RealGM 2023 Top 100 Project - #18 (Dirk Nowitzki)

[HeartBreakKid]

Nash only won MVP because he switched teams and people noticed how much better the team got when he moved. If he'd stayed on one team his whole career like Stockton, he never would have had a prayer. Stockton has 13 seasons with a higher BPM than any Nash year.

Disagree. If Dirk had gotten hurt for instance and he carried the team in his absence, people would have noticed. Stockton did not ever carry the team, and as Dr MJ points out the Jazz peaked as his role diminished.

Nor can one say Stockton was secretly having superstar impact and it was never noticed. Not when you're losing to the 86 Mavs in the 1st round, the 87 Warriors in the 1st round, the 89 Warriors in the 1st round (swept), the 90 Suns in the 1st round, the 93 Sonics in the 1st round, etc. The Jazz were only a 49.77 win team over Stockon's first 9 years with Malone, when he was aged 23 to 31. It seems clear there were not 2 superstars on this team who were secretly unseen, but delivering superstar impact. For mine the credit goes to Malone, but you can decide for yourselves which of the 2 to side with.

OK, but Dirk never got hurt and neither did Malone. How's Stockton supposed to show what he can do in Malone's absence when Malone never missed more than 2 games in a year the entire time he played in Utah? If lack of playoff success is what you're dinging Stockton for, here are the top 10 BPMs for Stockton and Malone in any given postseason:

Stockton: 12.0, 8.8, 8.7, 8.6, 8.4, 7.8, 6.7, 6.6, 6.4, 6.1
K. Malone: 7.3, 7.1, 6.5, 6.5, 6.0, 4.7, 4.7, 4.5, 4.0, 3.9

You bring up the Jazz getting swept in '89, but Stockton averaged 27/3/14/4/2 that series on 51/75/91. He was a Superman. Whatever the problem was, he wasn't it.

PJ Tucker could do that, no problem. Get that stuff out of here.

[Colbinii]

You can’t just throw away KDs warriors years lol

You can justify why you don’t take them at face value which is perfectly fine but you can’t just take them out when making a comparison when those were probably his peak years

I think the Warrior years highlight exactly why KD is so great. He isnt the straw that stirs the drink but he is additive to anything. He raises the baseline of any offense because he can score at an insane rate for undesirable offensive shots.

I think the Warrior years highlight why KD ISN'T so great. When he replaces Harrison Barnes as a catch and shoot guy, the team barely gets better at all. When Curry was hurt and he had to replace him as the primary offensive creator, the team fell off a cliff. He's a nice accessory, but he's not the guy that's actually making a major impact.

I already said he isnt the straw that stirs the drink. But KD is a Top 30 player of alll-time, a goat level "plug and play" player.

You aren't arguing, disagreeing or presenting anything I didn't already say

[AEnigma]

BPM does not inherently mean anything other than “this combination of box metrics plugged into this formula spits out this number”. It is not a substitute for player assessment or analysis.

[lessthanjake]

His peers were not outraged by Stockton's award recognition or lack thereof. He was felt to be ranked fairly. I'd also add the media's record of ranking players in awards has been so much better than player voted awards that it's not funny. The players are as bad as the fans, it's been an embarassment.

You think Stockton didn't get any award recognition? He was voted all-NBA 11 times. That's more than KD. Now granted, Magic and Michael did lock down the first team spots a lot of those years, but the idea that he wasn't recognized in his day is completely wrong. And now that we've learned over time how passing, defense, and efficiency are a lot more valuable than we thought relative to raw scoring volume, it makes sense that we'd value him even higher. And when we have analytics that rate his age 34-40 seasons higher than anyone of the last 26 years except for LeBron, KG, CP3, and Tatum? Well, it makes sense that we might revise that upward even further.

I think we should be pretty careful about drawing too strong a conclusion from Stockton’s impact-metric numbers.

