Doctor MJ wrote:Re: Became elite with Moses. Ah, but what does "becoming elite" mean? They got worse at eFG and FT/FGA. The big thing Moses did was really help the offensive rebounding. That's absolutely legit offensive impact, but it wasn't about them making Moses the first scoring option. Tomjanovich & Murphy were still scoring more, scoring more efficiently, and assisting more. Moses' impact then wasn't really about demoting those guys as it was him taking the place of others.
In terms of rORtg, that's the apex of the Rockets. Later they would give Moses more an more primacy, but even with the addition of Ricky Barry, they'd never separate from the field as much as they did in '76-77.
Of course, it would be unfair to Moses not to note that by the time of the playoffs, Moses was the big minute guy, on his way to everything being built around him. I'm not looking to elevate his teammates above him overall, only to say that this wasn't a situation where having Moses eventually become the high primacy guy is what elevated the team to elite offense.
Re: after he left. No doubt this is huge impact, but it's also a team that's:
a) Unwisely using Hayes as a volume scorer. Always a very bad idea, but really, really bad by this point.
b) Letting itself fall apart on its way to back-to-back #1 picks.
Re: 76ers. As I've said, I'm not looking to knock '82-83. He's the clear cut #1 guy in the league then, and I get how folks look at the previous year's impact and think Moses was reliably going to have that impact again and again...but of course the 76ers were a bit of a bumble bee with Moses. They had one of the most dominant playoff runs in history...and then the next year - with Moses a mere 28 years old - they lose in an upset to the Nets where they lose the rebounding battle as a team and Buck Williams outrebounds Moses.
What I see in general from Moses is a guy who could have tremendous impact with the right context, but I'm uncomfortable acting as if it was always there. He needed other guys to take up some shooting volume as the primary attack, and he needed to be able to bully the opposing bigs...which he wasn't actually able to do against all other players all through the age one might assume the way we talk about guys like Wilt & Russell.
But I’d argue that this is a good thing! Anytime a guy can get massive offensive value without needing the ball (which historic-outlier offensive rebounding is of course a fantastic example of), that leaves room for other players who are really good offensively to get lots of offensive value too!
Of course, I’d also note that the Rockets were the league’s #1 offense, with a rORTG of +4.9 in 1978-79, with Moses being easily their highest scorer. So I don’t really think it’d be right to say that he couldn’t be the primary scoring option on an elite offensive team, since he definitely did that (albeit not as some cartoonishly primary scoring option—Murphy and Tomjanovich didn’t get way fewer shots than him). It’s just that he could also get huge offensive impact even while not the primary scoring option, because of his idiosyncratically great offensive rebounding. I see this as a really good thing!
One other thing I’ll note about Moses offensively is that I think he provided a really good safety valve, in a somewhat similar way to someone like Kobe or Hakeem or MJ. Basically, there are guys who are really great at difficult shot-making. In a lot of scenarios, you don’t necessarily want difficult shots taken when the offense could get a better one. But if the shot clock is running out and the offense hasn’t produced anything, you do actually ideally want a guy who you can give the ball to and they’ll be able to score fairly well even when forced to take a closely-covered bad shot potentially even while double-teamed. Moses was definitely a guy who could do that.
OhayoKD wrote:Lebron contributes more to all the phases of play than Messi does. And he is of course a defensive anchor unlike messi.
Doctor MJ wrote:Re: Became elite with Moses. Ah, but what does "becoming elite" mean? They got worse at eFG and FT/FGA. The big thing Moses did was really help the offensive rebounding. That's absolutely legit offensive impact, but it wasn't about them making Moses the first scoring option. Tomjanovich & Murphy were still scoring more, scoring more efficiently, and assisting more. Moses' impact then wasn't really about demoting those guys as it was him taking the place of others.
In terms of rORtg, that's the apex of the Rockets. Later they would give Moses more an more primacy, but even with the addition of Ricky Barry, they'd never separate from the field as much as they did in '76-77.
Of course, it would be unfair to Moses not to note that by the time of the playoffs, Moses was the big minute guy, on his way to everything being built around him. I'm not looking to elevate his teammates above him overall, only to say that this wasn't a situation where having Moses eventually become the high primacy guy is what elevated the team to elite offense.
Re: after he left. No doubt this is huge impact, but it's also a team that's:
a) Unwisely using Hayes as a volume scorer. Always a very bad idea, but really, really bad by this point.
b) Letting itself fall apart on its way to back-to-back #1 picks.
Re: 76ers. As I've said, I'm not looking to knock '82-83. He's the clear cut #1 guy in the league then, and I get how folks look at the previous year's impact and think Moses was reliably going to have that impact again and again...but of course the 76ers were a bit of a bumble bee with Moses. They had one of the most dominant playoff runs in history...and then the next year - with Moses a mere 28 years old - they lose in an upset to the Nets where they lose the rebounding battle as a team and Buck Williams outrebounds Moses.
What I see in general from Moses is a guy who could have tremendous impact with the right context, but I'm uncomfortable acting as if it was always there. He needed other guys to take up some shooting volume as the primary attack, and he needed to be able to bully the opposing bigs...which he wasn't actually able to do against all other players all through the age one might assume the way we talk about guys like Wilt & Russell.
But I’d argue that this is a good thing! Anytime a guy can get massive offensive value without needing the ball (which historic-outlier offensive rebounding is of course a fantastic example of), that leaves room for other players who are really good offensively to get lots of offensive valu
if its a good thing why do ball dom guys lead the best o? 4.7 isnt as good as the offenses i see kd post for folks like magic and nash.
it’s perhaps worth noting that the Rockets defeated the Lakers in the playoffs in 1981 in part because Kareem was held to just 51.7% TS% (in a season where he’d averaged 61.6% for the year). It’s a low sample size and I’m just talking about one matchup as an example, but I do think that Moses played Kareem well defensively and that feels meaningful to me regarding his defense.
It's also worth mentioning that Moses wasn't Kareem's main defender in these games.
That’s true in the sense that Billy Paultz tended to be on Kareem when Paultz and Kareem were both on the court. But Moses ended up guarding Kareem for substantial portions of those games. And, while I’ve not tallied anything up, I certainly got the impression watching it (“it” being your videos, so thank you!) that Kareem found more success in that series when guarded by Paultz than he did when guarded by Moses.
It’s also perhaps worth noting that as early as 1977-1978, the Rockets gave up 107 points a game in the games Moses played, and 110 points a game in the 23 games he missed that season. Of course, that’s not per-possession data, but it does lend some support to the idea that Moses was a positive-impact defender at the time.
Do we have any pace estimations for this sample?
