Post#58 » by One_and_Done » Sun Jun 1, 2025 3:04 am
So the case with Stockton has been gotten into many times before, and boils down to the following points:
1) Stockton was not considered to be an MVP calibre player during his career
2) The results of the team with Stockton are not suggestive of the Jazz having a 2nd MVP calibre player
3) The skillset Stockton possessed is not what you expect from an MVP calibre player (even less so today)
Let’s go through those in turn.
During Stockton’s career, between 1988-03, Stockton was 7-15 in the MVP vote (when he got votes at all). The 7th place was kind of an anomaly (it happened in 1989, when people were a little high on Stockton’s supply), but he was mostly seen as a guy in the 10-15 range. He made two all-nba 1st teams, but those happened in years when other guys were injured or retired, and there was a dearth of talent at the guard spot. He was not actually seen as a top 5 guy. The public reaction to the way Stockton was ranked was… nothing. Nobody commented about how Stockton was being grossly underrated, etc. Stockton was largely felt to have been rated correctly.
Of course, sometimes award voters and the media get it wrong, and a guy was really much more valuable than the numbers indicated. That happens. But there is no indication in the actual results that is suggestive of that being the case here. From 88 to 94 Stockton was the Jazz starter. At age 25-31 he was in what we would typically call the prime of a players career. During that time, according to Stockton’s revisionist supporters, the Jazz supposedly had 2 MVP candidates on the team, but the results don’t show that. The Jazz averaged only 51 wins per year over that stretch. They were fully healthy, and their SRS ranged from 1.74 to 5.7 during that time, but tended to be closer to the former than the latter. Over that stretch they were booted out in the 1st round three times, and made the conference finals only twice. Losses included some pretty underwhelming defeats, such as a sweep by the 43 win Warriors.
It is basically unprecedented in the history of the NBA for two MVP candidates, two top 5 players, to be together in their prime like this, and have such lacklustre results. They weren’t lacklustre in general, but by the standard of 2 MVP candidates being on the same team they were. No obvious justification for this exists. This isn’t a situation where 2 players weren’t an optimal fit (like say Lebron and Wade, who made it work anyway); Stockton and Malone were a perfect fit next to each other. It wasn’t a situation where they got unlucky with injuries; Stockton and Malone were iron men who were never injured. It wasn’t a case where the coach sucked and misused them; their coach was a well regarded HoFer who is seen as somewhat ahead of his time. Even worse for Stockton, he was playing in an era where a single player should have been able to have an even bigger impact for a variety of reasons (e.g. the star focused iso-offenses team ran, and the protection a star got via illegal defence rules).
So the starting point is that you would have to argue some explanation for why Stockton and Malone are a singularly unique situation in NBA history. A number of excuses have been offered to try and explain away these outcomes, but they all collapse under the slightest scrutiny.
- Some have argued Stockton and Malone didn’t have enough of a support cast. That doesn’t hold up because a) if you have 2 MVPs on the same team you shouldn’t need much of a support cast to at least be a consistent contender (e.g. who was Shaq and Kobe’s 7th man? Nobody remembers or cares, because it was irrelevant; having superior depth did nothing to allow the Kings/Mavs to overcome the Lakers), and b) the Jazz actually had a very solid support cast. Eaton was a DPOY and all-star who even got some MVP votes. Jeff Malone had his flaws, but was a multiple time all-star who was a decent 3rd best player. Thurl Bailey was a solid player. Hornacek, if anything, was the underrated Jazz support man, not Stockton. He was better than any of the guys I just named. So that argument doesn’t hold up.
- Others have suggested Stockton wasn’t appreciated by MVP voters because K.Malone “cannibalised” his vote, or that he didn't have enough ppg to get votes… but we have many examples of that not being true, which have been cited. If you were good enough, over a long enough timeline, you should have started to see that reflected in the MVP voting, and it just wasn’t. I also find it hard to buy the idea that a humble, white, all-American, was at a disadvantage when it came to getting love in the media. If anything, you’d think he would have had an advantage at that time.
- Others have bemoaned the tough teams Stockton (sometimes) had to play, like the 1988 Lakers. That is not a point in Stockton’s favour. If his impact was really that big, the Jazz should have won enough games that they didn’t need to play the Lakers early in the (at the time weak) Western Conference. It’s the same bad argument Hakeem fans make, trying to write off his playoff failures by pointing to the (sometimes) strong opposition, when really if Hakeem was so impactful then he should have led them to enough RS wins that they never play that team in the 1st round to begin with.
