Should Pippen be rated higher than a player like Chuck?

[lessthanjake]

Didn’t Shaq once deliberately postpone surgery in 2002 to occur during the season, saying that “I got hurt on company time; I’ll rehab on company time.” Pippen wasn’t always a team player, as indicated by 1994 playoffs, but he wasn’t the only one with that problem. And you mention that one game in 1994. What about the whole year? Pippen was the clear #1 and MVP candidate on a Bulls team that won just 2 games fewer than it did with Jordan in 1993. A

What about the whole year? It was a fluke as the following season proved. In the end it doesn't matter what you do in the regular season; he got exposed all series long as a guy who couldn't close out his opponent in crunch time. When the lights got brighter, he shrank.

It wasn’t a fluke. His numbers in 1995 were almost identical to his numbers in 1994 . The team as a whole regressed. They lost even with Jordan in 1995 (and no, Jordan wasn’t rusty. Right before they lost to Magic, he put up a 50-point performance against the Knicks at MSG)

Jordan absolutely was “rusty” in 1995. From 1987-1996, his BPM ranged from 9.7 to 13.0 every year. Except 1995, when his BPM was 4.2. In that same timeframe, his playoff BPM ranged from 9.9 to 14.6 every playoffs. Except 1995, when it was 8.0. We also know his on-off data in the games he played in that season and in those playoffs, and it was a huge outlier in the negative direction compared to anything else in his career (we have on-off data from every playoff game he played, and 739 of his 1109 overall games with the Bulls, so we have a lot to compare to). This shouldn’t be some surprise either. Obviously, not playing basketball for almost two years and molding your body for a different sport will make someone rusty.

Didn’t Shaq once deliberately postpone surgery in 2002 to occur during the season, saying that “I got hurt on company time; I’ll rehab on company time.” Pippen wasn’t always a team player, as indicated by 1994 playoffs, but he wasn’t the only one with that problem. And you mention that one game in 1994. What about the whole year? Pippen was the clear #1 and MVP candidate on a Bulls team that won just 2 games fewer than it did with Jordan in 1993. A

The Bulls added Kukoc, Kerr, and Longley and Kukoc hit some game winning shots during the season, and the 1993 team underperformed during the regular season as they were going for a 3-peat, but in 1992 they won 67 games.

Kukoc was a rookie, Kerr was a bench player, and Longley only started 17 games that season. No matter how you slice it, they replaced the best player in the league with depth pieces and only won two fewer games than they did the previous season. Pippen was a legitimate MVP candidate, 1st team all-NBA team, and 1st team all-D.

Kukoc was a rookie only really in name. He was 25 and had been the top player in Europe for years, and had led his team to a bunch of success internationally (they won the FIBA World Cup with him as MVP, won silver in the 1992 Olympics, etc.). He was really good already, and not akin to a normal rookie.

[OdomFan]

watched a good video yesterday about Pippen and Barkley's time together as teammates in Houston. Pippen basically sabotaged the team because his ego couldn't handle being the third banana behind Hakeem and Barkley. He also showed who he was by refusing to go in the game in the 1994 playoffs vs the Knicks. Saying that Pippen should be above Barkley would be like saying Jalen Williams should be ranked higher than Luka

Watch on YouTube

Didn’t Shaq once deliberately postpone surgery in 2002 to occur during the season, saying that “I got hurt on company time; I’ll rehab on company time.” Pippen wasn’t always a team player, as indicated by 1994 playoffs, but he wasn’t the only one with that problem. And you mention that one game in 1994. What about the whole year? Pippen was the clear #1 and MVP candidate on a Bulls team that won just 2 games fewer than it did with Jordan in 1993. A

Maybe he was, but he wasn't the sole reason behind the team winning those 55 games. The 94 squad had 8 or 9 players returning that were part of either some of all of the first 3 peat, not to mention the same coaching staff running the triangle offense. There was no reason that they shouldn't still be a very good team without Mike with that much experience still there.

Pippen did fairly, but it was clear that they still needed MJ.

