Voting Post
1. George Mikan
Nomination
Nikola Jokic
Mikan: before this project, i figured i'd be voting for george mikan once we got everyone else out of the way. that's what you do. you vote for all the people who have won an alpha championship, throw in some longevity guys whose careers you remember real well, and then you eventually vote for "that guy". mikan. guy who played in the 40's. with the plumbers. and not even the good plumbers.
but then you think about it, and the guy started his nba career 12 years before west and oscar. those guys played in a modern league, right? and they were nowhere close to the era-relative dominance of mikan. like, not even a little. and then you go back a little further. bill russell won a title in 1957 as a rookie, and we all just lump that in with his other 10 titles. all from the modern nba, right? and yet just 3 years earlier, mikan won a title as the best player in the league. could the league have changed
that much? it's not like the league suddenly became massively more popular and money started flooding in and the 1957 talent pool swamped the 1954 talent pool.
while i do think it's reasonable to think that there was a fairly rapid increase in the league talent in the early days, it's hard to think that titles in 1953 and 1954 could really be that different from a title in 1957.
obviously, if you are going to play in the weakest era, perhaps weakest by a bit, you better absolutely dominate. and mikan does. enough that i think that's it's certainly right to start talking about him now. we are talking about west and oscar, and they are seemingly fairly distant 3rd/4th in their era. is a clear cut #1, arguably a bill russell-level winner with wilt chamberlain-level stats, from just 12 years before not better than them? there obviously isn't much to go on as far as stats or videotape for mikan, but what we do have in stats is dominant.
once they start counting minutes in 1952, which is after the lane-widening, mikan leads the league in PER for the next 3 years. actually peaking at 29.0 in 1954. he finishes 2nd, 1st, and 3rd in WS48.
in the playoffs, he leads the league in PER all 3 years. he finishes 3rd, 1st, and 1st in WS48.
in fact, in 1954, the year that is only 3 years before bill russell wins his first title, mikan sets the playoff record for PER (33.6) and WS48 (0.391), records which would stand for a multi-series playoff run until 2009 lebron. the 0.391 WS48 is just enormous. so he had the most statistically dominant playoffs for most of NBA history while winning a title, including winning as an SRS underdog in the finals against +4.3 team.
and of course, by all accounts this is the weak part of his career. from 1949-1951, he average 28.0 ppg on 41.7 FG% compared to 20.7 ppg and 38.8 FG% from 1952-1954. the league was a little faster-paced in the earlier 3 year era, but considering the gulf between these stats and given that he was leading the league in basically everything from '52-'54, he was almost certainly having the highest PER seasons in history from '49-'51. he played 40 mpg in 1952. even if we assume he played 43 mpg in 1949, 1950, and 1951, his WS48 in the regular season would beat 1972 kareem all 3 years for the nba record.
in the playoffs, the statistical difference between '49-'51 and '52-'54 is basically the same. so again, almost certainly at least in 2nd all-time in PER behind 2009 lebron and possibly in first. even if he played all 48 minutes in 1949, he would have the WS48 record at 0.420. so mostly like somewhere around 0.450 WS48 if he played 45 minutes. only 1951 shows a drop off.
and what probably impressed me the most when i started looking at numbers before this project, things that were supposed to impress me about hakeem, mikan stands out as an amazing playoff riser.
Actual Championships vs Expected Championships - 5 vs 2.31 (2.69 delta is 7th), +116% is 13th
how did this happen? well, playoff resiliency. i looked at the last project's Top 33 (just stopped at pippen due to time and less interest in the players below him) plus newer guys like jokic, giannis, embiid, and kawhi and then put in tatum and butler. i would've put in doncic but i only did ages 22-35 and doncic only had one season (though he would have led the list below).
all the data is from ages 22 to 35 and it looks at the BBRef stats PER, WS48, BPM, and TS% and compares each year to the regular season. the resilience at the end is just an average of the normalized increase/decrease for each value. +1 is a top 95% value and -1 is a bottom 6.5% value (couldn't use 5% because the lower values were so low that they were making the average season as slightly "resilient"). for playoff runs shorter than 10 games, the final value was multiplied by "Games/10" so a 5 game, 1 round playoffs would get weighed at 50%. the table is their career average (each playoff run weighed equally to essentially average your resiliency from year to year). mikan comes in 3rd behind kawhi and hakeem. so the guy who absolutely kills regular season stats also shows up as one of the great individual playoff risers ever. and he's a huge team riser as well.
Code: Select all
Rank Player Name Career Avg
1 Kawhi Leonard 0.4561
2 Hakeem Olajuwon 0.3315
3 George Mikan 0.3246
4 Lebron James 0.2747
5 Bill Russell 0.2548
6 Walt Frazier 0.2318
7 Jerry West 0.2142
8 Michael Jordan 0.2081
9 Tim Duncan 0.166
10 Magic Johnson 0.0968
11 Scottie Pippen 0.0963
12 Oscar Robertson 0.0865
13 Kobe Bryant 0.0856
14 Charles Barkley 0.0779
15 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar 0.0554
16 Dirk Nowitzki 0.0534
17 Jayson Tatum 0.0247
18 Nikola Jokic 0.0205
19 Shaquille O'neal 0.0179
20 Moses Malone 0.0093
21 Dwyane Wade -0.0021
22 Chris Paul -0.0156
23 Julius Erving -0.0231
24 Jimmy Butler -0.0341
25 Wilt Chamberlain -0.0851
26 Kevin Garnett -0.1115
27 Larry Bird -0.1327
28 Kevin Durant -0.1435
29 Patrick Ewing -0.1446
30 David Robinson -0.1552
31 Steve Nash -0.1582
32 Stephen Curry -0.1613
33 Bob Pettit -0.1624
34 John Stockton -0.182
35 Giannis Antetokounmpo -0.1975
36 James Harden -0.1982
37 Karl Malone -0.2959
38 Joel Embiid -0.533
the following table shows how much better a player was in the playoffs to explain how many championships they won. well, it turns out for mikan it would be a massive 13.5 wins per season or 5.0 SRS. even above hakeem.
won like russell, dominated stats like wilt, playoff riser like hakeem. at some point, winning 7 titles in 8 years, dominating basically every regular season stat that was available, dominating every playoff stat that was available, being one of the great playoff risers ever, and still basically being able to do it all within 3 years of bill russell entering the nba, tells me mikan needs to be above other players from the league's first 25 years who weren't nearly as dominant in their era.
The Other Nominees
As you can see in the resiliency table, Karl Malone is way ahead for biggest postseason faller other than Embiid (who hasn't finished his career). I didn't break it down here, but on TS%, he has a negative score in 13 of his 15 playoffs and just based on TS% his score would go from -0.2959 to about -0.50. So just a truly huge faller in TS%. Robinson fares better for his career at 30th place with a -0.1552 but it's largely on the back of his Duncan years. In his best years of 1994-96 he's at -0.4904, so terrible in the years it mattered most, and that's with a nice boost from an easy series in 1996, so he was arguably even worse when it really mattered. Since I've decided to table West and Oscar for now, that probably leaves me voting for Dirk next thanks to his alpha championship and his huge performance against the Spurs in 2006. Honestly, not sure if I shouldn't just start voting for Jokic.
