One_and_Done wrote:Your argument is just offbase.
Eaton technically played in 1993, but he was playing only 17 mpg in those 64 games, and was now 36 years old. It was his last year in the league, and he was clearly washed. The previous 8 years his minutes per game were 34, 32, 32, 33, 36, 28, 32 and 25. Now I noted, I agree that Eaton was falling off towards the end, but the point is that from 88-90 Eaton helped make them the 1st, 1st and 5th ranked defence, and those were marks that the Jazz never reached to from 94-98 when they were ranked 7th, 8th, 8th, 9th and 17th. So while Eaton’s prime didn’t overlap entirely with Stockton and Malone, in the years that it did we aren’t seeing the results we’d expect from 2 supposed top 10 players being paired with a DPOY.
No, you said Eaton was not there in 1993 and acted like their defense got worse without him. That’s just not what happened. The defense dipped in his last year and improved after he left. Regardless of whether his minutes were down in his last year, this does not in any way lead to the inference you suggested. You made an argument based on a false premise.
And I don’t know why you lump in 1990 for Eaton’s prime. He took a huge step down defensively by then, as we can see from the steep decrease in his blocks that year, the steep decrease in the Jazz’s rDRTG, and the fact that he didn’t make all-defense for the first time in years. You do this multiple times in this post. Eaton was a bad player by 1990. He was not bad in 1988 and 1989, though he was definitely bad by the time the playoffs rolled around in 1989. You say the Jazz were the 5th-ranked defense in 1990 as if that shows Eaton was a good player, but their rDRTG was pretty indistinguishable from what they would have in later years without Eaton, and Eaton was one of the worst offensive players in history. This is suggestive of Eaton being bad overall by that point.
As for what we saw in the two years of Eaton’s prime that actually did overlap with Malone/Stockton being stars, we’ve been over those years. In one of them, it was the year Malone/Stockton broke out as stars, and the team had a very mediocre first half the season, and then, as Malone/Stockton actually matured into genuine stars (seriously, the stats in the first and second half the season for both of them are actually night and day), the Jazz played like a contending team in both the second half the season and in the playoffs. And in the other year, the Jazz were considered a serious contender, and Eaton was awful in the playoffs (as were others in the supporting cast). After that, Eaton was washed, and the rest of the supporting cast was bad.
So it’s really not clear what you want from Malone/Stockton here. There’s a two-year window where they’re stars and they actually even have one positive player in their supporting cast. Aside from the first half of that first breakout year, the team was a contender-level team during those seasons. They also played like a contender-level team in one of the playoffs, and in the other playoffs the supporting cast (including Eaton) were abysmal. How is this not consistent with Stockton and Malone being great players? Are you expecting them to be a title favorite? Because the supporting cast definitely wasn’t there for that.
I’d add that while Stockton didn’t start in the RS in 87, he actually did start in the playoffs and 24 year old Stockton and almost 24 year old Malone were rolled in the 1st round that year by the Sleepy Floyd and Joe Barry Carroll Warriors (a 42 win team). This was despite having prime Eaton still, and Bailey, etc.
Again, you make statements here that are extremely misleading. You say Stockton “did start in the playoffs,” but he only started 2 games in the 1987 playoffs.
Anyways, if you want to argue that Stockton and Malone were late bloomers, I’d agree with you. They both came into the league relatively old and took a few years to turn into stars. They weren’t major stars in 1987, and they certainly weren’t playing like top 20 all-time greats at that point. But, of course, they also both were really good to an abnormally late age, so despite being late bloomers they had great longevity.
You describe Eaton as a “marginally positive” player, and Bailey as “slightly” negative, views that appear to be based on nothing. Eaton was the DPOY and was in his prime for at least 88-90. In those years prime Stockton & Malone led the Jazz to records of 47, 51, and 55, with first or second round exits each year. I reject the idea that +500 title odds (assuming that’s even correct) somehow means that the Jazz performed well in the RS in 89 (or any of those years). The West was the weaker conference back then, and the Jazz were nothing special. Their SRS ranged from 2.96 to 4.82. As noted, their D was 1st, 1st and 5th (thanks in large part to Eaton), but they were 16th, 17th and 10th in offense. They did not have the profile of a contender, because they were not. If you put two top 10 players together, and a DPOY candidate, they should be a contender.
