Retro Player of the Year 1992-93 UPDATE — Hakeem Olajuwon

[Cavsfansince84]

I think the “except for the 41ppg finals” part is a really big caveat here. It isn’t necessarily always the case that a prime ATG who won the finals should be POY (though that’ll usually be the case). But when a prime ATG wins the finals with a genuinely historic finals performance, it’s hard for me to conceptualize not giving that person POY. I don’t think Magic 1988 rises to that level (heck, Magic wasn’t even voted Finals MVP in 1988—though I think that was probably wrong). That said, I do think it’s perfectly defensible to vote for Magic for POY in 1988—voting for a prime ATG who won the finals is essentially always going to be perfectly defensible. And, indeed, in the 2010 POY project, Magic got 8 first-place votes out of 21 votes. It was a close vote, and that seems totally fair to me. I wouldn’t regard it as a “huge slight” to vote for Magic over Jordan that year.

Well again that's your prerogative but at the same time I'd honestly argue that Hakeem in 93&94 had two of the best rs's of all time. So I think it could go either way. The finals was a nice cherry on the top of MJ's season but you can't really bring that up without also bringing up the series before where MJ had 3 pretty bad games in a row that easily could have led to the Bulls being in a 0-3 hole. He really only had 2 good(one of them great) games that whole series so you could say it might balance out the finals to some degree.

[lessthanjake]

I think the “except for the 41ppg finals” part is a really big caveat here. It isn’t necessarily always the case that a prime ATG who won the finals should be POY (though that’ll usually be the case). But when a prime ATG wins the finals with a genuinely historic finals performance, it’s hard for me to conceptualize not giving that person POY. I don’t think Magic 1988 rises to that level (heck, Magic wasn’t even voted Finals MVP in 1988—though I think that was probably wrong). That said, I do think it’s perfectly defensible to vote for Magic for POY in 1988—voting for a prime ATG who won the finals is essentially always going to be perfectly defensible. And, indeed, in the 2010 POY project, Magic got 8 first-place votes out of 21 votes. It was a close vote, and that seems totally fair to me. I wouldn’t regard it as a “huge slight” to vote for Magic over Jordan that year.

Well again that's your prerogative but at the same time I'd honestly argue that Hakeem in 93&94 had two of the best rs's of all time. So I think it could go either way. The finals was a nice cherry on the top of MJ's season but you can't really bring that up without also bringing up the series before where MJ had 3 pretty bad games in a row that easily could have led to the Bulls being in a 0-3 hole. He really only had 2 good(one of them great) games that whole series so you could say it might balance out the finals to some degree.

I don’t think I’d agree that Hakeem 1993 was one of “the best rs’s of all time.” But, at the same time, I don’t even really think it matters for these purposes, because I could put my estimation of Hakeem’s 1993 RS up to that level and I’d still feel the same way. To use your example, it’s similar to how I would easily vote for Magic in 1988 if he’d had a genuinely historic finals, even though I think Jordan’s 1988 RS was incredible. To give a more recent (and less hypothetical) example, I think Jokic’s 2021 RS was incredible (as you may know, I regard Jokic these past several years as being up there as possibly the GOAT peak), but I’d have no problem voting Giannis above Jokic for 2021 POY, because Giannis was a prime ATG who won the finals while having a genuinely historic finals performance (and that’s despite Giannis definitely being lucky his team won the last couple games of the ECF entirely without him). And I definitely believe that would be the dominant view in both of those instances—with us being able to see that Giannis was fairly easily voted POY in 2021 over Jokic, and 1988 Magic was close to Jordan even in the 2010 voting (and won in this more recent, but less populated, iteration of the 1988 POY voting) despite not really having a genuinely historic finals. I think it would be a real anomaly for a prime ATG that had this type of Finals performance to not be voted POY.

[Djoker]

… 119 Ortg…
… playoff Drtg of 103…
… RS Drtg of 94…
… Jordan's playoff Drtg was 105, so barely below Ewing.

Yet again, those are box composites. Maybe Djoker has Jordan’s actual oRtg and dRtg numbers for that series, but what you see in the per 100 tab on BBR is just a formula on par with GameScore.

Since I didn't personally track the 1993 ECF and Ben never gave the team points scored and allowed, I don't have the offense/defense splits for that series.

I do have the splits for the Finals for MJ and Barkley.

Jordan - 1993 NBA Finals

ON: 116.4 ORtg, 113.5 DRtg, +2.9 Net
OFF: 81.2 ORtg, 108.9 DRtg, -27.7 Net
ON-OFF: +35.2 ORtg, +5.4 rDRtg, +30.6 Net

Barkley - 1993 NBA Finals

ON: 112.0 ORtg, 114.5 DRtg, -2.5 Net
OFF: 124.8 ORtg, 98.0 DRtg ,+26.8 Net
ON-OFF: -12.8 ORtg, +16.5 DRtg, -29.3 Net

Only the ON samples are useful here because OFF samples truly are tiny for a single series. With MJ ON, the Bulls had a +9.7 rORtg and with Barkley ON, the Suns had a +5.9 rORtg.

[One_and_Done]

Both Grant and Vlade were much better passers and defenders. Thorpe was closer to Kevin Willis (also a 1992 all-star, averaging more points and rebounds than Thorpe) or young Oakley in actual impact, and if anything both of them have a lot more room for confidence on that end. This is pretty shameless.

Thorpe was a good player. OhayoKD admitted that the Rockets actually ran their offense through him at many points in the Seattle series. This isn't such an important point to expand on further though.

The question was not which team is better; the question was why is it demonstrably more impressive for Jordan to lift a 50-win team to 65-wins and six titles than for Hakeem to lift a 31-win team to 53-wins and two titles.

What you want to do, without taking the time to formulate your thoughts to outright say this, is take the good team redundancy approach to excuse that — again ignoring that you just claimed Hakeem had a really good team despite all evidence to the contrary… — but then that would require the Bulls to not have a massive scoring vacuum without Jordan. He is not being disadvantaged here by sharing a role and needing to scale anything down.

On that note, you tellingly did not take this approach back when Magic was lifting his teams well above Jordan’s while having a more natural replacement in Michael Cooper than “Pete Myers / nobody”.

It's better because lifting better teams is much harder. Once you get to 65-win pace, that's basically the ceiling. Exactly 10 teams in history have SRS > 10 and three of them are Jordan's Bulls.

Magic lifted good Lakers teams to ~7 SRS. That's not exactly applicable to what we're talking about here.

And what did Hakeem do from 1996-1998 while Jordan was threepeating? He certainly had a pretty good cast in Houston in those years. Of course we pretend they don't exist and Hakeem gets no blame for his super team with Barkley and Drexler not working out. The 1995 team though without Barkley was also really really talented and they ended up winning by the skin of their teeth.

Do you just go fully primeval whenever you see Jordan challenged, or are you being deliberately disingenuous. Or maybe both.

1) What happened to your constant focus on relative efficiency? Opponents scored at 50% true shooting against the Knicks. Hakeem scored 26.9 points on 55.6% true shooting and was very involved in the passing game.