Not that I’m aware of. And it’s *possible* that the pace was higher in games Moses didn’t play. But I’ll note that if there were some major effect in that regard, then we’d probably expect the team’s overall pace that season to be higher than in the surrounding years where Moses barely missed any time. And we don’t see that (if anything, it’s the opposite, with the pace in the surrounding years being equal or higher).
OhayoKD wrote:Lebron contributes more to all the phases of play than Messi does. And he is of course a defensive anchor unlike messi.
lessthanjake wrote:That’s true in the sense that Billy Paultz tended to be on Kareem when Paultz and Kareem were both on the court. But Moses ended up guarding Kareem for substantial portions of those games. And, while I’ve not tallied anything up, I certainly got the impression watching it (“it” being your videos, so thank you!) that Kareem found more success in that series when guarded by Paultz than he did when guarded by Moses.
I certainly hope so as the Whopper, while a decent middle rank center, was nowhere near a top 100 candidate, especially on defense.
“Most people use statistics like a drunk man uses a lamppost; more for support than illumination,” Andrew Lang.
I will say, I consider Gervin to be a pretty weak #1 so that opens the door to others, but I also have Kareem over Moses for that year.
Are you not overly impressed with Kareem’s defense in 1979? Gervin in those 3-4 years was such a great scorer (and fun to watch), but Kareem was a highly efficient scorer himself even if the volume was less, a much better defender, and Gervin didn’t really have the advantage in playmaking as he wasn’t a great playmaker.
I think in general any time you're arguing for Kareem over Gervin you've got a good case.
I'll put it like this:
Gervin played on the Spurs, Kareem on the Lakers. I think the Spurs had a better year than the Lakers.
Who was on Gervin's team with him? Main teammates: Larry Keenan, James Silas, Mike Gale Who was on Kareem's team with him? Main teammates: Norm Nixon, Jamaal Wilkes, Adrian Dantley
Who had more help? Kareem by a wide, wide margin.
One can bring up fit of course, but as I've said before, I don't believe fit is something to be adjusted for when we talk about accomplishment.
Even if we do adjust for it and denigrate Dantley, I'd be inclined to take Nixon & Wilkes over anyone Gervin was playing with.
Now again, I'm not looking to say I'd take Gervin over Kareem in a vacuum, but this does get into the heart of why it's hard for me to take too seriously the idea that the only reason Kareem wasn't winning titles every year is that he lacked help.
lessthanjake wrote:That’s true in the sense that Billy Paultz tended to be on Kareem when Paultz and Kareem were both on the court. But Moses ended up guarding Kareem for substantial portions of those games. And, while I’ve not tallied anything up, I certainly got the impression watching it (“it” being your videos, so thank you!) that Kareem found more success in that series when guarded by Paultz than he did when guarded by Moses.
I certainly hope so as the Whopper, while a decent middle rank center, was nowhere near a top 100 candidate, especially on defense.
Haha, well yes, but the point is that Kareem was held to very bad scoring efficiency in that series, and it looks to have been disproportionately caused by the time periods that Moses guarded him.
OhayoKD wrote:Lebron contributes more to all the phases of play than Messi does. And he is of course a defensive anchor unlike messi.
Doctor MJ wrote:I value your thoughts here. I'd be curious to see elaboration on put-backs year-by-year. As well as anything we have that compared his put-backs to other players.
I will keep that in mind and come back with some data tomorrow
Doctor MJ wrote:Re: Became elite with Moses. Ah, but what does "becoming elite" mean? They got worse at eFG and FT/FGA. The big thing Moses did was really help the offensive rebounding. That's absolutely legit offensive impact, but it wasn't about them making Moses the first scoring option. Tomjanovich & Murphy were still scoring more, scoring more efficiently, and assisting more. Moses' impact then wasn't really about demoting those guys as it was him taking the place of others.
Don't you think that's actually his strength, not something we should criticize him for? I mean, he's one of the very few bigs in the league history who as volume scorers doesn't lose any value on offense next to quality perimeter creators. He just does his things without taking away anything from your other players. That's the definition of ceilling raiser and high level scalability.
I understand why my words would read as a criticism, but really I was just looking to state facts and emphasize that the Moses was working on the backs of better creators. It's nice that we can point to his midrange game, but the reality is that I don't think you'd really be thinking of it as a huge asset if you were looking to build a champion.
Isn't that ceiling raising? Yes it is, which is certainly a good thing.
Thing is: The Rockets didn't actually get that much better. This was a team regularly winning 40+ games before Moses who never broke 50 with them, and by SRS, they went from a previous peak in '74-75 of +0.84 to a new era peak in '76-77 of +1.44. That's basically incidental impact.
Again, his work in '82-83 is great ceiling-raising, so I'm not saying he couldn't do this on a great team at all, only that we've seen that this wasn't a guy who was giving a large ceiling-raising impact year-in and year-out despite the fact that in theory, he should be.
Doctor MJ wrote:Re: Became elite with Moses. Ah, but what does "becoming elite" mean? They got worse at eFG and FT/FGA. The big thing Moses did was really help the offensive rebounding. That's absolutely legit offensive impact, but it wasn't about them making Moses the first scoring option. Tomjanovich & Murphy were still scoring more, scoring more efficiently, and assisting more. Moses' impact then wasn't really about demoting those guys as it was him taking the place of others.
In terms of rORtg, that's the apex of the Rockets. Later they would give Moses more an more primacy, but even with the addition of Ricky Barry, they'd never separate from the field as much as they did in '76-77.
Of course, it would be unfair to Moses not to note that by the time of the playoffs, Moses was the big minute guy, on his way to everything being built around him. I'm not looking to elevate his teammates above him overall, only to say that this wasn't a situation where having Moses eventually become the high primacy guy is what elevated the team to elite offense.
Re: after he left. No doubt this is huge impact, but it's also a team that's:
a) Unwisely using Hayes as a volume scorer. Always a very bad idea, but really, really bad by this point.
b) Letting itself fall apart on its way to back-to-back #1 picks.
Re: 76ers. As I've said, I'm not looking to knock '82-83. He's the clear cut #1 guy in the league then, and I get how folks look at the previous year's impact and think Moses was reliably going to have that impact again and again...but of course the 76ers were a bit of a bumble bee with Moses. They had one of the most dominant playoff runs in history...and then the next year - with Moses a mere 28 years old - they lose in an upset to the Nets where they lose the rebounding battle as a team and Buck Williams outrebounds Moses.
What I see in general from Moses is a guy who could have tremendous impact with the right context, but I'm uncomfortable acting as if it was always there. He needed other guys to take up some shooting volume as the primary attack, and he needed to be able to bully the opposing bigs...which he wasn't actually able to do against all other players all through the age one might assume the way we talk about guys like Wilt & Russell.