There’s two significant issues here:

1. There’s just a ton of collinearity issues with Stockton and Malone in terms of RAPM, since they were on the same team, were almost always rotated at the same time, and so rarely missed games. For instance, in the 1997-1998 regular season, Stockton played 85% of his minutes with Karl Malone. There were only 278 minutes without Malone. In the 1998-1999 regular season, Stockton played 90% of his minutes with Karl Malone. He only played 139 minutes without Malone. In the 1999-2000 regular season, Stockton played 92% of his minutes with Karl Malone. He only had 190 minutes without Malone. In the 2000-2001 regular season, Stockton played over 87% of his minutes with Karl Malone, and only 301 minutes without Malone. In the 2001-2002 regular season, he played 85% of his minutes with Malone, and 397 minutes with Malone off the court. And in the 2002-2003 regular season, he played 90% of his minutes without Malone, with just 232 minutes with Malone off. These are extraordinarily high proportions of minutes together. A RAPM model has almost no data for these years with which to figure out who is having what impact, and a good bit of the data that is there is probably garbage time. Interestingly, the one year where they didn’t overlap so insanely was in 1996-1997, where only 75% of Stockton’s minutes with were Malone (712 minutes without). And, perhaps not coincidentally, Stockton was only 19th in the league in RAPM that year in Engelmann RAPM (and 15th in GitHub RAPM). It was Stockton’s worst RAPM showing (and certainly nowhere near being top-tier in general), in the one year where there wouldn’t be such huge collinearity issues with Karl Malone. Not sure that that’s a coincidence.

2. Stockton ranks highly in WOWYR (being 5th all time), but it’s basically based on nothing. The data is based on a grand total of 22 missed games over the course of a decade. In those games, they went 13-9 without Stockton, so it’s not even like they did badly without him. And while WOWYR does adjust for teammates to try to help estimate a player’s impact, we run into a huge collinearity issue again, with Karl Malone only missing 4 games over the entire decade. So the model really has essentially zero way of figuring out which of the two was having what impact, and is basically rating Stockton more highly based on an amount of missed games from Stockton that is just noise.

[One_and_Done]

Nash only won MVP because he switched teams and people noticed how much better the team got when he moved. If he'd stayed on one team his whole career like Stockton, he never would have had a prayer. Stockton has 13 seasons with a higher BPM than any Nash year.

Disagree. If Dirk had gotten hurt for instance and he carried the team in his absence, people would have noticed. Stockton did not ever carry the team, and as Dr MJ points out the Jazz peaked as his role diminished.

Nor can one say Stockton was secretly having superstar impact and it was never noticed. Not when you're losing to the 86 Mavs in the 1st round, the 87 Warriors in the 1st round, the 89 Warriors in the 1st round (swept), the 90 Suns in the 1st round, the 93 Sonics in the 1st round, etc. The Jazz were only a 49.77 win team over Stockon's first 9 years with Malone, when he was aged 23 to 31. It seems clear there were not 2 superstars on this team who were secretly unseen, but delivering superstar impact. For mine the credit goes to Malone, but you can decide for yourselves which of the 2 to side with.

OK, but Dirk never got hurt and neither did Malone. How's Stockton supposed to show what he can do in Malone's absence when Malone never missed more than 2 games in a year the entire time he played in Utah? If lack of playoff success is what you're dinging Stockton for, here are the top 10 BPMs for Stockton and Malone in any given postseason:

Stockton: 12.0, 8.8, 8.7, 8.6, 8.4, 7.8, 6.7, 6.6, 6.4, 6.1
K. Malone: 7.3, 7.1, 6.5, 6.5, 6.0, 4.7, 4.7, 4.5, 4.0, 3.9

You bring up the Jazz getting swept in '89, but Stockton averaged 27/3/14/4/2 that series on 51/75/91. He was a Superman. Whatever the problem was, he wasn't it.

World B. Free posted big numbers. I want numbers that translate into impact/winning. Alot of guys can post numbers in a sweep. This is where, even if you are a big plus minus guy, Stockton is getting special treatment just because we don't have plus minus for all these failure years.

In any event, if 2 guys are having MVP impact, the team shouldn't be getting only 50 wins on average for that period, and getting smacked over the knee by such meh teams in the 1st round. Especially when the Jazz support cast generally wasn't bad, including at times all-stars like Eaton, J.Malone & Hornacek.

[iggymcfrack]

His peers were not outraged by Stockton's award recognition or lack thereof. He was felt to be ranked fairly. I'd also add the media's record of ranking players in awards has been so much better than player voted awards that it's not funny. The players are as bad as the fans, it's been an embarassment.

