kcktiny wrote:In between Walton & Eaton, there was a remarkable lack of top tier defensive bigs
???
Jabbar, Cowens, Gilmore, Parish, Caldwell Jones, Tree Rollins, George Johnson.
I'm not sure why I need to explain that these guys were not in the same tier as Walton & Eaton generally - fine for you to disagree, but the ??? is just weird - but I will emphasize that I'm literally talking about the era in between Walton's best (1977-ish) and Eaton's best (1984-ish), so Kareem & the boys older than Walton are generally not at their best in this time frame.
kcktiny wrote:being the best as you can be as a Squid-like player wouldn't normally make you the right choice for DPOY.
Well the people watching the league at that time and voting for DPOY thought differently than you do 4+ decades later, as he received more DPOY votes than both Tree Rollins and Mark Eaton.
But I didn't say they made the wrong choice. I literally said it was weak competition that justified the choice.
I'll also say that during Moncrief's 2 DPOY wins, Eaton wasn't playing the minutes he would starting in '84-85 when the basketball world voted for him over Moncrief, so I think it's pretty clear to the voters at the time: Eaton D > Squid D > Part-time Eaton D.
Tree Rollins is a more interesting question though. It absolutely makes sense to ask why voters at the time didn't give Tree the DPOY.
I do think part of the answer has to do with the fact that Moncrief was someone already getting media attention before there was a DPOY, and when he had reached a new overall peak in '82-83, DPOY served as a consolation prize for a guy who would probably never win MVP when finishing 4th behind Moses/Larry/Magic.
But I'll also say that I have Sid as my DPOY in the years he won it, so I don't think these were literally bad choices, and I've managed to come to the same conclusion about "Not Tree" that they did.
So what's the issue for me? Been a while since I thought it through to be honest, but things I'll note:
a) I like many tend to point to blocks as the key defensive box score piece, but they don't tell the whole story.
b) The Hawks weren't an elite defense during these years, and also weren't actually clearly better than what they were in earlier years when Tree played less.
c) The Hawks were terrible at defensive rebounding. That's not all on Tree - defensive rebounding is a team thing - but when a player is getting that many blocks while having a "strongest, most brutal guy in the game" type reputation and it isn't translating into defensive rebounding competence, this is a concern.
The idea with a guy like Tree is that his presence should help you be able to have more FGA than your opponent, and so the fact that the Hawks were getting less also relates to why they were a negative SRS team
kcktiny wrote:Alvin Robertson gambling for steals like crazy on a team that was failing at the more important task preventing the offense from making shots
Alvin Robertson is quite likely the greatest perimeter defender the league has
ever seen, in terms of stopping shots from going in, forcing turnovers, and rebounding defensively.
So you're giving a lot of hyperbolic praise without pointing to anything objective. Doesn't mean you're wrong, but you're not really giving anything to respond to. I'm not sure what to say to you.
So I guess I'll wing it like this:
If you're high on Alvin and his DPOY, I have to assume you're in love with his time on the Spurs when he was getting his biggest numbers, so let me point to the Spurs' overall defensive performance (rDRtg & rank) for those years along with the year after, with AR related details.
'84-85 1.1, 17th of 23 (AR 21.3 MPG)
'85-86 1.0, 17th of 23 (AR 35.1 MPG, 3.7 SPG, DPOY)
'86-87 2.5, 19th of 23 (AR 33.3 MPG, 3.2 SPG, Def1
'87-88 4.8, 22nd of 23 (AR 36.3 MPG, 3.0, Def2
'88-89 0.1, 13th of 25 (AR 35.2 MPG, 3.0, Def2
'89-90 -3.9, 3rd of 27 (No AR)
So:
1. When you watched Robertson's Spurs, were you thinking "This is an ineffective defensive basketball team?", because that's what they were. I find it hard to believe you were since I don't think anyone thinking those thoughts would also be thinking "that's the greatest perimeter defender the league has ever seen".
2. There is also the matter that the team instantly became a way better defensive team without Robertson. Now, I'd say that's mostly about David Robinson and being really good, so I wouldn't want to use that to say "Alvin was the problem!". But thing is: If the arrival of a big caused a much bigger jump than losing the small, then the small probably wasn't ever having big-level impact.
3. And so I dare to ask, might you have been overindexing on how impressive Robertson's gambles looked when they paid off out of proportion with the cumulative impact of the player playing in this way all game long? I think ya probably were, just because that's really quite normal.
To be absolutely clear:
4. I don't cast stones at you for not being able to recognize merely with your own eyes that the Spurs were fundamentally ineffective at defense in that time, because in general I think this is way harder to do than most even today want to admit. Really good eyes - which I'm not claiming I have, just so we're clear - can tell you a TON about what I generally call scouting information: Specific player strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies, player chemistry, team strategy, etc. I they struggle at recognizing actual holistic impact because merely being able to narrate roughly what happened and whether a particular move succeeded or failed doesn't tell you how to quantify the effect of what they player(s) achieved with precision.
This is why some of us are pointing to the experiment that you can do for yourself if you really want: Watch a game for an extended period of time with the sound off and with the score not visible while explicitly focused on scouting - as in, process, not result - and then at the end, try to estimate the scoreboard result in whatever way makes sense to you, but also minimizes the chance you'll accidentally cheat by taking in extra non-basketball related information (crowd behavior, body language, tactics of desperation, etc).
I would suggest that almost no one can do this well, and that those who can tend to have extremely strong automatic "video" memories that effectively let them just run the game back in their head again while counting the points. And I put video in quotes because I really don't think humans record memory like that, but I do think that if you're a) extremely visually attentive, b) extremely adept at chunking information in the domain you're attending too, c) have a strong mind's eye (hyperphantasia), and d) have a long habit of enjoying remembering strings of events, you can effectively "call a game" from memory in the sense that you can make it basically sound like a live commentator's narrative. I think listening to LeBron doing Mind the Game really gives a window into somebody like this.
5. This overindexing thing I'm saying I think you're probably doing. I do it too.
I don't want to, but I do. I think I'm better at not doing it as badly now that I used to be,
but I still do it.
And this is not unrelated to why my analysis here tends to rely so much on stats. In a nutshell, I don't believe I can trust my eyes on this. They are an indispensable part of the process, but they can't do all the work for me.
My eyes told me that Allen Iverson was the MVP, in part because of how badass it was that AI would take these incredibly hard shots.
The data tell me that he wasn't effective enough at those shots to justify the decisions he made from the context of helping his teams win.
The latter doesn't prevent the impulse or undo the aesthetic effect it had on me, but it does change my stance on whether he really was the most valuable player. And while I do have mixed feelings about that, if I'm in a conversation about basketball effectiveness as most conversations on this board are, I'm just not going to present arguments in favor of AI based on badassery of appearance all that often.
