Throwawaytheone wrote:lessthanjake wrote:Once he hit his prime in 2014, Steph Curry typically outdid LeBron in regular season impact (as I’ve shown a bajillion times by listing who was ahead year by year in the various metrics we have)
and subsequent data we have gotten (i.e. for instance, RAPM data, including the limited pre-play-by-play stuff we have) really doesn’t paint a picture of players that are at all close.
Could you post the impact data comparisons for both, with values? How close were Bron/Curry vs Hakeem/Jordan? Would help bring some statistical veracity to the debate.
This doesn’t have the specific values in it, but I did a list of which one of the two was ahead in a ton of different impact metrics each year from 2014 onwards. You can find it in the first spoiler in my post here: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=2309163&p=107697936&hilit=Curry+Estimated#p107697936
For convenience, I’ll copy-paste that in a spoiler here:
There’s also the Basketball Database RAPM that I’ve discovered since that post. Using their three-year RAPM, we see the following:
Basketball Database Three-Year RAPM
2014-2016: Curry
2015-2017: Curry
2016-2018: Curry
2017-2019: Curry
2018-2020: Curry
2019-2021: LeBron
2020-2022: Curry
2021-2023: Curry
2022-2024: Curry
Using their five-year RAPM instead, we get the following:
Basketball Database Five-Year RAPM
2014-2018: Curry
2015-2019: Curry
2016-2020: Curry
2017-2021: Curry
2018-2022: Curry
2019-2023: Curry
2020-2024: LeBron
The website has one-year RAPM, but single-season raw RAPM is a pretty bad stat (too much noise—I probably shouldn’t have even included it in the post I linked to above, but did for sake of completeness). That said, in case you’re curious about that, Curry is ahead in 7 of the 11 single seasons from 2014 to present—with the exceptions being 2016, 2020 (obviously), 2021, and 2024.
Also, as an amendment on what I said in the spoiler about not being aware of publicly-available PIPM data beyond the 2015-2017 years I noted there, the Basketball Database website does have more fulsome PIPM data. And we see that it looks like this:
Basketball Database PIPM
2013-2014: Curry
2014-2015: Curry
2015-2016: Curry
2016-2017: Curry
2017-2018: Curry
2018-2019: Curry
2019-2020: N/A
2020-2021: Curry
2021-2022: Curry
2022-2023: LeBron
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I also did some related analysis last year of the average league placement of players in various impact metrics. See the spoiler and link below: https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=2310528&p=107776281&hilit=Placement#p107776281
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Note: On the values themselves, we can’t really do much of a comparison, because we don’t have the same impact metrics for the vast majority of Jordan’s and Hakeem’s careers. To the extent we do have different stuff for Jordan and Hakeem (such as Squared’s RAPM), different measures are scaled differently and use different methodology, so we can’t really compare the numbers in a direct way to what we have in different measures for LeBron and Curry. And even the small number of measures we have for both sets of players (Real Plus Minus being one example) are likely not scaled the same in different years, making it probably a flawed approach to compare values in different years. This is largely why my past analysis has focused on who is ahead in a given year or timeframe, as well as looking at average league placement. Indeed, at one point I did analysis on average values in some of these stats, and had the pro-LeBron crowd here tell me (I think correctly actually) that that was not a valid approach, for these reasons. In any event, here I don’t know that we have any need to compare values, since we have Curry outdoing LeBron in Curry’s prime, while, as I’ve noted, Jordan easily outdoes Hakeem in the impact data we do have from their years.
And since I haven’t noted this stat previously regarding Jordan/Hakeem and writing this made me think of it, I’ll note that we have RPM from 1997, a year where Hakeem was still in his prime, and Jordan was ranked 1st in the league with 7.62, while Hakeem was ranked 30th with 2.77. In 1998, Hakeem was arguably not quite in his prime anymore and Jordan had declined a bit, but Jordan was 5th with 5.96, while Hakeem was 22nd with 3.18. So yeah, Jordan is ahead and it’s not close. And we see a similar story in the various other metrics I’ve mentioned for those two (Squared RAPM, Engelmann’s quarter-by-quarter RAPM approximation, single-season RAPM from the play-by-play era, WOWYR, Moonbeam’s regressed WOWY analysis, the Basketball Database’s multi-year RAPM, etc.)