You think Stockton didn't get any award recognition? He was voted all-NBA 11 times. That's more than KD. Now granted, Magic and Michael did lock down the first team spots a lot of those years, but the idea that he wasn't recognized in his day is completely wrong. And now that we've learned over time how passing, defense, and efficiency are a lot more valuable than we thought relative to raw scoring volume, it makes sense that we'd value him even higher. And when we have analytics that rate his age 34-40 seasons higher than anyone of the last 26 years except for LeBron, KG, CP3, and Tatum? Well, it makes sense that we might revise that upward even further.

I think we should be pretty careful about drawing too strong a conclusion from Stockton’s impact-metric numbers.

There’s two significant issues here:

1. There’s just a ton of collinearity issues with Stockton and Malone in terms of RAPM, since they were on the same team, were almost always rotated at the same time, and so rarely missed games. For instance, in the 1997-1998 regular season, Stockton played 85% of his minutes with Karl Malone. There were only 278 minutes without Malone. In the 1998-1999 regular season, Stockton played 90% of his minutes with Karl Malone. He only played 139 minutes without Malone. In the 1999-2000 regular season, Stockton played 92% of his minutes with Karl Malone. He only had 190 minutes without Malone. In the 2000-2001 regular season, Stockton played over 87% of his minutes with Karl Malone, and only 301 minutes without Malone. In the 2001-2002 regular season, he played 85% of his minutes with Malone, and 397 minutes with Malone off the court. And in the 2002-2003 regular season, he played 90% of his minutes without Malone, with just 232 minutes with Malone off. These are extraordinarily high proportions of minutes together. A RAPM model has almost no data for these years with which to figure out who is having what impact, and a good bit of the data that is there is probably garbage time. Interestingly, the one year where they didn’t overlap so insanely was in 1996-1997, where only 75% of Stockton’s minutes with were Malone (712 minutes without). And, perhaps not coincidentally, Stockton was only 19th in the league in RAPM that year in Engelmann RAPM (and 15th in GitHub RAPM). It was Stockton’s worst RAPM showing (and certainly nowhere near being top-tier in general), in the one year where there wouldn’t be such huge collinearity issues with Karl Malone. Not sure that that’s a coincidence.

2. Stockton ranks highly in WOWYR (being 5th all time), but it’s basically based on nothing. The data is based on a grand total of 22 missed games over the course of a decade. In those games, they went 13-9 without Stockton, so it’s not even like they did badly without him. And while WOWYR does adjust for teammates to try to help estimate a player’s impact, we run into a huge collinearity issue again, with Karl Malone only missing 4 games over the entire decade. So the model really has essentially zero way of figuring out which of the two was having what impact, and is basically rating Stockton more highly based on an amount of missed games from Stockton that is just noise.

Right, but then our next best method of estimating impact when we don't have good on/off data is BPM, and in BPM Stockton is 8th all-time despite playing much longer than most players. He has 17 seasons in the top 10 and 12 seasons in the top 5. In VORP, he ranks 3rd all-time trailing only LeBron and MJ. I feel like all the indicators here point in the same direction that Stockton was actually massively valuable, much greater than his repuation would suggest.

[iggymcfrack]

Disagree. If Dirk had gotten hurt for instance and he carried the team in his absence, people would have noticed. Stockton did not ever carry the team, and as Dr MJ points out the Jazz peaked as his role diminished.

Nor can one say Stockton was secretly having superstar impact and it was never noticed. Not when you're losing to the 86 Mavs in the 1st round, the 87 Warriors in the 1st round, the 89 Warriors in the 1st round (swept), the 90 Suns in the 1st round, the 93 Sonics in the 1st round, etc. The Jazz were only a 49.77 win team over Stockon's first 9 years with Malone, when he was aged 23 to 31. It seems clear there were not 2 superstars on this team who were secretly unseen, but delivering superstar impact. For mine the credit goes to Malone, but you can decide for yourselves which of the 2 to side with.

OK, but Dirk never got hurt and neither did Malone. How's Stockton supposed to show what he can do in Malone's absence when Malone never missed more than 2 games in a year the entire time he played in Utah? If lack of playoff success is what you're dinging Stockton for, here are the top 10 BPMs for Stockton and Malone in any given postseason:

Stockton: 12.0, 8.8, 8.7, 8.6, 8.4, 7.8, 6.7, 6.6, 6.4, 6.1
K. Malone: 7.3, 7.1, 6.5, 6.5, 6.0, 4.7, 4.7, 4.5, 4.0, 3.9

You bring up the Jazz getting swept in '89, but Stockton averaged 27/3/14/4/2 that series on 51/75/91. He was a Superman. Whatever the problem was, he wasn't it.

