I just watched 87 Pistons G5 against Boston a few weeks ago. Right in the first quarter, Dantley does a Dantley about 3 times, holding, wheeling, dribbling (fiddling and diddling) only to pass the ball out to a helpless teammate with 4-8 seconds on the shot clock 35 feet away. Some players opt to shoot at that spot, but Dantley isn't comfortable that's it's super high percentage, so he passes.
**The result is no stat for Dantley**
The result for the Pistons is an ugly, super low-efficiency possession because Dantley couldn't do anything productive. They called his number and he fell flat on his face. I played with guys like this in HS, and while they thought they were the business bc of their one-on-one skill set, they often struggled to even make organized teams.
To me that's Dantley. He doesn't do much else but score well. When he doesn't, it can really hurt the possession. He doesn't seem like a very good defender, although isn't as bad as Melo from what I can tell. The overall net might be a small positive, but I'm not sure I can find a single season where I think Dantley is a top-15 player. He never really "puts it together," there is never noticeable change before or after, people don't seem to want him, and he's even benched at one point in his career basically.
Then you look at his on/off, which deviates wildly from every other player I've ever looked at:
In Dantley's case, I've looked at 6 big seasons of in/out data from him.
1979 22g 4.0 to 4.1
1980 12g -0.6 to -6.1 (missing 2 games)
1983 59g -2.1 to -6.0 (missing 1)
1985 26g 4.3 to 1.3 (missing 1)
1988 13g -2.0 to 4.9
1989 40g -3.6 to 4.1 (Detroit only - replaced by Aguirre)
1989 51g -5.6 to -4.7 (Dal only)
So, in 4 of the 6 seasons he misses considerable time, the team performs *better* without him, and 2 cases (early Utah) the team is just horrible, and it doesn't even matter. In Detroit they are good, but jump to elite without him. Of 178 In/Out player seasons in my database, Dantley has 3 of the 5 worst and 4 in the bottom 17. Not one single other player is close to showing that kind of impact.
His numbers in those seasons:
1979 17.3 ppg 58.9% TS
1980 28 ppg 63.5% TS
1983 30.7 ppg 66.1% TS
1985 26.6 ppg 60.7% TS
1988 20 ppg 61.9% TS
1989 19.2 ppg 58.1% TS
I'd say there's a reason he was traded multiple times and that his teams show no notable declines when he leaves or improvements when he arrives.
It's interesting to note that the Lakers soured on him and they were merely a .500 team without him. It just was that clear something was wrong with the way he played (and consider that it's his best In/out run by a mile of the 6 seasons...and it's not so coincidentally the one in which he had the smallest role).
Between the eye test and the data on these many teams, in many years, it's hard for to see Dantley as comparable to any of the guys we're talking about.
