7 TOV. This is the first time Bird has played without HCA in the playoffs and his team loses.
1988- Bird's PPG drops by 5.4 PPG, Reb by 0.5 Reb. Bird shoots an awful 40-114 (.351) against the Pistons. Has a mediocre .538 TS% and 20.2 PER in the playoffs. The Celtics had HCA and the #1 SRS in the league and you probably guessed what happened next, Larry Bird loses with HCA once again.
1989- Injured doesn't play in the postseason.
1990- Bird shoots .539 TS% and has 3.6 TOV as the Celtics once again you guessed it, lose with HCA.
1991- In the first round, his team needs to go 5 vs. the 41 win Pacers. His PPG drop by 2.3 PPG and his Rebounds and Assists also drop quite a bit. Has a .490 TS% 15.8 PER in the playoffs. Against the Pistons Bird averages 13.4 PPG on .446 TS%. His 56 win team played with you guessed it HCA and loses with it.
1992- Doesn't play in the first round as the Celtics sweep the Pacers. In round 2, his team goes 7 against the Cavs, but Bird plays in 4 games and his team was 1-3 in those games. Averages a pathetic 11.3 PPG and 4.5 Reb which are 8.4 PPG and 5.2 Reb down from his regular season average. He has a .514 TS% and 16.4 PER in the postseason.
So out of 12 years, you get 9 years under .540 TS%, 5 under .520 TS%, and 3 under .500 TS%. From 80-83, he had a 19.9 playoff PER. In that span, Johnny Moore, Franklin Edwards, Gus Williams, and Bob Lanier all had better playoff PER and WS/48. Teammates Parish, McHale, Tiny Archibald, and Cedric Maxwell had better TS% in that span. From 88-92, he had a 18.8 PER which is 25th among players with 10 playoff games played. Players who had better playoff PER's in that span include Fat Lever, Terry Cummings, Roy Tarpley, Cedric Ceballos, and Sarunas Marciulionis. His teammates Reggie Lewis and Kevin McHale had better playoff PER's in that span.
With Bird you get a nice 4 year run that had 4 straight finals appearances but outside of that you get a 4 year span of .505 TS% (80-83) and a .525 TS% span (88-92). In 12 years, you get 7 losses with HCA. Basically out of Bird's 13 year career, you have 1 injury season and 3 non-descript postseasons at the end of his plus some playoff disappointments early in his career.
KG is likely to be nominated, but I would also say that Steph, for all my criticism of him, is a much stronger candidate. As is Mikan for the strict era-relativists. Potentially oscar too.
Not sure I understand what people are seeing for Bird here, but feel free to persuade me
its my last message in this thread, but I just admit, that all the people, casual and analytical minds, more or less have consencus who has the weight of a rubberized duck. And its not JaivLLLL
70sFan wrote:Not that I agree Kobe should be outside top 20 (I don't), but if Hakeem is comparable to you in what the majority are offensive metrics, then it's not a great case for you to be inside top 10. Hakeem's defensive advantage is gigantic.
I don’t really think that means much when
A. Kobe blows Hakeem out of the water offensively
B. Defensive metrics don’t underrate Hakeem
C. Defensive metrics do underrate Kobe
Think them being comparable in this as well WOWY and WOWYR type data (and even raw box data) is a good indicator that they’re at definitely comparable all time (I’d have Kobe over Hakeem but would accept a Hakeem > Kobe argument).
Those numbers you posted show Kobe 1-2 PPG better and 1-2 APG better on the same efficiency. How is that "blowing Hakeem out of the water"? Meanwhile, Hakeem's defense is more valuable than Kobe's offense and Kobe's defense is about as valuable as.... maybe Austin Reaves' offense if he's lucky? (Tried to think of a playoff riser since Kobe's gets pretty much all his defensive value in the playoffs when he actually has to try once in a while).
He's talking about in the offensive components of RAPTOR, and Backpicks BPM, I imagine.
I'm enjoying the substantial Wilt praise this thread with anecdotal evidence. I am not saying that it has completely changed my view on him, but its opened my mind a bit to being near the conversation of these #6-#10 picks.
Ignoring his offense for a moment, the thing that holds him up for me is his defense (like Russell).
His team was fairly consistently the next best defensive team as compared to Russell's Celtics (in 1967-1968, they were the number one defensive team).
I would like to talk about 1964-65 where he was traded mid-season from the Warriors to the 76ers. I calculated his team's DRTG for only games he played in. In doing so, I did discover an odd mark on Wilt.
In 1964-65, Wilt's teams with him on the floor had a DRTG of 94.1 which was not stellar and would have come in 5th out of 9 teams (basically where the 76ers end up in the standings). Without Wilt on the floor for both teams, they had a combined 91.8 DRTG, 2.3 points better than when Wilt was on the floor. The Warriors that traded him improved 1.1 points per 100 poss with him off the team. The 76ers tanks 4.2 points per 100 poss when he joined them.
I really don't know what to make of this, but its fairly interesting data.
OhayoKD wrote:Would appreciate a link to what data from JE you're using.
I am aware of two sources with data that covers Duncan and Shaq's primes. Cheema's which(overall) favors Duncan by a rather large margin whether you use career-wide or 5-year sets, and JE's which favors Duncan by a smaller-margin per possession for their career(1997-2022) and by a much larger margin if you zero in on 2001-2014.
assuming we can agree that the "Overall" score is more important, shouldn't we be looking at what the offense and defense add up to?
I am getting the data from a spreadsheet file on my hard drive; unfortunately I cannot remember where I downloaded it from, and despite spending a while looking tonight, I cannot find it online. I am reasonably sure it's JE though - it is single-year prior-informed RS+PO RAPMs for every player 1996-2019.
If you really want it, I suppose I could upload the file somewhere.
Alright, so looking at this data, keeping in mind we are trying to assess the defense and the offense(not merely the distribution towards one end), this set you have has Duncan posting 3 of the 4 scores between him and shaq and the best overall(that bits not that important but still). JE's other data puts Duncan ahead for career and even more ahead over a narrower frame that captures "prime". Fixating on DRAPM here feels like you're missing the forest for the trees. Setting aside that APM o/d distribution can be wonky, the data from JE consistently favors Duncan just like the data from Cheema does regardless of time-frame.
With that bit, I wasn't really comparing Shaq to Duncan as much as I was comparing later Shaq to his earlier self. My point with that was simply that by RAPM, he was still making an impact as late as 2007-08, and that most of that impact, according to that data, came on the defensive side. I was making that point because 70sFan had stated that Shaq ceased being impactful after 2005-06(and others have gone even earlier than that, like 2003-04). I was using this as an argument in favor of the idea that the strike on Shaq's "longevity" is overstated a bit.
I also don't really think you should be using ts add as a proxy for offensive impact as it only captures scoring. I would say Duncan and Shaq were closer as creators than they were as scorers which is another reason the offensive gap might be smaller than the defensive gap as the data you're using suggests it is. And the extended playoff-data from Cheema does not suggest this gap was bridged.
I don't think I ever once used the phrase "offensive impact" when looking at TS Add stuff. I specifically used phrases like "scoring impact" or "as a scorer", and I addressed the playmaking gap entirely separate from TS Add. I know what it measures and what it doesn't measure. Though I can see how some of my TS Add stuff being under the heading "Offensive Gap vs Defensive Gap"[/i] might've given you that idea. I use TS Add to measure a player's scoring impact(volume+efficiency+consistency) and nothing else.
Shaq also does not have a robust track-record of leading decent playoff or rs defenses(lakers defense was actually better without him over an extended sample), which opens the possibility there's a misallocation of credit here. Will also point out that JE's data also strongly favors Garnett with Cheema's corraborating for the regular season and the playoffs.
One and Done has explained this pretty well, but, Duncan the playoff faller(and shaq the playoff riser) doesn't really hold up nearly as well when you adjust for basic context like... ...games missed
In 2002 for example the Lakers are better in the rs when shaq plays than the Spurs are so at this point we are basically punishing Duncan for playing every game while Shaq did not. In my mind playing every game for back to back seasons should boost our evaluation of a year. Perhaps Duncan would have been even better in the playoffs had he taken off games.
Is the point here that Shaq had "rise" in the playoffs because his legs were fresher as a result of playing fewer games in the RS? Or is it that you think his numbers, or the Lakers' winning percentage/SRS, would've been worse if he'd played all 82 games? You can argue that, but I don't really find it to be very convincing. It seems like there's an assumption there that if Shaq plays more, either his or the team's(or both) numbers deflate. I don't agree with that.
As I've noted, if we use the box-score to internally scale, Duncan sees significant across-board elevation while shaq does not. As has also been noted despite Shaq's regular season teams being underrated because of his health, Shaq is batting .500 with his teams rising or falling. If we use AUPM which combines box with impact(and i would guess should skew shaq): [img]https://images-ext-2.discordapp.net/external/ZqG_wydO8ohKc70RV14gTFMtDg921RtLln-vQFVYoTU/https/thinkingbasketball.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Top-PS-AuPM-2.0-768x869.png?width=384&height=434 [/img]
I mean, that paragraph of text below Shaq's name in that image explains pretty nicely why/how you could argue for Shaq over Duncan despite those numbers.
Duncan's real-world signals are also very impressive in a way shaq's only really are if you look at 2000 and disregard the playoff drop-off. Duncan is obviously a much better leader, and while the "playing in different situations" point is interesting, Duncan has actually won multiple titles with completely different sets of teammates on teams that played very differently from each other. And when he isn't winning, he's competing, regardless of support or situation. With an impact portfolio that suggests perhaps he should have been voted a round or two earlier, a track-record of team success that is nigh unrivalled, excellent off-court intangibles, and the player profil/skillset we should expect for a guy being voted this high or higher, I'm going to vote
DUNCAN
Not for nothing, but weren't we explicitly told to only consider direct on-court production? You mention that Duncan is a "much better leader" and his "excellent off-court intangibles". Frankly, I too have mentioned those things when arguing Duncan over Garnett in an earlier thread, but I'm not sure we're supposed to be doing that.
OldSchoolNoBull wrote:Not for nothing, but weren't we explicitly told to only consider direct on-court production? You mention that Duncan is a "much better leader" and his "excellent off-court intangibles". Frankly, I too have mentioned those things when arguing Duncan over Garnett in an earlier thread, but I'm not sure we're supposed to be doing that.
I think you should ask whether you believe leadership and locker-room intangibles have no effect on how a team performs. Those traits are different from “global popularity” or “community reputation” or whatever.
MyUniBroDavis wrote:Some people are clearly far too overreliant on data without context and look at good all in one or impact numbers and get wowed by that rather than looking at how a roster is actually built around a player
Vote: Tim Duncan Alternate: Wilt Chamberlain Nominate: Larry Bird
In any discussion about total career-value, this feels like the absolute floor for Timmy. 19 seasons, 15 of them officially all-NBA (but 17 or 18 of them at an all-NBA level). He was one of the best players in the NBA every year but his last. By contrast, every other player here has a washed up chunk of their career that Duncan magically opted not to have. Wilt starts his career 2 years later than Duncan, declines very steadily once he goes to LA, and plays his last season at age 25.
