Retro POY '75-76 (Voting Complete)

[Sedale Threatt]

Good points as well, especially about the head-to-head. That was probably the decisive factor in his favor.

Couldn't agree more about leaving him off ballots, too. Asinine. Which is why you can't do this by rote.

Regarding Dr. J's "dip" in the NBA, I've been told a lot of that was injury related.

[JordansBulls]

Not true. David Robinson for instance had monster stats in the regular season as well and made the playoffs and he was getting moved down dramatically on people's list even though he actually made the playoffs.
Now imagine having monster stats but not making the playoffs when half of the best players are in another league?
If you can't even make the playoffs and at least 4 of the top 10 players are in the ABA, then how is that helping someone's case here?
It is a joke that you have teams that won 42 games making the finals or teams with one star in the 70's winning it all like the Warriors in 1975, Bullets in '78, etc but yet Kareem when favorite goes down early or fails to make the playoffs.
If David Robinson got blasted in each year in this project for that, then so should Kareem.

It's like if he has the best record and goes down in round 1, it is no biggie but then other stars get the brunt of the same situation (Robinson in many years, Malone in 1995)
If he doesn't do as well when he should because half of the greats are in another league, it is no biggie as well.

Also I don't see what the big deal is here. Some posters have a criteria where they don't vote any rookie in their top 5. Some posters say if a player doesn't make the playoffs he doesn't make their top 5. Some posters say if a player loses in round 1 they won't be the #1 guy for that season.
As long as it is consistent I see no problem with it.
I think it is clear the voting has changed a bit from how it was initially to what it was a month later as everyone started to get more familiar with the format and knew what to look for each year.

Like for me, I feel if a player won League MVP and the title that year they are #1 period.

Examples:

1961 Bill Russell
1962 Bill Russell
1963 Bill Russell
1965 Bill Russell
1967 Wilt Chamberlain
1968 Connie Hawkins (ABA)
1970 Willis Reed
1971 Kareem
1974 Julius Erving (ABA)
1976 Julius Erving (ABA)
1980 Kareem
1983 Moses Malone
1984 Larry Bird
1986 Larry Bird
1987 Magic Johnson
1991 Michael Jordan
1992 Michael Jordan
1994 Hakeem Olajuwon
1996 Michael Jordan
1998 Michael Jordan
2000 Shaquille O'neal
2003 Tim Duncan

[Sedale Threatt]

So it's the same old question: What more could he have done?

Beyond that, you've got a wealth of good candidates in most of those years where Robinson was savaged. The only guy that's even close to being on Kareem's level this year is Dr. J. He was clearly better than everybody else in either league.

Plus, he wasn't getting his ass handed to him on a platter in his prime. It would have been one thing if that was the case, and his team won 55 or 60 games and then was upset. That wasn't the case. The biggest problem he had was that he was playing on a borderline expansion team.

Why is that his fault?

For that you're basically punishing a guy who led the league in two major statisical categories, and almost every important advanced measure. I can understand second; Julius was phenomenal. But to leave Kareem off the ballot entirely is simply inexcusable.

[semi-sentient]

Robinson was blasted because he regularly under-performed in the playoffs. His game just didn't translate well and at times he simply got owned in his match-ups. Kareem could not be stopped so it comes down to having a very poor supporting cast as opposed to him failing individually.

[Dr Positivity]

With leaving Kareem off here and the comment in the big thread about Frazier making a couple of his #1s, it's pretty obvious what's happening here IMO (JB playing down Kareem to try and preserve MJ's #1). I would vote in favor of a veto

[JordansBulls]

With leaving Kareem off here and the comment in the big thread about Frazier making a couple of his #1s, it's pretty obvious what's happening here IMO (JB playing down Kareem to try and preserve MJ's #1). I would vote in favor of a veto

So let me get this straight? A guy who doesn't make the playoffs when he wanted to get traded to another team and his former team does as well should be automatic top 5?

