Retro Player of the Year 1951-52 — George Mikan

[AEnigma]

If people want to share instances where Ben’s current pace/ortg/drtg model meaningfully contrasts with what is listed on basketball-reference, I hope they do so, but I think few people here are going to change their stance if a +4 offence/defence is more realistically estimated as a +3.5 one.

[Doctor MJ]

Mikan this year has more of a Duncan type impact no longer in consideration for OPOY votes, but that still seems like it's probably #1

I'm leaning towards Arizin 2nd even though his team goes .500. A near league leading efficiency 25ppg is by far the best offensive wing, there is no other wings above 15ppg. Cousy hasn't separated himself in assists yet (The leader is Phillip) although his scoring volume is impressive for a PG. I'm considering Mikkelson top 5 with the efficient 15 points being solid for this era and better defense than a lot of the competition.

For defensive players I'm extremely high on Mel Hutchins D for the 50s overall however this year he is on a 17 W team. So maybe I'll wait one more thread and rate bigs like Clifton and Mikkelson as still ahead of him.

So first wanted to say I like seeing the mention of Hutchins who is renowned for his D and arrives in the NBA this year, though I agree that it's hard to champion him when his team is so ineffective.

To your other points:

- Indeed, I would say '51-52 really begins the time period in the NBA where bigs are for defense much more so than offense, though awareness of this isn't something I'm confident ever permeated the consciousness of the contemporaries. Them seeing the defensive impact was of course clear, but it the usage of big as volume scorers who shouldn't have been volume scorers lasted many, many decades after that.

- I expect I'll side with Arizin too and think it likely he'd have won OPOY for many, many years had the military not come calling.

- Re: Mikkelsen. I think further discussion of Mikan's teammates makes a lot of sense in general. Back when we did the HOF project back in 2020, the fact that Mikkelsen just looks like clearly the #2 guy on the Lakers by box score loomed large, and raised questions about the respect given to other teammates, but I actually came out more convinced of Pollard & Martin's significance than Mikkelsen's.

I think probably the biggest thing to consider is the effect on stats of perimeter players in a scheme where they are trying to get the ball into the interior so that the big can go to work. It's entirely possible to have a scheme where perimeter players don't actually get much credit for assists and their shot attempts are disproportionately desperation heaves, which would make their stats look awful.

Now, just because their stats don't look as good as they could have in another scheme doesn't mean that their actual value isn't represented by those stats, but that's where we get into the weirdness that by the time you get to '53-54, it's going to be Pollard & Martin who are playing the big minutes as Mikan & Mikkelsen play considerably less. Fine to still call Mikan the MVP of the team (I do) based on how big he is in the minutes he plays, but in general, if there's a team who during their championship playoff run has two guys play HUGE minutes and everyone else plays way less, the idea that the team is winning a title without the two HUGE minute guys being quite valuable just doesn't make sense to me.

Back to Mikkelsen: I don't want be too negative on him as he's clearly a great player, but while he was a great rebounder and rebounding helps with team defense more when guys are missing more shots, I don't think anyone actually argues he was the best interior defender on the Lakers.

Meanwhile, Martin is often raved about as the premier shot down guard defender of his era, and Pollard is seen as the best athlete of the era with remarkable defensive versatility - from the perimeter to being known for goaltending himself back before it was illegal.

[Dr Positivity]

Vote

1. George Mikan - Probably a tier below the best offensive players but great on D makes him still the best, easy to vote for best player on champion

2. Paul Arizin - As mentioned he is WAY above the other wings on offense, presumable some spacing impact.

3. Bob Cousy - He is around league average in TS which for a guard with very high volume, I think is fine, in addition to the playmaking.

4. Ed Macauley - Hyper efficient 19 a game with plus passing and decent floor spacing seems pretty great on offense for this era, not enough info for me to treat him as a total negative on D.

5. Bob Davies - As with a previous thread, we'll guess that with some really efficient Royals supporting members, there is a Davies effect helping them with his relative modern game.

Schayes misses as he's only healthy for like 45-50 games. Mikkelson is close but I can see his physicality getting more attention on D than some quieter good defensive players.

Offensive player of the year

1. Paul Arizin
2. Bob Cousy
3. Ed Macauley

Defensive player of the year

1. George Mikan
2. Nat Clifton
3. Vern Mikkelson

Senesky plays on last placed D so we'll drop him this time.

[ZeppelinPage]

If people want to share instances where Ben’s current pace/ortg/drtg model meaningfully contrasts with what is listed on basketball-reference, I hope they do so, but I think few people here are going to change their stance if a +4 offence/defence is more realistically estimated as a +3.5 one.

Not quite relevant yet, but here is a post I made regarding the Russell-era Celtics. Taylor's data does have them as a plus offensive team, sometimes even top 2-3, so quite a significant change. They are still elite defensively:

Thread on why Basketball Reference underestimates the Celtics offense:

Read on Twitter

Ben Taylor's own data supports this theory as he likely has differing pace estimations that account for the specific context of the Celtics touched on in the thread above.

According to Taylor's data, the Cousy-era Celtics are more often than not a plus offensive team (with 4 of 7 seasons ranked in the top 4):

1957 Celtics rORTG: +2.2 (2nd of 8)
1958 Celtics rORTG: +1.4 (3rd of 8)
1959 Celtics rORTG: +1.7 (4th of 8)
1960 Celtics rORTG: +2.5 (2nd of 8)
1961 Celtics rORTG: -1.4 (7th of 8)
1962 Celtics rORTG: +0.9 (5th of 9)
1963 Celtics rORTG: -0.6 (5th of 9)

Following Cousy's departure, the offensive outlook is split, but nonetheless more favorable compared to Basketball Reference:

1964 Celtics rORTG: -2.4 (8th of 9)
1965 Celtics rORTG: -0.4 (6th of 9)
1966 Celtics rORTG: -0.5 (6th of 9)
1967 Celtics rORTG: +2.3 (2nd of 10)
1968 Celtics rORTG: +0.5 (5th of 12)
1969 Celtics rORTG: +0.1 (8th of 14)

This data paints the Celtics as (for the most part) a more balanced team. A fraction of the credit the defense receives is simply given to the offense. They still had a fantastic defense for their era and on an all time scale--this defense was the backbone of their team and was key to their championships. But with a more accurate possession estimate, it's likely that the Celtics offense contributed to winning more than previously thought.