Again, talking about 1990 for Eaton as if he was in his prime is just wrong. I’ve addressed stuff about him above. Meanwhile, my assertions about Bailey aren’t “based on nothing.” I’ve explained my views on him in-depth—it’s just that you have, without any explanation, declared that you don’t care about the data I’ve presented on this (his negative BPM), and also completely ignored other data I presented (the fact that you were completely wrong about his rebounding being a positive).
As for the title odds part, I don’t know what else you want. Your entire argument is premised on the idea that they were not legitimate contenders. I point out clear evidence that they were considered legitimate contenders at the time. And you basically say you don’t care. You just don’t want to internalize the vast swaths of information that are clearly contrary to the conclusion you want to have.
What happened in 1989 is that the Jazz had a good season and were considered a serious title contender, but the supporting cast demonstrably laid a total egg in the playoffs (while Malone and Stockton both played well) so the Jazz lost early in the playoffs. You somehow criticize Malone and Stockton for this. Your only argument seems to be that, even though they were considered a serious title contender, you still don’t think they did well enough in the regular season. And it’s true that 51 wins and 4.01 SRS are good numbers but not incredible. But let’s remember again that every supporting cast player on the Jazz that year was a negative player except Eaton. Many of them were huge negatives. It’s not realistic to expect them to have the type of regular season that a title favorite would have. The difference in depth between the Jazz and the title-favorite-level teams that year like the Lakers and Pistons is genuinely absolutely night and day. And that matters way more than you’re acknowledging.
To again come to Bailey’s aid; the average TS% from 88-90 was 537-538 TS%. Bailey’s TS% in the RS from 88-90 was 541. He was a perfectly acceptable scoring option, who was averaging 19.6, 19.5, and 14.2 those three years (mostly off the bench), while averaging a healthy 5-6.5rpg. He was a solid player. Nobody has come out and said he was a world beater, but he was good enough to get a lot of 6th man buzz and was not a “negative” player as you suggest. Nobody was suggesting Bailey was a bad player in the 88 playoffs for example, when he was putting up 23-6 on 488. FG%, which included a series where Bailey performed well against the Lakers. Bailey’s D wasn’t amazing, but it wasn’t bad, and he served as a major contributor for some of the best defences in the NBA as I noted already. He’d have been a 4 today, but for the era he was in he served as a 3 just fine. Pundits certainly thought he was good, he was runner up 6th man in both 88 and 89. So you have a 6th man of the year candidate as well, and yet the Jazz still don’t look like a real contender.
Again, Thurl Bailey had a negative BPM in all but one year in his career. He wasn’t awful, but he was mediocre at best. He was a guy that scored at okay efficiency and was either neutral or a negative in everything else. Granted, the Jazz would’ve been thrilled to have a supporting cast made of guys that were only as bad as Bailey. If that’s what they had, then they’d have been a much better team. But that doesn’t mean Bailey was moving the needle positively.
As for the sixth-man thing, as you surely know, sixth-man-of-the-year voting has historically been very biased in favor of volume-scoring bench guys, regardless of whether they’re really positive-impact players (probably because people don’t really care about bench players and just quickly glance at PPG stats before voting). It’s not an award that really tells us much about whether a guy was really a positive player.
You do finally try to address this by comparing the 88 Jazz to the 2025 Lakers. This seems a misguided comparison. Firstly the Lakers 2nd star is 40 years old and clearly past his prime. Stockton and Malone are in their primes. The Lakers also didn’t have a DPOY on their team. Their playoff run would have looked very different with such a player at the 5. The Lakers were also a team that was cobbled together mid-year due to trades, without the chance to properly balance the roster or to let the team figure out how to play together in training camp. The Jazz roster was the picture of continuity, with 2 stars who complemented each other well (unlike Luka and 40 year old Lebron, who both want the ball). And with all that, the Lakers still won 50 games in a much tougher league with Lebron and Luka/AD playing 70 games each between them, and playing with injuries through the year. Malone and Stockton were healthy as can be.