But I’d argue that this is a good thing! Anytime a guy can get massive offensive value without needing the ball (which historic-outlier offensive rebounding is of course a fantastic example of), that leaves room for other players who are really good offensively to get lots of offensive value too!
Of course, I’d also note that the Rockets were the league’s #1 offense, with a rORTG of +4.9 in 1978-79, with Moses being easily their highest scorer. So I don’t really think it’d be right to say that he couldn’t be the primary scoring option on an elite offensive team, since he definitely did that (albeit not as some cartoonishly primary scoring option—Murphy and Tomjanovich didn’t get way fewer shots than him). It’s just that he could also get huge offensive impact even while not the primary scoring option, because of his idiosyncratically great offensive rebounding. I see this as a really good thing!
One other thing I’ll note about Moses offensively is that I think he provided a really good safety valve, in a somewhat similar way to someone like Kobe or Hakeem or MJ. Basically, there are guys who are really great at difficult shot-making. In a lot of scenarios, you don’t necessarily want difficult shots taken when the offense could get a better one. But if the shot clock is running out and the offense hasn’t produced anything, you do actually ideally want a guy who you can give the ball to and they’ll be able to score fairly well even when forced to take a closely-covered bad shot potentially even while double-teamed. Moses was definitely a guy who could do that.
Ah, as I said to 70s, I understand the theory of ceiling raising here and agree we saw something impressive in '82-83, I think that the addition of Moses to those Rockets had disappointingly little holistic impact, and this is also where I think we need to remember:
Crashing the offensive boards tends to hurt your defense. In Moses' position, typically, your main value add is to secure the defense...but that's not the impact Moses had.
Re: don't think it's right to say he couldn't be the primary scorer on an elite offense. Right, the question is whether him being the primary scorer actually helped the team more than him being tertiary on that front. If we're just treading water when he adds volume, then should we talk about his volume scoring game as if it's a big deal?
Re: if the shot clock is running out, you want a guy you can give the ball to and he'll be able to score pretty well. I think we should be careful in assuming that that's what was happening as a matter of course. Remember that in the modern game, come clutch time, this typically means that bigs get demoted and perimeter guys take primacy. If Shaq isn't the focal point of his teams' crunch offense, do we really think Moses was in most years. Remember that in '78-79 he's playing with Murphy, Tomjanovic & Barry, and he himself is known for not being a good passer. Did the Rockets really try to do a clutch offense where they passed the ball to Moses and told the other 3 to stay out of the way? If that's the case, it would seem like an awful waste of perimeter playmaking talent.
Re: Moses vs Kareem. While I haven't done heavy analysis to confirm that the belief that Moses really had Kareem's number, it makes sense. I'll note two things, one obvious, one not so much:
1. Kareem was basically made to be bullied by thick guys, and at an older age, by guys with a higher motor. Makes sense he'd struggle with them.
2. If we expect that Moses' extreme offensive board crashing generally hurt his team on defense, then old-Kareem shooting possessions seem like a godsend for Moses' teams. It basically means that instead of taking advantage of the vulnerability that Moses leaves open for his team, you're giving the ball to a guy who likes to play real slow. Basically, any possession where Kareem shoots is a possession where the Lakers didn't attack when they had the advantage.
That's probably too simplistic, but I think it's a serious concern.
lessthanjake wrote:Vote for #9: Stephen Curry Alternate Vote: Magic Johnson Nomination: Moses Malone
On Steph, please see my explanation in an earlier thread (viewtopic.php?p=107697936#p107697936), as well as the various posts I’ve made about him over the course of the last bunch of threads.
Regarding Magic, I suspect that the vote will probably come down to Magic and Garnett. Garnett has incredible impact numbers, but Magic likely does too from what we can see. Garnett has more longevity, but the level of achievement Magic has in the NBA is just at a completely different level from Garnett. Obviously Magic had a much better team, and it’s possible that Garnett could’ve been just as successful on a similarly good team. But I just can’t vote for a speculative hypothetical over someone that really did have tons of success. And I don’t really value Garnett’s longevity over Magic very much, since I don’t think Garnett had more top-tier seasons, and those are the seasons I value by far the most (and Garnett didn’t achieve anything significant in his other seasons, such that I’d make an exception and value them more than normal).
All of Curry "longevity" is actually from this era. Inflated era. Magic was clearly better at peak, prime ect. Its not so close actually. Even if we assume that Curry at his peak and prime (15-19) was 95% as good as Magic (87-91), which I dont think is the case, 90% more likely, I dont think its enough for curry to surpass Magic with 2021-23 "longevity" in the inflated era. And this assuming we take additive approach, which I dont use in GOAT conversations, because In this case Oscar also is better than Curry and Magic. I like holistic approach, where Peak and prime weighted significantly more than longevity without titles, much impact and in the inflated era. Basically who was the best at their best, when they "dominated" the league.
This server consists of huge amount of Curry fanboys and nuthuggers, its obvious (you are not one of them), so its nonsentical to talk with them, 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 is the GOAT PG. And its not currChoke
But, having compiled these numbers, I’ll tell you that you’re not going to find it...
But we have...
And "better", Steph does not look. "average the single-year ranks" is not a thing no matter how fervently you try to make it one. A bigger outlier does not magically became a smaller outlier because you apply a random filter.
Averaging single-year ranks is a good way of comparing how well players did compared to their peers across a given time period. Which is exactly what we are trying to figure out. You don’t like it because it doesn’t come to a result you like, but it’s objectively a perfectly valid way to compare players across different time intervals. And indeed, it’s actually a method that’s probably inherently biased against Steph, since he plays in a more talented era, so placing higher is more difficult.
To the extent you’ve cited Cheema’s 5-year stuff that has Garnett 1st in four different time periods (and 2nd in several others), while Steph is 1st in two different time periods and 2nd in a couple others, that’s in some sense a data point in Garnett’s favor in terms of cross-period comparisons by league ranking. But it’s not a very strong one. You see, that data set only has 4 five-year time periods in which Steph was fully in his prime the whole time (it would have two more at this point, but the analysis was done a couple years ago). And those are the 4 time periods where he’s 1st twice and 2nd twice. Garnett has 6 time periods that were fully in his prime (i.e. basically the 2000’s), and he was 1st in four of them and 2nd in two of them. So an average prime placement of 1.50 for Steph and 1.33 for Garnett. Advantage Garnett I suppose, but hardly in a meaningful way, especially when we take into account that prime Steph was facing LeBron, and Garnett largely was not (and to the extent a prime Garnett time period even included one prime LeBron year, LeBron finished ahead of Garnett).
Of the candidates on the board, KG is the king of JE RAPM. Peak, prime, career, you name it. I'm also not sure why you are trying to reduce Garnett's case to longevity while acknowledging KG looks better on average for his career. KG's case is not longevity, it would be that he is better. That's "the bottom line".
