OhayoKD wrote:Winning MVP over 80's Kareem is a bit different than winning it over 70's Kareem.
He also won an MVP over 1970’s Kareem.
Not via "dominance on the boards".
Moses wasn’t just dominant on the boards. He wasn’t Andre Drummond. He also scored 27 points a game on about 109 TS+ in those years—largely using physical dominance to do so (along with a good jump shot and some surprisingly acrobatic rim finishes).
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.
I’d be hesitant to assume that Moses’s dominance on the boards was less important than other things. When he joined or left teams, their relative offensive rebounding % tended to go up or down about 4% or 5% on average (not just in the minutes he was on court, but in the team’s overall numbers), and that was higher in his peak years. The math is a bit more complicated than this, but roughly speaking, causing your team to get an offensive rebound about 4% or 5% more often basically increases offensive rating by about 4-5% (actually slightly more for various reasons). That’s an enormous difference, and I don’t think there’s much of any evidence that Embiid has that kind of effect defensively. For instance, last year the Sixers had a defensive rating of 116.3 with Embiid off the floor, and a 113.3 defensive rating overall—which suggests he had a +2.6% effect overall on their defensive rating (and that’s probably overselling it since he is on the court with stronger players than average). The same analysis for the year before would be +2.9%. Granted, that’s all a bit back-of-the-napkin, but in general I just wouldn’t underestimate the effect of Moses Malone’s offensive rebounding.
If your point is that, if they played today, Moses might not be able to extract as big a gap on the offensive boards, then I’d say perhaps that’s right, given the lack of emphasis on offensive boards nowadays. I’ve noted in prior posts that there’s a bigger tradeoff in going for offensive rebounds now, so maybe Moses wouldn’t be able to go for as many (or if he did, it might have a bigger opportunity cost). But, of course, if he played today, he’d be playing against fewer bruising big men, so he might find it even easier to get those boards when he went for them, which could make him even better at it. It’s hard to know. Overall, I do think there’s a point that extracting value from being incredible on the offensive boards is a bit tougher nowadays, so it’s reasonable to think he might not be quite as good in this era as he was in reality. But he was great in his era (which matters most in this analysis) and the reason to think he’d maybe be a bit less good in today’s era is specific to the recent era (i.e. it doesn’t apply to the vast majority of NBA history).
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:
It’s not circular. The two players were on a team together and it was super obvious which one was better. It was like LeBron and Wade on a team together.
As for those playoff stats with Kareem, they look very similar to me, and Moses got the better of Kareem when they actually faced each other in the playoffs in that era, so I’d say tiebreaker goes to Moses there.
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".
I don’t know why you’re putting “statistical dominance” in quotes. I never said peak Moses displayed “statistical dominance.” He was great statistically and also was plainly recognized at the time as the best player, given that he got 3 MVP awards in those 5 years, with two of them being when his team won as few or fewer games than all the other major candidates for the award. When a player dominates the MVP award over a given time period despite having a relative lack of team wins, I think our baseline assumption should be that he was the best player in the league, unless there’s some significant reason to think otherwise. As it is, box stats don’t provide any such reason—with him looking very similar to (or perhaps even slightly better than) Kareem and better than everyone else. The fact that the MVP is merely a regular-season award doesn’t provide any such reason, as Moses won a dominant title in this timeframe, dragged a weak team to the finals another year, and got the better of his biggest rival both times they met in the playoffs. Nor can we reasonably say that impact data provides such a reason either. We basically have zero WOWY data for Moses in the timeframe, but we know that the Rockets completely collapsed when he left, that the 76ers were raised from really good to historically great when he joined, and that the on-off numbers we have for one year in this time period show him having a +15.6 on-off for a season. We also don’t have any real indication that the MVP votes themselves were seen as particularly controversial/wrong/close at the time, given that Sporting News’s MVP was the same in all those years too, and none of the actual MVP votes were all that close (with 1982 being the closest, but Moses still got twice as many first-place votes as the 2nd place person that year). I just don’t really see any compelling reason to second-guess his dominance of the MVP award in that timeframe.
Math in the bolded part is off as less than half of possesions of the average team end in offensive rebounds, even in the era
What you could go for instead is evaluating how many extra rebounds per 100 that offensive rebounding advanrage translated to and assuming each extra shot accounts for roughly 1/1.1 points (even accounting for the factor of reducing fastbreak opportunities)
Thanks for this post. Just as an initial note, I think maybe you might’ve misunderstood what I was saying. I’m not saying a 5% increase in offensive rebounding rate in the sense of, say, 30% —> 31.5% (i.e. 31.5/30 = 1.05). I’m talking a 5% increase in offensive rebounding rate in the sense of 30% —> 35%. That’s the sort of thing we see when Moses joined or left a team.
That said, now that I think about it more closely, you’re right that I may have overstated the effect on offensive rating. The offensive rebounding rate doesn’t affect the points per possession in any of the scenarios where a possession ends in an initial made shot. And, turnovers are a confounding factor that lowers the overall effect of increasing the offensive rebounding rate (since those are possessions that do not have a possible offensive rebound). Basically, obviously a lot of possessions don’t have a missed shot to rebound. Also, a team getting lots of FTs can lower the number of possible offensive rebounds a bit too, since a possession that ends in FTs has a lower chance of producing a possible offensive rebound. But at the same time, I believe teams generally score more efficiently than normal after an offensive rebound, so that goes the other way.
The effect is still significant though. Some quick math in a simplified example to illustrate:
Let's say a team has 110 possessions. 10 of them end in a turnover (a bit lower than normal turnover rate, but I'm also not going to account for teams scoring more than normal after an offensive rebound), and they have a 50% FG% on all two-point shots in the other 100 possessions (we'll ignore FTs and threes for purposes of the example). So they make 50 shots, and miss 50 shots. Let's say normally they have a 30% offensive rebounding rate. This means they'd rebound 15 of their own shots. Applying the same turnover rate after the offensive rebound, they'd have 1.36 turnovers, and then they'd make 6.82 shots and miss 6.82 shots. Now there's 6.82 shots to rebound. They'd rebound 2.05 of those. They'd have 0.19 turnovers from that, and then make and miss 0.93 shots. They'd then rebound 0.28 of those. They'd have 0.025 turnovers from that, and then make and miss 0.128 shots. They'd rebound 0.0384 of those. They'd turn over 0.0035 from that, and then make and miss 0.0175 shots. I could keep going, but the numbers are tiny at this point. The bottom line is that in those 110 possessions, the team would make 57.90 shots, which would come out to an offensive rating of 105.26.
Let's keep everything the same and instead assume a 35% offensive rebounding rate. The team has 110 possessions. 10 of them end in a turnover. They have a 50% FG% on all two-point shots in the other 100 possessions. They make and miss 50. All the same as before. Except now they rebound 17.5 of their own shots. After turnovers, they'd now make and miss 7.955 shots. Now there's 7.955 shots to rebound. They'd rebound 2.784 of those. After turnovers, they'd make and miss 1.265 shots. They'd then rebound 0.443 of those. After turnovers, then then make and miss 0.201 shots. They'd rebound 0.0705 of those. After turnovers, that's another 0.032 made and missed shots. And I'm going to again stop because the numbers are miniscule. That comes out to an offensive rating of 108.10.
Obviously, this model is simplified and the numbers are made up, so they do not actually have direct relation to the exact effect this would have for a specific team. But it does illustrate how an increase in offensive rebounding rate can have a pretty sizable effect that we shouldn’t immediately assume is less than the effect of an elite rim protector’s defense.
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: Wilt is also the only one that maybe offensive rebounded anything like Moses. It’s really not a common thing, and Karl Malone definitely isn’t a valid comparator IMO. Prime Moses had about twice the offensive rebounding rate of prime Karl, and the *lowest* offensive rebounding rate of Moses’s career was still 40% higher than the *highest* offensive rebounding rate of Karl’s career (14% vs. 10%). In any event, on the question of value, Moses was literally deemed the most valuable player in the league 3 out of 5 years—despite his team not being all that great in two of those three MVP-winning years. He was widely understood to be a hugely valuable player, and what happened to his teams when he left Houston and joined Philadelphia backs this up, as does his on-off in the one year in the time period we have that data for.
I'd say the closest comp is Pettit. He's the one mainly known for offensive rebounding even more than rebounding in general, good post defense but not a great rim protector, low assist generator, not the physical beast Moses was but with more shooting range, got a significant number of his points on the FT line where (like Moses) he shot a good percentage, and was the best in the league for a few years between guys rated much higher (Mikan/Russell v. Kareem/Bird/Magic).
There’s definitely some good parallels. I don’t really think we have any idea if Pettit was the kind of offensive rebounder Moses was though. I’m very skeptical that he was.