Yeah ok. I already stated years where guys get #1 period.

You wanna know a year where Frazier gets #1? 1973. Knocked off a team that won 68 games and then beat the defending champions who won 60 games.

Walt Frazier - Led in Playoff Win Shares, 4th in season Win Shares, 5th in WS Per 48 Minutes and Upset the top 2 teams record wise in the league.

[Sedale Threatt]

And just to refresh JB's memory, here are David's finishes during some of the years in question.

95 -- third, behind Olajuwon and Shaq
94 -- second, behind Olajuwon
93 -- fifth, behind Jordan, Olajuwon, Barkley and Ewing
92 -- fifth, behind Jordan, Malone, Drexler and Ewing

You can quibble about a spot or two, but these seem pretty fair in hindsight. It should be noted that, in addition to having much better competition than we have here, where Kareem and Dr. J are head and shoulders above everybody else, at no point did Robinson finish off the ballot.

And another question: What's the major difference between Kareem in 76 (team: 40-42, no playoffs; individually: won MVP, led the league in rebounds and blocks, as well as PER, win shares, off. win shares, def. win shares and win shares/48) and Malone in 82 (team: 46-36, out in the first round; individually: won MVP, led the league in rebounds as well as PER and win shares)?

It must have been massive, because JB voted Moses first and for Kareem not at all.

[JordansBulls]

Robinson was blasted because he regularly under-performed in the playoffs. His game just didn't translate well and at times he simply got owned in his match-ups. Kareem could not be stopped so it comes down to having a very poor supporting cast as opposed to him failing individually.

Wait a minute, how was Robinson's cast any different? At least Kareem had Goodrich in his prime, who exactly did Robinson have?

[Sedale Threatt]

People expected more than he was doing. It was never enough. Those teams in the late 70s would have been lucky to win 20 games without him.

[JordansBulls]

And just to refresh JB's memory, here are David's finishes during some of the years in question.

95 -- third, behind Olajuwon and Shaq
94 -- second, behind Olajuwon
93 -- fifth, behind Jordan, Olajuwon, Barkley and Ewing
92 -- fifth, behind Jordan, Malone, Drexler and Ewing

You can quibble about a spot or two, but these seem pretty fair in hindsight. It should be noted that, in addition to having much better competition than we have here, where Kareem and Dr. J are head and shoulders above everybody else, at no point did Robinson finish off the ballot.

And another question: What's the major difference between Kareem in 76 (team: 40-42, no playoffs; individually: won MVP, led the league in rebounds and blocks, as well as PER, win shares, off. win shares, def. win shares and win shares/48) and Malone in 82 (team: 46-36, out in the first round; individually: won MVP, led the league in rebounds as well as PER and win shares)?

It must have been massive, because JB voted Moses first and for Kareem not at all.

I may very well end up putting Kareem 3rd or 4th here on stats alone, however I honestly don't see why I should if he couldn't even make the playoffs. I mean seriously, if Dr J wasn't in this, people would be putting a guy who didn't even make the playoffs as the #1 guy. How crazy is that?

[Mean_Streets]

With leaving Kareem off here and the comment in the big thread about Frazier making a couple of his #1s, it's pretty obvious what's happening here IMO (JB playing down Kareem to try and preserve MJ's #1). I would vote in favor of a veto

So let me get this straight? A guy who doesn't make the playoffs when he wanted to get traded to another team and his former team does as well should be automatic top 5?

I can go the other way as well. A guy wins NBA MVP & is the most dominant force in the league & he doesn't crack your top 5? Every player who has won NBA MVP has finished atleast in the top 5 in this project.

[Sedale Threatt]

I mean seriously, if Dr J wasn't in this, people would be putting a guy who didn't even make the playoffs as the #1 guy. How crazy is that?

What more could he have done?

