lessthanjake wrote:theonlyclutch wrote:lessthanjake wrote:Yep, they weren’t podcasting and then they realized they need a career after professional basketball in order to keep anything like their current standard of living, and decided to start on that before they were done playing. In a general sense, that’s also what’s going on with a lot of the examples One_and_Done was aiming to reference. Of course, the point isn’t that Draymond and Paul George are truly similarly situated financially to NBA players in the 1960s. I think the bad faith here would be reading my post to be saying that, particularly given the second paragraph of my post. The point is rather that the mere fact of doing other work while playing professional basketball really does not mean that NBA players are *poor*. They made a good living in the 1960s.
No, but it does mean that the more marginal players (I. E most of them) aren't working hard to stay in the league, or get in the league, because of vastly lower opportunity costs if they have to go back out to another career, and that sort of competition (or lack thereof) trickles upwards.
lessthanjake wrote:The person I was responding to has repeatedly used data about average salaries in that era compared to today. We might prefer data on the median or different percentiles, but I am not aware of any such data, so I can’t exactly use data I am unaware of (and that probably doesn’t even exist).
Also, I do just want to note that we really aren’t exactly interested here in the incentives of the median NBA player or some minimum-salary player. All we really care about for these purposes is what the incentives were for people who would be the very best at basketball, because that’s the only thing that’s really relevant to determining whether lesser incentives would make the guys who were the best in that era not be the best in an era with more incentive to play professional basketball. Of course, as I’ve posted in this thread already, the very best players may not know beforehand that they are that good, so their incentives may arguably be based on a lesser expectation. But that isn’t necessarily true, since the guys in that era who would be the best pretty much knew they were great when they played in college. And one could say that they might not have played college basketball if professional basketball was less lucrative, but getting a college scholarship was a hefty incentive to play in college either way (more on that later).
So yeah, it’s a bit complicated but I’m really not sure we care about what the incentives were for minimum-salary guys. If the minimum-salary type of guys were worse because those types of guys weren’t incentivized to play basketball but all the very best people still ended up playing basketball, then the guys who were the best in that era shouldn’t be downplayed as if there might have been guys who were better than them that simply didn’t play basketball. Of course, “all the very best people still ended up playing basketball” is not necessarily right (in fact, my guess is that it isn’t quite right—as I mentioned in the post you’ve quoted), but the higher-end salaries are probably the more important factor to assessing to what degree we think that was true.
NBA role players
are still some of the very best players at playing basketball, and provide the competition/support that stars needed.
It's like arguing the current NBA would take no dip in quality if everyone from the 7th man onwards made 100k and were driving ubers/moonlighting for Meta in the offseason instead of focusing on their games to stay on the gravy train.
lessthanjake wrote:I think you’re not really internalizing that these numbers are *very* consistent with my post. Let’s remember that the people playing basketball are in their 20s, and often not from very privileged backgrounds. If the *minimum* that these young guys would make is above the overall median household income (which is made up of data points that predominantly include incomes of much older people, as well as some multi-income households even back then), that’s extremely likely to be substantially higher than anything they could otherwise get.
For reference, median household income now is about $85k. That 10k is 8.7% higher than the 9.2k median income you mention. So that NBA minimum salary you reference is roughly equivalent to about $90-95k now. That’s way higher than the typical salary for people in their twenties (which is somewhere in the zone of 40k to 60k, depending on exact age:
https://www.bls.gov/charts/usual-weekly-earnings/usual-weekly-earnings-current-quarter-by-age.htm). And that’s the *minimum* NBA salary that year. So I’d say this data strongly suggests that I was right in saying that “it was substantially more money than the vast majority of those players could make doing anything else.”
Considering that a median career in the NBA was (still is) measured in years and has little direct transferable experience to the outside workforce (heck lack of social media back then means ways of monetizing fame is significantly curtailed). There are a sizable amount of career paths that can arguably make more sense to a college graduate (which applies to 60s NBA players) in a way that does not apply today.
Of course, that this aforementioned minimum was something the NBAPA had to
bargain for and only received at the end of the 60s, after ABA came and provided competition for talent, (ergo, they were not getting paid these levels in the early-mid 60s) but that point seems to have flown over your head as well.
lessthanjake wrote:
This is a relevant fact, but it kind of goes the other direction. A significant part of the incentive to play basketball in that era was getting a college scholarship out of it. Particularly in a world where not many people went to college, that meant that basketball also opened up a lot of high-level post-basketball career paths that probably wouldn’t have otherwise been open to them. In other words, pursuing basketball basically juiced up your income in your early years way above what it’d otherwise have been, while simultaneously substantially increasing your opportunities after that as well.
Only if we pretend that a college scholarship in the 60s is worth nearly as much monetarily back then as it does now.
In short, the scholarship granted was more 'supplanting the part-time income that the student-athlete would have otherwise earned to fund the tuition, knowing that NCAA commitments would make obtaining such incomes difficult', and not in itself a lifeline that prospective athletes needed to go to college in the first place.
This appears to mostly just be you telling us what these guys did when they retired in their early 30s. The fact that they left basketball at a pretty normal time to be finished with professional sports and then did something after basketball is a pretty unremarkable fact. And you don’t tell us how many of those jobs these guys could’ve gotten if they’d not gotten to go to college on a scholarship. In some of these cases, these jobs are part of the incentive structure. For instance, would Bob Pettit have been able to be a banker in Louisiana without basketball allowing him to get a degree from LSU? There’s a good chance the answer is no. Same with the guy working for IBM, and potentially the guy you speculate started an engineering business. Getting very good jobs afterwards is part of why people were incentivized to play basketball back then!