[B-Mitch 30]

I'll never be sure how Mikan would do if he grew up in today's game, but I'll always appreciate how good a free throw shooter he was even by modern standards.

[Djoker]

VOTING POST

Player of the Year

1. George Mikan - Averaged 23.8/13.5/3.0 on 45.9 %TS (+2.1 rTS) in the regular season then 23.6/15.9/2.8 on 47.7 %TS (+3.9 rTS) in the playoffs. Still the best defensive player in the league too. Lakers were by far the #1 defense in the league and his teammates had something to do with that too but Mikan was the biggest reason.

2. Bob Cousy - The game's first great offense engine has arrived on the scene. Boston was the #2 offensive in the league thanks to their playmaking maestro. Cous averaged 21.7/6.4/6.7 on 44.5 %TS (+0.7 rTS) then upped that to a ridiculous 31.0/4.0/6.3 on 55.1 %TS (+11.3 rTS) in the postseason. Yes Boston lost in Round 1 but they lost to the Knicks team that ended up losing the Finals in seven hard-fought games.

3. Bob Davies - The other great PG. Rochester was the #1 offense. Davies averaged 16.2/2.9/6.0 on 45.5 %TS (+1.7 rTS) then 19.8/2.2/4.7 on 51.2 %TS (+7.4 rTS). Still couldn't justify putting him over Cousy considering how great Cousy was in the playoffs. Davies was really good but not nearly as good.

4. Paul Arizin - Incredibly efficient scorer. 25.4/11.3/2.6 on 54.6 %TS (+10.8 rTS) then 25.7/12.7/2.7 on 57.0 %TS (+13.2 rTS) in the playoffs. I feel like others have him a bit too high for my liking. His team just isn't very good.

5. Ed Macauley - Schayes is definitely the better player but injured too many games for my liking.

HM: Dolph Schayes, Vern Mikkelsen, Jim Pollard

Offensive Player of the Year

1. Bob Cousy

2. Bob Davies

3. Paul Arizin

Cousy and Davies made their teammates easier shots so I think they are the two best offensive players. Arizin is third thanks to some monster scoring although I could have maybe taken Mikan here.

Defensive Player of the Year

1. George Mikan

2. Vern Mikkelsen

3. Slater Martin

All Lakers for DPOY this time. Their defense was just way too dominant.

[eminence]

^Schayes played injured for a decent chunk, but only actually missed 3 games.

[Colbinii]

5. Ed Macauley - Schayes is definitely the better player but missed too many games for my liking.

HM: Dolph Schayes, Vern Mikkelsen, Jim Pollard

Schayes missed 3 games. It wasn't an 82-game season, which is probably what brought you to the conclusion of too many games missed.

[Djoker]

Sorry I meant to type injured. He didn't actually miss the games but he played well below his level.

[AEnigma]

Offensive Player of the Year
1. Bob Cousy
2. Bob Davies
Still thinking about the Player of the Year ordering, because I have slightly more confidence in Davies as a defender than I do in Cousy, but here I am more secure in siding with Cousy’s playmaking volume. The Royals seem to have been the better offence, but not by a degree where I would attribute the difference to Davies specifically rather than to the roster generally being more offensively adept than what the Celtics had (especially with Sharman only being a part-timer). And in a playoff setting, I do not believe Davies had the capacity to expand his production the way Cousy did against the Knicks. Without a notable efficiency advantage (think 2003 Nash versus 2003 Kidd) or a perceptible advantage in playmaking quality (think 2010-12 Nash versus 2010-12 Rondo), Davies just does not have the necessary indicators to excuse that difference in volume.

3. Paul Arizin
Reluctant to ever go higher than this for a non-creator on an OPoY ballot. However, I do not think any other playmaking guard was especially close to the Bobs this year, and there is no denying the impact Arizin provided to this Warriors team as the league’s unquestioned best scorer in both the regular season and postseason. The utter collapse of the Warriors the subsequent year without Arizin is a little overstated by the raw change in relative offensive efficiency, but it does speak to the sheer lift his scoring profile provided.

Defensive Player of the Year
1. George Mikan
2. Nat Clifton
In 1954 specifically I might question the automatic placement of Mikan here, but for now it stays his award after anchoring one of the most dominant defences in NBA history. I was cautious with Clifton last time, but now he is the team leader in rebounds and second on the team in both total minutes and minutes per game despite being the team’s worst scorer. The Knicks also manage their best defence by far of this entire era with him as an anchor next year, although this year is his most productive rebounding season. Altogether, he is the easiest DPoY runner-up choice I will have until 1957/58 Stokes.

3. Joe Graboski
This was between Graboski and Rocha. Not overly impressed by Rocha — terrible signal to leave the Nationals in 1954 and see them improve defensively despite no significant additions — but this season he joined the Nationals and led them in minutes, which corresponded with a significant defensive improvement despite the team losing Alex Hannum and despite Schayes being limited for much of the season. However, I am much more confident in Graboski as a superior rebounder and as a consistent defensive contributor looking forward, and the Olympians had the more impressive turnaround from his addition compared to the Nationals adding Rocha.

Player of the Year
1. George Mikan
2. Paul Arizin
3. Bob Cousy
4. Bob Davies
5. Dolph Schayes
Interesting to come back to write this after reading Eminence’s and Doc’s voting posts, where I end up higher on Arizin than both. Evidently there is a difference in approach in OPoY versus PoY, where I think Arizin was a mediocre and easily replaceable defender who still contributed more on that end than Cousy or Davies did, absent proof of either significantly elevating the offensive production of stalwart defenders (e.g., if there were an instance of someone like Nat Clifton suddenly becoming more efficient when playing with them, that would assuage most concerns).

I think Schayes was likely still the second-best player at full capacity. I can see LA Bird’s angle that Schayes’s injury did not really cost the Nationals anything, in much the same way eminence points out the Royals did not lose anything from Davies’ lower regular season minutes. As I have said before, though, I do not quite treat this as a best player ranking.

