Elpolo_14 wrote:I thought there would be more Vote/Argumentation for WILT Chamberlain ( 64 / 67 ) to be in the podium more frequently in this second thread or the next thread.
Personally he a player I was debating among the top 3-6 myself.
With his all time defensive ability generate by his Physicality+Athlétisme relative to his Pier in the 60s to be a dominant interior defender ( might care too much about foul to be fully committed there ) can be Impactful against mobile wing - Strong Center. Also a great transition game both end of the floor due to his Speed + motion on the recovery.
Was anchor all time playoff defense in 67 too when he wasn't focus on scoring to the point he doesn't have enough energy to put Elite effort on Defense.
He becomes an elite offensive player in these year Which I don't think he was in his early career. The ascension as a passer playmaker in 67 really benefits his teammates/team just by him being more willing as a passer and paying more attention to the court. Help develope aspect in offense that make him all time great. And he still was a positive scorer in the rim / post / paint
His development both end of the floor in the mid late 60s while still maintaining GOAT tier glass cleaner and Possession extender on the Offensive Rebounding really make me wonder If I personally put him too low in my peak list
Good push. 1967 Wilt is definitely in my own personal list of contenders right now, and as I've said before, I definitely consider Wilt's peak to be the highest peak other than Russell from his own era and before.
Whenever Wilt was focused on defense, he was great, and 1967 was such a season (as was 1964).
Coach Hannum's 1967 change in offensive strategy to make Wilt a passing pivot seems to have worked incredibly well with the team recording the best ever ORtg to that point in NBA history. (And while I give Hannum a ton of credit here, I don't look at player vs coach impact as a zero-sum thing.)
I would say at the time it was almost certainly consider as the crowning moment proving Wilt at his best was better than Russell.
Yet, I've been voting 1964 Russell, and not 1967 Wilt, so what's going on there?
I'll say one quick Russell thing, but we're talking Wilt here, so that'll be what I focus on:
I think what Russell led in 1964 was something that went way beyond court itself, with the retirement of Cousy, and the elevation of Russell's primary partner in crime since college, KC Jones, to starter status. While I don't want to give all the credit to Russell for making Cousy's retirement the rare case where a dynasty achieves addition by subtraction, he became the clear cut leader of the team in this season (literally became Team Captain), and that leadership I think was central to why the Celtics as a whole actually took a step forward after losing the player that some at the time insisted was the GOAT.
I don't mean to imply that that leadership didn't have clear on-court effects - it was central, along with the elevation of Jones, to taking the best defense in the world, and ramping it up even further. But I also think zooming in on moments when great leaders were able to emerge as culture-definers is meaningful and useful.
Okay, over to my cautiousness with 1967 Wilt:
General rule: When the offense chooses a strategy that goes counter to what defenses are set up for, then to the extent the offense is equally capable of implementing both strategies, the offense will do better because they are in effect playing against a worse defense.
Micro-example: When a player known to be score-first passes in a situation he typically shoots, the opponent probably isn't guarding optimally for the pass, and thus the play will have a greater chance at success, all other things held equal.
I would suggest that the success of 1967 76er offense needs to be seen to some degree benefitting from defenses just being too afraid of Wilt as a scorer to commit to scheming to defend the pivot passing model.
Now, if we take this as a fact, it does not necessarily imply that we should be less impressed with Wilt that year, because frankly, offensive schemes and players are always trying to attack defenses where they are most vulnerable, and their success in doing that isn't something I think it makes sense to normalize for on principle.
However there is the question of how we should think of sustainability when we consider Peak. A focus on a single season makes sense as a definition for Peak is natural based on how the basketball world defines meaning, but if a shift in offensive strategy only lead to massive offensive improvement in one season, and then it goes back mostly to where it was before - which is what our estimates of 1960s ORtg tell us - then I think we have to consider whether opposing defenses came back more committed to dealing with Hannum's strategy than they'd been the prior season, and once they did, the 76er offensive effectiveness went back down to the good-but-not-great levels where it had primarily lived through Wilt's career to that point.
Of course the precise truth of what all affected what and by how much is something we'll never have certainty on, but I have a reluctance for celebrating an inherently temporary competitive advantage.
Now a couple ways people might push back on this:
1. Isn't the fact that the 76ers made it through the playoffs that year proof that responding to the new offense wasn't a simple matter? And well, I wouldn't call it a "proof" but it's definitely a lot more convincing than mere regular season success.
2. Given that I just emphasized in my arguments for Curry in my 3rd ballot spot that I was focused on separation from contemporaries, and so the adaptations that had come to be by the 2020s which make a good case for, say, Jokic to be a more capable player for this era were not held against MVP era Steph, why would then hold something analogous 1967 Wilt?
Here I'd say that there's a distinction between the competition getting better generally vs getting better matchup up against you. With Curry I emphasized how he has a 5-year RS RAPM that outclasses anyone in the PBP era. I would say that you don't get that if are able to figure you out. And Wilt was someone who I think very much was able to be figured out, and while it didn't stop him from being awesome by all typical standards - and the concept of RAPM doesn't even really make sense for him because he played so many MPG - I don't think he was having consistent outlier impact the same way.
Okay, reflecting right now, I feel I'd be remiss if I didn't share a couple more things that weigh on me:
a. I don't actually think Wilt was that great of a passer. I think great passers don't get tunnel vision as they work their scoring bag, and the reason why Hannum needed to change Wilt's role was because defenses were able to count on him not recognizing the gaps they left open as they committed everything to stopping the team's standard attack of getting the ball to Wilt on the interior, and then letting him go to work.
The fact that I just don't think Wilt was ever a great passer to me says any offensive scheme that focused on him playing as a passing pivot had a limited shelf life in any era of basketball, and if teams back then had access to the analytics we do now, they've have adapted quicker and it may well have kept the 76ers from winning that lone title.
b. While my separation-from-contemporaries focus tends to have me focused on rORtg & rDRtg more so than absolute ORtg & DRtg, I do think we should keep certain things about the absolutes in mind.
The 1967 76er offense was a massive improvement on prior Wilt offenses not because it's absolute ORtg was impressive by later standards, but just because offenses back then were just in general not as effective against opposing defense.
While I'm always looking to emphasize that the game was different before the 3 came in and got embraced, this doesn't explain the league average ORtg just generally going up as a matter of course from the start of the NBA through the '70s. While the '70s themselves might be dismissed by some as a product inflation as a result of ABA competition & NBA expansion, I think that's a distraction from a more general truth offense has mostly just been getting more and more effective against defense as the sport matures.
This then to say that I think it's important not to visualize the 1967 offense (or any other offense from the deep past) running circles around opposing defenses, because in reality, those defenses were having great success per possession relative to what any of us are used to seeing.
None of this means you can't choose to largely normalize that away in your assessment, but I think it does answer the question of:
How did a pivot passing offense built around a not-great passer outperform all other offenses? Because the other offenses had kinks in the joints really holding them back compared to what we're used to seeing offenses do.
And it matters to me in part because I'm pretty skeptical that with Wilt's passing limitations it would really make sense to play him in that role in later eras. I could see Wilt playing something of a Giannis helio role - not saying you couldn't helio Wilt - but literally playing pass-first? I think that was pretty crazy it ever worked, and I don't think Hannum would have tried anything so drastic if he had a player who could just consider all possible actions and make the right basketball play.
Okay, I'll end there and brace for rebuttals. I'll reiterate that despite my criticisms I see Wilt as a very strong candidate.
