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mdonnelly1989 wrote:FrodoBaggins wrote:Shaq used to be a lock for top 2-3 in these projects in the past. How things have changed!
And Michael Jordan used to a be a LOCK for Top 1
f4p wrote:mdonnelly1989 wrote:FrodoBaggins wrote:Shaq used to be a lock for top 2-3 in these projects in the past. How things have changed!
And Michael Jordan used to a be a LOCK for Top 1
I'm guessing a lot of people who support people like Shaq and Jordan and Kobe have generally left the board over the years.
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
FrodoBaggins wrote:Shaq used to be a lock for top 2-3 in these projects in the past. How things have changed!
f4p wrote:TheGOATRises007 wrote:Kawhi didn't slow down Giannis either. It was a complete team effort from one of the best defensive units ever.
If you asked Kawhi to guard Giannis 1vs1 on an island, he'd get torched.
I mean the greatest team ever held giannis to 27 ppg on 58 TS% for the first 2 games and then over the last 4 games with kawhi, it was 20.5 ppg on 48 TS%.
Peregrine01 wrote:70sFan wrote:cupcakesnake wrote:
With old man Pippen, that felt like the last part of his game that stayed elite. I'm not going off data here, just so many memories of a graying Pippen in baggy shorts getting those 7'3" arms everywhere in the playoffs.
Ben guarded Shaq a ton, and there were also some regular Elden Campbell minutes. Ben would do plenty of fronting, and they also weren't shy about bringing Ben up to the point of attack against screens for Kobe, while the other Pistons rotated behind the play and ignored shooters. Having Rasheed Wallace be able to step behind Shaq as a secondary rim protector was a hilarous luxury.
I remember a 2006 Suns regular season game against the Houston Rockets, where Boris Diaw and Shawn Marion ruined Yao Ming life for a night, just making impossible for him to get a clean catch. This is a few years later than prime Shaq, but I think defensively teams weren't conceding post touches lazily. Fronting the post and playing deny defense were basic fundamentals. Having the bodies to do it to Shaq was a different story.
I agree with cupcakesnake here - of course now teams have a few more tricks to front post players successfully (especially compared to the illegal defense era), but it's one thing to perform these strategies on regular basis and it's another to try it on Shaq. People keep talking about Portland doing reasonably well, but they had 7'3 300 lbs wall on him and two of the best help defenders in the league with immense length.
It's not that you can take any team today and just prevent Shaq from dominating you just by fronting him in the post. Good luck trying that without enough size, length and skill.
In my view, the issues when Shaq couldn't get the ball wasn't just that he didn't get the ball. It was that if he couldn't get the ball, he wasn't going to come outside the paint at all and if he's feeling particularly petulant, he'd intentionally draw offensive 3 seconds.
When he ballooned to become Lakers Shaq he kinda stopped doing a lot of things other than park himself on the block. I think this was an understated part of the disconnect between him and Kobe - it just became my turn your turn basketball in their last couple of years together.
cupcakesnake wrote:Peregrine01 wrote:falcolombardi wrote:
The idea of shaq always has been a bit better than the reality of shaq and there was some lazyness imo involved (it was easy to just say he was "most dominant ever" without actually comparing him to peers in deptg)
I must admit, when I was watching Shaq during my teen years and just watch him catch deep and dunk the ball again and again my first and deepest impression was: "this isn't fair". The visual of that was so strong that it overwhelmed a lot of his shortcomings on the court - namely his statuesque defense and inability to really do anything outside of 10 feet from the basket.
Defenses then look primitive to what they look like now and didn't really obstruct him much from operating within that 10 ft radius. I'll always remember the 2001 Finals when Shaq would obliterate Mutombo under the basket and dunk on him again and again. Yet Mutombo would still run down the court dutifully positioning himself behind Shaq and let him get sealed all over again. The Sixers were coached by Larry Brown no less and still had probably the worst strategy possible against Shaq.
There is just no way the defenses of today would let that happen. Instead, they'd put a beefier center like Ratliff on Shaq, having Mutombo roam on the weak side, and have a phalanx of wings denying the post entry. When Shaq had to face a much more active team defense like he did against the Blazers in 2000 or the late 90s Jazz, he had a lot more trouble implementing the "catch and dunk" strategy.
To be fair to Larry Brown, he coached the 2004 Pistons to a much more optimal Shaq strategy (against an admittedly lesser version of Shaq), but those Pistons had an insane personnel compared to those Sixers.
Ratiliff was injured and traded, but also wasn't bulkier than Dikembe. He was listed at 235lbs and was drafted 10 pounds lighter than that. Dikembe was listed at 260lbs. that year. There's no real track record of bulky centers having success against Shaq, but it was something teams constantly tried. Todd McCullough played real minutes againt Shaq in 2 different finals for 2 different teams.
I agree with everything you're saying about more active defenses, but Shaq was uniquely good at sealing guys. Lakers did all kinds of things to make Shaq a less stationary target so defenses couldn't load up on him. Shaq was unusually good at sneaking and powering into seals under the rim, where he's then a huge target to pass to, and he had elite catching mits.
Even though today's defenses are way better at making post-ups less efficient, Shaq has advantages that no one else ever has. He'd be used in pick & roll way more today, but I think those Shaq ducks in work in any era (after the 1970s or whenever they started allowing more contact from the offensive player).
Joao Saraiva wrote:I'm surprised. I don't think in any peaks project Shaq would be out of the top 5 and behind Duncan if it was made 5 or 10 years ago!