So here is what I see. In the regular season, the most notable non-Mikan figure is Arizin, and while impact is tough to parse in this era, on this Warriors team he seems to have been as significant as anyone in the league. LA Bird’s citation to Arizin’s more tepid 1955 impact when reuniting with the in-his-prime Johnston is why I have theoretical concerns with Arizin’s overall profile (and the profile of any player who only or otherwise disproportionately contributes value through volume scoring), but that does not change the dynamic at play this season. In the postseason, he and Schayes thoroughly outplay each other in their teams’ respective first win. In the deciding Game 3, Arizin puts up 26/15/1 on 57.2% efficiency (and fouls out at some point) while Schayes puts up 17/11/2 on 49.9% efficiency (four fouls). Arizin leads both teams in points and rebounds that game, providing a third of his own team’s total in both, while Schayes is the second most productive player on his own team behind Rocha’s 20/11/3 on 63.1% efficiency (five fouls); judging by the DPoY votes, most here think Rocha was more of a standout defender than Schayes too. While again I see a path to arguing Schayes could have still been the “best” player in the series, I side with Arizin — which leaves Schayes with only a theoretical case over him this year in both the regular season and the postseason.

Moving on to Cousy. As highlighted, the Celtics narrowly lose to the Knicks in a double-overtime series decider. One point away. Cousy has two of the best games any guard has ever played to that point. I can entertain the argument he cost them Game 2… but more realistically, Sharman’s absence is what cost them that game, because his absence left the Celtics with only two capable scorers (and I am skeptical that Cousy was habitually failing to pass the ball to Macauley). All told, under Cousy, I think the Celtics were a better team than the Knicks this year but simply had some bad luck. The Nationals, by contrast, were much less successful against the Knicks. Schayes was to his credit extraordinarily efficient (looks like 60% true shooting across those four games), but here is where I think inability/unwillingness to scale up volume is a comparative detriment to a team. Eminence highlighted how in the postseason, Davies was only a minute per game behind Arizin. Well, Schayes was over 3 minutes per game behind Davies, fourth on his own team. And Cousy? 35 minutes in an 11-point win, 48 minutes in a 4-point loss, and 55/58 minutes in that double overtime loss. He was out there trying to do everything he could for the team. That gives him the third spot on my list.

And now Davies. 26 points per game on 53.4% efficiency against the Pistons (although Wanzer was the true standout scorer). Phenomenal in a Game 1 win against the Lakers. Great in a Game 2 overtime loss (one point away from being up 2-0). Injured in a 10-point Game 3 loss (could he have swung that result if healthy?). And good in the 2-point series-ending Game 4 loss. Again, no real criticism of his play or approach. Lost a tight series against a strong champion after leading his team to the most wins in the league. Not quite as impressive to me as Cousy’s total season, but not far off, so even if Schayes was the “better” player, Davies feels like the more notable figure in any season summary.

[Doctor MJ]

A quick note on OPOY:

I expect to have Arizin at #1 there, and I'm seeing folks put him, as the star of the #3 ORtg team this year, placed behind the stars of the #1 & #2 teams.

I like that people are really thinking hard about ORtg, but I'd note that the gap between these 3 team's offenses isn't actually that big, and while it's reasonable in general to wonder if the biggest scorer of the bunch is getting in the way of his team's overall performance, keep in mind that when Arizin returns to the NBA he'll end up leading a #1 ORtg higher than any of the teams from this year, and leading them to the title.

Now, it's a team game and he has help getting his team to the promised land, but to the question of:
Is Arizin holding his team offense back relative to other offensive stars? I have to say my answer is "No".

A couple other things to consider.

First,
Arizin this year led the league in:
PPG
FG%
TS Add
FTs made
FTA
Minute Played

He did not lead the league in FGA, because Mikan & Cousy were ahead of him. Mikan isn't our OPOY focus any more, but Cousy is, and we're in this precarious time where Cousy has extreme primacy and his team has a high rORtg, but knowing what we know about Cousy going forward, I think it absolutely makes sense to ask whether Cousy should have been taking more FGA than Arizin. I don't think so.

Further, while Arizin's Warriors got eliminated in the fist round, consider Arizin's numbers in that series in comparison to the star of the other team (Schayes):

Arizin 25.7 PPG on 57.0% TS with 12.7 RPG.
Schayes 20.3 PPG on 52.4% TS with 13.7 RPG.

Now at first glance you might think "Arizin a bit better as a scorer, Schayes a bit better as a rebounder, might be a wash", but remember: Schayes was a big, while Arizin wasn't. Arizin at 6'4" was 4 inches shorter than Schayes, and shorter than any other Top 10 rebounder in the league.

Second, as we're noting that Arizin saw his PPG, TS% & rebounds go up in the playoffs from the sky high numbers they already were, consider the rest of the team's rebounding. While Arizin got 13.7 per game, only one other teammate broke 5.0 per game, and that teammate (Ed Mikan) only got 6.7. Hard then to imagine Arizin should have been doing more than he did.

There is still defense to consider for POY - and Mikan looms quite large there - but just on offense, I'll put it like this:

Arizin was the best offensive talent to enter into the NBA until Wilt/Oscar/West show up about a decade later, and while the poor decision to allow Fulks to keep chucking in '50-51 clearly got in the way of him showcasing it fully as a rookie, by '51-52 Arizin put the doubts to rest.

[trex_8063]

Busy this go-around; gonna have to be short and sweet on my picks to beat the deadline....

Player of the Year
1. George Mikan - Likely not a lot to explain, certainly I can't add anything that probably hasn't already been said. Most dominant defensive force in the league [he'll get that pick from me, too], while also being one of the better offensive forces, too. Handily the best player on the best team.

2. Paul Arizin - His peak season. I don't see anyone else around who [by reputation] can challenge that, save maybe Dolph Schayes (but this was an injury year for him, iirc). League-best ppg with near-best TS%, and with 11+ boards per game too. Based on how they fall off a cliff the following year with the loss of him and Andy Phillip (even with the emergence of Neil Johnston), it's suggestive of major impact.

3. Bob Cousy - Primary engine of the 2nd-rated offense, going for a somewhat bonkers [for the time period] 22/6/7 statline on decent shooting efficiency. Lost a 3-game series in playoffs, but he was individually astounding (31.0/4.0/6.3 on absurd shooting efficiency).

4. Bob Davies - Led the best offense in the league in ppg and apg on decent/good shooting efficiency. 19.8/4.7 in the playoffs on excellent efficiency, though they fell short against the eventual champs. No shame in that game.