I specifically said I was talking about the Lakers the last couple years, not just this year, so I’m not sure why you’re focusing only on things very specific to the last third of this year. Both the 1988 Jazz and the Lakers the last couple years have had two superstars (LeBron/AD, eventually LeBron/Luka, and Stockton/Malone), and a pretty bleak supporting cast with one somewhat positive player (Eaton and Reaves). Of course, those two positive players got their value in very different ways, but the point remains more generally. Your arguments about continuity are clearly unimportant because the Lakers weren’t any better in 2024 and in 2025 pre-trade, when they had AD and plenty of continuity. You say LeBron is old, but that’s actually part of the parallel here: The Lakers don’t have LeBron at his best, and the 1988 Jazz didn’t have Malone/Stockton at their best. The point about how many games the stars played is mostly not all that relevant, since stars play fewer games in general now, so you’re also facing star opposing stars less now. The 2024 Lakers and 2025 Lakers have been plenty healthy compared to the norm in the league.
Ultimately, the parallel here is a simple one and doesn’t warrant trying to distinguish the situations in every little way you can think of. The point is that two all-time greats not in their best years + 1 somewhat positive player + a bleak rest of the supporting cast should not be expected to do all that great. The 1988 Jazz actually did better than the Lakers did the last two years (certainly in the playoffs, at least), and perhaps that’s reflective of Malone/Stockton both being better than 40-year-old LeBron, but the general parallel rings true. Supporting cast matters. People generally understand that when they talk about present-day basketball, but they don’t tend to acknowledge it when they’re talking about past eras that they didn’t watch (perhaps because they don’t know what supporting casts were good or not). The Jazz had a bleak supporting cast, and you basically just don’t realize that and are choosing to deny it and blame the results of it on Malone/Stockton.
The attempt to say the Jazz “turned the corner” in the latter half of 88 doesn’t make much sense because the Jazz won 51 and 55 the next 2 seasons, and were still not a contender. Sometimes teams have hot streaks and cold streaks during the year; trying to extrapolate a stretch where they played like a 57 win team isn’t sensible given the receipts from the following years.
This doesn’t make any sense. The Jazz were 18-22 to start the 1988 season (a 37-win pace). They went 29-13 after that (a 57-win pace). As you say, they then won 51 games and 55 games in the next two seasons. This is pretty consistent stuff after the mediocre first half of 1988. I don’t know how you could look at this and say that the next two years weren’t consistent with what they did in the latter half of 1988.
And you say they “were still not a contender,” but we’ve already established that they were considered a contender in 1989, with +500 pre-playoffs title odds. And, in 1990, they had the 4th best pre-playoffs title odds (though tied with a few teams), at +800. To put these odds in perspective, those numbers are roughly equivalent to the pre-playoff title odds that the Celtics and Bucks had in 2022 (and actually better than the eventual-champion Warriors had). You’re choosing to just declare that their regulars seasons weren’t good enough for them to be contenders, but people at the time who actually watched these teams did not agree with that assessment. So I’m not sure how you can center your argument on the idea that Malone/Stockton didn’t make the Jazz a “legitimate contender,” without just having the argument be based on your own vibes about who was a contender in a year that you did not watch basketball. Of course, ultimately, the Jazz didn’t get close to winning the title either of these years, but one of those years that was clearly due to an utterly abysmal showing from the supporting cast in the playoffs, and in the other they lost to a 63-win, 8.47 SRS team. The former is clearly not Malone/Stockton’s fault, and the latter is really not mutually exclusive with the Jazz being a legitimate contender.
You say nothing indicates Jeff Malone was a positive impact player, but I already told you what did; that he led 2 teams to the playoffs, and was clearly a big driver of their success. Healthy Lavine and Stackhouse did much the same by the way. The Jazz getting better when Hornacek arrived doesn’t prove Jeff Malone was bad, it proves Hornacek was even better. If you want to talk about underrated players who would be better today, Hornacek is among them for sure. It’s criminal he only made 1 all-star team, and honestly his impact was closer to Stockton than Stockton’s impact was to Karl Malone.
You did already tell me your argument on this. It’s just that your argument was that Jeff Malone was a major volume-scoring piece on a negative-SRS team. And I pointed out to you that one-dimensional volume-scorers on negative-SRS playoff teams usually are actually negative-impact players. So the indicator you’re pointing to is more consistent with him being a negative-impact player.
And yes, LaVine and Stackhouse did do much the same. They also were negative-impact players. For instance, go peruse their lifetime RAPMs. You’ll see negative numbers.
