Comparing Players across Eras

[kabstah]

Simple adjusted numbers for 1960 Russell -- he starts at 18.2pts on .467 shooting (might be his best offensive season btw). Average team scored 115.3ppg and shot .410 from the field (no 3 point line so efg is .410 too). In 2010, the average team scored only 104.0 ppg on .461 from the field, but with the prevalence of the 3 point shot, league-wide efg% was a spectacular .501. Russell's rough equivalence would be 16.4ppg on .571 efg.

And remember, a player shooting .467 in 1960 is a high percenage player who you want to get more shots, a player shoooting an efg of .467 in 2010 is an extremely poor percentage player in your lineup (ignoring foul draw and other similar factors). How can these be equivlanet?

More efficient than Jermaine O'Neal . . . hell yes, though if you adjust for his whole career instead of just one of his best years Russ still comes off pretty mediocre offensively.

More efficient than Dwight (18.2 on .613fg%) . . . no, Russell's best year was barely better than Dwight at age 20 and significantly worse than every year since; and yet people slam Dwight here for his "weak" offensive game.

Do you not consider it a possibility that Russell, and just about anyone from 1960, might actually be a low efficiency scorer by modern standards? I think after you do your efficiency normalization, you have to do a sanity check on your results. You're saying that we could take a player from 1960, drop him in the modern game and give him the same role on offense, and his FG% will rise 10%. That makes no sense to me when Russell never demonstrated he had that kind of ability -- unlike Wilt who was already shooting in the low to mid 50's at over twice the volume, and hit 68% just 6 years later when he brought his shooting volume down to more sane levels.

[penbeast0]

I am saying it makes a lot more sense in terms of "gut check" to assume that the most athletic and quickest big man in the league with great jumping ability but relatively raw skills (Russell -- or Dwight Howard today) would tend to have a pretty high shooting efficiency though not great volume.

I would also suggest that it makes a lot more sense (sanity check) that, IF YOU FEEL PLAYERS FROM OTHER ERAS COULD COMPETE IN THE MODERN ERA given equivalent coaching, equipment, etc., that a player from an earlier era who was in the top 5 in the league in FG% shooting .050 higher than the league average is going to be a more efficient scorer than a player who is probably the lowest percentage shooter in the modern league shooting .050 lower than the league average (for all players, not just for centers).

The era around 1960 is when it is the most obvious because of the rapid rise in fg% from 60-65 but I believe that efg has been going up consistently through the last 60 years in incremental amounts, in modern times mainly due to the increased use of the more efficient 3 point shot rather than long 2 point jumpers for most guards (haven't done the work but that's my impression).

[kabstah]

Well if you take 1960 Bill Russell, and have him born 50 years later then brought up on modern coaching and training, then he's not 1960 Bill Russell anymore, is he? And really, that's a pretty intellectually dishonest position to take. I mean we can all agree that Usain Bolt is the world record holder in the 100 meter dash and the world's fastest man, without resorting to hypotheticals like having Jesse Owens born in the 1980's.

Pluck Russell from 1960 right now, put him on a team and give him the off-season to get comfortable with the modern game, and do you think he'll be Howard-esque on offense? I'm betting that he doesn't. I mean, we're talking about an era where just about everyone dribbled with their heads down. Cousy even admitted that kids today do things with the ball that he never could.

[penbeast0]

I agree with that actually, I just think it's ridiculously unrealistic. Anyone growing up in the USA today would have the same coaching, equipment, training, etc; and I've always assumed that in comparing across eras. Otherwise I think you discount older players so seriously that it's just worthless to try to compare them.

Oh, and as I said, Russell was never Howardesque, he just wasn't Ben Wallace. Dwight is often badly underrated here on RealGM offensively because his game isn't "pretty." Dwight is Artis Gilmore. Russell was a 12pts/16reb guy with decent but not great efficiency who has a prime Ben Wallace defensive impact plus good passing and who always somehow gets your team the playoff win even against better teams.

[kabstah]

It really depends on what you're trying to get at when you compare across eras. I mean, are we talking about a direct head-to-head match-up or which player separated himself from his peers more? Either way, the whole "take past player X, and give him modern training and medicine" approach never sat well with me because it requires too many assumptions. For example, why should we assume that Russell would pick up modern post scoring skills when we know for a fact that he wasn't capable of even mastering a much more basic skill in free throw shooting even with years of practice? Now I don't mean that post scoring correlates to free throw shooting, I'm just saying that we shouldn't take for granted that a player is capable of picking up a skill he's never actually demonstrated before. Proficiency in scoring seems to be innate to a large degree, and IMO it's baseless to assume that Russell had such a natural aptitude.

I agree that comparing Russell's offense to Ben Wallace is taking it too far in the other direction. Big Ben never scored 10 PPG and had poor to mediocre efficiency from the field despite not taking that many shots. He was literally almost always the last option on offense regardless of who was on the floor, whereas Russell was very involved in the Celtics offense. And like you said, Russell was a much more capable passer.