5. Dolph Schayes - 14/12/3 on good efficiency in the rs for a solidly good team. In a 7-game playoff sample he blasts off for a super-efficient 20/13.


I wish I'd had more time to better review things, and I fear I might be going too much on name recognition, but that's the ballot I'm going with.


Crap; don't have time for the other categories, though I'm sure Mikan will sail to #1 in DPOY without my help.

[AEnigma]

A quick note on OPOY:

I expect to have Arizin at #1 there, and I'm seeing folks put him, as the star of the #3 ORtg team this year, placed behind the stars of the #1 & #2 teams.

I like that people are really thinking hard about ORtg, but I'd note that the gap between these 3 team's offenses isn't actually that big,

An approximate point of separation from the Celtics and another point of separation on top of that from the Royals seems significant — and unlike the Warriors, neither of those teams had completely sacrificed their defence to achieve those offensive heights. I have no intent to reserve a perennial spot for Alex English on my OPoY list either.

and while it's reasonable in general to wonder if the biggest scorer of the bunch is getting in the way of his team's overall performance, keep in mind that when Arizin returns to the NBA he'll end up leading a #1 ORtg higher than any of the teams from this year, and leading them to the title.

… Next to an even more efficient scorer, whose exit from the team in 1959 will correspond in a collapse of the team’s offence.

Now, it's a team game and he has help getting his team to the promised land, but to the question of:
Is Arizin holding his team offense back relative to other offensive stars? I have to say my answer is "No".

There is a difference between “not holding back” and actively creating looks — which you know.

Just on offense, I'll put it like this:

Arizin was the best offensive talent to enter into the NBA until Wilt/Oscar/West show up about a decade later

Was he the best offensive talent, or was he the best scorer. Again, you know the difference, so it is strange to see you just gloss over that ratio of ~9.5 shot attempts to 1 assist. Adrian Dantley generally had a better ratio than that, and while I think that comparison is generous to Dantley and overly critical of Arizin, it is not the type of comparison we should want to see for the league’s best offensive player. Even Groza and Mikan were not quite that low (although I am not saying Groza was actually a more active playmaker), and if you are going to argue for positional considerations when comparing Arizin’s rebounding to Schayes’s rebounding, then I may as well mention we historically expect more creation from our star wings.

[Doctor MJ]

A quick note on OPOY:

I expect to have Arizin at #1 there, and I'm seeing folks put him, as the star of the #3 ORtg team this year, placed behind the stars of the #1 & #2 teams.

I like that people are really thinking hard about ORtg, but I'd note that the gap between these 3 team's offenses isn't actually that big,

An approximate point of separation from the Celtics and another point of separation on top of that from the Royals seems significant — and unlike the Warriors, neither of those teams had completely sacrificed their defence to achieve those offensive heights. I have no intent to reserve a perennial spot for Alex English on my OPoY list either.

What specifically leads you to conclude that the Warriors were sacrificing defense by allowing Arizin to play as he did?

Not saying an absence of specific evidence would prove that this wasn't the case, but are we going by anything other than the fact that the Warrior defense fell off this year?

and while it's reasonable in general to wonder if the biggest scorer of the bunch is getting in the way of his team's overall performance, keep in mind that when Arizin returns to the NBA he'll end up leading a #1 ORtg higher than any of the teams from this year, and leading them to the title.

… Next to an even more efficient scorer whose exit from the team in 1959 will correspond in a collapse of the team’s offence.

I mean, when we're talking about Neil Johnston, we're talking about a guy whose greatest prominence as a scorer happens on teams with literally below average ORtgs, and who literally never looks like a superstar in the playoffs in his entire career.

One thing to talk about Johnston's role as a supporting member of the champion Warriors, quite another thing to talk as if Johnston was the better scorer.

Re: more efficient. So let's note here that Johnston was a big who got his numbers like a big primarily on the interior with a hook shot whereas Arizin was a perimeter player. Doesn't mean Arizin was better, but it does give us a window as to why a) maximizing Johnston's numbers might not actually be the best way to build a team offense, and b) Johnston's approach was easier to clamp down on in the playoffs.

In terms of the Warrior collapse coinciding with Johnston's falloff, the fact that Johnston in general doesn't show a great correlation between his presence and the team's success I think makes it pretty clear that it wasn't simply a matter of Johnston being the critical piece, however it's worth analyzing more broadly to figure out what happened.

And when we look at the key point in time where the offense stopped being elite, that was '57-58, during which Johnston was still very much Johnston, and the core of the championship team (Arizin, George, Johnston, Gola) was still on the roster and not that old. The big difference from the previous is that Gola is back and is now the primary playmaker while George is reduced to a smaller role...but the team did better when Gola was playing, so it's really not obvious that the switch there represented a problem.

There is one particular guy who is new though, and that would be rookie Woody Saulsberry, who is given shooting primacy up near Arizin & Johnston, and who would be hideously inefficient both as a rookie, and through his entire career (he might actually have the all-time worst career TS Add, though I don't have that list handy).

This then to say that I think part of what happened to the Warriors is that in '57-58 they brought in a rookie that despite the fact they didn't draft him high (60th overall pick in a league with 8 teams), they proceeded to play as if he were a major scoring star.

I think it's basically a sure thing that this hurt the Warrior offense significantly, and I'm very curious to be able to learn more details about precisely what the Warriors were thinking, and how Saulsberry's significant place in the Warrior hierarchy affected the way the offense as a whole operated.

One thing I think is quite clear: Saulsberry's issue wasn't that there was no one to pass it to him. He was just a guy who a) was in the NBA to score, and b) just didn't hit shots like he needed to in order to be valuable, and the idea of inserting him with significant volume on to a team that had previously been the best ORtg for 2 years running was an incredibly bad one.

Now, it's a team game and he has help getting his team to the promised land, but to the question of:
Is Arizin holding his team offense back relative to other offensive stars? I have to say my answer is "No".

There is a difference between “not holding back” and actively creating looks — which you know.

Just on offense, I'll put it like this:

Arizin was the best offensive talent to enter into the NBA until Wilt/Oscar/West show up about a decade later

Was he the best offensive talent, or was he the best scorer. Again, you know the difference, so it is strange to see you just gloss over that ratio of ~9.5 shot attempts to 1 assist. Adrian Dantley generally had a better ratio than that, and while I think that comparison is generous to Dantley and overly critical to Arizin, it is not the type of comparison we should want to see for the league’s best offensive player. Even Groza and Mikan were not quite that low, and we historically expect less creation from bigs.