For reference, let’s take Bob Pettit’s highest rebounding year (i.e. 1960-61)—a year that was a significant outlier for him in rebounding. We know his team missed 5,177 field goals. We also know they missed 774 FTs, and we can reasonably assume about half of those were missed FTs that were eligible to be rebounded. So we have 5,564 possible offensive rebounds. Pettit played 79.39% of the team’s minutes, so we can reasonably estimate that he was on the court for about 4,417 possible offensive rebounds. Pettit had a total of 1,540 total rebounds that year. Now let’s generously assume an upper bound where the percent of his total rebounds that were offensive rebounds was the same as it was for peak Moses (42.56% for Moses during that five-year peak). That gets us an upper-bound of about 655 offensive rebounds for Pettit. Which would get us to an offensive rebounding rate of 14.8% for Pettit, using the stats from Pettit’s outlier rebounding year (and, for instance, if I do the same calculation for the year before that, we get to 13.8% instead). This is high, but still notably below peak Moses’s offensive rebounding rate of 17.9% (and 19.6% at his highest year in that time period). I think it’s a fair assumption that Pettit was not all that close to Moses in terms of offensive rebounding.
OhayoKD wrote:Lebron contributes more to all the phases of play than Messi does. And he is of course a defensive anchor unlike messi.
Interesting. BBR has Moses averaging an Orb% of >19 from 77-80; you may be underestimating Moses if anything.
Not sure why Pettit's differential from best year of 20.3 reb/game to 2nd best of 18.7 is an outlier year while Moses going from 17.6 in his best year to 15.3 in his 2nd best year is not when both the raw and percentage differential is significantly higher for Moses.
“Most people use statistics like a drunk man uses a lamppost; more for support than illumination,” Andrew Lang.
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.
Was he really more central than West? the 1972 Bucks were better at full-strength than the 71 Bucks despite Oscar dropping off and played like a 62-win team in games without him. They then outscored Wilt-West Lakers with Oscar falling off a great deal more due to injury.
What makes you think West was a smaller factor than Oscar?
I think that's a great conversation we should keep having. Certainly there's not a question as to who held up better in '71-72 - that was West. So Oscar's basically a spent force before West is...though of course he's also a regular MVP candidate before West is.
Re: 1972 Bucks better at full-strength than 1971 Bucks. Please elaborate. I'm not really sure what you mean.
Well then, elaborate I shall!
In 1972, the Bucks repeated their league-wide dominance when healthy, but Oscar missed 18 games. Without him, they played at a staggering 62-win pace (7.8 SRS)
At full-strength, Milwaukee played at a 70-win clip (again) with an even better point differential (12.4 SRS) than in ’71. They collided with power Los Angeles — a 69-win team themselves — dropping the Western Conference Finals in six games in a battle of titans.
Now let's add some context:
(71 Oscar)
(72 Oscar, Regular Season)
(72 Oscar, Playoffs with a torn groin)
Now tbf, everyone's offense is suffering in what was a bit of a grindfest in the 72 series but this is where I think it's important to look at how the Bucks became so good in the first place:
(Left side is relative offense, right side is relative defense)
The story goes Oscar came and turned the Bucks into goat-tier team by unlocking their offense. But there's a few wrenches here:
-> The Bucks defense improves as much as their offense does and is actually the thing they're better at for most of their "best 1-title team ever" run from 71-74. Don't know about you Doc, but I do not think Oscar's the guy driving that -> Kareem by box or most film-analysis is himself improving as an offensive-player from 70 to 72 and then polishes his scoring-game after a 2011 lebron equivalent in 1973 -> Oscar is steadily declining by box and most film analysis(at least from what I've seen) over this time period
and also
-> 1974
(RS Oscar)
Now you might be saying "wait, the Bucks were not posting amazing srs in 74!". Here's where we need to apply some context:
mote than 3 srs-points ahead of the next best team is pretty rarified air. Let's compare it to another team that was awsome in the RS and then lost to a significant srs underdog:
Similarities: -> Both teams are probably way better in the rs than they have any right to be -> Both teams look all-time dominant through the early rounds -> Both lose a very competitive game to a sneaky good team - Differences: -> The Celtics are >> the Magic(90 pistions+ by sans standard deviation, won 68 previous season before losing in 7 to one of the better near-dynasties in the Knicks who they beat in 5 to get to Kareem) -> Bucks are the bigger RS outlier(relative to the league)
Here was what Oscar did those playoffs:
Some other things to consider
-> Oscar did actually have a wierdly good(at least by box) playoff in 1973 with his scoring volume(21 ppg) and effeciency spiking(57%!). Yet it was by far the Bucks worst postseason performance of that stretch with Kareem choking(and while we do not have pace-adjustment, the sub-100 scoring would suggest the Bucks were competitive on defense, not offense -> Oscar was completely out of the picture in 1977 when Kareem leads a cast I've got at sub-30 to a level of performance I think can legitmately be argued vs those aforementioned Cavaliers.
As for I keep bringing up Lebron's cavs...
In the regular season, the Lakers won 4 out of 5 meetings. In the playoffs, the Lakers won the series in 6 games. That means that over the course of the year, the Lakers won 8 while the Bucks won 3. Seems pretty decisive.
...yeah doc, honestly, this seems like a stretch and a half.
In the games that actually mattered all the Bucks wins were blowouts and the Lakers wins were by a combined margin of less than 8 points. His injury was a factor all playoffs and many would argue the refs swung game 2.
Yes the Bucks lost in 72. And yes they won(against west-less LA) the previous year, but the drop between dominance and "dominance" save for a very close loss to one of the best teams ever(by Standard deviation too fwiw) is not gigantic. Kareem probably needed Oscar to win, but that does not mean Oscar was a Draymond, a Wade, or a Pippen(or an early 70's West). Frankly, considering all the above, I'm tempted to think he might have been closer to a kyrie during his bucks tenure. And yeah, Lebron needed Kyrie healthy to beat the Warriors and get a ring in cleveland, but I think we can agree that doesn't mean Kyrie was some fringe MVP.
Oscar was a great player, but I suspect the idea he was still "one of the best offensive players ever" during his Milwaukee tenure might be putting too much weight on what he was doing before. And stepping back, I wonder if we've misassessed Kareem's pre-Magic teams:
While people seem to view then as should-have-been-dynasties that failed to launch. I'm starting to think it was something more like: "what if Lebron stayed in Cleveland for almost all of his prime". Yes Kareem left the Bucks but I do not think it was really a basketball move(and I'm guessing his support was not better).
In this lens, I'd say the Bucks were incredibly successful. And to his credit, when he got an Anthony Davis, Kareem had himself a 2nd great dominant championship run before receding gracefully en route to a dynasty.
penbeast0 wrote:Interesting. BBR has Moses averaging an Orb% of >19 from 77-80; you may be underestimating Moses if anything.
Not sure why Pettit's differential from best year of 20.3 reb/game to 2nd best of 18.7 is an outlier year while Moses going from 17.6 in his best year to 15.3 in his 2nd best year is not when both the raw and percentage differential is significantly higher for Moses.
Yeah I was using Moses’s rebounding rate in his peak period as an overall player (1978-1979 to 1982-1983), rather than using his peak period in terms of offensive rebounding rate—which you are right is a slightly earlier time period. So you are right that, in a sense, I was actually underestimating Moses.
I didn’t use the term “outlier” to mean it was *massively* above anything else for Pettit, but I’d say that a year with 20.3 where 18.7 is your second best is definitely the clear highest rebounding year, especially when it was actually also a bit lower in minutes per game than the 18.7 rebounds year. And my point was just that I was using the year that I figured would look best for Pettit. For reference, if I do the same calculation for the 18.7 rebounds year, it comes out to an upper bound of a 13.98% offensive rebounding rate.
OhayoKD wrote:Lebron contributes more to all the phases of play than Messi does. And he is of course a defensive anchor unlike messi.
Kevin Garnett's two way impact I find is very comparable to Tim Duncan's at the very least.
Magic was God like on offense but meh on defense, he didn't play for that long.
Bird was better on defense but wasn't nearly as consistent on offense. His inability to get easy buckets I believe hurt his efficiency.
Kobe wasn't as good on offense as either guy, perhaps due to being behind as a passer. He was a better defender than either guy in his best years but also a worse defender than either guy in his worst years.
Curry...hm..I'm not fully sure what to make of him. Impact stats are there. Again though he's not much of a blip on the radar when it comes to defense due to being a point guard. He's fine..I guess, perhaps better than Magic but I'd take the superior offensive player. Curry is on and off in the playoffs in terms of scoring impact, still very good in the post season but usually not God like.
As for Garnett specifically, him generally having many years of leading the league in impact stats means he has a ton of evidence supporting his impact. Usually the arguments against him are due to lack of winning, but his bad teams are well documented and his good teams are usually omitted from Anti-Garnett parties (ie, he's in a position where he can't win either way). I actually think it is very impressive that the Timberwolves got to where they were considering they still are not a stacked team by all time great player standards (injury to Sam Cassell led to their elimination, past prime Sprewell who wasn't even that great in his best years).
Interestingly enough, Garnett's correlates a lot with positive offenses. I think this makes sense given his playstyle revolves around stretching defenses and making good reads with his passes. While his scoring struggles in the post season it doesn't seem like a massive decline from his RS, scoring isn't really what makes KG, KG, so a dip in scoring doesn't hurt him the way it would a one way player like Curry or Bird (they're not really one way players, but compared to most great frontcourt guys).