2) This is a non-sequitur. Hakeem grossly outplayed Ewing (unlike 1993 Jordan), his team directly beat Ewing’s, and even if Hakeem “wasn’t very good offensively” (again, patently false), he held the Knicks six points below their regular season offensive rating.

He certainly scored better. Maybe you should be honest and admit that is what really matters to you instead of trying some sloppy sleight of hand.

Jordan and Ewing don't even play the same position.

Jordan is also a far superior ball-handler and playmaker compared to Hakeem, not just scorer. Per Thinking Basketball, 1993 Jordan had a Box OC of 12.4 and 1993 Hakeem had 5.0. That's two and a half times more shots created for teammates. Add that to averaging 9 ppg more on similar efficiency and with way fewer turnovers and it's just not close. There is a chasm between Jordan and Hakeem on offense. A CHASM...

1993 Playoff Averages
Hakeem: 23.5 pts/75 on +3.0 rTS, 5.0 Box OC, 10.8% cTOV
Jordan: 32.3 pts/75 on +2.9 rTS, 12.4 Box OC, 5.2% cTOV

You make an important point RE: the post 95 Rockets. Fans build narratives around players, and then when a player fails they retrospectively act like their failure was expected for XYZ reasons.

A good example is 2011. Heading into that season, most pundits had the Lakers as the favourites, not the Heat. Nobody thought Kobe was 'past his prime' until he got his ass kicked by Dirk. Suddenly, Kobe was past his prime (until the 2013 preseason when the Lakers were being discussed as a 70 win team and 'prime Kobe' as an MVP candidate). In reality, 2011 Kobe probably still was in his prime, he just got his ass kicked. His subsequent stats don't suggest some drop off prior to his Achilles injury.

If people are going to say 'such and such was past their prime' I think that deserves closer scrutiny. Usually there is some definite evidence for it, e.g. KG getting hurt in 09 and never being quite the same, or Duncan's knees just gradually getting worse from his peak in 02 & 03 until we see time catch up to him in 08 (by the playoffs especially). There are usually stats that back up what's happening too, e.g. Shaq getting older and fatter corresponds to his stats collapsing.

I also think that if people are going to take a position on when a prime ended then that's fine, but we have to hold them to it. I think Hakeem's prime was 93-96, which means my support for him after 96 is going to drop off. Similarly, in all-time votes, I have to recognise Hakeem's career outside 93-96 was not on the same level, which drags his ranking down in the top 10. What I am hoping not to see is people who think Hakeem was just as good from 86 to 98, but then ignore his team's failures during that stretch.

[Cavsfansince84]

I don’t think I’d agree that Hakeem 1993 was one of “the best rs’s of all time.” But, at the same time, I don’t even really think it matters for these purposes, because I could put my estimation of Hakeem’s 1993 RS up to that level and I’d still feel the same way. To use your example, it’s similar to how I would easily vote for Magic in 1988 if he’d had a genuinely historic finals, even though I think Jordan’s 1988 RS was incredible. To give a more recent (and less hypothetical) example, I think Jokic’s 2021 RS was incredible (as you may know, I regard Jokic these past several years as being up there as possibly the GOAT peak), but I’d have no problem voting Giannis above Jokic for 2021 POY, because Giannis was a prime ATG who won the finals while having a genuinely historic finals performance (and that’s despite Giannis definitely being lucky his team won the last couple games of the ECF entirely without him). And I definitely believe that would be the dominant view in both of those instances—with us being able to see that Giannis was fairly easily voted POY in 2021 over Jokic, and 1988 Magic was close to Jordan even in the 2010 voting despite not really having a genuinely historic finals. I think it would be a real anomaly for a prime ATG that had this type of Finals performance to not be voted POY.

Well Hakeem's 93 season generally won't get talk of being atg level mainly because a. he didn't win mvp and b. his team only won like 46 games but I personally would have it up there along with his 94 season so like I said that's my own grade. There's lots of examples but I think at the end of the day what I'm saying is that in all of these years both guys have a strong case and its not a slight to any of them to have one over the other. Like I also said, if you wanna give extra credit for the 93 finals you can also ding him for the ecf(I mean its by MJ's standards a very bad series).

[70sFan]

What’s holding me back from taking Hakeem this year is one of the same things that jumps out in the Hakeem v.s Duncan analysis. Hakeem lost in both 93 and 96 to the Sonics. That wasn’t random. The Sonics deployed a defence that pushed the limits of illegal defence rules, and Hakeem was bad at dealing with it. If Hakeem had come up against the Sonics in 94 or 95, maybe he doesn’t win a title at all. I feel like that failure to adapt in the PS has to hold him back against Jordan, just as I mark him down for it v.s Duncan (who didn’t have the benefit of illegal D for almost the whole of his career, and yet was still awesome.

So, I have seen this discussion being quite heated, so I decided to touch a few points on my own, using some notes from my tracking work on the series (focusing mostly on game 7).

First of all, I want to provide G7 of the series, giving the opportunity for anyone to watch it and make their own conclusion:

Watch on YouTube

Now, to the specifics - I see the discussion growing on Hakeem's playmaking limitations and inability to deal with Sonics pressure defense. Let's take a look at a few plays from the game, showing how he fared against pressure:

Let's start with the fact that Olajuwon created A LOT of open threes for his teammates. We all know about Rudy T gameplan but we have to appreciate that it all started with Hakeem's scoring game that demanded a lot of defensive pressure. Here we can see him dealing with aggressive double quite nicely - he didn't pass immediately after the first opening appeared, but he waited, knowing that the help defender would help on Horry. Hakeem confused him and forced him to gamble and made him pay for it:

Watch on YouTube

This is not some kind of basketball mastery, but it shows that Hakeem was capable of patiently breaking down doubles. Another example, this time on a triple team - again, notice how much pressure Sonics put on him and how much patience he had before releasing the ball:

Watch on YouTube

This read is significantly more advanced and it's probably the best pass of the game - take a look at this play:

Watch on YouTube

Hakeem got the ball at the end of the possession. The moment he catched the ball, he started scoring move. On that moment, the opposing guard decided to double him. Hakeem saw him coming when he turned around and from that moment, he realized that Horry was open, so he waited for the guard to fully commit and he exploited it perfectly - all in 6 seconds of play. This is not an example of player who can't deal with defensive pressure.

The Sonics were so afraid of him in the clutch that they doubled him on a catch, often forcing miscommunications like this one:

Watch on YouTube

Hakeem's main strength as a creator is finding open men outside, but agressive help also gave him openings inside, which he could also take advantage of:

Watch on YouTube

Again, you don't need to be Jokic to make these passes, but he did that consistently in the elimination game, against gigantic pressure.

Of course, Hakeem didn't have great court vision, so that performance wasn't flawless from creation standpoint. He had moments like this one, when he missed the read inside because of triple team swarmed him:

Watch on YouTube

He often went to the scoring mode too early - like on this one, when he missed open teammate inside (that's not an easy read, but great post passer could get that one):

Watch on YouTube

When the Sonics swarmed him early enough, he could struggle to take advantage of that, like here for example:

Watch on YouTube

Notice that even a simple kickout gave Houston positional advantage, as Hakeem absorbed 3 defenders at once.