Well in a nutshell: If there were evidence that you could build a best-in-league offense around Dantley being Dantley, I'd see him quite differently.

General rule: If you're putting up league leading scoring volume, you're having a huge influence (avoiding the term impact here because of its +/- type connotation) on your team's offense. If a team letting you have such influence is having great offensive success, then that probably means that you taking on that high primacy role was a critical part of that team's success, and I see your numbers as pretty dang legit.

What does it say if there are also years where the offense isn't great where you put up numbers? Well it's a negative compared to what would otherwise be, as it demonstrates that simply letting you do what you do is not alone sufficient to create a great offense, but it doesn't mean that you are actually doing things that are making the team less effective.

On the idea that true facilitators are more of a gold standard here compared to scorers, there's truth in that, but going back to Saulsberry, if the issue isn't that there's no one to give him the ball, but instead that the facilitators are instructed to pass the ball to an ineffective guy about as much as much more effective guys, then the facilitators aren't going to be able to save you.

In specific we're contrasting Arizin with two point guards here in Cousy & Davies.

With regards to Cousy, what we see in general from him in the years to come is that he's not the kind of point guard who has a great sense of how efficient he is compared to other scoring options, and he tends to call his own number way too much, and this contributes to plenty of offensive woes on his team.

As such, I tend to see Cousy as a guy with way more red flags offensively than Arizin. I'd take a truly exceptional decision maker like Oscar over Arizin without question, but Cousy's not that guy. And while you can still point to the league best ORtg for the Celtics in '51-52, the Celtics' TS Add is utterly dominated by Ed Macauley, someone who was a huge TS Add guy before Cousy, and so there's no reason really to think it was Cousy "making" Macauley achieve like this. Further, once the Celtics stopped having anyone who could stand out like Macauley from their offensive peers, the Celtics stopped being an effective offensive team, and thus demonstrated that Cousy clearly wasn't capable of creating this type of team offensive success as a matter of course.

What about Davies? Well, he's the other guy I'd consider for the #1 OPOY spot here and I expect to have him 2nd. I'm a believer in his judgment as a point guard and that goes along way.

But, I'm also cautious about dismissing his teammates here. It's not just that he has Risen, who I ranked higher than him in POY last season, it's that the two big minute guys on the Royals were Wanzer & Coleman, and the distribution of assists on the club was pretty spread out (particularly in the playoffs I'll note, though small sample).

And this gets us into an aspect of how the Royals played offense: It wasn't heliocentric like the Celtics, it was the precursor to the motion offenses of the Holzman Knicks, the Jackson Bulls/Lakers, and the Kerr Warriors. They played fast, and they passed fast.

While Davies was the spearhead of this approach back in 1945, along with the designated face of the franchise, the only way an approach like this succeeds is if you develop multiple players who can hang with it. And so while I celebrate Davies and generally consider him my OPOY candidate from the Royals, I think the other guys shouldn't get the short-shrift as if he was out there with a bunch of replacement level guys.

One more thing that's been alluded to here is in the minutes played.

Arizin 44.5 MPG
Cousy 40.6
Davies 36.8

Now, 36.8 is a perfectly respectable number and I'm not looking to say it was an actual problem, but just from a perspective of team ORtg:

When the #1 ORtg team in the league's best offensive player plays 36.8 MPG, and the #3 ORtg team in the league's best offensive player plays 44.5 MPG, I think we need to have some consideration of what the #1 ORtg is doing when the 36.8 MPG player isn't out there.

Is it possible that the Royals had skyhigh ORtg in the Davies' minutes and crap the rest of the time? Sure, though I don't think it that likely. But even if we grant this premise, why is it that Davies is resting 11.2 MPG while Arizin is resting 3.5?

Perhaps it's just coaching philosophy, but there's also the matter that Davies was 32 years old at this point, and this was an era were 32 was old. There wasn't anyone as old as Davies playing as much as he was, and that's impressive for his age, but everyone in the top 10 in MPG (in this 10 team league) was in their 20s.

Given this, and the fact that as mentioned Davies was not the big minute guy on his team, and the fact he played less and less minutes from here on out until he retires after his age 35 season, I think it's pretty safe to say that the team was getting from Davies what they could get, and minutes-wise, it really wasn't on the same level as a young buck like Arizin.

Does this mean Arizin achieved more than Davies this year? No, but speaking as someone who doesn't see any particular reason to be skeptical about the ceiling of an offense built around Arizin relative to the other players in the league at this time, I do think it represents an important advantage.

[penbeast0]

...

There is one particular guy who is new though, and that would be rookie Woody Saulsberry, who is given shooting primacy up near Arizin & Johnston, and who would be hideously inefficient both as a rookie, and through his entire career (he might actually have the all-time worst career TS Add, though I don't have that list handy).

This then to say that I think part of what happened to the Warriors is that in '57-58 they brought in a rookie that despite the fact they didn't draft him high (60th overall pick in a league with 8 teams), they proceeded to play as if he were a major scoring star.

I think it's basically a sure thing that this hurt the Warrior offense significantly, and I'm very curious to be able to learn more details about precisely what the Warriors were thinking, and how Saulsberry's significant place in the Warrior hierarchy affected the way the offense as a whole operated.

One thing I think is quite clear: Saulsberry's issue wasn't that there was no one to pass it to him. He was just a guy who a) was in the NBA to score, and b) just didn't hit shots like he needed to in order to be valuable, and the idea of inserting him with significant volume on to a team that had previously been the best ORtg for 2 years running was an incredibly bad one....

Strangest thing about this is that I've read at least 3 articles saying that black players, and referencing Sauldsberry in particular, were not passed to and were expected to be just defenders and rebounders. This certainly may have been true in general. It would seem that Sauldsberry is an attempt to go in the other direction and a failure at it but people get invested in their theories and don't check them against statistical evidence sometimes.

[AEnigma]

A quick note on OPOY:

I expect to have Arizin at #1 there, and I'm seeing folks put him, as the star of the #3 ORtg team this year, placed behind the stars of the #1 & #2 teams.

