Why did Wilt Chamberlain's defensive impact seem so underwhelming at times?

[Yoshun]

I'm a little skeptical of a lot of the data from that time period.

Found Tyler Herro's burner account.

You caught me. As a reward, some inside knowledge:

Spoiler:

Pay Riley's hair isn't real

.

[Doctor MJ]

Wilt was more about the "look what I can do" and "be amazed by me" than the actual game itself. He chased stats over wins

Based on what? He ran into better teams, just like all great players have done. It doesn't mean he was all about stats.

Of course it doesn't mean that necessarily, but both the narratives of the day and the data we now have available tell us really specific stories about Wilt. I wouldn't suggest you should learn about them just to bash Wilt, rather I'd say that understand Wilt's weaknesses in both body & mind relative to the sport he's most known for and happens to be our passion is probably the most useful analysis you can do to gain better understanding of how basketball evolved through the '60s and onward.

Now, I could put it a bit less judgy than Wigg did and say:

1. Wilt understandably saw himself as bigger than the game of basketball, and was more interested in the mainstream interest he could draw from playing ball than he was in making sure he maximized his impact moment-to-moment. This was a perfectly fine choice that doesn't deserve moral tsk-tsking, but it does mean that for future generations who focus on who is winning the actual basketball competition with greater and greater granularity, he was essentially taking his foot off the pedal in the race we're looking to judge.

2. Wilt absolutely had a tendency to fixate on objective measures. While this began with PPG & RPG, it then spread to APG and eventually FG%. The thing that was particular bizarre about that to me is that by late in his career if felt on offense nothing mattered to him more than NOT missing FGs...but missing FTs was something he just accepted with his form seeming to get worse at times for no physical reason.

This tendency to fixate on objective measures, and the issue this has on impact, is actually something described by a phenomenon known as Goodhart's Law. You can click the link if you want to go down a rabbit hole (well worth it!), but the essence of it is that whenever we measure something adjacent to the actual goal, we run the risk of agents making the adjacency their goal rather than the actual.

Give a student a grade and they'll often be more focused on the grade than what they're there to learn.
Punish a police commissioner for having too many crimes in his area and he'll fudge the numbers.


Wilt is far from alone in being vulnerable to this - we all are! - but in his specific case we were certainly talking about someone considerably more vulnerable to it (at least in the manner he was) than most players of his stature. So why was that? My thoughts:

1. I would say Wilt had something of an analytic mind, strangely, not too dissimilar from modern analytics geeks (of which I'm certainly one). It's worth noting that Wilt made money by a number of different means after he retired, some of which had nothing to do with his celebrity directly (real estate for example). While it's certainly easier to make large amounts of money when you get paid a lot, we know that so many players of all eras find themselves in bankruptcy before they're even old men, and while Wilt earned more than his contemporaries he certainly didn't earn enough to keep him from going bankrupt, let alone increasing his wealth by an order of magnitude.

This then to say: I think Wilt would have probably done better than most NBA players on the SAT and especially the SAT Math section. By any kind of IQ-like measure, Wilt was a smart man, and strangely, I think this was actually a problem in his time because of the limited data available and Goodhart's Law (which, to be clear, was not actually a published academic idea until the late '70s, by which time Wilt had obviously retired).

Had Wilt had access to the kind of data we have now, it's possible he'd benefit from it a great deal. For example, if him seeing a stat like TS%, which factors in FTs & 3s, made him re-dedicate himself to the charity stripe.

2a. Wilt had a strong need to be respected (and venerated) by others, and this led him to chafe at the idea that he was good simply because he was big. He wanted people to see he could do all the things. This led him, for example, to take shots with more finesse to show he was no mere brute. And I think it also eventually led him to seek out stats he could max out to prove he was no one-trick pony.

2b. Interestingly, had Wilt been winning titles often (which we should expect he would have if Bill Russell didn't exist) I don't actually think he'd have been less drawn to doing stuff like this to be honest, but the tone of it would have probably changed. It would have felt a bit more like a showman doing tricks rather than an aggrieved man trying to prove doubters wrong.

3. But on top of these things there's the spectre of what "BBIQ" actually is in practice, the fact that it really isn't the same thing as IQ, that I'd say was bound to cause his teams to underperform against the very best so long as the offense was built around his decision making on the floor.