I could go on and on, but I think I gave enough examples for a conclusion. Hakeem struggled the most when he had to improvise, when he had to make quick decisions. He also didn't have a great vision, which is why he often missed cutters and high quality reads. He didn't really struggle with "cheating" zones, swarms and pressure. Hakeem was fairly good at finding shooters around him and he didn't really struggles against doubles. Of course, attacking him with doubles and triples could slow him down - like any other post player. The problem in this game was that Rockets perimeter players struggled to create something out of the space created by Olajuwon. I have no reason to believe that Olajuwon underperformed during that game (or the whole series). I haven't even touched his immense defensive presence, that's a story for another discussion.

Of course I am open to different interpretations. Please, let me know if you have any specific questions or comments.

[OhayoKD]

Remarkably little talk here of Jordan’s performance in the actual NBA Finals, where Jordan put up an astonishing 41 PPG—the highest average ever in a Finals series—on +2.6% rTS% (and with very few turnovers, as well), while his co-star shot at an abysmal -7.3 rTS% and the supporting cast as a whole had a negative rTS% (though the catch-and-shoot guys shot well). This was an enormous series for Jordan, which, having come in the NBA Finals, surely tips the balance for him in terms of POY

It was addressed here:

Spoiler:

Why are you switching from 'weak defense" to "overall" while pulling up offensive numbers?

His best offensive series came against the...checks notes... "great" -1.3 Suns defense that went

+3 vs the Sonics
+/- 0 vs the Spurs
-4 vs the Lakers

On the back of this incredibly valuable scoring outburst, the Bulls were a whopping 1 point better against a defense that was decent in the regular season and average in the playoffs. And apparently that bridges the chasm in demonstrated(not hypothetical) impact between Jordan and Hakeem

You and the 6 people who upvoted you have a poorly supported prior that extra points are harder to replace than Hakeem's massive advantages on nearly ever aspect of defense(the biggest gap being in terms of paint-presence which affects offenses on almost every possession) and for this season major advantage in terms of gravity. The problem here is the actual result calls into question this prior as an even series vs the Pheonix Suns with 50-win support(where your team drops 2 points more offensively compared to your seemingly much less valuable than Hakeem regular-season self than the Sonics) does not indicate Jordan was as valuable as Olajuwon, even for this singular series.

I think the “except for the 41ppg finals” part is a really big caveat here. It isn’t necessarily always the case that a prime ATG who won the finals should be POY (though that’ll usually be the case). But when a prime ATG wins the finals with a genuinely historic finals performance, it’s hard for me to conceptualize not giving that person POY. I don’t think Magic 1988 rises to that level (heck, Magic wasn’t even voted Finals MVP in 1988—though I think that was probably wrong). That said, I do think it’s perfectly defensible to vote for Magic for POY in 1988—voting for a prime ATG who won the finals is essentially always going to be perfectly defensible. And, indeed, in the 2010 POY project, Magic got 8 first-place votes out of 21 votes. It was a close vote, and that seems totally fair to me. I wouldn’t regard it as a “huge slight” to vote for Magic over Jordan that year.

Well again that's your prerogative but at the same time I'd honestly argue that Hakeem in 93&94 had two of the best rs's of all time. So I think it could go either way. The finals was a nice cherry on the top of MJ's season but you can't really bring that up without also bringing up the series before where MJ had 3 pretty bad games in a row that easily could have led to the Bulls being in a 0-3 hole. He really only had 2 good(one of them great) games that whole series so you could say it might balance out the finals to some degree.

It only balances out anything when it's explained why Jordan's ultra valuable 41 ppg led to a result indicative of lesser impact than Hakeem Olajuwon. There is nothing inherently irreplaceable about higher points by higher-shot totals, especially when it's a defense especially weak at your area of attack and you are attacking it facing less defensive coverage than most superstars would, including the one you are being compared to.

This is not retro scorer of the year. Cherrypicking aspects of the game does not an argument make.

I don’t think I’d agree that Hakeem 1993 was one of “the best rs’s of all time.” But, at the same time, I don’t even really think it matters for these purposes, because I could put my estimation of Hakeem’s 1993 RS up to that level and I’d still feel the same way. To use your example, it’s similar to how I would easily vote for Magic in 1988 if he’d had a genuinely historic finals, even though I think Jordan’s 1988 RS was incredible. To give a more recent (and less hypothetical) example, I think Jokic’s 2021 RS was incredible (as you may know, I regard Jokic these past several years as being up there as possibly the GOAT peak), but I’d have no problem voting Giannis above Jokic for 2021 POY, because Giannis was a prime ATG who won the finals while having a genuinely historic finals performance (and that’s despite Giannis definitely being lucky his team won the last couple games of the ECF entirely without him). And I definitely believe that would be the dominant view in both of those instances—with us being able to see that Giannis was fairly easily voted POY in 2021 over Jokic, and 1988 Magic was close to Jordan even in the 2010 voting despite not really having a genuinely historic finals. I think it would be a real anomaly for a prime ATG that had this type of Finals performance to not be voted POY.

Well Hakeem's 93 season generally won't get talk of being atg level mainly because a. he didn't win mvp and b. his team only won like 46 games but I personally would have it up there along with his 94 season so like I said that's my own grade.

They won 55 games. Think you have your wires crossed.

[70sFan]

If people are going to say 'such and such was past their prime' I think that deserves closer scrutiny. Usually there is some definite evidence for it, e.g. KG getting hurt in 09 and never being quite the same, or Duncan's knees just gradually getting worse from his peak in 02 & 03 until we see time catch up to him in 08 (by the playoffs especially). There are usually stats that back up what's happening too, e.g. Shaq getting older and fatter corresponds to his stats collapsing.

So you have no problem saying such thing, while strongly pushing the ideas that Bird was past prime in 1988 or that Duncan was a shell of his former self in 2008... Hate to say but to me that's the definition of building "narratives around players, and then when a player fails, retrospectively acting like their failure was expected for XYZ reasons".

I think Hakeem's prime was 93-96, which means my support for him after 96 is going to drop off.

That's obviously not carefully selected, after all Hakeem wasn't better in 1997 than 1996 at all, right?

What I am hoping not to see is people who think Hakeem was just as good from 86 to 98, but then ignore his team's failures during that stretch.

Nobody keeps Hakeem prime to 1998.
I am hoping not to see people who reduce the whole team success to the performance of one player.