I'm a guy who thinks Bill Russell should be voted in at #1 or #2. So for me having major impact on a teams defense goes a long way. Garnett confirmed that he could carry a defense with the right coach. The 08 Celtics have some solid defenders but nowhere near stacked on that end, not to the point where they would be the most dominant defense in quite some time. It's not all Thibs or them playing that style of defense before everyone else caught up because Garnett anchored the #1 defense in 2012 when he was past his prime (and over a more defensively stacked Bulls as well, who also had Thibs as their HC as opposed to just an assistant).
Tldr...Garnett is good, Timberwolves were not. He has a lot of evidence due to impact stats. His weakness is scoring but he wasn't some terrible scorer (he was top ten in PPG also). He played in an era that underused his tools, and those tools happen to be things that are seen as universally good today (bigs hitting long jumpers, basic handles to get the ball around, good passing, guarding the pick and roll). The traditional "big" things other than scoring down low he still did pretty damn good (he's not seen as a shot bocker but 2 blocks per game as a PF is elite, and he lead the league in rebounds a few times, so he's not nearly as "weak" as people make it seem).
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.
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.
This is a really interesting discussion, i.e., offensive rebounding and its effects on defense. I ran a few simple correlations between DRtg and OReb% which doesn’t exactly get to what we want because what we really want to see is how many players teams are sending to crash the board and how that affects defense. But unless one charts this, there’s no way to know though I’m sure NBA teams have their own data. Additionally, players such as Moses might boost OReb% numbers without teams having to rely on others to also to so given how good some like Moses is at offensive rebounding. Here are the quick and dirty results with the usual caveats, i.e., correlation doesn’t imply causation, T-tests haven’t been run for significance, r values even at their strongest are between .55 and .60 p, which isn’t indicative of a strong correlation to begin with, etc.
First of all, between 1976-1977 and 1985-1986 (10 seasons) there was a general slight positive correlation between OReb% and ORTg NOTE: for reference, TS% and ORtg will usually correlate between .65 to .85; of course, TS% is made up of multiple components:
Year ORtg and OReb% correlation 1976-1977 0.386 1977-1978 0.086 1978-1979 0.187 1979-1980 0.321 1980-1981 0.569 [strongest correlation here though still moderate by statistical standards] 1981-1982 0.378 1982-1983 0.491 1983-1984 0.35 1984-1985 0.547 1985-1986 0.461
Between 1977 and 1986, there wasn't much of a correlation between Oreb% and DRtg though over all, DRtg generally seemed to slightly positively correlate with OReb% [DRrg went up as OReb% went up]
Year DRtg and OReb% correlation 1976-1977 -0.081 [negligible, but negative here means as the OReb% goes up, the DRtg falls] 1977-1978 0.106 1978-1979 0.29 1979-1980 -0.187 1980-1981 -0.11 1981-1982 0.021 1982-1983 0.092 1983-1984 -0.025 1984-1985 0.183 1985-1986 0.157
Between 2013-2014 and 2022-2023, there wasn't as strong of a correlation between Oreb% and ORtg as there was in the 1977-1986 period though over all, an increase in OReb% correlated with an increase in ORtg:
Year ORtg and OReb% r 2013-2014 0.048 2014-2015 0.028 2015-2016 0.325 2016-2017 0.239 2017-2018 0.263 2018-2019 0.269 2019-2020 0.296 2020-2021 0.296 2021-2022 0.35 2022-2023 -0.148 [highest negative correlation coefficient between OReb% and ORtg]
Surprisingly, between2013-2014 and 2022-2023, there was overall a slight negative correlation between OReb% and DRtg. One would think that defenses would pay more today than back n the late ‘70s and early/mid ‘80s but this didn’t turn out to be the case.
My argument is fairly old at this point as its comparing KG to Wilt, Hakeem, and Shaq and they've all been voted in before KG. Attaching in spoiler.
Spoiler:
*Post was made before Wilt and Hakeem were voted in
I feel like I have to explain a lot to have KG this high. I'll just start by saying I am not super confident about this pick. Wilt and Hakeem are right there. There's something in KG that is harder for me to see in those two and I think pushes him over.
I think Hakeem and Garnett are insanely good two way guys who combined generational defense with near-generational offense. Hakeem worked best as the “number one guy” and Garnett probably always needed to be a “number two guy”, but never got that opportunity with TWolves. Both of them are impeccable defenders. I think I like Garnett’s help defense a lot more.
Earlier, I said that I though Hakeem was a great "number one guy" and KG was a great "number two guy". I think this was disingenuous to say about KG, but I also think it is a positive that is hard to also give to Hakeem. Being a "number two" on offense is a frowned upon statement, but in reality its an incredibly hard thing to be on a championship roster. KG, I believe, had the opportunity to be a "number one" guy and win a title with the skills he had when he was on the Timberwolves, but the Timberwolves roster made it nearly impossible.
Rk Player Name Exp Titles Actual Delta Delta % 6 Wilt Chamberlain 3.04 2 -1.04 -34.3% 9 Hakeem Olajuwon 0.1 2 1.9 1868% 11 Kevin Garnett 0.76 1 0.24 30.8%
I think there is a lot of nice data in f4p's post: Top 100 - Expected Titles (by SRS) vs Actual Titles (viewtopic.php?f=64&t=2305821). I think a lot of it is very contextual so I want to do my best not to take everything at face value. I just stole the data for the three guys I feel like I have to compare KG with (sorry Shaq).
Between the three, KG lands in the middle in winning more than he should have with the teams he had. While, I still rate Celtics KG fairly highly (especially in the first two years), I do think this data makes his tenure on the Timberwolves not look as bad as it was.
In KG's 12 year tenure with Minnesota, his team only managed an SRS over 3 twice. Once he moved to Boston, his team did it four years straight and much above 3 twice. The question here is do you blame KG for these poor team results. In my mind, no.
If we are looking by RAPM in three year increments, Garnett is closer to Duncan than Shaq. He looks incredibly elite especially in the 2002-05 stretch. I don't think blaming Garnett for team failures is especially fair.
I spoke of Garnett's ability to be a "number two" guy and I believe he got to show it on the Celtics. While being the best player on the Celtics due to his dominant defense, he was able to play off Pierce due to his connective tissue passing and ability to space the floor with his jumper.
I like that as Garnett's offensive ability and explosiveness waivered with injury and age that his defense mostly stuck and became a high level all-star to sub all-star defensive big man later in his career.
I admittedly know very little about RAPM, but what I have learned about in these forum posts. I somewhat hate one number metrics in general, especially when compared directly to others because they do not paint the picture, but instead inform it.
To touch on KG over the current nominees, I'd say Curry, Kobe, and Bird are all better overall scorers. KG gets a lot of his offensive value for me based on how he can scale up and down and I think that is something he is better at than at least Kobe from these three.
However, why Garnett is here is because of his generational defense where none of these nominees compare. KG can work as a drop big, help guy, or post defender and is elite at all of them. Garnett also never stops moving. He has his arms in the passing lanes and tags players with advantages.
His defense over these guys and him being in the mix as a scorer, especially one that can work off-ball puts him here for me.
Nomination: Jerry West
Last time I said it was between Kobe and West for this spot. I picked Kobe last time mainly because I haven't delved deep enough into Jerry to show that he is above Kobe yet.
*1960-61 to 1972-73 are rFGA/36 and 1973-74 is rFGA/75
West's scoring numbers show him to a highly efficient volume scorer. Being with guys like Elgin Baylor, he did not pound the rock as much some of the other nominees (outside of Magic), but he seemed to be a very good passer (especially when Wilt got to the Lakers where his ASTs skyrocket). From the little bit of film I've watched of Jerry, he seems to also be a good perimeter defender.
Garnett has some of the best career total stats, with a fantastic top-10 level peak and arguably the best longevity of the remaining players. His prime WOWY looks like better than everyone but Curry, his adjusted WOWY metrics look better than everyone (no data for Curry). His career PIPM is the best of everyone available. He's below Wilt in box stats, but ahead of everyone in Basketball Reference VORP and in WS. In Backpicks VORP (which I trust more), he's just behind Magic.
Context wise, I think peak Garnett had just about the worst situation of any Top 15 player ever. I just have a hard time blaming him for his lack of postseason success early on, even more so when Sam Cassell's injury before the 2004 Western Conference Finals potentially prevented him from making it to the finals over the Lakers in his best year. Even so, he still floor-raised the 04 Timberwolves to a better ELO ratings than any Hakeem team ever (https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=107696166#p107696166).
And of course when he gets to Boston, he immediately leads them to contention. The 2008 Celtics were one of the best regular season teams ever. They underperformed (for their Top 15 regular season ever) in the playoffs... but the underperformance was primarily against weaker competition on the road. They were just as expected against better opponents. And when Garnett was healthy, the Celtics continued to be dominant. He was just 5 points short of a second championship in 2010. The RAPM and WOWY based metrics make it abundantly obvious that it was Garnett driving the success of those Celtics -- they fell apart completely without him.