- Another oft cited excuse is that in this series or that series Stockton still posted high volume stats, so it wasn’t his fault. This is another flawed argument. If Lebron & Wade, or Shaq & Kobe, other (actual) instances of top 5 players being paired together, had gotten swept in the 1st round in their primes by a 43 win team, do you think anyone would care that “they had good counting stats”? Of course not. When your stats don’t translate to impact, they are meaningless. That result would have been an unmitigated disaster for those guys, and it should be seen that way for Stockton and Malone too. We can see in today’s game, where it’s harder for a single perimeter defender to have an impact, how huge guys like Caruso and Nesmith have been in limiting other team’s star players. Yet Stockton, playing in the handchecking iso-ball era, could apparently do nothing to slow down freaking Mitch Richmond and Chris Mullin. It’s a terrible look, and others have noted the other series where guys like Terry Porter were just torching Stockton and clowning him. But we’re supposed to ignore this, because some talking head had some quote about what a great defender Stockton was. I’ll take the results over the hyperbolic comments of players thanks.
Really, the revisionist movement to crown Stockton as a “secret” MVP seems to be driven by 2 things:
i) Advanced stats, and
ii) His longevity
I’ll start with the latter first. For I guess understandable reasons, some fans are impressed by career accomplishments, and there are few “bigger” career accomplishments than Stockton’s assist record. The thing is, that’s based on longevity. It does not actually tell us who the best passer was (certainly not Stockton FYI). It just tells you he played for a long time, and was healthy, and yes that has value… but you don’t win titles by having your all-star guard stay healthy a lot. You win titles by having genuine top end talent driving your team, which Stockton was not. Obviously any player who puts up 15.4ppg & 13.4apg is an unbelievable player, except that player is Kevin Porter, and no Kevin Porter was not an unbelievable player. Nobody looks at Mark Jackson, who has over 10,000 assists, and thinks he was some sort of legendary player because of that fact. Neither was Stockton, with his questionable, homecooked assist record (though whether there was homecooking of the stats or not doesn’t really matter).Andre Miller is 12th all-time in assists, and he was not even a particularly good player. He just played for a long time. Nobody sensible trying to win a title would prefer 19 years of a solid all-star type player to 10 years of a genuine top 5 player, because your window to win is when you have the latter.
The second thing is that advanced stats which were developed after Stockton retired now paint him as having been this incredible player… but we know there are many reasons advanced stats can be wrong. Statisticians will tell you them, and I don’t propose to go into all the reasons now, but the overemphasis on this (based on a small sample, because we only have stats for the end of Stockton’s career) is misguided in my view. All the evidence above shows that it’s likely a distortion, for any of the myriad of reasons that tends to happen (bad replacements, random noise, wonky line-ups, etc).
The coffin in the nail for Stockton is that at the end of his career, when he was no longer in his prime, his role and minutes decreased between 97 and 98. Stockton played 64 games instead of 82, and his minute load dropped from over 35 to 29mpg… and the team was largely unaffected. They went from 64 wins to 62, even though his replacements were horrible. Unfortunately, that is basically the only year in Stockton’s 19 year career when he missed games, so it’s all we can point to… but it’s pretty telling, and confirms much of what the evidence above suggests.
Then you look at Stockton’s skillset. He can’t create off the dribble, or generate his own offense very well, which in today’s game would be fatal. He hit 3s at a good clip, but back then nobody was guarding them properly. In today’s game, the entire defensive scheme is geared towards taking away the 3pt shot. Stockton benefitted a lot from playing in a weaker league, against weaker opponents than he would today, with a offensive and defensive dynamic that should have greatly favoured him. Today lead guards are expected to run the offense and be the point of attack on offense, which Stockton can’t really do due to the limitations I noted above. In Stockton’s day the point guard would dribble the ball up and pound it into the ground until they had a good entry pass. Today everything is different.
After a while you should realise that the simplest explanation is usually the right one. The Jazz weren't that good because Stockton was who peoole thought he was. Stockton is not underrated, he is actually one of the more overrated players out there, though in his own career he was rated pretty accurately.
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