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
ut this doesn't mean anything of itself. For the KD parallel to work, the Celtics need to be great(relative to the comp) without Russell. Nothing suggests this is true beyond the Celtics first few titles(i listed the different stuff in my previous post). Crucially everything we have suggests the opposite was true in 1969, and here the competition is far better than "not weak".
Assuming you are not trying to break era-relativity, here are 3-ways we can look at opposition strength
1. Look at how the teams look relative to the league for the era(bullets and knicks are outliers by srs, Lakers are close)
2. Look at how the comp was relative to the league that season(Celtics beat the best, 2nd best and 4th best opponent they could have had by SRS)
3. Look at how the comp was in surrounding seasons(Knicks SRS doubles en-route to a championship the following year, Bullets and Lakers srs drops but they take the Knicks to 7 and LA win a championship and make 3 finals)
By any of these approaches the Celtics faced an all-time difficult gauntlet and there is absolutely nothing to suggest the Celtics were some stacked super-squad. "Competition" is not a serious argument here. Bill went through just about the hardest possible route, with weak support, in a year where the best teams were unusually good. Not sure how that doesn't get him to a tier 1(era-relative) peak unless you arbitrarily decide to curve 1969 down to what feels reasonable without scaling the other title-winning years up.
George Mikan (1924) "Mr. Basketball", 6'10" center, the first true big man, 7 total pro titles with Chicago Gears & Lakers
Image
Origin: Illinois
College: DePaul
Series Wins: 23
All-League 1st Team: 8 times
Star-Prime: 8 seasons
POY wins: 8, POY shares: 8.0
OPOY wins: 3, OPOY shares: 3.8
DPOY wins: 6, DPOY shares: 6.2
The obvious top player from the era so maybe not a ton to be gleaned from going into further detail, but some observations:
- Mikan appears to have been the best offensive player in pro basketball basically from the time he turned pro. Eventually others arrive in the league to top him, but he remains elite until the rule change of 1951 that widened the key from 6 to 12 feet specifically to stop him. From that point onward, while Mikan likely remained the best rebounder in the world, it seems that the rule change did have the desired effect.
- Mikan almost certainly would have been an even more impactful defender from the jump if not for the banning of goaltending. As it was, it seems like it took Mikan some time to re-optimize his defensive play. He had a recurring issue of foul trouble that was often the Achilles heel for his teams win the lost.
- So far as I can tell, Mikan's defensive dominance in the NBA was less about shotblocking and more about rebounding. Certainly the shotblocking threat was there to a degree, but in a league with such weak shooting percentage, rebounding was arguably king.
ShaqAttac wrote:I'm gonna vote 49 MIKAN for 2
One_and_Done wrote:Joao Saraiva wrote:I'm surprised. I don't think in any peaks project Shaq would be out of the top 5 and behind Duncan if it was made 5 or 10 years ago!
Thankfully it seems voters have gotten more discerning over the years.
Joao Saraiva wrote:One_and_Done wrote:Joao Saraiva wrote:I'm surprised. I don't think in any peaks project Shaq would be out of the top 5 and behind Duncan if it was made 5 or 10 years ago!
Thankfully it seems voters have gotten more discerning over the years.
Well we're getting extra data nowadays with advanced metrics that we didn't have in the past, so previous voters couldn't use that information.
Also the poll of voters eventually changes over the years, so it's natural the results change the same way.
I still wouldn't think it's too crazy to have Shaq in the top 5 or above Duncan. Do you think there is a gigantic gap that justifies Shaq not even having a case?
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
70sFan wrote:Peregrine01 wrote:70sFan wrote:I agree with cupcakesnake here - of course now teams have a few more tricks to front post players successfully (especially compared to the illegal defense era), but it's one thing to perform these strategies on regular basis and it's another to try it on Shaq. People keep talking about Portland doing reasonably well, but they had 7'3 300 lbs wall on him and two of the best help defenders in the league with immense length.
It's not that you can take any team today and just prevent Shaq from dominating you just by fronting him in the post. Good luck trying that without enough size, length and skill.
In my view, the issues when Shaq couldn't get the ball wasn't just that he didn't get the ball. It was that if he couldn't get the ball, he wasn't going to come outside the paint at all and if he's feeling particularly petulant, he'd intentionally draw offensive 3 seconds.
When he ballooned to become Lakers Shaq he kinda stopped doing a lot of things other than park himself on the block. I think this was an understated part of the disconnect between him and Kobe - it just became my turn your turn basketball in their last couple of years together.
I think you understate how hard it is to deny the ball from Shaq.
I created a short post not long ago about Shaq'd off-ball game and it's just not true that all Shaq did was "park himself on the block". Shaq moved without the ball all the time, he pressured defenses throughout the whole possession and it's extremely hard to keep him off ball all the time. I mean, for all the faults he had and the laziness he showed on defensive end, Shaq was one of the most active bigs without the ball I've ever seen.
If you do everything to deny Shaq from the ball at all costs, you most likely won't win the game. You said it's bad to guard Shaq straight, but if you have a good post defender that might be a better option because Shaq wasn't super efficient ISO scorer. You have to throw different looks at him, kinda like Russell did to Wilt.
Peregrine01 wrote:What I meant by parking himself on the block was that he wasn't going to leave the paint and that can clog an offense up.
I didn't say that it was bad to guard Shaq straight but that it was bad to guard Shaq straight with a guy who isn't very sturdy. Shaq had a lot of trouble getting deep seals on a guy like Rodman for instance which is why he struggled to score in isolation against him more than he did against some guys his own height.
But the best defense I've seen played against Shaq's teams are those that made it very difficult for him to get the ball in the first place which also had the effect of burning a lot of clock. This was difficult to do in the illegal defense era and without a guy like Pippen who could be in two places at the same time.