Playstyle wise, I'm generally a fan of Garnett (and Curry and Bird for that matter). Garnet is the picture of scalability. You don't want him floor raising offenses as the sole volume scorer deep in the playoffs, but add some good teammates around him... and you get possibly a Top 5 defender ever (certainly top 10), a brilliant basketball mind to orchestrate your offense and defense, a stretch big who can pull opponents out of the paint, a big with off-ball value, complementary passing, and a scoring package that's still great as a secondary scorer.
Longevity wise, he looks great. His late-career RAPM for example shows he was having a greater impact than late-career Shaq. The arguments for Shaq are rarely just longevity based of course, usually they're peak and prime based with the thought that he has enough longevity for his peak and prime to get him over his competition -- I'm just saying longevity is another point in KG's favor.
…
Magic was the leader of one of the greatest dynasties of all time. He had help, and certainly Kareem deserves much of the credit in the early 80s, but Magic had a year to year consistency that is very commendable. His / his team’s dips in 81, 86 playoffs, and 89 playoffs from injury seem like a lesser dip than Shaq’s inconsistency (e.g. 2001 regular season, and 2002 onward), Curry’s injuries, Bird’s injuries, or perhaps even Garnett’s dips in 2005–07.
Put another way, I’d describe Magic has having quite a long peak, and a very consistent prime. So when the impact metrics and team results portray this peak and prime so well (which they do), Magic starts to rise the ranks.
Impact Metrics: His career raw WOWY score is below everyone (Curry, Garnett, Shaq, Bird, in that order). And his multi-year WOWY sample are also lower than Curry or Bird particularly. But! I tend to weigh adjusted WOWY stats like WOWYR more (it has a larger sample than raw WOWY and adjusts for teammates… why wouldn’t I like it more?). And Adjusted WOWY puts Magic above Bird or Shaq for his career value, just below Garnett (no Curry numbers).
His available RAPM numbers are also quite compelling. Magic was +8.92 in 1985 (1st in league in 41 games!), +6.62 in 1988 (2nd in league behind Jordan in 54 games!), +4.0 in 1991 (9th in league in 51 games where the Lakers underperform, ~4.55 or 5th in the league if we curve up based on the expected full-season team performance).
Box metrics are also positive on him. In my most trusted box metrics, he looks better than Garnett, Shaq, Bird(?), and Curry in Backpicks VORP. He looks better than everyone save Garnett in Career RAPTOR. Only career PIPM is lower on him, putting him at the bottom of this group. If we add on playoff minutes into Backpicks VORP or weigh peak more heavily in career RAPTOR, his box stat advantage still remains
Team Results: Magic certainly has the team results to be up here. Arguably not as good as peak Curry, and Shaq/Bird both have single years that top anything Magic ever did, but prime Magic’s teams were more consistent than any of those players. His down years weren’t as bad. And his good years, particularly those late 80s runs when less of the credit can go to Kareem (though more goes to his other teammates), really emphasize Magic’s ability to lead championship level teams.
Compared to other players: I’m not as convinced of his peak as some of the other players here. I have Curry, Shaq, and Bird over Magic for peaks (in that order). But I’m not sure Shaq has the longevity to quite get over Magic, particularly if I’m downgrading Shaq’s peak from Tier 1 (with Jordan and LeBron) to Tier 2 (with some of the other Top 10 players). Bird’s injuries are what do him in — the injuries in 1985 and 1988 playoffs dent what could have been some of Bird’s best seasons. I certainly have Bird as the better player early on in the 80s, but I also certainly have him as worse at the end of the 80s and early 90s, when Bird’s injuries began to accumulate while Magic’s IQ and shooting touch continued to flourish. Curry doesn’t quite yet have the longevity. If he continues to age gracefully and remain healthy for the playoffs (further cementing that his wrongfully perceived playoff decline are simply a function of injuries), it’s quite possible he could end up overtaking Magic. But I’m not quite ready yet, particularly if I curve for longevity relative to era. The average player played 4.66 years in the 1980s compared to 6.66 years in the 2010s (43% more), and while I suspect the difference for stars is lesser, it’s still an era advantage that Curry had. I suppose Curry also played in a more competitive era with all the international talent and rule optimization, as did Shaq/KG to a lesser extent. But I’m still not quite yet ready to put Curry over Magic for career (peak is a different story).
My biggest concern with Magic are threefold. -First, longevity (but I’ve discussed above and will do more below). -Second, defense. I have his prime defense as the weakest of any Top 15 player, and here’s where I think popular opinion overrates him. He has size, but he doesn’t provide any rim protection, and he lacks any horizontal mobility to defend guards either. He does provide defensive rebounding at the guard position, and occasionally gets good steals (although he misses on plenty too). But for someone with such revolutionary basketball IQ on the offensive end, his defensive IQ (or perhaps his defensive effort and habits) are really lagging behind other all-time smart players like Bird or KG. -Third, and this is a smaller point, but I don’t love his lack of an off-ball game offensively. Having scalable stars does trend with producing better teams (e.g. scalability trends positively with Sansterre’s overall SRS). I wouldn’t characterize him as having negative portability: he has strong shooting, GOAT-level passing, he isn’t unreasonably selfish, and he has great offensive IQ. But he is a bit ball-dominant (and so doesn’t fit as well with other papers or ball-dominant players) and isn’t much of an off-ball scoring threat aside from his floor spacing. It’s nothing major, it doesn’t limit his team performance *that* much, I’m merely pointing out this as an area where Magic isn’t as good as Bird or Curry.
An Aside on Magic’s Longevity: When Magic was forced into retirement in 1991, he was Top 10 in league RAPM at the age of 31. He had just led his team to the finals. Then he retired. He was just 32. Without him, his team dropped from 6.73 SRS to -0.95, a raw WOWY score of +7.68. After missing 4 straight seasons, he returned for part of the 1996 season. Out of shape and out of practice, he still managed to have a +1.14 RAPM (only 96th in a 24 game sample, but still better than small samples of Berkeley, Malone, Miller) with a raw WOWY of +2.23.
As Doctor MJ pointed out, we’ve seen offensive with a strong handle, all-time passing, and great basketball IQ age quite well. Nash is the most clearest example (actually peaking after turning 30), but LeBron is another great one. Oscar performed great at the age of 32 (which was much later in people’s careers back in the day) on the 1971 Bucks, and 34–35 year old Chris Paul was a strong contributor on the 2020 Thunder and 2021 Suns, before injuries and age started catching up with both of them.
Given how well Magic was playing when he retired, given his strong performance when he came back at 36 years old (and a positive performance with the Dream Team), and given his archetype doesn’t tend to age that poorly, it’s hard to imagine healthy Magic having poor longevity. Instead, we lost 4 seasons of healthy Magic. This is a pretty unique circumstance to force a player into retirement. It required a combination of having an epidemic develop at the time Magic was aging (which wouldn’t have happened if Magic was born earlier) and not having the tools or cultural awareness to deal with a player catching the epidemic disease (which wouldn’t have happened if Magic was born later). You may not want to award Magic for years that he didn’t play. But qualitatively, I’m more forgiving of a lack of longevity for a situation like this vs a player who loses their athleticism and fails to remain valuable. Put another way, this lack of longevity doesn’t really limit Magic’s *goodness*, even if it doesn’t help his career value in the 80s. And this could boost Magic’s career longevity if you consider the time machine argument to basically any other era. I don’t weigh the time machine argument that heavily, but it’s a nice tiebreaker-style point in his favor, which certainly doesn’t hurt.
...
Appendix A: Career Stats:
LukaTheGOAT wrote:
DraymondGold wrote:A few Career Totals so people have them in one place
Obviously these miss many of the subtleties of ranking different players (how to we weight longevity vs peak? How did their situation affect their performance? How do we see them fitting on a championship team? Do we consider curving for the strength of their era or consider any time machine arguments?), but career stats can do a better job at summing the total contributions of a player (measured in a certain way) than just qualitatively describing the players alone.
To me, the ideal analysis incorporates many sides -- impact stats, qualitative descriptions, historical context, film analysis, team performance, etc. Many of these I can't provide for you, but I can gather a lot of impact stats in one place for ease of access and to help guide future discussion. I've included some leftover players in brackets from when I first gathered these stats to provide some comparative context...
Impact Metrics : These are based off actual impact, and so are less likely to underrate stuff like defense or off-ball creation or BBIQ. But they can be a bit noisier, more uncertain, and context-dependent, especially the WOWY based stuff.
Career PIPM (in units of "wins added", box estimate is used for the pre-97 seasons): [no Wilt available] [Duncan: 284 wins added] Garnett: 261.4 Shaq: + 232 (with box estimates for early years) Curry: ~202 (if we consider 2021-2023 to be 3 average prime years. ~181 if we add 3 average career years. +142 pre 2021). Magic: + 188 (box estimate)
Career RAPM: tbd, haven't calculated, would also depend on RAPM source.
Approximate Career raw WOWY (prime WOWY per game x total games): -Curry: +10.2 per game * 882 games= +8996.4 in his career (40% ahead of Hakeem) -Garnett: +5.7 per game * 1462 games = +8333.4 in his career (29% ahead of Hakeem) [-West: +7.8 per game * 932 games = +7269.6 in his career (13% ahead of Hakeem)] -Shaq: +5.5 per game * 1207 games = +6638.5 in his career (3% ahead of Hakeem) -Hakeem: +5.2 per game * 1238 games= +6437.6. in his career [-Bird: +5.3 per game * 897 games = 4754.1 in his career] -Magic: +4.7 per game * 906 games = 4258.2 in his career -Wilt: +1.2 per game * 1045 games = 1254 in his career *[note Wilt's prime WOWY is dominated by 1965, when he was apparently playing injured!]
