AEnigma wrote::roll:
Yes, only those of us who watched basketball in the 2000s could possibly understand that Kobe was a more celebrated figure than Dirk. Surely Mr. “LakerLegend” must be sincerely flummoxed at all these “young” posters who must have never truly watched Kobe — ignoring that the vast majority of this thread has featured posts from people who have been around for a decade, when Kobe was still a locked in all-star starter simply by existing. Surely that is what explains the disconnect. Pay no heed to how Dirk preceded that 2007 MVP by finishing third in each of the prior two seasons, both times ahead of Kobe — no, we should definitely pretend he was just another Tatum, who has one (edit: now two) top five MVP finish and no top three finishes, because what all of us who paid attention to the state of the sport in the mid-2000s were thinking was just how amazing support Jason Terry and Josh Howard were, and how fortunate Dirk was to be reaping the accolade benefits of that stacked supporting cast.
Why stop at Dirk. After all, only posters who never watched Kobe would pick Garnett’s peak/prime/career. Only posters who never watched Kobe’s explosive outputs against the Spurs would ever place Kobe above the retroactively crowned Duncan. It is simple history!
Dude, this is just such an unnecessarily aggressive post—as is sadly typical from you. I wasn’t talking to you and made no reference whatsoever to you, but since you made it about you, I am actually aware that you’ve probably been watching basketball for a while. Your account may say you joined RealGM in 2022, but that’s only because your original account was permanently banned years ago. So you’ve definitely been watching basketball longer than that. You may even have been watching basketball in the 2000s! If you were, then you’d know that I’m absolutely right about how Dirk and Kobe were perceived at the time. And to the extent you think that that perception at the time was wrong in retrospect, you’ll find that you simply agree with the conclusion of my post.
Your argument to the contrary about contemporaneous perception appears to involve drawing a huge distinction between getting 3rd in MVP voting and getting 4th. We can use arbitrary MVP vote-rank cutoffs all we want. For instance, at age 26, Tatum already has been top 6 in MVP voting as many times as Dirk was in Dirk’s entire career! Advantage Tatum, right? But, in reality, MVP voting doesn’t really give us more than a general ballpark idea of how players were perceived, because MVP vote ranks depend so much on other factors—such as the team success and health of other top guys in a given year.
One rough way to gauge how a player was perceived is to look at whether other players placed ahead of a guy even though those other players had the same or worse record. Finishing ahead of a guy in MVP voting when your team does better could mean you were considered a better player, or it could mean that the team success factor got you ahead of players that people nevertheless thought were better than you. So we can’t tell much from that scenario. However, if a guy finished higher than another guy despite having a worse team record, then they were likely considered the better player at the time. It’s definitely not a perfect gauge and it glosses over some season-specific context so probably isn’t all that useful at a micro-level, but is a good way to use MVP voting to actually retroactively get a rough sense of contemporaneous perception in an era if you were not around to actually recall what people thought back then. If you look at that, you’ll find that in the 2002-2012 timeframe when Dirk got MVP votes every year, Dirk averaged being behind 2.2 players per year that had the same or worse record than him (and that’s not even including being tied with Baron Davis in MVP voting in 2004, despite Dirk’s team winning 11 more games). For Tatum the last four years, he has averaged 3 players per year. For Kobe, this was only like 0.75 per year from 2002-2013. So this analysis of MVP voting does suggest Tatum has maybe been seen slightly lower in the pecking order than Dirk was (a conclusion I don’t have any problem with), but it also suggests Dirk is closer to Tatum than to Kobe in this regard. I’ll give you that Dirk did have two years where no one with a worse record finished ahead of him—2005 and 2007. And Tatum has never had a year like that (Kobe had 6, by my count). And there certainly is something to be said for the fact that Dirk won MVP in 2007 and Tatum didn’t win the 2024 MVP. Dirk won it because his team did so well, not because he was actually considered the best player, but Tatum wasn’t close to winning it when his team did similarly well. So, again, I’ll grant you Dirk’s stature was a bit higher (or at least it was for a few years there—after he was in the heart of his prime, but before the 2007 playoff disaster reset perception down a peg). But I think Tatum probably is the best current-day analogy, even if it’s underselling Dirk’s stature a little bit. I could buy a comparison of Dirk’s stature as being somewhere between Tatum and Luka, though. I think it was closer to Tatum most of the time, but maybe it was more Luka-like in those few years in the mid-2000s, prior to the 2007 playoffs.