[Doctor MJ]

So I'll just say, when I compare players across eras, in the end I tend to go with a "who impresses me more" philosophy. Part of that means cutting guys some slack for not having modern equipment. Part of that means taking a hard look at talent levels in the league. I mean, Tarzan Cooper was arguably the greatest center in the first half of the 20th century, and he's 5 inches shorter than me. Yes, there are changes to the population based on general health, but let's not be crazy. Tarzan's only slightly older than my late grandpa, my grandpa was 6'3", and he wasn't the tallest guy in his white high school in Minnesota. Obviously there was a lot of talent back then that just didn't focus on basketball because there was not much reason to focus on basketball, and it's been a gradual rise to today.

So any way, I'm incredibly impressed by Russell I don't really hold his lack of efficiency against him because his focus was clearly elsewhere. Elgin Baylor I'm more harsh with - the man's primary quality was scoring from the inside, and he's got a shorter, weaker, less athletic, not much younger teammate scoring with far higher efficiency. That's a major problem when comparing him to someone like Charles Barkley.

[kabstah]

I'm curious what you think about the overall quality of play in the early 1960's. There's not much footage of that era, but from what I have seen, there's a general lack of skills that we take for granted nowadays. I'm not talking fancy things like the UTEP Two Step or the Dream Shake either, just really basic things like using your off hand or not looking at the ball while you dribble. I even read an anecdote somewhere that credits Russell for pioneering the act of jumping on defense to block a shot. It really strikes me as a league and a game in its infancy, when few people really knew what they were doing.

[penbeast0]

I think the 60s were the beginning of the modern era; the 50s to me seemed like the ACC ball I grew up watching with 4 corners offenses and a lack of good post play.

The 60s to me were a modern era; similar to the 70s except that in the 70s, free agency, expansion and a second league gave players a lot more power which negatively impacted their defense/team play -- more individual hot dogging and less team play except for the Celtics and a few other teams. I actually thought the play was better in the 60s though I only saw the tail end of it.

That Russell quote is a bit BS. Russell is credited for making the blocked shot a primary weapon and for pioneering the "soft" block which kept the ball in play rather than the Wilt style block where Wilt liked to slam the ball 20 rows into the stands to intimidate. Never heard that bigs didn't jump before except maybe that with no taping and canvas sneakers in the 50s, many bigs didn't jump that much preferring to use their body to create horizontal space for their hook shots (same way I play, lol).

As for the dribbling, it's more a matter of rule enforcement than anything else. When you enforce the rule against cupping/palming the ball (which modern players do on virtually EVERY dribble), you prevent 90% of the modern fancier moves and up the difficulty of dribbling considerably. It's why Auerbach used to make the Celtics practice fast breaks with no dribbling at all, not even from Cousy. If you allow some palming, you can get away with murder -- I watched Marques Haynes of the Globetrotters as a kid and he did all sorts of crazy things with his dribble; like watching Rafer Alston on the AndOne tour.

[tsherkin]

Efficiency has gone up, but you have to consider the addition of the 3PT shot and differing rules regarding fouls too, Dr MJ.

And for player averages, minutes are as big as any pace-related factor. Run Wilt's PER36 numbers sometime, without even bothering to adjust for pace. Then do the same to Oscar. See how drastically that affects a player. Most starts play 36-38 mpg now, not 41-44.

[kabstah]

I understand that dribbling was regulated much closer to the letter of the law in that era, and I'm not expecting Cousy to cross someone over at the top of the key. Hell, even the slowest, most basic of crossovers are physically impossible without touching the side of the ball (how else would you impart the horizontal momentum).

But things like not being able to look up and dribble at the same time or not being able to use your off hand have nothing to do with palming the ball. Even when the rules were relaxed enough to allow Pistol Pete to do his thing, he still looked down to dribble.

[ElGee]

We should consider the origins of dribbling in the first place: The league at the middle of the century was a passing league.

There was no shot clock, and teams would sometimes put on passing "clinics" in attempt to break the defense, like a game of hot potato. Only when a great shot finally opened up would they take one. This was accomplished by rapid and sometimes "dazzling" ball movement. It's like the buildup seen in international football today.

Then came the shot clock. Cousy. Fast breaks. etc. But still, the dribble-drive wasn't really seen as a weapon. Elgin Baylor had one going to his right -- he broke into the league in 1959 -- just to name an early prominent user. But with different spacing, different rules and the old-guard concept of the game, it just wasn't implemented too often. Pass. Cut. Move. Pick. Repeat. That was the general offensive MO of the time. And run.

The Celtics utterly dominated that period in time, and with only a few teams in the league, emulating their style was logical. There was little incentive to open the game up and use the dribble as a weapon. Could the great guards of the 60s like West, Oscar and Jones get to the basket? I think so. But in general, it just really wasn't part of most people's approach to the game.

Only by the 70s, when the talent pool expanded and the league expanded and the ABA came to prominence did this element of the game really change. Even then, the relic of the past playing styles can be seen by many of the successful teams throughout the decade.

Relatively speaking, the evolution in basketball is actually a rapid one and has less to do with drastic changes in athletes -- although with a larger talent pool and sports technology that has happened -- and more to do with changes in strategy and rules in the system. The growth was actually fairly rapid from 1955 to 1985. In a sport/game like Curling, which originated in the 1500s, there were no rules about "guard" tactics until 1991. 1991! The former rules dictated a logical defensive tactic that would make any lead nearly insurmountable. Very few teams apparently took advantage of these rules even as late as the 1970s, thus no change was forced. I realize, no one on this board could pick a curling rock out of a stone wall, but the point still stands.