[JordansBulls]

With leaving Kareem off here and the comment in the big thread about Frazier making a couple of his #1s, it's pretty obvious what's happening here IMO (JB playing down Kareem to try and preserve MJ's #1). I would vote in favor of a veto

So let me get this straight? A guy who doesn't make the playoffs when he wanted to get traded to another team and his former team does as well should be automatic top 5?

I can go the other way as well. A guy wins NBA MVP & is the most dominant force in the league & he doesn't crack your top 5? Every player who has won NBA MVP has finished atleast in the top 5 in this project.

You are correct, and the fact he won MVP should put him in the top 5. However how many guys ever won MVP were on teams that didn't make the playoffs?

I will adjust my rankings to put Kareem in the top 5 probably #4 at the moment.

Edit: No one complained about "Dr Mufasa" rankings in 1978 when he left Bill Walton off his list even though he led his team to the top seed with 58 wins and won league MVP. But all of a sudden because Kareem didn't make the playoffs, I get accussed of sabataging votes. What a joke!!

[fatal9]

'75 Lakers were the worst defensive team in the league, the last team in the conference and second worst in the entire league. Now take the '75 Lakers and take away their entire frontcourt (Elmore Smith and Happy Hairston), Brian Winters, add a year of aging to the already ancient Laker starters (Goodrich 33, Russell 31), but Allen played 20 more games in '76 and Russell played 30 more, and you have an accurate picture of the team Kareem got traded to.

As someone mentioned, the Lakers had the fourth best record in the conference that year and should have made the playoffs, but due to the format, two worse teams got in over them. This made the NBA change the format the very next year. I should also add 40 wins in the 70s is a bit different because of the parity at the time, no team would win more than 60, and no team would lose more than 30 (didn't have multiple bottomfeeders who won 15-25 games to beat up on). Despite all this, Kareem did get a chance to still get the Lakers in the playoffs because Suns were the last team they played in the regular season. I think whoever won the matchup would have gotten in the playoffs, but Lakers got blown out. Not sure if you can fault Kareem for that if the team was overwhelmed, but it is something to consider.

Also, the '75 Bucks were 3-14 without Kareem and 35-30 with him. They were a 44-47 win team with him, and a 14-18 win team without him. He was literally worth 30 wins to that team. If you are going to make the claim that '75 Bucks and '76 Bucks had the same record, please also mention this fact.

[Doctor MJ]

Moving on, I guess I'm looking for somebody to make a case that Dr. J was better in 76 than Walton in 77.

I think we all agree that Walton had one of the all-time great individual seasons that year, leading to one of the closest votes in the project. Kareem was deemed to have been better there.

But was Dr. J better than that? This seems pretty critical to me, considering Kareem doesn't drop off at all. Indeed, in some ways he might have been better in 76 than he was in 77.

So if he was good enough to beat prime Walton, giving a historically unique combination of scoring/rebounding/playmaking/defense en route to a championship, I'm thinking he's certainly got a good case to beat prime Erving, who dominated on both ends with revolutionary style en route to a championship.

Not an easy choice, mind you, but as I stated previously, I don't see any case whatsoever for a "no-brainer" in the Doctor's favor.

I'm not going to say anything's a no-brainer, but Erving isn't nearly so reliant on intangible based arguments as Walton is - and I believe that's part of why you're skeptical about Walton. In Kareem vs Walton, there's just no debate that Kareem is easily the more productive player in terms of individual stats. And in '75-76, Kareem does not have any such clear advantage over Erving.

In the regular season, Erving's got superior PER, WS, WS/48, and TS% than Kareem, all while leading his team in all major defensive stats (well, all stats period but I'm making a point here), makes All-Defensive team, and his team has the best defensive efficiency in the league (and as I mentioned before the 3rd best defensive team in the ABA this year, went on to be the best defensive team in the entire merged NBA) (oh, and 2nd best was Gilmore's Colonels which also didn't carry over to the NBA).