KG looks better than Steph in career-wide JE RAPM. His highest values in JE RAPM are higher, but we know we can’t actually draw much of any valid conclusion from that. Meanwhile, prime vs. prime, prime Steph had better average league placement compared to his peers than prime Garnett. So it's objectively complicated. Meanwhile, Steph looks unambiguously better across a panoply of other metrics I've listed—most of which we perhaps should, if anything, weigh more highly than a RAPM calculation personally done by a random guy known to make questionable methodological decisions.
I get that DARKO is a metric that is measuring something similar
You do not need to explain to me how DARKO works. I took the liberty of doing that myself when I brought it up last thread. I am aware it has biases. That was the point. And frankly, it's odd how quickly you switched from caring to not caring about methodology:
lessthanjake wrote:
iggymcfrack wrote:This really just all flows from the specifics of one particular stat: Box Plus Minus. VORP is just a non-rate-stat version of BPM, so Moses Malone not doing well in VORP is really just not doing well in BPM. Meanwhile, this AuPM for Moses Malone takes Pollack’s on-off data and regresses it with BPM. Crucially, we know that Moses Malone’s actual plus-minus data was really good.
As I'm sure you're aware, the reason why Ben put own BPM into AUPM was to make the data more accurate. So why do you suddenly care that the box-component maybe suppressing his score?
You're welcome to chime in to the discussion about Moses. The issue there is that I have a *very specific* reason that I think that certain measures may be underrating Moses Malone in particular (i.e. that there is reason to believe a generally "accurate" measure may underrate Moses Malone by not properly valuing his historically idiosyncratic offensive rebounding value—which has been shown uniquely effective at actually dramatically raising his teams' overall offensive rebounding rate). As I pointed out in my last post, you have not raised any specific reason that the details of any particular measure would lead to it overrating Steph Curry's impact or underrating any other player's impact despite the measure generally being accurate.
And discussing this sort of thing is more important with Moses, because we don't actually have a panoply of impact metrics relating to him. There's basically AuPM and then some really low-sample-size WOWY stuff. So there's no option to just look at everything and hope that the flaws cancel out. That makes it much more important to drill down into potential flaws of the small number of indicators we do have. Maybe if we had more impact measures for Moses, there'd be ones with box priors that would value Moses's offensive rebounding a lot more and he'd look great!
You also need to make up your mind about the value of "intent" because Cheema and JE's sets were explicitly intended for the cross-period comparison.
There is no real basis for that statement. Just because they listed output from different time periods together in a list that you can further filter down by time period—which is a perfectly reasonable way of presenting data from a bunch of different time intervals—doesn’t mean they were “intended” for cross-period comparison or, more importantly, that doing so wouldn’t have the exact same flaws as making cross-period comparisons with other measures. It’s just inherently true that different periods will be scaled separately, and therefore any cross-period comparison runs into the same issue.
Regardless, I'd also caution against thinking that if someone "intended" something to be used a certain way that using it that way must not be flawed. Again, the academic output of people who are foremost in their field is often riddled with fundamental and often pretty obvious flaws (even when read/interpreted as they intended). I've literally repeatedly sat in rooms at Harvard listening to prominent academics present papers that are laughably flawed, and then when questioned about those flaws have seen them be unable to even understand the issue. And I myself have had to completely rewrite things prior to publication, because of major issues. So I'm just not going to sit here and assume that if Jeremias Engelmann or Ahmed Cheema didn’t realize something doesn’t make sense then it must make sense.
Your link shows you at "we can't precisely compare"/"it is not strictly valid". This then morphs into "we can't compare" (post #69) which leads to "not debatable premise!!!!!!!"
And all along, it's you using an approach which is "meaningless". Again, you can check the graph above. "Average placement" doesn't mean anything. As it happens, all the "not strictly valid" methods you acknowledge we can draw inferences from put KG firmly ahead.
I’ve not morphed at all (except to the extent that I initially recognized the issue with comparing values across time intervals once it was first pointed out to me). We cannot precisely compare values across different time intervals because of different scaling. This issue makes it difficult to compare players' impact metrics across time intervals. One good way to try to get around that issue is to instead compare average league placement. Of course, in certain ways that’s flawed too, since bad outliers are an issue and league placement would be biased against a player playing in a more talented league. But I've already addressed how the outlier issue if anything is biasing the data against Steph, and the same would be true of the issue about league talent since Steph has played in a league that we'd virtually all generally regard as more talented than past eras (due to more international talent, etc.). I'm open to the identification of other flaws so we can analyze those flaws and see how they cut, but you just saying average league placement "doesn't mean anything" is not a good argument (or an argument at all).
I’d urge people reading this to just peruse my prior posts about this, which were obviously far more complete in their analysis of Garnett and Curry than this
"All stats flawed so let's just spam and count" is not what I'd consider "far more complete" analysis. This double-speak where you cannot be bothered to vet what you're using but also are so confident that you set "bottom lines" isn't going to cut it. Just listing metrics that lean one way or the other is not "looking at the data in totality", it is "looking at the data in a manner which is convenient".
There's no way to "vet what [we're] using"! Surely you understand that? If our bar was that we won't look at any data unless we can rigorously vet its methodology, then we'd have essentially zero data to look at, because we don't have the necessary information to do that.
What we have are a bunch of measures that we can't really vet in any meaningful way. It's not an ideal situation. I think the most reasonable thing to do in that situation is to look at all the data in its totality, hoping that the inevitable flaws in the different measures roughly cancel out. It's basically akin to the 538 "throw in all the polls and hope their biases cancel out" approach. Not perfect by any means, but I think it's clearly better than your approach—which essentially amounts to "Only consider a given metric if its output confirms my priors, and if it doesn't confirm my priors then throw it away with little real explanation."
OhayoKD wrote:Lebron contributes more to all the phases of play than Messi does. And he is of course a defensive anchor unlike messi.
Doctor MJ wrote: Ah, as I said to 70s, I understand the theory of ceiling raising here and agree we saw something impressive in '82-83, I think that the addition of Moses to those Rockets had disappointingly little holistic impact, and this is also where I think we need to remember:
Crashing the offensive boards tends to hurt your defense. In Moses' position, typically, your main value add is to secure the defense...but that's not the impact Moses had.
My instinct is to think that crashing the offensive boards in that era didn’t hurt your defense nearly as much as it does now. Teams space out so much on offense now that crashing the offensive boards will very often entail abandoning the guy who was guarding you and running towards the basket from an outside position (i.e. actively putting yourself in a way worse position defensively than you otherwise were, in order to try to get the offensive rebound). Back then, with much less spacing and much more prominent post games, a guy like Moses Malone wasn’t really doing that. He was just positioned near the basket to begin with and stayed there to battle with his man to get rebounds. You’re not compromising your defense in even remotely the same way doing that as compared to what crashing the offensive glass requires today. Which is, of course, a huge reason why teams now don’t try to get offensive rebounds nearly as much as they did back then—the opportunity cost for doing it now is *way* higher.
