Laimbeer wrote:Just as a general comment as much as here specific to this, this is where realgm often goes off the tracks. Warspite wrote a valid post pointing out how competitive the Bad Boys were with the other great teams of that era. This was based on actual events and series outcomes.
Your reply was, basically, the results you saw on the court are trumped by some statistic. When actual competition tells us teams were very close but stats tell us a different story, we should probably believe what we saw.
The criticism that I and others overuse statistics is valid. I'd say the issue isn't so much that there's a "right way" to these thing and that stats are "wrong", as it is that there's no perfect way. If somebody says "I saw X play, and he was better than Y", how does somebody else argue with that? Using the same type of reasoning yields a worthless "No he's not. Yes he is." impasse. The use of statistics on these boards is encouraged partly because it's something that can be referred to besides raw opinion.
Now, those aren't the only two alternatives, but more nuanced conversation is typically something that happens once two people have at least come together on some issues. Warspite thinks the Pistons would go 82-0 in the current league, I don't see anything like that happening, do you really think the issue here is that I'm too reliant on stats?
Additionally though, the specific debate was focusing at least partially on the matter that the Pistons won a lost less titles than the other teams in the era. Warspite brought up the "almosts". That's valid to bring up, but the literal opposing point to that in my mind to looking at what happened in the small sample size of a playoff series is looking at what happened with the teams generally, and SRS is just a great short hand to use their. What we see is that these other teams were generally dominating the league at a far greater level than the Pistons, but the Pistons managed to get close a 7 game series sometimes, and actually won the title a couple times.
When I look at a GOAT team, I don't want to see a plucky underdog that made good some of the time. If we're not talking about a full on dynasty, I want to see a one year BANG where the team was just killing everybody. The Bad Boys just weren't on that level. They rank well above the "lucky" champs like the Sonics and the Heat, they are very worthy of respect, but no, when I'm looking at a tournament of every team in history, those Pistons aren't really on my short list of teams that I think would win that tournament.