Approximate Career Adjusted WOWY (average between prime WOWYR/alt-WOWYR/GPM per game * total games): [no Curry available] -Garnett: +6.3 per game * 1462 games = +9210.6 in his career (35% ahead of Hakeem) -Magic: +9.0 per game * 906 games = +8154 in his career (19% ahead of Hakeem -Shaq: +6.4 per game * 1207 games = +7724.8 in his career (13% ahead of Hakeem) [-Hakeem: +5.5 per game * 1238 games= +6809. in his caree]r [-West: +7.3 per game * 932 games = +6803.6 in his career (equal to Hakeem)] -Wilt: +5.2 per game * 1045 games = 5434 in his career *[note Wilt's prime WOWY is dominated by 1965, when he was apparently playing injured! This likely biases WOWYR too.] [-Bird: +5.3 per game * 897 games = 4754.1 in his career *[note Bird has highest adjusted WOWYR uncertainty, likely due to WOWYR over-crediting small-sample Reggie Lewis for the Celtics success in 88-91. Bird is +7.9 WOWYR from 80-83, which is on pace for +7086.3 for his career, above Hakeem). ]
Now for the box stats. These are less noisy, more stable, but can miss some of the subtler ways of impacting the game (rim deterrence, off-ball creation, BBIQ, etc.).
Backpicks VORP (Thinking Basektball's Box Plus Minus per 100 possessions over total career possessions. This is generally considered more accurate than Basketball Reference BPM or WS, and it goes back to the 50s. However, it's missing seasons below a certain minute/game/etc. threshold): Wilt: 6472.7 [Russell: 5250.6 ] Magic: 4425.5 Garnett: 3984.2 (missing 2014–2016) [Hakeem: 3731.8 (missing 2000–2002)] Shaq: 3720.5 (missing part of 2008, 2010, 2011) Curry: 3210.5 (missing 2012, 2020)
Career RAPTOR (WAR, in units of wins added. This is the historical box component, which goes back until the 70s). [No Wilt available] [Duncan: 230.0] Garnett: 216.9 Magic: 216.5 Curry: ~191.7 (if 2023 was like 2022. 176.8 pre-2023!). [Hakeem: 190.8] Shaq: 178.3
Basketball Reference VORP (Basketball Reference's Box Plus Minus over total career, in units of wins added I believe): [Wilt/West/Ocar unavailable] -Garnett: 96.86 (31% ahead of Hakeem) -Magic: 79.97 (1% ahead of Hakeem) [-Bird: 77.24 (equal to Hakeem)] -Shaq: 75.51 (equal to Hakeem) -Hakeem: 74.22 (equal to Hakeem) -Curry: 65.61
Total Career Win Shares: -Wilt: 247.26 (52% ahead of Hakeem) -Garnett: 191.42 (18% ahead of Hakeem) -Shaq: 181.71 (12% ahead of Hakeem) [-Hakeem: 162.77] [-West: 162.58 (equal to Hakeem)] -Magic: 155.79 [-Bird: 145.83] -Curry: 128.00
General Trends: -Garnett's combination of great impact and longevity basically always has him near the top. -Wilt is the top of every box stat we have, but is lower in WOWY based stuff (perhaps because he was injured during his largest off sample in 1965). -Curry's the top of the WOWY stuff by a large margin, and sneaks ahead of Magic in PIPM, and also looks near the top of available players in RAPM samples. Box stats are much lower on him, likely missing the subtler off-ball stuff he does on offense. -Magic's ahead of Shaq in more of our box stats (Backpicks VORP, Raptor, Basketball Reference VORP); Shaq closes the gap in impact metrics like PIPM, raw WOWY, although Magic is ahead in adjusted WOWY)
Brief aside on playoffs: ceoofkobefans suggested I bring in postseason into these career stats. I fear that may be a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison for players that made it to the postseason a bunch and had four-series postseasons in a larger league (e.g. Magic, Curry) compared to players that weren't on postseason teams or had two-series postseasons in a smaller league (e.g. Garnett, Wilt). Definitely still worth looking at postseason numbers... e.g. how much do players improve or fall by? If they improve by 10%, are the close enough in the regular season stats to bump their ranking up?... but from a "career volume" perspective, I might have postseason volume as a separate category.
Part 1: Overall Team Performance We have two major stats to evaluate in-era dominance by a team in the regular season and playoffs combined: overall SRS (by Sansterre) and ELO (by fivethirtyeight). Stating the obvious, these are team metrics, not player metrics. Teammates matter. But team playoff (over-)performance is one of the primary arguments for Hakeem, and team performance does still give us a handle on how good these players are at ceiling raising, so let's dive in...
Overall SRS team performance:
Spoiler:
Curry’s 17 Warriors (+16.15, +3.27 standard deviations) Curry’s 18 Warriors (+12.9, +2.69 standard deviations) Bird’s 86 Celtics (+12.55, +2.53 standard deviations) Shaq’s 01 Lakers (+12.2, +2.47 standard deviations) Curry’s 15 Warriors (+12.9, +2.34 standard deviations) Wilt’s 72 Lakers (+11.77, +1.75 standard deviations) Magic’s 85 Lakers (+11.36, +2.52 standard deviations) Magic’s 87 Lakers (+11.26, +2.24 standard deviations) Wilt’s 67 76ers (+11.25, +2.06 standard deviations) Curry’s 16 Warriors (+10.98, +1.90 standard deviations) Curry’s 22 Warriors (+9.4, +1.85 standard deviations) Shaq’s 02 Lakers (+9.06, +2.11 standard deviations) Bird’s 82 Celtics (+8.98, +2.06 standard deviations) Garnett’s 08 Celtics (+8.91, +1.66 standard deviations) Wilt’s 73 Lakers (+8.86, +1.48 standard deviations) Magic’s 89 Lakers (+8.76, +1.54 standard deviations) Bird’s 81 Celtics (+8.45, +1.92 standard deviations) Bird’s 80 Celtics (+8.43, +1.96 standard deviations) Shaq’s 00 Lakers (+8.0, +1.70 standard deviations) [Kareem/Magic’s 80 Lakers (+7.79, +1.81 standard deviations)] [Kareem/Magic’s 82 Lakers (+7.62, +1.74 standard deviations) Bird’s 85 Celtics (+7.72, +1.72 standard deviations) Magic’s 86 Lakers (+8.54, +1.72 standard deviations) Magic’s 91 Lakers (+7.67, +1.47 standard deviations) Magic’s 84 Lakers (+7.65, +2.20 standard deviations) Bird’s 84 Celtics (+7.48, +2.15 standard deviations) Hakeem's 95 Rockets (+7.47, +1.50 standard deviations) [Shaq/Wade’s 06 Heat (+7.05, +1.71 standard deviations] Hakeem's 94 Rockets (+7.0, +1.34 standard deviations)
So Hakeem’s teams are 2/3 of the very worst by overall SRS: Wilt has 3 teams better, Bird has 6, Magic has 6–8 (depending if you credit Kareem in 80/82), Shaq has 3, Garnett has 1, Curry has 5 so far. By standard deviations, Hakeem’s 95 Rockets improve to 4th to last (sneaking above Magic’s 91 Lakers and Wilt’s 73 Lakers, falling behind Shaq/Wade’s 06 Heat).
What about these teams' rankings in ELO? Team Rankings by ELO:
By ELO, Wilt has 3 teams better, Bird has 6, Magic has 7-9 (depending if you credit Kareem in 80/82), Shaq has 6, Garnett has 4, Curry has 6 so far. So this measure is even more favorable for the other players.
What if we look at playoffs-only SRS? Well the 95 Rockets certainly improve: from 93rd in overall SRS to 55th in playoff SRS pre-2021 (note: the 95 Rockets are currently 100th in overall SRS through 2023). But Wilt still has 2 teams better in playoff SRS only, Bird has 2, Magic has 4, Shaq has 1, Curry has 5.
Hey jake, thanks for the thoughtful reply! I've been a bit busy and haven't gotten too much time to go through this point by point (and haven't seen if you followed this up with later arguments). This is partly in response to what you said, partly just to help get my thoughts about Moses (statistically) out there, and also help form them in writing this!
lessthanjake wrote:
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.
Let me start with box stats, since I think there's a larger variety of those available...
Box Stats: It’s definitely possible that the smarter box stats are still missing something. Some of them (e.g. RAPTOR) are designed based on how well recent players’ box stats correlate with value in the modern era. But I’d push back that we should distrust the better stats entirely, especially if we’re replacing them with the weaker box stats like PER. For example, you argue that the rebounds seem to be extra additive, that Moses' rebounds are "much more additive than the typical offensive rebounds". It sounds like you're arguing for something like 'increasing returns' for every extra rebound. But is there any reason to think it's not linear? Like if Moses adds 4 more offensive rebounds than a normal center at this level, and a rebound is worth x, what evidence is there to think that Moses isn't just adding about 4x more value from his rebounding?
