Top 25 peaks of the 2001-25: #3-#4 Spots

[One_and_Done]

I'm voting Shaq #2 here (to Steph).

But somehow Shaq only won 60 games 3 times in his prime despite playing with a lot better players than 'decent roleplayers'. None of them in the eligible timeframe (96/98/00).

Well, that's what happens when you miss games alot 'on company time' to recover.

[eminence]

I'm voting Shaq #2 here (to Steph).

But somehow Shaq only won 60 games 3 times in his prime despite playing with a lot better players than 'decent roleplayers'. None of them in the eligible timeframe (96/98/00).

Well, that's what happens when you miss games alot 'on company time' to recover.

Do missed games not count in the standings or something?

Cause prime Shaq + loaded casts was significantly under 50% to get to 60 wins here in reality (0% success in the eligible years).

In what reality was Shaq + roleplayers regularly getting 60?

[One_and_Done]

I'm voting Shaq #2 here (to Steph).

But somehow Shaq only won 60 games 3 times in his prime despite playing with a lot better players than 'decent roleplayers'. None of them in the eligible timeframe (96/98/00).

Well, that's what happens when you miss games alot 'on company time' to recover.

Do missed games not count in the standings or something?

Cause Shaq + loaded casts was significantly under 50% to get to 60 wins here in reality.

In what reality was Shaq + roleplayers regularly getting 60?

They definitely count, and it is a mark against Shaq all-time compared to the Duncan's and Kareems of the world. Not sure what the relevance is for discussion of his peak seasons though. He played 74 in 01, and 79 in 00.

Shaq led the 00-04 Lakers to a 60+ win pace in games he played and Kobe didn't (31-11, and that includes 6-5 in 04 when the team was dysfunctional and Shaq was not as good/healthy compared to the earlier years of the sample). There are some other seasons that are suggestive of a similar impact, which I outlined on page 1.

[f4p]

Here's where I'll also say that I'm quite cautious about trying to normalize for fit when doing player evaluation. I want to note the degree of synergy between the teammates, and I do recognize that some of that is out of the player's hands, but I also want to credit players for actively seeking to learn to fit around the teammates they have, and doing that historically well as has happened with Curry & Green is something I see as a major positive.

so i think this is where i tend to disagree most with you, and this is a general PC board thing also but i know you didn't want a general conversation. i think y'all tend to credit people in great situations as having created those situations as opposed to a sports career involving a ton of luck in how things work out. whereas i view the magic/duncan/curry types as basically being born rich and then getting credit for being good with money. you view things like fitting well with your teammates as something actively created by being a smart basketball player or, what is really implied, by just being a good person who likes to fit in to help his teammates, as opposed to largely a completely random process created by a small sample size thing like a sports career where your franchise only has so many chances to fit players around you and if they knock it out of the park like golden state well, great for you, and if they don't, like KG in minnesota, then oh well.

like it's not like anyone can look at draymond and steph curry's games and skillsets and somehow conclude that steph just actively built himself to fit into that (or that draymond did either), unless we're arguing that steph really wanted to keep playing like mark jackson wanted and just acquiesced to steve kerr's model because he just realized it was better for the team. they just have remarkably well-fitting skills, as does klay with them. pippen fits great next to jordan. kareem fits well with magic. lebron doesn't fit great next to wade because they are identical. it's okay to just say people have inherent skills and sometimes they don't line up with the limited number of people a team can acquire for them as teammates. now, someone like lebron, who has fit in like 10 different situations, gives us more confidence that he can fit in a lot of situation. but a lot of the situations i mentioned above are basically career-long situations which don't really tell us anything about the players outside of that one situation.

So I’ve said this before when you’ve made this exact same argument, but I think the examples you use really undercut the point you’re trying to make—at least as applied to the player you’re trying to make the point about. You say that “lebron doesn’t fit great next to wade because they are identical.” And I think that’s basically right. But then you say that Klay has “remarkably well-fitting skills” with Steph, despite the fact that Steph and Klay have really similar skill sets. If one guy doesn’t fit well with someone who has a similar skill set as him, while another guy fits “remarkably well” with someone with a similar skill set as him, then that strongly suggests that the latter guy is easier to fit with. It’s definitely easier to build a well-fitting team around a guy if you don’t need to avoid players with similar skill sets.

well to some degree that might be true, but also not in this particular situation necessarily. trying to find someone to pair with lebron's on ball game where he creates high value shots for everyone while he doesn't necessarily provide spacing would seem somewhat obviously not to pair with someone who also creates high value shots for everyone while he doesn't necessarily provide spacing. you'd rather have shooting and iso scoring like kyrie, which isn't really any harder to find, just different. yes, i realize lebron eventually shot better, but was never really a guy defenses bent towards even with better shooting. and lebron isn't really unique in being a creator without spacing.

but steph is somewhat unique, even today. the offensive system needed around him has to be the complete steph curry experience to maximize his game. you either have to set picks for him or be looking to pass to him, with no concern for individual creation or scoring for yourself. and no lack of attention paid to steph. and we know this, because when i've argued that james harden weirdly played 2 very close series (and score more and had better on/off) with steph and his much more talented team and argued they might be closer than their #3 peak/#19 peak would indicate, i've been told by you and DraymondGOLD and others that the real problem was steph couldn't play well because kevin durant was scoring too many points, too efficiently. obviously, this is a problem 99.3% of all players historically would love to have, a teammate scoring a lot and doing it efficiently. but since iso scoring (not very unique) breaks the rhythm of the steph curry offense, he couldn't get in his flow and do what he does. well, what best works with that then? another off-ball guy who also runs around without needing to iso or dribble and who catch and shoot like few people ever. well, there aren't many of those guys, but one of them is klay thompson and he just happened to get drafted the year after steph when no one foresaw the steve kerr offense, meaning it probably was just happenstance that these 2 unique, well-fitting guys, just happened to end up on the same team where a future coach saw they were both maximized by the same thing.

i'm not trying to evaluate steph based on the 2016 finals. and again, nothing i'm saying isn't that he's been an awesome player. just that he's more "next tier" than "1st tier". if we're going off of "team results based on team talent" and box production (great but nothing first tier) and playoff resiliency (lower tier). i suspect where we would most disagree is the warriors overall talent, but i see a team that was #1 in defense in 2015, #2 in 2017, #1 in the playoffs (when they actually tried), and #1 in 2022. with a klay or klay and KD around to help with the offense.

if i was evaluating on the 2016 finals, he would obviously be much, much lower (or not in this project). i'm arguing this board is doing the opposite with 2017. if we went by the box, steph's 2017 playoff numbers are probably as far away from his second best season than just about any top 20 all time player. by raw on/off, it's 8 points higher than any finals run (2019) and over 10 points higher than any other. and people are essentially taking this outlier on/off (which i'm assuming translates into the RAPM mostly) as evidence that somehow the amazing 2017 warriors (and yes, they were amazing, maybe the best ever) were a steph curry creation when we have plenty of data that A) draymond is massively impactful during this entire warriors run and is probably taking up a susbtantial part of the warriors +11 net rating and B) that the warriors playoff net rating spiked after adding KD and dropped right after he got injured, down to even a negative net rating in the 2019 finals so it seems likely that KD (who led the 2018 team in on/off) is probably a susbstantial part of the overall story, as you would expect from a team with a prime MVP and peak DPOY "supporting" cast.

so if we somehow have a noisy on/off that spikes for 2017 steph in a way it doesn't for any other year, it would feel like people are overly indexing to it when the surrounding data doesn't tell the same story and especially the surrounding data in the 2 nearest years in 2016 and 2018. nor do the warriors amazing team results, matched overall by the 1996 bulls (a team with 3 stars but two of them fairly old with 33 year old jordan and 35 year old rodman), and in the playoffs by the 1991 bulls (a team with only 2 peak stars) and the 2001 lakers (a team with only 2 peak stars), necessarily seem to indicate that with so much overall talent on the warriors that they must have had a guy with an outsized peak above your more standard 2006 wade, 2001 shaq, or really even 2008/2009 kobe type team.

