DraymondGold wrote:lessthanjake wrote:4. Dwyane Wade (2006)
I was writing up an entry here for 2004 Garnett, and ended up changing my vote mid-post, because I started talking about why I put Garnett above 2006 Wade and I realized I didn’t really buy my own reasoning.
The crux of Wade’s case here is that he had an incredible playoff run, leading the Heat to the title. In my view, that Heat team had little business winning the NBA title. Shaq was still a good player, but he was pretty diminished by the end. Meanwhile, the Heat gave their second-most playoff minutes (and almost as many shots as Shaq) to Antoine Walker—who IMO is arguably the worst consistent starter in NBA history, with just awful impact data, combined with my eye test thinking he was just terrible even back then. Jason Williams, Udonis Haslem, and James Posey ranged from neutral to somewhat negative players IMO. They did benefit from depth, in that their 7th and 8th men were old Gary Payton and old Alonzo Mourning, who were both positive players in the limited minutes they got. Overall, in my view, that team was not really a championship-quality team. And yet Wade led them to a title. I found it shocking at the time, and I still do.
This wasn’t an easy road either. The first two rounds were not against overly difficult opponents, but I wouldn’t say the Kidd/Carter/Jefferson Nets were minnows either. More importantly, the Heat faced the Pistons in the conference finals. This was a team that had won the title in 2004, and had lost a close Game 7 in the Finals in 2005. They had also just had their best regular season, winning 64 games. This was the title favorite. And Wade absolutely torched them, putting up a 68.4% TS% for the series. The Heat then played the 60-win, 6 SRS Mavericks, who had just gotten done beating the Spurs and Suns and looked pretty destined to win the title. And Wade torched them too, carrying the Heat with 35 points a game, including just dominating the last four games that the Heat won after going down 0-2. Basically, Wade dominated two great teams that I don’t think the Heat had any business beating. FWIW, he also had a +22.2 on-off in the playoffs, though I don’t value that much due to the tiny sample size.
So I think 2006 Wade had a playoffs that is on my short list for most impressive title runs by a player. But what about the regular season? Well, it was still really good. He led the league in RAPTOR, and was basically in a tight group of a few players near the top of the league in other metrics. He had a fantastic +15.2 on-off. He definitely wasn’t clearly the best player in the regular season. But he was in the conversation. And when combined with one of the most impressive playoff runs ever, I find it very compelling.
As I mentioned, I was going to put 2004 Garnett here. I certainly think it’d be relatively straightforward to conclude that 2004 Garnett generally had more impact per 100 possessions than 2006 Wade. But Wade was still very impactful, and 2004 Garnett simply did not have the playoff run that 2006 Wade had. So, overall, I just find it difficult to conclude that 2004 Garnett was actually “greater” than 2006 Wade.
The actual question for me is whether 2006 Wade should be even higher. Is 2001 Shaq better than this? I guess my logic here is that Shaq had a slightly better argument for being the league’s best player in the regular season than Wade did, and they both were extremely impressive in the playoffs (with Shaq leading his team to a 15-1 playoff record, while Wade led a team to a title that had no business winning it). That shorthand logic ends up with Shaq a bit ahead. But I struggle with the conclusion that 2001 Shaq’s regular season actually was better than 2006 Wade’s, since the SRS of the two teams was virtually identical and I think Shaq had the better supporting cast. That said, I do look at surrounding years and see Shaq looking better than Wade, and that gives me some info about their individual level in these particular years. So, while I’m not certain 2006 Wade doesn’t deserve to be #3 here, I am not quite ready to do it.
Hey jake! I'm a bit surprised to see 06 Wade already. I'd definitely consider it within uncertainty range of Wade's evaluation, but personally I struggle to get quite that high on Wade. So I guess two questions:
(1) How much of a concern is the sample size and the lesser of regular season pop for Wade vs the competition?
You mention that the 06 Heat had no business winning the title, and that's definitely true. It was definitely an upset, which is credit to Wade!
