RealGM 2023 Top 100 Project - #9 (Kevin Garnett)

[LukaTheGOAT]

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).

My apologies I'd I got the wrong implication from your post. Although, idk what the point of your, "isn't this box-score," post considering it would have to be as we don't have plus-minus for the years listed.

Also, I never said you came to the conclusion through using PER and WS. I was only pointing out that you are willing to use box-score metrics in your evaluation.

[Doctor MJ]

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.

I can understand the theory that crashing the boards wouldn't hurt then as much then as it does now - it's definitely something that depends on what the opposing offense is looking to do. I'll say though:

1. It's not a question of whether the Rockets' defense was bad with Moses, or whether it hit its nadir of badness when Moses was there - it was and it did - it's really just a question of why it was and why it did. Maybe Moses' role was just in being bad at the stuff a half court center was expected to do, but I'd be inclined to think that his half court defense was better than that and that his focus on the offensive glass was holding the rest of his defense back.

2. The reality is that the thing that always makes crashing the offensive glass more problematic defensively is when the opponent looks to attack in transition. And there that's always going to be a thing that varies from opponent to opponent within the league based on their strategy and skills.

3. I don't think it's realistic to assume that all teams are looking to crash the boards equally, any more than it makes sense to assume all teams are looking to attack in transition equally. Yes contemporaries will tend to have things in common relative to other eras, but that won't make them identical.

4. Re: less damaging when not crashing from outside. Maybe a little, but the reality is that just because you and an opposing big are both in there battling, that doesn't mean none of the rest of the opposing players are leaking out for the break. Stopping the break is about getting back to protect your own goal before the offense gets an easy shot, and so if any of the opponents get there before you, you're vulnerable.

I'll also note that while we might be imagining it being opposing bigs who are racing down to receive the pass from their teammates, that's certainly not how it was for the Showtime Lakers. Easy to battle down low with Kareem for the rebound only to look back and see Magic propelling the ball up toward Cooper or Worthy.

[Doctor MJ]

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

falco, please see your PMs.
Doc

[ZeppelinPage]

Vote: Magic Johnson
Nomination: Jerry West

Among the available options, I have Magic the highest. I would prefer to vote West or Oscar though, so I'll dedicate some time so that they might gain traction, starting with West. To put it simply, Magic is the greatest passer ever and the value he brings as an offensive engine while bringing size, versatility, and rebounding to the table is too much for me to ignore among the current candidates. I don't see other candidates having quite his level of overall impact. Now, onto West:

Everyone here is knowledgeable enough to know just how good West was on offense during his time. His TS+ numbers on such a high volume are among the greatest ever. He was a fantastic all-around player that could drive or utilize his lighting fast pull-up to catch defenders off-guard. Perhaps later on I'll post some more on West's offensive capabilities, especially his passing.

What I did want to bring to light was Jerry West's defensive ability. Earlier I saw someone mention something along the lines of "West was a good defender but nothing spectacular" so I did want to go into a little more detail about what coaches, players, and writers of the time thought about West's defense. This is important because, while there is a good amount of footage on West out there, nobody watched West more than these contemporary sources. Afterwards, I wanted to show more of what West can do on film.

"I don't even like to talk about myself but I think I would have set a steal record that no one would have ever come close to--no one."
-- Jerry West on Point Forward with Andre Igoudala and Evan Turner

"I think the best player that I had play defense against me was Jerry West."
-- Sam Jones in a 2011 ESPN interview

Jerry West was around 6'5" in shoes. He's spoken about his athletic abilities before, but he was quite a standout in his era and would hold up even today. He was quick, long (around a 6'9" wingspan), and could jump higher than most players.

Through my research I've found what seems like countless mentions of Jerry West's defense. His stealing and blocking ability was frequently mentioned:

"Certainly, he blocks more shots than any other guard ever and more than most centers. Then, too, he breaks up a lot of plays."
-- Bill Sharman in 1965, years before he coached West

Spoiler:

"Jerry is a superstar on offense who can be just as valuable on defense and you can't find too many of those around . . . He blocks more shots than any other guard."
-- Warriors Coach Bill Sharman in 1967, years before he coached West

Spoiler:

"At his position, nobody does as good an all-around job. Bill Russell is 6-10, so he is big enough to plug up the middle, but West deflects more passes and blocks a lot of shots."
-- Fred Schaus in 1967

Spoiler:

"...I lost count of all his steals and blocked shots."
--Basketball column by John Hall following 1968 Western Conference Finals

Spoiler:

"Sure, Jerry gets a lot of steals, but people often overlook how many times he touches the ball on defense during the game. He has the quickest hands of any player I've ever seen."
-- Hot Rod Hundley on West in 1969

Spoiler:

"[Jerry West] merely leads the NBA in assists and the world in steals, deflected passes and broken dribbles."
-- 1970

Spoiler:

Jerry West records 7 steals in the 3rd quarter against the Sonics:

Spoiler:

Jerry West records 9 steals and a "few" blocks:

Spoiler:

Jerry West records 10 steals in three quarters:

Spoiler:

Jerry West records 12 steals against the Phoenix Suns in the 1970 playoffs:

Spoiler:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Praise of West's general defensive abilities was also common:

"Right close by his offensive prowess was his defensive ability, and to me, Jerry West was the most underrated defensive player in that era."
-- Red Auerbach

"West is the greatest superstar in the league at both ends of the court."
-- Warriors Coach Bill Sharman in 1968, years before he coached West

Spoiler:

"I've often said he's the best defensive guard EVER to play the game . . . I know he has two or three times more blocked shots than any guard who lived."
-- Lakers coach Bill Sharman in 1973

Spoiler:

"He is the best defensive guard in the league."
-- Chicago Bulls coach Johnny Kerr in 1968

Spoiler:

"It's the best defensive job done on me this year -- or any year for that matter."
-- Hall of Famer Lou Hudson after 1970 Western Conference Finals where Jerry West held him to 16.3 PPG on a 29 FG%

Spoiler:

"Jerry's defense is what they miss the most when he's not there . . . West gives more defensive effort when the other team has the ball than any other of the big offensive stars in the entire NBA."
--Cincinnati Royals player on West in 1964

Spoiler:

This is all just a snippet of many more mentions regarding West's defense that I have found, far too many to list here.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Let's take a look at the film and see if it supports what contemporary accounts are telling us.