I feel like this is kind of beating on a straw man. I don’t think anyone is really materially basing their opinion of 2017 Steph on Steph’s playoff on-off that year. Single-year playoff on-off is really random, and pointing to the years around it not being as high in on-off basically is just pointing to noise. Overall, Steph has a really high +12.0 on-off in his playoff career. So when we actually look at a playoff sample that is approaching decent sized, the on-off data indicates Steph is a really impactful player. Indeed, his career playoff on-off is actually even *higher* than his career regular-season on-off (and that’s true even if we only start the RS data at the year of his first playoffs). Trying to cherry pick out specific small sample data points within that to act like playoff on-off data doesn’t have Steph looking really good seems like it’s clearly just picking out noisy data points where the noise happens to go in the direction you want it to. Granted, the same would be true if someone was really pushing Steph’s 2017 playoff on-off data as a major point, but I don’t see people doing that. The reality is that we can’t zero in to a specific year (or even a small number of specific years) and get meaningful playoff on-off data. What we can do is look at career data to get an okay-sized sample (and even then, only really for certain players with a lot of playoff experience), and when we do that for Steph the on-off data looks great for him.

okay, but his plus/minus is largely buoyed from the non-title years, with numbers like +25 and +37 in 2013 and 2014 and +18 in 2023. which is actually similar to harden with bigger numbers in OKC and 2013/14 than in his 2015-2020 peak (+8), but with basically the same +11 in 13 years from 2010 to 2022 as steph has.

but would i be right in assuming that the same RAPM data from 2017 that paints it as steph being the primary driver of one of the greatest teams ever, which seems to be the crux of his peak argument while sustained on/off greatness would be more of a Top 100 argument, would also not paint that same picture just one year later in 2018 when steph finished 4th on the team in on/off?

[lessthanjake]

I appreciate the back & forth. Responding to your points:

1. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the statement that a drop in 3% TS from RS to PS is something we should see as a major drop off. I'll grant that Wade's change looks better, but from a perspective Garnett effectively dropping something like a tier because of it, I dunno man.

These are good responses, and I’ll just respond to several things.

Regarding the above, I think 3% TS% is pretty significant. Garnett was taking about 24 true shot attempts a game in those playoffs. If he had a 3% higher TS%, he would’ve scored about 1.5 extra points a game. Which, roughly speaking, amounts to about 1.5 extra points of a impact per game (missed shots can be offensive rebounded and the team can score afterwards, which somewhat mitigates the effect of a lower TS%, but at the same time, making shots makes it easier on the next defensive possession, which exacerbates the effect of missing shots, so we can probably roughly say those things cancel out). From the perspective of player impact, I actually do think that that amounts to a tier of impact. And I think it certainly does if we add in the extra turnovers, as well as the lower per-possession output.

I'll also say that when you say he dropped to negative rTS, you're just comparing him to the regular season average TS, right? Because Garnett is still above playoff average TS in 2004.

I got Garnett’s playoff rTS% from the Thinking Basketball website. I’m virtually certain that they compare it to the opponent’s defense’s regular season TS%, rather than any league average.

We should also note that this is 2004 we're talking about, so while Minny having a PS Ortg of 101.9 sounds owful, it was actually good relative to other playoff teams that year.

So for example, Minny loses a series largely without one of their only 2 all-star level players with an ORtg of 104.0
The prior round, the Spurs lost to the same team while achieving an ORtg of only 95.2.

Now, leading a better offense than the Spurs doesn't make you a tippy top tier offensive player, but if what we're asking is instead about whether we should be dropping Garnett a tier because he only led an offense that was 8.5 points better than the Spurs seems a bit harsh.

The Timberwolves had a -1.2 rORTG in the playoffs, with the rORTG being calculated relative to the opponent’s regular season DRTG. Granted, I wouldn’t say playoff rORTG is a flawless measure (I talked about that some in this thread, with regards to Jokic), but I do think the Timberwolves being a subpar offense in the 2004 playoffs is consistent with what we might expect given Garnett’s offensive struggles.

2. More MPG means less production per minute in this case. That's true, and I'm not trying to suggest that there aren't stats that Garnett goes down by so much as I'm focusing on the "played worse in the playoffs" statement. If you're just seeing your stats go down a little bit against the tougher defense of the playoffs, to me this isn't really "playing worse". Fine to celebrate the rare players who seem to be an exception to the rule, but if a guy is largely doing what was reasonable to expect him to do in the playoffs, then we shouldn't be looking to classify that as a disappointing drop off.

Yeah, this is definitely a fair point. I do think that if someone’s production drops off in the playoffs due to playing tough defenses, then it may be understandable but it also has a good chance of meaning that the guy’s impact was lower than in the regular season. And that’s especially the case when the drop in efficiency is actually seen relative to the quality of the specific opponents (which is what is the case with rTS%, and I’m sure is the case with the turnovers too).

I also think that we shouldn’t lose sight of Garnett being compared to 2006 Wade here. Even if we assume for argument’s sake that Garnett was more impactful in the regular season than Wade was and Garnett’s impact didn’t actually drop off in the playoffs, it definitely doesn’t necessarily mean he was as good as Wade was in the playoffs. After all, Wade was pretty clearly better in the playoffs than in the regular season. And if we excuse Garnett’s drop in production in the playoffs because he played playoff defenses, then that same logic should equally make us think even more highly of Wade’s playoff stats. So, while this factor about playoff defense might be able to move the needle in a comparison between 2004 RS Garnett and 2004 Playoff Garnett, this factor can’t really move the needle here in a comparison between playoff Wade and playoff Garnett.

3. Re: "but Kobe didn't have a good 2004 playoffs". My immediate thought here is:

Kobe was in his prime in the 2004 playoffs and roughly healthy, so what we see from him represents a reasonable Kobe-level of play.

Meaning, this whole thing where we imagine players are getting tiers better or tiers worse from RS to PS from season to season within their prime is, I think, largely a trap we fall into. The reality is that the players were the players, and while some seasons end up looking narratively immaculate and some don't, that doesn't mean that it was primarily about the player becoming fundamentally better or worse.

Now as I say that, I recognize that 2004 was an odd year for the Lakers and it’s certainly not a coincidence that Kobe scored less that year than, say, in 2006. I'm not trying to argue that 2004 was Kobe's best season, but any idea of "but that wasn't Good Kobe" smacks of bit of that perfectionist bias I've been alluding to.

A couple responses to that:

1. I think there are real differences in how good players are in different seasons and different playoffs in different years, even within their primes. Some of that is just matchup related in the playoffs, and a lot of it is also health. For instance, just because a guy plays in two playoffs doesn’t mean his body was doing equally well both times. There’s also mental factors. People aren’t always as checked in at all times (which I think was probably the case with 2004 Kobe). That said, I do agree that sometimes things are just random.