World B. Free posted big numbers. I want numbers that translate into impact/winning. Alot of guys can post numbers in a sweep. This is where, even if you are a big plus minus guy, Stockton is getting special treatment just because we don't have plus minus for all these failure years.

In any event, if 2 guys are having MVP impact, the team shouldn't be getting only 50 wins on average for that period, and getting smacked over the knee by such meh teams in the 1st round. Especially when the Jazz support cast generally wasn't bad, including at times all-stars like Eaton, J.Malone & Hornacek.

BPM is literally determined by a regression on which stats lead to winning most. It's the definition of a stat that translates into impact/winning. World B. Free never had one season where he ranked in the top 15 in BPM. Stockton ranked in the top 10 in 17 different seasons. Then, the years where we do have actual impact data, Stockton, over a 7 year span at ages where most stars are either role players or retired ranked 5th out of every player of the last 26 years. I feel like the indicators would show that Stockton had more of the impact than Malone, but also I feel like you're underselling how well they actually did over that time period. Here are the teams with the best records in the NBA through the 1990s:

Chicago Bulls 558-230 (.708)
Utah Jazz 524-246 (.688)
Seattle Supersonics 511-247 (.648)
Phoenix Suns 503-285 (.638)
San Antonio Spurs 496-292 (.629)

They were much closer to the Bulls than the field during the decade. That's something to be proud of, not ashamed of. If Jordan hadn't been allowed to get away with a superstar 2 hand shove in Game 6, they probably would have won the title that year and this whole narrative would have been flipped. Instead of being "the team that couldn't win the big one", they'd be "the team that finally dethroned Jordan". I daresay Stockton was just as successful playing with Malone as KD was playing with Westbrook, Harden, Kyrie, and Booker.

[iggymcfrack]

BTW, I've enjoyed talking about Stockton, but it's kinda funny how much discussion he's gotten relative to his actual level of support. Here's the vote count right now:

Selection
Dirk 5, Karl 4, CP3 2, KD 2, Dr. J 1
(Dirk 8-6 after alternates)

Nomination
Giannis 4, Barkley 3, Jokic 2, Moses 1, Nash 1, Stockton 1, Pettit 1
(Giannis 4, Barkley 3, Jokic 3 after alternates from single votes)

[Clyde Frazier]

Stockton was an all-star/all-nba type guard, not a star. The stars are who we ahould be discussing now. If PJ Tucker had really high impact stats should I rank him top 100? The answer is pretty obvious. You can't build a contending team around Stockton as the best player.

There are guys with alot of longevity left who were also superstars. How about we vote them in before we takk about a non-franchise player with longevity.

Longevity can't help you against a plainly superior player. AC Green has more longevity than Kawhi Leonard, but one guy doesn't move your titles odds much and the other does.

Making blatant exaggerations in your comparisons doesn't help prove your point.

Spoiler:

Stockton was an all-star/all-nba type guard, not a star. The stars are who we ahould be discussing now. If PJ Tucker had really high impact stats should I rank him top 100? The answer is pretty obvious. You can't build a contending team around Stockton as the best player.

If he had the record of assists in NBA history, steals in NBA history, high impact stats, a great win%, great longevity, fantastic shooting and all time series where he outplayed Magic for example... well then you might want to consider him in the top 30, let alone top 100.

Let's not pretend Stockton isn't an unique type of player. He's a 9 time assist champion. He lead the playoffs in APG 10 times. He was a 60ts% type of guy before guys jacked up a ton of 3s, so he was definitely efficient. He definitely belongs in the conversation.

If you can build a contender arround Nash you can definitely build a contender arround Stockton.

And you can argue Stockton was our best player from 88 to 92.

Alot of what you're citing is accolades, not ability. I don't care who the all-time assists leader is, or how many apg he had. Obviously if a guy can average 15.4 ppg and 13.4 apg in a season he's an incredible player, except that player was Kevin Porter and he was far from incredible.

Stockton was not considered to be a superstar by his contemporaries, as the award voting makes clear. Nor would he be today. His lack of ability to get to the basket and score, his lack of athletic gifts, renders him an all-nba type guard at best. I don't care what his advanced stats were, but if I did I would note that one reason his advanced stats might be good is due to him being ahead of his time in his play style. Today everyone uses pick and roll and shoots a tonne of 3s, so some of the things Stockton did are less special. Same issues I raised with Reggie Miller.

