sp6r=underrated wrote:RCM88x wrote:I've never really understood the fascination with Chris Webber to be quite honest, he was a fringe top 10 player for a 5 year span and solidly one for just a single season. Was he ever really much better than guys like Ray Allen or Paul Pierce?
To answer the question though, no. Physically he certainly had the tools but never really applied them or took things seriously enough to really hit and maintain his ceiling as a player.
Oddly I agree with your assesment of Webber career, save the serious aside, which is why I find him interesting.
He is a bright guy, very gifted athletically who never quite figured out how to apply those gifts in a way that helped his team consistently. It makes him interesting for discussion because there are a lot of players I can think of who are dimmer than Webber but would have done more with his considerable gifts.
That differs from your analysis of Allen or Pierce. No matter what you think of those two, they did maximize their ability so there isn't much to say. With Webber that wasn't the case.
So I'll jump in here pigging backing off of you two:
I'm generally low on Webber in most conversations. I think he got way too much of the credit in Sacramento for example.
But what I will say is that there's definitely a broader phenomenon I think about with players where if I could come back from the future and tell them to tweak something they were probably capable of tweaking, they might have been not just a little more impactful but a lot.
The poster boy for this is Pete Maravich. If he'd been able to see analytics about what he was doing was working often enough and what wasn't, that might have changed everything, because there wasn't really any doubt he checked all the other boxes for being a floor general except the actual decision making.
It's not that that means he shouldn't get knocked for this - in part because the very best had an innate sense for judging how likely a move was to pay off that Maravich clearly didn't - but it's important to understand both when we try to think through Maravich-types (yes, his gifts were real, he just also had a specific weakness) and try to grasp the importance of data access. The optimization of the game we've seen in the 21st century enables non-intuitive players to play smarter than they would be able to figure out on their own.
And with this in mind, this means there's reason to think that Webber today might play effectively enough to deserve the accolades he got when he played, though he didn't deserve some of them then. Quality analytics might have just have been able to make Webber realize that he wasn't nearly as effective of a scorer as he thought he was, and that if he truly looked to emulate teammate Divac, he'd be the better player for it.
Last, just a note on Allen & Pierce:
In the case of Pierce, I think to some degree we have a guy who was lucky to be (almost) as good as he thought he was. I don't know if he had a better grasp of the optimality of what he was doing than Webber, but as they say, the game evolved in his direction rather than Webber's direction.
In the case of Allen, there we have a very different basketball brain I'd say. His reputation for OCD preparation while seeming a fish-out-of-water socially among NBA players probably led him to more optimal approaches in many ways, but some struggles in others.