2. Even if we say Kobe was in his prime and maybe just randomly didn’t have as good of results in the 2004 playoffs as he usually did, I think you’re comparing to Kobe in that particular year and then drawing a conclusion that compares to prime Kobe in general. If he played worse in the 2004 playoffs than he normally did, then there’s ample room for someone to have put up numbers as good as 2004 Kobe specifically while still being worse than prime Kobe in general. To take a fairly extreme example of this to illustrate my point, I wouldn’t say that since Dirk was better in the playoffs than 2011 LeBron, and since LeBron was in his prime in 2011 then we should conclude that 2011 Dirk was better than prime LeBron in general. In any event, I’m not sure it really matters much for purposes of this discussion, since Kobe’s rTS% in that series was better than Garnett’s.

4. Re: Talking through bad schemes involves speculation, but to avoid here.

So let me make a few distinctions here:

a) It's one thing to talk about scheme issues to elevate a player who otherwise looks unremarkable, and another thing to talk about scheme issues as another reason to be cautious about small sample size theater changing our regular season assessment dramatically.

So from my perspective, I'm using a conservative approach here not overreacting to individual playoff data in a way that would lead me to say the player was a worse player in the playoffs simply because he was dealing with a greater degree of difficulty.

To be clear, I’m not really thinking that Garnett was systematically worse in the playoffs. I just think that in the small but very important sample of the playoffs, his performance wasn’t quite up to the level he was at overall in the regular season. If those playoffs were played over again, maybe that wouldn’t have been the case. But what happened in the playoffs is what happened, and I do see a significant gap between 2006 Wade’s playoff performance and 2004 Garnett’s playoff performance, even though I don’t actually think Garnett was bad at all in the 2004 playoffs. He just was clearly not as good as 2006 Wade, which there’s no shame in.

b) While I allude to all the schemes back then being problematic, they weren't equally so, and it's generally pretty simple to identify who the most obsolete offenses coaches were, because their teams shot the least 3's. There's much more to offense than 3's of course, but if you were a particularly anti-3 coach in an era where no coach's team shot enough 3's, then your players were unlucky to be saddled with you.

I don’t disagree with this line of thinking (though I second your statement that there’s much more to offense than threes). But are we sure that the Timberwolves coach was particularly anti-three as much as that he didn’t have the personnel to produce more open threes? After all, Flip Saunders went to the Pistons a couple years later and the Pistons went from being well below average in 3PA the two prior years to being a bit above average in Saunders’ first year. There’s an element to which focusing your offense on a high-post guy (i.e. Garnett) who doesn’t really have the tools to pressure the rim and isn’t a guy who regularly collapses defenses in the low post makes it really hard to produce lots of threes. Of course, one answer to that might be to orient the offense around a different player on the team that could help you produce threes more. That might’ve been better for the Timberwolves. But at that point we’re getting into a really speculative land in terms of Garnett’s impact, because who knows what happens to his impact and box stats if the team’s offense is reoriented away from him. We have a good data point in that regard on the Celtics, where he was still very impactful with a team that wasn’t particularly offensively oriented around him, but the box stats took a definite tumble and we also just don’t know what that would look like on the Timberwolves.

5. Re: title wouldn't necessarily make opinion of Garnett higher. Well and of course, it shouldn't in theory, but I think we all tend to anchor ourselves on types of winning bias we don't even realize.

The idea that there were major issues with a Garnett-led offense in Minny but not a Duncan-led offense in SA is, I would say, precisely that. We're talking about to incompetent offenses by modern standards whose gap in effectiveness at the time wasn't even necessarily that clear, so why do people immediately start talking about Duncan's volume scoring when doing those comparisons?

I think it's the chips.

There’s definite truth to this. That said, to add on to what I said above, I do think that Duncan was better suited to produce threes for his team, since he was a guy who could at least collapse the defense towards him in the low post. Duncan-centered offense wasn’t modern offense by any means, but I do think it was easier for a team to produce more modern shot selection with Duncan than with Garnett.

[lessthanjake]

so i think this is where i tend to disagree most with you, and this is a general PC board thing also but i know you didn't want a general conversation. i think y'all tend to credit people in great situations as having created those situations as opposed to a sports career involving a ton of luck in how things work out. whereas i view the magic/duncan/curry types as basically being born rich and then getting credit for being good with money. you view things like fitting well with your teammates as something actively created by being a smart basketball player or, what is really implied, by just being a good person who likes to fit in to help his teammates, as opposed to largely a completely random process created by a small sample size thing like a sports career where your franchise only has so many chances to fit players around you and if they knock it out of the park like golden state well, great for you, and if they don't, like KG in minnesota, then oh well.

like it's not like anyone can look at draymond and steph curry's games and skillsets and somehow conclude that steph just actively built himself to fit into that (or that draymond did either), unless we're arguing that steph really wanted to keep playing like mark jackson wanted and just acquiesced to steve kerr's model because he just realized it was better for the team. they just have remarkably well-fitting skills, as does klay with them. pippen fits great next to jordan. kareem fits well with magic. lebron doesn't fit great next to wade because they are identical. it's okay to just say people have inherent skills and sometimes they don't line up with the limited number of people a team can acquire for them as teammates. now, someone like lebron, who has fit in like 10 different situations, gives us more confidence that he can fit in a lot of situation. but a lot of the situations i mentioned above are basically career-long situations which don't really tell us anything about the players outside of that one situation.

So I’ve said this before when you’ve made this exact same argument, but I think the examples you use really undercut the point you’re trying to make—at least as applied to the player you’re trying to make the point about. You say that “lebron doesn’t fit great next to wade because they are identical.” And I think that’s basically right. But then you say that Klay has “remarkably well-fitting skills” with Steph, despite the fact that Steph and Klay have really similar skill sets. If one guy doesn’t fit well with someone who has a similar skill set as him, while another guy fits “remarkably well” with someone with a similar skill set as him, then that strongly suggests that the latter guy is easier to fit with. It’s definitely easier to build a well-fitting team around a guy if you don’t need to avoid players with similar skill sets.

well to some degree that might be true, but also not in this particular situation necessarily. trying to find someone to pair with lebron's on ball game where he creates high value shots for everyone while he doesn't necessarily provide spacing would seem somewhat obviously not to pair with someone who also creates high value shots for everyone while he doesn't necessarily provide spacing. you'd rather have shooting and iso scoring like kyrie, which isn't really any harder to find, just different. yes, i realize lebron eventually shot better, but was never really a guy defenses bent towards even with better shooting. and lebron isn't really unique in being a creator without spacing.

but steph is somewhat unique, even today. the offensive system needed around him has to be the complete steph curry experience to maximize his game. you either have to set picks for him or be looking to pass to him, with no concern for individual creation or scoring for yourself. and no lack of attention paid to steph. and we know this, because when i've argued that james harden weirdly played 2 very close series (and score more and had better on/off) with steph and his much more talented team and argued they might be closer than their #3 peak/#19 peak would indicate, i've been told by you and DraymondGOLD and others that the real problem was steph couldn't play well because kevin durant was scoring too many points, too efficiently. obviously, this is a problem 99.3% of all players historically would love to have, a teammate scoring a lot and doing it efficiently. but since iso scoring (not very unique) breaks the rhythm of the steph curry offense, he couldn't get in his flow and do what he does. well, what best works with that then? another off-ball guy who also runs around without needing to iso or dribble and who catch and shoot like few people ever. well, there aren't many of those guys, but one of them is klay thompson and he just happened to get drafted the year after steph when no one foresaw the steve kerr offense, meaning it probably was just happenstance that these 2 unique, well-fitting guys, just happened to end up on the same team where a future coach saw they were both maximized by the same thing.

