LakerLegend wrote:Who's in 03 Duncan's stratosphere? 03 Duncan is considered one of the greatest peaks in NBA history. Only Jokic is currently in that discussion.
No, that's also wrong.
Luka, Jokic, SGA right now, Giannis when he's healthy... there are a bunch of guys on a similar plane. Don't confuse accomplishment with player value; they aren't the same thing.
If anything Duncan's offensive impact would be better.
Gods, no. That's DEFINITEY wrong. He wasn't good enough on offense in a primary scoring role for that to be true. Yes, if you played him like his 2014 self, that would be valuable. Duncan was always unselfish, and didn't care about stats. He did what Pops said was necessary to win, and then stepped it up as necessary. But he wasn't a good enough shooter from basically anywhere to be a high-volume scorer of value in this environment. He had structural limitations on his utility. So a sensible strategy wouldn't have him scoring a ton, he'd be more like his later self, where he was more of a decoy. And that limits his upper bound relative to others.
Look at an old Duncan on the 14 Spurs who were very much a "modern" offense.
Right. And he was a 29 mpg player who took 12 FGA/g that year. Not really sure you're grokking my point if you're raising that season as being of relevance to this discussion.
He wasn't just a post-up guy which BTW, Jokic makes a lot of his living off of.
Sure, but he wasn't as good a finisher, wasn't as good a passer, had nothing like Jokic's range and struggled at the line enough to separate himself there as well. Not really sure where that was going. Jokic is an ATG offensive player. Duncan was not; his bread and butter were defense, rebounding and team-centric attitude on O. He would scale poorly on O in this era due to skill limitations.