West has described "seeing the game in slow motion" and thinking about the game in "angles" as a key reason for his impactful defense. His long arms and quick hands could find these angles and poke the ball free. This, combined with his leaping ability, led to plays like this:

West Steal to Win Game 3 of 1962 Finals:

Spoiler:

West 3 Blocks vs Warriors - 1964:

Spoiler:

Spoiler:

Spoiler:

West 2-on-1 Transition Block into Steal (Lakers Coach Fred Schaus Commentating) - 1965:

Spoiler:

West Back-to-Back Steals at End of Game 7 of the 1966 Finals:

Spoiler:

Spoiler:

West Steal and Block vs 76ers - 1969:

Spoiler:

Spoiler:

West Pressuring and Deflecting - 1969 Western Conference Finals:

Spoiler:

West Blocks Sam Jones Twice and Steals Pass - Game 1 of 1969 Finals:

Spoiler:

Spoiler:

West Disrupts Celtics in Transition for Steal and Reads Pass for Steal - Game 4 of 1969 Finals:

Spoiler:

Spoiler:

West Uses Length to Strip Connie Hawkins - Game 7 of 1970 Western Division Semifinals:

Spoiler:

West Pokes Ball Away for Steal - 1970:

Spoiler:

West's threat level on defense could help negate the transition game of teams like the Celtics. In Game 7 of the 1962 NBA Finals, Jerry West falls back off missed shots to ensure he's there to disrupt the Celtics' fast break. Not only does he block this Sam Jones drive:

Spoiler:

But his presence alone was making it more difficult to pass or get open looks:

Spoiler:

Spoiler:

Much like the written sources, this is but a tiny glimpse of West's defense, but he consistently displays this high-impact defense that is mentioned from people of the time period. I believe West is one of the greatest defenders of his era, and among the greatest stealers and off-ball defenders to ever play the game.

[ceoofkobefans]

This is my voting post

Vote: Kobe Bryant

Here’s a comparison between the nominees + Kobe in some career Impact metrics aggregates (this way that longevity is actually being accounted for and not punishing players).

Career VORP (RS+PO)

Garnett: 106.3
Magic: 98.31
Kobe: 96.3
Bird: 92.59
Curry: 78.1

Career Win Shares (RS+PO)

Garnett: 207.84
Kobe: 201
Magic: 188.43
Bird: 170.66
Curry: 149.69

Career RAPTOR WAR (RS+PO)

Garnett: 216.9
Magic: 216.5
Kobe: 210
Bird: 192.1
Curry: 187.7

Here’s a comparison of some PO stats of the 6 in their 3yr peaks

08-10 Kobe (IA/75)

30.5 PPG
5.6 APG
5.8 RPG
1.5 SPG
3 TPG
+3.9 rTS%
4.7 AuPM
7.8 BPM
6.3 BP BPM
8.1 RAPTOR

84-86 Bird
23.9 PPG
5.9 APG
8.9 RPG
1.8 SPG
.8 BPG
2.7 TPG
+4.8 rTS%
8.8 BPM
7.3 BP BPM
7.9 RAPTOR

86-88 Magic
20.3 PPG
12.7 APG
6.4 RPG
1.6 SPG
3.1 TPG
+6.4 rTS%
8.2 BPM
7.3 BP BPM
8.8 RAPTOR

15-17 Steph
28.8 PPG
6.5 APG
5.8 RPG
1.8 SPG
.3 SPG
3.9 TPG
+8.3 rTS
+4.4 AuPM
+8.5 BPM
+6.5 BP BPM
+9.1 RAPTOR

Didn’t include KG since he doesn’t have a real 3yr PO stretch (unless you want 2 years with one series which I’m not interested in looking at)

Included these just because I know most people in this forum value box score numbers and impact metrics and these show Kobe being very comparable to these 5 peak for peak. He obviously has strong team success indicators with WOWY/WOWYR data comparable to these guys and guys that have already been voted into the top 10. He also has really strong team ratings from an offensive stand point

Lakers rORTG in games Kobe played 99-13

99: +5.4
00: +4.9
01: +6.4
02: +5.7 (+2.5 in 15 GP w/o Shaq)
03: +4.3 (-4.7 in 15 GP w/o Shaq)
04: +4.5
05: +3.2 (Shaq Leaves)
06: +3.1
07: +2.5
08: +5.5 (+9.6 in 27 games w Pau)
09: +4.5
10: +2.2
11: +4.4
12: +1.7
13: +2.9

these only improve in the playoffs (Kobe was apart of 2 teams with a +5 rORTG over a 5Yr span in the playoffs) and outside of Shaq these supporting casts are not very good (lakers are defensively slanting outside of Kobe and Shaq and this is more emphasized after Shaq leaves).

Kobe also has great longevity staying at a weak mvp level or higher from the start of the century until the 2013.