While I never quite get to thinking Tim Duncan is the best defensive player ever (there are players with better physical gifts than him and players more dominant relative to era), I sometimes wonder if he is (Russell and Hakeem are the only ones I feel comfortable putting over him). I've probably never seen better footwork on defensive rotations, and I've never seen better defensive discipline. It's too hard to compare him to 60s bigs, but Tim did play in an era with multiple other all-time defensive great bigs (Ben, KG, Dwight, M.Gasol) and had plenty of crossover with others (Hakeem, Dikembe). I like Tim's total package best. He may not have been as quick as KG, but he was stronger, better in drop, and better at the vertical contest. He didn't cover vertical ground like Ben, but he was wayyyyy bigger. He's much more mobile than DK or Dwight ever were. His boring, steady, mistake free style meant he never captured the imaginations of DPOY voters, but Tim was a strong DPOY candidate every year of his career until his last. Looking at DPOY voting year-to-year, despite Tim almost always picking up votes, it's pretty silly how often his defensive value was ignored. His playstyle almost comically avoided flash so I get it but like...I'm looking at the voting some years and seeing guys like Mike Conley got more DPOY votes and wondering how it goes that far. He just had no defensive weaknesses. Even when he slowed down later in his career, he looked slower than he effectively was. There's not a whole lot of footage out there that shows Tim Duncan's speed ever opening weaknesses on defense. He was an economical mover. When you can economically move around a 6'11" long armed frame, that's a lot of defense.
Then flip over to offense and the story is similar. Doesn't have some of the high end tools or flashiness of other guys in this conversation (Wilt, Shaq, Hakeem), but also lacks any of their weaknesses (Wilt/Shaq's FT shooting, Hakeem's passing and efficiency). His post scoring was good enough pressure the defense, the passing was highly proactive. On defense, his elite decision making was more invisible (doing the expected right thing rarely seems like a decision), but on offense if you were rooting against Tim, he was just PUNISHING. The footwork and movement here again is just insane. Perfect screens, perfect timing on slips and rolls, perfect duck ins, timely cuts. When to shoot when to pass felt so automatic. Honestly, Jokic is the only other big man I've seen make better decisions, and that advantage might have more to do with the stronger passing vision, shooting touch, and scoring pressure through his better size/strength.
Wilt felt like the only other guy I could argue is a better combination of offense and defense, but Tim excels in all the little ways ways Wilt felt lacking. Then, as mentioned before, Tim just plays a bigger chunk of All-NBA level seasons.
"Being in my home. I was watching pokemon for 5 hours."
For anyone wondering I have the count at 13 Duncan, leading Wilt and Hakeem at 4 each. Given at least half the non-Duncan voters have him 2nd it's functionally over. Not sure if anyone wants to move to thread #6 slightly early?
I have Shaq and Magic up next, and they've barely been mentioned, so clearly I have some work to do. After that I guess Hakeem, Curry, KG, Bird, etc.
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
OldSchoolNoBull wrote:Not for nothing, but weren't we explicitly told to only consider direct on-court production? You mention that Duncan is a "much better leader" and his "excellent off-court intangibles". Frankly, I too have mentioned those things when arguing Duncan over Garnett in an earlier thread, but I'm not sure we're supposed to be doing that.
I think you should ask whether you believe leadership and locker-room intangibles have no effect on how a team performs. Those traits are different from “global popularity” or “community reputation” or whatever.
also the project-runner has explicitly mentioned it as a factor in his votes so
its my last message in this thread, but I just admit, that all the people, casual and analytical minds, more or less have consencus who has the weight of a rubberized duck. And its not JaivLLLL
OldSchoolNoBull wrote:Not for nothing, but weren't we explicitly told to only consider direct on-court production? You mention that Duncan is a "much better leader" and his "excellent off-court intangibles". Frankly, I too have mentioned those things when arguing Duncan over Garnett in an earlier thread, but I'm not sure we're supposed to be doing that.
Ah, understandable question, to be clear: Anything that affected competitive outcome is relevant here - and that can include off-court stuff.. What's not relevant is things like innovation-for-innovation's sake.
So for example, a hero of mine growing up was Tim Hardaway with his "UTEP 2-step" crossover. However significant that is to the evolution of the game, that's a question for a different set of criteria. Here Hardaway just benefits from how that innovation ended up benefitting him competitively.
Please let me know if you'd like anything else to be better clarified.
First, I'm going to spoiler my previous Nomination vote for Magic, I'm really just looking to riff a bit further so I think it makes sense to include it, but if you've already seen it, you don't have to again.
Spoiler:
Speaking of Magic, he'll be my first Nominee. To tell a bit of my journey here:
When I started on RealGM, I had Magic higher than the Olajuwons/Shaqs/Duncan/KGs. Then I started focusing on two things:
1. Longevity - where Magic's HIV diagnosis forever damaged what he could achieve.
2. Impact - Shaq, Duncan & KG had such high impact, and impact on both sides of the ball, that it was hard to imagine that Magic was enough better to make up for longevity issues.
Also, related to impact, was me consider how lucky Magic was to arrive on the Lakers. Incredible team success to be sure, but to be expect to a degree with that talent around you, right?
On the longevity front, I've walked it back a bit. While I'm still fine using extended longevity as a tiebreaker, I'm generally more focused in what a player can do in 5-10 years, because for the most part that's when a franchise can expect to build a contender with you. And of course, Magic had that. In Magic's 12 years before the HIV retirement, the Lakers had an amount of success that's just plain staggering for any career.
12 years. 12 years 50+ wins. 32 playoff series wins.
For the record, if my count is correct, LeBron himself only has 12 50+ win years (though he does have 41 playoff series victories).
So yeah, Magic packed in so much success into his career, that it's hard to take seriously longevity as that big of concern to me. Tiebreaker at most really.
Of course he had help and I don't want to just elevate the guy because he had more help...but being the star and leader of the team having the most dominant decade run since Russell is not something to be brushed aside lightly. I think we need to be very careful about assuming other guys have a comparable realistic ceiling.
Going back to LeBron, I'll say that watching him through his career has also helped me gain more confidence in Magic's ability to find ways to control the game around him no matter the context or how his body changed. I think Magic had an extremely strong intuition about how to win the arm-wrestling contest of basketball, finding little affordances to gain leverage over time, and I think it's offensive geniuses who in general have this capacity in the modern (and even somewhat-near-modern game).
Alright so I want to first vote the context within this project. This is the first time my prior vote for Nominee will immediately translate into my vote for Inductee, and it feels awkward, but I know it won't be the last time this happens.
Without further ado...
Bird and Magic, the Beautiful Rivalry
I can't help but think about Magic with the rivalry and comparison to Larry Bird in mind. Obviously we all know them to be an amazing rivalry that dominated a decade, and probably all of us are aware that it's with the two of them that the NBA regains its momentum, and this is a big deal for a lot of reasons but its bigness isn't that relevant to this particular project.
What's just amazing about this rivalry to me is that both players weren't just very, very good at basketball, but that both players feel so qualitatively distinct from the players that came before. Magic's the most obvious one here because while you can point to transition-offense legends and tall guards of the past, I'm sure no one looked at Magic and though "Hey, he should try to play a bit like Bob Cousy!".
I find Bird's uniqueness - at least such that I perceive it - to be the more profound. In Bird you have a player with off-the-charts level awareness and (while young) an incredibly high motor, and he begins positioned - literally and figuratively - where you'd expect for a guy with his size and touch given contemporary thought, and from there he just vibrates all around based on what his utterly-unique instincts told him to do.
Bird to me feels like something of a self-taught genius in the sense that he's so incredibly good at the things he applies his mind to do, and this is a weird thing to me because he's from Indiana, the land of high school basketball for more than half a century before then. You would hope that a player who came of age there with prodigious talent would come out of their pyramid highly optimized.
It's as if Bird's in-the-moment BBIQ was so overpowering that coaches really had no idea what they could do with it other than just let him keep doing his thing.
But while that led to a career that will places him very high on my list, there was a time where I actually had him higher than Magic, and times after that where I agonized between the two of them. At this point, I have to give Magic the nod by a good distance.
It wouldn't be so strange perhaps if I said this was because of Magic's longevity - though that in itself is debatable - but there's another thing on the forefront of my mind.
I think that fundamentally on offense, there's just a real cost to have an insane in-the-moment basketball intelligence not having the ball for any extended period of time. However valuable you are off-ball, you have less decision making power because the ball is the thing.
Magic's instinct to keep control of the ball and the offense in a way allowed him considerably more impact than Bird on offense, even though I think Bird's in-the-moment BBIQ was even higher than Magic's. It's possible Bird could have been even better than Magic at being Magic if that's what he were groomed to do. It's also possible that in an age with mature 3-point shooting Bird's gravitational value would significantly change the equation. But as things played out in our universe, to some degree it's like Bird brought a knife to a gun fight with Magic.
Now let me say: This isn't factoring in defense, where I'm considerably more impressed early on by Bird, nor is it me trying to say Magic reached the tippy top tear as quickly as Bird did, but just looking at ability for offensive impact, Magic's approach was the killer app.
Top 5 ALL 11 healthy years? Really?
This is a place where I completely understand if you think I'm too eager to give Magic such credit early on. He only makes Top 5 in the NBA MVP voting 9 times. Now, I'd note that it's still AMAZINGLY impressive that he proceeded to be in the Top 3 of the MVP race each of the 9 next seasons before his diagnosis - I don't believe any other player in NBA history can claim they have 9 in a row with the debatable caveat of Jordan depending whether you consider '93-94 & '94-95 as dealbreakers.
But yeah, I think he deserves an All-Season POY Top 5 nod in both '79-80 & '81-82 as well, and that's also what the consensus was during the RetroPOY project too. So while we can disagree, I feel pretty settled on him making my Top 5 for those seasons too.
And so yeah, that's all 11 of his healthy years, which puts him in very rare air.
You can bring up that he was in a fortuitous context, cool, and yeah it helped him win more, but lots of guys go into fortuitous contexts, and they don't bat a thousand at it like Magic did. Further, we should keep in mind that we wouldn't give Magic those nods simply for being on Kareem's team. Magic got the accolades he got because he was so good, he made Kareem into a sidekick.
Now, Kareem's already voted in and I wouldn't have it any other way. Obviously it's an older Kareem that we're talking about here...but while that's not fair apples-to-apples, it's worth pondering what it would have taken to do that to Jordan or LeBron at the same age. Even if you want to say Kareem was X% lower a summit to summit, it still speaks to how incredible Magic was.