Just because you're better than most with the math doesn't mean your optical system has the ability to process visual information faster than the average Joe - and of course the average pro basketball players has always been far stronger on this regard than the average person.

Let me point out a couple other guys here:

- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is probably the greatest intellectual among NBA players in history. He's a brilliant man! But his BBIQ wasn't an outlier in that way. You might say he was an incredibly wise basketball player from a young age given that he quickly recognized a talent for the hook shot and practiced it obsessively from middle school onward. But that didn't mean he was the quickest thinker on the court. He didn't have Magic Johnson's brain on the court...and Magic didn't have Kareem's brain off it.

- The story of Kevin Garnett being the one to break the HS-to-pro barrier is absolutely fascinating. For those who don't know, the root of KG skipping college had to do with him not being able to score well enough on the ACT. In the deeper past, colleges regularly took star athletes who were not academically prepared to study there, and thus often made the whole "student athlete" thing a sham. So rules were implemented, and KG's issues with meeting the threshold made him start thinking about just skipping college. And that's obviously what he did.

But the thing is: KG's BBIQ was stunningly high. His ability to rapidly process visual information and react before anyone else was legendary, and when sophisticated defensive schemes were enabled in the 2000s, KG became the poster boy for them. He used his position behind his teammates to read the half court, and not just react himself, but tell his teammates what to do. It's basically the same thing that makes Draymond Green so great, and I'd note both guys are motor mouths who are very quick thinkers in conversation.

So this then to say, there's this intangible factor rooted in sensory processing speed, as well as spatial memory and some more abstract concepts, that just plays a big role in your BBIQ that doesn't necessarily matter in school, and that's why you can have a guy be a genius on the court even if he can't grasp probability theory, or vice versa.

On Wilt, I'm not saying he was the lowest BBIQ guy, but this really did seem to hold him back relative to some other legends.

[tsherkin]

- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is probably the greatest intellectual among NBA players in history. He's a brilliant man! But his BBIQ wasn't an outlier in that way. You might say he was an incredibly wise basketball player from a young age given that he quickly recognized a talent for the hook shot and practiced it obsessively from middle school onward. But that didn't mean he was the quickest thinker on the court. He didn't have Magic Johnson's brain on the court...and Magic didn't have Kareem's brain off it.

Kareem did, however, exhibit pretty reasonable coachability under Wooden and in the league, which is an underrated trait in a star.

- The story of Kevin Garnett being the one to break the HS-to-pro barrier is absolutely fascinating. For those who don't know, the root of KG skipping college had to do with him not being able to score well enough on the ACT. In the deeper past, colleges regularly took star athletes who were not academically prepared to study there, and thus often made the whole "student athlete" thing a sham. So rules were implemented, and KG's issues with meeting the threshold made him start thinking about just skipping college. And that's obviously what he did.

Wasn't Moses the one who broke that barrier?

[JonFromVA]

Wilt was more about the "look what I can do" and "be amazed by me" than the actual game itself. He chased stats over wins

Based on what? He ran into better teams, just like all great players have done. It doesn't mean he was all about stats.

Of course it doesn't mean that necessarily, but both the narratives of the day and the data we now have available tell us really specific stories about Wilt. I wouldn't suggest you should learn about them just to bash Wilt, rather I'd say that understand Wilt's weaknesses in both body & mind relative to the sport he's most known for and happens to be our passion is probably the most useful analysis you can do to gain better understanding of how basketball evolved through the '60s and onward.

Now, I could put it a bit less judgy than Wigg did and say:

1. Wilt understandably saw himself as bigger than the game of basketball, and was more interested in the mainstream interest he could draw from playing ball than he was in making sure he maximized his impact moment-to-moment. This was a perfectly fine choice that doesn't deserve moral tsk-tsking, but it does mean that for future generations who focus on who is winning the actual basketball competition with greater and greater granularity, he was essentially taking his foot off the pedal in the race we're looking to judge.

2. Wilt absolutely had a tendency to fixate on objective measures. While this began with PPG & RPG, it then spread to APG and eventually FG%. The thing that was particular bizarre about that to me is that by late in his career if felt on offense nothing mattered to him more than NOT missing FGs...but missing FTs was something he just accepted with his form seeming to get worse at times for no physical reason.