It would be historically anomalous for 2 top 20 all-time type players to be on the same team for so long, with good team mates and coaching, and have so little to show for it. They have so many bad postseason exits. If Shaq and Kobe has performances like these 2 we'd roast them.

Next time we do a peaks project you can shine light on Kevin Porter doing that for a single season. Of course bringing him up here in comparison to Stockton's career is irrelevant.

You can weigh "advanced stats" however you like but completely dismissing them is taking your player evaluation down a notch. The impact data we do have should at least be acknowledged. How on earth is a player being "ahead of his time" a knock against them?

You seem to be taking offense to Stockton being mentioned when he isn't even nominated yet. He's mostly been mentioned because of the Malone discussion which is inevitable. I'd say the majority of voters here aren't ready to vote him in yet. However, Stockton was a great shooter, passer and defender with elite durability and longevity. He's objectively a top 50 player of all time. The middle ground here is pretty reasonable.

[One_and_Done]

BPM is literally determined by a regression on which stats lead to winning most. It's the definition of a stat that translates into impact/winning. World B. Free never had one season where he ranked in the top 15 in BPM. Stockton ranked in the top 10 in 17 different seasons. Then, the years where we do have actual impact data, Stockton, over a 7 year span at ages where most stars are either role players or retired ranked 5th out of every player of the last 26 years. I feel like the indicators would show that Stockton had more of the impact than Malone, but also I feel like you're underselling how well they actually did over that time period. Here are the teams with the best records in the NBA through the 1990s:

Chicago Bulls 558-230 (.708)
Utah Jazz 524-246 (.688)
Seattle Supersonics 511-247 (.648)
Phoenix Suns 503-285 (.638)
San Antonio Spurs 496-292 (.629)

They were much closer to the Bulls than the field during the decade. That's something to be proud of, not ashamed of. If Jordan hadn't been allowed to get away with a superstar 2 hand shove in Game 6, they probably would have won the title that year and this whole narrative would have been flipped. Instead of being "the team that couldn't win the big one", they'd be "the team that finally dethroned Jordan". I daresay Stockton was just as successful playing with Malone as KD was playing with Westbrook, Harden, Kyrie, and Booker.

Ah yes, the narrative that goes something like "at age 32 a young whippersnapper named John Stockton entered the NBA and did exactly what we expected, until age finally slowed him down 4-5 short years later".

Amazingly the clock does not begin on Stockton's career in his 30s.

I don't really care what number BPM or metric X spit out: it didn't lead to enough winning for his first 9 years with Malone to make the idea they both had a superstar impact plausible.

[MyUniBroDavis]

You can’t just throw away KDs warriors years lol

You can justify why you don’t take them at face value which is perfectly fine but you can’t just take them out when making a comparison when those were probably his peak years

Who does that?

What's substantial difference there is between 2016 and 2017 Durant?

I aint making the argument lol, but it’s gonna come down to how much of the improvement was the situation, how much of it was from him himself, and maybe how much of it was based on how his situation in okc was in general


If you wanna say KD is the same or KD got better, you gotta justify that statement, which probably isn’t hard to do either way

[One_and_Done]

The impact data we do have should at least be acknowledged. How on earth is a player being "ahead of his time" a knock against them?

It's a knock when you wouldn't get the same benefit of doing it today, and so it reduces your impact. Same thing I discussed with Reggie Miller in the Ben Taylor thread that's open.

[Doctor MJ]

BPM is literally determined by a regression on which stats lead to winning most. It's the definition of a stat that translates into impact/winning. .

So I would strongly disagree, but I think having the discussion about this is really important - and it's within the realm of possibility that something has been innovated that I'm not aware of.

Big picture, I see these domains Holistic Basketball Player Evaluation Metrics:

Box Score Weighted (Production)
Scoreboard Correlated (Impact)
Player Tracking Weighted (Record? Action? Track?)
Biographically Weighted (Stereotype? Measure? Scout?)
Hybrids

I'd say all of these domains have potential value, and the Hybrids possibly most of all...though I've long been known about the dangers of Hybrids to serious basketball analysts.

I'll also say that I'm super-high on continued progress with Player Tracking Weighted measures. I see a tremendous amount of potential there.