Anyway, this gets back to the thing where I think Magic had more (or the same in Wilt's case) Top 5 level seasons than any of the other guy's remaining, and this makes it hard for me to knock him too hard for longevity.
What about Defense?
The question of whether guys like, say Hakeem/Duncan/KG, are overall better or more valuable than Magic is something I've chewed on a lot over the years. While Magic moved down my list below those guys in the past partially due to ideas of longevity, there was also that 2-way advantage in my head, as well as how great KG & Duncan's on/off looked.
I've come to the conclusion that in practice, the Lakers' ability to have a good-enough defense to win playoff series was quite robust. And while I've had questions about how well this could be achieved today in this era of spacing, not only is that technically irrelevant to the criteria I'm personally using at this time, I just witnessed arguably the closest thing to Magic play out in the 2023 playoffs with Jokic and the Nuggets, and it really seemed okay.
Magic looks great in the +/- stats we have, but the sample is very small. It's possible I'll see bad enough stuff in the future to lower my assessment of Magic, but I have to say that that unless it was something really dramatic, I don't know if I'd be swayed even if he looked a bit weaker than these other guys. As I've alluded to, Magic has such profound ability to apply control and add impact on offense, that I think it would make his teams a very hard out as a matter of course...kinda like LeBron.
A moment to mourn for what might have been
Not factoring into his placement here, but I think it's critical to just appreciate how this project would look if not for the HIV diagnosis, or a better understanding of HIV at the time. Magic at age 31 was showing no signs of slowing down. We know that incredible floor generals can thrive into a late age - demonstrated most crazily by what we might call the age-inverse of Magic in Steve Nash who only began his MVP-candidacy at age 30 - and we know that Magic 2.0, aka LeBron, has stayed amazing for an incredibly long time (not identical players, but more in common than most superstars to be sure).
It's quite plausible that Magic could have kept up his game without much fall off for another half decade, and that if he did, I wouldn't be talking about how no one's ever had more Top 5 seasons than Russell, because Magic could've been rocking 15 by then.
It's quite possible, in other words, that in another basketball universe, I'd have Magic as my GOAT.
Vote 2: Tim Duncan (reposted from last time because it's still the same candidates)
Spoiler:
Alright, we've got Wilt, Shaq, Hakeem & Duncan. All have arguments against each other.
I'm going to start with Duncan vs Hakeem, which might be the one that bothers me the most depending on my criteria. Like Garnett, I'm more impressed by what Hakeem brought to the table than Duncan - not by a lot, but forced to choose peak vs peak, I'll take Hakeem.
But, while you can make a case for Hakeem having accomplished more than Duncan, the reality is that Duncan had a very long career leading to incredible cumulative team success, and while we don't have detailed +/- data from much of Hakeem's career, what we do have honestly seems to give Duncan the edge. Definitely a case that Duncan was just plain better there, but regardless and more relevant: I'm not prepared to make a case for Hakeem's career over Duncan's all things considred.
Duncan vs Shaq. As I've alluded to, this is a place where I'm quite comfortable letting longevity decide the matchup. I hold it against Shaq that he had a tendency toward inconsistent play, drama queening, and blowing up teams. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that if you had a chance to draft either Shaq or Duncan, you'd be wise to pick Duncan.
Duncan vs Wilt. I hold similar things against Wilt and this is why I've had Duncan ahead of both Shaq & Wilt for a good while.
I will say, having gone through again recently year-by-year, while it actually hurt Shaq, it helped Wilt. So while I know I'm going to rank Shaq at the bottom of this foursome, Wilt could end up above or below the Duncan/Hakeem duo. To try to put some shape to the dilemma:
If I'm going simply based on my POY shares, Wilt has the edge on the back of him finishing 2nd more times than anyone else. One might say that Wilt has a harder degree-of-difficulty due to the presence of Russell, or easier based on the fact that there just wasn't that much competition back then...but to get 2nd, it generally meant topping Oscar & West who were incredible players. I'll keep chewing on what I see on this, but just taking on face value, the question then becomes:
Does Duncan's non-Top 5 year achievement allow him to top Wilt? Well, this is where that whole "Could I imagine Wilt leading a franchise the way Duncan did?". Maybe today it'd be different, but back then? I don't think so. I don't think that really made sense given his goals.
Now, one might ask: Was what Wilt did changing teams all that different from LeBron-style Player Empowerment? If it isn't, in which case one might ask whether Duncan should be ahead of LeBron if it matters enough to surpass Wilt.
Two big things:
1. LeBron was always first and foremost on a GOAT NBA career in a way that Wilt was not. I would understand someone looking at that as just an era thing to be normalized away, but mentality-wise, it is different.
2. I'm afraid there's a big POY share gap for me when I just tally things up between LeBron & Wilt. In a nutshell, if I separate players into tiers base on places where there's a major gap in the tally, it would look like this:
Tier 1: Bill Russell Tier 2: LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, George Mikan, Magic Johnson Tier 3: Wilt Chamberlain...and everyone else.
Mikan aside, who is going to get hurt significantly by the degree-of-difficulty, hard for me to put others ahead of the other 5...and while Wilt stacks up well, he's still in that tier down where things get all bunched up.
Nominate: Steph Curry
So, along with Magic, Curry is benefitting from my perspective shaped by how many Top 5 years he has achieved. For different reasons, Curry also is seeing as having weak longevity. Unlike Magic there's an aspect of this that's just utterly mundane:
In my experience with Career GOAT lists, our sense of a player's longevity tends to lag behind what it actually is while he is in prime. It's as if we don't actually look to quantify a player's longevity until it's basically over and done with.
I firmly believe this is something that has been hurting Curry in people's eyes at least in prior projects, and I'd advise folks to ruminate on whether it might be hurting him here.
As I've pointed out, in my estimation he's actually had a pretty long career as star player. Not enough that he should kill other candidates in play right now based on longevity, but enough that I don't think anyone should get an automatic longevity-win over Curry until they've really thought about it remembering it's 2023 now.
I chose an image for Curry emphasizing his shot, which is obviously his big weapon. He's the greatest shooter in basketball history, bar none, easy to see how that's helped him have a legendary career.
The most interesting thing to me about Curry's shot sequence is the fact that it's so clearly NOT about about having a form that helps him be the most accurate 3-point shooter in a vacuum. It's a form crafted to allow him to get his shot off so quickly that it's hard to block, even though Curry is a small guard by modern NBA standards. This isn't the first time a new standard has emerged that's about preventing blocked shots even if it means sacrificing accuracy - that's what the jump shot is after all, and that's what all manners of floaters are.
But the fact that I don't believe ever had a shooter be this impactful before in all the decades of basketball, and he's doing it with such a non-vacuum-optimal approach that adds to the degree of difficulty is breathtaking, as is the fact we are now more than a decade point the point where Curry became the clear-cut best shooter in history...and we haven't seen anyone from new draft classes to this point who seems like he's going to be even close. That could change in a hurry, but is hasn't yet, and to be honest, I'm surprised.
Just a bit of context here: I tend to mark the evolution of the game from a horrifically small sample size playing once or twice a year against teams at my high school. Feel free to chuckle at my expense here, but what I can't help but notice as a 6'9" man:
I used to block their shots like crazy and the games were close. Now I basically don't block shots and the teams kill us, and it's not because I'm older and even more out-of-shape (ahem, though both things are true). It's because they aren't even trying to attack the interior except in transition or rebounding situations where the defense (eh, me) isn't set. And they haven't changed this out of strategy to beat me...that's just how they play now. If you give them room to shoot a 3, they'll take it, and they all seem to have proficient form modeled after Curry. They just plain torch us every time, boys or girls. They all shoot from range with a proficiency that us old guys just don't have.
I'll note that I don't teach at a school where students come for hopes of athletic scholarship. Rationally I know these kids aren't great within their own generations standards...yet they are considerably more effective than they were 5-10 years ago because of the way they shoot 3's. And this is why I think Curry is going to go down as one of the most influential players in NBA history.
But again, his influence is irrelevant here and it's not why I'm nominating him. I'm nominating him because that shooting - along with his roving off-ball play and the rest of his game to whatever amount its added to his success - has led him to achieve so, so much as the fulcrum of everything the great dynastic run of this era has implemented.
Okay, only other thing I really feel a need to touch upon here is my man KG:
Breaks my heart having him sink on my list if I'm honest. I desperately want others to be as in awe of what he was capable of as I am, and in another universe, he'd be higher on my list. To some degree I suppose, it's the fact that I'm irritated with what happened in my own universe that I feel such a need to champion a guy like KG.
I realized though as I was going through that last pass year-by-year and considering something like where he belonged in my DPOY ballot that I'd been tying myself in some logical knots putting him above a guy like Duncan. While I can intellectually justify why KG's team defenses weren't stronger based on things that were unfair to him about his context (teammates, scheme, etc), the reality is that in doing so I was effectively projecting what I "knew" about KG back into those earlier years when I did that rather than judging his achievement based on what actually happened - and that gets me back to the question I kept circling back to:
Do I want to do this project by imagining how things would go if...?, or, Do I want to talk about what guys actually did?
Based on the latter, KG just spent a good chunk of his career in a place where he didn't have the opportunity to define an epoch the way that Curry has. Not his fault - you might call that a minor basketball tragedy, but that's life. I can't normalize for opportunity and still talk about what actually happened, so I chose the latter.
Although I don't see him coming up for a couple of spots for me, I get his placement this high and I respect it. His offensive package has a peak of top ever era-adjusted. I don't necessarily have him that high, but there is definitely an argument. Him being a mismatch for basically every team and also being as skillful as he was is almost completely unfair. He also benefited extremely from the illegal defense rules in that regard.
His longevity is almost underrated due to his HIV diagnosis. As you said, he was a legit top 5ish force for 11 seasons.
Doctor MJ wrote:What about Defense?
The question of whether guys like, say Hakeem/Duncan/KG, are overall better or more valuable than Magic is something I've chewed on a lot over the years. While Magic moved down my list below those guys in the past partially due to ideas of longevity, there was also that 2-way advantage in my head, as well as how great KG & Duncan's on/off looked.
I've come to the conclusion that in practice, the Lakers' ability to have a good-enough defense to win playoff series was quite robust. And while I've had questions about how well this could be achieved today in this era of spacing, not only is that technically irrelevant to the criteria I'm personally using at this time, I just witnessed arguably the closest thing to Magic play out in the 2023 playoffs with Jokic and the Nuggets, and it really seemed okay.
This is the only knock I have on him and its quite a large one for me.
As the illegal defense rules helped him on offense, I'd say it hurt him on defense. Luckily due to his size, they had the opportunity to play him on multitudes of players to hide him there. I do not like his one-on-one game (which gets enhanced due to illegal defense) and while harder, I don't think was a great rim defender for his size.
ijspeelman wrote:I'm enjoying the substantial Wilt praise this thread with anecdotal evidence. I am not saying that it has completely changed my view on him, but its opened my mind a bit to being near the conversation of these #6-#10 picks.
