AEnigma wrote:Top players on the board for me are Elvin Hayes, Dikembe Mutombo, Robert Parish, and Paul George. Looking past them, my next names are Unseld, Carter, and Billups.
Bobby Jones does not make my top hundred. I agree with Doc that he was never a true superstar the way we could at least argue was true of Manu, and after 1977 I think he stops being a true all-league player. Now, he could make up for that by just accruing sub-all-star value like Parish did… but he played far too few minutes to qualify in my eyes. I have him more on par with Dave DeBusschere — who is also probably not in my top hundred.
Rodman by contrast is in my top hundred. Playing a key role on five title teams, plus what I see as a reasonably impressive peak in 1992, gives him a safer floor there. However, I still tend to mark him below forwards like Rasheed, Marion, Nance, Cunninghan, Worthy, Wilkins, English… by this point Tatum…
So just chiming in with some thoughts on the guys mentioned and other who they make me think of.
- Hayes vs Unseld is always an interesting one to ponder. My instinct is to favor Unseld, but many have presented good arguments for Hayes, with beast's always sticking in my mind because of his Bullet perspective. I am inclined to turn my nose up at Hayes scoring due to the inefficiency, but someone needed to shoot on that team, and that team had quality, sustained success. Add in that Hayes had the length to be a defensive anchor and Unseld did not, it's very possible that Hayes not only was more valuable in some years, but might have been more valuable over the entirety of his time on the Bullets than Unseld was.
- But with that said, I don't think there's any doubt who Mr. Bullet is - it's Wes who was the foundation on which they built, it's Wes who had legendary leadership stature, and it's Wes who approached the game in a way that seemed sure to add positive value filling in the gaps others didn't focus on.
- Mutombo & Parish are two guys I'm thinking about alongside Ben Wallace. In both cases I see an argument for 2-way impact, and in Mutombo's case there's the argument he was better on defense too. Ben became a more singular icon leading the Pistons to the title, but how much of that is just luck? Certainly some. I think there's a question of whether there was something about Ben's less stretched out frame that was enough of an advantage to leave him better suited against more modern play.
- Paul George - so I'm low on George's career, and to be honest maybe unreasonably so. Both he and Shawn Marion have this situation where they pushed their way out of their best basketball situation acting as if they were aggrieved by organizations I think did everything you could reasonably ask of them, and this sort of thing lingers with me. Now, George is in better shape than Marion with this because with George we can continue to see the talent instead of seeming to leave what was truly special behind him, but I still have this sense of George's career that it hasn't amounted to much. He was certainly on his way to a career with a legacy in Indiana, but then he blew that up, jerked his next team around, and has been a part of Clipper superteam now for many years without them actually leaving much of a mark.
- Carter as I've noted recently is a guy who I'm increasingly feeling like I've underrated. Still don't feel like it's necessarily a dramatic peak underrating, but the rest of his career was more solid than it tends to get credit for.
- Billups is interesting. His rise to his 2020 rank definitely felt like a situation where my position was overtaken by events - from a proponent to a skeptic. As we near the 60s, siding with Billups doesn't seem strange. My pre-list had Lillard ahead of him, but I could see that being reversed. I will say I go back & forth on Billups vs Ben. Certainly perception shifted from Ben as the team MVP to Billups as the team MVP over their time together, and I think that was correct. Had it been, say, 2006 where the Pistons broke through and won the title selecting Billups over Ben would likely be an easy call. But it was 2004 when it happened, and of course 2004 was coached by one guy (Larry Brown) and 2006 by another (Flip Saunders), with changes to philosophy along the way as well as player aging. This then to say that if I'm talking simply about Hall-worthiness, Ben > Billups pretty easily, but from there it's a question of criteria.
- Bobby Jones & DeBusschere. 2 things here: 1) Bobby was a big time shot-blocker, and that's no small thing when comparing defenders, and 2) Bobby was hyper efficient, and DeBusschere really wasn't. I can definitely see arguments for DeBusschere based on minutes, but I don't really see them as having a similar statistical silhouette.
- Bobby Jones & Rodman. Same things as in the DeBusschere comparison for the most part. Big difference with Rodman is the way he absolutely fixated on rebounding. If you believe that's valuable enough then I'd expect you to favor Rodman here. I'll say though that before we got +/- data, there were arguments that essentially theorized that Rodman was a massive +/- guy, and that's not really what the data has told us. By contrast, there were similar arguments for Jones and those arguments arguably underestimated Jones even though they were praising him. And then beyond that, there's the destructive part of his behavior to consider. I don't want to overstate that significance of that, but Jones was definitely better as a culture guy.
- Sheed. Speaking of not-so-culture guys. I can definitely see the argument for Sheed over, say, Jones, but much of what Sheed brought that Jones didn't, Sheed didn't seem to enjoy using. Sheed seemed happiest being a role player for Detroit and while he was a hell of a role player, I can't say I think he was better at it than Jones except possibly by minutes.
- Nance. I'm on Team Larry too. The more I learn about him, the more he steps forward as a guy who was better than people realized. I could see going for Nance before any of the other guys mentioned so far honestly, though I'm not at this time planning to champion him.
- Cunningham. Definitely a guy to consider. Had the rep as a high BBIQ guy and Moonbeam's RWOWY liked him quite a bit iirc. But if I'm bringing up Cunningham, it makes me want to talk about other ABA guys. Yes Cunningham came right in and won the MVP, but the team didn't keep it up in the playoffs. By contrast a guy like Zelmo Beaty did. We then also have guys like Connie Hawkins & Mel Daniels to consider. After having championed Hawk through projects end to no avail last time, I'm going to be cautious about putting his name forward at all despite the fact I think he was better at basketball than any of these guys...but I am feeling a pull toward Zelmo.
- Worthy, Nique, English. So a bunch of '80s scorers makes sense to discuss them together. I do feel compelled to pick up Worthy and say "No, he's different." The eternal question is how well each guys would do if Worthy changed places with Nique or another volume scorer in the time period. I don't know, but what I will say is that a) I think it matters a great deal whether a scorer could play as well as Worthy did in Magic's offense, and b) I think people back then very much overrated how impressive volume scoring at mediocre efficiency was. (Granted English was pretty efficiency.)
- Tatum. I've never really been a Tatum fan...but I think he's accomplished more to this point in his career than Embiid, so yeah, I think we need to talk about him. You brought up Paul George. Pretty sure we're going to need to discuss Rudy Gobert & Luka Doncic too. The thing about Tatum is that he's actually look remarkably consistent as an elite +/- guy for quite a while now but I think most of us tend to think he isn't quite as good as the numbers say, and so the question is: What's with the discrepancy?
