lorak wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:I was saying that Russell had more impact in his situation than Kareem did in his, along with some other details indicating I believed this even after you adjust for era degree-of-difficulty.
Ok, but team result alone doesn't say much about player's impact (I know you know that!). I mean, for example mid 70s KAJ's Lakers teams were clearly worse than Russell's, but it is possible KAJ still had more impact, but couldn't led LAL to better result, because his team was so bad. So mu question is how do you exactly evaluate how big was Jabbar's impact in 70s? I think it's important question. because Jordan will win in this thread (so far he has 18 votes, Russell 7 and KAJ 2) and in next one we would have a lot KAJ vs Russell discussion. And BTW, my feeling is that over the years I've been on realGM KAJ is the least discussed player among GOAT candidates, what might hurt his position on such list, so I hope we would discuss about him as much as possible in this and next thread.
These are good points, and I agree with you that Kareem gets underdiscussed. An interesting phenomenon, because it seems to stem from people basically agreeing about him more than they agree about other guys.
So then say, with Russell, there's a tendency to look at the Russell vs Kareem debate more in terms of whether Russell is truly legit than whether that's enough to surpass Kareem.
What I'll say about Kareem is that my impression of him is as more of an individual force than a team force. He's one of the few bigs I'd truly want volume scoring, but while he doesn't have a Wilt or Dantley-ish issue of suffocating his teammates while he scores, neither does seem to be a true "pick your poison" offensive threat who passes for an easy bucket the moment the defense commits to him. Part of that is simply because that's how most scorers are, but part of that also is that my perception of his attack is considerably more elongated than I'd prefer in my ideal scenario.
As he works himself into position, this gives teams time to react, and his success was noteworthy because it seemed to occur against very well prepared defenses. That's amazing, but I don't think it's as potent as the threats specifically going after a defense at its weakest.
Similarly on defense, while Kareem blocked shots, and is in that sense a help defender, he didn't have a my-god-he's-everywhere feel to him to me. And while that's certainly subjective on my part, to the extent my feeling overlaps with the players on the court, it has a big influence on how effective Kareem was at actually altering shots.
But in the end, none of this is quantitative, and so it's tough to be too certain.
Something I will note is that Kareem had two teams peaks, and in each case you can argue that the more salient feature was how powerful a force the point guard he played with was (Oscar and Magic). With Magic it's a pretty obvious point, but with Oscar it's rather amazing the effect he had so late in his career taking on a role very much distinct compared with how he'd played in Cincinnati.
And this certainly factors in to how I see Kareem. He's a primary offensive player who isn't really a GOAT offensive candidate. One can certainly argue that two-way and with the longevity it's enough to give him the nod, but I suppose when the his team results lag behind a little bit, I'm inclined to believe it's partially because he couldn't give as much as the absolute peak of a super-duper-star NBA player.