[dcstanley]

watched a good video yesterday about Pippen and Barkley's time together as teammates in Houston. Pippen basically sabotaged the team because his ego couldn't handle being the third banana behind Hakeem and Barkley. He also showed who he was by refusing to go in the game in the 1994 playoffs vs the Knicks. Saying that Pippen should be above Barkley would be like saying Jalen Williams should be ranked higher than Luka

Watch on YouTube

Didn’t Shaq once deliberately postpone surgery in 2002 to occur during the season, saying that “I got hurt on company time; I’ll rehab on company time.” Pippen wasn’t always a team player, as indicated by 1994 playoffs, but he wasn’t the only one with that problem. And you mention that one game in 1994. What about the whole year? Pippen was the clear #1 and MVP candidate on a Bulls team that won just 2 games fewer than it did with Jordan in 1993. A

What about the whole year? It was a fluke as the following season proved. In the end it doesn't matter what you do in the regular season; he got exposed all series long as a guy who couldn't close out his opponent in crunch time. When the lights got brighter, he shrank.

Horace Grant, who was by far the second best player on the MJ-less Bulls, was no longer on the team. How well does Jordan fare on a Bulls team without Pippen and Grant?

The Bulls added Kukoc, Kerr, and Longley and Kukoc hit some game winning shots during the season, and the 1993 team underperformed during the regular season as they were going for a 3-peat, but in 1992 they won 67 games.

Kukoc was a rookie, Kerr was a bench player, and Longley only started 17 games that season. No matter how you slice it, they replaced the best player in the league with depth pieces and only won two fewer games than they did the previous season. Pippen was a legitimate MVP candidate, 1st team all-NBA team, and 1st team all-D.

Kukoc was a rookie but he was also 25 and hit 4 game winning shots during his rookie season. He misses those, and the Bulls only win 51 games and Pippen probably doesn’t beat Shaq in MVP voting.

The Bulls had great depth, the best depth of any Bulls team as they still had Paxson, BJ, and Cartwright, and added Kukoc, Kerr, and Longley, and won a lot of close games. A great bench can help you win a lot of regular season games. We don’t have access to play-by-play data from 1994, but we can look at point differential:

1992 Bulls: +11.0
1993 Bulls: +6.8
1994 Bulls: +3.3

No doubt he was a good player but he was still a rookie that played 24 MPG. At the end of the day, the absurdity of a team replacing Michael Jeffery Jordan with some (admittedly) great depth pieces cannot be understated. For example, do you think the Nuggets win as many games as they did this past season if you replace Jokic with Cooper Flagg, Sam Hauser, and Steven Adams?

[lessthanjake]

Didn’t Shaq once deliberately postpone surgery in 2002 to occur during the season, saying that “I got hurt on company time; I’ll rehab on company time.” Pippen wasn’t always a team player, as indicated by 1994 playoffs, but he wasn’t the only one with that problem. And you mention that one game in 1994. What about the whole year? Pippen was the clear #1 and MVP candidate on a Bulls team that won just 2 games fewer than it did with Jordan in 1993. A

What about the whole year? It was a fluke as the following season proved. In the end it doesn't matter what you do in the regular season; he got exposed all series long as a guy who couldn't close out his opponent in crunch time. When the lights got brighter, he shrank.

Horace Grant, who was by far the second best player on the MJ-less Bulls, was no longer on the team. How well does Jordan fare on a Bulls team without Pippen and Grant?

Kukoc was a rookie, Kerr was a bench player, and Longley only started 17 games that season. No matter how you slice it, they replaced the best player in the league with depth pieces and only won two fewer games than they did the previous season. Pippen was a legitimate MVP candidate, 1st team all-NBA team, and 1st team all-D.

Kukoc was a rookie but he was also 25 and hit 4 game winning shots during his rookie season. He misses those, and the Bulls only win 51 games and Pippen probably doesn’t beat Shaq in MVP voting.

The Bulls had great depth, the best depth of any Bulls team as they still had Paxson, BJ, and Cartwright, and added Kukoc, Kerr, and Longley, and won a lot of close games. A great bench can help you win a lot of regular season games. We don’t have access to play-by-play data from 1994, but we can look at point differential:

1992 Bulls: +11.0
1993 Bulls: +6.8
1994 Bulls: +3.3

No doubt he was a good player but he was still a rookie that played 24 MPG. At the end of the day, the absurdity of a team replacing Michael Jeffery Jordan with some (admittedly) great depth pieces cannot be understated. For example, do you think the Nuggets win as many games as they did this past season if you replace Jokic with Cooper Flagg, Sam Hauser, and Steven Adams?