Ignoring his offense for a moment, the thing that holds him up for me is his defense (like Russell).
His team was fairly consistently the next best defensive team as compared to Russell's Celtics (in 1967-1968, they were the number one defensive team).
I would like to talk about 1964-65 where he was traded mid-season from the Warriors to the 76ers. I calculated his team's DRTG for only games he played in. In doing so, I did discover an odd mark on Wilt.
In 1964-65, Wilt's teams with him on the floor had a DRTG of 94.1 which was not stellar and would have come in 5th out of 9 teams (basically where the 76ers end up in the standings). Without Wilt on the floor for both teams, they had a combined 91.8 DRTG, 2.3 points better than when Wilt was on the floor. The Warriors that traded him improved 1.1 points per 100 poss with him off the team. The 76ers tanks 4.2 points per 100 poss when he joined them.
I really don't know what to make of this, but its fairly interesting data.
This is certainly an interesting blip in Wilt's career as he regularly anchored top defenses. I believe this is linked to both Wilt's health issues over the course of the season and specific injuries within the 76ers team after Wilt joined.
Before training camp, a doctor ran an electrocardiogram that indicated Wilt had a heart problem that was causing him stomach pains. Doctors ran tests and speculated if Wilt could have had a heart attack.
However, Wilt didn't agree with this diagnosis because he had experienced stomach pains since high school and was told it was from a lack of calcium. Stan Lorber, a gastroenterologist and Wilt's doctor from Philadelphia, concluded Wilt was suffering from pancreatitis. This was based on everything Wilt had told him and the fact that Wilt always had an irregular EKG. The hospital where Wilt was being treated consulted one of California's top cardiologists, who advised Wilt to not even consider playing basketball for a year:
"He said I shouldn't even think about basketball for a year, 'Then,' he said, 'after all that rest, come and see me, and we'll talk about it again.' But he made it pretty clear that he didn't think I'd ever play basketball again." -- Wilt: Just Like Any Other 7-Foot Black Millionaire Who Lives Next Door by Wilt Chamberlain and David Shaw
The Warriors team doctor evaluated him and also believed Wilt had a heart condition. Later, on his plane ride to meet Dr. Lorber in Philadelphia, he had an "attack" causing him great pain. Wilt figured pancreatitis was more logical than cardiac trouble and he accepted the diagnosis that Lorber concluded. Years later he would die of congestive heart failure while he was being treated by his doctor for a cardiac condition.
Wilt is declared available after a six-week hospital stay--missing training camp, pre-season, and the first five games of the season. The Warriors are losing. Wilt had lost 35 pounds but Warriors owner Franklin Mieuli ordered Hannum to get Wilt back into the lineup. That Warriors team suffered injuries throughout the year and could never get into a groove.
After the trade, the 76ers actually start out 9-2 but Greer, Jackson, and Costello get injured and then Wilt has further health issues:
"In one game at the end of the season, Chamberlain's pain became so unbearable that he had to stop playing." -- The Rivalry: Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, and the Golden Age of Basketball by John Taylor
The 76ers started out strong but eventually began to slide as the injuries built up.
After Wilt was traded, the Warriors had Nate Thurmond, who I believe to be one of the greatest defensive centers ever, replacing him. So, it makes sense that they appear to be better defensively with a healthy Nate Thurmond, as opposed to Wilt, who was dealing with health issues.
The fact he was even playing through these issues is astounding, as it was painful and certainly possible he was experiencing heart problems. His career has moments of him either playing through injury or returning faster than he should. In the 1969-70 season, Wilt ruptured his right patellar tendon (in the same knee he had injured in the '69 Finals) and came back in just 4 months after the orthopedic surgeons claimed he might never play basketball again. Dr. Robert Kerlan said the injury was "Severe, one of the worst I ever saw" and Jerry West called his return "one of the most remarkable recoveries from an injury ever in the history of the game" in Goliath.
What is even more impressive to me here is that in the famous 1965 series against the Celtics, where they had a -9.4 relative defensive rating, Wilt had one of his greatest performances. He averaged 30 points, 31 rebounds, and 3 assists per game on a 55% FG%. Unfortunately, Larry Costello was playing injured and averaged only 5.5 points per game as the 76ers barely lost in Game 7.
f4p wrote:Well it's still 14th out of 18. That's still much nearer the bottom than the top. Curry to Kareem is also a sizable jump in win percentage.
Yeah, he's also 2nd in the same list in terms of volume of such series played. Curry is "better" by winning 12 series less and losing 5 series less.
To be honest, I don't find this argument persuasive at all, but it's possible I miss something.
i guess i don't see why playing in more would make him more likely to lose a higher percentage. there's a decent chunk of guys above 90% or in that 16-2/18-2 range at 87.5% or above. duncan is slightly below 80%. so he's twice as likely to lose such a series as some of these guys and about twice as likely as another bunch of them.
And when I go back and watch games (do you have a source better than youtube because the selection is limited?),
Yes, I do, but I don't have the access for them right now (I am out of my country). I will share them for you next week.
the pattern always seems to be what I remember. Duncan eats early, then Shaq gets put on him in the 4th, then we don't hear from Duncan (and I wanted the Lakers to lose).
Again, I already posted the video but I will post it again:
Game 5 I had Duncan at something like 2/9 in the 2nd half when Shaq was his primary defender (you seemingly have different numbers).
I have him 3/11 in the 2nd half when Shaq was his primary defender, not a big difference.
The thing is that game 5 performance isn't representative at all and I think you got his conclusion only from this game.
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it's possible. again, i can't watch every game over again. but i did watch them live. and it's possible that wanting the spurs to win (well, wanting the lakers to lose) made me remember the duncan failures more than the positives. and the one game i could find on youtube a few months ago (game 5) fit the pattern to a tee.
I just watched Game 4 for Duncan/Robinson guarding Shaq so I didn't track Shaq guarding Duncan, but Shaq blocked him I believe 3 times straight up because Duncan kept trying to turn right and shoot with his right and was practically just throwing it into Shaq's arm.
Could you show me these plays?
hmm, maybe i'm smushing game 5 into 4. but i did find one clear example at 6:00 in this video.
also, that game 4 is also devastating for the spurs in terms of 4th quarter letdowns in that series. they have a 84-74 lead with 6:15 left and proceed to score 1 point the entire rest of the way while losing by 2.
You say you don't have Shaq guarding him much but do you have a breakdown by quarter? Because I certainly don't think Shaq did much in the 1st half or early 3rd.
Just from my video I made, Duncan's FG/FGA when he was guarded by Shaq (so excluding help defense):
G1:
0/0 in 1st 4/4 in 2nd 1/2 in 3rd 1/3 in 4th
G2:
0/0 in 1st 0/0 in 2nd 1/1 in 3rd 0/0 in 4th
G3:
0/0 in 1st 0/1 in 2nd 1/3 in 3rd 1/2 in 4th
G4:
0/0 in 1st 0/1 in 2nd 0/0 in 3rd 0/1 in 4th
G5:
1/1 in 1st 0/1 in 2nd 1/5 in 3rd 2/6 in 4th
Again, this is a clear picture of what I've been saying in a long time - game 5 isn't a good representation of what happened throughout the series. I understand that Shaq finishing strong in game 5 may create a narrative, but we should focus on more than just narratives in this project.
okay, but duncan ends up 6 for his last 21 against shaq in games 3/4/5. 2/8 even without game 5.
And I think it's why the narrative from those years was that Shaq was better than Duncan. Because Duncan didn't seem to take it to Shaq directly. And while Duncan might have played very well in 2002, getting just straight up annihilated in 2001 stuck in people's minds (and should have) and 2004 was a straight up poor series from Duncan.
Well, Shaq didn't do any better than Duncan in 2002 series and he got completely outplayed in the next year. Not to mention 1999...
the world does probably forget about 1999 too easily. fair if we're looking at kobe, but not fair since shaq was smack dab in his prime.
They have very similar stats (at least by box score) over their playoff careers. I'm voting Duncan 6th. He obviously has performed well. But my central thesis is that Hakeem didn't just perform well, but seemingly always performed well in his biggest moments, the ones where a championship might at least be reasonable (even if still quite unlikely), and these were moments where success was not a foregone conclusion, either because his team was an underdog or his counterpart on the other team was often viewed as an equal or even a superior until Hakeem ended that conversation decisively.
While the consistency of Hakeem's performance under those circumstances was indeed fantastic and worth mentioning, we're still comparing someone who had a brief window of championship possiblity at his best vs someone who competed for titles for the majority of his career. I think comparing the quantity of "good and bad" series between them is pointless with such a different environment they played in.
ok, but then what do we do? it sounds like we just have to cede the competition to duncan because he had better coaching and teammates. like, what's the story of hakeem's career that gets him above duncan? i could see if we just had 1994 and then said "well, 1995 was just too tough", but hakeem took a super low chance in 1994 and converted it, then took a seemingly impossible chance in 1995 and converted it. all on the back of him smacking around top 30 players left and right, series after series. in very close series where the pressure never let up. also, it was something he had proven he could do back to 9 years earlier.
by championship odds, duncan had 14 seasons higher than hakeem's best chance. even if i do a back of the envelope look at vegas, 1994 hakeem has about a 17.4% chance if i just multiply all the series odds. duncan has 10 chances better than that (by championship odds, not vegas). if we can't compare how often they converted, then duncan just wins by default at that point, unless he somehow had only managed to win 2.
My list wasn't just 4 series where Hakeem played well, but all came from the conference finals or later, and all with all-time players on the other side (i.e. not his matchup with Joe Kleine). Hakeem did not get 9 or 10 conference finals or 5 or 6 finals to have great moments, with a few chances to slip up here or there and still win some championships. He got 4 conference finals and 3 finals. From my list, in 4 of those he massively outplayed a great, 3 of whom of were centers. And it's not like the other 3 were bad. He was easily the best player in the 1994 WCF and outplayed Shaq at least a little in the 1995 Finals. Only in the 1986 Finals, where he got bested by peak Larry Bird while still putting up 25/12/3 could you say he wasn't the best player. And the Rockets still took 2 games off a Celtics team that had just monkey-hammered a +8.7 Milwaukee team by sweeping them with an MOV of 15 ppg.
That's 7 Series featuring: 4 Top 10 Players (Magic, Kareem, Shaq, Bird) 3 Top 20 Players (Malone, Robinson, Malone) 3 Top 30 Players (Stockton, Ewing, Stockton)
Each series had at least 1 of those players and 3 had 2. 9 of those guys were in prime seasons, probably half at peak (or very near) seasons, and Kareem was good enough that he was 1st team All-NBA.
And he outplayed 9 of 10 players and won 5 of the 7 series while usually being a significant SRS underdog (except 1994 Utah).
What 2nd Malone are you talking about?
i'm listing the guys non-uniquely in the order of the series they played (1994 malone, 1995 robinson, 1997 malone).