[lessthanjake]

I don’t think I’d agree that Hakeem 1993 was one of “the best rs’s of all time.” But, at the same time, I don’t even really think it matters for these purposes, because I could put my estimation of Hakeem’s 1993 RS up to that level and I’d still feel the same way. To use your example, it’s similar to how I would easily vote for Magic in 1988 if he’d had a genuinely historic finals, even though I think Jordan’s 1988 RS was incredible. To give a more recent (and less hypothetical) example, I think Jokic’s 2021 RS was incredible (as you may know, I regard Jokic these past several years as being up there as possibly the GOAT peak), but I’d have no problem voting Giannis above Jokic for 2021 POY, because Giannis was a prime ATG who won the finals while having a genuinely historic finals performance (and that’s despite Giannis definitely being lucky his team won the last couple games of the ECF entirely without him). And I definitely believe that would be the dominant view in both of those instances—with us being able to see that Giannis was fairly easily voted POY in 2021 over Jokic, and 1988 Magic was close to Jordan even in the 2010 voting despite not really having a genuinely historic finals. I think it would be a real anomaly for a prime ATG that had this type of Finals performance to not be voted POY.

Well Hakeem's 93 season generally won't get talk of being atg level mainly because a. he didn't win mvp and b. his team only won like 46 games but I personally would have it up there along with his 94 season so like I said that's my own grade. There's lots of examples but I think at the end of the day what I'm saying is that in all of these years both guys have a strong case and its not a slight to any of them to have one over the other. Like I also said, if you wanna give extra credit for the 93 finals you can also ding him for the ecf(I mean its by MJ's standards a very bad series).

I think going through individual ECF games to ding Jordan for in order to find reason to vote for someone who did not even make the conference finals (and didn’t exactly light the world completely on fire while losing) definitely feels like a real stretch. This is one of those years that’s not that complicated. There’s a prime ATG who had a great year, culminating in winning the finals while averaging more points than anyone has ever averaged in finals history (not to mention also leading the league in essentially every box metric we have, in both RS and playoffs, FWIW). A guy who led his team to a 3.57 RS SRS and a second-round playoff exit against an opponent that lost to an opponent that lost in the finals is not POY. Again, there’s years where that might be enough. Not every year has a prime GOAT candidate putting up a record-breaking Finals performance. This particular year does, though. Was Jordan great in the ECF? No, he had a few rough games (though also a truly great game at a crucial time). But let’s not overthink this. Is a prime ATG who won the Finals while putting up a genuinely historic Finals performance really not POY because of a series where he put up 32/7/6, with +1.8% rTS% and more steals than turnovers?

[Cavsfansince84]

I think going through individual ECF games to ding Jordan for in order to find reason to vote for someone who did not even make the conference finals (and didn’t exactly light the world on fire while losing) definitely feels like a real stretch. This is one of those years that’s not that complicated. There’s a prime ATG who had a great year, culminating in winning the finals while averaging more points than anyone has ever averaged in finals history (not to mention also leading the league in essentially every box metric we have, in both RS and playoffs, FWIW). A guy who led his team to a 3.57 RS SRS and a second-round playoff exit against an opponent that lost to an opponent that lost in the finals is not POY. Again, there’s years where that might be enough. Not every year has a prime GOAT candidate putting up a record-breaking Finals performance. This particular year does, though. Was Jordan great in the ECF? No, he had a few rough games (though also a truly great game at a crucial time). But let’s not overthink this. Is a prime ATG who won the Finals while putting up a genuinely historic Finals performance really not POY because of a series where he put up 32/7/6, with +1.8% rTS% and more steals than turnovers?

Ok at this point you are restating yourself. I get that MJ has a strong argument. What I don't agree with is a. disregarding the ecf when looking at his overall playoffs(in some ways he was lucky to win that series) and b. putting MJ's rs on Hakeem's level. This was by most metrics Hakeem's best offensive season and prob top 3 defensively(he was dpoy). He had a strong playoffs even if it ended in the 2nd rd. I'd go so far as to say rs wise it was as good or better than any MJ ever had(with 93 definitely not being his best) but this is also me repeating myself from the last voting thread where I made a case for two way centers in general in terms of impact. So we can disagree, its not the end of the world. You made your points and I made mine. Voters will give their own rationale for how they rank them.

[OhayoKD]

Both Grant and Vlade were much better passers and defenders. Thorpe was closer to Kevin Willis (also a 1992 all-star, averaging more points and rebounds than Thorpe) or young Oakley in actual impact, and if anything both of them have a lot more room for confidence on that end. This is pretty shameless.

Thorpe was a good player. OhayoKD admitted that the Rockets actually ran their offense through him at many points in the Seattle series. This isn't such an important point to expand on further though.

1. When did OhayoKD say this? (are you confusing me with fatal 9)
2. Them running their offense seems through is repeatedly noted as a negative that assists with Hakeem being frozen out of the game.
3. Considering he is the best teammate and by the data is a terrible best teammate, I would say this is actually pretty important when trying to argue Hakeem's demonstrated impact is fake, yeah.

The question was not which team is better; the question was why is it demonstrably more impressive for Jordan to lift a 50-win team to 65-wins and six titles than for Hakeem to lift a 31-win team to 53-wins and two titles.

What you want to do, without taking the time to formulate your thoughts to outright say this, is take the good team redundancy approach to excuse that — again ignoring that you just claimed Hakeem had a really good team despite all evidence to the contrary… — but then that would require the Bulls to not have a massive scoring vacuum without Jordan. He is not being disadvantaged here by sharing a role and needing to scale anything down.

On that note, you tellingly did not take this approach back when Magic was lifting his teams well above Jordan’s while having a more natural replacement in Michael Cooper than “Pete Myers / nobody”.

It's better because lifting better teams is much harder.[/quote]
You keep saying this but I still see no basis. What is the evidence a 20-win player on a 30-win team generally retains less than 75% of their value on a 50 win team?

And what did Hakeem do from 1996-1998 while Jordan was threepeating? He certainly had a pretty good cast in Houston in those years. Of course we pretend they don't exist and Hakeem gets no blame for his super team with Barkley and Drexler not working out. The 1995 team though without Barkley was also really really talented and they ended up winning by the skin of their teeth.

Let's see

-> Made the conference finals and choked vs the same team Jordan choked against (96)
-> Led a 64-win pace with Charles Barkley and then was the best player in the playoffs including performing much better vs a common opponent than Jordan (1997)
-> Was bogged down by injury in the regular-season but was then on-pace to upset the Jazz till barkley got hurt again. A team Jordan is facing away from home in a game 7 if not for shot-clocks errors. (1998)

Hakeem broke down earlier not getting to take any 2 season breaks but he seemed to do fine when the "superteam" had the pieces they scrapped their depth for.

Do you just go fully primeval whenever you see Jordan challenged, or are you being deliberately disingenuous. Or maybe both.

1) What happened to your constant focus on relative efficiency? Opponents scored at 50% true shooting against the Knicks. Hakeem scored 26.9 points on 55.6% true shooting and was very involved in the passing game.

2) This is a non-sequitur. Hakeem grossly outplayed Ewing (unlike 1993 Jordan), his team directly beat Ewing’s, and even if Hakeem “wasn’t very good offensively” (again, patently false), he held the Knicks six points below their regular season offensive rating.

He certainly scored better. Maybe you should be honest and admit that is what really matters to you instead of trying some sloppy sleight of hand.