Relatedly, I don’t see much indication that Moses was crashing the offensive glass more than anyone else, as opposed to just being better at it. Even to the extent that going for offensive rebounds meaningfully hurts the defense (which, as noted above, is a premise I question as it relates to that era), he’s only hurting the defense relative to other players if he’s going for offensive rebounds substantially more often than other players at his position. And I don’t really see that happening, as much as that he just was way more effective at actually getting those rebounds.
OhayoKD wrote:Lebron contributes more to all the phases of play than Messi does. And he is of course a defensive anchor unlike messi.
lessthanjake wrote:Vote for #9: Stephen Curry Alternate Vote: Magic Johnson Nomination: Moses Malone
On Steph, please see my explanation in an earlier thread (viewtopic.php?p=107697936#p107697936), as well as the various posts I’ve made about him over the course of the last bunch of threads.
Regarding Magic, I suspect that the vote will probably come down to Magic and Garnett. Garnett has incredible impact numbers, but Magic likely does too from what we can see. Garnett has more longevity, but the level of achievement Magic has in the NBA is just at a completely different level from Garnett. Obviously Magic had a much better team, and it’s possible that Garnett could’ve been just as successful on a similarly good team. But I just can’t vote for a speculative hypothetical over someone that really did have tons of success. And I don’t really value Garnett’s longevity over Magic very much, since I don’t think Garnett had more top-tier seasons, and those are the seasons I value by far the most (and Garnett didn’t achieve anything significant in his other seasons, such that I’d make an exception and value them more than normal).
All of Curry "longevity" is actually from this era. Inflated era. Magic was clearly better at peak, prime ect. Its not so close actually. Even if we assume that Curry at his peak and prime (15-19) was 95% as good as Magic (87-91), which I dont think is the case, 90% more likely, I dont think its enough for curry to surpass Magic with 2021-23 "longevity" in the inflated era. And this assuming we take additive approach, which I dont use in GOAT conversations, because In this case Oscar also is better than Curry and Magic. I like holistic approach, where Peak and prime weighted significantly more than longevity without titles, much impact and in the inflated era. Basically who was the best at their best, when they "dominated" the league.
This server consists of huge amount of Curry fanboys and nuthuggers, its obvious (you are not one of them), so its nonsentical to talk with them, 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 is the GOAT PG. And its not currChoke
Once Magic gets in I'll be voting for Curry, KG and Bird, I suspect in that order. Curry peaks higher than the other 2, and had enough longevity.
It's after that it becomes alot tougher. I'm not sure KD will have been nominated by that point, in which case hopefully I'll still have Dr J, K.Malone, Dirk, Giannis, etc, to choose from.
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
All-Time: 1965, 66 MVP Level: 1964, 68-70 Fringe MVP: 67, 71 (Due to playoffs missed) Weak MVP: 1962-63 All NBA: 1961, 72-73 All-Star or Fringe: 1974
So, out of the three: It appears West has the highest apex for me - as I think defense is giving him the edge. In terms of playoff translation as it pertains to offense, he has an argument as the best of the three. Prime consistency/quality is somewhat of a different story (where being injured / missing two playoff runs in his general prime is somewhat of a disadvantage here). I think that's where some of the divergence (if any) is coming from with him and Oscar in a career sense. I wouldn't quite say it's longevity - as I view 70s West as a better player from the two's overlapping span of 1971-73, though o.t.o.h. Oscar accrues a decent gap in career value from 1961-63 & 1964 is when I'd say it's close between the two. With West's high ends, feel comfortable giving him the edge here in this grouping - as I see that serving as a tie-breaker. Both him and Oscar have 8 years at the ~MVP threshold to Dirk's 7 - whereas West and Dirk come out with 2 more All-NBA years than Oscar (13 vs. 11). When considering the nuance longevity then is harder to accrue than longevity now, the three end up very close to one another. For now, am going to nominate West - but the ordering of them could change as these three with others gain more circulation in the projects' voting.
Mogspan wrote:I think they see the super rare combo of high IQ with freakish athleticism and overrate the former a bit, kind of like a hot girl who is rather articulate being thought of as “super smart.” I don’t know kind of a weird analogy, but you catch my drift.
DraymondGold wrote:Some Statistical Analysis of Moses
lessthanjake wrote:I’m curious if anyone can articulate to me an argument in favor of nominating someone else over Moses Malone. Only one other guy on the table was the best player in the league over significant timespan (Mikan), and Moses Malone had way better longevity than Mikan and faced much stiffer competition for being best in the world (i.e. prime Kareem). And no one else being considered on the table at this point actually won more than Moses. He led one of the greatest teams of all time and also took a team to the finals (past the 1980s Lakers) that would proceed to win 14 games on -11.12 SRS when he left a couple years later.
Hey Jake! We've agreed on our interpretation of a fair number of players, but I'm not sure we see eye-to-eye on Moses. I thought it'd be fun to raise a bit of a counter argument here
~Raw WOWY and Adjusted WOWY~:
Prime WOWY rank: 85th all time. I think we both get that WOWY is particularly noisy, especially in small off-samples, or if hyper-focusing on just a single context. And like you've said, Moses has a tiny sample of mid-season WOWY.
Thanks for the in-depth post about Moses! To address this first point, I don’t put much credit in WOWY for Moses, because he missed so few games. As far as I can tell, Backpicks is defining Moses’s prime as starting in 1977, which means that the inquiry is being swamped by Moses missing 23 games in 1977-78. There’s a few issues with that IMO:
1. Most importantly, this was not Moses at his best yet (I have him down as merely as all-star level player that year, before he took a big jump the next year), so I’m skeptical that it can really form the basis of much of a conclusion about how good he was later, especially when we have actual on-off data from stronger years for him that show him having a large on-off impact (an average of +12.3 on-off in his four years with the 76ers). In his best years, Moses barely missed games, so there’s really just no WOWY sample that can tell us much about what effect he had in those years.
