therealbig3 wrote:I think it might be unfair to simply count how many times a player was top 5 in the league. Competition plays a factor. Pierce has played in a notoriously strong era for wings, so he hasn't gotten much recognition. I think it's better simply to compare Gervin and Pierce straight up, and to measure how much they helped their teams. I haven't really seen what Gervin's team impact was, but he seems a lot like Reggie Miller, from the posts I've read about him.
Gervin's pace adjusted scoring numbers really aren't that much better than Pierce's, and Pierce does hold a large advantage pretty much everywhere else. As an offensive player, I think Pierce gives you more value.
And I don't really know what to make of Gilmore. Early on, when he was being nominated, I was impressed, because he seemed like a Dwight Howard with longevity, or at least that's how he was presented.
But more recently, and I think it was mainly a post by DavidStern, a lot of legitimate questions about Gilmore came up. Was he really a defensive beast? I think I read he was on some of the worst defensive teams of the time. And was he really a dominant low-post scorer that you could build an offense around? I think it was ronnymac2 who wrote that you couldn't build an offense around Gilmore, and that he was more of an opportunistic scorer.
And maybe a lot of that is unfounded, but it seemed that their arguments were more convincing. So is he a Dwight Howard with longevity, or does he put up kind of empty 20-10 numbers? If he's closer to the latter, then I don't really see his case over Pierce at all. Of course, if he's the former, then he should definitely go over Pierce. If he's somewhere in the middle, then I think him vs Pierce is a good debate, and you can go either way.
Your philosophy of not letting the competition of a given era skew perception of how good a guy actually was is good, but I question whether that's truly the proper way to look at Pierce. It's not the case that Pierce was always up just a hair below a group of unreal superstars who prevented him from earning far greater accolades. Pierce only received MVP votes 5 times, and only made 4 All-NBA teams in his entire career because he was going up against B-listers and often not beating them out.
There's also the matter I think that Pierce is getting a kind of credit for proving he could win while people seem skeptical about Gervin, and this just seems bizarre to me. Gervin played his entire decade-plus prime with San Antonio and there was only one losing season in the whole run. The notion that Gervin's game didn't work with a winning team, or a strong offense is entirely backward.
It's understandable to say that Pierce had a more well rounded game than Gervin, but contemporaries knew that back then as well. Bottom line was that Gervin was one of the truly great scorers in history on a level above Pierce.
With Gilmore I do understand the concerns. Let's start by establishing what Gilmore meant in the beginning.
When he joined Kentucky they saw an over 8 point SRS improvement. This despite the fact that the team didn't really add anyone else, and the team already had a respected big man in Dan Issel. Where did that impact come from? Well a 2.4% defensive eFG improvement relative to the league average resulting in the team going from below average to far better than any other team in the league (gap between Kentucky & #2 was bigger than between #2 & #7 in an all-team league). More stunning still on defense, a 6% defensive FT/FGA improvement relative to league average which made the team 4.9% better than league average.
Now remember, Gilmore came into the league with "that's not possible athleticism". Look at the picture on the original post on that thread. I've done estimates before on where his reach was there, it's comparable to what Dwight Howard did in the slam dunk contest a few years back, except that Howard needed a running start (again estimate, not precise, I won't say he was clearly above Howard in how high he could get but he was certainly at least comparable). Gilmore's ability to get up and block shots no one else could that in addition to his 5 blocks per game, he racked up goaltending charges at simply bizarre levels, which Rick Barry insists were typically were not actually goaltending.
And of course, the team also saw a major improvement in offensive eFG (1.9% relative to average), indicating Gilmore was contributing lift on the other side of the ball.
People will talk about the fact that the team got upset in the playoffs and that's certainly relevant. But that doesn't change the fact that he was having huge impact generally, and it's not like his Colonels didn't have great playoff success over the next few years.
So basically: If you respect the ABA early in Gilmore's career, you need to look at Gilmore as someone with a Top 5-level peak.
Big "if" though, right? I get it, the early ABA was weak, people's stats went down after Gilmore's rookie year, and Gilmore was typically not a top 5 level player in the NBA. It all seems coherent with the idea that Gilmore just dominated a minor league...
Except that he literally was in a league with guys like prime Erving, Barry, and Billy Cunningham and until Erving later on, none showed signs of being clearly better players than Gilmore. I've heard some people say that Gilmore was disproportionately successful in the ABA because the league happened to be weak on big men, but this seems silly to me. This isn't a Wilt Chamberlain situation where his team just kept feeding him the ball because there was no one who could match up with him, this is a guy dominating primarily on defense as an unspeakable shotblocker. The guys in this league have seen 7 feet tall shotblockers before, and they know what to do about it (it's pretty obvious). Yet you have a pro like Rick Barry telling us Gilmore was like nothing he had ever seen despite playing against Russell and Wilt and playing with Thurmond.