But in terms of team dominance, they were 93rd in Overall SRS through 2023 (87th through 2021), so a pretty far cry from any form of dominance. Even just taking playoffs alone, they rank 81st through 2021 (lower through 2023). Looking at the playoffs by each round, they were +3.5, +8.9, +12.2, +10.6 in overall SRS (reminder that we expect overall SRS to get higher each round, based on the way it's calculated). So it's really just the last two--three rounds that look any good (Wade's Backpicks BPM also looks worse in the first round). Which is great that they won the two most important rounds of the entire season, and off the back of plenty of Wade heroics too! But it's also starting to rely on smaller and smaller sample sizes for the signal.
So I’d say a few things on this:
1. To some degree, I see the “greatness” of a peak year as analytically different from how good I think they were at basketball in a vacuum. It is indeed true that Wade’s 2006 heroics in the business end of the playoffs are inherently not a large sample. Do I think he would’ve done the same thing again if those playoffs were played over again? Maybe not! But he did do it in reality, and what actually happens in those portions of the year have an outsized importance to the “greatness” of a player’s year IMO.
2. I’m not very troubled by the 2006 Heat merely being a 52-win, 3.59 SRS team. To be sure, that is not amazing. 2006 Wade certainly doesn’t have the lead-an-all-time-great-team thing going for him that a guy like 2017 Steph does. But I just don’t think that that 2006 Heat team was very good. Not only that, but they also weren’t very healthy during the season. Most importantly, Shaq missed 23 games. They were a 58-win, +6.2 net rating team in the 54 games Wade and Shaq both played. Even that isn’t lighting the world on fire, but I think it’s pretty impressive, given Shaq had declined (though obviously his presence helped the team) and the rest of the supporting cast was only okay (and Antoine Walker was absolutely worse than okay).
3. As for the 2006 Heat not having the best playoff SRS, I think even the playoff SRS they got was very impressive under the circumstances. And, perhaps more importantly, playoff SRS can often obscure things by being skewed by a single series where a team absolutely dominated the other team (often an early round series), or by a team winning a massive blowout. That isn’t meaningless of course, but it can take on an outsized importance in playoff SRS. The thing I’d note with the 2006 Heat is that no one even took them to 7 games. And that’s with Wade having a team we both think had no business winning a title. I think if you take a team to a title that had no business winning one, and no one even takes your team to 7 games, despite not getting a fortunate draw at all, then it’s extremely impressive, even if there were enough close games and not enough blowouts for the playoff SRS to be sky high.
Off the cuff (and taking out Curry, Jokic, Shaq who are 1-3 on your ballot), the next guys are (in no order):
-Garnett, Dirk, Chris Paul, Kobe, Durant, Kawhi, Shai, Giannis, Wade
(hard to know exactly where to cut things off, so maybe you drop a few of those and introduce some others -- maybe someone switches in Nash or Harden?)
Of these guys: Wade has one/two great playoffs during his peak, but Kawhi definitely does too and most agree, Dirk definitely does too and most agree Giannis/Durant/Kobe might have great playoffs (though you get a little wider spread on each, with Giannis having some playoff decline/injuries, Durant having his best playoffs often with Curry, Kobe being less of an impact giant). What makes you higher on Wade relative to those other guys?
Taking full-season RAPM (RS + PS) from nbarapm.com (which as far as I can tell, only puts their full-season RAPM values on each player's specific page) to get a sense of their value...
2-year Full-Season rapm:
03–04 Garnett +9.4 [07–08 +8.9, 08–09 +8.9) > 11-12 Dirk +9.0 [10–11 Dirk +6.7] > 16–17 Kawhi +7.4 [20–21 Kawhi +7.3] > 06-07 Wade +6.0 [09–10 +7.5] (not adding everyone because I'm lazy)
3-year Full-Season rapm:
02 – 04 Garnett +9.2 [08-09 +10.6] > 14-16 Chris Paul +8.3 (=16-18 +8.3) > 06-08 Steve Nash +8.0 > 16-18 Kawhi +7.8 [15-17 +7.4] > 10-12 Dirk +7.2 [11-13 +7.7, 09-12 +5.4, 02-04 +7.2] > 20-22 Giannis +6.7 [18-20 +6.5] > 06-08 Kobe +6.0 > 14-16 Durant 5.9 [15-17 +5.6, 19-21 +6.6] > 05-07 Wade +5.6 [08-10 +7.2, 09-11 +5.6]
5-year Full-Season rapm:
14-18 Chris Paul +9.8 > 03-07 Garnett +9.3 [06-10 = 07-11 +10.1] > 07-11 Nash +8.5 [05-09 +8.3] > 06-10 Wade +8.1 [big drop off in surrounding years: 05–09 +6.0] > 14-18 Kawhi +7.5 [17-21 +6.9, 20-24 +7.9] > 19-23 Giannis +7.3 [=18-22 +7.3] > 07-11 Dirk +7.1 [08-12 Dirk +7.1]> 13-17 Durant +6.4 [19-23 Durant +6.4] > 06-10 Kobe +6.0 [04-08 +6.1]
RAPM's not everything, but it does seem like that 06 run is clearly less impactful than some of the other guys we have here (including Garnett, who didn't have the best playoff run in 04, but also didn't have a chance to show his mid-peak playoff performance in 05, 06, or 07). Some of the guys you might cut out for health concerns or playoff drop concerns (e.g. Chris Paul).