If Jamal Murray and Aaron Gordon had both just had the worst year of their prime and then proceeded to have probably the best year of their career in the non-Jokic year, and we assume that Cooper Flagg is actually already very good (like Kukoc), then yeah I can definitely see that. The impact of the #2 and #3 guys having perhaps their best ever year instead of their worst prime year is very large. And bringing in multiple very good role players would have a huge impact, particularly on a team like the present-day Nuggets or 1993 Bulls, which have some very negative role players (i.e. the difference between a good role player and who they’d be replacing is large). That amounts to really huge upgrades all around.

I did some calculations in another post recently, in which I looked at the RAPM & BPM we saw from Kukoc, Kerr, Longley, and Wennington compared to the RAPM and/or BPM we saw from the guys on the 1993 Bulls whose minutes they were replacing, and adjusted it down for the number of minutes Kukoc/Kerr/Longley/Wennington actually played. This is a pretty reasonable way to estimate how much impact the upgrade in role players might have had, and I made some conservative assumptions to keep the result as low as I reasonably could. And yet it came out as estimating that Kukoc/Kerr/Longley/Wennington increased the Bulls average margin of victory by about +5.4 points a game (https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=118913712#p118913712). That suggests the Bulls would’ve only been about a 30-35 win team without those additions. And that’s not even getting into the fact that Pippen and Grant were far better in 1994 than in 1993. If you add that to the mix, you’re probably looking at an estimate of the 1993 Bulls being a 20-25 win team if Pippen/Grant played like they did in 1993 and the supporting cast was the same as 1993. Of course, that’s probably unrealistic in the sense that Pippen/Grant surely never would’ve played as badly as they did in 1993 if Jordan wasn’t there, because they were coasting that year out of complacency/confidence, which they almost certainly wouldn’t have had without Jordan. But whatever the reason that they both played much worse than normal in 1993, it happened, and I think that and the upgrades in the supporting cast pretty demonstrably made a massive difference. This shouldn’t be all that surprising. Star players having up or down years matters a lot, and having much better role players matters a lot too. Those two things combined can and will be the difference between a bad team and a good one.

Of course, for purposes of this thread, I don’t think this really reflects too badly on Pippen. Part of the point here is that the difference between a down year and up year for Pippen is significant. And that’s because Pippen was really good.

[NZB2323]

Didn’t Shaq once deliberately postpone surgery in 2002 to occur during the season, saying that “I got hurt on company time; I’ll rehab on company time.” Pippen wasn’t always a team player, as indicated by 1994 playoffs, but he wasn’t the only one with that problem. And you mention that one game in 1994. What about the whole year? Pippen was the clear #1 and MVP candidate on a Bulls team that won just 2 games fewer than it did with Jordan in 1993. A

What about the whole year? It was a fluke as the following season proved. In the end it doesn't matter what you do in the regular season; he got exposed all series long as a guy who couldn't close out his opponent in crunch time. When the lights got brighter, he shrank.

Horace Grant, who was by far the second best player on the MJ-less Bulls, was no longer on the team. How well does Jordan fare on a Bulls team without Pippen and Grant?

Kukoc was a rookie, Kerr was a bench player, and Longley only started 17 games that season. No matter how you slice it, they replaced the best player in the league with depth pieces and only won two fewer games than they did the previous season. Pippen was a legitimate MVP candidate, 1st team all-NBA team, and 1st team all-D.

Kukoc was a rookie but he was also 25 and hit 4 game winning shots during his rookie season. He misses those, and the Bulls only win 51 games and Pippen probably doesn’t beat Shaq in MVP voting.