Jordan and Ewing don't even play the same position.

Jordan is also a far superior ball-handler and playmaker compared to Hakeem, not just scorer. Per Thinking Basketball, 1993 Jordan had a Box OC of 12.4 and 1993 Hakeem had 5.0. That's two and a half times more shots created for teammates. Add that to averaging 9 ppg more on similar efficiency and with way fewer turnovers and it's just not close. There is a chasm between Jordan and Hakeem on offense. A CHASM... [/quote]
By Lebronny's tracking Hakeem created ~15 while Jordan created ~10:
https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=2420305

BOX OCs only really input and weigh assists(that bit uses various components) which means open looks that don't lead to a score or which don't come off a pass aren't counted and do not care if an assist isn't creating (rather relevant when assessing someone who operates on the weak-side of the triangle).

DTOs have Hakeem as an era outlier so far in terms of assist-quality(I am doing 93 Jordan vs the Knicks now).

In the absence of tracking to the contrary(preferably with time-stamps), I'm skeptical about "Jordan was a way better creator than Hakeem because he assisted more!"


Also as has been covered, Jordan's assists/oc/passer-rating are high relative to his offensive signals:

Spoiler:

jordan archangel, 13-11, +2 net, with a team that won 27 before he got there

Spoiler:

lebron arc1-0 +8 net with starters(- mo williams) that won at an 18-win pace(15 by record) without Lebron but with Mo-Williams

I don't see much in formulas when they stop being able explain reality/

[OhayoKD]

I don’t think I’d agree that Hakeem 1993 was one of “the best rs’s of all time.” But, at the same time, I don’t even really think it matters for these purposes, because I could put my estimation of Hakeem’s 1993 RS up to that level and I’d still feel the same way. To use your example, it’s similar to how I would easily vote for Magic in 1988 if he’d had a genuinely historic finals, even though I think Jordan’s 1988 RS was incredible. To give a more recent (and less hypothetical) example, I think Jokic’s 2021 RS was incredible (as you may know, I regard Jokic these past several years as being up there as possibly the GOAT peak), but I’d have no problem voting Giannis above Jokic for 2021 POY, because Giannis was a prime ATG who won the finals while having a genuinely historic finals performance (and that’s despite Giannis definitely being lucky his team won the last couple games of the ECF entirely without him). And I definitely believe that would be the dominant view in both of those instances—with us being able to see that Giannis was fairly easily voted POY in 2021 over Jokic, and 1988 Magic was close to Jordan even in the 2010 voting despite not really having a genuinely historic finals. I think it would be a real anomaly for a prime ATG that had this type of Finals performance to not be voted POY.

Well Hakeem's 93 season generally won't get talk of being atg level mainly because a. he didn't win mvp and b. his team only won like 46 games but I personally would have it up there along with his 94 season so like I said that's my own grade. There's lots of examples but I think at the end of the day what I'm saying is that in all of these years both guys have a strong case and its not a slight to any of them to have one over the other. Like I also said, if you wanna give extra credit for the 93 finals you can also ding him for the ecf(I mean its by MJ's standards a very bad series).

I think going through individual ECF games to ding Jordan for in order to find reason to vote for someone who did not even make the conference finals (and didn’t exactly light the world completely on fire)

If Hakeem had one of the best regular seasons ever while leading the Rockets to 55-wins as Cavsfan seems to believe, then Hakeem carrying the Rockets to 55-win play vs the Sonics seems quite more deserving of "lighting the world completely on fire" than Jordan+great help being pressed by the Suns.

[lessthanjake]

Remarkably little talk here of Jordan’s performance in the actual NBA Finals, where Jordan put up an astonishing 41 PPG—the highest average ever in a Finals series—on +2.6% rTS% (and with very few turnovers, as well), while his co-star shot at an abysmal -7.3 rTS% and the supporting cast as a whole had a negative rTS% (though the catch-and-shoot guys shot well). This was an enormous series for Jordan, which, having come in the NBA Finals, surely tips the balance for him in terms of POY

It was addressed here:

Spoiler:

Why are you switching from 'weak defense" to "overall" while pulling up offensive numbers?

His best offensive series came against the...checks notes... "great" -1.3 Suns defense that went

+3 vs the Sonics
+/- 0 vs the Spurs
-4 vs the Lakers

On the back of this incredibly valuable scoring outburst, the Bulls were a whopping 1 point better against a defense that was decent in the regular season and average in the playoffs. And apparently that bridges the chasm in demonstrated(not hypothetical) impact between Jordan and Hakeem

You and the 6 people who upvoted you have a poorly supported prior that extra points are harder to replace than Hakeem's massive advantages on nearly ever aspect of defense(the biggest gap being in terms of paint-presence which affects offenses on almost every possession) and for this season major advantage in terms of gravity. The problem here is the actual result calls into question this prior as an even series vs the Pheonix Suns with 50-win support(where your team drops 2 points more offensively compared to your seemingly much less valuable than Hakeem regular-season self than the Sonics) does not indicate Jordan was as valuable as Olajuwon, even for this singular series.

Okay, so as an initial matter, I think it is a little silly to just ignore actual individual output, in favor of entirely basing ones’ analysis on whatever cherry-picked extrapolations you can make using team data to try to get to the conclusion you want. Scoring more points per game than anyone has ever scored in finals history is self-evidently a big deal—and it’s an especially big deal when the rest of the team is struggling to score (particularly his co-star, who was worse than a -7 rTS% in the series). You can run as many cherry-picked “extraps” as you want to try to argue otherwise, but massive individual output in an NBA Finals win is a really big deal.

More generally, POY isn’t a “Most Impactful Per 100 Possessions Player of the Year” award. That’s what your cherry-picked extrapolations are all geared towards. And I could definitely argue with those assertions, which are all based on cherry-picked inferences. But obviously POY is, in a significant part, about a player’s concrete achievements that year. Jordan won the title with a genuinely historic finals performance. This is obviously a way bigger deal than anything Hakeem did in 1993. It’s not even close. And that makes this pretty simple—just like I think the 2021 POY is pretty simple, even though I actually think Jokic was a better and more impactful player than Giannis that year.

I think the “except for the 41ppg finals” part is a really big caveat here. It isn’t necessarily always the case that a prime ATG who won the finals should be POY (though that’ll usually be the case). But when a prime ATG wins the finals with a genuinely historic finals performance, it’s hard for me to conceptualize not giving that person POY. I don’t think Magic 1988 rises to that level (heck, Magic wasn’t even voted Finals MVP in 1988—though I think that was probably wrong). That said, I do think it’s perfectly defensible to vote for Magic for POY in 1988—voting for a prime ATG who won the finals is essentially always going to be perfectly defensible. And, indeed, in the 2010 POY project, Magic got 8 first-place votes out of 21 votes. It was a close vote, and that seems totally fair to me. I wouldn’t regard it as a “huge slight” to vote for Magic over Jordan that year.