But just compared to the 'great single run' guys like 17 Kawhi or 11 Dirk, it's not clear 06 or 09/10 Wade is more impactful than those guys in an rapm sense. And Just looking at the small sample single playoffs, 17 Kawhi for example has a higher playoff EPM than 06 Wade, and I'm not sure if I would weight 06 Wade better on film personally (though haven't watched 06 Wade recently).
(2) Do you have any scalability or fit concerns with Wade compared to someone like Garnett or Dirk or Kawhi? I'm personally a little less clear on how he maintains impact if he doesn't have the ball, e.g. having a clear impact decline in multi-year RAPM whenever we include 2011 in the sample.
Thoughts? Not saying it's impossible to take Wade, just trying to understand what puts him over some of the other great playoff guys. Do you see 06 playoff Wade as a level above 17 Kawhi or 11 Dirk?
A few more thoughts:
1. As mentioned in my prior post, I think it’s very reasonable to conclude that peak Garnett was generally a more impactful player than Wade. The same might go for a few other players who could be considered for this spot. If I were ranking based on RAPM, then 2006 Wade would not make my ballot in this thread. But 2006 Wade’s playoff heroics weigh heavily to me, when it comes to assessing the “greatness” of his year. I really think 2006 Wade was a “greater” year than 2004 Garnett, even if 2004 Garnett very likely was generally more impactful per 100 possessions. If someone weighs playoff heroics and team success much less than I do, then I can certainly see putting 2004 Garnett (and potentially others) ahead of 2006 Wade, on the basis that one just thinks they were a better basketball player in a vacuum. But that’s not the approach I generally take with these rankings.
2. I think there’s some guys you mentioned that are similar in the sense of having a great playoff run in which they led their team to a title, while also having put in a great regular season but not being clearly the NBA’s best player during the season. I’d put 2011 Dirk, 2021 Giannis, and 2019 Kawhi in that bucket. Those are all great years, and I wouldn’t say 2006 Wade is way better than any of them. 2021 Giannis certainly had an amazing Finals, but the fact that he was injured for a portion of the conference finals is enough to keep it out of the running for this spot for me. As for Dirk and Kawhi, I just don’t rate their playoff runs as being quite as impressive as Wade’s. For instance, Dirk had an amazing run, but I wasn’t overly impressed with his performance in the Finals. And Kawhi simultaneously had a notably more talented team than Wade, while also being very fortunate with opponent injuries in the Finals (even leaving Durant aside, the Warriors were 2-2 and ahead in another game in the games Klay played). Kawhi played great, but I also don’t think he absolutely dominated in the same way that 2006 Wade did against the Pistons and Mavericks. So yeah, to an extent it’s splitting hairs, but I am just more impressed by Wade’s playoff run than I am by those of these other guys. They’re all pretty close though (and not just to me—all four guys were ranked between 13th and 23rd in the last peaks project).
3. I will note that I don’t rate 2017 Kawhi much as a peak. He may well have been at his best as a player that year, but if you have a playoff-ending injury, I’m not going to vote for that year in a greatest peaks project.
4. I do agree that scalability is a concern with Wade. But, for purposes of this project, I’m more concerned with what actually happened than a hypothetical of how these players might’ve done in a different situation. To me, the fact that Wade might be harder for other great players to fit with than someone like Dirk doesn’t take much away from the greatness of his 2006 year (particularly when I think he fit just fine with Shaq).