2. Secondly, the Backpicks WOWY analysis of 1977-78 relies on the idea that the Rockets’s SRS was only 3.2 better in games Moses played than games Moses didn’t play, after you throw out the games that Moses played with Rudy Tomjanovich (who got injured relatively early in the season and was not there for any of Moses’s off sample). In a sense that’s perhaps a fair adjustment, but it lowers the sample of data even further, making it even more dubious to draw much of a conclusion about WOWY that is disproportionately drawn from it
3. Relatedly, it’s worth noting that, while the Backpicks analysis relies on what the SRS was, looking at the actual wins and losses doesn’t exactly tell the same story. The Rockets were 5-18 without Moses Malone that year. They were 23-36 with Moses Malone. And even if you take out Rudy T’s missed games, they were 13-23 with Moses. It’s bad either way, but that’s a pretty significant difference in record. And so I just am not really convinced that there’s much of any negative conclusion to draw from a team going 23-36 (or 13-23 without Rudy T) with Moses and 5-18 without Moses in a pre-prime year for Moses.
And the only other year that WOWY can get almost any data from is Moses missing 11 games in the 1983-1984 season. But we also know that that was a negative outlier for Moses in terms of impact, since we have actual on-off data for Moses in his 76ers seasons and his on-off in those years was: +15.6, +3.3, +21.7, and +7.2. That +3.3 year is that 1983-84 season. So basically, the two remotely significant WOWY samples come from a pre-prime year and a season that we know was a negative outlier in terms of Moses’s impact. Which seems to me like a textbook example of a biased data set. Maybe Moses’s WOWY would look incredible if he’d missed lots of games in those seasons where his on-off was +15.6 and +21.7!
But adjusted WOWYR metrics do increase the sample size! By adding in so many samples from so many different players, it can start to get a truer signal. There’s certainly a larger number of games where Moses’ teammates were in and out of the lineup. And this doesn’t even count all the opponents that were in and out of the lineup, which also helps boost the number of datapoints we can use to get a signal. Here's a rough sketch of teammates that missed time (20+ mpg), just to give a sense of the samples size:
Spoiler:
78 Rudy Tomjanovich (3rd man) missed a lot of games, more in 79 Moses (22 yo) missed a bunch As did 7th man
In 1980, Everyone on his team from 2nd to 9th man missed games. Rudy, 4th man, missed 20 games, and 6th man missed 45 games. Even more missed games from lower bench guys.
In 1981, Everyone from 3rd man to 9th missed game. Rudy (4th man) missed 30 games, 7th man missed 16.
82, 2nd, 4th-6th man missed a small amount of games. Not many though.
In 83, Erving missed 10 games, 3/5th-8 missed a small amount of games (7th man missed more )
In 84, Moses missed 11 games. Everyone from 2nd to 8th man all missed a few games (especially 6th man and 8th man)
In 85, Again a small amount of missed games from the stars but 12 missed games from 4th man
In 86, 8 missed games from Moses and Erving, 12 from 5th and 6th man, 53 from 7th man old Bob McAdoo
Of course, there’s still sample size limitations and uncertainty with adjusted WOWY metrics. The Adjustment doesn’t always get what we think is right… like crediting Reggie Lewis for some of the late 80s Celtics run slightly more because they improved when he joined the team and crediting Bird slightly less. But I don’t think it’s all noise that WOWYR is much lower on Moses than other competitors. And it’s not just this one regression method, but alt-WOWYR and GPM too!
I like WOWYR, but ultimately isn’t that WOWYR still in large part keying itself off of what happened in Moses’s missed games in 1977-78 and 1983-84, just with adjustments for teammate effects? As per the above, I don’t really think that can tell us much, since it’s really a pre-prime year and a known low-impact outlier.
~Box stats~:
You mention that Backpicks BPM is lower on him. Which is true! Out of some of the popular next tier of players: career Backpicks BPM for sure puts Karl Malone, David Robinson, Kobe Bryant, Dirk Nowitzki over Malone. It might put West, Oscar, and Erving over him too (though I haven’t checked yet).
Why? Qualitatively, Backpicks BPM is higher on defense and creation than the early all-in-one box stats like WS or PER (and it does a better job at capturing those areas than those other stats). And these are Moses’ two biggest weaknesses.
I agree we shouldn’t mindlessly throw out something that is typically accurate. But ultimately, we should also realize that accuracy here is essentially measured by general fit with RAPM in periods where we have both. And a box-composite can in general be a good fit overall (and therefore be very “accurate”) while at the same time not accurately assessing the value of a *specific* player. And we’d expect that to more likely be the case with a pretty idiosyncratic player, who may get idiosyncratic levels of value from things in a way that a well-fitting model won’t necessarily assess correctly.
Moses Malone is exactly that type of player IMO. He is a pretty extreme outlier in offensive rebounding. And a lot of box-score models don’t value offensive rebounding that highly, particularly when it comes from a center. This might actually make good sense when trying to increase the overall fit of a model. In general, I don’t think that individual offensive rebounding correlates that highly with team offensive rebounding rate (and therefore, ultimately, team offensive rating), and it may correlate even less when it’s from a center. This is probably in large part because a lot of individual offensive rebounds may not be additive (i.e. if the center didn’t get it, someone else on his team would’ve). So, on average, we might look at offensive rebounding and determine that it’s not usually all *that* valuable, and construct a box-score composite that doesn’t value it highly and is more accurate as a result. But that can break down if you get to someone who is a complete outlier in offensive rebounding. Moses Malone was getting so many offensive rebounds that it’s perfectly reasonable to think that they were much more additive than the typical offensive rebounds—i.e. a much higher percent of his rebounds would not otherwise have been gotten by his team. We do actually see evidence of this in Backpicks’ own analysis of Moses, with there being huge increases in Moses’s teams’ league-relative offensive rebounding rate when Moses joins the team and huge decreases when Moses leaves the team. Moses Malone seems to have had a uniquely huge effect on his team’s offensive rebounding rate. A model that generally downplays offensive rebounding value from centers can therefore simultaneously be a generally very accurate model while also unduly underestimating the value of an idiosyncratic player like Moses Malone.
And the same goes for other box stats. I’m just not convinced that box stats value Moses’s rebounding as much as they should, when he seems to have had a massive effect on his team’s offensive rebounding that actually isn’t at all common with the best rebounders and therefore that weightings of sophisticated models are very likely to underrate. I think perhaps the people around the league at the time that voted him MVP three times may have actually had an instinctively better handle on his idiosyncratic value in this regard.
What about the traditional box stats?
If we do go to Basketball Reference VORP: Robinson, Dirk, Karl Malone, Erving, and Kobe are all higher (no West/Oscar available).
In win shares: Oscar, Erving, Karl Malone, Dirk ahead of him (David Robinson is within 1 win share, Kobe is within 8, West is just over 15 WS below him with no box defensive stats to try to measure West’s value).
I’d say Moses looks good in Win Shares, though. Like, obviously a guy like Karl Malone will have more win shares overall than Moses, since Karl Malone simply had superior longevity. But Moses is ranked pretty highly and is also above guys like Hakeem, Kobe, Russell, West, Magic, Bird, Steph, etc. I think there’s people still left that could make a longevity case over Moses. A guy like Karl Malone definitely could. Dirk probably could as well. But they were never the NBA’s best player for a substantial timeframe, like Moses was. Thus, in my mind Moses peaked higher than they did. And, to me, that weighs higher than their longevity advantage—especially when Moses is no slouch in that regard either.