Well again that's your prerogative but at the same time I'd honestly argue that Hakeem in 93&94 had two of the best rs's of all time. So I think it could go either way. The finals was a nice cherry on the top of MJ's season but you can't really bring that up without also bringing up the series before where MJ had 3 pretty bad games in a row that easily could have led to the Bulls being in a 0-3 hole. He really only had 2 good(one of them great) games that whole series so you could say it might balance out the finals to some degree.

It only balances out anything when it's explained why Jordan's ultra valuable 41 ppg led to a result indicative of lesser impact than Hakeem Olajuwon. There is nothing inherently irreplaceable about higher points by higher-shot totals, especially when it's a defense especially weak at your area of attack and you are attacking it facing less defensive coverage than most superstars would, including the one you are being compared to.

This is not retro scorer of the year. Cherrypicking aspects of the game does not an argument make.

It’s not really cherry-picking aspects of the game to put a lot of weight on massive performances in the NBA Finals, for purposes of POY voting. Everyone does that. If Hakeem went to the Finals and was amazing but didn’t score 41 points per game but instead was historically good in other ways, maybe he’d be POY. But he didn’t do that, or even get remotely close to doing that.

[One_and_Done]

If people are going to say 'such and such was past their prime' I think that deserves closer scrutiny. Usually there is some definite evidence for it, e.g. KG getting hurt in 09 and never being quite the same, or Duncan's knees just gradually getting worse from his peak in 02 & 03 until we see time catch up to him in 08 (by the playoffs especially). There are usually stats that back up what's happening too, e.g. Shaq getting older and fatter corresponds to his stats collapsing.

So you have no problem saying such thing, while strongly pushing the ideas that Bird was past prime in 1988 or that Duncan was a shell of his former self in 2008... Hate to say but to me that's the definition of building "narratives around players, and then when a player fails, retrospectively acting like their failure was expected for XYZ reasons".

I think Hakeem's prime was 93-96, which means my support for him after 96 is going to drop off.

That's obviously not carefully selected, after all Hakeem wasn't better in 1997 than 1996 at all, right?

What I am hoping not to see is people who think Hakeem was just as good from 86 to 98, but then ignore his team's failures during that stretch.

Nobody keeps Hakeem prime to 1998.
I am hoping not to see people who reduce the whole team success to the performance of one player.

Not everyone is going to agree on these things, I said that too. My point was that: 1) there should be evidence for these claims, and 2) people have to be consistent.

Duncan for example was not 'a shell' in 08, he was still an all-nba player, but he had gradually degraded due to the toll his injuries took. That can be observed through alot of evidence, both anecdotal and statistical.

For anyone who watched or followed the game at the time, the slow decline after his injury in mid-04 was fairly plain to see. He was probably only 5% worse the next several years, but certainly by 08 the media coverage was that Duncan's knees were 'bone on bone'; I recall Shaq discussing it in an article at the time. He looked slower and less athletic compared to his 02 and 03 peak, and by the 2011 offseason he realised he had to drop alot of weight to still be impactful. This let him play better in 12-14 than he did in 11, though still no longer at prime Duncan levels.

Statistically, it's much the same. During Duncan's prime from 98 to 07 the Spurs Drtg was always under 100. In 08 it dropped to 101.8, and the following 2 seasons it was over 104. The timing of this aligns with the progression of Duncan's loss of mobility and athleticism. We also saw the decline in other ways, such as Duncan's personal #s dipping. In 08 his Drtg was 97, the worst number of his career to that point. Over the previous 3 years Duncan had averaged 34pp100 in the playoffs. In 08 it was down to 27pp100 at a TS of only 488, by far the lowest % of his career to that point. Frim 98-07 Duncan scored 32pp100 in the PS on 560 TS%, the next 3 years it was 28pp100 on 509 TS% (against weaker foes and with much worse team outcomes). I could go on.

Of course, people aren't always going to agree as I said. I see the sharp increase in stats from 93 to 96, combined with other evidence like team results and watching his play as evidence of that being Hakeem's prime. Enigma does not. What I want to see is consistency. I have to assume if Hakeem was just as good from 86 to 97 then Hakeem had alot of underachieving seasons. I also have to assume that, if the Sonics had played Hakeem in 94 or 95, that the Sonics should have been favoured to win.

[lessthanjake]

Well Hakeem's 93 season generally won't get talk of being atg level mainly because a. he didn't win mvp and b. his team only won like 46 games but I personally would have it up there along with his 94 season so like I said that's my own grade. There's lots of examples but I think at the end of the day what I'm saying is that in all of these years both guys have a strong case and its not a slight to any of them to have one over the other. Like I also said, if you wanna give extra credit for the 93 finals you can also ding him for the ecf(I mean its by MJ's standards a very bad series).

I think going through individual ECF games to ding Jordan for in order to find reason to vote for someone who did not even make the conference finals (and didn’t exactly light the world completely on fire)

If Hakeem had one of the best regular seasons ever while leading the Rockets to 55-wins as Cavsfan seems to believe, then Hakeem carrying the Rockets to 55-win play vs the Sonics seems quite more deserving of "lighting the world completely on fire" than Jordan+great help being pressed by the Suns.

These are the kind of simplistic inferences you like to base arguments on. It’s silly. Jordan had a genuinely historic series against the Suns in the 1993 Finals. Hakeem did not have a genuinely historic series against the Sonics in 1993. You can try to pull a bunch of team data around to try to draw some inference that’s contrary to that, but it’s basically just data manipulation by someone in search of a particular conclusion. It’s really not that complicated.

I’ll harken back to a post I once wrote to you, spoofing the way you go about arguing things:

Well I for one am now thinking about ranking Jordan outside of the top 100. You see, in my large-sample multi-year extrap, I’ve found that the Bulls won 57 games with Jordan in 1993, and then he got replaced by a below-replacement-level Pete Myers and the team added a rookie Toni Kukoc, and they won 55 games. We can assume that if Pete Myers had just been replacement level, the Bulls would’ve been able to maintain the same record as in 1993—after all, they were very close as it was. And would’ve maintained the same SRS too if they’d been as healthy as in 1993 (fully-healthy SRS in 1994 was already close!). So that has Jordan’s value above replacement level in 1993 as being roughly the same as the value that Toni Kukoc coming off the bench in his rookie season brought—since the effects of Jordan leaving and Kukoc joining seems to have canceled out. Meanwhile, if we try to measure Jordan’s value at his peak in 1991, we see that, without Jordan, the 2015 Hawks won just 1 fewer game than the 1991 Bulls with 3.8 SRS lower. So this large-sample multi-year extrap shows that Jordan only provided about a 3.8 SRS lift in 1991. And Jordan had a better team than the 2015 Hawks—the Hawks didn’t have Pippen or Grant, both better than anyone on those Hawks!—so that 3.8 SRS lift is really the upper bound. And that’s at Jordan’s peak year! Obviously, our other extrap shows that, by 1993, he was only worth as much as a rookie Toni Kukoc. Meanwhile, we know that in the second three-peat, Jordan was past his peak, so we can assume that his value/impact only went down from there. So what these extraps show is a guy who, at his very peak, could provide at most a 3.8 SRS lift (probably less!) and then quickly became only as impactful as a rookie Toni Kukoc, before retiring and then coming back in 1995-1998 in further diminished form. I don’t think this is an impact profile I can put in the top 100. The bottom of the top 100 includes guys like Carmelo Anthony. Carmelo even in his rookie year showed more SRS lift than Jordan ever did, lifting his team from -7.41 SRS the year before he got there, to 1.65 SRS his rookie year. That 9.06 SRS lift is almost 2.5x peak Jordan! And that was Carmelo’s rookie year at age 19, not even close to his peak! And Carmelo also has the longevity edge on Jordan. When large-sample multi-year extraps massively favor rookie Carmelo over peak Jordan AND Carmelo has the longevity edge, there’s really no argument for Jordan over Carmelo. So I don’t see how Jordan can be top 100. In fact, given that almost-peak Jordan was equivalent in impact to rookie Toni Kukoc according to the extraps, I think we’re looking at Michael being roughly a Kukoc-level player at best, with who I’d put ahead depending on whether we think Jordan’s drop from his 1991 peak to 1993 was more or less than Kukoc’s improvement from his rookie year to his peak. I’d have to run some more extraps to figure that out.

