Djoker wrote:OhayoKD wrote:Djoker wrote:Honestly Russell at #1 this year is not very convincing and I say that as someone who thinks Russell is the GOAT. Bill is so far behind after the RS almost certainly not a top 5 player
-> Celtics are a few tenths behind the #1 team in SRS
-> Celtics are back to being a massive defensive outlier
-> Russell posts the best impact signal of anyone in the league
"almost certainly not a top 5 player" because...
Russell at this point gives you almost nothing on the offensive end.
...of something no one has ever been able to demonstrate is neccessary for winning or for impact in the 60's.
If your focus is impacting winning, russell is the only player with a serious #1 argument this year. "I don't have 100 percent certainity in what's there" doesn't justify "let me put my fingers in my ears and ignore the evidence". We saw a better hondo the next two years...and the Celtics suffered more than most teams who lose best-player-in-the-league candidates. Seems like this applies to the voting block too
Aenigma wrote:No better proof of the scoring blindness inherent to the media and audience that Russell was not essentially deified for winning three road series over the other three best teams in the league — one of them playing at an 8-SRS level and another the league’s first true “superteam” combination — before retiring and seeing his team drop to two seasons of total irrelevance (in direct contrast to what had consistently happened with his primary positional rival). And he did it all as a player-coach. This two-year run is one of the most impressive feats in team sport history. I know this vote will not be unanimous, but frankly it should be. No one else brought more success to their team.
Over the last few threads when 69 comes up, as always, there is a seeming allergy to positive argumentation...as in, backing what you think is correct as opposed to...explaining why what another person is saying may be incorrect. At no point in this project has anyone even seriously attempted explaining how Jerry West scoring a bunch of points logically links to him being better than Russell, just like no has been able to do that for Wilt, or Oscar, or anyone.
The results say Russell is the best. Theory says Russell is the best. But something with minimal relationship to russell's ability to impact games apparently tells us he was not the best...
Yeah, that's not a serious argument.
Not a top 5 player because he's more Rudy Gobert than David Robinson. He's basically giving you nothing on offense.
This is the 60's. Not the 90's. What offense is Thurmond offering when his teams improve by 20-wins year in and year out and he's giving Wilt and then Wilt and West and Baylor all hey can handle? The best two offensive players in the league combined for a whopping 0 titles during Russell's reign. The two-way forces combined for two and the first one arguably happening because Russell got hurt.
I have no idea why you insist on projecting 2023 theory in the year 1969. Thurmond, a defensive specialist sees bigger drop-offs than west over the last two years. The best two teams by srs are teams led by defensive speciailsits. The MVP was a defensive specialist who saw a very strong signal of his own.
You think offense isn't necessary for winning? By definition, offense is equally important as defense on a team level. In the 60's with less outside shooting, an inside defensive presence was admittedly the most impactful type of player but Russell in his last season isn't a tier ahead of Wilt, Thurmond or possibly even a few others in terms of defensive impact.
The Celtics were close to the best team in the league/top-5 entirely on the strength of their defense. They were bad defensively this season when he missed games and the next season when he left. They replaced finkel and whether you go by 71 or 72 were not contenders(atypical for gauntlet busters like Boston). When Hondo and sam jones missed games, the Celtics held up rather well.
If i decided to only care about how much Jordan or Kobe protected the paint, they would not even be top 50 players in any year. Saying a player you have as the GOAT is actually not even top 5 because they are not scoring is 60's equivalent of that approach...except worse because all the cold data says they actually were still an outlier, and you're choosing to dismiss all that in favor of the idea with no basis in the actual results that transpired during the 60's: "you have to be an okay offensive player to be impactful"
Why do I say that? For one he's lagging behind both Wilt and Thurmond in minutes played.
Russell winning vs. Russell impacting winning are too different things. The first is correlation while the second is causation
Unfortunately, the most direct possible measure of causation also sees Russell not just topping,
but clearing the field.
Obviously I don't mean that 1969 Russell isn't impacting winning at all but I'm not convinced he's that impactful this season. Say Boston loses Game 7 to LA. Russell probably isn't seriously considered to even make the ballot.
You are convinced the direct measures are biased against to russell to a massive degree. A bias they seem to consistently mantain for other players with russell's profile (thurmond, reed, act).
Russell would still be the favorite among this voting bloc with a game-7 loss. At least I would hope, though it's clear Russell is graded on a higher curve based on extremely weak theory.
You talk about WOWY and how the Celtics got 7 SRS point worse when Russell retired as proof of his impact when that is more proof of his indispensability than impact. They replaced him with Hank Finkel (who?). Using WOWY as end all be all is also flawed
It does not need to be the end-all-be all, it simply needs to be stronger evidence than what the other side can offer...and currently what is being offered is close to nothing.
It's a single data point but you're ignoring box score signals completely.
Because the box-score signals cited do not have explanatory value, if they warranted being taken seriously defensiive specialists like Thurmond would not be outimpacting alleged best player in the league Jerry West and the Celtics would not have kept winning when cousy left and not have collapsed when russell left.
The real issue here is you treating "a" box-score as if it is "the" box-score.
There are infinite "box-signals" that could be concocted that would have Russell at the top of the league and West as below average. Just because basketball statisicans are too lazy to test vs a control group (and love reinforcing their own priors) does not make the box-signals you cling to for West any more relevant than a metric which only counts defensive actions(including ones where the defender doesn't touch the ball) and gives 90 percent weight to how many possessions a player is guarding the basket.