Out of these 10 seasons, I counted 14 such series. We can count out Garnett series because Minny were overwhelmed by Spurs talent, so 12 such series. In these 12 series, Duncan outplayed Shaq (top 10 all-time) 3 times (1999, 2002, 2003), LeBron (top 10 all-time) once (2007), Kobe at least two times (1999, 2003, likely 2003 as well), Malone 2 times (though we shouldn't really count 2004), Dirk all 3 times (with 2006 being arguable) and Nash 2 times. Again, weaker series happened more often but he has way more such series.
well, some of these aren't conference finals or later (actually, 10 out of 14 aren't now that i count it, though some were i guess de facto at that level), and i don't see 1999 kobe or 2007 james even remotely near their peak levels (or 2004 malone obviously). and he outplayed james in the sense that lebron set the bar quite low and duncan walked over it while parker got one of those "we know he's not actually the best player, but the other guy struggled, so here you go" finals mvp's. this probably ties in somewhat to the fact that duncan only faced 6 teams that were +6 during this period.
I think the narrative from the 1994 Finals was that Hakeem and Ewing were both solo stars and Hakeem outplayed Ewing so he won. But I would say the Knicks had the better supporting cast. They were actually a 60 win team by SRS compared to Houston at 53 wins. Only luck/randomness (clutchness?) got the Rockets homecourt in the first place at 58 wins to 57 wins. This is a series where the Knicks actually outscored the Rockest by 0.7 points per game. Where every game was decided by single digits. Hakeem can't have a 2005 Finals where he just can't score against a great frontline and all-time defense. He can't even just outplay Ewing. He has to destroy him to just eke out a game 6 and game 7 victory. And he does.
I won't try to take away anything from Hakeem's performance, but I don't think it's that clear the Knicks were more talented. I think Riley did a tremendous job at slowing down Rockets offense and despite his horrible shooting, Ewing did a tremendous job defensively as well.
well, the knicks were +2.3 SRS favorite and i've never heard anyone put forth a case that 1994 ewing was better than 1994 hakeem. and if riley did a great job, it only further put the pressure on hakeem. in that series you have:
FG% Hakeem = 50.0% Rest of Rockets = 39.7% Ewing = 36.3% Rest of Knicks = 42.4%
3P% Rockets ex-Hakeem = 30% (36 made 3's, 36-120) Knicks ex-Ewing = 35% (35 made 3's, 35-100)
So the vaunted Rockets 3 point advantage was actually a knicks advantage in this series. Hell, even on ft's Hakeem was at 86% and the rest of the Rockets were at 71.6%.
I think the narrative from the 1995 WCF was Hakeem destroyed Robinson and the Rockets cruised to the Finals and beat the Magic. But the Rockets didn't cruise. They outscored the Spurs by less than 2 ppg. They didn't win while Hakeem destroyed Robinson. They only won because he did. Game 1 is a 1 point game where Robinson shoots 5-17. Game 6 is a 5 point game where Hakeem puts up 39/17 while Robinson shoots 6 for 17. Hakeem can't just outplay Robinson if he wants to advance, he needs one of the greatest playoff series of all time. And he delivers it on cue.
Well, I think you fixiate too much on the averages in this case. Spurs were that close in average score only because they won game 4 by 22 points. Without this blowout, the Rockets won comfortably all but first game.
and the rockets won game 5 by 21. both teams had a 21/22 point win and a 5 point win. the other games were 1 point and 10 points. that seems close. game 6 was a one point game going into the 4th quarter, despite hakeem's dominance over robinson. to be fair to robinson, hakeem was literally throwing in circus shots. there was no hope for anyone.
There's no 2004 series loss vs the Lakers where victory just required a typical Tim Duncan series, not some all-time great series.
I'd say the Rockets could do a lot of damage in the playoffs in 1996 had Hakeem played up to his standards against the Sonics. That's a comparable situation and no, Duncan didn't have a better team around him than the Lakers.
comparable? is the standard that hakeem has to perform miracles until the end of time? yes, he didn't play well, but this was a 64 win, +7.4 Sonics team against a 48 win, +1.6 Rockets team that had just won 6 straight series as an underdog. the series ended in a sweep. for hakeem to turn that around would require an unbelievable level of play, not just a normal series. and the reward would be another +6 opponent in utah (-4.6 underdog) before getting mauled by the bulls. and the sonics actually bested their -5.9 rDRtg against the rockets against both their 1st round opponent sacramento (-9.3) and their WCF opponent Utah (-8.4), before posting a healthy -3.3 vs the bulls and giving jordan his worst finals ever. they were very good, the rockets were mediocre.
also, the series featured hakeem at the age of 33, with various people having told me that duncan should really only be looked at until age 30 (or 31) in 2007. there's a reason the only older duncan series i picked was literally losing to an 8th seed and not something like the 2012 WCF.
as for 2004, i won't pimp for the spurs having the worlds greatest roster, but even vegas had the spurs as slight favorites going into the series. and they won the first 2 games. and duncan was 27. and he was really bad overall in the final 4 games, not just one game. the reason the spurs were favorites is the lakers outside of the big 4 played the following rotation. devean george starting and derek fisher as 6th man, and almost every single other minute in the series went to slava medvedenko and kareem rush. yikes.
slava and kareem played as you might expect, posting 1.5 and 1.1 game scores for the series and 48.2 TS% and 43.6 TS%. except malone and payton combined shot even worse at 48.3 TS% and 41.2 TS%, with payton especially sucking all playoffs long.
I bring up expected titles, because Duncan's 5 titles against 4 expected basically just make him look like a guy who got 19 chances to play with good teammates and great coaching and converted them about like you would expect. Overperform some times, underperform some times. It all averages out so you'll still get your 5 titles. Lose as a #1 SRS? Well, just come back next year and be #1 SRS again. Have a bad 2004 series, it's not the end of the world. Your team will still be great in 2005 and Ginobili will go crazy in the playoffs. Lose a heartbreaker in 2006, there's always 2007. Have a down 4 years, don't worry the front office will reload.
Ok, but these numbers don't give you any idea about how each player played or what's the circumstances of these losses. That's why I don't see this as a very valuable approach.
well, i tried to list series that played a very large part in shaping those results. that's what the 4 series for hakeem and 4 series for duncan were. not just good series and bad series. but the ones that shaped the "actual vs expected" dynamic. the reason hakeem got to 1 titles instead of 0 was that, in the highest championship leverage situation to that point in his career, he massively outplayed patrick ewing to a degree that almost no one expected to win a super close series. the following year, in his next biggest moment, in a series vegas had as a -330 series for the spurs even after seeing the rockets beat the suns, hakeem had to go nuclear and have the greatest series of his career in a close series if he wanted to get from 1 title to 2 (and that's not even counting the fact he still had final boss shaq left). losing a 2-0 series lead as a betting favorite while you play poorly, that's how what could maybe be 6 is instead 5. harsh? perhaps, but hakeem "hey, why don't you play 10,000 career minutes with buck johnson" olajuwon is unmoved.
Hakeem's numbers won't change because that's when all those series are from.
Duncan didn't play a ton in that time frame and goes to 3-3 (including 2006 Dallas).
So 6-6 vs 3-3.
Thank you, so Duncan's numbers got noticeably worse when he went past his prime. That could suggest that the Spurs needed him more than some may want to admit.
no one said he wasn't needed. but a) hakeem still wins just as much and in a larger amount of series so it's not like he just fluked his way to a 1-1 record and i'm saying it's the same as 3-3 and b) duncan's strongest case over hakeem (or even shaq) can't be all that high level play he had from 2011-16 but then also it doesn't count if anything bad happened in those years.
Maybe that's not what you were doing, but I always get a little squeamish when longevity guys start not getting later career things counted like Kareem getting outplayed by Moses in 1981 and 1983 or Hakeem in 1986.
I count everything, but I also try to contextualize it.
Kareem wasn't past his prime in 1981 (he was later) and he wasn't outplayed by Moses in that year, but that's another discussion.
No. Is there a way to get that? Robinson had a good split between off and on minutes (35 to 13 per game) and also was +20 on and -15 off, so this wasn't just a +3 on, -32 off situation due to an ill-timed 12-0 run by the other team.
I don't know where to get such numbers from 1999. Consider this though (numbers from basketball-reference):
Duncan and Robinson: 531 minutes, +19.3 ON Robinson: 598 minutes, +20.3 ON, -14.8 OFF Duncan: 728 minutes, +10.4 ON, +14.0 OFF
Robinson played total of 67 minutes without Duncan in the playoffs, which gives us less than 4 minutes per game. In comparison, Duncan played almost 200 minutes without Robinson, which gives us 11.6 mpg to be precise. Duncan basically played full quarter without Robinson, while Robinson played almost all minutes next to Duncan.
Sure, they were obviously good. But also good without duncan. I'm pretty sure the adjusted stuff still shows Duncan as good, but it's still quite an odd thing for someone to be a straight up on/off negative guy as the leader of a title team. Only 7 of the 49 guys I looked at were negative, and other than 2001 Shaq, you have Duncan a whopping 3 times and the other 3 were all secondary players (1998 Pippen, 2006 Shaq, 2013 Wade) and almost all of those guys are viewed as struggling in those playoffs. when your case is built on being invaluable, winning 3 championships where your team was doing even better without you on the floor should at least be something to discuss.
The case of 2001 Shaq should already tell you something about such a criteria.
well, i'm not the biggest fan of plus/minus numbers, as i think they produce more wonky results than i'm comfortable with and can produce a > b > c > a situations, but much like longevity, duncan's impact is often used to show how he's better than everybody not on Mount Rushmore. if i have to remove underperformance from after 2007, and i can't look at his plus/minus numbers because they must not really mean anything, then i'm not seeing where all his incremental value is coming from over hakeem. and if i can't point to team under/overperformance in the playoffs or look at the specific situations where that under/overperformance was generated by good/poor series by hakeem/duncan, then i don't see what someone like hakeem can do to surpass duncan. duncan just wins because his team won too much and the spurs were too good for too long.
As for 2014 Duncan - yeah, he wasn't "invaluable" in a way that you couldn't replace him with anyone else in the league. This title was definitely the case of Duncan being a part of a very strong team around him - which is why nobody mentions it as a serious accomplishment that should put him ahead of someone like Hakeem.
Mind you that we don't have the on/off numbers for Hakeem, so we don't know how he'd look by them.
sure, it's a problem with hakeem/duncan or jordan/lebron conversations.
As I explained, this contextless use of SRS to determine who was the favourite is clearly unsound. You should know this because we're coming off a season in which the Nuggets had an SRS of 3, but were favoured most of the playoffs.