This tendency to fixate on objective measures, and the issue this has on impact, is actually something described by a phenomenon known as Goodhart's Law. You can click the link if you want to go down a rabbit hole (well worth it!), but the essence of it is that whenever we measure something adjacent to the actual goal, we run the risk of agents making the adjacency their goal rather than the actual.

Give a student a grade and they'll often be more focused on the grade than what they're there to learn.
Punish a police commissioner for having too many crimes in his area and he'll fudge the numbers.


Wilt is far from alone in being vulnerable to this - we all are! - but in his specific case we were certainly talking about someone considerably more vulnerable to it (at least in the manner he was) than most players of his stature. So why was that? My thoughts:

1. I would say Wilt had something of an analytic mind, strangely, not too dissimilar from modern analytics geeks (of which I'm certainly one). It's worth noting that Wilt made money by a number of different means after he retired, some of which had nothing to do with his celebrity directly (real estate for example). While it's certainly easier to make large amounts of money when you get paid a lot, we know that so many players of all eras find themselves in bankruptcy before they're even old men, and while Wilt earned more than his contemporaries he certainly didn't earn enough to keep him from going bankrupt, let alone increasing his wealth by an order of magnitude.

This then to say: I think Wilt would have probably done better than most NBA players on the SAT and especially the SAT Math section. By any kind of IQ-like measure, Wilt was a smart man, and strangely, I think this was actually a problem in his time because of the limited data available and Goodhart's Law (which, to be clear, was not actually a published academic idea until the late '70s, by which time Wilt had obviously retired).

Had Wilt had access to the kind of data we have now, it's possible he'd benefit from it a great deal. For example, if him seeing a stat like TS%, which factors in FTs & 3s, made him re-dedicate himself to the charity stripe.

2a. Wilt had a strong need to be respected (and venerated) by others, and this led him to chafe at the idea that he was good simply because he was big. He wanted people to see he could do all the things. This led him, for example, to take shots with more finesse to show he was no mere brute. And I think it also eventually led him to seek out stats he could max out to prove he was no one-trick pony.

2b. Interestingly, had Wilt been winning titles often (which we should expect he would have if Bill Russell didn't exist) I don't actually think he'd have been less drawn to doing stuff like this to be honest, but the tone of it would have probably changed. It would have felt a bit more like a showman doing tricks rather than an aggrieved man trying to prove doubters wrong.

3. But on top of these things there's the spectre of what "BBIQ" actually is in practice, the fact that it really isn't the same thing as IQ, that I'd say was bound to cause his teams to underperform against the very best so long as the offense was built around his decision making on the floor.

Just because you're better than most with the math doesn't mean your optical system has the ability to process visual information faster than the average Joe - and of course the average pro basketball players has always been far stronger on this regard than the average person.

Let me point out a couple other guys here:

- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is probably the greatest intellectual among NBA players in history. He's a brilliant man! But his BBIQ wasn't an outlier in that way. You might say he was an incredibly wise basketball player from a young age given that he quickly recognized a talent for the hook shot and practiced it obsessively from middle school onward. But that didn't mean he was the quickest thinker on the court. He didn't have Magic Johnson's brain on the court...and Magic didn't have Kareem's brain off it.

- The story of Kevin Garnett being the one to break the HS-to-pro barrier is absolutely fascinating. For those who don't know, the root of KG skipping college had to do with him not being able to score well enough on the ACT. In the deeper past, colleges regularly took star athletes who were not academically prepared to study there, and thus often made the whole "student athlete" thing a sham. So rules were implemented, and KG's issues with meeting the threshold made him start thinking about just skipping college. And that's obviously what he did.

But the thing is: KG's BBIQ was stunningly high. His ability to rapidly process visual information and react before anyone else was legendary, and when sophisticated defensive schemes were enabled in the 2000s, KG became the poster boy for them. He used his position behind his teammates to read the half court, and not just react himself, but tell his teammates what to do. It's basically the same thing that makes Draymond Green so great, and I'd note both guys are motor mouths who are very quick thinkers in conversation.

So this then to say, there's this intangible factor rooted in sensory processing speed, as well as spatial memory and some more abstract concepts, that just plays a big role in your BBIQ that doesn't necessarily matter in school, and that's why you can have a guy be a genius on the court even if he can't grasp probability theory, or vice versa.

On Wilt, I'm not saying he was the lowest BBIQ guy, but this really did seem to hold him back relative to some other legends.