It's quite reasonable to say that Erving was the more productive player in the regular season before you even get into the fact that he's clearly superior as a leader, and he clearly provided greater lift for his team. And then you get into the playoffs, where Erving got significantly better toying with that Nugget defense in a way that just doesn't normally happen to good defensive teams, let alone in the finals.

It isn't a given that Erving this year was better than Walton in '76-77, but that's because nothing's clear cut with the intangible factors. However, if you're skeptical of intangibles, there's absolutely no doubt that Erving's year was much a classic case of a do-it-all superstar.

[ElGee]

I'm actually interested on other takes here as I've been wondering lately why Magic's Lakers had no change (or even improved) once Kareem was no longer a piece in the offense (after 1986). Shouldn't 25 points and 4 assists per 36 minutes (118 ORtg) of automatic post offense be having a greater impact? Not that it's a big knock on Kareem -- dude barbecued Boston in the 85 Finals with great team results -- but I'm thinking of Braess's Paradox again...

My thought is that's not really a Braess' Paradox example. After all, Magic scored more in '87 than Kareem scored in '86. This isn't a team getting better without their star by learning to play more together, this is just the team coming to realize even more than before that Magic is an amazing, amazing player that they can utilize even more than they already have.

I don't think it's any major knock on '86 Kareem to say he wasn't as good of an offensive player as prime Magic.

No, I agree it's not really an example of the Paradox. But I do think Kareem's stats aren't completely reflecting his impact. Some players affect the game more than stats suggest -- eg Walton and Nash -- some players less.

He missed the first 16 games of the 1975 season with the Bucks, who played an above average schedule (1.14 SRS) and more roads than homes. In that time they were -6 in point differential. In the other 66 games they were +1.7 (+7.7 difference with Kareem). That's in the same ballpark of the +5.7 from his time missed in 1977.* And again, there was almost no change in points allowed with Kareem out.

*One can easily do the same calculations with players from this decade with comparable sample sizes and compare them to 82games on/off and Adjusted +/- and whatnot. I've done a few and sometimes they are almost spot on (LeBron James, Steve Nash) and sometimes the correlation is small (eg Yao Ming).

I actually think Yao Ming is an interesting comparison in this case. In general terms, he's a giant in the game, swats some shots, has good post moves and even passes well. Score a lot from the post (22-25 a game) on ~60% TS and snatches 10 or 11 boards. Doesn't that sound like a player who, intuitively, should be having a greater impact on the game than his +6.4 Roland or +7.3 APM would suggest? His team actually performed better without him from 08-09. (And I'm sure we can all come up with valid reasons for why without marginalizing Yao Ming.)

Getting back to Kareem, I find his defense to be a tad overrated. His best defensive asset to me is his length, usually in one-on-one post defense. That's where he collects a lot of blocks. But he's vulnerable to faster paced teams -- which there were more of then -- centers who stretch him and, at times, his help defense suffers. Frankly, I thought he was having a larger defensive impact in the 1980 games I watched than in the 70s. My hunch is his block/rebound numbers are overstating his defensive impact.

Offensively, I feel like Kareem would be better in today's game with spacing and 3-point shooters around him. But I don't think his offensive game, which is somewhat static despite his good passing, has the same impact on his teammates on every possession that Walton's, Nash's, Magic's, etc. does, despite those gaudy individual numbers.

So coming full circle to 1986, Magic clearly improved the following year. Maybe even Worthy and Scott were a touch better as well. But that still makes my point, namely that removing 17 shots a night from a post weapon like that SHOULD be hard to replace. But LA didn't miss a beat and only got better. So how great was it in the first place?

[Dr Positivity]

They didn't remove 17 shots a night from a post weapon though. Kareem's role got lesser, but he was still scoring 17ppg on 12.7 shots a game, which is 20ppg on 14.6 shots per 36, and doing it on 54% shooting. That still makes him a certifable offensive weapon - and "option in the network" teams had to guard, which made it more difficult to concentrate on the perimeter guys. Kareem wasn't the centerpiece anymore and taking 4 FG a game less, but was still a big offensive contributer.