This is all just a rehash of a discussion we’ve had long ago, but I think if your argument centers around Steph not fitting with Kevin Durant, then it’s pretty clearly a bad argument. After all, Steph and Durant combined together to produce probably the best team in NBA history. They clearly did not fit badly together! And you yourself have made arguments about how the team did even better in the playoffs when Durant was added, which certainly suggests that the two players fit well together (especially when we keep in mind that Durant was added to a team that was already great in playoffs—having won a title and lost in the Finals before Durant got there). This is an example of two superstars actually fitting well together and producing an astoundingly good team as a result. The fact that that’s your poster child for a type of player Steph wouldn’t fit with kind of makes clear how easy Steph is to fit with.

I also want to note that I think you’re misconstruing what others have said about Steph and Durant, or at least you are when it comes to what I’ve said. I did not say Steph “couldn’t play well because Kevin Durant was scoring too many points.” I made the very unremarkable point that Steph’s box stats naturally went down when Kevin Durant was added to the team. But I also said that I think his impact stayed incredibly high, and I’ve produced data to that effect. Which essentially translates to Steph playing as well and being similarly impactful, despite another superstar being added. Again, that’s certainly not indicative of a bad fit!

okay, but his plus/minus is largely buoyed from the non-title years, with numbers like +25 and +37 in 2013 and 2014 and +18 in 2023. which is actually similar to harden with bigger numbers in OKC and 2013/14 than in his 2015-2020 peak (+8), but with basically the same +11 in 13 years from 2010 to 2022 as steph has.

Again, plus-minus numbers are very random in small samples. If a guy’s playoff on-off looks better in years where he wasn’t actually as good a player, our conclusion shouldn’t be that he was better in those lesser years. Nor should it be that we should ignore the data in those years and just artificially lower an already-small sample. Rather, we should compile the data we have so that we can get a sample size that is approaching something meaningful and see what that tells us. Anything else is just engaging in cherry-picking and small-sample-size theater. And when we do compile the playoff on-off data for Steph, it looks really good. It definitely does not indicate that Steph has a drop-off in impact in the playoffs.

but would i be right in assuming that the same RAPM data from 2017 that paints it as steph being the primary driver of one of the greatest teams ever, which seems to be the crux of his peak argument while sustained on/off greatness would be more of a Top 100 argument, would also not paint that same picture just one year later in 2018 when steph finished 4th on the team in on/off?

I’m not quite sure what RAPM data you’re asking about, and RAPM data without some sort of box prior is too noisy to be of much value for a single season, so it’s hard to really parse between 2017 vs. 2018, since the most meaningful RAPM data would include multiple years. But, FWIW, by one measure, Steph was 1st in the NBA in single-season RAPM in both 2017 and 2018 (See: https://basketball-analytics.gitlab.io/rapm-data/season/2016-17/regular-season/ and https://basketball-analytics.gitlab.io/rapm-data/season/2017-18/regular-season/)). By another single-season RAPM measure, Steph was 1st in the NBA in single-season RAPM in 2017 and 2nd in the NBA in single-season RAPM in 2018, while being far above anyone else on the Warriors (See: https://www.thebasketballdatabase.com/201939RegularSeasonAdvanced.html and https://www.thebasketballdatabase.com/2017-18GSWRegularSeasonAdvanced.html).

[Djoker]

My top 2 got voted in so here come my previous #3, #4 and the two HM's not on the ballot.

1. 2001 Shaquille O'Neal
2. 2017 Stephen Curry
3. 2023 Nikola Jokic
4. 2008 Kobe Bryant

Shaq in 2001... his regular season just isn't good compared to most top guys on here. The postseason is amazing putting up basically the same numbers as in 2000 despite the team not really needing it. Also very consistent from game to game. I think Kobe being so darn good in 2001 (IMO even a slightly better PS than Shaq) gives me pause but not really.

Steph as lessthanjake and several others said suffers from never putting together a GOAT-level RS (2016) with a GOAT-level PS (arguably 2017). I think if he did, I would strongly consider him for #1. Leading a 73-win team and then having an unassailable PS sounds like the best ever. But it never happened. Steph's 1-year peak when it comes down to it gives me less than the three guys in front of him. Compared to Shaq, Curry lacks a little bit of playoff resilience. In years outside of 2017, the Golden State offenses haven't looked as good in the playoffs whereas Shaq's Lakers looked really good.

As a fellow Serb, saying that I love Nikola would be an understatement. But still, if I'm going to be objective, I don't see him being higher than #3 on this list and see him as a rung below the other offensive GOAT's. Why? Quite simply, his postseason offenses have been underwhelming.

We can excuse 2021 and 2022 due to Murray's injury but it's a consistent trend throughout his career. From 2021-2025, his ON-Court rORtg is +9.6 in the regular season but just +4.5 in the postseason. Big drops every postseason suggests that there may be something to the Denver offense that good teams in the playoffs "solve". Nikola himself is almost impossible to stop individually but team playoff resiliency is super important and this is one area he lacks in.

Impact metrics don't really love Kobe. For instance, he looks a good deal lower than everyone else in terms of RAPM, DARKO, RAPTOR etc. That said, I love the malleability in his skill set and his teams have usually been better than the sum of their parts. Shaq for all his greatness only led truly great teams alongside Kobe. Kobe also maximized Gasol and role players after Shaq left with those teams playing at 60+ win pace and dominating in the PS with Kobe carrying big loads.

For instance, despite being a clearly lesser player by individual metrics, Kobe's ON-Court offensive ratings post-Shaq have looked outright better than Jokic's in the postseason and roughly on Curry's level. And that does matter. It makes me think his team's offense built around him is difficult to neutralize in a playoff setting. That doesn't necessarily show up on the stat sheet but it matters a ton. Or I should say it matters enough to earn him an HM and a swift inclusion on future ballots. Kobe is definitely the guy with one of the widest ranges. I think if you're very optimistic in his valuation (elite unmatched skill and adaptability, solid positive on D) you can put him as high as #3 behind Lebron and Duncan IMO. With a pessimistic view focusing on rTS and seeing him as a near neutral defender he can fall much lower behind the likes of KG, Giannis, Wade... Because impact stats don't exactly love him and he's had tremendous success as a ceiling raiser, there is a great deal of subjectivity.

HM: Kevin Garnett

He's the only one I could really really maybe sneaking onto my ballot but I'm just not convinced. The playoff declines combined with total disappointment as far as team results means he is just unproven. That might feel unfair to say given his **** sandwich situation in Minnesota but I can't give the guy credit for leading championship teams at his peak when he didn't even come close. If you just focus on his impact stat profile in the RS, you can put him pretty darn high... but I won't. I care about playoffs a lot. The Wolves looking poor in many of these series on both ends of the court has to reflect at least somewhat poorly on KG. In Boston he sort of did it but it wasn't convincing. The 2008 Celtics also had a pretty dramatic decline comparing their RS form to their PS form. It's a common denominator with Garnett across two teams.

