Dr Mufasa wrote:Yeah, as I said, with Rodman it's useful to compare him in each role compared to KJ, Lanier, Pau, Parish, etc.
As 1st player/team leader - Takes a big strike compared to the others here, in both pure game and leadership. I agree that with most of the players on the board you're not getting past 50 W pretender type team if they're your best guy like Lanier, Pau, KJ's best teams... but I don't think Rodman gets that far. 92 I suppose was the closest we saw to that with Rodman being the best statistical player on a 48 W-er, but the it was still the Isiah and Dumars backcourt defining the team, especially mentally
As 2nd best player - Very feasible he can be #2 on a contender/title team. But I'd feel even more confident if KJ, Pau, etc. are my 2nd best player. With Rodman your best fit is a great guard I would assume... Kobe seems as good a fit as any. Would anyone really rather have Kobe and Rodman over Kobe and Pau? I wouldn't. Harder to cross compare KJ's superstar partner Barkley because you obviously don't want him playing with Rodman, but we can sub in Jerry West or Steve Nash who are close to Barkley in impact - Would you take West and Rodman/Nash and Rodman over KJ and Barkley? Over say, Wade and Parish? I definitely, would not. When I look at the situations, the 20/10 big man like Pau, Parish, etc. always looks even better beside a star guard like a Kobe, Wade, Isiah, etc. than Rodman does. And Rodman doesn't have more value beside a star SF, PF, or C than they do, I wouldn't think - We saw him with DRob and while it led to fine results, obviously you'd prefer Kevin Johnson or Ray Allen playing beside Robinson that year if you could have them
See, this is where we each have to decide how well our intuition serves us. Because yes, the intuition is that you would prefer a balanced player like Pau Gasol to a super-specialist like Rodman. But then, what happens if you really play it out in your head...
Let's look at the two times in the last four years that the Lakers have lost in the playoffs. In '08 against the Celtics, a little-appreciated aspect of that series is that the rebounds told the story. In games 1, 2 and 6 the Celtics dominated the glass (average 14.7 rpg advantage for Celtics) while in games 3, 4 and 5 the Lakers battled them on the glass (Lakers +1 net on the glass in those 3 games). Not coincidentally, the 3 games that the Celtics easily won the battle of the boards are the 3 games that they controlled, while the other 3 games were two Lakers wins and another game that the Lakers perhaps SHOULD have won outside of an epic collapse.
The same two teams met in the Finals 2 years later, and once again, it was the rebounds that told the story. The team that won the battle of the glass won all 7 games in the series, and of course game-7 was a Lakers win almost solely because they were able to crash the boards so hard to overcome a difficult shooting night.
Then, this year, the Lakers were swept by a Mavericks team that they purely couldn't stop. Dirk Nowitzki absolutely torched them. But if you were able to pick any player from NBA history that you would choose to guard Dirk Nowitzki...wouldn't Rodman have to be top-3 on your list?
I feel like I could make a very reasonable case, from this exact example, that the Lakers with Rodman instead of Pau Gasol would have been favored to win the title in each of the last four years. The primary benefit of Pau over Rodman is obviously on offense, but Kobe and Odom both had the ability to score more that they reigned in with Pau in attendance, and then when Bynum was healthy he gave you another scoring option. But at the other end, the Lakers never really had anyone that could fully replicate what Rodman could give them. The difference is, if it were Rodman in place of Gasol our instinct would be to declare that it was really Odom or Bynum that was the 2nd best player because they would be handling more offense. But just because Rodman's tools of dominance lie elsewhere, that doesn't mean they aren't being brought to bear.
And though what I just fleshed out was an argument based on one specific example, I feel like we've seen enough from Rodman's career to suggest that his impact is scalable to many different situations. That was something that the in-depth website that DocMJ linked to several threads back really brought home...Rodman missed a lot of games over many different years, and the consistent result was that when he was gone his teams suffered. As such, when the author looked at in/out effect on win%, scoring differential, or a combination of the two, the result was always the same...Rodman leading every NBA player since 1986 that had missed a lot of games ( http://skepticalsports.com/?p=1214 ). A list in which the rest of the top-5 that he beat out were Shaq, Barkley, Kidd and Kobe.
I've seen folks question whether Rodman was really one of the best players on the '90 champion Pistons, but he was the Defensive Player of the Year on a team that won with defense first. In Chicago he amped up his minutes when Pippen missed half of a season in '98, and the defense if anything got stronger without arguably the best perimeter defender in history.
Rodman' skill set is what we associate with role players, but his impact seems much more consistent with what we consider to be superstars. And every thought exercise proposed, if I really play it out to it's end point, seems to end with me believing that Rodman really would improve a team even over the more traditional offensive contributions of the other players that we are considering for this slot.