I like that people are really thinking hard about ORtg, but I'd note that the gap between these 3 team's offenses isn't actually that big,

An approximate point of separation from the Celtics and another point of separation on top of that from the Royals seems significant — and unlike the Warriors, neither of those teams had completely sacrificed their defence to achieve those offensive heights. I have no intent to reserve a perennial spot for Alex English on my OPoY list either.

What specifically leads you to conclude that the Warriors were sacrificing defense by allowing Arizin to play as he did?

Not saying an absence of specific evidence would prove that this wasn't the case, but are we going by anything other than the fact that the Warrior defense fell off this year?

I do not think a single offseason producing an 8-point defensive swing on one side coinciding with a 3-point offensive swing on the other is entirely natural in the absence of significant roster overhauling, no.

There are few teams which could not change their skew to some extent if so committed — we can see that right here with the 1952/53 Royals — but I only find it relevant in extreme splits like this where we are seemingly acting as if the results are distinct and separate. If the Warriors were more like a +1 offence and a -2.3 defence and then had the exactly same collapse the following year, does that significantly change how you assess Arizin? Do you think the 1953 Royals roster was materially worse than the 1952 Royals roster across the board offensively… while also materially improving across the board defensively?

and while it's reasonable in general to wonder if the biggest scorer of the bunch is getting in the way of his team's overall performance, keep in mind that when Arizin returns to the NBA he'll end up leading a #1 ORtg higher than any of the teams from this year, and leading them to the title.

… Next to an even more efficient scorer whose exit from the team in 1959 will correspond in a collapse of the team’s offence.

I mean, when we're talking about Neil Johnston, we're talking about a guy whose greatest prominence as a scorer happens on teams with literally below average ORtgs, and who literally never looks like a superstar in the playoffs in his entire career.

One thing to talk about Johnston's role as a supporting member of the champion Warriors, quite another thing to talk as if Johnston was the better scorer.

Re: more efficient. So let's note here that Johnston was a big who got his numbers like a big primarily on the interior with a hook shot whereas Arizin was a perimeter player. Doesn't mean Arizin was better, but it does give us a window as to why a) maximizing Johnston's numbers might not actually be the best way to build a team offense, and b) Johnston's approach was easier to clamp down on in the playoffs.

In terms of the Warrior collapse coinciding with Johnston's falloff, the fact that Johnston in general doesn't show a great correlation between his presence and the team's success I think makes it pretty clear that it wasn't simply a matter of Johnston being the critical piece, however it's worth analyzing more broadly to figure out what happened.

I am not saying Johnston was better or more valuable, but you have a habit of minimising him and attributing all good to Arizin as if Johnston were a functional non-entity. Being the best player on a championship-winning #1 offence is fine support for him being in this discussion generally, but when you start getting into “four years later he led a better offence” while not touching on how he led a better offence by playing in a more efficient league, then it looks more like prestidigitation than a sincere attempt to convince people he was a more valuable offensive player than the league’s best and highest volume creators.

The Saulsberry commentary is interesting in totality but mostly tangential to what I am discussing here, so I have nothing to add on that topic.

Now, it's a team game and he has help getting his team to the promised land, but to the question of:
Is Arizin holding his team offense back relative to other offensive stars? I have to say my answer is "No".

There is a difference between “not holding back” and actively creating looks — which you know.

Just on offense, I'll put it like this:

Arizin was the best offensive talent to enter into the NBA until Wilt/Oscar/West show up about a decade later

Was he the best offensive talent, or was he the best scorer. Again, you know the difference, so it is strange to see you just gloss over that ratio of ~9.5 shot attempts to 1 assist. Adrian Dantley generally had a better ratio than that, and while I think that comparison is generous to Dantley and overly critical to Arizin, it is not the type of comparison we should want to see for the league’s best offensive player. Even Groza and Mikan were not quite that low, and we historically expect less creation from bigs.

Well in a nutshell: If there were evidence that you could build a best-in-league offense around Dantley being Dantley, I'd see him quite differently.

General rule: If you're putting up league leading scoring volume, you're having a huge influence (avoiding the term impact here because of its +/- type connotation) on your team's offense. If a team letting you have such influence is having great offensive success, then that probably means that you taking on that high primacy role was a critical part of that team's success, and I see your numbers as pretty dang legit.

What does it say if there are also years where the offense isn't great where you put up numbers? Well it's a negative compared to what would otherwise be, as it demonstrates that simply letting you do what you do is not alone sufficient to create a great offense, but it doesn't mean that you are actually doing things that are making the team less effective.

On the idea that true facilitators are more of a gold standard here compared to scorers, there's truth in that, but going back to Saulsberry, if the issue isn't that there's no one to give him the ball, but instead that the facilitators are instructed to pass the ball to an ineffective guy about as much as much more effective guys, then the facilitators aren't going to be able to save you.

In specific we're contrasting Arizin with two point guards here in Cousy & Davies.

With regards to Cousy, what we see in general from him in the years to come is that he's not the kind of point guard who has a great sense of how efficient he is compared to other scoring options, and he tends to call his own number way too much, and this contributes to plenty of offensive woes on his team.

Do you think that was true this year.

As such, I tend to see Cousy as a guy with way more red flags offensively than Arizin. I'd take a truly exceptional decision maker like Oscar over Arizin without question, but Cousy's not that guy. And while you can still point to the league best ORtg for the Celtics in '51-52, the Celtics' TS Add is utterly dominated by Ed Macauley, someone who was a huge TS Add guy before Cousy, and so there's no reason really to think it was Cousy "making" Macauley achieve like this. Further, once the Celtics stopped having anyone who could stand out like Macauley from their offensive peers, the Celtics stopped being an effective offensive team, and thus demonstrated that Cousy clearly wasn't capable of creating this type of team offensive success as a matter of course.

But Johnston was an even more additive scorer than Macauley, and Arizin never led any elite offences without him.

It is also not true that the Celtics stopped being an effective offensive team when Macauley left, which yet again you know.

What about Davies? Well, he's the other guy I'd consider for the #1 OPOY spot here and I expect to have him 2nd. I'm a believer in his judgment as a point guard and that goes along way.

But, I'm also cautious about dismissing his teammates here. It's not just that he has Risen, who I ranked higher than him in POY last season, it's that the two big minute guys on the Royals were Wanzer & Coleman, and the distribution of assists on the club was pretty spread out (particularly in the playoffs I'll note, though small sample).