In 2004 for example Shaq missed 17 games, Kobe missed 15, and Malone missed 40. So right off the bat you know their SRS and wins won't reflect their true strength; and that's before we account for the fact the Lakers were clearly coasting as they had done in the past few years. With so much wear and tear after so many deep postseason runs it made no sense for them to go all out in the RS. They were the definition of a 'flip the switch' team. It's absurd to act like the 2004 Lakers weren't favoured over the Spurs because they won a single game less (meaningless with the 2-3-2 format anyway) and had a lower SRS. The oddsmakers and pundits had them as a clear favourite at the time, and rightly.
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
I had typed up a long post that got lost in the ether when submitting, as RealGM logged me out. So I don't think this will be as long or detailed.
Vote for #5: Wilt Chamberlain
This is a tough choice, as I can see arguments for all 5 nominees in this spot. I can't help but come away with the feeling that Wilt Chamberlain was the best player among these 5 (and maybe even among the players that have already been voted in). There are legitimate questions about him that I acknowledge: some weird down years for his teams in 1963 and 1965 (SFW), questions about how his gaudy statistics benefited his teams, concerns about his attitude to teammates and coaching, and so forth. But what Wilt Chamberlain was able to do is something I don't think any other player in history could. He was a dominant offensive force in 3 main modes of operation: as a Paul Bunyan stat-stuffer whose top scoring seasons far outpace any other comer, as a dual scoring and passing threat that saw greater team-wide success in Philadelphia, and then as a third-at-best option who scored on monster efficiency. All the while, he was arguably the most formidable rim protector in the history of the league, and a rebounding king in an era where rebounds were at a premium due to lower shooting percentages. That he was capable of high offensive impact with different styles of play is to his credit, and that he remained a fearsome force on defense, particularly with a heavier offensive load through the early and middle stages of his career, is jaw-dropping. The amount of energy it must have taken to do *all* of that in such high minute seasons is something I don't think anybody else could have done. And he was durable, too. By my count, he missed only 11 games during his first 10 seasons, and despite missing 70 games in 1970, he played every single game in his final 3 seasons. All in all, he played in 1205 out of a possible 1286 games for his teams, good for nearly 94%, and he averaged 46 minutes per game in those games.
Looking at individual statistics, it's easy to form an argument that he should be #1. Initial versions of my metrics for estimating the number of series and championships won with a player as the most impactful player ranked him at or near the top. Obviously the individual statistics we have are limited and only tell part of the story, but the degree to which the gulf in individual statistics between Wilt and the others contending for this #5 spot would have to be closed is sizeable. There's only so much we can measure, and it's certainly possible that with appropriate adjustments and context, Duncan or Magic or Shaq or Hakeem (or some combination of them) could come out on top, but I'm just not convinced.
One final note: the relative lack of playoff success that gets held against Wilt could use a little more nuance, IMO. I think penbeast has pointed out that outside of the Celtics, Wilt's teams won some 80%+ of playoff series, and others have noted key injuries to teammates during many postseason runs. Ultimately, I think for all players, the way legacies are so largely defined by the binary outcome of a win or a loss is too simple. For instance, if the "phantom foul" (not saying it was a phantom foul, necessarily) wasn't called against Bill Laimbeer in the 1988 Finals and Detroit won that series, how would Isiah, Dumars, Laimbeer, Rodman, and Dantley (especially Dantley) be perceived? How much would the legacies of Magic, Kareem, and Worthy take a hit? IMO, the distance between the potential legacies of these players and the current legacy they have given the actual outcome is far too large.
With this in mind, it's worth noting that Wilt's teams played 4 series to a near-draw against the Celtics:
1962 loss to the Celtics by 2 points in Game 7 (-5.5 series MOV) 1965 loss to the Celtics by 1 point in Game 7 (-2.9 series MOV) 1968 loss to the Celtics by 4 points in Game 7 (-2.5 series MOV) 1969 loss to the Celtics by 2 points in Game 7 (+0.4 series MOV)
To be fair, Wilt's teams won a few series that were quite close as well:
1964 win against the Hawks by 10 points in Game 7 (+4.9 series MOV) 1971 win against the Bulls by 11 points in Game 7 (+2.3 series MOV) 1973 win against the Bulls by 3 points in Game 7 (+2.9 series MOV)
That said, in Game 7s decided by 5 points or less, Wilt's teams were 1-4. Among those 4 losses to the Celtics, Wilt was limited by Bill Russell to be sure, but that's to be expected from the greatest defensive player ever. But I can only look to 1969 as a series that Wilt may have cost his team the victory. If Wilt wins 1 or 2 of those near-draw series, how much of the narrative of him as a playoff loser goes away? How much of that narrative should there be in the first place?
As I mentioned, the other 4 players all have reasonable cases. Tim Duncan and Magic Johnson had teams that were perennial contenders every year that they played for their teams. Sure, they both had some fortunate team circumstances (especially Magic, IMO), but the amount of mental fortitude and competitive spirit it takes to ensure such enduring success is something well worth championing. With that in mind, Tim Duncan is my alternate vote here.
Shaq also had many years where his sheer presence ensured his team would be a contender, and I think the early 00s Laker teams were more dominant than any other team among the 5 nominees here. And certainly, his playoff prowess is right up there with Hakeem in terms of raising his game for the postseason. However, Shaq wasn't that durable and his motor went through lots of ups and downs over the years in a way that wasn't the case with Duncan or Magic. Had Shaq been consistently committed to dominate like only he could in that era, I think he'd be a strong Top 3 candidate here.
Hakeem was an exceptional player, but I don't think I can take him over Duncan, as I've elaborated here. After the surprise 1986 Finals run, there were some lean years for Houston. This is at least in some part due to teammates having issues off the court with drugs and so forth, but I remember an NBA guide from the early 90s (maybe 92?) that said the only notable thing he did that year was go from Akeem to Hakeem. There seemed to be a general feeling that he didn't have what it took to lead his teams into contention until the 1993 season. A lot of that criticism is unfair, IMO, and f4p's brilliant post is well worth reading in advocating for him here.
I'll nominate George Mikan once again. I don't know that I'd put him over most of these current nominees, but I'd be fascinated to see his merits weighed up against the others. He might have an argument for the most sustained period of individual and team dominance in league history.
One_and_Done wrote:Hint; I'm not going to look at a Laker team, who had stars missing chunks of the season and were taking it easy, as the underdog just because they lost a few games more, and the bookmakers and pundits of the time didn't see it that way either; it's easy to go back and see who the actual favourites were perceived to be in advance.
this is the site i get all my nba historical betting odds from:
they have the spurs as the favorites in 2004. even with all those missed games and such, they still had the spurs as the favorites. now maybe you have a different site with different numbers because i'm guessing gathering the historical data has the occasional mistype, but i'm guessing this site didn't just make these numbers up for my benefit. the home team with the better MOV during the season is a logical favorite.
3) The fact that a site run by Bill Simmons is doing a similarly bogus stat analysis using SRS doesn't make it valid.
yes, i'm sure math stops being true if bill simmons is 8 levels up the org chart from whomever did the calculation.
It's also absurd for you to cite this SRS based invented stat to prop Hakeem,
there is nothing "invented" about it. SRS is cited a million times a day on this very board, in all sorts of contexts. because it is generally viewed as the best measure of the strength of a team. if it isn't, come up with a better one. using SRS in pythagorean formulas to calculate win percentages is not invented. people have been doing it for forever. it's how basketball-reference comes up with "Predicted Wins" for a team each season. as in, something considered a better measure of a team than just their straight up wins. if you have a better formula than all the analytics guys who have been looking at this stuff far more than you or i, then i'm all ears.
from there, if you know the probability of winning a game, it's literally just math to get the probability of winning a series. and once you know the probability of winning each series, it's just multiplication to get the title odds. this isn't a black box or secret formula. the only barrier is inputting all the data and formulas. plenty of people on this board could replicate the calculations no problem, and i can assure you, they would arrive at the same answers.
right after also saying that we can't take SRS too seriously because look even Hakeem's title teams didn't really have good SRS. Either SRS is useful or it's not.
please reread what i wrote and then consider it. it said nothing about not taking SRS seriously. it contested the idea that hakeem was really playing on good teams in the 80's but his own lack of talent/impact was holding them back. and yet, even when you agree that hakeem did have a lot of talent/impact (1993/94), the Rockets still did not surpass a 6th place finish in SRS. in other words, even if hakeem had been playing at his best level (according to you) for his entire career, his 80's teams would be very unlikely to exceed 6th in SRS as no one would say those teams had better supporting casts than his 1993/94 teams. and considering a 6th place finish in SRS basically gives you 0% titles odds, hakeem does not look good by "actual vs expected" titles just because he wasn't good (according to you) in the 80's. how you got "we can't take SRS seriously" from that, i don't know.
I think SRS has some uses, but the bogus way you're using it to create a new invented number is not useful.
it's no more invented than saying "4" is an invented answer to "2+2". it's the result of straightforward calculations.
Firstly, 2008 to 2011 are irrelevant for a prime to prime comparison, because Duncan wasn't in his prime anymore and I've told you this many times now. You are including those years because they help your argument, but there is no validity to doing so.
there's no validity? 2008-2011 are the same ages (AEnigma's objections notwithstanding ) where hakeem won a title (1994), won another title (1995), finished 4th in mvp voting (1996), and was the best player on a conference finalist and outplayed the MVP in the conference finals (1997). hakeem was very much in his prime, arguably even his peak. either we should be examining the same seasons for duncan as part of his prime or, if we're not, then hakeem would seem to be the one with the pretty sizable longevity advantage as he would be winning championships after his prime.
5) Duncan can beat Hakeem with longevity, because prime years aren't the only ones that count. You can add value with a bunch of all-nba seasons where you added value, even if that value was no longer you at your prime.
well, apparently hakeem's non-prime includes his two championship seasons, or at least 1 if you want to go by number of seasons (10) for prime instead of age (up to 30). plus a couple of other very very good seasons.
Those are they key points.
Spoiler:
f4p wrote:
One_and_Done wrote:So I’m going to focus on the points f4p makes (see spoiled text below) that seem relevant, to try and keep this reply concise.
The first point f4p makes is that Duncan’s situation was so much better. As has been explained, on the whole this is no doubt true. But for various years we can see Duncan’s support cast was not good at all. 2002 and 2003 in particular are examples of teams where the support cast was simply bad for a contender, yet they were a contender anyway. In contrast, Hakeem does not lift his bad teams to contender status when his team is similarly bad to the 02 or 03 Spurs. Indeed, Hakeem has 1st round losses to all manner of weak teams like the 39 win Sonics, the 1988 Mavs, another weak Sonics team, etc. The Rockets didn’t even make the playoffs in 92. Sure, Hakeem was injured, but the results still aren’t coming out with a Duncan like lift even when he’s healthy. I actually think the 2001 Spurs were pretty bad too, and the 1999 Spurs seem to have gotten quite overrated. Watching some of their games compared to modern basketball is painful. The 1999 Spurs were much weaker than the 2007 Spurs, it was just the league was weaker in 1999.
if you think 2003 duncan was playing with a 1980's hakeem supporting cast, but instead of 42 wins and a 1st round loss, he was turning it into a 60 win team and a championship, then we are extremely far apart on hakeem and duncan. there is simply not a universe where either a) duncan was that much better than hakeem or b) hakeem was that much worse than duncan but then improved so much between the late 80's and early 90's that he also eventually was able to take a weak cast to 58 wins and a championship.