Here’s a comparison between the 6 in mvp voting throughout their careers

MVPs won

Magic: 3
Bird: 3
Steph: 2
Kobe: 1
KG: 1

Top 3 placements

Magic: 9
Bird: 8
Kobe: 5
KG: 4
Steph: 3


Top 5 placements

Kobe: 11
Magic: 9
Bird: 9
KG: 5
Steph: 4

Top 7 placements

Kobe: 11
Magic: 9
Bird: 9
Steph: 6
KG: 5

Top 10 placements

Kobe: 12
Bird: 11
Magic: 10
Steph: 9
KG: 7

To continue with the copy paste I’d like to show their WOWYR numbers per Backpicks.com since the site is back up (data not available for Steph sadly)

Scaled WOWYR

Magic: +9.3
Kobe: +6
KG: +5.7
Bird: +3.8

Alt Scaled WOWYR

Magic: +9.3
Bird: +6.5
KG: +6.3
Kobe: +5.1

10yr GPM

Magic: +8.3
KG: +6.8
Bird: +5.8
Kobe: +5.4

Prime WOWYR

Magic: +10.1
Kobe: +6.5
KG: +6.2
Bird: +4.1

Avg WOWYR

Magic: +9.3
KG: +6.3
Kobe: +5.8
Bird: +5

5Yr peaks in PI RAPM (this sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KNPi1_ttTJondEhrtf1Xzcm5JF5QARpllg39kAp70Bg/edit)

KG: +7.3
Steph: +5.8
Kobe: +5.3

Scaled APM

Steph: +6.3 (only 3yrs)
KG: +5.9 (+7.1 3yr)
Kobe: +5.3 (+5.5 3yr)

Iirc these are RS only samples which means they don’t account for Kobe being an all time PO riser while Kg is a dropper (and Steph also isn’t a very big riser either).

From an Offensive standpoint Kobe is very much comparable to Larry bird while being far superior to KG. I’d have a tier below Steph offensively peak wise. Kobe gets heavily underrated as a playmaker the most which is thanks in huge part to the media narrative being told that he was some shot chucking ball hog that never passed. Not only is this silly it’s quite the opposite of the truth. At his peak Kobe is averaging upwards of 6 IA AST/75 and is doing this with an amazing turnover economy (barley turns the ball over with a huge load). His box playmaking stats are actually pretty comparable to bird and superior to kg.


Ast% cTOV% box OC and Passer rating in the RS by year

Name Box OC PR AST% cTOV%

Kobe
01: 9.1, 6.2, 23%, 8.7%
02: 9.2, 6.2, 25.9%, 8.3%
03: 11.3, 6.6, 27.2%, 8.6%
04: 8.2, 7.6, 24.4%, 8.1%
05: 11, 5.6, 28.5%, 10.6%
06: 11.8, 6.4, 24.1%, 7.1%
07: 10.8, 6.2, 25.5%, 8.4%
08: 9.7, 6.7, 23.9%, 8.4%
09: 10, 6.8, 23.8%, 7.4%
10: 9.6, 6.3, 23.8%, 8.9%
11: 11.5, 6.9, 26.7%, 8.6%
12: 9.7, 6.5, 23.7%, 9.3%
13: 10.6, 6.2, 29.7%, 9.8%

Bird
80: 5.4, 5.4, 18.5%, 10.9%
81: 7.9, 5.9, 20.4%, 11.6%
82: 9.2, 6.5, 22.5%, 10.7%
83: 9.2, 6.9, 22.4%, 9.6%
84: 10.4, 7.5, 26.2%, 9.2%
85: 8.9, 7.2, 25.7%, 8.2%
86: 8.9, 7.5, 26.3%, 9%
87: 11, 7.6, 28.6%, 8.5%
88: 10.9, 6.9, 25.7%, 7.3%
90: 9.8, 7.6, 28.9%, 8.9%
91: 7.6, 8, 25.9%, 9.9%
92: 8.8, 8.2, 26.9%, 9%

KG
99: 5.3, 6, 21.3%, 9.9%
00: 6.5, 5.9, 21.5%, 10.6%
01: 6.4, 6.6, 21.8%, 9.6%
02: 6.6, 6, 22.4%, 9.5%
03: 7.1, 7.3, 25.8%, 9%
04: 7.9, 5.6, 24.4%, 8.3%
05: 7.7, 6.4, 27.1%, 9.4%
06: 5.3, 6.3, 20.2%, 9.2%
07: 5.9, 6, 19.5%, 9.5%
08: 5.3, 6.2, 19.9%, 8.8%
09: 4, 6.8, 14.7%, 8.5%
10: 4.2, 7.1, 15.7%, 8.7%

Again these are RS numbers only you have to also mentally curve for 2 being playoff droppers and one being one of the biggest playoff risers ever.

Think longevity is what really makes the difference when comparing Kobe to bird and Steph especially. I think there’s enough evidence to support the 3 being on a Similar tier in their peaks but Kobe has about 4 more high quality years without missing a full year in his prime which is enough for me to have a hard time seeing one of those two over Kobe all time.

KG i also see peaking similar to Kobe (although I have Kobe > kg as opposed to worse than bird and curry). Kobe also has a longevity advantage due to KGs body wearing down first (tbf Kobe has slightly worse longevity inside their peaks). Also think Kobe is up there for most consistent players ever. He just constantly put out mvp to all time years and didn’t fluctuate much year to year.

Kobe vs Magic is pretty much the same story as Kobe v Bird where they’re very similar peak wise but Kobe’s superior longevity and durability makes it hard to see the case against him.