As explained above, college tuition in the 50s/60s was affordable enough such that a scholarship is
not the financial lifeline without which higher education is impossible. Alternate universe Pob Bettit and Aaul Prizin, trading off college basketball for part-time work, most likely could go to college and pursue their eventual careers anyway, and even if their were barriers. The fact that college education is so much more expensive at present would be further motivation for today's players pursuing basketball (hence talent) for athletic scholarships - given the relative costs of 60s higher education vs now.
The value of a college scholarship back then was not just about avoiding the tuition—though that was a very big deal too, particularly in a less wealthy world that was also without ready access to student loans—but also about the fact that getting a college degree in the first place put you amongst the most educated ~8% of the population and was generally really reserved for the most educationally-inclined and privileged people. That obviously carried more status and was a bigger differentiating factor in the labor market than a college degree is now, when that number is orders of magnitude higher. It was the path to various stable, well-paying professions such as medicine, law, engineering, business management, academia, etc. For some reference, back then, a significantly lower percent of people got college degrees than the percent who get post-graduate degrees now. Therefore, playing basketball essentially allowed people to put themselves among the most educated elite of the country.
You've successfully established why a college degree was valuable in-so-far as differentiation then (relative to now), which makes sense given that America was just starting to transition from a manufacturing-driven economy to a services-driven one (i.e positions require higher education starting to become widespread, with a population that previous largely haven't required/received higher education). That is of little relation to whether a basketball scholarship (and therefore incentive to play well at basketball) was more valuable then (relative to now). To do so requires examining the degree of difficulty of going to college without such scholarships, I've established already that tuition in the 60s was far cheaper than today adjusted for inflation, looking at acceptance rates for say, UC Berkeley, an academically strenuous public school with a sizable NCAA presence (Jason Kidd/Kevin Johnson are both Alumni)
https://www.collegetransitions.com/blog/how-to-get-into-uc-berkeley-admissions-data-and-strategies, acceptance rates have dropped from 67% in the 70s (assuming similar in the 60s) to around 11-14% today. This does not seem to be an outlier with the broader trend for U.S universities (acceptance rates significantly dropping), therefore the logical conclusion would be that a basketball scholarship to say, the Cal Bears, would be more valuable today than in the 60s, given i) the significant increased difficulty of getting accepted into Berkeley without one, and ii) the significantly higher tuition that would need to be paid without one. (The really high compensation for going pro, whether NBA or overseas, also helps)
(P. S: Stable, well-paying professions such as medicine, law, engineering, academia etc STILL require college degrees regardless of the fact that more of society has them, them being less "valuable" as a differentiator doesn't mean that from a young adult's point of view there are more viable career paths that
don't require college when comparing now vs the 60s)
lessthanjake wrote:For reference, the only player you list there who is actually arguably at Bill Russell’s level is Nikola Jokic. But Jokic was drafted at an age where Bill Russell hadn’t even played a single varsity college game yet. People probably wouldn’t have known how good Bill Russell was at that age either! Meanwhile, when Jokic was the age Russell was at the time Russell was drafted, Jokic had just finished a season ranked 7th in the NBA in BPM. I am extremely confident that if Jokic had played outside the NBA until that age, he would not have been drafted 41st.
Of course, this isn’t to say that scouting is perfect, even with a lot of years to look at a player. Draymond Green and Jimmy Butler played through college and still weren’t drafted very high. But, with all due respect to them, they’re not the type of player that would have given Bill Russell a run for his money for being the best player of his era. It’s theoretically possible that someone even better than them could’ve slipped through the cracks back then, but it was definitely not likely. Which is made more obvious by the fact that that era’s major superstars—Russell, Wilt, West, Oscar, and Pettit—were all drafted with the top 3 picks of their drafts. If there was a good chance of a Russell-level player getting overlooked to the point that they’d expect to be a minimum-salary guy, we’d expect to see something even approaching that to have actually happened—rather than every major superstar approaching Russell’s level clearly being recognized as a top prospect when entering the NBA.
Your focus seem to be on whether any of these players could've been "on Bill Russell's level" and dismissing them outright as notable factors if they could not, it doesn't seem clear to me you understand what Bill Russell's level is measured against.
"Bill Russell's Level" i.e his impact, is based on his on-court performance
relative to his peers on the court, and if the question posed by the OP was "who was the better player in their era" then it's hard to put any case against Russell, but the question was "Who would be the better player today", to which end a satisfactory answer
must include a relative analysis of the strength of those peers the respective players were measured against. The incentive structures in the 60s structurally discouraging the formation of Draymonds, Butlers, Jokics, Goberts (nvm that the latter are overseas players which have no shot in the first place) and a whole host of valuable and productive late drafted players from working hard to stay in the league
weakens the relative level of the league, whether they turn out to be as good as Russell or not.
Or in statistical terms, there is a particular distribution of data for which one data point is 3 standard deviations to the right (the "Bill Russell"), but then it is discovered that the dataset was biased in such a way that a significant set of data points forecasted to be 1-2 standard deviations to the right were not measured. When revising the dataset to include those data points, would the original "Bill Russell" data point stay 3 standard deviations to the right?
