Have been planning a reply on a similar kareem-related inquiry so may as well just do a 2 in one with the first part
Rishkar wrote:What edges over Jokic does Kareem have that don't show up in the boxscore? I'd love to learn more about his game, and I don't want this post to come off as confrontational. Merry Christmas
Tsherkin wrote:Whatever his rep was, the Bucks defensive excellence from 70 to 74(at which point dandrige wasn't all that) in the regular-season and playoffs correlates with Kareem rather strongly in a way you can't really claim for Jordan and Chicago or Jokic and Denver(or even Lebron outside of the 2016 playoffs).
Oh yes, Kareem was a good defender. He was a nasty rim protector, no question. I didn't mean to imply that he wasn't a good defender. But DPOY?
I mean looking at the results...
https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=107818815#p107818815-> Bucks jump by
4 points defensively when they draft him(and dandridge who is averaging 30 minutes) going from bad to solidly above average
-> Bucks jump by jump another 3 points in 1971(kareem and dandrige both level up)
-> Bucks then stay -4 as Dandridge's minutes drop from 39 to 35 with Kareem averaging 8 more minutes
(Note, even though their raw rating is higher earlier, they might a bigger outlier in 1974 than earlier via standard deviations)
1974 is also the first year we get block data and Kareem's blocks and block percentage absolutely dwarfs his 2nd highest scoring teammate(even on a per-minute basis)(4% to 0.8,: 3.5 to 6) as do his rebounds/rebound rate(nearly twice as much) which together, from the biggest player on the team(from tracking and synergy stuff it seems smaller players tend to feed off bigger players for blocks) suggests he is far and away the best paint-protector on an excellent 4-year defense that seems to
improve in the playoffs(no defensive rating, but we have point totals and they are lower scoring). Meanwhiile he is also reducing the effenciency of opposing all-stars by
3-points over said 4 years, and from accounts his milwaukee self is unusally mobile for a big(and maybe that plays into initial bill russell comparisons. We also have 70's film-tracking from his later less athletic self in 77 and he looks like a defensive monster in his worst games of that run.
Given how valuable paint-protection historically has been, the basic correlation of his arrival, and the mantainance as his best defensive teammate fell off, and the strong man d to go with all that, seems like in 74 at least he has a decent DPOY case(the award didn't exist at the time).
For comparative purposes, Jordan won dpoy getting a -2 next to a collection of defensive specialists(fell to average the next year). Lebron got 2nd anchoring a -5 in 2009 next to a defense-slanted cast(though trading for mo slightly hurt that)
and then fell to -3.5 with z falling off and ben wallace out(for my money Lebron has a solid case as the 2nd best defender that year after dwight), and the nuggets get a but worse defensively with jokic on the floor.
I have him a fair bit higher than the latter on that end and alot higher than the former FWIW.
tsherkin wrote:OhayoKD wrote:[
Defense is a thing. So is ball-handling. Jokic doesn't stack up statistically to Jabbar, James, or Russell and it's not hard to see why.
He surely stacks up to them statistically, though. He certainly doesn't run with them defensively, and you won't find me MAKING the GOAT argument for Jokic at this point just yet, but he's in the neighborhood for sure, leastwise by level of play.
Well then I'd be interested in you playing devil's advocate and try to make that case.
Jokic's best looking real-world signal(2023) is matched by lebron rs-coasting in his 30's(and Kareem posts similar looking stuff a bunch) and waxed outright from the best stuff we have for that big 3(1977, 2009/2010, 69 and it's not as clean but i'd throw 72 and 74 there too).
Moreover, we saw an extended stretch of Jokic playing without his best teammates and it looked a hell of a lot worse from what we've seen from that trio in the regular season and the playoffs: Lebron goes 58-win pace without wade and kyrie, 11-0 without Mo-Williams, posts a +10 san PSRS in 2015. Kareem goes 62-win without Oscar, outscores an all-time team with Oscar injured, and carries a massive regular-season outlier within a game of a championship in spite of lucas getting hurt, and dandrige and oscar being shells. Russell's celtics stay the best team in the league when his best teammates miss significant time.
By RAPM, Jokic looks worse than embid and a peer for Giannis. The only major goat candidate with full data there dominates every sourced set we have for the last 30 years.
By on/off Jokic posts a slight .9 1-year advantage in 2023 over 2009 James, but that evaporates if you add playoff games to that sample because Jokic also happens to keep running nuetral/negative there. Any other frame and Lebron and a bunch of other players best him.
I will reiterate as I have before On/off does not have the stablity of RAPM or the inclusiveness/per-game sample of wowy and wowy-adjacent stuff but people have been very keen to use it so...
You can bring up Jokic's BPM or PER but that's not really any different from someone counting blocks, steals and contests, giving them 3, 1, and 4 points each and declaring Russell the king of numbers. As is, even with per-esque player preference, plenty of box metrics exist where Jokic isn't grading out as a clear top player post-prime Lebron, let alone all-time(and to be clear Lebron mostly cooks in the most correlative of those metrics I've seen).
Back to basketball....
If he can't run with them defensively and data which accounts for defensive impact consistently has him not on that level...I'd say that's a strong indicator his "level of play" is not actually on that level when you account for the other end of the court. Honestly even offensively I'm pretty skeptical Jokic is not just straight outproduced in a matchup against 2009 Lebron's regular-season(alot more ball-handling, drawing more defensive attention) nevermind when he turned on the heater in the postseason.
Even talking offense-only studs, I have a hard time coming up with a clear statistical justification to place him ahead of Magic who we saw cook minus Jabbar and led all-time offenses in multiple distinct systems under multiple coaches, made the finals with a skeleton crew in 91, and has, imo, the best cold-data portfolio of the 80's(best wowy signals, very much alive to look like a rapm king or co-king for the 80's).
The issue isn't a lack of data, it's that the data available paints him alot less favorably than what is
consistently present for a modern player, as a peer for multiple contemporary, and then you have to consider the majority of nba history where what we have puts Russell as nigh unassailable and Kareem as proto-Lebron.
Furthermore, as you allude to, there is the lack of sustained data which, even from a peak/prime perspective, makes one peaking higher(under the premise that data is noisy and uncertainity is always there) statistically likelier with a player who has more years to throw in the hat and is looking better at earlier and later points(something which applies to all 3 in a comparison to Jokic). A player who has 10 "peak" calibre looking years is just more likely to "truly" peak higher than a player with "7"(and this is really what the value of RAPM is).
And as I touched on before, it doesn't help that when Jokic has handled situational hurdles(teammate injuries) his team doesn't do anywhere near as well as what we've seen repeatedly from those 3 in question(replication -> less likely to be a result of situation)
So we have a player who doesn't have much of anything hinting to himself as a murks the field outlier(Lebron has an abundance there, most of what we have of russell suggests he's an even bigger one, Kareem and Magic to a lesser degree), and also doesn't have anything suggesting he's a historically unusual metronome(Lebron has that in spades, kareem to a degree, magic and jordan may get that too depending on how the squared's stuff shakes out)
I don't think GOAT really has much point as a term if we are going to apply it that generously(and at this point, from a statistical perspective, i think there's only really 2 viable picks here even if you make it "prime" and not "career")
I also don't know about "never had it in his rep" considering his rookie self was being compared to Bill Russell.
Which was and remains an odd comparison.
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Yeah, but it speaks to a high defensive rep for whatever that's worth. As said before, with Wilt bowing out and Walton not yet a factor, maybe the best dpoy argument of anyone in 1974(to go with a clear cut opoy one)