[capfan33]

I don’t think I’d agree that Hakeem 1993 was one of “the best rs’s of all time.” But, at the same time, I don’t even really think it matters for these purposes, because I could put my estimation of Hakeem’s 1993 RS up to that level and I’d still feel the same way. To use your example, it’s similar to how I would easily vote for Magic in 1988 if he’d had a genuinely historic finals, even though I think Jordan’s 1988 RS was incredible. To give a more recent (and less hypothetical) example, I think Jokic’s 2021 RS was incredible (as you may know, I regard Jokic these past several years as being up there as possibly the GOAT peak), but I’d have no problem voting Giannis above Jokic for 2021 POY, because Giannis was a prime ATG who won the finals while having a genuinely historic finals performance (and that’s despite Giannis definitely being lucky his team won the last couple games of the ECF entirely without him). And I definitely believe that would be the dominant view in both of those instances—with us being able to see that Giannis was fairly easily voted POY in 2021 over Jokic, and 1988 Magic was close to Jordan even in the 2010 voting despite not really having a genuinely historic finals. I think it would be a real anomaly for a prime ATG that had this type of Finals performance to not be voted POY.

Well Hakeem's 93 season generally won't get talk of being atg level mainly because a. he didn't win mvp and b. his team only won like 46 games but I personally would have it up there along with his 94 season so like I said that's my own grade. There's lots of examples but I think at the end of the day what I'm saying is that in all of these years both guys have a strong case and its not a slight to any of them to have one over the other. Like I also said, if you wanna give extra credit for the 93 finals you can also ding him for the ecf(I mean its by MJ's standards a very bad series).

I think going through individual ECF games to ding Jordan for in order to find reason to vote for someone who did not even make the conference finals (and didn’t exactly light the world completely on fire while losing) definitely feels like a real stretch. This is one of those years that’s not that complicated. There’s a prime ATG who had a great year, culminating in winning the finals while averaging more points than anyone has ever averaged in finals history (not to mention also leading the league in essentially every box metric we have, in both RS and playoffs, FWIW). A guy who led his team to a 3.57 RS SRS and a second-round playoff exit against an opponent that lost to an opponent that lost in the finals is not POY. Again, there’s years where that might be enough. Not every year has a prime GOAT candidate putting up a record-breaking Finals performance. This particular year does, though. Was Jordan great in the ECF? No, he had a few rough games (though also a truly great game at a crucial time). But let’s not overthink this. Is a prime ATG who won the Finals while putting up a genuinely historic Finals performance really not POY because of a series where he put up 32/7/6, with +1.8% rTS% and more steals than turnovers?

To be clear, we’re not nitpicking individual games in the series because there’s no need to, he shot 35% from the field outside of an admittedly incredible game 4. And if it weren’t for an incredible performance from Pippen and the rest of the team in game 3, likely would have lost the series.

At the end of the day, they won, and he gets the glory. But responding to 2 of the worst shooting games of your career coming back home, down 0-2, with a 3-18 performance? Yea, that’s deserves quite a bit of scrutiny, as I’m sure we would with literally any other player.

[OhayoKD]

Remarkably little talk here of Jordan’s performance in the actual NBA Finals, where Jordan put up an astonishing 41 PPG—the highest average ever in a Finals series—on +2.6% rTS% (and with very few turnovers, as well), while his co-star shot at an abysmal -7.3 rTS% and the supporting cast as a whole had a negative rTS% (though the catch-and-shoot guys shot well). This was an enormous series for Jordan, which, having come in the NBA Finals, surely tips the balance for him in terms of POY

It was addressed here:

Spoiler:

Why are you switching from 'weak defense" to "overall" while pulling up offensive numbers?

His best offensive series came against the...checks notes... "great" -1.3 Suns defense that went

+3 vs the Sonics
+/- 0 vs the Spurs
-4 vs the Lakers

On the back of this incredibly valuable scoring outburst, the Bulls were a whopping 1 point better against a defense that was decent in the regular season and average in the playoffs. And apparently that bridges the chasm in demonstrated(not hypothetical) impact between Jordan and Hakeem

You and the 6 people who upvoted you have a poorly supported prior that extra points are harder to replace than Hakeem's massive advantages on nearly ever aspect of defense(the biggest gap being in terms of paint-presence which affects offenses on almost every possession) and for this season major advantage in terms of gravity. The problem here is the actual result calls into question this prior as an even series vs the Pheonix Suns with 50-win support(where your team drops 2 points more offensively compared to your seemingly much less valuable than Hakeem regular-season self than the Sonics) does not indicate Jordan was as valuable as Olajuwon, even for this singular series.

Okay, so as an initial matter, I think it is a little silly to just ignore actual individual output

I am not. I am disputing your baseless assumption that higher scoring output = higher individual output. Hakeem is exerting the most output for his team on half or so of their defensive possessions. By comparison, Jordan's output on that end is near non-existent.

Hakeem also has plenty of output offensively on non-scoring attentions considering the entire scheme of the Sonics was to prevent him getting the ball and to immediately force it out of his hands and the scheme of the Rockets was to make him the focal point of the offense. Neither applies to the same degree describing Jordan vs the Suns.

More generally, POY isn’t a “Most Impactful Per 100 Possessions Player of the Year” award. That’s what your cherry-picked extrapolations are all geared towards. And I could definitely argue with those assertions, which are all based on cherry-picked inferences. But obviously POY is, in a significant part, about a player’s concrete achievements that year.

Jordan won the title with a genuinely historic finals performance.

It can be. Player of the year is by design vague so that people can choose their own criteria as long as it centers on what transpired in the season in question. Impact on winning is the centerpiece of most voters criteria because it is the "accomplishment" which an individual exerts the most control over. And when the gap is clear, I see no reason to reinforce groupthink by voting against more deserving candidates.

