Cavsfansince84 wrote:The one thing I don't get about all the criticism I see about Johnson both here and in top 100 projects is people point at his team's O/DRtg in the 2 years without Arizin when they were terrible in 53 and mediocre in 54 and wonder how he could be as good as his numbers suggest yet we've seen this before with KG, who is widely seen as a goat level floor raiser yet played on bad to terrible teams from 05-07. So no one is even putting Johnston on KG's level so I don't think it should be that hard to see how he could play on a couple bad teams in those years and then we also see after Arizin comes back that they don't improve that much the first year then win the title the following year(which further shows the level of teammates before he came back and Johnston's ability to play on a title winning team in his era).
EDIT: Just realized I'm still talking in terms of '52-53 instead of '53-54. That's because '52-53 is what really illustrates the principle for me here, and when Johnston's on more competitive teams I don't refuse to consider him.
So as someone known for being high on KG and low on Johnston, makes sense for me to elaborate on my thought process.
1. I was low on KG before I was high - or rather, when things fell apart in Minnesota, I didn't spare Garnett in my assessment.
2. At that time I got in conversations with people where I conceded KG might just be unlucky, but I thought most likely there was more to the story. Then KG went to Boston and basically proved me wrong. Even then I didn't immediately change my assessment and really it took a few years of people working on me here before I did so.
3. It's important to remember a key throughline we have for KG that we don't have for Johnston: The +/- That told enough of a story that I was never super-down on him, but it wasn't quite enough to elevate him to the top of my MVP (and later POY) lists either, and I'll say this is something that didn't really change:
4. While my esteem for KG went up considerably, and with that a slight uptick in my POY voters, my POY votes at present don't by any means capture how good I think he was. Some of that is just the metric being too simplistic, but not entirely. There's this other perspective of competitive achievement that really is just classically built up from great team success, and I don't feel comfortable utterly abandoning.
5. So while I believe KG to be a greater talent than Duncan, and I think he could have achieved more than Duncan had he been used and built around more optimally all throughout his career, in practice, Duncan was just more in a position for competitive achievement than KG, and that's how it goes.
Over to Johnston:
1. I want to emphasize first and foremost that there's a lot of uncertainty in any of these deep-past assessments - much less, for example than what I had when I was first underrating KG. And so yeah, I don't know that Johnston for sure didn't deserve award X, I'm just going with the most likely assessment as best I can.
2. I'll emphasize the +/- again. Were I to somehow see +/- data from this era with full sample and Johnston looked like a positive outlier as a matter of course like KG, it would certainly swing what I thought was most likely.
3. As others have pointed out though, we're not just talking about non-elite team results here. We're talking about an uncompetitive team.
It's a league where every team lost at least 23 games during the season, but the Warriors only won 12 times.
It's a league that prioritized playing on the weekend, and so Philly played only 1 game on Monday and just 4 times on Friday. How'd they do on the weekend?
On Saturday, 2-14 with an average margin of loss of 8.8 points.
On Sunday, 2-16 with an average margin of loss of 9.9 points.
So, that means that on weekdays, they had a record of 8-27. Terrible, but much better.
I'm not going to work out the math, but given that on average they lost games by 7.2 PPG, that means they were at least doing better than that on weekdays.
Another perspective: How were they on the road? 1-28. (Note that they played considerable neutral games back then which is of course different from going into the teeth of the other team. They were 6-17 on neutral sites ftr.)
4. As bad as they were on defense, the offense was outright the least effective in the league.
5. Adding this all up: Doesn't mean that Johnston wasn't a fine basketball player, but I think it's a mistake to take box score as proxy for competitive achievement, and in particularly when we can see an extreme disconnect between a player's box score and the team result. In a nutshell:
Teams didn't need to stop Johnston from scoring 22.3 points, to keep his team from scoring more than 80.2 points, and since keeping a team from scoring 80.2 points (on however many possessions) was enough to lead to a comfortable win most of the time, Johnston and the Warriors was not making these other teams uncomfortable by what he/they were doing.
6. A thing that's important to how I see things I should add here: I think in general it's a easier for an interior scorer to end up getting his with high rTS% on an ineffective team that it is for a perimeter guy. Why? Because with the interior scorer, they can ruin the opposing offense by making it hard to get the scorer the ball, and if they do that well enough, it won't even matter if they give up some gimmie shots as they gamble for turnover creation.
This isn't the interior scorer's fault and it doesn't mean he can't be a valuable piece on a better team, but it does mean that the box score we happen to associate with the interior scorer in this situation may drastically overrate the effectiveness of the team possession that revolves around getting him the ball.
Okay, think I ran out of things to say.