Nominate: Karl Malone

Not really in the mood to heavily gas Karl Malone rn but the reason I’m nominating him so highly is because he is the king of longevity. He never misses games he’s producing at the same level for over a decade and he stays playing at very high level into his late 30s. Combine that with a clear MVP level peak and you get a t15 player ever sadly

Edit: i forgot to add an alternate

Alternate: Kevin Garnett

KG is a weird guy for me. Impact metrics love him but he’s a clear PO dropper and I question just how valuable is Offense can really be in the PO. But he’s clearly the best defender out of all the nominees. I’m lower on his peak because of my questions on his offensive game and I think he has enough longevity to get over bird Magic and Steph. The question for me is whether or not it’s good enough to put him at the top of the Magic bird Steph tier or if it puts him in the Hakeem wilt bill tier (7-9 on my list).

[f4p]

Voting
1. Magic Johnson

Nominate
George Mikan

if i was the only one who could vote (a man can dream), i would've voted magic #5. but since that clearly wasn't the direction the project was going, i voted for hakeem, and hakeem ended up exactly where i would have had him anyway at #6.

with magic, i am one of the ones who doesn't really hold his longevity against him. he retired for a completely unique reason in nba history. he wasn't injured, his skills didn't deteriorate. he was still excellent. his numbers as an overweight 36 year old after 4 years off tell me he would have almost certainly been excellent well into his mid-30's.

he started off as a 20 year old rookie. and far from a slow start, with an nba finals clinching game in front of him, with Cap not playing, he put up a 42/15/7 masterpiece to lead his team to victory. does that overstate how great he was early in his career?
sure. but it showed his ceiling in any given game was already tremendously high. it seemed to show a flair for the moment and the big stage right from the very start. and at 31 he was still taking a team to the finals without kareem. the year after winning 63 games without kareem. he basically non-stop led top tier, and often #1, offenses for basically his whole career. even after kareem retired.

5 titles in 9 years, the driving force for most of them. showed the tiniest indication of a dip in 1991 (to be expected at 31), but give or take in line with his peak years and almost certain to have 14+ years of very good to all-time play if not for the retirement. the best player of his decade.

- by my normalized box calculation, basically the same in the playoffs as the regular season so no dip.
- 28-4 as an SRS favorite
- 4-4 as an SRS underdog but 6 of those are <2 SRS underdog so not much to write home about
- like tim duncan, average loss is as a favorite so a little reason to hold him back there
- should not have lost to the rockets in 1986 and really not in 1981 even if he was injured. if lebron had it easy making 8 straight finals in the east, the lakers had it even easier and couldn't match that.
- on the other hand, 5 actual titles vs 2.5 expected titles, one of the higher deltas out there.

did he have a ton of talent to help him? most definitely. one of the great "per year" franchise situations ever. drafted with kareem on the team. an entire other #1 overall pick in james worthy (who lived up to his #1 pick status) added just 3 years later. an embarrassment of riches. which is why there had better have been a lot of winning. and there was. 50 wins every season. 9 finals appearances. already showing greatness at age 20 and still going very strong and making the finals at age 31.

[penbeast0]

Jerry's defense is what they miss the most when he's not there . . . West gives more defensive effort when the other team has the ball than any other of the big offensive stars in the entire NBA."
--Cincinnati Royals player on West in 1964

Bit of a swipe at Oscar's defensive effort since that is an unnamed teammate.

[eminence]

Love the shout outs.

I think Tatum, Haynes & Clifton are the clear top 3 Globetrotters from this Golden Age from what I see.

Haynes is a tricky one to peg competitively because his dribbling skill is from an era where much of the value of dribbling was from stalling. You gave the ball to Haynes once you had the lead, and it was so hard to get the ball from him without overcommitting defenders that a lot of time could be wasted. Of course dribbling never stopped being valuable, but it changed. Haynes signature was going to ground and playing keep away, which is very different thing from a killer crossover while driving to the rim.

It's possible that he could have been great in the NBA, but the NBA prioritized Clifton while the Globetrotters prioritized Haynes along with Tatum-pivot-clown descendants. Haynes & Tatum were more entertaining, Clifton had the body.

Gates is certainly a big deal, and I think he too could have done more in the NBL if White basketball was ready for a Black star.

Re: Clifton untapped potential? 2 biggest things about him specifically:

1. He said that he wasn't used as a star the way he'd been on Black teams. Possible that's sour grapes, but it's a thing to keep in mind.

2. Scoring was his thing. He was good at other things, but he was the guy leading the New York Rens to the Finals of the final World Professional Basketball Tournament (WPBT) in 1948 where they lost 75-71 to the Lakers. He made the 1st team for the tournament - the only Ren to make it - while 3 Lakers made it (Mikan, Pollard, Schaeffer). In the title game Mikan scored 40 while Clifton scored 24.

Beyond this, I've just seen various anecdotes along these lines. Black players talk about being expected to be enforcers. Worth noting that the guy who was first given this opportunity was Maurice Stokes, who was born about 11 years younger than Clifton. While you can ask yourself whether Stokes just happened to be the first Black player to warrant this level of primacy, I think we know based on the WPBT that elite White basketball had nothing on elite Black basketball by the end of the '30s. There was just a fear that White fans would abandon the league if they allowed it to become a Black league.

Re: integration, Blacks in NBL. Right, but the BAA banned Blacks, so when it swallowed the NBL, Blacks were out of luck.

This lasted until the most powerful man in the BAA - Ned Irish the owner of the Knicks- decided he wanted Clifton to better compete against Mikan and strong-armed the rest of the league.

I think Haynes/dribblers in general get remembered for that because it was so unique/entertaining, I don't think it was actually a particularly valuable on-court thing to be doing. But Haynes was certainly capable of playing serious basketball, I believe he was usually the leading scorer for the Trotters in their exhibitions vs the Lakers (I wish he'd been on the Trotters when they had their 2 exhibitions vs the Royals, narrowly missing out on the best guard clash of the era). Led his college team to a win over the Trotters prior to signing with them.