But right now we're mostly use Production, Impact, and Production-Impact Hybrid Holistics.

Anyway, speaking with this schema in mind - which I'd enjoy discussing further - the really relevant point to me with regards to our disagreement is this:

I'm not ever comfortable using Production data as substitute for Impact data.
I may effectively weight Production more heavily the less Impact data I have, but it doesn't fill the niche of Impact data, that void remains and shows its affect with greater uncertainty in my final assessment.

Why do I feel strongly about this? Honestly, because I've seen the scale of the problem in the case of someone like Steve Nash.

Impact stats have led me to conclude that Nash was the clear cut top offensive player in the league for many years...but he never leads the league Offensive Win Shares or BPM over on bkref. So obviously I think that means they underrate him, but the more important point to me is that they underrate him specifically because their are dimensions of impact that they simply don't have statistical access to...which means we have to bring that our adjustment ourselves, and we do so cognitive tools that are effectively heuristic approaches that emulate the other domains listed above.

And of course, the defensive problems are bigger. Measures like these think Magic Johnson was a better defender than Michael Cooper, because the things Cooper was tasked to do aren't what the box score tracks.

A guy like Nash is a limited defender, but he's not getting so few steals because he's doing nothing out there, but rather because it's not his job to be the one taking risks on defense. His job out there is to work within the team defense, and in Phoenix he really wasn't a clear-cut negative defensive impact guy. Nor should we think that because the Suns defenses were never elite that that means they couldn't have made a good defense with Nash on the court. During the brief stint that Kurt Thomas was the starting center for the Suns, the team had a legit top-third defense, and it's not like Thomas is known for being an amazing defender. He was just a lot better than Amar'e or Old Shaq.

This then points to what I'm looking for with Player Tracking. When we can get it to the point where it can effectively predict Impact by Tracking, we're going to have something incredibly powerful...but I really don't think anything all that close is possible based solely on the Box Score.

[HeartBreakKid]

The impact data we do have should at least be acknowledged. How on earth is a player being "ahead of his time" a knock against them?

It's a knock when you wouldn't get the same benefit of doing it today, and so it reduces your impact. Same thing I discussed with Reggie Miller in the Ben Taylor thread that's open.

But he would get the same benefit...teams still use the pick and roll and use it more optimally than Sloan did 30 years ago.

you're implying that teams would be able to guard it now because pick and roll ball is very common but not acknowledging that offenses are better at using it and use it on higher volume. A great pick and roll player is going to be worse in an era where his strengths are going to be used more doesn't sound likely.

The fact that pick and roll is used even more than era would mean that players who are good at it would be valued more.

Being ahead of your time is a pretty good thing. And I never get why people who rely entirely on conjecture and hypotheticals never try to look at it both ways, why are you hypothetically assuming Stockton wouldn't be ahead of his time if he played today? Players who are innovative or have high B-Ball Iq's are going to advance the meta no matter what. It's odd how you frame things like players are lucky they were stumbled upon these great talents that weren't even utilized properly by their coaches. You give zero credit.

[One_and_Done]

What I said there about Reggie basically applies to Stockton too RE: offense.

His assessment of these guys is annoying because there's a complete lack of analysis as to how they'd play today.

It's counterintuituve, but Reggie for example would be worse today. Why? Because when Reggie played teams didn't understand the value of 3s, which contributed to an environment where it was easier for him to get open 3s (especially the 3 years the line moved in).

Today teams sell out to stop open 3s. The way you take advantage of that is by being a deadly iso-player who blows by your defender when they get too close trying to deny the 3. Harden is a good example, with his shiftyness and handle letting him kill defenders for making the wrong decision. Miller was not much of a driver. He didn't have shake or a lightning first step or superior athleticism. In today's game he might take more 3s, but he wouldn't be able to exploit his 3pt ability to drive powerful offenses. He'd basically be a slightly lesser version of Klay. That's valuable, but it doesn't make him a star today. Ditto Stockton in relation to his 3pt shot.

He'd also be worse because he'd be taken advantage of so much more on D, where they'd bumhunt him on pick and rolls and score in him at will. In Reggie's day you had minimal movement and Reggie could chill and get some rest on a bad offensive player.

