AEnigma wrote:70sFan wrote:I remember Wilt winning 1968 POY, but it was competitive with Russell (who had relatively unimpressive RS).
For people who voted Russell over Wilt, but still pick James here - what am I missing?
I see the analogy in the sense of “would have been the unanimous Player of the Year until a 0-3 slide against the Celtics but still won the majority anyway,” but in the context of the season overall, I do not think it is analogous to the extent it needs to be to serve as a meaningful counter-point.
First, I think the gap between Wilt and Russell in the regular season was smaller than it was with Lebron and Kobe, with Wilt being worse than Lebron and Russell being better than Kobe. Kobe and Russell are maybe the two most variably assessed top players here on RealGM, with each seeing support as both a top five peak/prime and more of a fringe top fifteen peak/prime, but frankly that needs to lean harder on the postseason, because 1969/70 make it much easier to argue against
Wilt’s regular season impact than against
Russell’s, and there is no remote equivalent to even attempt to argue Kobe over Lebron in the regular season (with more people entertaining him outside the top five than saying he had a case for second). Relatedly, Lebron had a cavernous disadvantage at supporting cast yet still had the more successful regular season, whereas Wilt had the better regular season cast than Russell did (and even if they were the same, eight wins is a smaller gap than I think you would see from regular season Lebron versus regular season Kobe).
In the postseason, Wilt loses head-to-head, which is not an inherent mark against a player so long as their opponent looks worse… but for most of us that was not our impression (consider also 1985), and if Lebron has his three-game slide directly against Kobe while relinquishing a 3-1 lead in the process, that would be a harsher mark against him than it was against a Celtics team which played like more of a true ensemble effort (Garnett was a near unanimous top three in 2008 but looks like he will only manage a couple of scattered fifth place votes this year). Russell also significantly added to his case by upsetting the 1968 West/Baylor Lakers, which with West played at a higher level than Wilt’s 76ers did. (This does not apply to me, but as an added note, PC Board consensus seems to have this West above any version of Kobe.) By comparison, Kobe does not have anywhere near the same quality of feats on his postseason résumé this year, and with a more substantial regular season impact gap, I do not see any particular application of that analogy here, no.
On a regular season scale, this year seems more analogous to the already mentioned 1973, which for the group (both this time and in 2010) is a positive signal for Lebron’s candidacy… but speaking as someone who voted against Kareem that year, I think Kareem’s postseason was several orders of magnitude worse because of how truly irrelevant it made him look (arguably outperformed by his own teammate and lost to a team which lost uncompetitively to a team which lost uncompetitively in the Finals). And then for postseason comparisons, my postseason commentary can be similarly extended to attempted analogies with 1995 or the like: reasonably good run from Kobe, sure, but nothing especially notable on its own.
I would take a
lot of title winners, including Kobe last year, as Player of the Year over Lebron this year explicitly because of those brutal last three games… but what it comes down to for me is that
2010 Kobe did not quite offer the holistic season-long achievement which I would want to see. Understand how others could reasonably differ, and definitely feel it is close — if he won Finals MVP performing like Wade did against the Celtics, then congratulations to Kobe — but my lasting impressions of this season are defined more by Lebron, three-game fade and all, than by Kobe.
(That all said, strong odds I abstain from voting on RPoY this year anyway, because I cannot confidently say I would have felt the same in 2010, and that is the standard I personally intend to use for these final five years where our point of comparison is contemporaneous voting rather than hindsight voting.)