I don't disagree with validity to the general idea of Black players being held back from offensive stardom in the early days (particularly the BAA) - just not sure Clifton in particular had the chops. The NBL much much more open on this front (Boswell made All-NBL in '43 and was 4th in the league in pts, admittedly basically a 4 team year) - not too surprising, at the time the upper midwest/rustbelt was pretty much at the forefront in terms of racial equity. (complete side-note here: I've never really looked much into the AAU teams and how/when they integrated, that's something I should do sometime).

From my impression that was a bit of a high-end scoring game from Clifton, looking at the Trotters exhibitions against the Lakers he averaged something like 12 pts/game.

I would push back on the WPBT showing significant evidence of Black ball being superior at that point in time (equal to everybody but Mikan is about where I'd put it). The Rens came home with 2 titles in 10 years (disguised as the Washington Bears in '43) and the Trotters once in 7 years. For exhibitions - the Trotters went 1-1 vs the Royals, with the Royals owning the more emphatic win, though history remembers the upsets the Lakers went 5-2 vs them in the Mikan era. Mikan also led the OG Celtics squad (named the 'George Mikan Allstars' for the event, but as a team clearly inferior to the Lakers) to a 2-1 exhibition win over the Trotters in Hawaii in '48.

Edit: Also, I'd feel bad not mentioning Don Barksdale as the first black NBA Allstar in 53 (with teammate Fred Scolari, so at least seen as a co-star).

[eminence]

Jerry's defense is what they miss the most when he's not there . . . West gives more defensive effort when the other team has the ball than any other of the big offensive stars in the entire NBA."
--Cincinnati Royals player on West in 1964

Bit of a swipe at Oscar's defensive effort since that is an unnamed teammate.

Twist - what if it was Oscar?

But agreed, West was clearly the superior defender.

[Gibson22]

This one should be magic.
The ones I'd consider for the next spot are bird, curry, magic, oscar. Then I would have kobe. KG, karl malone. And then the rest

On this note, do you think that kobe has a legit case over oscar or west? I'm not saying he doesn't have any argument, he has some longevity (which is kind era relative), probably has defensive advantage over robertson, rings, and if you consider them really close you could give the advantage to kobe because he played in the 00s and not in the 60s, but I struggle to think he has a solid case over one of them. Oscar had tremendous offensive impact, consistently leading n.1 offenses which would fall apart without him, he was posting +10rts scoring seasons on high volume and he was the best playmaker. He was easily the best playmaker of the pre 3 point era and a top 4 scorer, making him in my opinion the best offensive player (would probably go oscar kaj west). The offensive advantage that oscar has is clearly, imho, smaller than the little defensive advantage that we have reason to suppose kobe has over him.
And west has such a big defensive advantage while also being a better offensive player (more efficient scorer, better playmaker, just as much combination of spacing/gravity), and all these legendary playoff performances.
I just think that, compared to their peers, those 2 just had more stand up skills compared to kobe. Better athletes, playmakers, shooters.

[Doctor MJ]

Love the shout outs.

I think Tatum, Haynes & Clifton are the clear top 3 Globetrotters from this Golden Age from what I see.

Haynes is a tricky one to peg competitively because his dribbling skill is from an era where much of the value of dribbling was from stalling. You gave the ball to Haynes once you had the lead, and it was so hard to get the ball from him without overcommitting defenders that a lot of time could be wasted. Of course dribbling never stopped being valuable, but it changed. Haynes signature was going to ground and playing keep away, which is very different thing from a killer crossover while driving to the rim.

It's possible that he could have been great in the NBA, but the NBA prioritized Clifton while the Globetrotters prioritized Haynes along with Tatum-pivot-clown descendants. Haynes & Tatum were more entertaining, Clifton had the body.

Gates is certainly a big deal, and I think he too could have done more in the NBL if White basketball was ready for a Black star.

Re: Clifton untapped potential? 2 biggest things about him specifically:

1. He said that he wasn't used as a star the way he'd been on Black teams. Possible that's sour grapes, but it's a thing to keep in mind.

2. Scoring was his thing. He was good at other things, but he was the guy leading the New York Rens to the Finals of the final World Professional Basketball Tournament (WPBT) in 1948 where they lost 75-71 to the Lakers. He made the 1st team for the tournament - the only Ren to make it - while 3 Lakers made it (Mikan, Pollard, Schaeffer). In the title game Mikan scored 40 while Clifton scored 24.

Beyond this, I've just seen various anecdotes along these lines. Black players talk about being expected to be enforcers. Worth noting that the guy who was first given this opportunity was Maurice Stokes, who was born about 11 years younger than Clifton. While you can ask yourself whether Stokes just happened to be the first Black player to warrant this level of primacy, I think we know based on the WPBT that elite White basketball had nothing on elite Black basketball by the end of the '30s. There was just a fear that White fans would abandon the league if they allowed it to become a Black league.

Re: integration, Blacks in NBL. Right, but the BAA banned Blacks, so when it swallowed the NBL, Blacks were out of luck.

This lasted until the most powerful man in the BAA - Ned Irish the owner of the Knicks- decided he wanted Clifton to better compete against Mikan and strong-armed the rest of the league.

I think Haynes/dribblers in general get remembered for that because it was so unique/entertaining, I don't think it was actually a particularly valuable on-court thing to be doing. But Haynes was certainly capable of playing serious basketball, I believe he was usually the leading scorer for the Trotters in their exhibitions vs the Lakers (I wish he'd been on the Trotters when they had their 2 exhibitions vs the Royals, narrowly missing out on the best guard clash of the era). Led his college team to a win over the Trotters prior to signing with them.