The Bulls had great depth, the best depth of any Bulls team as they still had Paxson, BJ, and Cartwright, and added Kukoc, Kerr, and Longley, and won a lot of close games. A great bench can help you win a lot of regular season games. We don’t have access to play-by-play data from 1994, but we can look at point differential:

1992 Bulls: +11.0
1993 Bulls: +6.8
1994 Bulls: +3.3

No doubt he was a good player but he was still a rookie that played 24 MPG. At the end of the day, the absurdity of a team replacing Michael Jeffery Jordan with some (admittedly) great depth pieces cannot be understated. For example, do you think the Nuggets win as many games as they did this past season if you replace Jokic with Cooper Flagg, Sam Hauser, and Steven Adams?

No, I don’t think the Nuggets supporting cast is in any way, shape, or form comparable to the 1994 Bulls and have never made that claim. Pippen is better than Murray, Grant is better than Gordon, Kukoc is better than MPJ, and they have great depth and defense.

Maybe the 1980 Lakers would be a better example. Kareem goes down in game 6, they win the game. If they replaced Kareem with 3 solid depth pieces it’s possible they could go from 60 wins to 58 wins. Another example could be the 2017 Thunder, who lost 8 games after losing KD. Give them one of the best bench players in the league, the most efficient 3 point shooter in the league, and a backup center and they

We’ve seen success with other teams playing well without their stars. The 96 Magic went 20-8 without Shaq. The Mavs won 6 more games after losing Steve Nash in free agency. The Knicks won the ECF without Ewing. The Lakers won overtime after Shaq fouled out.

The 94 Bulls point differential was half of what is was in 93, and a third of what it was in 92. They went from 2nd in offensive rating to 14th. They won games primarily because of their defense, which was 6th, and Pippen was a big part of that but so were Grant and Cartwright.

They won 4 games because Kukoc hit game winning shots, which I can’t really give credit to Pippen for. They lost in the 2nd round and the only reason it went to a 7th game is because Kukoc hit a game winning shot in a play that Pippen decided not to play in, which I can’t give Pippen any credit for. If we compare that to Barkley making the finals in 93, it’s no contest.

We can also add in that Pippen was an average-to-below average player his first 3 years, whereas Barkley was immediately an above average player.

[lessthanjake]

We can also add in that Pippen was an average-to-below average player his first 3 years, whereas Barkley was immediately an above average player.

This is actually a very good point. Barkley’s prime was 1986-1997. So he had a 12-year prime. Pippen’s prime was more like 1991-1998. Which is an 8-year prime. We could maybe include 1990 in there for Pippen too, but I don’t really think so. And either way, Barkley definitely had noticeably more years as a major star than Pippen did. Of course, some of that may be that Pippen being a major star was a bit contingent on the triangle bringing out the best in him.

[lessthanjake]

Didn’t Shaq once deliberately postpone surgery in 2002 to occur during the season, saying that “I got hurt on company time; I’ll rehab on company time.” Pippen wasn’t always a team player, as indicated by 1994 playoffs, but he wasn’t the only one with that problem. And you mention that one game in 1994. What about the whole year? Pippen was the clear #1 and MVP candidate on a Bulls team that won just 2 games fewer than it did with Jordan in 1993. A

What about the whole year? It was a fluke as the following season proved. In the end it doesn't matter what you do in the regular season; he got exposed all series long as a guy who couldn't close out his opponent in crunch time. When the lights got brighter, he shrank.

Horace Grant, who was by far the second best player on the MJ-less Bulls, was no longer on the team. How well does Jordan fare on a Bulls team without Pippen and Grant?

We actually have a good idea about this question. Pippen missed 38 games in 1997-98. And, by that season, Rodman was washed and had a negative BPM, negative on-off, was benched in the playoffs, and washed out of the league soon thereafter. So this was Jordan without Pippen, without Grant, and without any genuinely positive player replacing Grant. And it was Jordan at the tail end of his prime, notably less good than he’d been in prior years.

What happened in those games? Well, the Bulls won at a 56-win pace and had a +6.3 SRS. In 1995, before Jordan came back, the Bulls won at a 43-win pace and had a +3.8 SRS. Very different. And that’s with the 1995 Bulls having peak Pippen and the 1998 Bulls having a pretty declined Jordan. It’s pretty safe to say that peak Jordan would’ve had that team at 60+ wins and 8+ SRS.