Wish I could +10 this, but some part of Russ's advantage was just how he thought about his place in a functioning team. Not necessarily IQ or BBIQ just wisdom.

[Doctor MJ]

- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is probably the greatest intellectual among NBA players in history. He's a brilliant man! But his BBIQ wasn't an outlier in that way. You might say he was an incredibly wise basketball player from a young age given that he quickly recognized a talent for the hook shot and practiced it obsessively from middle school onward. But that didn't mean he was the quickest thinker on the court. He didn't have Magic Johnson's brain on the court...and Magic didn't have Kareem's brain off it.

Kareem did, however, exhibit pretty reasonable coachability under Wooden and in the league, which is an underrated trait in a star.

- The story of Kevin Garnett being the one to break the HS-to-pro barrier is absolutely fascinating. For those who don't know, the root of KG skipping college had to do with him not being able to score well enough on the ACT. In the deeper past, colleges regularly took star athletes who were not academically prepared to study there, and thus often made the whole "student athlete" thing a sham. So rules were implemented, and KG's issues with meeting the threshold made him start thinking about just skipping college. And that's obviously what he did.

Wasn't Moses the one who broke that barrier?

- Agree that Kareem was teachable/coachable to an unusual degree among NBA superstars.

- Moses. Oh I just mean in terms of kickstarting the HS-to-NBA trend in the '90s. You're certainly right that Moses did it earlier.

[tsherkin]

- Agree that Kareem was teachable/coachable to an unusual degree among NBA superstars.

It's an excellent trait. Underrated.

- Moses. Oh I just mean in terms of kickstarting the HS-to-NBA trend in the '90s. You're certainly right that Moses did it earlier.

[/quote]

Ah, my bad. My brain was just like "Noooo, Moses!" xD

[FarBeyondDriven]

your first mistake is using laughable advanced stats to discuss the NBA 60 years ago

[Lalouie]

he didn't have a basketball mind

BBIQ/savvy/self-awareness has been fairly rare throughout the history of the league. Wilt was perhaps the first object lesson that superstars who played for stats rather than the team weren't going to win.

Big part of why MJ had so many doubters in his early days before PJ.

he's not on any of my all-timers other than the pure freakishness of his atheticism. on THAT, if he said he'll do something, he did it. if he said he could shut down mj i had no qualms about him doing it 1on1. but that's 1on1, that's NOT basketball.

he would answer critics who said negative things about his apg and he went out and averaged 7or8
he said he was going to break the record of consecutive fg's, and he did it............but at the same time he didn't do anything else. he couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time

however your post led me to think of something else.
maybe the game wasn't quite as sophisticated for centers at the time. maybe we should cut him a break for playing a position that was more restricted than other positions

russell was given all the kudos cuz mainly he WON. but it was actually walton who expanded on the position.

i give wilt props for being THE GUY. everyone knew who "wilt the stilt" was. he was iconic and prolly known around the world more than any nba'er

nevertheless, through my lens there were others of wilt's era who were refining the game better than him

[Lalouie]

Wilt was more about the "look what I can do" and "be amazed by me" than the actual game itself. He chased stats over wins

Wrong. But thanks for perpetuating that myth.

You're wrong, based on absolutely nothing...your turn again...

on the positive - i cut wilt a break because that was the 60s and the game was simpler

on the NEGATIVE - looking back i don't think criticisms were all that nuanced either. bill won, wilt lost. it was as simple as that.

but my dad always observed "elgin shoots too much". it was a simple statement but even the fans could see there were certain nascent truths that were forming.

oscar imo gave the player breadth, bill gave the GAME depth, wilt gave the game a spotlight,,,,,,,,,and lew was the whole package - he was the game's first teen idol as well

jmho

[JonFromVA]

Wrong. But thanks for perpetuating that myth.

You're wrong, based on absolutely nothing...your turn again...

on the positive - i cut wilt a break because that was the 60s and the game was simpler

on the NEGATIVE - looking back i don't think criticisms were all that nuanced either. bill won, wilt lost. it was as simple as that.

but my dad always observed "elgin shoots too much". it was a simple statement but even the fans could see there were certain nascent truths that were forming.

oscar imo gave the player breadth, bill gave the GAME depth, wilt gave the game a spotlight,,,,,,,,,and lew was the whole package - he was the game's first teen idol as well

jmho

Bill knew why he won, Wilt couldn't figure out why he was losing. I mean one example - Bill was blocking shots in play to launch fast breaks ... he didn't give a shot that his teammate scored it.