Noteably the Lakers offense was still really good in 90 and 89 (when Kareem was mad old). But that's a big gap in years to compare...

[Warspite]

Quite frankly anyone who doesnt have DrJ #1 realy needs to do some soul searching. Theres no bigger fan of KAJ than True LA Fan and he has DRJ #1. I honestly thought this is the one yr that it would be unamious.

Yeah, this is pretty much a no-brainer.

I don't see it as a no-brainer at all. Frankly, other than the fact Erving had flashier/better stats than Walton, it looks fairly similar to last year's debate to me. Otherwise, Kareem might have been even better than he was in '77, with his biggest flaw being that his team sucked.

So yeah, I'm giving fair warning right now that I could be That Guy. I'm going to take a little more time to think on it than I did in the last thread, but if I voted for Kareem over Walton I have no problem voting Kareem over Erving.

Regarding the ABA/NBA thing, I don't think there's any question the NBA was the better league. But from all I've read, I'd come up with a very unscientific, totally subjective guess that it was closer than some would think, especially at the time. Maybe 60/40 in the NBA's favor?

IMHO: The ABA is superior to NBA in a 60/40 favor. The ABA has about 30 of the top 50 players but they have half as many teams. The NBAs advantage is that there bench players are better. Thats simply not enough to justify the talent disparity at the top. Again the ABA player plays more games vs allstar peers (I will grant you that 25% of the ABA starters are allstars so the allstar teams are watered down a bit) and faces better opponets on avg.
Basicly the 2 GOAT season in the history of basketball are 67 WIlt and 76 DrJ. Theres nothing no player has ever done in the last 35 yrs that matches what DrJ did in 1976. Essentialy if you replace any starting SF today on any team with 76 DrJ that team makes the NBA finals today. That guy is better than any player that has played the game in our lifetimes.
Talking to my dad in 1990 as we watch the Bulls play the Pistons my dad says "Jordon is great but he could never be as good as DrJ. If DrJ was on that Bulls team the Pistons wouldnt have a chance."

[ronnymac2]

This looks like a deep year. Deepest year I can remember.

ABA sucks this year though. Willie Wise only played 46 games. Willie Wise is the mother **** man, and if he doesn't qualify, then that league automatically sucks.

[Sedale Threatt]

IMHO: The ABA is superior to NBA in a 60/40 favor. The ABA has about 30 of the top 50 players but they have half as many teams. The NBAs advantage is that there bench players are better. Thats simply not enough to justify the talent disparity at the top. Again the ABA player plays more games vs allstar peers (I will grant you that 25% of the ABA starters are allstars so the allstar teams are watered down a bit) and faces better opponets on avg.
Basicly the 2 GOAT season in the history of basketball are 67 WIlt and 76 DrJ. Theres nothing no player has ever done in the last 35 yrs that matches what DrJ did in 1976. Essentialy if you replace any starting SF today on any team with 76 DrJ that team makes the NBA finals today. That guy is better than any player that has played the game in our lifetimes.
Talking to my dad in 1990 as we watch the Bulls play the Pistons my dad says "Jordon is great but he could never be as good as DrJ. If DrJ was on that Bulls team the Pistons wouldnt have a chance."

Come on. Do you honestly expect me to buy any of this?

Put '76 Erving on the Minnesota Timberwolves, and they make the Finals? Or put '76 Erving on the Bulls instead of arguably the greatest player of all time, and the Bulls suddenly go from pushing the championship Pistons to the limit to beating them soundly? And the notion this is the best individual season of the past 35 years?

I'm sorry, but that's a bunch of hyperbolic crap.

His numbers and achievement speak for themselves. He very well could have been the best player in the game at that point. I'll also acknowledge that I could have been way off on my 60/40 estimate. I still think the NBA was better overall, but I'm just making an estimate.

But the rest? You're hurting your case far more than helping.