Doctor MJ wrote:70sFan wrote:VanWest82 wrote:I'm swayed by Shaq's relentless physicality in 2000 over Kareem's scoring efficiency. Him getting voted 2nd in DPOY was a nod to that imo, and even the drawn fouls advantage on the other end doesn't tell the whole story because those weren't normal fouls. Shaq wore you down. He was also +23 net on-off in that title run, so I'm inclined to forgive the post season efficiency drop off. I do think Kareem gets knocked here just a little because he didn't win while at his best in an era that wasn't exactly loaded with talent. It's not really fair but as I said I'm not quite sure what to do with it.
Shaq has two main advantages over Kareem offensively - foul drawing and offensive rebounding. I think these two aspects of the game are important, but I always thought I am in the minority. I don't see anyone raving about Moses Malone peak here thanks to his even more impressive foul drawing and putback generation abilities.
All the other advantages are clearly overstated. Kareem at his peak had ridiculous inside gravity, he was excellent passer and playmaker for a center, he was extremely imposing physically, just in a different way than Shaq. He also has clear advantages over O'Neal, which are well known.
On top of that, I can't think of any advantage Shaq has on defensive end outside of post defense - which is again, rarely valued here. Outside of that, Kareem was better at basically everything.
I am not saying that Shaq over Kareem is wrong, I just find it hard to understand why it's such a popular view here.
So, I’d say there’s a history here - and I’m sure in other places on the internet - to look at Jordan and Shaq as the two great peaks prior to LeBron.
I specifically remember that when we were doing All-Time Draft Leagues here circa around 2006 while Jordan or Wilt tended to be the first pick, when we did the actual “playoff” voting, Shaq’s teams would be the ones winning out. Yes his team having the advantage of earlier draft picks in the 2nd and 3rd rounds in a snake draft, but in the end, it just seemed like when people imagine all the greats battling each other, Shaq felt unstoppable.
Clearly part of what was going on here were the 3-peats, which combined with massive PPG seemed to tell an “unstoppable” story.
I should note that I can kinda speak to this personally. I remember believing that Shaq’s brute force made him more unstoppable than Kareem’s finesse game.
Where my perspective has shifted so much over time is in applying the lessons of the pace and space era back to Shaq and coming to the conclusion that the league during Shaq’s prime was serendipitous for his strengths and weaknesses.
- Illegal Defense made low post scoring more effective than it had been since they widened the key, and so being the biggest baddest MFer in the league was really nice at that time.
- officiating allowed offensive bully ball to proceed ina way they just didn’t let happen back in, say, Wilt’’s day.
- Flopping was in its nascent stages of acceptability and so teams really did try to stand up to Shaq rather than get him called for offensive fouls. (Note that in earlier eras, defenders didn’t need to flop against bully ball because the refs whistled the offense simply for applying the bully force.)
- Then there’s the defensive side of the ball where the lack of 3-point shooting allowed Shaq to stay in the interior where he could be effective on size and strength. In the modern game, he’d be forced out of his comfort zone and I don’t think it would be pretty.
As always, feel free to chime in if you think I’m mischaracterizing anything in the actual basketball, but my point here is really that I think Shaq just came along at a perfect time, and that’s why he was able to be the most valuable offensive player in the game, while also typically being quite effective on defense despite iffy BBIQ and spotty effort.
And this propagated forward to now still has an effect that honestly, isn’t necessarily wrong but it is a thing.
How do we do a Peak debate between a guy who played in a perfect context compared to a guy who didn’t? It very much depends on your personal philosophy, and me personally I still go back and forth whenever we do this.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I consider Garnett and Duncan to be better fits than Shaq in most basketball eras, but I don’t think either had a season as dominant as Shaq 2000, so how should I rank them ?
I’ll leave it there and welcome response from you and others particularly on that last question.
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I don't really disagree with anything you're saying here about how the game was played when Shaq was in his prime and how that may have benefited him. What I disagree with - and I believe I've been consistent on this as an era-relativist - is the larger idea of using a player's era against him. You go down that road, you can do it for anyone else. You can say Mikan played in an era without a shot clock and a narrower lane and where his height advantage was more pronounced due to fewer tall players. You can say Russell played in the fast-paced 60s which may have benefited a team whose offense largely came on fast-breaks triggered by Russell's defense/rebounding/outlet passes(although I guess you can argue a chicken or egg thing where you ask if the pace got faster in the 60s because the league had to content with the Celtics). You can say Michael Jordan benefited from playing in a league where zone defense wasn't allowed. You can say certain current offensively-slanted players benefit from playing in a league with more spacing and/or where the fouls aren't as hard as they were 30 or 40 years ago. These are all things that the players had little or no control over, and they should not, imo, be penalized for them. I think, especially in the context of a peaks project, you evaluate a player based on what they did in the league they played with the teammates they had against the competition in front of them under the rules in place at the time.