To try and counter the points made above, f4p makes some arguments that do not stand up to scrutiny. A particularly dubious one is trying to look at “average series lost when you were an SRS underdog”. It is absurd, because he is in effect rewarding Hakeem for having mediocre teams, instead of asking “why is the SRS of Hakeem’s team so bad if he has a supposed Duncan like impact? Why isn’t he lifting the team to a good SRS, like Duncan could do in 2002 or 2003?”
well, why could duncan lift team so high but then lose as a favorite. not sometimes, but as an average. is your argument that he wasn't really lifting them as high as it looked? besides, go read the section about what hakeem would have needed to do to explain his career results. he would have needed to be almost 5 SRS points (13 wins) better every season to explain him winning 2 championships. duncan would have needed to be 0.6 SRS points (1.7 wins) better every season to explain him winning 5 championships. so if hakeem wasn't simply a playoff beast like we've never seen, you're saying really they were similar playoff players but hakeem was just underperforming a typical duncan season by 11.3 wins! that seems like a staggering difference, especially considering all evidence says Hakeem was in the conversation for post-Russell defensive GOAT.
This is similar to when Jordan fans want to look at home court advantage; an arbitrary fact that ignores all context (e.g. if a better team was missing their best player for 20 games, and still only won a single less game in the RS, were they really the “underdog” if their star was heathy again in the playoffs? Especially with the old 2-3-2 format?). The arguments are not balanced, they are selective. There seems to be a undue focus on arbitrary points of reference that do more to support the end position that Hakeem is better, as the selective use of SRS illustrates (see next para)
jordan was 25-0. how much context are we supposed to apply to that? besides, it's not like i made up the idea of comparing winning as a favorite/underdog or the idea of playoff resilience. should we just say every team that wins a series was better all along? what's the alternative? these guys get 82 games to establish a baseline. they the real season starts and we see who steps up and who doesn't.
The lengthy analysis he undertakes of “year by year” SRS comparison is therefore irrelevant, because Hakeem’s teams not having a high SRS to begin with is bad, and something we should be blaming him for. F4p purports to respond to this, but doesn't in any way that matters. He uses a super dodgy, invented stat where he tries to break SRS down with expected wins to calculate title odds, and then cites other stats like game score which I also think have nil value. He even attempts to use Hakeem's relatively bad SRS in the 2 title years as a positive, by saying 'see even when everything went well Hakeem's teams had bad SRS, so like, how could we expect him to have good SRS in non-title years?' It's a mind boggling take, because he spends so long using SRS to pump Hakeem. If SRS is meaningless why are you relying on it? I think the answer is pretty obvious.
super dodgy? excuse me? here is literally an article from the Ringer doing the exact same thing and getting the exact same numbers.
if you want a ton of careers looked at, the Ringer article has a spreadsheet that blows mine away. doing it on my own, though, has given me the year by year breakdown for the Top 100, which the Ringer does not have. so it's still good that i have my spreadsheet.
if we did a retro-Player-of-the-Series project, how many times would it probably pick the person with the best game score? i bet a lot. you think hakeem won 10 of 11 series from '93 to '96 by accident. that jordan led 35 of 37 career series by accident? that bird and magic led a decent chunk of their series by accident? and if you say things have nil value, then propose something else.
no one said SRS is irrelevant. you seem to be taking the approach that we just look at a team's SRS/win total and then decide how good their best player is. if they win 60 games, their best player is amazing. if they win 45 games, not so much. the garnett fans are not going to be happy to hear this.
This “let’s have it both ways” approach by f4p continues with his use of stats, as he has at times cited Drtg as an indicator of why the Spurs support team was so good, without recognizing that Duncan has the higher Drtg than Hakeem in the 10 year sample
DRtg can and is impacted by the overall team. it's why at the beginning of a season you will sometimes see one team have the top 3 or 4 guys in DRtg. it also is not adjusted for the league environment. hakeem playing when the league ORtg was 108 is different than Duncan playing in the deadball era. so hakeem's 93.4 in 1990 when the league was at 108.1 is basically the same as say duncan's 88.5 in 2004 when the league was at 102.9. hakeem led the league 5 years in a row in DRtg and duncan did it 4 times so they both seem pretty good by this stat. also, i'm not sure you can find DRtg to have value but not game score.
I cited in the last thread, comparing per 100 stats over Duncan’s prime from 98-07 in the RS and PS. Similarly, there is no explanation provided for why the Spurs were romping along at a 15-3 win pace without D.Rob in 2003, and were just as good or better without him the following year, if he was still so important. Similarly the Spurs were I think 10-3 in the games Manu missed in 2003. There is no indication of secretly awesome players on the Spurs in 2002 or 2003. The young guys in those years weren’t good enough yet, and the old guys were washed. It was all driven by Duncan.
so what happened from 2004 to 2011? with ginobili and parker getting so much better, with the loss of david robinson apparently being irrelevant with rasho around, sounds like we've got an 8-peat on our hands, right? well, 9-peat with 2003. you throw trash next to duncan and he wins, then i assume a couple of top 75 teammates in their prime for 8 years is all she wrote for the league. shaq and kobe even went away after 2004 so that obstacle was out of the way. i guess your argument is that duncan got much worse during this time period? or should we acknowledge that the spurs had a deep team of veterans, if no stars, and david robinson and bruce bowen are probably pretty elite defenders based on long careers of proving that.
We only have a couple of games he missed to judge by, but needless to say the Spurs lost them. In particular, the game he missed in the 2002 1st round series against the Sonics stands out. With every incentive to try their best to win without Duncan, because it’s the playoffs, the Spurs were embarrassed. They looked like they’d be lucky to win 20 games without him to be honest. F4p also continues to blur Duncan's prime and non-prime years without saying as much. Duncan's prime was 98 to 07. Use that for prime to prime comps please. Of course F4p continues to ignore per 100 stats, assumedly because they highlight the lack of volume stat advantage Hakeem has. Even TS% is not consistently cited.
i'm not sure what blurring i'm doing. but duncan can't simultaneously beat hakeem with his unbelievable longevity, but also anything starting in 2008 is off limits because he's too old for it to count. i believe i cited very few per 100 or box score composite stats, unless i'm forgetting. if you want prime to prime, Age 22-31 (99 to 08 for duncan, 85 to 94 for hakeem), i get hakeem with a postseason advantage (9th at 0.731 compared to duncan 14th at 0.705). and it's almost certainly getting better for hakeem if i expand it out to 22-34 for 13 year primes. and 98-07 or 99-08 for duncan doesn't change anything because 98 isn't better than 08.
There hasn’t been much discussion of Hakeem’s team mates, but I think for a number of years they were quite solid, certainly as good or better than the 2002 or 2003 Spurs (or even the 2001 Spurs to be honest).
yeah, again, this doesn't seem to be a widely held opinion, although you are certainly free to make the case. but we're back to you having duncan as like 20 wins better than hakeem. since you have hakeem 7th all-time, then you should apparently have duncan as the unquestioned GOAT.
F4p cites a number of stats I find unconvincing, like expected wins/titles or PER. I don’t really care about those stats, so I won’t speak to them. What I will say is that even useful stats like Adjusted plus minus are just one data point. They are not the be-all, and should be taken as just one bit of evidence. It’s kind of like the recent thread on adjusted plus minus stats, which supposedly prove KG is better because he has 0.4 higher in APM over their whole careers. That’s meaningless for stats that have so much noise and randomness thrown in, and it’s doubly meaningless when Duncan is doing it over such a bigger sample size. The bigger the sample, the less likely you are to be able to maintain your high numbers.
the vast majority of my post was about accomplishments in the playoffs, coming up big in the biggest series against the best opponents, winning as a staggering underdog with a KG-level amount of support for his career, about how he even managed to beat his best opponents at a rate similar to duncan, despite clearly not having the same level of support over his career (which even you acknowledge is the case).
F4p engages in a lengthy analysis of Hakeem’s post 1996 career. I don’t really care what he did after 1996, because he was posting largely empty numbers most of those years. He was mostly done. Barkley has talked about his time in Houston extensively, and admits as much. He and Hakeem were shadows of what they once were, and by Barkley’s own telling Scottie Pippen realized it the moment he got to training camp with them in 1999. He took one look and told them he was getting out of there as soon as he could, and Barkley didn’t even blame him. He knew they were washed. Hakeem was still pretty good in 1997, though nothing like what he had been, but yeh. After that it’s a literal drop off a cliff. There’s a reason those teams fell short.
his 1997 playoff numbers by the box score are every bit the equal of 1993-1995, though bumped up a little too much by his ridiculous 63 TS%. if 27 ppg on 59% shooting in the conference finals while you put up 9 rpg, 4 apg, 3 bpg, and 2 spg is empty then i'm not sure what to say. and who cares what barkley says. he's a hilarious showman, not a basketball analyst. hell, barkley was still very good in 1997 and even had a great 1999 playoff series. hakeem in 1999 put up 19 ppg, 9.5 rpb, and 2.5 bpg and made 3rd team all nba as a 36 year old. pippen's analysis seems pretty stupid, if that's what it actually was. and of course pippen himself gave us a sparkling playoff series with 32.9/27.3 shooting splits.
As I noted in my previous post, Hakeem has a number of things that are favourable to him which f4p does nothing to account for (weaker league, favourable rules, less minutes on his body, padding his stats against weaker 1st round foes, etc). Maybe Hakeem could have survived playing more minutes, and posted just as good stats against the best teams consistently, but the reality is he never did it and we are ranking guys on the careers that actually happened.
is the league being weaker just some obvious thing i'm supposed to agree to? hakeem and duncan's careers overlapped by 5 years, how much worse could it be? and then who else am i supposed to be knocking down from that time period?
the weaker first round opponent thing was already addressed in another thread. hakeem literally played 4 teams above a 6.7 SRS before 1993 even happened. average of 3.22 before 1993, which is pretty normal as things go. both his first round opponents in 1990 and 1991 were 6.7 or above. so he got, what, 4 series in 1987-1989 sandwiched in between peak celtics/lakers in 1986 and two more really good lakers teams in 1990 and 1991? the best way to face weak first round opponents is actually to be a 1st or 2nd seed.
also, the idea he padded his stats on weaker teams doesn't even follow what happened. the two worst teams he faced were his two very first series and he has low numbers (especially scoring) those 2 series. the 1986 lakers series was his best stat series of the first 2 years. the mavs team he bludgeoned was a +3.6 team, so basically the average of duncan's career.
f4p wrote:i guess i don't see why playing in more would make him more likely to lose a higher percentage. there's a decent chunk of guys above 90% or in that 16-2/18-2 range at 87.5% or above. duncan is slightly below 80%. so he's twice as likely to lose such a series as some of these guys and about twice as likely as another bunch of them.