I don't disagree with validity to the general idea of Black players being held back from offensive stardom in the early days (particularly the BAA) - just not sure Clifton in particular had the chops. The NBL much much more open on this front (Boswell made All-NBL in '43 and was 4th in the league in pts, admittedly basically a 4 team year) - not too surprising, at the time the upper midwest/rustbelt was pretty much at the forefront in terms of racial equity. (complete side-note here: I've never really looked much into the AAU teams and how/when they integrated, that's something I should do sometime).

From my impression that was a bit of a high-end scoring game from Clifton, looking at the Trotters exhibitions against the Lakers he averaged something like 12 pts/game.

I would push back on the WPBT showing significant evidence of Black ball being superior at that point in time (equal to everybody but Mikan is about where I'd put it). The Rens came home with 2 titles in 10 years (disguised as the Washington Bears in '43) and the Trotters once in 7 years. For exhibitions - the Trotters went 1-1 vs the Royals, with the Royals owning the more emphatic win, though history remembers the upsets the Lakers went 5-2 vs them in the Mikan era. Mikan also led the OG Celtics squad (named the 'George Mikan Allstars' for the event, but as a team clearly inferior to the Lakers) to a 2-1 exhibition win over the Trotters in Hawaii in '48.

Edit: Also, I'd feel bad not mentioning Don Barksdale as the first black NBA Allstar in 53 (with teammate Fred Scolari, so at least seen as a co-star).

So, for reference, here's a link to all the Laker-Trotter games with box scores.

Game 1 - Feb, 1948: Trotters 61, Lakers 59
Leading scorers:
George Mikan (MNL) 24
Jim Pollard (MNL) 18
Ermer Robinson (HGT) 17
Marques Haynes (HGT) 15
Willie Kings (HGT) 12

Game 2 - Feb. 1949: Trotters 49, Lakers 45 - Clifton joins Trotters, but Lakers missing Pollard
Leading scorers:
George Mikan (MNL) 19
Goose Tatum (HGT) 14
Sweetwater Clifton (HGT) 11 (fouls out)
Marques Haynes (HGT) 11

Game 3 - Mar. 1949: Lakers 68, Trotters 53
Leading scorers:
George Mikan (MNL) 32
Sweetwater Clifton (HGT) 14
Marques Haynes (HGT) 13 (fouls out)
Goose Tatum (HGT) 13
Herm Schaeffer (MNL) 11

Game 4 - Feb. 1950: Lakers 76, Trotters 60 - Mikkelsen & Martin join Lakers
Leading scorers:
George Mikan (MNL) 36
Marques Haynes (HGT) 16
Vern Mikkelsen (MNL) 13
Jim Pollard (MNL)

Game 5 - Mar. 1950: Laker 69, Trotters 54 - Clifton's final game, joins the Knicks next season
Leading scorers:
Marques Haynes (HGT) 23
George Mikan (MNL) 21 (fouls out)
Vern Mikkelsen (MNL) 18
Jim Pollard (MNL) 16
Sweetwater Clifton (HGT) 10

Game 6 - Feb. 1951: Lakers 72, Trotters 68 - Lakers missing Mikkelsen
George Mikan (MNL) 47 (fouls out)
Ermer Robinson (HGT) 18
Marques Haynes (HGT) 12
Rookie Brown (HGT) 11
Slater Martin (MNL) 10

I'll stop it there, but there are two more games in the '50s that the Lakers win.

I think you're right that Haynes is probably the average lead scorer on the Trotters in the games, but he also wasn't the leading scorer in either of the two Trotter wins. Still, I think you're right that Haynes was certainly a prospect for the NBA had he gone in that direction.

Re: WPBT game unusual for Clifton's scoring. I think it's important to remember that this was Clifton on a different team. On the Rens in that tournament Clifton was easily the team's leading scorer in every game (averaging a smidge under 24 PPG for the tournament). Then he went to the Globe Trotters who already had an offense with a pecking order and wanted him to slow down Mikan. I really think it's pretty clear cut that Clifton was more of a scorer in the WPBT than any other Black player in the history of the tournament, and quite possibly more so than any player period other than Mikan.

Re: push back on Black basketball being superior at the time. Ah, let me try to re-state because I don't mean to characterize it quite like that:

The performance of the Rens, Trotters & Bears in the first half decade of the WPBT made clear that there was no reason to presume that White basketball had a clear cut advantage over Black basketball in that timer period. (btw, I wouldn't call the Bears the Rens in disguise. Rather, this was the Black owner of the Rens running out of money during the war and a White owner swooping in to steal talent. In terms of Black ownership, the Rens were the team.)

After that point, elite White basketball started gaining more and more of an advantage because of the continued blossoming of the NBL as the place for elite competition. Prior to that point, there was no sustained dominant league and the best teams were generally barnstormers. Once a top league emerged though, that became the place for the most elite regular competition, as well as the place to get the most money.

Incidentally, what allowed the NBL to emerge as the dominant league in the '40s after being less significant in the 1930s? Fred Zollner, head of the Zollner Corporation, which made pistons that were considered central to war effort. This allowed him to a) make a ton of money, b) keep his employees from being drafted, and so c) offer basketball players more money than anyone else to come be his employees. He create the Zollner Pistons in 1939, joined the NBL in 1941, and started bringing in the best talent not in the military. Further, not only was his team bigger budget than anyone else, but he would help with financial support of other NBL teams to keep the league afloat.

With the ending of the war, the Pistons dominance ended, but the NBL would remain the dominant league until the BAA came in with the really big bucks from the arena/NHL owners of the East Coast which allowed them to steal entire teams rather than just players.

Of course, none of this specifically pertains to the existence of Mikan & Kurland. In terms of guys on the radar of the basketball world, I think those were the supreme talents ever seen given the rules of the time. To me the only question is why the first giants of the game were White. Was this just luck? Was it the by-product of college basketball being White-dominated? Is it possible that back then Whites were taller than Blacks due to nutrition advantages? I doubt we'll ever know.

