Doctor MJ wrote:GreenHat wrote:They want his efficiency to be bumped up because the whole era was inefficient, but for his defense not to take a hit from competing against inefficient players.
Your statement doesn't even make sense to me. Russell's defensive greatness isn't dependent on other people's poor FG% against him compared to stars of other eras. We don't even have that information.
I question whether Russell would stand so far above everyone else all time in terms of defensive impact if he faced efficient competition.
I concede that he very well could still be the best defender of all time in an absolute sense, but I don't think he would perform so far ahead of every other player from all eras if he wasn't defending teams that were just chucking up bad shots and making them at 40% even against bad defenses.
I think playing against more efficient offenses would bring his defensive impact back to the pack (he may very well still lead the pack, but he wouldn't be lapping the field against better offenses is my contention).
GreenHat wrote:They want his assist numbers bumped up because it was harder to get assists back then but they want you to ignore that rebounds were almost twice as easy to gather.
Count me among those who want you to adjust for both properly. When you do that, you see a guy with a fantastic pace-adjusted rebounding rate and who also racked up assists quite well.
I agree with that completely, I'm not a Russell hater at all, I just don't think he is the best at playing basketball of all time.
GreenHat wrote:They want you to assume that Russell would routinely get 10 blocks a game in today's game, even though calculating his blk% off of game films doesn't support that conclusion at all with the much fewer shots.
I would not ask you to assume Russell would block anything like 10 blocks per game today, though I am curious where you've seen numbers giving those estimates.
What I would ask you to do is recognize that there's a hell of a lot more to Russell's defense than shotblocking numbers, and that the other skills he possessed in spades are that made Garnett arguably the best defender of his generation.
I have at least a dozen times over multiple threads in the last week admitted that Russell had by far the biggest defensive impact compared to his peers of all time and am willing to concede that it fairly likely that even in an absolute sense he could have the biggest defensive impact. Is that not enough recognition from me?
That part about 10 blocks was hyperbole (but also true because people on this forum have made claims like that). Change it to 6 or even 5 if you want.
GreenHat wrote:They want you to count his rings without taking into account that he only had to beat out 7 teams at some points and 0 teams over a 2 SRS in some seasons.
Factor in the league size all you want. It's frankly not clear to me how to do so, but I won't say you can't.
I think its a huge factor. Its a numbers game, the less people you have to face the better your chances of winning (especially when you're the favorite). Just ask the top poker players how much harder it is to win the world series of poker.
GreenHat wrote:They want you to recognize how much better his team is than everyone without accounting for how good his teams were minus him.
Go analyze Russell's last few years in the league man. Seriously. Anyone who doesn't come away with some serious respect after that isn't being objective.
From '65-66 to '68-69, Wilt had at least comparable supporting talent to Russell (and clearly superior talent in the last year), and Russell's team still won 3 of 4 times. Then Russell retired, and the team won less than 35 games.
You assume that I don't respect Russell as a player for whatever reason. Just because I consider some of the other all time great players better than him does not mean I don't respect him. Jordan is the only perimeter players I would take ahead of him, that's hardly an extreme position or shows any lack of respect.
Winning 3/4 with comparable teams, isn't some kind of amazing stat and certainly doesn't point to Russell having these magical winning intangibles that people anoint him with. And what about before '66?