~Plus Minus Stats~
On/off: Like you mentioned, his on/off is great in certain years… but not as good in others. Moses 1983: +15.6 (1st on 76ers, Cheeks 2nd at +14.1, Erving +10.3) Moses 1984: +3.3 (5th on 76ers, behind Jones, Toney, Cheeks, Erving) Moses 1985: +21.7 (1st on 76ers, Cheeks 2nd at +14.1) Moses 1986: +7.2 (3rd on 76ers, Cheeks 1st at +20.3, Barkly 2nd at +10.6, Erving 4th at +4.6)
So the 1983 and 1985 years are great! But 1984 is really a down year like you say, and 86 also isn’t the best. It might be used to argue a good peak, but not exactly the kind of thing to suggest compelling consistency or longevity like the stuff we see from his competition.
On-off in individual years can be pretty noisy. Even LeBron has a prime year with a +1.9 on-off. Garnett has a year smack in the middle of his peak years with a +0.7 on-off. But if we take a weighted average for those 4 years for Moses, Moses comes out with a +12.3 on-off in his years with the 76ers. That is really good! And there’s only really one peak year in there, with the rest of the years being a late-prime time period, so if anything it was probably higher in the prior years. (And the Rockets SRS decreasing by an enormous 10.73 when he left is at least suggestive of Moses having huge impact on the Rockets).
Squared2020 RAPM: We also have some (limited sample) RAPM for him. Moses 1980: +1.63 (45th in league, but on only 1 game… so not really useful) Moses 1985: +6.34 (3rd in league! Behind Magic and Kareem, in 31 games) Moses 1988: -1.53 (261st in league, but in only 9 games, so not really useful).
So 1985 again looks great! But all three are in a limited sample, and 1980/88 are really too small to use. And it seems there isn't enough of a sample size to assuage concerns about non 83/85 years.
I forgot about the Squared data! Unfortunately, here, I don’t think it really tells us anything, as you note. The samples for 1980 and 1988 are too small to have any meaning. And the 1985 data is really great, but we actually already know Moses’s on-off for the whole season that year was extremely high, so that’s no surprise.
Me personally, I absolutely don't see him as the best in the world for as long as you do. You mention you thought "Moses Malone was the best player in the world in a five-year span (1978-1979 to 1982-1983)."
I do not see him being the best player in the world in 1979 or 1980. To me, Kareem absolutely had that title (see, e.g. , Thinking Basketball's Greatest Peaks series on 77–79 Kareem). Even in 1981, I'd argue that Kareem still has a case (and may have a case after Moses' 1983 peak... e.g. note that Kareem's 1985 RAPM is higher than Moses, and Kareem had a great playoffs).
Around 1980–81, Bird enters the picture, and I don't see what puts Moses clearly over Bird in those years (Bird entered the league as one of the best rookies ever). I've also seen people argue there's a case for Erving in the pre-83 years, if you think it's poor fit and situation that's dropping his raw on/off stuff, though I don't want to make the case for Erving just yet.
Anyway, let me know what you agree and disagree with!
I think Kareem has a case for that five-year period, but overall I see Moses as superior. His PER was higher than Kareem’s. His Win Shares were higher than Kareem’s (despite his team having fewer wins, and therefore fewer win shares to go around). He did substantially better than Kareem when they faced each other, including in their two playoff series’s in that timeframe. He won 3 MVPs. He did better in all-NBA voting. So I guess the way I see it is that viewers and people around the league clearly saw Moses as having been superior at the time, and analysis of box score stats doesn’t make that conclusion look silly at all, nor does it look at all silly if we look at how they did against each other. Meanwhile, putting Moses above Kareem in this time period also makes sense if we look at team results IMO. The Lakers did win two titles in this time period, while Moses got only one, but the one year in this time period that Moses had a comparably talented team, Moses’s team dominated in a way that those Lakers did not (i.e. 65 wins, only 1 playoff loss). And with a weak team, he managed to drag them to the finals once in a way that Kareem didn’t get even close to doing early in the period (or in the few years prior to this period) when he was on fairly weak teams. It’s just hard for me to get to a place where I’d actually put Kareem over Moses in this time period, even if I don’t think the gap was huge.
1979-1983 Kareem in the PS Adjusted 25.4 pts per 75 (rTS% of 7.5%)
ScoreVal: 2.2 PlayVal: 0.1
Backpicks BPM: 5.6 BPM: 6.6 PER: 24.2 WS/48: .196
1979-1983 Moses Malone in the PS
Adjusted 24.7 pts per 75 (rTS% of 3%)
ScoreVal: 1.6 PlayVal: -0.8
Backpicks BPM: 3.3 BPM: 4.2 PER: 24.0 WS/48: .195
Moses doesn't look definitively better when you just look at their raw numbers in the PS during this stretch. Also, not to be a jerk, but I find it interesting how you used PER, and winshares to justify Moses being the best player during this stretch. Yet, questioned the validity of defensive metrics that are much more sophisticated in their box-score inputs than PER and WS, when I attempted to shed light on how good of a defender Hakeem is compared to other legends.
LukaTheGOAT wrote: 1979-1983 Kareem in the PS Adjusted 25.4 pts per 75 (rTS% of 7.5%)
ScoreVal: 2.2 PlayVal: 0.1
Backpicks BPM: 5.6 BPM: 6.6 PER: 24.2 WS/48: .196
1979-1983 Moses Malone in the PS
Adjusted 24.7 pts per 75 (rTS% of 3%)
ScoreVal: 1.6 PlayVal: -0.8
Backpicks BPM: 3.3 BPM: 4.2 PER: 24.0 WS/48: .195
Moses doesn't look definitively better when you just look at their raw numbers in the PS during this stretch. Also, not to be a jerk, but I find it interesting how you used PER, and winshares to justify Moses being the best player during this stretch. Yet, questioned the validity of defensive metrics that are much more sophisticated in their box-score inputs than PER and WS, when I attempted to shed light on how good of a defender Hakeem is compared to other legends.
