RealGM 2025 Greatest Peaks Project Discussion Thread

[Djoker]

I'm in on this and let's keep the voting format from 2022. No need to change something that worked very well last time.

And don't mean to sound like an exclusionist but newer posters that are interested in participating can be allowed in but they have to pull some weight IMO. If you have 20 total posts on the boards you better be showing some serious value. RealGM was always about quality not quantity. A project with 10 informed participants and high-level analysis beats a project with 100 participants and low-level analysis any day of the week.

[Top10alltime]

Yep, I wanna join? Could I?

[OhayoKD]

Interested of course

Will say though

And don't mean to sound like an exclusionist but newer posters that are interested in participating can be allowed in but they have to pull some weight IMO. If you have 20 any number of total posts on the boards you better be showing some serious value. RealGM was always about quality not quantity. A project with 10 informed participants and high-level analysis beats a project with 100 participants and low-level analysis any day of the week.

New posters on average made much higher quality posts during the RPOY so it's probably the old guard that needs to be held to standards if anything. The quality of a post is the quality of post. Newness has nothing to do with anything.

[Paulluxx9000]

Not promising to be active but, I’m interested in participating.

[tsherkin]

Think I'll give this a shot this time around.

[mdonnelly1989]

It has been 3 years since the last peaks project, and I am not aware of any other planned projects for the offseason, so it is time to discuss a new iteration.

The primary purpose of this thread is to gauge whether there is sufficient interest for this project to go ahead. Active posters who participated in the 2024 RPoY, the 2023 Top 100, and/or the 2022 Peaks Project have been automatically included in the notification list at the end of this post, but anyone can request to join in the project. If we do not have 15-20 people expressing interest in participating, then the project will be postponed to another year.

The secondary purpose is to settle on a voting approach, which has tended to vary with every iteration because of differences in desired tallying. I think the 2022 condorcet iteration had a good approach… but it also involved more tallying effort than something like the 2015 peaks project run by trex_8063 or like the 2024 RPoY. I also thought the “nominate then vote” aspect of the 2023 Top 100 made for an interesting way of keeping ballots somewhat focused, which has often been an issue later in these projects. So all that definitely needs to be settled before proceeding.

Spoiler:

If interest and activity is sufficient, maybe we can even push for 60 players this year!

YES! BUT WE NEED TO USE A POLL! There is no better way than using a Poll to decide who the Peaks Project.

[AEnigma]

It has been 3 years since the last peaks project, and I am not aware of any other planned projects for the offseason, so it is time to discuss a new iteration.

YES! BUT WE NEED TO USE A POLL! There is no better way than using a Poll to decide who the Peaks Project.

Anyone can vote on a poll without contributing reasoning. The intent for all these projects is always the discussion.

[ceoofkobefans]

i will be participating in the peaks project and the way we did it in 2022 seems fine to do again

[tsherkin]

YES! BUT WE NEED TO USE A POLL! There is no better way than using a Poll to decide who the Peaks Project.

No, we definitely don't. AEnigma already put it rather succinctly, but there's no regulation on a poll, and that is the opposite of the point in such a project. It would be a very bad decision.

[Mogspan]

I’m interested!

[AEnigma]

Looks like we already have 20+ people interested, so this will proceed with the first thread next week. I will edit this into the opening post, but please express interest in participating in advance of that first thread, preferably by this weekend.

Based on feedback, condorcet voting will be the method. I still feel pretty strongly about incorporating a nomination process after the first thread akin to how the 2023 Top 100 went (creating a 5-6 player list in each thread after the first from which people submit their ballots), but I will not press the issue if the majority (or the vocal plurality) oppose it.

[f4p]

i'm interested in participating. since i will not be doing the tallying, i have no preference for voting but the 2022 peaks worked just fine if we wanted to stick to that. nominations seem like a good idea since it worked for the Top 100. although there is probably more agreement on best players (at least early on) than peak seasons so maybe it will be too constraining. of course, if a season isn't even nominated, i guess it probably wouldn't have won in a more open field anyway.

[DCasey91]

Yeah I'll join.

[Cavsfansince84]

I don't have the necessary time/energy to dedicate to something like this but I also want to reiterate that I think the single season form of peak is a flawed thing to use that always favors players whose peak rs happened to coincide with playing on a title winning team. I think it also tends to work backwards from that rationale for players who did win titles such as with often seeing 2017 used for Steph & KD as peak seasons or 2011 for Dirk. I think allowing for different regular seasons and post seasons to be combined would be a more accurate way to see what a player's peak actually was. Sometimes it does happen to align well but I think it also forces people to shoehorn things together often and doesn't give a good indication of what a player's peak actually was. In short, I think its sort of an outdated way of doing it.

[clearlynotjesse]

lemme play

[Lebronnygoat]

I’ll vote

[Ollie Coraline]

Hell yeah. Sign me up.

[jalengreen]

I don't have the necessary time/energy to dedicate to something like this but I also want to reiterate that I think the single season form of peak is a flawed thing to use that always favors players whose peak rs happened to coincide with playing on a title winning team. I think it also tends to work backwards from that rationale for players who did win titles such as with often seeing 2017 used for Steph & KD as peak seasons or 2011 for Dirk. I think allowing for different regular seasons and post seasons to be combined would be a more accurate way to see what a player's peak actually was. Sometimes it does happen to align well but I think it also forces people to shoehorn things together often and doesn't give a good indication of what a player's peak actually was. In short, I think its sort of an outdated way of doing it.

I agree that it's flawed but I don't think combining regular seasons and postseasons is meaningful either. Random example, if somebody wants to combine 2013 LeBron RS + 2018 LeBron PS or something, they're not even talking about a real player at that point. I do think 2016 Steph RS + 2017 Steph PS makes more sense but I dunno, things could get weird

[Cavsfansince84]

I don't have the necessary time/energy to dedicate to something like this but I also want to reiterate that I think the single season form of peak is a flawed thing to use that always favors players whose peak rs happened to coincide with playing on a title winning team. I think it also tends to work backwards from that rationale for players who did win titles such as with often seeing 2017 used for Steph & KD as peak seasons or 2011 for Dirk. I think allowing for different regular seasons and post seasons to be combined would be a more accurate way to see what a player's peak actually was. Sometimes it does happen to align well but I think it also forces people to shoehorn things together often and doesn't give a good indication of what a player's peak actually was. In short, I think its sort of an outdated way of doing it.

I agree that it's flawed but I don't think combining regular seasons and postseasons is meaningful either. Random example, if somebody wants to combine 2013 LeBron RS + 2018 LeBron PS or something, they're not even talking about a real player at that point. I do think 2016 Steph RS + 2017 Steph PS makes more sense but I dunno, things could get weird

I'm not saying its perfect to use ones from different years but I think at least then you are using a true peak for the given player and there's no gray area there where other seasons are shoe horned in by some but not by others. Using 2017 Steph as an example, in the last peak project a common thing I saw was people basically saying it was 2016 Steph in the rs and whatever drop in stats was from him adjusting to KD. Which makes some sense but the problem is that he didn't actually perform like 2016 Steph in the rs. Stuff like that happens a lot where its like people just make their own rules for how it works but will go out of their way to use the player's best ps. Maybe a rule where any rs and ps that occurred within 5 years of each other can be used. Not that I think this will happen but just giving my own thoughts and views on this topic.

[LeoClark]

I am down.