[iggymcfrack]

BPM is literally determined by a regression on which stats lead to winning most. It's the definition of a stat that translates into impact/winning. World B. Free never had one season where he ranked in the top 15 in BPM. Stockton ranked in the top 10 in 17 different seasons. Then, the years where we do have actual impact data, Stockton, over a 7 year span at ages where most stars are either role players or retired ranked 5th out of every player of the last 26 years. I feel like the indicators would show that Stockton had more of the impact than Malone, but also I feel like you're underselling how well they actually did over that time period. Here are the teams with the best records in the NBA through the 1990s:

Chicago Bulls 558-230 (.708)
Utah Jazz 524-246 (.688)
Seattle Supersonics 511-247 (.648)
Phoenix Suns 503-285 (.638)
San Antonio Spurs 496-292 (.629)

They were much closer to the Bulls than the field during the decade. That's something to be proud of, not ashamed of. If Jordan hadn't been allowed to get away with a superstar 2 hand shove in Game 6, they probably would have won the title that year and this whole narrative would have been flipped. Instead of being "the team that couldn't win the big one", they'd be "the team that finally dethroned Jordan". I daresay Stockton was just as successful playing with Malone as KD was playing with Westbrook, Harden, Kyrie, and Booker.

Ah yes, the narrative that goes something like "at age 32 a young whippersnapper named John Stockton entered the NBA and did exactly what we expected, until age finally slowed him down 4-5 short years later".

Amazingly the clock does not begin on Stockton's career in his 30s.

I don't really care what number BPM or metric X spit out: it didn't lead to enough winning for his first 9 years with Malone to make the idea they both had a superstar impact plausible.

Sure, Stockton took a while to get going in the NBA. He came off the bench most of the time his first 3 years and wasn't a regular starter until age 25. Who cares when he literally has top 5 longevity in NBA history and was an impact player up until age 40. The decade I listed the Jazz's record over goes from Stockton at age 27-37. Let's look at a longer period and pro-rate the Jazz's record in the lockout season over 82 games. From 88/89 (Stockton's 2nd season as starter) through 00/01, the Jazz only had one season where they won 50 games or less. Over that same time period, they had 4 seasons where they won 60 or more. They were massively successful. They certainly weren't "averaging 50 wins" during Stockton's prime as you said earlier.

Did they win as much as they would have liked in the playoffs? No, of course not. They played a lot of good teams though. If we define that span as Stockton's prime, the Jazz went 11-4 to teams with an SRS under 5.0, and 4-9 to teams with an SRS over 5.0. The four "bad losses" the Jazz had over that span were a freak 1st round loss to the Warriors where Stockton put up an insane video game stat line that would have made LeBron proud, two losses to the back-to-back champion '94 and '95 Rockets, and a 3-2 loss to the 4.6 SRS Mavericks with Dirk and Nash in 2001 when Stockton was 38 years old. The only real bad team loss over that span was the fluke series where Stockton scored 27 PPG on 50/70/90 while averaging 4 steals and 2 blocks per game. So it's not like they performed poorly in the playoffs overall. They were one bad call away from likely dethroning the Jordan Bulls at home. But again, if there is blame to be apportioned for falling short in their playoff results, it probably goes to Malone who I've seen people designate as the #1 playoff faller of all-time on some recent statistic posted.

Currently, I have Stockton #16 on my all-time list ahead of Wilt, Oscar, Bird, and Kobe but the more I look into it, the more I think he might still be too low. Does he have a case over Dirk? Over CP3 and Magic? Over Giannis and Jokic? From a CORP perspective, he certainly does. Again, he's #3 all-time in the history of the NBA in VORP. 6th all-time in win shares. And his impact numbers EXCEED his box score numbers! Putting him outside the top 30 is utter absurdity. He absolutely deserves a nomination soon.

[One_and_Done]

Because your narrative is illogical and appears to be a backwards constructed attempt to justify the advanced metrics you favour. I don't agree that Stockton 'took a while to get going', or that he was a superior player in his mid 30s to previous years. The more sensible conclusion is that he just isn't as good as you think and the short run when the team improved in the mid to late 90s was due to other factors. There are so many guys we should be considering before Stockton or Pettit.

[trelos6]

Since we are talking about Stockton, l have him at 9 all NBA level seasons and 14 all star seasons with 10 all defensive.

Very good longevity, just doesn't have the peak for me. I have him around 33 -35

[iggymcfrack]

BPM is literally determined by a regression on which stats lead to winning most. It's the definition of a stat that translates into impact/winning. .