[jalengreen]

3. 2015 Stephen Curry
I've been voting for 2017 recently, but there was such a complete and utter lack of challenge there, I don't really see the reason to pick it over 2015 where Curry had slightly worse playoff numbers, but much better regular season numbers. Whichever year you pick, it seems like has several seasons that beat any other player left's best individual season by xRAPM and his combination of shooting and off-ball movement to a special additive effect that's pretty much unprecedented the rest of NBA history.

Does xRAPM refer to Engelmann's on xrapm.com?

If so, Steph doesn't actually have any seasons with a higher xRAPM than 2025 Shai. Does not have multiple over CP3 or Kawhi either.

Highest xRAPM among players not named LeBron/Duncan/Jokic/KG (the guys voted in or placed ahead of Curry on your ballot):

2025 Shai - 9.2
2016 Curry - 8.2
2017 Leonard - 8.2
2015 Paul - 8.1
2018 Curry - 8.0

(Wouldn't actually take any of these players over peak Curry)

[Doctor MJ]

i'm continuing this from the last thread since these guys are still on the ballot.

Shouldn't stuff like this force people to be higher on #19 peak harden? He's basically tied with Steph and duncan while being the only non-KG guy who wasn't on a dynasty, which you say above tends to make it tough to look good in these measures, like we see with Manu and green.

Well, I can only speak for myself, and for myself I'm not coming in with any assumption of where Harden should be.

But I would also note that you just singled out the measure I posted where Harden looks best - so there are other perspectives that look worse - and we are talking about a career measure here rather than a peak/prime measure. We should remember Harden's best Playoff RAPM span almost certainly has a significant OKC component, and while I'm not looking to knock his time in OKC at all - I thought he was severely underrated - this likely means that around the time of his MVP he probably wouldn't rank quite as high as this study suggests.

On this note, I'm going to take data from a source I'm really cautious about using because a) playoff RAPM is fraught with issues, b) single post-season RAPM data all the more so, and c) I don't know anything about who the source actually is, but it's what we have and it's relevant here:

Single-season RS & PS RAPM studies on Github

So for Harden, in the playoffs, this is where this source rates Harden, fwiw:

OKC
'09-10: +0.3665 (50th & below Durant, Westbrook)
'10-11: +1.9783 (6th & above them)
'11-12: +2.7003 (3rd & above them)

Houston
'12-13: -.5004 (negative)
'13-14: -.0815 (negative)
'14-15: +0.2547 (67th)
'15-16: -1.4063 (negative)
'16-17: +0.6537 (37th)
'17-18: +1.6445 (8th)
'18-19: +1.1475 (26th)

That's as far as their studies go, and we should note that the Cheema study goes two more years which could have helped some. In neither case is it factoring in the last 4 years.

i mean someone like steph has most of his best on/off numbers (can't speak to this github RAPM stuff) from non-title years. also, aren't the numbers you posted the kind of thing that should lower our confidence in these numbers? so james harden was best in his 2nd and 3rd year in the league as a 21 and 22 year old (i'll just get ahead of anyone saying we can't use this to rank players even though we do all the time)? he was maybe a positive in an mvp caliber 2015 season with very nice box score numbers and a very good playoffs until game 5 against the warriors? the 2019 rockets somehow got carried to a dominant first round and neck and neck series with the steph/KD warriors with the 26th best player who wasn't really that impactful? harden wasn't even a positive player 2014 or 2016 and the 2017 rockets would have been just fine without the guys who accounted for the 2nd most points in history? but 2012 james harden would have wrecked shop? feels like it's way to "value you in your role" oriented to mean basically anything.

edit: 2013 and 2014 being negative also just seems really weird. harden's box score numbers fell off hard but his on/off those years was +30 and +16. given that the other numbers largely follow harden's raw on/off, kind of hard to imagine how +30 and +16 can flip to a negative.

Re: Steph has most his best on-off numbers from non-title years. Same concern applies to every player certainly, and relates to why on top of being cautious about using PS +/-, and specifically cautious about using career PS RAPM in a peak conversation.

Re: Should lower our confidence in these numbers? I'm not sure what "these numbers" entails, but we should always have less confidence in small sample size numbers, and this is a bigger concern with +/- than traditional box score.

Re: So Harden was best in his 2nd & 3rd years according to this data. Wouldn't say best, but potentially more impactful playing the way he did in OKC with those teammates against contending competition than he was later years with his ultra-high primacy game.

Re: "until Game 5". Not sure what precisely you're speaking to there, but I'm certainly cautious about saying he was X until this one game based on +/- data, and just generally my broader point is that we need to be careful about this data in small sample size, so I'm not looking to try to give explanations for noise.

Re: "but 2012 Harden would have wrecked, feels like value in your role oriented to mean basically anything". I'm not sure what to say here. Harden played a very different role in OKC than in Houston, and thus it's possible he was more impactful in the OKC role than the Houston role.

If you're confused about Harden playing a different role in OKC than Houston, we can certainly talk about it.

So I'll probably always talk more about RS RAPM data than PS RAPM data even as I acknowledge that legacy is determined primarily from the post-season. And this definitely leaves room for the possibility of a player being much less or much more effective in the playoffs relative to rivals than RS RAPM would indicate, and once again drives us back to the final step of analysis not being following stats but explaining how we come to differ in assessment from them.

so then we're at the point of the playoffs being given enormous weight for a player's legacy, moreso than any other sport, but then primarily using a measure that can't be trusted for the playoffs. i know you acknowledged it's an issue, but it seems to be a really big issue.

I wouldn't call it a small issue, and at the same time, I'd say this family of stats has quite a lot to do with why NBA basketball is so much more effective now than it was 20 years ago, because the issue with using box score production without pairing some form of WOWY type analysis are much, much worse. (I'll also say, the timeline for the WNBA is delayed further, and some of the award choices made in the 2010s WNBA feel like they were made by NBA journalists from decades further back.)

I would emphasize that I don't only use +/- data in my analysis, and would never recommend anyone do that for any measure. So why do I emphasize it to start discussion?

1. It represents a valid statistical measure - while box score production is invalid in the technical meaning of the word in that it biases assessment away from scoreboard impact - that with sufficient sample will approximate actual impact, hence when we do have bigger samples, it's a logical place to start.

It's not that I expect any +/- measure to be the "right answer", but I think it's an important step to try to understand how a player's +/- data in large sample came to be, and have a basketball sense for why deviation from the measure in your assessment makes sense.

2. It's always been harder to come by, and less consumed, than traditional stats. Everyone who can find realgm.com also knows how to find all the box score stats, but play-by-play stats organized in a way that's readable, not as much.