Specifically as regards Duncan and Garnett, I would take peak Shaq over them. As Duncan is the one with traction right now, I'll focus on him.
The question of how much you take surrounding seasons into question when evaluating a player's peak is, I guess, a subjective thing. If you're evaluating a single season of a player's career, should you be allowing other parts of their career to inform that evaluation? What I'm getting at is that if we're purely looking at peak seasons only, and we're taking 2000 as Shaq's peak and 2003 as Duncan's peak, we can look at the team relative defensive ratings and see that the 2000 Lakers were at -5.9, and the 2003 Spurs were at -3.9.
This is obviously not representative of their careers, as Shaq never anchored a defense close to that outside of this one season and that -3.9 is actually the lowest ranked Spurs defense of any year between Duncan's rookie season and 2008-09. Though on the latter point it is worth asking whether or not is actually an argument in favor of late-career David Robinson's defensive impact that of all the years Duncan and Robinson played together, the lowest defensive rating came in the season where DRob played the fewest games(64).
Anyway, this is why on a career basis no one would ever argue Shaq as a greater defender than Duncan. But for this one season the Lakers had a higher defensive rating by two full points. And we can also say it's a team stat, right, but are we going to argue that anyone on that Laker team was more responsible for that defensive rating? 36 year old AC Green? Rob Horry(who played 22mpg)? Young Kobe(who only played 66 games) 36 year old Ron Harper? Or is it more likely that Shaq, never the most disciplined player, simply was motivated to make a defensive effort that he simply never cared to replicate thereafter?
If you accept all this line of argument, then you can say, for
this peak season, Shaq anchored a superior defense while also being a higher volume and more efficient scorer in the regular season. Though it is fair to point out that Duncan did in fact score more efficiently in the playoffs(but on far less volume).
There is also this - and I know this forum does not like feeling-based arguments, but I can't help it: I was, during Shaq's prime, not a fan. I was pretty much a Laker hater. So I rooted against him a lot. And I can say this with full confidence: I always knew and respected how great prime/peak Duncan and Garnett were, always, but I never feared them the way I feared peak/prime Shaq. In the instances where I'd root against them(which wasn't that often TBH), I never felt as hopeless as I sometimes did when rooting against peak Shaq. I know that is wholly unscientific, but it is a distinct feeling that I remember. I'm a lifelong Bulls fan, so I never rooted against Jordan, but I imagine it's what it must have felt like for those rooting against him during the dynasty years.
So yes, if I have one season to win a championship, I'm taking 2000 Shaq over 2003 Duncan.
All of this said, I am not sure I'd take Shaq over Kareem. Frankly, I think the evidence is solid that Kareem was better than Shaq defensively and better than Duncan/Garnett offensively. Which is why he's usually taken ahead of all of them. It might depend on which version of Kareem you're taking as peak, but I think it would be close with Shaq, peak for peak.
But I'm stilling leaning towards 71 as peak Kareem.
All this talk of his scoring peak in 77, but look at 71 vs 77:
(I'm using pp36 here because there is no per100 for 1971)
1971: 28.4pp36 on +10.6 rTS, +6.7/-4.1 rOrtg/rDrtg
1977: 25.7pp36 on +9.7 rTS, +1.9/-0.6 rOrtg/rDrtg
It seems to me that he scored on higher volume and efficiency in 1971.
Of course the argument will be that his playoff numbers were much better in 1977. Ok, but the 11 game sample(in a post-season where his team was swept out of the playoffs) is going to outweigh the 82 game sample?
Also, it's not as though Kareem played bad in the 71 playoffs. It was still 23.2/14.8p36 on +4.5 rTS, and the team still cruised through the playoffs and won the Finals handily, winning three out of four games by double digits.
I guess the other argument is that he did what he did in 77 without an Oscar Robertson next to him. But I'm still leaning towards 71 as peak. And 71 Kareem vs 00 Shaq...without taking any of the rest of their careers into consideration...it's tough. I probably do go with Kareem, if for no other reason than 71 Kareem's efficiency is more than double 00 Shaq's - +10.6 rTS vs +5.5 rTS - on higher volume - 28.4pp36 vs 26.7pp36 - without even taking defense into consideration.