Comparing raw win% only makes sense when the sample is comparable, not when one player played 50% less series than the other.
As I said, I don't find this argument to be very convincing.
it's possible. again, i can't watch every game over again. but i did watch them live. and it's possible that wanting the spurs to win (well, wanting the lakers to lose) made me remember the duncan failures more than the positives. and the one game i could find on youtube a few months ago (game 5) fit the pattern to a tee.
Memory can do tricks to us, that's why it's very important to rewatch games from 20, years ago.
hmm, maybe i'm smushing game 5 into 4. but i did find one clear example at 6:00 in this video.
I included that play in my video, it's likely that you did mixed games 4 and 5. Shaq didn't guard Duncan much in game 4.
also, that game 4 is also devastating for the spurs in terms of 4th quarter letdowns in that series. they have a 84-74 lead with 6:15 left and proceed to score 1 point the entire rest of the way while losing by 2.
Do you think that was solely Duncan's fault that they managed to score 1 point for the half of the quarter?
All in all, I didn't say that Duncan played perfect basketball in that series - he had a lot of rough moments. When you take context into account (his best teammate injured, facing far better team, guarding Shaq for a big part of the series and clearly outplaying him) I don't see this series as a failure at all.
okay, but duncan ends up 6 for his last 21 against shaq in games 3/4/5. 2/8 even without game 5.
2/8 is meaningless when he averaged over 20 FGA per game in that sample.
ok, but then what do we do?
Nothing, I just don't agree that this arguments puts Hakeem clearly ahead of Duncan. They played in much different environments and I don't find comparing things like "wins as a favorite" a good way to differentiate between them. I am fine with taking Hakeem ahead of Duncan, but these numbers don't give me much info for this comparison.
by championship odds, duncan had 14 seasons higher than hakeem's best chance. even if i do a back of the envelope look at vegas, 1994 hakeem has about a 17.4% chance if i just multiply all the series odds. duncan has 10 chances better than that (by championship odds, not vegas). if we can't compare how often they converted, then duncan just wins by default at that point, unless he somehow had only managed to win 2.
Well, I think it's worth considering if that gap was created strictly because of teammates, or maybe (just maybe) Duncan being a better RS player has something to do with that as well? Of course it doesn't explain such difference, but you basically treat them as the same in RS, while giving Hakeem the edge because he converted at better percentage - that's not a fair way to compare them in my opinion.
What 2nd Malone are you talking about? [/quote]
i'm listing the guys non-uniquely in the order of the series they played (1994 malone, 1995 robinson, 1997 malone).
and he outplayed james in the sense that lebron set the bar quite low and duncan walked over it while parker got one of those "we know he's not actually the best player, but the other guy struggled, so here you go" finals mvp's.
I am not really sure Parker was even 2nd best player in that series, let alone the best. Yeah, Duncan had two poor shooting nights away, but it doesn't make his performance bad. He's my clear FMVP for that series and it's another case of people caring about ppg way too much.
this probably ties in somewhat to the fact that duncan only faced 6 teams that were +6 during this period.
Yeah, that's what high RS seeding makes to your playoff competition. I don't think praising Duncan for facing more top teams while having worse RS success would make any sense.
well, the knicks were +2.3 SRS favorite and i've never heard anyone put forth a case that 1994 ewing was better than 1994 hakeem. and if riley did a great job, it only further put the pressure on hakeem.
That's in part because Hakeem's teams usually underperformed in the RS throughout his career. I'm fine with saying the Knicks were more talented overall, but painting is as the one man show against much superior team isn't fair to me. These two teams were comparable and nobody would call these Knicks amazingly talented.
in that series you have:
FG% Hakeem = 50.0% Rest of Rockets = 39.7% Ewing = 36.3% Rest of Knicks = 42.4%
Yeah, Rockets were more reliant of Hakeem's scoring than Knicks with Ewing, I'm not sure what it proves.
comparable? is the standard that hakeem has to perform miracles until the end of time? yes, he didn't play well, but this was a 64 win, +7.4 Sonics team against a 48 win, +1.6 Rockets team that had just won 6 straight series as an underdog. the series ended in a sweep. for hakeem to turn that around would require an unbelievable level of play, not just a normal series.
The same Sonics team lost two straight years against significantly less talented teams than the Rockets. For all this talk about RS SRS, Sonics were far from the unbeatable juggernaut in the playoffs.
About SRS difference - do you think that the Rockets overperformed their talent in RS? Do you think they weren't better than +1.6 SRS and 48 wins? That's what I'm talking about - Hakeem didn't always play up to his talent in the RS and that caused his team to play more as an underdog without HCA.
I think there is a middle ground between "Duncan choked against inferior teams" and "Hakeem was mediocre RS player", but both takes are wrong in my opinion.
and the reward would be another +6 opponent in utah (-4.6 underdog) before getting mauled by the bulls.
So we shouldn't look at how Hakeem performed, because he wouldn't be able to win the ring anyway? Then why do you care about 2008-11 Duncan underperformances?
and the sonics actually bested their -5.9 rDRtg against the rockets against both their 1st round opponent sacramento (-9.3) and their WCF opponent Utah (-8.4), before posting a healthy -3.3 vs the bulls and giving jordan his worst finals ever. they were very good, the rockets were mediocre.
They also got eliminates by Nuggets in 1994 and by Lakers in 1995. Again, they were far from the juggernaut.
also, the series featured hakeem at the age of 33, with various people having told me that duncan should really only be looked at until age 30 (or 31) in 2007. there's a reason the only older duncan series i picked was literally losing to an 8th seed and not something like the 2012 WCF.
So it's perfectly fine to mention 1997 because Hakeem played well, but it's not fair to use 1996 because he didn't play well?
I didn't say you to ignore anything after 2007, that was a different poster. To me, looking at 1998-10 vs 1985-97 is fair.
as for 2004, i won't pimp for the spurs having the worlds greatest roster, but even vegas had the spurs as slight favorites going into the series.
Do you think the Spurs had a stronger roster than the Lakers? If not, why do use Vegas as an argument?
Do you think 1996 Hakeem would lead 2004 Spurs to the same amount of wins?
and they won the first 2 games.
Yeah, two games in SA.
and duncan was 27. and he was really bad overall in the final 4 games, not just one game.
If you want to be precise, then the Spurs outscored the Lakers in game 5 when Duncan was on the floor and he made the shot that would give the Spurs win in 99.99% of the time. I certainly wouldn't say he was bad in that game, though the rest of this 4 games sample is certainly bad.
the reason the spurs were favorites is the lakers outside of the big 4 played the following rotation. devean george starting and derek fisher as 6th man, and almost every single other minute in the series went to slava medvedenko and kareem rush. yikes.
slava and kareem played as you might expect, posting 1.5 and 1.1 game scores for the series and 48.2 TS% and 43.6 TS%. except malone and payton combined shot even worse at 48.3 TS% and 41.2 TS%, with payton especially sucking all playoffs long.
No, the reason why the Spurs were favored is because they had the HCA and they beat them the year before. I think you put way too much faith in the analysis they do.
Cool, now compare that to the production Duncan got from Parker, Nesterovic, Bowen and Horry. Do you really believe that the Spurs were a better team in that year? Please answer the question.
well, i tried to list series that played a very large part in shaping those results. that's what the 4 series for hakeem and 4 series for duncan were. not just good series and bad series. but the ones that shaped the "actual vs expected" dynamic.
But you only examples you chosen from Duncan is where he "underperformed".
no one said he wasn't needed. but a) hakeem still wins just as much and in a larger amount of series so it's not like he just fluked his way to a 1-1 record and i'm saying it's the same as 3-3 and b) duncan's strongest case over hakeem (or even shaq) can't be all that high level play he had from 2011-16 but then also it doesn't count if anything bad happened in those years.
I don't think it's fair if you take Duncan over Hakeem based on 2011-16 only, so I agree with you here.
So with the deadline having passed I have the vote Duncan 13, Wilt 5, Hakeem 4, Magic 1.
As to f4p's points: 1) I definitely remember the 04 Lakers being the favourites. Happy to google some evidence for this. Either way, they illustrate the point that you can't just use SRS as a substitute for how good they were. The Lakers also obviously had the better team, irrespective of whether some gambling sites picked wrong. 2) SRS is a real stat. Using it without context to plus and divide it to make other stats is not. Let's say for the sake of argument the 04 Lakers were slight underdogs. The issue isn't just who was the underdog. Once you understand the SRS isn't reliable because of context it becomes useless as a way of creating new stats off it. Whether the Lakers were underdogs or overdogs in 04, their SRS clearly didn't reflect the talent for the reasons discussed. It makes you using SRS for formulas meaningless. You're using SRS because Hakeem's teams had bad SRS, so obviously his underachievement will favour him. 3) choosing non-prime years because 'they are the same ages' is clearly absurd because not every prime happens at the same age. Walton, Hakeem and Nash are 3 good examples. But you know this.
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
Duncan vs Hakeem discussion became intense. How would you compare them year by year?
1985 vs 1998 1986 vs 1999 1987 vs 2000 1988 vs 2001 1989 vs 2002 1990 vs 2003 1991 vs 2004 1992 vs 2005 1993 vs 2006 1994 vs 2007 1995 vs 2008 1996 vs 2009 1997 vs 2010 1998 vs 2011 1999 vs 2012 2000 vs 2013 2001 vs 2014
That would help us understand how you view their career trajectories.
70sFan wrote:Duncan vs Hakeem discussion became intense. How would you compare them year by year?
I personally don't think it's terribly helpful because it can be super misleading due to timelines, context, etc. That said:
1985 vs 1998 Duncan 1986 vs 1999 Duncan 1987 vs 2000 Duncan 1988 vs 2001 Duncan 1989 vs 2002 Duncan 1990 vs 2003 Duncan 1991 vs 2004 Duncan 1992 vs 2005 Duncan 1993 vs 2006 Duncan 1994 vs 2007 Hakeem (probably) 1995 vs 2008 Hakeem 1996 vs 2009 Hakeem 1997 vs 2010 Hakeem 1998 vs 2011 Duncan (probably) 1999 vs 2012 Duncan 2000 vs 2013 Duncan 2001 vs 2014 Duncan
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
So I don't think this will be as long or detailed.
) where hakeem won a title (1994), won another title (1995), finished 4th in mvp voting (1996), and was the best player on a conference finalist and outplayed the MVP in the conference finals (1997). hakeem was very much in his prime, arguably even his peak. either we should be examining the same seasons for duncan as part of his prime or, if we're not, then hakeem would seem to be the one with the pretty sizable longevity advantage as he would be winning championships after his prime. 