Here's where I'll also say that I'm quite cautious about trying to normalize for fit when doing player evaluation. I want to note the degree of synergy between the teammates, and I do recognize that some of that is out of the player's hands, but I also want to credit players for actively seeking to learn to fit around the teammates they have, and doing that historically well as has happened with Curry & Green is something I see as a major positive.

so i think this is where i tend to disagree most with you, and this is a general PC board thing also but i know you didn't want a general conversation. i think y'all tend to credit people in great situations as having created those situations as opposed to a sports career involving a ton of luck in how things work out. whereas i view the magic/duncan/curry types as basically being born rich and then getting credit for being good with money. you view things like fitting well with your teammates as something actively created by being a smart basketball player or, what is really implied, by just being a good person who likes to fit in to help his teammates, as opposed to largely a completely random process created by a small sample size thing like a sports career where your franchise only has so many chances to fit players around you and if they knock it out of the park like golden state well, great for you, and if they don't, like KG in minnesota, then oh well.

like it's not like anyone can look at draymond and steph curry's games and skillsets and somehow conclude that steph just actively built himself to fit into that (or that draymond did either), unless we're arguing that steph really wanted to keep playing like mark jackson wanted and just acquiesced to steve kerr's model because he just realized it was better for the team. they just have remarkably well-fitting skills, as does klay with them. pippen fits great next to jordan. kareem fits well with magic. lebron doesn't fit great next to wade because they are identical. it's okay to just say people have inherent skills and sometimes they don't line up with the limited number of people a team can acquire for them as teammates. now, someone like lebron, who has fit in like 10 different situations, gives us more confidence that he can fit in a lot of situation. but a lot of the situations i mentioned above are basically career-long situations which don't really tell us anything about the players outside of that one situation.

So, I thought I was following until you got to KG in Minny, because this board being high on KG is maybe its greatest stereotype, and that seems to run 180 counter to the "credit people in great situations as having created those situations".

I do think that the conversation around fit is quite important, and it's understandable to disagree on how to consider fit in any given context. I'm on record being against trying to normalize for fit in an MVP context, but I'm not drying such a clear cut line in this project. In a nutshell, while impact is fit-dependent, in theory goodness isn't.

I will say that proving that you can fit in with other talents is a big deal to me.

I'll also say that I don't think Steph ever benefitted from Kerr's offensive scheme nearly as much as people think. He demonstrated prior to Kerr he was capable of being more of an on-ball point guard and being an MVP candidate level player, and then he demonstrated with Kerr that he could play off-ball rover and be an MVP candidate level player. Utterly remarkable that he was able to switch from one to the other. If one of Dame or Giannis could have done that in Milwaukee, everything would have gone different there.

By contrast, while Curry didn't need Green to be an offensive superstar on-ball, he does need a great passer like Green to have comparable offensive impact while playing off-ball... but this is true of everyone. Everyone on the court who doesn't have the ball needs the guy with the ball to be good at passing, and if he isn't and he dominates the ball, they won't be at their best.

And I'd say this is why Klay was the primary intended beneficiary of Kerr's scheme, not Steph. It was frustration with Jackson's inability to develop Klay that was the basketball part of why Jackson had to go (the other part was Jackson's insecure narcissism). Of course you can argue that Steph was less valuable as an offensive player pre-Kerr precisely because as point guard he couldn't get everything out of Klay, and I wouldn't really argue against that though I would emphasize a) we already had all the box score & +/- indicators that Steph was amazing, and b) Klay was never actually THAT good - the type of player Klay was, is basically something every team should have and that's great, but the Splash Brothers branding really gives a false impression of how much of an outlier Klay was compared to Steph.

Meanwhile on Dray, he really is THAT good imho and him being unlocked had everything to do with the Warriors not simply emerging as a contender, but emerging as a dynasty. The Warriors deserved some credit for drafting Green of course, but Kerr's scheme wasn't implemented with the idea Green specifically is one of the smartest players in NBA history, and while the scheme was going to lead to smart players flourishing over others just by definition, it was quite fortunate for all others involved that Green emerged as the outlier talent he is.

But as I say all of that, it's not like Green has offensive RAPM numbers that make him look like a superstar or challenge Curry. Mostly what we're talking about in terms of his impact is his defensive IQ, and while Curry is lucky to have such a defender by his side, and having such a defender was a critical part of the dynasty, none of it changes the fact that Curry's an extreme offensive outlier.

Re: LeBron & Wade didn't fit well. So, here's where I'll emphasize that from an MVP perspective I find the idea of normalizing for fit absurd. When a player specifically chooses to play next to a guy he doesn't synergize that well next to, he makes his own bed.

It's more complicated when we're talking about a guy who just ends up on incompetent franchise without any choice on the matter, but when you choose, and you don't choose as wisely as you could have, it's on you from a value-achievement perspective.

From a goodness perspective though, it ideally shouldn't matter, it's just that time spent playing with a noticeably poor fit raises questions about your lack of versatility - either due to talent issues, or stubbornness issues.

This is what I mean by kids gloves. Yes, LeBron is amazing and maybe had his best series ever, or maybe anybody's best series ever. But the warriors lost because steph was real bad. Full stop. The scoring champion averaged 22 ppg and had more turnovers than assists for the series and went 6/19 in a nail biter game 7 against a team with no elite perimeter defenders that regularly had 35 year old richard jefferson and kevin love playing forward minutes.

It doesn't get talked about like 2011 LeBron, but it's arguably even more of a thrown away title. Like the Heat needed to win 2 more games, the warriors just needed to score more than 0 points in the final 5 minutes of the series.

So, let me acknowledge that the mere fact that it was LeBron's team that Steph's team lost to doesn't mean Steph should be above criticism in non-LeBron debates.

But let me also point out that you're zeroing in on what you perceive as Steph's greatest failure to evaluate him as a player, and this is something that I try to avoid, just as I try to avoid getting overly infatuated with runs that seem "perfect" as if the player's lack of perfection in any other years is about that player getting a tier worse.

So in the '15-16 Finals, Steph has worse numbers than in the '14-15 Finals. Does that mean he generally got worse at basketball from one year to the next? I think all would say "No", and would also note that Curry clearly improved from '14-15 to '15-16 looking at the entirety of the season. So what does it mean that Curry was worse in the '15-16 series?

i'm not trying to evaluate steph based on the 2016 finals. and again, nothing i'm saying isn't that he's been an awesome player. just that he's more "next tier" than "1st tier". if we're going off of "team results based on team talent" and box production (great but nothing first tier) and playoff resiliency (lower tier). i suspect where we would most disagree is the warriors overall talent, but i see a team that was #1 in defense in 2015, #2 in 2017, #1 in the playoffs (when they actually tried), and #1 in 2022. with a klay or klay and KD around to help with the offense.

if i was evaluating on the 2016 finals, he would obviously be much, much lower (or not in this project). i'm arguing this board is doing the opposite with 2017. if we went by the box, steph's 2017 playoff numbers are probably as far away from his second best season than just about any top 20 all time player. by raw on/off, it's 8 points higher than any finals run (2019) and over 10 points higher than any other. and people are essentially taking this outlier on/off (which i'm assuming translates into the RAPM mostly) as evidence that somehow the amazing 2017 warriors (and yes, they were amazing, maybe the best ever) were a steph curry creation when we have plenty of data that A) draymond is massively impactful during this entire warriors run and is probably taking up a susbtantial part of the warriors +11 net rating and B) that the warriors playoff net rating spiked after adding KD and dropped right after he got injured, down to even a negative net rating in the 2019 finals so it seems likely that KD (who led the 2018 team in on/off) is probably a susbstantial part of the overall story, as you would expect from a team with a prime MVP and peak DPOY "supporting" cast.

so if we somehow have a noisy on/off that spikes for 2017 steph in a way it doesn't for any other year, it would feel like people are overly indexing to it when the surrounding data doesn't tell the same story and especially the surrounding data in the 2 nearest years in 2016 and 2018. nor do the warriors amazing team results, matched overall by the 1996 bulls (a team with 3 stars but two of them fairly old with 33 year old jordan and 35 year old rodman), and in the playoffs by the 1991 bulls (a team with only 2 peak stars) and the 2001 lakers (a team with only 2 peak stars), necessarily seem to indicate that with so much overall talent on the warriors that they must have had a guy with an outsized peak above your more standard 2006 wade, 2001 shaq, or really even 2008/2009 kobe type team.