[Lalouie]

You're wrong, based on absolutely nothing...your turn again...

on the positive - i cut wilt a break because that was the 60s and the game was simpler

on the NEGATIVE - looking back i don't think criticisms were all that nuanced either. bill won, wilt lost. it was as simple as that.

but my dad always observed "elgin shoots too much". it was a simple statement but even the fans could see there were certain nascent truths that were forming.

oscar imo gave the player breadth, bill gave the GAME depth, wilt gave the game a spotlight,,,,,,,,,and lew was the whole package - he was the game's first teen idol as well

jmho

Bill knew why he won, Wilt couldn't figure out why he was losing. I mean one example - Bill was blocking shots in play to launch fast breaks ... he didn't give a shot that his teammate scored it.

i'm gonna steal this
better this than writing a 300 word paragraph

[druggas]

Reading these stats don't tell the whole story, do you know what kind of league they played in? How many teams there were? The caliber of competition? There was NO else comparable to Wilt outside of Bill, who happened to play for the 1 team that had more wins then him

Another ill informed post.

what are you even contributing here lol a one sentence rebuttal for everything you read. You look like you know nothing about this topic other than what you pre-decided as fact

whats your response? let me save your the time..."this guy has no clue" lmao

I get so tired of posters like you that always spews the same crap about Wilt, without ever seeing him play. You just regurgitate the same old tired stuff. Maybe read a book since Wilt can't defend himself.

[WiggOuts]

Another ill informed post.

what are you even contributing here lol a one sentence rebuttal for everything you read. You look like you know nothing about this topic other than what you pre-decided as fact

whats your response? let me save your the time..."this guy has no clue" lmao

I get so tired of posters like you that always spews the same crap about Wilt, without ever seeing him play. You just regurgitate the same old tired stuff. Maybe read a book since Wilt can't defend himself.

Sure buddy, I guarantee I've seen way more of him than u have unless you're like 100 years old. And still what have you offered to the actual thread itself...0

Don't bother responding to me bud, have a good one

[druggas]

what are you even contributing here lol a one sentence rebuttal for everything you read. You look like you know nothing about this topic other than what you pre-decided as fact

whats your response? let me save your the time..."this guy has no clue" lmao

I get so tired of posters like you that always spews the same crap about Wilt, without ever seeing him play. You just regurgitate the same old tired stuff. Maybe read a book since Wilt can't defend himself.

Sure buddy, I guarantee I've seen way more of him than u have unless you're like 100 years old. And still what have you offered to the actual thread itself...0

Don't bother responding to me bud, have a good one

Put your money where your mouth is.

[dhsilv2]

- The story of Kevin Garnett being the one to break the HS-to-pro barrier is absolutely fascinating. For those who don't know, the root of KG skipping college had to do with him not being able to score well enough on the ACT. In the deeper past, colleges regularly took star athletes who were not academically prepared to study there, and thus often made the whole "student athlete" thing a sham. So rules were implemented, and KG's issues with meeting the threshold made him start thinking about just skipping college. And that's obviously what he did.

But the thing is: KG's BBIQ was stunningly high. His ability to rapidly process visual information and react before anyone else was legendary, and when sophisticated defensive schemes were enabled in the 2000s, KG became the poster boy for them. He used his position behind his teammates to read the half court, and not just react himself, but tell his teammates what to do. It's basically the same thing that makes Draymond Green so great, and I'd note both guys are motor mouths who are very quick thinkers in conversation.

I'm always blown away at how good a KG take on a game can be...and then he'll go onto something just convoluted and idiotic about training or something that isn't actual on court play. I'd love to see more on this. Much like Wilt's over sized ego, which generally comes from people who tend to be a lot less intelligent but want people to see them higher. Though perhaps it was just honest displeasure with not getting judge correctly?

[maverick_41]

Could you please recommend a list of Wilt's games to watch that are available on YouTube or other platforms. I would like to familiarize myself with the data provided here by making an eye-test.

[dhsilv2]

Could you please recommend a list of Wilt's games to watch that are available on YouTube or other platforms. I would like to familiarize myself with the data provided here by making an eye-test.

Good starting point is our boy's youtube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/@70sfan