Re: Barksdale. Cool you mentioned him. I don't think he was actually as accomplished as Clifton that year - Barksdale's team was awful, Clifton's was great, and I actually think Clifton had the best year of anyone on his team playoff included, but Barksdale was historically important even before that for being a Top 3 player on the US Olympic team along with Kurland & Groza.

[Doctor MJ]

Nomination: Jerry West
.

What a fantastic post!

I've gone back & forth between the two guys for years and have them right next to each other on my list now. Think I'm going to stick with the Oscar nom for now, but when they are competing for Induction I'm going to keep thinking about this.

As I've said, I think West was the more capable player in a vacuum, but struggle to say West achieved more in his career.

[MyUniBroDavis]

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

I was confused and then realized this was a gregoire copypasta, suprised it took this long lol

[Doctor MJ]

All my votes are repeats from last time so putting in spoilers.

Vote 1: Magic Johnson

Spoiler:

Original Nomination Post:

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).

Actual voting post
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: Steph Curry

Spoiler:

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.

Nominate: Oscar Robertson

Spoiler:

Saw iggy's comment and figured I should post sooner than later on Oscar's behalf.

When I first arrived at RealGM I was skeptical of Oscar. He had huge individual numbers, but his team often wasn't that amazing, so maybe, I thought, this was one of those situations where one guy just dominated everything and it kept his teammates from doing more. There was also the matter that he had Jerry Lucas on most of those Royal teams and Lucas was also won of the great prospects of the era - arguably just behind Oscar & Wilt. With Cincy having possibly the most talented top 2 in the world, shouldn't they have been able to do better?

As we started to get more data though - shout out Ben in particular here - it became clear that not only did Oscar lead an offensive dynasty, but that in his rookie season of '60-61, he had arguably the single greatest offensive season in NBA history to that point.

First, by the data used by bkref based on Ben's original algorithm, those Royals put up the best ORtg in history to that time with Oscar leading all statistical categories we have - minutes, scoring volume per minute, TS%, assists, rebounds.

Later, bkref put up their TS Add stat that allowed for easy comparison of volume/efficiency. And there Oscar led the league with a +335.1 to go along with putting up more APG than anyone else.

All this before Lucas arrived, and when Lucas did arrive Oscar remained a WOWY king while Lucas really never did.

You take all of that, and then you get what happened in Milwaukee. Yes Kareem was the MVP of the team, but the team immediately had the most dominant playoff run in all of history to this day (by some measures at least), with Oscar continuing to control the offense but smoothly transitioning from being his team's main scorer to focusing primarily with a teammate. Clearly, Oscar didn't need to be the guy doing the big scoring, it just seems he made that call - correctly - until a new approach made sense.

Astonishing career. In the argument for greatest offensive career ever.

I have Oscar was having a Top 5 season 10 times. The only players who match & surpass that - Russell, LeBron, Kareem, Jordan, Magic, Wilt - have all at least been added to the Nominee list already, with Magic being the only one who hasn't yet been Inducted.

Now as I say this, first, this is certainly on the back of his offense. His defense is what dragged him behind Russell & Wilt as a matter of course so I'm not dismissing it...but as I've said, falling behind Russell & Wilt when those guys are already voted in doesn't seem like it should really be held against him too hard.

I do have one observation that could be seen as a criticism: I think Oscar was a bit of a cautious control freak like Chris Paul. Oscar liked to slow things down and not make mistakes, and as a result I'd argue he was actually loss of a jaw-dropping passer than, say, contemporary Elgin Baylor. That doesn't prevent Oscar from being considerably more effective as a floor general than Baylor, but when compared to guys who have the aggression of Baylor but with better judgment and accuracy, it does.

So, I'd be inclined to rank Magic & Nash ahead of Oscar prime vs prime, but that's basically it among guys who I really think of as "point guards". (If you want to talk about guys like LeBron or Curry cool, but they are a bit different to me.)

But I do rank Oscar comfortably ahead of Nash by career. The difference between having the GOAT offensive season as a rookie, and not really getting an opportunity to shine for a number of years.

I'll also mention Jerry West as someone I've gone back & forth with respect to Oscar over the years. In the end my criteria for this project sees Oscar as being the more accomplished player. I think I'd draft West ahead of Oscar - better scorer, considerably better long-range shooter, better defender, also a passing whiz when given the opportunity - but the reality is that West in vivo had greater synergy issues than Oscar did. I don't think this was West's fault - I'm critical of coaches, management, Baylor for many years, and Wilt pre-Sharman - but it is what it is. West will be up for me soon, but not before Oscar.

Last guys I'll mention are Kobe & KD, who are being talked about relative to Oscar elsewhere.

Oscar vs Kobe is the most straight forward to me. The thing about Kobe is that he really wasn't impact-oriented, and that's not meant as a criticism. The goal of the game is not to win every game by as many points as possible. It's to win games, and in particular, win playoff games. I do think Kobe played more effectively in the playoffs compared to the regular season on average, and I think his defensive focus had a lot to do with that. But while Kobe had a lot of playoff success, and in seasons where that was profound enough he tends to make my POY ballots, it didn't happen every year. He wasn't Duncan, and in seasons without that kind of playoff run, it really holds Kobe back.

Oscar vs KD is a situation where KD's toxic personality looms large. In general I actually think our POY votes have underrated Durant - I think we should venerate that he was a critical part of the best basketball team of all time - and so going purely by my POY votes as I have them at this time, he's actually above Oscar by a smidge. But KD's negative effects on his franchises that come due to his insecurity and poor social coping mechanism hurts him more than a smidge. And in fact, I'd still probably put Kobe ahead of him. Kobe had his own interpersonal issues, but from a team-franchise perspective, they weren't nearly as debilitating.

