AEnigma wrote:Okay if we are doing that then I am going to press you on #5 Brad Miller in 2004 lol.
As long as folks are polite about it and can understand if I get overwhelmed and down get back to you on a thing, I'm happy to do it.
I'm extremely high on Brad Miller, and this season is his big year. To give some context:
Miller was an undrafted player had gradually clawed his way up from a fringe player to a full time starter earning positive On/Off in ever stint, of every season, across 3 different teams. This is one of the things I look for when I do analysis of a player's career. Many tend to assume that if a player wasn't getting run much in the NBA, or being kept by one team, it says something about how good he was at the time. I think this often isn't true, and in particular, it's typically not true when you're talking about a 4-year college player from a major conference who is a number 2 seed in the NCAA tournament (made Sweet 16), who led the team in scoring with extreme efficiency - got to the line, hit from the line, and even made some 3's, led the team in blocks and rebounds, and was 3rd in assists.
Miller is the type of player who seems to come out of nowhere as someone who was lucky to get the call, but the evidence suggests that he was ready to do everything he was doing basically from the time he entered the NBA in 1999, and that translated to a kind of word-of-mouth growth to his buzz that made him eligible new stints in a promoted role that were often temporary in plan. The team ends up thinking highly of the player, but doesn't see the potential to the point that they make him the priority he should be.
Raja Bell is the archetypical player for this to me, because he's the one I heard talk about his experience. Here's a guy who was 3 & D in college graduating in 1999 to an NBA world that doesn't have a concept of "3 & D" yet. If people knew then what they knew now, he'd have been a lottery pick, and whoever drafted him would immediately make use of him in that much-in-demand role.
And Miller, is an extremely basketball smart big man with great capacity for passing, aka pivot play, aka Jokic-lite.
Meanwhile in Sacramento, they've been having great success with Rick Adelman's
corner offense, a read & react scheme with a lot of high posting for bigs Chris Webber and Vlade Divac... but had just lost Webber to an ACL tear. They needed a guy who could step in for Webber, and so they traded for Miller to play with a playmaking focus he'd not been tasked with before.
So then we have our man Miller, career journeyman, stepping in for Webber, big scoring big man lauded for his passing. And Miller...worked better for the team offense, which spiked. The obvious thing people noticed was that Stojakovic got unleashed as a scorer, but Miller was the one who has always looked to be having the greater impact by +/-, both that year and going forward.
So then we get to the post-season, where some interest things happen.
Webber comes back.
They move Miller to the bench.
Miller continues to lead the team in +/-, and being one of only two Kings (the other being point guard Bibby) to have a positive +/ in both the series the team played (while Webber was the only King who played serious minutes to have a negative +/- in both series).
That's not necessarily an argument that helps Miller's POY candidacy. When a team demotes your primacy, it often can't help but shrink your achievement. Just because the issues it causes are not your fault, that doesn't mean we credit you as if you did the things you could have done but weren't given the opportunity to do.
But it does provide more data suggesting Miller's value was no mirage, as does the next year where Miller continues to outperform Webber until they traded Webber. I actually think the shame of it is that they moved on from Divac in the 2004 off-season. It made sense to think that with Miller's rise and Divac's age, and Miller should take Divac's place, but I actually think the better play would have been to offer Divac enough for him to stay, and trade Webber both to clear him out of the way and because he actually had trade value.
Okay, now what about Miller vs Shaq? Well let's remember that Shaq was a 21 PPG guy for the Lakers at this time, and past his prime on defense too, on a team that was called "Lakers Re-Loaded" with the addition of Malone & Payton, who they added without sacrificing most of their depth of veteran playoff role players. This to say I would actually say that Shad MORE talent on his supporting cast than Miller did, and was leading his team to better results when he was on the floor.
I'm under no illusions that that's going to sway anyone who's never really thought about Miller in these terms before, but I hope it makes sense why I'd argue that just based on on-court impact, Miller was more impressive in the regular season.
I also understand saying that Shaq and the Lakers getting to the Finals is enough to give him the nod. I would object to that being a given, but it's certainly something I think about.
The other factor that looms significantly for me that many will not factor in is the horrendous off-court toxicity Shaq brought to those Lakers. Now, he & Kobe both deserve a lot of blame for how that played out imho, but there's a broader dimension to what Shaq did that I alluded to before that was all about the 2003 off-season.
This was the season where Malone & Payton give up tens of millions of dollars to sign at the minimum to play with the Lakers, and Shaq starts a war of escalation with ownership about getting his big extension not one but 2 seasons before the current one ended as an overweight giant who would be 35 when the new 3-year extension kicked in and had many concerned about his ability to hold up as a star even a fraction of that time.
And so as a season was starting that was supposed to be a giddy time for all of Lakerland, Shaq was out there on the court yelling at owner Jerry Buss, in the
words of a teammate:
Brian Shaw wrote:Dr. Buss is sitting courtside, and Shaq kind of struts along the sidelines, and he looks directly at Dr. Buss and says, ‘You better pay me!’ And Dr. Buss really, really took that personally. I don’t think, at the time, Shaq knew how Dr. Buss felt. That he was showing him up.
It began a season where everyone within the organization, with the notable exception of Karl Malone, seemed to be sniping everyone else. The made their way through the season on fits and starts winning on talent more than synergy...until they hit a team in the Pistons that really made use of the kind of defensive team play that the dropping of illegal defense allowed, and it was like they popped a tire and skidded to the side of the road.
People talk about Kobe giving the Lakers an ultimatum the next off-season like that was the reason the Lakers were willing to move Shaq. In reality, before that happened Shaq had already made it untenable for the Lakers to keep him. The only question was what deal they would accept. To put it another way: I don't see this as a choice between which star you want to build around going forward, but about how urgent it was to move on from the deteriorating Shaq. A kind of "You gonna a try to hold on to Shaq another season hoping the right offer will come along? Don't waste our time, we're not going to win another title with him like this, and he's getting in the way of what we're going to need to do next - which is do everything around me."
Self-serving? Absolutely. A bit personal? Probably. But wrong? I don't think so. As an Angeleno Laker fan at the time, it felt like absolutely everyone - including Shaq - was in agreement that it was time for he and the Lakers to part ways.
All of this is stuff that doesn't need to factor in for others in this project, but for me it has to. Why? Because to me the only people who really, really need to answer this stuff are people who work for NBA franchises, and it goes without saying they think about ego and attitude concerns when they look to evaluate how desirable a player is. If they factor it in, why wouldn't I?