Re: not trying to judge him by 2016 finals. Okay, noted.

Re: "team results based on team talent". I mean, the Warriors had the single best regular season in NBA history in '15-16 with Steph with a supporting cast that absolutely no one thought was an outlier until they started having dynastic success, so anyone saying they should have done more given their talent is largely just saying they shouldn't have lost any playoff series, which I would say isn't a standard that other players are being held to.

Then Durant comes in '16-17, and the team is literally the best team in the history of the NBA based on how good they looked in the playoffs, so what more should they have done?

After that the seasons aren't such clear outliers, but we're still talking about

a) winning the '17-18 chip
b) nearly winning the '18-19 chip despite crippling injuries
c) winning a title in '21-22 despite losing KD and having Wiggins as the part of their Big 3 with Steph & Dray

I'm just real skeptical people thought they should do better than this.

In my experience, people have generally been low on the Warriors. Not predicting them to emerge as a contender in '14-15, not predicting them to take another leap forward in '15-16, and then burying them in 2020 dead convinced that Steph was cooked and taking the opportunity to emphasize that '14-15 was a fluke anyway, and that KD was the real top-tier talent despite him really never matching the impact indicators of Curry before, during, or after his time in GS.

Re: "noisy on/off that spikes for 2017 steph in a way it doesn't for any other year". I mean, Steph has a playoff on-off of >+10 in 6 of his 10 playoff runs, so I'd reject the idea that 2017 represents something completely uncharacteristic of his other seasons by that measure.

Re: Jordan Bulls match Steph Warriors. There's truth in that certainly. Those Bulls wouldn't have a prayer today without completely re-shaping the strategy, but they were super-dominant in their era, and I have no serious concern about Jordan or Pippen being able to adapt to today game pretty well.

[eminence]

When will this thread be open til?

[70sFan]

When will this thread be open til?

Next Sunday.

[One_and_Done]

Just leaving this here, but in 2017 Kawhi put up 39/9/5 per 100, with 121 Ortg and 610 TS%, while also being perhaps the best defensive player in the league. In the playoffs he got serious, and dropped 40/11/7 per 100, with 136 Ortg & 672 TS%. I'll repeat that again. His Ortg that playoffs was 136. Jokic has never had an Ortg that high in either the RS or PS, and he sure isn't providing a tenth of what Kawhi does on D.

[Jaivl]

Just leaving this here, but in 2017 Kawhi put up 39/9/5 per 100, with 121 Ortg and 610 TS%, while also being perhaps the best defensive player in the league. In the playoffs he got serious, and dropped 40/11/7 per 100, with 136 Ortg & 672 TS%. I'll repeat that again. His Ortg that playoffs was 136. Jokic has never had an Ortg that high in either the RS or PS, and he sure isn't providing a tenth of what Kawhi does on D.

I'd definitely consider him if he had been healthy.

[One_and_Done]

Just leaving this here, but in 2017 Kawhi put up 39/9/5 per 100, with 121 Ortg and 610 TS%, while also being perhaps the best defensive player in the league. In the playoffs he got serious, and dropped 40/11/7 per 100, with 136 Ortg & 672 TS%. I'll repeat that again. His Ortg that playoffs was 136. Jokic has never had an Ortg that high in either the RS or PS, and he sure isn't providing a tenth of what Kawhi does on D.

I'd definitely consider him if he had been healthy.

I don't understand the logic of these kinds of remarks. He played 74 RS games (with most of the missed ones being due to SAs resting policy) and 12 PS games, before a random injury sidelined him. Am I supposed to consider Kawhi 'injured', but 06 Kobe who played only 1 more game across the RS and PS to be 'healthy'? Kawhi made it to the WCFs, I don't see why we'd reward guys like Kobe who didn't make it far enough in the playoffs to get hurt. If Kobe made it to the WCFs maybe he'd suffer a random injury too. Giannis in 21 is being nominated, and only played 82 games. That wasn't his fault of course, but maybe if he'd played 86 he'd have been hurt also.

[Jaivl]

Am I supposed to consider Kawhi 'injured', but 06 Kobe who played only 1 more game across the RS and PS to be 'healthy'?

I think you're supposed to consider the injured player as injured and the healthy player as healthy, yes.

Kawhi made it to the WCFs, I don't see why we'd reward guys like Kobe who didn't make it far enough in the playoffs to get hurt.

What does this even mean you're not "rewarding" anybody. Having a reasonably healthy deep playoff run is far from an exceptional situation, it's the expected occurrence (at least until the last 5 years).

If Kobe made it to the WCFs maybe he'd suffer a random injury too. Giannis in 21 is being nominated, and only played 82 games. That wasn't his fault of course, but maybe if he'd played 86 he'd have been hurt also.

Maybe. And if Kawhi got to the Finals maybe he would've missed all his shots. We have the absolute certainty that Kawhi got injured in 2017. And on his particular case, he's been injured on more than half of his prime seasons. Maybe him not getting injured until the WCF was luck going on his favour.

[One_and_Done]

Kawhi played 86 games across the RS & PS. One less than 06 Kobe, and four more than 21 Giannis. That's what happened, and that's what I'll be rating him on. That's sufficient for me not to penalise him for a random injury.

[trelos6]

If a player is injured during the regular season, and misses 20 games, I’m less inclined to penalise them.

If they are injured in the playoffs, and it ends their season, then it’s a bigger issue. If Kawhi was healthy, maybe the Spurs could’ve won a championship. But he wasn’t, so the championship probability dropped like a brick.

[70sFan]

If Jokic was leading that team to 58 wins, it'd be impressive. 48 not so much.

In the last 25 years, we haven't seen anybody do so. We have seen people do a bit more with a bit better cast (02 Duncan, 07 James, a number of KG seasons) or do a bit less with a similar or a bit worse cast (05 KG, 09 Wade, 21 Curry), but never more with a similar cast.

I don't agree, but leaving that aside there seems to be quite strong proof that a team of decentrole players was a 60 win team with peak Shaq, which is why the 00-04 Lakers in particular was focussed on (and why some of 70sFans responses, where he didn't even seem to know who had played what year or at what level, were so insufficient).

When did I show I don't know who had played what year or at what level? I am well aware of the ages of Grant or Harper, otherwise I wouldn't call them roleplayers. It's not my fault that you are unable to provide one thing that made Austin Rivers a reliable bench player for playoff team.

[LA Bird]

Kawhi only started routinely breaking down in the playoffs from 2021 onwards so the 2017 injury to me was a one-off thing that's not too big of a dealbreaker. The bigger problem with that season was his impact metrics.

In general, I think people can sometimes be too black and white when it comes to postseason injuries. A player can be in all 82 regular season games and every playoffs game until the Finals but if he is injured there and misses the last couple games, someone like Ben will probably say that season is worth literally zero because of playoffs injury. Meanwhile, if the same player had an injury in the regular season which cost his team a playoffs spot completely, that won't be a zero season because he didn't have a playoffs injury. That's just silly to me. It's like saying a team which lost by 4 in regulation was closer to winning than a team that lost by 5 in OT. Or that it's better to lose in round 1 than to be swept in the Finals so you can avoid hurting your Finals record. Penalties for going further never make sense.