And this gets us into an aspect of how the Royals played offense: It wasn't heliocentric like the Celtics, it was the precursor to the motion offenses of the Holzman Knicks, the Jackson Bulls/Lakers, and the Kerr Warriors. They played fast, and they passed fast.

While Davies was the spearhead of this approach back in 1945, along with the designated face of the franchise, the only way an approach like this succeeds is if you develop multiple players who can hang with it. And so while I celebrate Davies and generally consider him my OPOY candidate from the Royals, I think the other guys shouldn't get the short-shrift as if he was out there with a bunch of replacement level guys.

Sure, but what is Arizin doing to take advantage of all those guys? If you want to say an elite point guard is limited by personnel in a way an elite scorer may not be, alright, but that is why we rarely discuss point guards who lead terrible offences for this award.

It feels like you danced around the core of my criticism here: what is Arizin doing to elevate the rest of his team as a relative non-playmaker? If you think it is sufficient to say that he led a title-winning #1 offence and guys like King and Dantley and Baylor and David Thompson and Marques Johnson never did, well, that is your prerogative, but when so much of this is a product of circumstance — e.g., does Arizin do that if he is paired with a less adept co-star than Johnston? — I would like to see a little more to excuse that degree of individual over team scoring when in almost any other decade it would be a major point of criticism.

One more thing that's been alluded to here is in the minutes played.

Arizin 44.5 MPG
Cousy 40.6
Davies 36.8

Now, 36.8 is a perfectly respectable number and I'm not looking to say it was an actual problem, but just from a perspective of team ORtg:

When the #1 ORtg team in the league's best offensive player plays 36.8 MPG, and the #3 ORtg team in the league's best offensive player plays 44.5 MPG, I think we need to have some consideration of what the #1 ORtg is doing when the 36.8 MPG player isn't out there.

Is it possible that the Royals had skyhigh ORtg in the Davies' minutes and crap the rest of the time? Sure, though I don't think it that likely. But even if we grant this premise, why is it that Davies is resting 11.2 MPG while Arizin is resting 3.5?

Perhaps it's just coaching philosophy, but there's also the matter that Davies was 32 years old at this point, and this was an era were 32 was old. There wasn't anyone as old as Davies playing as much as he was, and that's impressive for his age, but everyone in the top 10 in MPG (in this 10 team league) was in their 20s.

Given this, and the fact that as mentioned Davies was not the big minute guy on his team, and the fact he played less and less minutes from here on out until he retires after his age 35 season, I think it's pretty safe to say that the team was getting from Davies what they could get, and minutes-wise, it really wasn't on the same level as a young buck like Arizin.

Does this mean Arizin achieved more than Davies this year? No, but speaking as someone who doesn't see any particular reason to be skeptical about the ceiling of an offense built around Arizin relative to the other players in the league at this time, I do think it represents an important advantage.

Agree here. Minutes contribution is a worthwhile consideration that speaks more to Arizin than to the Bobs.

[Doctor MJ]

...

There is one particular guy who is new though, and that would be rookie Woody Saulsberry, who is given shooting primacy up near Arizin & Johnston, and who would be hideously inefficient both as a rookie, and through his entire career (he might actually have the all-time worst career TS Add, though I don't have that list handy).

This then to say that I think part of what happened to the Warriors is that in '57-58 they brought in a rookie that despite the fact they didn't draft him high (60th overall pick in a league with 8 teams), they proceeded to play as if he were a major scoring star.

I think it's basically a sure thing that this hurt the Warrior offense significantly, and I'm very curious to be able to learn more details about precisely what the Warriors were thinking, and how Saulsberry's significant place in the Warrior hierarchy affected the way the offense as a whole operated.

One thing I think is quite clear: Saulsberry's issue wasn't that there was no one to pass it to him. He was just a guy who a) was in the NBA to score, and b) just didn't hit shots like he needed to in order to be valuable, and the idea of inserting him with significant volume on to a team that had previously been the best ORtg for 2 years running was an incredibly bad one....

Strangest thing about this is that I've read at least 3 articles saying that black players, and referencing Sauldsberry in particular, were not passed to and were expected to be just defenders and rebounders. This certainly may have been true in general. It would seem that Sauldsberry is an attempt to go in the other direction and a failure at it but people get invested in their theories and don't check them against statistical evidence sometimes.

An excellent point. Timeline-wise, what I can't help but not is this:

The first Black-led NCAA champions were in (March) 1955. (USF - Russell & Jones).
The first Black player to get treated like a franchise player was drafted in (April) 1955. (Maurice Stokes).

I'm not saying that Stokes was plucked out of nowhere to be a franchise player because a Black-led team he wasn't on won the tourney, but I do think that the NBA was seeing NBA players quite differently in 1955 than it did in 1950, and it probably makes sense to see those earlier guys like Lloyd & Clifton as the "first generation guys who didn't get considered for primacy", with Stokes marking that next basketball generations arrival, and now top Black players were seen not just as players who could plausibly be as good as White players, but as a new kind of athlete that could do things physically that if White players could do it, it hadn't been seen before.

And yeah, I have to see Sauldsberry as part of this trend, though I don't want to oversell his primacy. He was never positioned like a future franchise player, he was simply treated from Day 1 like he warranted a prominent place on the best offense in the league, and I don't think he really ever in his entire career demonstrated that.

Just a timeline of birth years because I like listing this stuff out for my own grasp.

The 3 Original Black NBA players:
1922 - Sweetwater Clifton
1926 - Chuck Cooper
1928 - Earl Lloyd

"2nd Generation Black" all-stars
1933 - Maurice Stokes
1934 - Bill Russell, Elgin Baylor, Sam Jones, Willie Naulls, Woody Sauldsberry
1936 - Wilt Chamberlain, Hal Greer, Dick Barnett
1937 - Wayne Embry, Bob Boozer, Lenny Wilkens
1938 - Oscar Robertson

It's possible there are some interesting stories to be told that make the generation gap less clear cut, it really does seem to me that the change going on at this time is better thought of in terms of new wave of thought applied to Black basketball prospects coming out of college, more so than a colorblind approach just happening to go more in a particular direction.

Last thing I'll note, the Sweetwater homer in me, is Clifton's age relative to the other Originals. From a modern basketball perspective of "generation", we might consider him a generation before Lloyd. Clifton's journey was definitely a bit different than the other two.