[rk2023]

I'll also mention Jerry West as someone I've gone back & forth with respect to Oscar over the years. In the end my criteria for this project sees Oscar as being the more accomplished player. I think I'd draft West ahead of Oscar - better scorer, considerably better long-range shooter, better defender, also a passing whiz when given the opportunity - but the reality is that West in vivo had greater synergy issues than Oscar did. I don't think this was West's fault - I'm critical of coaches, management, Baylor for many years, and Wilt pre-Sharman - but it is what it is. West will be up for me soon, but not before Oscar.

Great write-up and vote, to no surprise. When you mentioned “synergy issues”, am curious as to what you mean? Am not the biggest fan of the concept of scalability, but it seems like West would be better in this regard than Oscar.

[penbeast0]

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

I was confused and then realized this was a gregoire copypasta, suprised it took this long lol

If you are copy and pasting a quote from another poster, you need to give attribution.

[MyUniBroDavis]

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

I was confused and then realized this was a gregoire copypasta, suprised it took this long lol

If you are copy and pasting a quote from another poster, you need to give attribution.

I mean, I agree that it wasn’t really a post a lot of people saw so probably could have mentioned it’s a copypasta that more clear but isn’t this the point of a copypasta lol, saying at the bottom “this is a parody of a gregoire post” kind of kills the point lol

[Doctor MJ]

I'll also mention Jerry West as someone I've gone back & forth with respect to Oscar over the years. In the end my criteria for this project sees Oscar as being the more accomplished player. I think I'd draft West ahead of Oscar - better scorer, considerably better long-range shooter, better defender, also a passing whiz when given the opportunity - but the reality is that West in vivo had greater synergy issues than Oscar did. I don't think this was West's fault - I'm critical of coaches, management, Baylor for many years, and Wilt pre-Sharman - but it is what it is. West will be up for me soon, but not before Oscar.

Great write-up and vote, to no surprise. When you mentioned “synergy issues”, am curious as to what you mean? Am not the biggest fan of the concept of scalability, but it seems like West would be better in this regard than Oscar.

In a nutshell:

I think that on average that West had more talent on his teams than Oscar, and that the gap between their team success is smaller than the talent gap.

If we're looking to place blame, we can argue that all of it belongs to Baylor, Wilt, coaches, and higher-ups, and arguing that that means West should rank higher than Oscar makes sense.

Aside from the fact that it's debatable whether that is the best approach to the GOAT list, a couple other things, the second related to the first:

1. Oscar seems to have had a dominant personality that led him to control every situation he was in (with the exception of the battle against coach Bob Cousy, but that's not necessarily a knock on Oscar). He dominated his college team, and he came right into the pros and dominated them, and even when he went to the Bucks when he was no longer the best player, he was very clearly the floor general. While I respect West's willingness to fit in around Baylor, it's possible he and the Lakers would have accomplished more if he called BS on Baylor's primacy.

2. While both Oscar & West eventually won titles on dominant champions, I'd say that Oscar played a bigger role in the 1971 championship than West did in the 1972 championship. Oscar was central to that Bucks team becoming what it did, and this is by some measures the most dominant team-season in NBA history. The 1972 Lakers, while it would superficially seem to relegate Wilt rather than West, in reality Wilt was the keystone of the team with West sharing the offensive attack with Gail Goodrich.

[penbeast0]

I think I'm higher on Jerry Lucas than you are and therefore feel there's less of a gap between team talent (the 3-8 talent gap between the Royals and Lakers is at least arguable). I think West accomplished more in terms of making his team a winner despite Oscar's superior stats. I think a lot of this is the defensive effort issue mentioned in an earlier post; when your star puts in full effort on both sides of the ball, other players tend to worker harder on that end too.

On the Oscar side, Oscar came into the NBA a star, it took West a year and he didn't develop his PG skills right away. Further, Oscar was very healthy through his career; West missed a lot of time with injuries. Both are Oscar bonuses. Oscar also had the rebounding and sheer physical advantage over West as shown by the triple double count.

[OhayoKD]

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.

Winning MVP over 80's Kareem is a bit different than winning it over 70's Kareem.

I genuinely don’t see the point about skill set. Physically dominant big men have been good in every era.

Not via "dominance on the boards".

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.

And worse passing, shot-making in general, "dominance on the boards gap" probably smaller than the defensive one today. Most voters use those speculative notions to an extent. Hence why Russell ended at 4th and Mikan finished 19th the last go around. I imagine that actually played a part in your own justification for earlier votes.

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.

Circular. And second claim probably is dependent on what stats you end up using. Kareem actually looks as good or better than moses in the playoffs by that box-stuff you like:

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

Bird "outplaying" Moses is also certainly a conclusion you can defend with the box-score. Bird actually looks better via bbr BPM during that stretch for both the rs and the playoffs. Ben's BPM is also pretty low on him. Seems like you're being selective with your assessment of Moses's "statistical dominance".

"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).

Protecting the rim was not less valuable in the past(probably more). Even as early as the 60's being able to find the open man made a difference(Wilt). Just because there weren't analytic departments does not mean Moses's weaknesses weren't meaningful.

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:

Okay, but distribution of help doesn't necessarily matter. A player who is the 2nd best player on a title team can win with less help than a "clear best player". A stacked team is a stacked team. They came within 2 games of the championship in a series that was razor-close by M.O.V the year before and your favored box-aggregates are split about whether Julius played better or worse(PER and ws/48 says better, bpm says worse) in the 83 playoffs.

Also...

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.

Hmm




One of these is not like the rest...