I see you referenced team results to support this, but there's a problem with this.... The smarter box stats can incorporate team performance to help them capture value they miss. For example, historical Raptor says it incorporates team results slightly more heavily to counteract the loss of plus minus data. This should help Moses!
And yet… 1983 is Moses’ best year and his best team year, only it ranks as the 43rd best single-year peak among players since 1977. Now I’d say that underrates Moses’ peak. But *it is still a point against him*.
Two key questions here: 1) If we’re going to argue the better box stats are biased against Moses’ archetype, why should we believe that worse box stats that are higher on him (like PER) are accurately rating Moses’ archetype? How do we know this is not a case where they’re less accurate too; how do we know they’re not overrating Moses? 2) If Moses is far behind other players up for nomination in the better box stats, and he isn’t better in many of the less accurate box stats (like Basketball Reference VORP or WS), why should we consider this a point in favor of Moses? Shouldn’t this be a point in favor of the players who are better in both stats?
For Question 1, It’s possible the better box stats are underrating this archetype’s value in the past. Moses was certainly a unique player, and these unique players are harder to properly rate. But if we’re arguing Moses’ archetype is underrated because it’s perhaps quite rare or less valuable today but was valuable back then, we need to show either 1a) Evidence that the archetype had strong value back in the day, or 1b) Evidence of Moses’ strong impact data
Let’s check 1a. This is going to be... a weak argument I'm about to make, but it's more a first pass check for what probably should be a longer project (that perhaps no one has time for lol). RAPM starts in 1997, and rebounding was way more valuable back then (when the paint was packed, pace was slower so less counters with transition), so who were the best offensive rebounders of the late 90s?
I’d argue Dennis Rodman is the closest match to Moses’ outlier rebounding value from a similar time period. Obviously they’re different players, with Rodman being clearly the better defender and Moses being clearly the better scorer and player overall.
But how does Rodman look in RAPM (Squared2020 pre-97, Goldstein 97–98)? 1998 Dennis Rodman: 250th (only 13 games) 1991 Dennis Rodman: 3rd (45 games, behind Jordan, Divac, just above Robinson) 1996 Dennis Rodman: 81st, 6th on his team (73 games) (behind Jordan, Pippen, Ewing, Kukoc, Robinson, Shaq, Mutombo, Olajuwon, Ron Harper, Mourning, Stockton, Drexler, Lucky Longley, Bud Buechler) 1997 Dennis Rodman: 31st in RAPM, 5th on his team (behind Jordan, Pippen, Mourning, Ewing, Garnett, Malone, Kukoc, Shaq, Ron Harper, Stockton, Payton, Drexler, Hardaway, Hakeem) 1998 Dennis Rodman: far out of the top 50, I believe 5th on his team.
So… the data we have doesn’t portray Rodman as a consistent league leader in RAPM. He has one great year in 1991, just like Moses has one great available year in 85. But! He also has a number of years where he doesn’t look league-leading. And interestingly, for all the years we have a larger sample (admittedly when Rodman is old, *but when he was closer to his peak as a rebounder), Rodman is ranked 6th, 5th, and 5th on his team alone.
What if we look at the other great offensive rebounders… Leaders in offensive rebounds: -1997: Dennis Rodman (320), Dale Davis (301), Antoine Walker (288), Shawn Kemp (275), Tony Seikaly (274) -1998: Jayson Williams (443), Dennis Rodman (421), Vin Baker (286), Zydrunas Ilgauskas (279), Dikembe Mutombo (276)
In 97, none of these guys pop out in RAPM. They’re all below Rodman, first of all. Shawn Kemp is +1.25 offensive RAPM, 97–98 Antoine Walker is +0.24 In 98, none of these guys pop out in RAPM. Jayson Williams is -3.16 in offensive RAPM, Vin Baker is +1.73 (good! not great), Zydrunas Ilgauskas is -0.13, Dikembe Mutombo is -1.68.
Now obviously this is a pretty cursory look. None of these guys are the offensive player Moses was. This doesn’t look at a massive sample, it’s just manually checking the RAPM for league-leading offensive rebounders back in the day. The thing to do would be to check for a larger correlation between offensive rebounding vs RAPM in the late 90s and early 2000s, when offensive rebounding was more valuable, compared to other stats like scoring or assists or whatever.
But! Even in a limited sample, I’m also not seeing compelling evidence that having a league-leading focus on offensive rebounding is some super-underrated archetype, even back in the late 90s. In fact, if you look at the player leading the league in RAPM back then (including Robinson and Karl Malone, who are up for nomination), it looks like scoring, defense, and creation are super highly valued back then.
Now Moses has some of the scoring. I do think there's a nice chemistry between his rebounding ability and his scoring threat, and it does provide nice scalability. But Moses certainly doesn't add the defense/creation of these other guys. And it's not exactly like those guys are scalability chumps either... Robinson and West are great from a scalable skillset perspective.
Overall, this doesn’t prohibit Moses from having fantastic RAPM numbers in the 70s or 80s. But It also doesn’t provide compelling evidence that the better box metrics are underrating him by a crazy amount, or that the more basic box metrics like PER are getting it right.
So to address Question 1, I’d have to see convincing impact evidence that the better box stats are underrating Moses’ archetype (more than they should), and that the worse box stats that are higher on him are doing a better job at capturing value.
Now Question #2. Do we have evidence that Moses had stronger impact in his era? Again not really. His on/off is great. But that’s quite a noisy stat which doesn’t correct for teammates, just like WOWY. Do we know, for instance, whether his rotations aligned with the other more valuable players on the team? That would boost his on/off by a ton, while not actually making him any more valuable.
Is his RAPM that great? Eh. We have 1 year where it is, and 2 years where it isn’t but we don’t have a high enough sample.
WOWY might be noise given the sample. But it’s at least not a point in his favor.
WOWYR, I would argue, should get it better. It’s still a noisy stat. But I showed evidence that there were quite a few missed games throughout his 10 year prime, *even closer to his peak in 81–85*. You suggest that his WOWYR score is is dragged down by his low WOWY. Likely so. But! I think the fact that his adjusted WOWY rank actually goes down, that adjusting for teammates actually hurts him, doesn’t suggest he was a huge impact star.
You might argue that this is still a noisy stat (it is), and we don’t have a large enough sample in his better years (e.g. 83 or 85). But… that would also be an admission that his peak/prime was super short, compared to the other guys up for nomination who showed signs of impact for a longer number of years.
I’d also bring up a new question. Question 3: Was Moses the best player in the year for ~ 5 years? I see the proponents of Moses usually bring up that he was the best player in the NBA for five years, and that this level of in-era dominance is a sign of his greatness. There’s two ways to push back on this.
First, 'best in the world' is context dependent: who were the other players in the NBA at the time? Mikan was the most valuable player relative to his era for a long timespan, but that doesn’t mean I’d take him over David Robinson if I was rating *goodness*. Now some people might be ranking based on in-era accomplishments or value. But that is a bit context dependent. I would absolutely *not*, for instance, have Moses Malone as the best player in the NBA if he were playing in a league with David Robinson, or Oscar Robertson, or Kobe, or a healthy West. Even without the time machine argument, I think just having a healthy Walton (one of the greatest what-ifs in NBA history) at his peak age of ~26–30 would be more valuable than Moses. Put another way, Oscar and West had to live in a league with Russell, Wilt, and early-prime Kareem. I wouldn’t take Moses over any of those three all time greats. So the fact that Oscar and West were playing at the same time as those other players doesn’t mean they were necessarily worse than Moses. David Robinson was playing at the same time as prime Jordan, who I’d also put cleanly above Moses. So the fact that David Robinson was fighting for the next few top spots in the league doesn’t mean he was worse than Moses, even if his rank in the world was one spot lower.
Second counter, I wouldn’t say Moses’ rank in the world was definitive. I think you can argue Moses was the best in certain years, but I think his ‘best in the world’ status was far less definitive than at other points in NBA history.
While there are box stats that favor Moses (e.g. you’ve referenced head-to-head stats of Kareem vs Moses, which is nice, but doesn’t describe them vs every matchup), there are box stats that don’t.
Going in less detail now, RAPTOR: -1979: Kareem’s above Moses -1980: Erving, Kareem, Bird are above Moses -1981: Erving, Bird are above Moses -1982: Magic, Erving, Bird, Moncrief are above Moses.
So it seems like the better box stats say Kareem was better overall in 1979–1980, that Erving and Bird were better in 1980–1982, and that a few other stars (e.g. Magic) may have been better in select years. And BPM agrees with PIPM and RAPTOR
Not saying these are decisive or anything. But if Moses was the best player in the world for the span you’re arguing, it’s certainly a lot less definitive than other “greatest in the world” stretches.
….