I think this is an unfair criticism that is referring to a discussion that is not analogous. I used PER and win shares as one part of the overall puzzle. I also emphasized that he won 3 MVPs—suggesting people at the time saw him as the best/most valuable player in the league. I also pointed out that he generally got the better of the other candidate for best player in their head to head matchups. I also pointed out how badly his Rockets team dropped when he left (not long after he’d taken them to the finals) and how dominant the 76ers were the year he joined. The PER and win shares stuff is definitely not conclusive at all (stuff like PER and win shares never are!). But I didn’t portray them as if they were. Indeed, I actually specifically framed this in the very post you are quoting as a supportive data point, rather than the main thrust of my argument: What I said was that “analysis of box score stats doesn’t make [the 3 MVP wins] look silly at all.” As in, it is something that helps to validate a stronger data point (the 3 MVPs), rather than being the main fact that I’m basing my view on. The proper analogy with our Hakeem discussion is if I’d asked what evidence there is that Hakeem is the #2 defender of all time, and you’d been able to say that he had won DPOY more times than anyone else (as Moses did with MVPs in this time period) and that box-score measures validate that he deserved those DPOYs, as did Hakeem’s team dropping enormously defensively when he left. It’s not analogous to an argument that simply used box-score measures and that’s it.
Also, I don’t recall doing any more than *asking a question* about whether the measures you posted were just based on box-score info (i.e. I didn’t say that that made them useless), so I don’t know why that response would cause you to get critical of me for ever referring to box-score measures in the future. (See my response here, for reference on exactly what I said: viewtopic.php?p=107727309#p107727309).
OhayoKD wrote:Lebron contributes more to all the phases of play than Messi does. And he is of course a defensive anchor unlike messi.
One_and_Done wrote:1. Wes Unseld and Cowens beat out Kareem for MVP too. MVPs were awarded even more poorly in the 70s than today. I don't put too much stock in that. How many of those MVPs would you say Moses actually deserved in hindsight? Moses game just doesn't translate to MVP play today either. As I alluded to, his skill set is overrated in most eras, but especially today. A big without any real offensive depth, who doesn't protect the rim, and makes his living grabbing offensive rebounds in the paint. He'd probably be torched in pick and roll too. Sounds like a tough fit.
2. Karl Malone wasn't even the best player, but I'm not sure Moses was; he was just wrongly perceived to be. He was also perceived to be in worse leagues. I'm not going to base a vote on anything as arbitrary as "won a title", and Moses won his ring by joining an existing contender anyway.
1. Wes Unseld did not ever get the MVP over Kareem. He got it the year before Kareem entered the league. And Cowens won the MVP over Kareem once, not three times. Cowens also only won it because his team won a massive 68 games. That’s very much not what happened with Moses Malone. Moses won his first two MVPs without his team even winning more games than Kareem’s! Indeed, in 1981-1982, Moses got the MVP in a year that Kareem’s team won 10 more games than Moses’s. Indeed, Moses’s team won the least games of any top-10 MVP finisher that year. For his first MVP, no one in the top 5 in MVP voting was on a team that won fewer games than Moses’s team. Moses was just regarded as the best player and therefore got the award.
I genuinely don’t see the point about skill set. Physically dominant big men have been good in every era. And he had a good mid-range jump shot too—which in this era probably would end up being a three-point shot (note: his FT% was good enough that I don’t think it is all that speculative that he could’ve shot the three). He’d be like Joel Embiid with much more dominance on the boards and a bit less rim protection. In any event, I think most people are voting based on how a player played within their era, not based on some speculative notion of how well they’d do in the current era.
2. Who was better than Moses from 1978-1979 to 1982-1983? Kareem? Moses had a higher PER and more win shares than Kareem in that timeframe. He won three MVPs to Kareem’s one MVP. He was superior in all-NBA selections in that timeframe. When their teams met in the playoffs twice in those years, Moses’s team won both times, with Moses being better than Kareem in both series. The only other guy to win an MVP in that timeframe was Dr. J, and it was pretty obvious Moses was better than Dr. J, given that they were on the same team for a year and Moses was the team’s clear best player. Bird was really good in that timeframe too (he was there for four years of it), but was pretty clearly statistically inferior to Moses. The Celtics did beat Moses’s Rockets twice in the playoffs, but Bird didn’t actually outplay Moses—Moses just had a clearly weaker team. Magic was around too, but wasn’t quite at that level yet, and was definitely outplayed by Moses in the series’s that they played against each other. I’m not really sure who would really have a particularly good case over Moses in that timespan.
i don't know where i have moses in this project, but i wrote this back during the peaks project (i redacted some snarkiness ) where i tried to get moses higher than he ended up. specifically the part about how much better moses was than the Sixers second best player in the 1983 playoffs. the Sixers second best player had way worse stats than any of the other team's #2's. it seems much more a one man show than it appears to be:
"He doesn't play an aesthetically pleasing type of basketball. He doesn't always find the open man or protect the rim. He doesn't do the things impact metrics love. Just give him the ball and get out of the way. Get out of his way even more if a rebound was to be had. I tend to think of the NBA as much simpler and more primitive the further back you go. You guard your guy, he guards you. Possessions weren't valued like now. People weren't breaking down film and doing analytics on their team strategy. Sometimes an ass-kicker like Moses was what you needed (and sometimes you still do). I just watched a highlight from Game 2 in 1981 against the Lakers, which the Lakers actually won. Kareem played well but he never looked like he wanted to guard Moses. Malone would get the ball against whoever in the post and, even if a double came, he just got to the basket. They didn't show a lot of rebounds, but Moses did get a few impressive blocks. There's nothing pretty about his game except the result. Anyway, back to the regularly scheduled copy and paste...
Fo' Fo' Fo'. Led the league in regular season PER and WS48 while putting up 24.5 ppg and 15.3 rpg and winning MVP. Then led the playoffs in PER (25.7) and WS48 (0.260) while putting up 26 ppg and 15.8 rpg on 58.7 TS%. In the Finals, he demolished (35 year old) Kareem with 25.8 ppg and 18.0 rpg in a sweep. I was actually just looking at this season to see where I might put it and then convinced myself when I looked at the rest of the Sixers in the playoffs. After Moses at 25.7 PER and 0.260 WS48, the next highest was Maurice Cheeks at 17.3 PER and Bobby Jones at 0.164 WS48 (Dr J really fell off in the playoffs). That puts Moses as far and away the best player in arguably the most dominant playoff run ever. One that he called before it happened just to make it more impressive. This isn't Shaq with Kobe or KD/Steph all having each other's backs in dominant 1-loss runs. Here are 6 dominant title runs I could think of off the top of my head and the separation between the #1 and #2 player on those teams, sorted by WS48 differential:
We can see that for the 2001 Lakers, 2017 Warriors, and 1999 Spurs, the #1 and #2 were practically identical. Except for BPM, Moses ends up there with MJ as being easily the best player on his team. And for what it's worth, BPM had Moses as the 4th best Sixer in the regular season, almost 3 behind the team leader, so that shows how much more it liked him in the postseason that he led the team. This may have been a guy who joined a stacked team, but it ended up a one man wrecking crew."