[ZeppelinPage]

Pollard had a strong playoff run and actually tipped in the game winner to send the Royals home (off a Mikan miss). He was injured for a couple games in the Finals, but I think his impact was felt this season, and the Minneapolis writers mention him very positively for this season.

Cousy also had an incredible playoff series. The Celtics actually defeated the Knicks in game one, but Bill Sharman got the chickenpox and missed games two and three. Considering the Celtics went to double overtime with the Knicks in game three, it's very possible that the Celtics win that series with a healthy Sharman. Cousy finished with 31/6 on 40/93 shooting splits (he went 41/44 from the free throw line) and his defense on Max Zaslofsky was also praised in game one.

Hard to argue against Mikan, and of course Arizin won the unofficial MVP for this season. I foresee both of them being in my top five. Wanzer, Davies, Phillip, and Schayes are all options for me as well.

[trex_8063]

.

Hey Mr. Chairperson. Not sure if you'd started tallying yet, but I swapped the position of Cousy and Davies on my ballot, after some consideration. Just a heads up....

[Doctor MJ]

.

So a lot of details here, and some of it I can feel it steering us into more contentiousness which I'd like to avoid.

I'm going to try to just focus on really specific things that struck me in your post to build off of:

I do not think a single offseason producing an 8-point defensive swing on one side coinciding with a 3-point offensive swing on the other is entirely natural in the absence of significant roster overhauling, no.

There are few teams which could not change their skew to some extent if so committed — we can see that right here with the 1952/53 Royals — but I only find it relevant in extreme splits like this where we are seemingly acting as if the results are distinct and separate. If the Warriors were more like a +1 offence and a -2.3 defence and then had the exactly same collapse the following year, does that significantly change how you assess Arizin? Do you think the Royals roster was materially worse on offence across the board… while also materially improving on defence across the board?

So, I suppose I'll put my general perspective here like this:

I identify what I believe to be the most likely causality, however much uncertainty still exists in the process, and in a project like this I just go with it.

And I see you doing something like that here: The most likely cause of a team doing better on offense while doing worse on defense is a shift in thrust more toward offense, and so it stands to reason that the driving force of the offensive rise has culpability in the defensive descent.

I will say though: I'm much more cautious about knocking an OPOY candidate for defense than I am a POY candidate.

Of course a rebuttal to myself here that immediately comes to mind is "Sure, but against candidates leading superior offenses, are you really going to choose a guy who individually-focused and is probably skimping on other parts of the game (given what's happening to the team's defense)?"

Honestly, I'll chew on this more, but the general direction of my thought from there:

While I love great facilitators, and am generally likely to side with the facilitator over the scorer in modern discussions, I don't think it's any kind of given that the biggest outlier at any given time among offensive players is a facilitator. I don't want to go into spoiler detail on my prior runs at this but suffice say that Kareem & Jordan are guys who (in the past at least) have gotten the OPOY nod from me many times each, and I don't believe they were ever in the discussion for best facilitator or highest BBIQ guys.

And I think part of the deal here for me is that I don't actually think Davies & Cousy were impacting the offense +/- wise like Oscar or Magic or Nash. I think Cousy played with the primacy to do so, but did so with flawed decision making.

With Davies I think he had the decision making, but not the primacy. Oh I expect he handled the ball about as much as any NBA point guard prior to Cousy, but still he didn't have it like the later playmakers I mention did, and that puts something of a ceiling on what he could do.

Does that mean his ceiling was less than '51-52 Arizin? As always, not necessarily. However:

1. Arizin is an absolutely massive statistical outlier with a TS Add of 329.7. This would be a) the highest mark by any non-big until Oscar, and b) the highest mark of the key-widened era until Oscar. Like, when we're asking who the biggest offensive outlier in this entire near-decade run, by TS Add, that's Arizin THIS year. Sure the whole league gets better in the future, but when judging players this year, we have a considerably-bigger-edge-than-we're-going-to-be-used-to on our hands. I don't think that's something to be taken lightly, and I also think it's a thing where we shouldn't assume that there's something inherently problematic about what he's doing that makes you not want to build your attack around. Would be one thing if he never led a great offense, but he would end up leading a great offense to a title, so that's not really a concern.

2. Davies is near the end of his time in the league. By next year it won't be a question at all as to whether he was passed his best days - this is the last year where we can plausibly say he was something like 100% of himself. And so then getting your point of:

Agree here. Minutes contribution is a worthwhile consideration that speaks more to Arizin than to the Bobs.

The idea that Davies could have just added 7-8 more minutes to his MPG like Arizin if he needed to just doesn't seem realistic to me. I think he was giving all he could at this point, and I think he was able to give more in the past.

That said, I also don't think it's crazy to argue that Davies could have been more valuable than Arizin despite the lesser minutes by any means, particularly with an eye toward Davies playing more minutes in the critical games.

With regards to Cousy, what we see in general from him in the years to come is that he's not the kind of point guard who has a great sense of how efficient he is compared to other scoring options, and he tends to call his own number way too much, and this contributes to plenty of offensive woes on his team.

Do you think that was true this year.

Well, I don't think he had a super-accurate gauge of the super-efficient play and then lost it in future years, so in the sense of it being a limitation that was with him in '51-52: Yes, I don't think he ever had it.

Do I think it was causing his team "woes" this year? Well, I think he was clearly a major net positive at this point in his career so no, I don't think "woes" is really the word I'd use for this incarnation of the league.

But I don't think we should gloss over the fact that while Arizin led the league in scoring, Cousy shot more than he did, he just did so on 10% worse TS. Do I think Cousy would have been a lot more valuable if he short 10% better than he did? Of course! So the missed shots are taking a toll here just like they always do.

So then I won't say it's impossible for Cousy to be more valuable (offensively or overall) than Arizin this year, but I am saying that if he is the more valuable offensive player, it's clearly not coming from his scoring despite the fact he's using up more of his team's possessions calling his own number while being the designated facilitator than Arizin despite not having that designation. And it's also clearly not coming back on rebounding, where Arizin also has the edge.

So then we're talking about Cousy's facilitation capacity being the thing that gives him the edge. This is possible in '51-52, but what we know of future seasons tells us this is less about his talent for choosing the right pass and more about him simply being given the opportunity to play helio at a time when no one else was playing helio.