We define accomplishment here. And I plan on defining it according to what I think is the most useful history for the project to tell. And I see nothing more useful than when we tell the story of players who already achieved being the best in the sport but went unrecognized. Hakeem was the best. Easily. That's why he should be POY. that's more than enough accomplishment for me.

Being the final person to touch the ball 41 times facing mediocre defense is not inherently valuable beyond whatever one is willing to assume about the impact touching the ball last has (assuming that is uniform which it obviously isn't). The only historic bit I see here is an arbitrarily weighed milestone which not you or anyone bringing it up is actually willing to try and ascertain the value of.

It's not team of the year, or last-ball-toucher of the year, it's player of the year and generally most people agree, myself included, the point of a player is to make their team better. Hakeem likely did that better than Jordan for a full season and postseason. That's clear cut POY to me.

Well again that's your prerogative but at the same time I'd honestly argue that Hakeem in 93&94 had two of the best rs's of all time. So I think it could go either way. The finals was a nice cherry on the top of MJ's season but you can't really bring that up without also bringing up the series before where MJ had 3 pretty bad games in a row that easily could have led to the Bulls being in a 0-3 hole. He really only had 2 good(one of them great) games that whole series so you could say it might balance out the finals to some degree.

It only balances out anything when it's explained why Jordan's ultra valuable 41 ppg led to a result indicative of lesser impact than Hakeem Olajuwon. There is nothing inherently irreplaceable about higher points by higher-shot totals, especially when it's a defense especially weak at your area of attack and you are attacking it facing less defensive coverage than most superstars would, including the one you are being compared to.

This is not retro scorer of the year. Cherrypicking aspects of the game does not an argument make.

It’s not really cherry-picking aspects of the game to put a lot of weight on massive performances in the NBA Finals,[/quote]

You are putting a lot of weight on a scoring performance. AKA cherrypicking. We know scoring alot more doesn't mean you are more or as valuable than someone. And we have no reason to think it made Jordan as valuable in 93. That's really all there is to it.

[AEnigma]

During Duncan's prime from 98 to 07 the Spurs Drtg was always under 100. In 08 it dropped to 101.8, and the following 2 seasons it was over 104. The timing of this aligns with the progression of Duncan's loss of mobility and athleticism.

The timing coincides with offensive efficacy increasing league-wide. It is like you cannot be bothered to even spend half a second thinking before offering the most convenient excuse you see.

The best bit here is that the worst league-relative Spurs defences in Duncan’s first eleven years were 2002 and 2003.

In 08 his Drtg was 97, the worst number of his career.

Still a box metric. This one is even less excusable than it already should be: we know Duncan’s actual defensive rating that season was 101.6, which was -5.9 league relative. In 2002 his individual on-court defensive rating was -5.8 league relative, and in 2003 it was -4.9 league relative.

I have to assume if Hakeem was just as good from 86 to 97 then Hakeem had alot of underachieving seasons.

Literally no one has ever said that.

I also have to assume that, if the Sonics had played Hakeem in 94 or 95, that the Sonics should have been favoured to win.

Oh, incredible, I was joking about Dikembe and Vlade, and you decided to fully commit to the joke. I suppose in the future I should remember that absolutely no bar is too low for someone to try to duck under it.

[OhayoKD]

I think going through individual ECF games to ding Jordan for in order to find reason to vote for someone who did not even make the conference finals (and didn’t exactly light the world completely on fire)

If Hakeem had one of the best regular seasons ever while leading the Rockets to 55-wins as Cavsfan seems to believe, then Hakeem carrying the Rockets to 55-win play vs the Sonics seems quite more deserving of "lighting the world completely on fire" than Jordan+great help being pressed by the Suns.

These are the kind of simplistic inferences you like to base arguments on. It’s silly. Jordan had a genuinely historic series against the Suns in the 1993 Finals. Hakeem did not have a genuinely historic series against the Sonics in 1993. You can try to pull a bunch of team data around to try to draw some inference that’s contrary to that, but it’s basically just data manipulation by someone in search of a particular conclusion. It’s really not that complicated.

Valuing performances based on Box-stats is inherently far more complicated than "impact extraps".

Stating empty claims as facts is fun but no amount of adjectives is going to change it is an entirely empty claim without some engagement with the concept you're spoofing.

[lessthanjake]

Well Hakeem's 93 season generally won't get talk of being atg level mainly because a. he didn't win mvp and b. his team only won like 46 games but I personally would have it up there along with his 94 season so like I said that's my own grade. There's lots of examples but I think at the end of the day what I'm saying is that in all of these years both guys have a strong case and its not a slight to any of them to have one over the other. Like I also said, if you wanna give extra credit for the 93 finals you can also ding him for the ecf(I mean its by MJ's standards a very bad series).

I think going through individual ECF games to ding Jordan for in order to find reason to vote for someone who did not even make the conference finals (and didn’t exactly light the world completely on fire while losing) definitely feels like a real stretch. This is one of those years that’s not that complicated. There’s a prime ATG who had a great year, culminating in winning the finals while averaging more points than anyone has ever averaged in finals history (not to mention also leading the league in essentially every box metric we have, in both RS and playoffs, FWIW). A guy who led his team to a 3.57 RS SRS and a second-round playoff exit against an opponent that lost to an opponent that lost in the finals is not POY. Again, there’s years where that might be enough. Not every year has a prime GOAT candidate putting up a record-breaking Finals performance. This particular year does, though. Was Jordan great in the ECF? No, he had a few rough games (though also a truly great game at a crucial time). But let’s not overthink this. Is a prime ATG who won the Finals while putting up a genuinely historic Finals performance really not POY because of a series where he put up 32/7/6, with +1.8% rTS% and more steals than turnovers?

To be clear, we’re not nitpicking individual games in the series because there’s no need to, he shot 35% from the field outside of an admittedly incredible game 4. And if it weren’t for an incredible performance from Pippen and the rest of the team in game 3, likely would have lost the series.

At the end of the day, they won, and he gets the glory. But responding to 2 of the worst shooting games of your career coming back home, down 0-2, with a 3-18 performance? Yea, that’s deserves quite a bit of scrutiny, as I’m sure we would with literally any other player.

Despite the FG%, Jordan actually had a +1.8% rTS% in that series. And he also had averages of 32/7/6 and more steals than turnovers. Is the positive rTS% caused by one game being amazing? Yeah, it was a bit negative without that game. But that game happened and the Bulls won the game and probably wouldn’t have won if Jordan hadn’t been incredible. It’s not something you can just hand-wave away—Jordan being amazing that game was tremendously important. And, as I said, when we don’t handwave away that game, we get a series where Jordan put up numbers of 32/7/6 on +1.8% rTS% and more steals than turnovers. Looking at that overall picture, is that a great series by Jordan’s standards? No. But, to repeat myself, is a prime ATG who won the Finals while putting up a genuinely historic Finals performance really not POY because of that series? Seems like a real stretch to me, especially when the beneficiary of that would be someone who didn’t even make the playoff round in question.