So I would strongly disagree, but I think having the discussion about this is really important - and it's within the realm of possibility that something has been innovated that I'm not aware of.

Big picture, I see these domains Holistic Basketball Player Evaluation Metrics:

Box Score Weighted (Production)
Scoreboard Correlated (Impact)
Player Tracking Weighted (Record? Action? Track?)
Biographically Weighted (Stereotype? Measure? Scout?)
Hybrids

I'd say all of these domains have potential value, and the Hybrids possibly most of all...though I've long been known about the dangers of Hybrids to serious basketball analysts.

I'll also say that I'm super-high on continued progress with Player Tracking Weighted measures. I see a tremendous amount of potential there.

But right now we're mostly use Production, Impact, and Production-Impact Hybrid Holistics.

Anyway, speaking with this schema in mind - which I'd enjoy discussing further - the really relevant point to me with regards to our disagreement is this:

I'm not ever comfortable using Production data as substitute for Impact data.
I may effectively weight Production more heavily the less Impact data I have, but it doesn't fill the niche of Impact data, that void remains and shows its affect with greater uncertainty in my final assessment.

Why do I feel strongly about this? Honestly, because I've seen the scale of the problem in the case of someone like Steve Nash.

Impact stats have led me to conclude that Nash was the clear cut top offensive player in the league for many years...but he never leads the league Offensive Win Shares or BPM over on bkref. So obviously I think that means they underrate him, but the more important point to me is that they underrate him specifically because their are dimensions of impact that they simply don't have statistical access to...which means we have to bring that our adjustment ourselves, and we do so cognitive tools that are effectively heuristic approaches that emulate the other domains listed above.

And of course, the defensive problems are bigger. Measures like these think Magic Johnson was a better defender than Michael Cooper, because the things Cooper was tasked to do aren't what the box score tracks.

A guy like Nash is a limited defender, but he's not getting so few steals because he's doing nothing out there, but rather because it's not his job to be the one taking risks on defense. His job out there is to work within the team defense, and in Phoenix he really wasn't a clear-cut negative defensive impact guy. Nor should we think that because the Suns defenses were never elite that that means they couldn't have made a good defense with Nash on the court. During the brief stint that Kurt Thomas was the starting center for the Suns, the team had a legit top-third defense, and it's not like Thomas is known for being an amazing defender. He was just a lot better than Amar'e or Old Shaq.

This then points to what I'm looking for with Player Tracking. When we can get it to the point where it can effectively predict Impact by Tracking, we're going to have something incredibly powerful...but I really don't think anything all that close is possible based solely on the Box Score.

I feel like I used to be a lot more skeptical on BPM, but I've actually been very surprised over the years how well it correlates to actual impact data. I'm not saying it has zero blind spots whatsoever and elite aggressive passing is one of them, but on the whole I feel like it does surprisingly well. Obviously, having stuff like EPM and RAPTOR is best, and having say a good PI RAPM would be next best, but in general I think BPM does fill in the gaps pretty well. And in the case of Stockton where we already have 7 years of elite impact data for him at a ridiculously advanced age, I don't see anything wrong with taking it at face value when it says he was a consistent top 5 player.

Where we do have actual RAPM data, we come up with:
Stockton: 5.6 (off), -1.6 (def), +7.2 (overall)
Nash: 5.1 (off), 0.8 (def), +4.3 overall

IDK, I feel pretty comfortable with the conclusion that Stockton was at least comparable to Nash at peak and once you get away from the top three years for each, Stockton has a pretty comfortable lead each of the rest of the seasons from 4th through 18th.

[iggymcfrack]

Because your narrative is illogical and appears to be a backwards constructed attempt to justify the advanced metrics you favour. I don't agree that Stockton 'took a while to get going', or that he was a superior player in his mid 30s to previous years. The more sensible conclusion is that he just isn't as good as you think and the short run when the team improved in the mid to late 90s was due to other factors. There are so many guys we should be considering before Stockton or Pettit.

You’re completely misrepresenting my position. I’m saying that from Stockton’s second year as a starter through his age 37 or 38 season, the team was fantastic. They only had one season under 50 wins and they only had one loss to a team with an SRS under 6 that wasn’t one of Hakeem's championship Rockets team. They played great, not just in the late ‘90s, but over a 12 year span.