To me, Moses just doesn't have the *statistical evidence* to be taken over any of Oscar, West, David Robinson, Karl Malone, Kobe, Dirk, if you’re weighting impact metrics as one of your major criteria.. -You could argue the better box stats are biased against his archetype. Which might be true! But it’s worth reiterating that they’re biased against the archetype because we don’t have strong evidence to suggest it’s quite as valuable as the defensive monsters or scoring/creation hubs. It doesn’t change the fact that there are still players who do better in both the better box stats (backpicks BPM/VORP, historical RAPTOR/WAR, box PIPM/Career PIPM) and the traditional box stats (Basketball Reference BPM/VORP, WS per 48 / Career WS, PER). And there are still players who do better in the better box stats, and around as well in the traditional ones. I’d argue that’s still a point in their favor, against Moses.
-You could argue that the RAPM data we have is complimentary in 1985, that on/off is complementary in 1983 and 1985. But that doesn’t change the fact that there are other players who have higher RAPM years, and certainly are more consistent in on/off and RAPM across their full career.
-You could argue that WOWY and WOWYR are super noisy with small samples. But that doesn’t change the fact that WOWYR has bigger samples and Moses does worse, that doesn’t change the fact that there are players who do seem to have much stronger WOWY and WOWYR signals.
To me, I’d just say there’s a lack of (*statistical) evidence to put Moses in the top 15 or even perhaps the top 20. Now we lack a lot of metrics for the older guys. There’s uncertainty in the small-sample RAPM and WOWY data we do have. But if you take a wholistic look at all the data available — at the better box stats, the traditional box stats, the smaller sample RAPM, the WOWY data, and the adjusted WOWY data — there are a group of players who perform better in basically every metric, and there players who clearly perform better in the majority of the metrics.
Now this doesn’t prohibit team-performance based arguments, or scalability based arguments, or arguments using film analysis. But me personally, I haven’t seen enough of that evidence to put him this high. I have him closer to the 20s, like a majority of the other lists from more analytical crowds (e.g. the top 100 project in 2020 and 2017 both had him 20th, 2014 had him 19th, and all of those had Curry/Durant/Cp3 lower which might not be true anymore; more recent lists like e.g. Fall 2022 Thinking Basketball had him 27th).
By my tally, when taking second votes into consideration, KG is up 12-11 right now, so I feel compelled to vote for the first time, if Doc will allow it.
Vote: Magic Johnson
I will quote my post from the previous thread, which rk also quoted in this thread for his vote:
Magic is arguably the greatest combination of scoring and playmaking the game has ever seen. For his career in the regular season, Magic averaged:
19.5ppg and 11.2apg on +7.2 rTS in 13 seasons(this includes 1996) 25.4pp100 and 14.5ap100
(At this point I want to say that I fully realize that there's more to playmaking impact than just looking at assists; it's just that it usually involves metrics that don't exist for Magic(or Oscar or the first two-thirds of Stockton's career, two players I'm going to be looking at, for that matter), so I'm just using assists as quick point of comparison).
Compare that to some others in the scoring+playmaking conversation...
LeBron: 27.2ppg and 7.3apg on +4.6 rTS in 20 seasons LeBron: 36.8pp100 and 10.1ap100
Oscar: 25.7ppg and 9.5apg on +6.8 rTS in 14 seasons (no Per 100 numbers available)
Oscar(adjusted for pace): 21.9ppg and 8.1apg on +6.8 rTS in 14 seasons
So, Magic and Oscar are pretty close as scorers, in both volume and efficiency, but Magic still has a big playmaking advantage.
Harden: 24.7ppg and 7apg on +5.7 rTS in 14 seasons 35.1pp100 and 10ap100
Steph: 24.6ppg on 6.5apg on +7 rTS in 14 seasons 34.9pp100 and 9.2ap100
As you'd expect, Steph has the best overall volume+efficiency combination as a scorer, but his assists numbers fall way short.
Nash: 14.3ppg and 8.5apg on +6 rTS(though he had two dramatic outlier years - the 99 lockout season and his final season, and if you removes those, it's +7.3 rTS) in 18 seasons 23.3pp100 and 13.8ap100
Nash falls short on the per game numbers, though it's certainly closer by Per 100...in fact there, Nash gets closer than just about anyone to Magic.
Stockton: 13.1ppg and 10.5apg on 7.3 rTS in 19 seasons. 21pp100 and 16.8ap100
Very similar to Nash, and again, by straight per-game numbers, his points are below, but like Nash, his Per 100 is comparable with Stockton in fact being the only one top Magic in ap100.
Paul: 17.9ppg and 9.5apg on +3.2 rTS 26.7p100 and 14.1ap00
CP3's per-game numbers are fairly comparable, and his Per 100 numbers even moreso, much like Nash and Stockton, but his rTS is well below anyone else I've looked at here, and his constant injury issues don't help his case either.
The broad point is that among these types of players, Magic ranks near the top as a scorer(with only Oscar and Steph clearly ahead by TS Add) and pretty much at the top as an assist-maker on a per-game basis(though Stockton and Nash have a strong Per 100 case there). His offensive impact, when looking at the volume and efficiency of his scoring combined with the volume and consistency of his playmaking, is GOAT tier. To the point where I'm not sure how much his defensive deficiencies matter.
In terms of actual impact signals, I look at two.
One, in his second season, 1980-81, he played only 37 games. The Lakers' overall SRS that year was 3.27. By my calculations, their SRS in the 37 games Magic played was 6.30.
Two, in 1990-91, the Lakers had a 6.73 SRS and +7.1 Net Rtg. Following Magic's retirement, in 1991-92, they had a -0.95 SRS and -1.2 Net Rtg. Now, I acknowledge that James Worthy also missed 28 games and that Vlade Divac also missed 46 games that season, and I'm sure that contributed to the team's precipitous fall, but I have to think Magic's absence was the biggest factor. Frankly, the following season, 1992-93, when Worthy and Divac were healthy, the numbers were even worse - -1.2 SRS and -1.3 Net Rtg.
(And FWIW, they fell from #5 in Def Rtg in 91 to #17 in 92 and #16 in 93, make of that what you will).
I said two, but I thought of a couple more that are less definitive imo but still worth mentioning. The 1989 Lakers swept through the playoffs, didn't lose a single game, and then got swept in the Finals after Magic went down. I know, Byron Scott was also out, and Magic in fact played the first game and most of the second game they lost. Still something to consider.
The 1996 Lakers' SRS was 4.21 but, by my calculations, their SRS in the 32 games Magic played was 5.81(and none of the other major pieces of that team missed any significant amount of time). Maybe it doesn't mean much, but again, worth mentioning.
Finally, with regards to his (lack of) longevity:
Look, I'm not a big longevity guy to begin with. But to hold it against a guy who was literally forced into his retirement seems particularly wrong-headed to me.
First off, compare his numbers from 1986-87 - usually held as his peak year - and 1990-91 - his last year:
1986-87: 23.9ppg, 12.2apg, 6.3rpg on +6.4 rTS, 9.4 BPM, .263 WS/48 in 36.3mpg over 80 games 1990-91: 19.4ppg, 12.5apg, 7.0rpg on +8.9 rTS, 9.0 BPM, .251 WS/48 in 37.1mpg over 79 games
Not a whole heck of a lot of drop there. You commonly hear this argument(usually from people trying to discredit MJ) that Magic was old or washed-up or done in 1991, and it's just nonsense. Magic was All-NBA 1st Team and #2 in MVP voting that year behind MJ, and I showed above what happened to that Lakers team the following two seasons after he retired.
He never wanted to retire, he had to. Then he came back, won the 1992 ASG MVP, played well for the Dream Team that summer, thought people were ready to accept him, launched a comeback in the preseason that fall, and was forced out AGAIN.
When he made an ill-advised attempt at coaching in 1994, it was quite obviously the decision of a man who desperately wanted to still be in the league.
And when he finally did come back in 1996, guys like Ceballos and Van Exel were acting like punks, giving him attitude, and just generally disrespecting him(while he was putting up pretty damn decent numbers for a 36 year old who hadn't played in 3.5 years[14.6ppg, 6.9apg, 5.7rpg on +7 rTS, 5.2 BPM, .181 WS/48 in 29.9mpg over 32 games], suggesting he would've been productive into the mid-90s if he'd had the chance), so it's no wonder he didn't come back for 96-97.
His body didn't break down. He didn't burn out. He was forced out. To hold it against him is in a maddening injustice to me.
He was the heart and soul of one of the three greatest dynasties in NBA history.
Don’t have time at least at the moment to respond to all of this, and I think my response to a lot of it would largely be the same as before. Which is to say:
(1) WOWY/WOWYR for Moses is largely just noise driven in huge part by specifically bad/biased samples for Moses*, and actual on-off data is really good for him (including being better overall than his teammates in those years, which suggests he’s the driver of it) as are signals from when he left Houston and joined Philadelphia; and
(2) I think the “better” box stuff or impact-box composites are likely underrating value from his offensive rebounding. Those metrics are made to be accurate in the aggregate, and from what I’ve seen it’s actually true that individual players who are good offensive rebounders nevertheless don’t usually have a big effect on their team’s offensive rebounding rate when they leave or join a team (or on the rebounding rate in on-off data for guys we have that for—for instance, according to pbpstats, the Magic’s OREB% in Dwight Howard’s years with them was only 0.3% better with Dwight on the court, and even for Drummond on the Pistons it was only 3.1% higher with him on the court, which is good but less than you might think), which suggests that individual offensive rebounding numbers are generally not actually that impactful. Which would naturally make offensive rebounds something that a model seeking to be accurate in the aggregate shouldn’t weigh very highly. But we know that that’s not true with certain really idiosyncratic rebounding outliers like Moses and Rodman—whose presence had large effects on their teams’ offensive rebounding rate. A model that is designed to be accurate in the aggregate will naturally underrate people who are an exception such that their actions/stats bring higher than typical value. And I think Moses is a good example of that.