Anyways, reposting my reasoning because there are no new players this round:

1. Stephen Curry (17)
2. Shaquille O'Neal (01)
3. Kevin Garnett (08 > 04)
4. Nikola Jokic (23)

Three offensive juggernauts next and I'll start with Shaq since he is basically the default peak outside of the PC board. 3 consecutive FMVPs while demolishing opponents on the biggest stage is obviously an easy case to make. But here is the thing - the Finals opponents were pretty much the worst teams the Lakers would face the entire playoffs during that 3peat. If we try a little thought exercise and label the eastern series as round 1 and the WCF as the finals, this is how things would look instead:

2000 Lakers barely win against choking Blazers. Shaq wins FMVP with 26/12.
2001 Lakers crush Spurs on a 15 game win streak. Kobe wins FMVP with 33/7/7.
2002 Lakers barely win against choking Kings. Shaq wins FMVP with 30/14.

On court performance stays the same but in terms of public perception, Shaq loses the MDE aura boost that historically elevated him above other GOAT peaks. IMO, if we are talking about real MDE, I think that title actually belongs to Curry's +18 on court offense in the 2017 playoffs. We can (and really should) ask questions about why Curry was merely averaging +5 offense the rest of his postseason career given this insane peak but that's outside the scope of this project. You can call it luck or whatever but things just clicked in that one run. It was the only time in his career Curry's 3pt volume and efficiency didn't decline from regular season to playoffs, and the only time he beat Draymond in playoffs on/off during their 15-22 title span. The team was stacked but every lineup combination also improved a lot with the addition of Curry. OTOH, the very strength of that team can be a counterargument. Curry has never had another playoffs offense even half as good as 17 and if the only time he is at this level is on a team that would cruise to an easy title with him doing way less anyway, how valuable really is that additional juice?

Going back to Shaq, he may lose the peak MDE label but I do think he has the most consistent playoffs track record here which is often overlooked. 01 is not as godly as 17 but then Shaq has four more +10 playoffs offenses. Curry has never gotten near that level outside 17. Neither has Jokic even when Murray was popping off (peaking at +7 in 20 and 23). In other playoff runs, Jokic has only been +1 in 21, +3 in 22, +2 in 24, and +3 in 25. Sure, we can talk about supporting casts playing an important role in overall team ratings but it's not like those early Lakers teams with teenage Kobe off the bench were stacked. And Jokic himself has carried Murray-less lineups well in the last few regular seasons - it just didn't translate in the playoffs. In the end, while Jokic beats Shaq in efficiency handily and in basically any type of skillset analysis, the lacking playoffs results led me to drop him back down in my rankings. Not very confident about it and maybe it's simply a product of the different league environments but it is what it is.

Why no Garnett yet? Well, it's not his fault but I think Minnesota was simply so bad that you can't really evaluate him properly. It's like watching a sprinter compete while carrying weights and trying to extrapolate how fast he would be without it. People will point to 08 Celtics as proof that KG's impact translates to better teams and while that is true, nobody is actually voting for the 08 version. We are voting for 04 when he had bigger offensive numbers while admitting it's a sub-optimal role. It's like if we agree on 67 Wilt's impact but then vote for his 62 season instead. Yeah, Garnett led three straight top 5 offenses in the 02-04 regular season and was among the league leaders in ORAPM. But do we really trust that to hold up in the postseason when his long 2s aren't falling at a Dirk-like rate? TWolves offense dropped in the playoffs as did KG's own RAPM numbers. Even on the Celtics when he was a better shooter (judging from FT%) and surrounded by talent, his offensive impact wasn't in that top echelon. Which is totally fine because he was a defense-first player after all but I do think people can get deceived by that 5.5 ORAPM number in 04 when discussing that season. Moving onto his defense, the guy checks all the boxes but I should point out RAPM is a rate metric and Garnett's minutes dropped to 32 once he went to Boston at age 31. Pierce and Allen didn't dip to that level until after they left Boston at age 36 and 37. Could KG have kept up the same defensive impact playing as many minutes as he did in 04? Possibly, but we never got to see it. He did anchor very strong playoff defenses while playing 36mpg on the Celtics (-9.8 defense) so maybe I'll move him above Jokic next round.

[Joao Saraiva]

1. Nikola Jokic 2023
I think he peaked the highest from the players available. I'm still stunned at what he brings to the table.

The complete offensive player - scoring, rebounding, playmaking. At levels that are unprecedent in scoring efficiency (yes, 70 ts% is out of this world and he's done it) and playmaking (no one even close as a big man). He makes construction trough center better than ever and is possibly the only center ever that would be the #1 option on almost any team if available - building trough perimeter players is usually the right recipit. But not when you have Joker.

This guy has been putting up a fight against anyone even with casts that have no business discussing anything. He's just on another level.

2023? Yes it's winning bias, it's just the better playoffs, the longest ones. It's not his best RS, but quite honestly he's been so good for the last 5 years that picking any RS is just nit picking.

On defense... he's a bit above average or average at most. But I think that it should be easy to compensate for that while he gives you that brutal offense.

2. Shaq 2001
Again an offensive force. Absurd in the paint. Couldn't get the ball deep. You couldn't front him cause he was too smart. He had the passing.

Teams building rosters with multiple big guys just to foul him.

Couldn't hang with faster players? True. Didn't want to get out much of the paint? Also true. In the early 00s? Not a problem. Otherwise we'd see more of Orlando's Shaq.

3. Steph Curry 2022
No longer had KD. Klay was not the same player anymore. And he still was a driving force.

This is the year I choose to put Steph Curry in, because altough it wasn't his better RS it still was a very good one, and it is combined with absolutely crazy good playoffs.

The biggest gravity ever as a shooter, making him an easy fit with almost every player and being able to maximize Draymond who could initiate.

His shooting was fire that year and he was above 65ts%. In the playoffs above 60 while having the lowest TOV% of his career.

I think this year doesn't get enough talk and it's the year that makes Curry knock on top 10 all time in my eyes - he really did sustain excellence trough the playoffs and proved that he wasn't just the ultimate ceilling raiser (maybe along Jokic) but also a very good floor raiser.

4. Kobe Bryant 2006
I know most people here won't see him as high as I do. But Kobe that year was special. The West was talented for sure, and Kobe drove that team to the playoffs and took the Suns to 7 games. One of his best years ts% wise, and given his offensive explosions I gotta say I was super impressed that year with his production.

Also his lower TOV% means per possession he was actually more efficient than even his ts% suggests.

On defense he took possessions off - that's only normal with such offensive burden. However, when needed he still displayed his man to man agressive and great defense.

I don't think many players could replicate his impact on winning so many games with a very bad roster. Kobe was special that year.

Maybe Giannis 21 and KG 04 should go in here but I just think Kobe did very well given his conditions and I don't see many guys replicating him as an offensive force.

Many, many players carried their teams more than 06 Kobe.

Well I see the Garnett post. Again I can't disagree might be OK ahead of Kobe.

Other than that... who could do that? It's not just about having impact stats, I believe that such thing could only have been done by brutal offensive explosion volume wise. And no, KG is not that guy.