Doctor MJ wrote:PTB Fan wrote:It goes beyond that. The Spurs won their championship similar to the '77 Blazers, expect they didn't have a No.2 All-Star option like Portland had in Maurice Lucas. They filled that weakness with playing their roles nicely, Duncan taking over games late well and him making big impact.
It's interesting the conversation when in the direction it did in response to this. My first thought was:
The problem with this line of thinking, even more than the focus on the #2 option, is in equating the success of champions. Some champions face tougher hurdles, and reach higher heights.
I can't emphasize enough how important it is to compare the '03 Spurs to the other Duncan Spur teams. By SRS '03 was actually the WEAKEST Spur team that prime Duncan ever played on ('99 to '07). They didn't win that title because Duncan's prime let them rise to new heights, they won that title because the rest of the league was at its absolute nadir contender-wise.
This is not to say Duncan doesn't deserve a ton of credit for the win. His team was a weak champion, but I'll get in line with you to say that it was a weak supporting cast compared to most champions. Even with the weak competition, Duncan only wins that title because he is playing fantastic, fantastic ball.
Now, as I say that, I need to also supply an obvious rebuttal, and speak to that rebuttal:
The '03 Spurs SRS might be low compared to the very high standards of the Duncan Spur era, but it's still quite good. About as good, in fact, as what the Walton Blazers achieved. If the '03 Spurs were about as good as those Blazers, and Duncan did it with less help, it would sure seem like Duncan has the edge there.
Here's where you need to remember that Walton missed a lot of time even during his "good" times. The '77 & '78 Blazers average performance in the regular season was in the 5-6 SRS range, but Walton missed about 20 games each season, and the on/off difference we see with and without Walton are mind-blowingly huge.
Bottom line, with Walton, these teams were far, FAR better than a 5-6 SRS team.
Also of note, in that era, there was a lot of parity SRS-wise. It's important to remember that talent distribution across leagues is not consistent from era to era. Suffice to say that whereas in Duncan's era, we expect multiple 6+ SRS teams in the league, in the post-merger '70s where wasn't as single 5+ SRS team other than Walton's Blazers until Bird & Magic showed up.
The gap between the quality of basketball Walton was leading his team to produce, and the quality of everyone else in the league, was just massive. And as noted, that basketball would disappear completely when Walton was out.
So yeah, for me, it's hard to imagine putting Duncan '03 over Walton '77. One more pause for a point of view though:
I only say this, because in '77 I don't see any reason to hold Walton's missed time against him. He led his team to best SRS despite his missed RS time, and in the post-season, he was healthy playing 40-ish MPG. That's fine by me.
If someone else though wants to have a more rigid perspective of value added over the course of a season, well then, I'd expect them to knock Walton significantly. Absolutely nothing wrong with that, just make sure you apply that reasoning consistently. If, for example, you voted for '77 Kareem in large part because of how amazing he looked in the playoffs that year, then you should be very careful about knocking anyone for RS issues that didn't actually change anything by playoffs' end.