Beyond that (which isn't really anything new from what I said before), I do want to note one new thing about the analysis on rebounding:
DraymondGold wrote:Let’s check 1a. This is going to be... a weak argument I'm about to make, but it's more a first pass check for what probably should be a longer project (that perhaps no one has time for lol). RAPM starts in 1997, and rebounding was way more valuable back then (when the paint was packed, pace was slower so less counters with transition), so who were the best offensive rebounders of the late 90s?
I’d argue Dennis Rodman is the closest match to Moses’ outlier rebounding value from a similar time period. Obviously they’re different players, with Rodman being clearly the better defender and Moses being clearly the better scorer and player overall.
But how does Rodman look in RAPM (Squared2020 pre-97, Goldstein 97–98)? 1998 Dennis Rodman: 250th (only 13 games) 1991 Dennis Rodman: 3rd (45 games, behind Jordan, Divac, just above Robinson) 1996 Dennis Rodman: 81st, 6th on his team (73 games) (behind Jordan, Pippen, Ewing, Kukoc, Robinson, Shaq, Mutombo, Olajuwon, Ron Harper, Mourning, Stockton, Drexler, Lucky Longley, Bud Buechler) 1997 Dennis Rodman: 31st in RAPM, 5th on his team (behind Jordan, Pippen, Mourning, Ewing, Garnett, Malone, Kukoc, Shaq, Ron Harper, Stockton, Payton, Drexler, Hardaway, Hakeem) 1998 Dennis Rodman: far out of the top 50, I believe 5th on his team.
So… the data we have doesn’t portray Rodman as a consistent league leader in RAPM. He has one great year in 1991, just like Moses has one great available year in 85. But! He also has a number of years where he doesn’t look league-leading. And interestingly, for all the years we have a larger sample (admittedly when Rodman is old, *but when he was closer to his peak as a rebounder), Rodman is ranked 6th, 5th, and 5th on his team alone.
What if we look at the other great offensive rebounders… Leaders in offensive rebounds: -1997: Dennis Rodman (320), Dale Davis (301), Antoine Walker (288), Shawn Kemp (275), Tony Seikaly (274) -1998: Jayson Williams (443), Dennis Rodman (421), Vin Baker (286), Zydrunas Ilgauskas (279), Dikembe Mutombo (276)
In 97, none of these guys pop out in RAPM. They’re all below Rodman, first of all. Shawn Kemp is +1.25 offensive RAPM, 97–98 Antoine Walker is +0.24 In 98, none of these guys pop out in RAPM. Jayson Williams is -3.16 in offensive RAPM, Vin Baker is +1.73 (good! not great), Zydrunas Ilgauskas is -0.13, Dikembe Mutombo is -1.68.
Now obviously this is a pretty cursory look. None of these guys are the offensive player Moses was. This doesn’t look at a massive sample, it’s just manually checking the RAPM for league-leading offensive rebounders back in the day. The thing to do would be to check for a larger correlation between offensive rebounding vs RAPM in the late 90s and early 2000s, when offensive rebounding was more valuable, compared to other stats like scoring or assists or whatever.
But! Even in a limited sample, I’m also not seeing compelling evidence that having a league-leading focus on offensive rebounding is some super-underrated archetype, even back in the late 90s. In fact, if you look at the player leading the league in RAPM back then (including Robinson and Karl Malone, who are up for nomination), it looks like scoring, defense, and creation are super highly valued back then.
At a brief glance, I actually think that this supports the notion that these box stats substantially underrate offensive rebounding at the historically high end. And this is because I don't think you've really completed the circle here in the analysis. The question is specifically whether the relevant box stats underrate uniquely great offensive rebounding, not whether Dennis Rodman (who was a significant liability offensively beyond offensive rebounding) was a highly impactful player overall. So the question to look at wouldn't be how good Dennis Rodman looks in RAPM, but how good Rodman looks in RAPM compared to how good he looks in the kinds of box stats we're talking about.
And there I think we see evidence supporting my point.
- You note Rodman being 3rd in RAPM in 1991. But if we look at something like BPM, for instance, Rodman was ranked 78th that year! And RAPM and BPM are actually broken down into offensive and defensive portions, and from what I can tell in the Squared data, Rodman is around like 25th even just in ORAPM that year, while he has a negative offensive BPM that year, ranking 95th in the league.
- You note that he’s 31st in RAPM in 1997. FWIW, he’s also 7th in RAPM that year in the GitHub data. And it’s 33rd and 11th respectively if you just look at the ORAPM in those metrics. Meanwhile, Rodman was 86th in overall BPM and 93rd in offensive BPM.
- You mention Rodman’s 81st in RAPM in 1996. But he’s 106th in BPM. And, crucially, the low RAPM for him that year in the Squared data is actually driven by an oddly bad DRAPM. His ORAPM is actually quite good, ranking about 20th in the league that year! Meanwhile, his OBPM ranked 119th.
- Similarly, his ORAPM in 1998 ranks 79th (and 83rd in the GitHub data). Not very good! And rightly so, since Rodman was pretty washed by that year. But he was ranked 131st in OBPM.
Basically, what I see in this data is that one of the only comparable offensive rebounders to Moses consistently looks substantially better in RAPM than he does in BPM—especially when we narrow it down to looking at ORAPM vs. OBPM, which are most relevant here. Which would actually suggest that I’m correct that these sorts of box stats underrate idiosyncratically great offensive rebounding. It’s just one example, but Rodman is actually the main guy I’m aware of who, like Moses, is an all-time offensive rebounder who has had a consistently large effect on his team’s offensive rebounding rate when he leaves and joins teams, so it seems the best example to look at for this.
I’ll also note that this is further backed by comparisons using other impact metrics, like WOWYR. Rodman ranks 41st *all time* in the average of WOWYR/GPM measures. Meanwhile, his BPM in the years that that WOWYR/GPM was based on (1988-1997) was 1.2, which is not very good at all. Meanwhile, Rodman ranks 109th all time in Career WOWYR, but his career BPM is 242nd.
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* EDIT: I do also want to note that the fact that Rudy Tomjanovich has literally by far the worst Prime WOWYR and Career WOWYR in the entire database suggests to me that there’s something a bit odd going on with how value is being attributed to players on that Rockets team by WOWYR. And that’s affirmed further I think by the fact that Calvin Murphy has the 26th highest prime WOWYR of all time in the database—just between Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—while having missed virtually no games at all in his prime. Seems to me like low sample sizes have left the model super noisy with regards to that team and the result is that it is way too high on Calvin Murphy to the expense of other players on the team (including Moses).
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:Tight vote with the deadline a few hours away; Magic 11, KG 10, Curry 3, Kobe 1.
I've got it 11-10 KG.
It's possible people switched. Either way, I'd suggest a very careful recount by others to check.
I also only see two votes for Steph. But I don't know when you did your count, so maybe someone did change. I just did my count 30 minutes ago.
BTW, it says "EST" in the thread title, so the deadline is already passed(though Doc said in an earlier thread votes will still count up until he tallies).
It's possible people switched. Either way, I'd suggest a very careful recount by others to check.
I also only see two votes for Steph. But I don't know when you did your count, so maybe someone did change. I just did my count 30 minutes ago.
BTW, it says "EST" in the thread title, so the deadline is already passed(though Doc said in an earlier thread votes will still count up until he tallies).
Two potentially confusing factors for counting: -> Ceoofkobefans added KG as an alternate but it's not bolded -> i do not think gibson is a registered voter or was necessarily trying to vote
Since KG/MAGIC are the two candidates here I'll just list their votes:
Wonder what the nom pool looks like right now & what the procedure is in that regard. Seems pretty close, with Oscar/Mikan/West receiving a decent share of them.
Nonetheless, certainly a vote where quality has been > quantity; there aren’t a ton of pages but there’s a ton of great discussion across the board in what is the tightest race for selection yet.
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.
My vote now comes out Magic 10, KG 10, Curry 2 and Kobe 1. I think votes were changed, or some of the posts moderators deleted had votes in them. I haven't checked preferences, but 2 of the 3 are ceokobefans and Pen.
Mikan was nominee easily, not clear who would be favourite next time due to the extremely divided vote.
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
One_and_Done wrote:My vote now comes out Magic 10, KG 10, Curry 2 and Kobe 1. I think votes were changed, or some of the posts moderators deleted had votes in them. I haven't checked preferences, but 2 of the 3 are ceokobefans and Pen.
Mikan was nominee easily, not clear who would be favourite next time due to the extremely divided vote.
that might be the difference. I counted preferences too
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