ushvinder88 wrote:carried a 41-41 team to the finals
This needs to stop getting raised as a major point in his favor.
The 81 Rockets were the 6th seed with a 40-42 record, not 41-41. They beat the Lakers 2-1 in the opening round, which is a shorter series than any we've seen in a couple of decades now. Then they had the opportunity to play ANOTHER sub-.500 team in the conference finals.
This is not an impressive achievement by any meaningful standard... It happened, and Moses generally played well, but he led the team to a sub-.500 record and got massively lucky in the playoffs, then finally caved when there was a normal-length series against legitimate competition. That's not something you want to use to elevate a player. Moses has enough legitimate achievements and accolades upon which to draw that such a thing can be safely ignored for the most part.
Warspite wrote: Its a general rant. If the shoe fits.... if not discard it. Moses like every player is less appreciated as time goes on. Everything said about Bob Cousey today will be said about MJ in 25 yrs and Kobe 15 yrs after that.
This is inaccurate.
Bob Cousy was not efficient relative to his era and didn't really craft a team offense which was particularly effective even by the rudimentary standards of his time. His team won on the basis of defense, playing with fairly tepid offense. The same is not true of Jordan or Kobe, and your comment doesn't hold any legitimacy as a result of the WILD contextual differences (and the reasons for which Cousy is seen as far lesser than in the proto-form league in which he played).
The eye test is the ultimate judge and any stat that doesnt support the eye test is suspect.
This is a wholly inaccurate statement; the eye test is riddled with inaccuracy and bias, and is the LEAST reliable of all sources of information without appropriate constraint and focus. It's very useful when breaking down certain things, like play types and style, but it is far, far too prone to human mental weakness. Statistics have their own weaknesses, but failing to acknowledge that the eye test has its own problems is just as foolhardy as doing the same for stats. You've managed to ignore the weakness of the human mind AND detract from the objective value of all stats (by lumping all quantitative examination together in a common and errant manner) all at once, and there's nothing of logic or reason to that sort of statement.
"Any stat that doesn't support the eye test is suspect" is a violently incorrect statement; what it actually represents is an opportunity to investigate WHY what we see and what the numbers suggest don't meet. Sometimes, we need to understand more properly what a stat is saying, and all must be examined in context. Sometimes, though, even often, the numbers are telling us something the eye test isn't prepared to accept based on narrative bias. It's ridiculous to pass off a stat just because it doesn't confirm what you already believe you know.
I get the resistance to certain stats: one-number stats are rife with all kinds of potential error. But as contextual data builds up to support an idea, the general infirmity of the eye test starts to fall before that sort of objective onslaught. If it's just one number, then that's something else.
In Moses' case, for example, we see that he's got big volume, good efficiency, great overall offensive productivity... but didn't exert quite as much impact on his teams as his numbers should suggest (especially in comparison with his peers).
His greatest achievements are snaking through an easy-as-hell route to the Finals and losing to Boston... and joining a team that had been to the Finals the year before and making it back, only to win... against a Lakers squad without Worthy and with Nixon and McAdoo hobbled by injuries. A legitimate title, for sure, but people get caught up in the sweep without remembering details of that sort.
He was a dominant player; he was a great player. He was a guy who played a unique style of basketball and he deserves recognition in this range we are now discussing. It's not unbelievable that he could be considered better than any of the handful of guys we're discussing right now. But we're seeing a lot of accolade bias and narrative influence here, and that's not always productive.
Moses was a great player, but the vitriol with which people are supporting certain elements of his narrative evade context, which grows frustrating. Comments like yours, Warspite, just don't make sense. Statistical analysis has significant value. Data tracking is vital to understanding more than what the human eye can tell. Obviously, you need to use both angles of examination to properly understand what's going on, but lending extra credence to the eye test is nothing more than resistance to an idea you dislike more than anything else.
TS% and ORTG, for example, are favorable things for Moses. Some of the issues taken with his game are that his individual dominance didn't create well for the rest of his teammates, so he didn't typically exert a huge impact on team offense apart from dragging it up from crap, as opposed to leading it to elite status. Some of it comes from exquisite career timing. Some comes from excessive credit to largely meaningless longevity. Some of it comes in comparison to peers who achieved more. The disbelief with which some are responding to Robinson being considered ahead of Moses is mildly amusing to me... not because I can't fathom a reason for Moses to be ahead, there's legitimacy to that argument, but because of the dishonest examination of Robinson's value as a player compared to a guy like Moses.
The other comment you made which I thought was interesting, and which you made a definitive statement even though it's not:
If we had a draft he would be a top 10 pick. He would win MVPs in any era he played.
That's not definitively true, no. He'd have had a hard time doing it in the 90s, with the competition present at his own position, let alone MJ, Malone and Barkley. He certainly wouldn't have cracked off three of them in that era.
The 2000s wouldn't have been a ton better for him.
It's very possible that he might have missed out on an MVP in another era, particularly the 90s. He'd certainly have been a perennial MVP
candidate in any era because of the magnitude of his value to most teams, but you can't just drop hammer statements like that as if they are accepted fact when there is nothing making them firmly true.
I still dont understand the whole logic of "Moses was a bad passer." That has to be one of the strangest things ever written on RealGM. Why would you want the best player in the world to pass up a 5ft layup so a teammate can brick a 20fter? Those Rockets teams didnt have anyone that could make LBJs Cavs teams yet he still got to the Finals.
This is an exaggeration. Moses did not take every shot from 5 feet, even by your own admission in the same post where you made this comment. The main rip on Moses is that when he had a back-down isolation, he wasn't a particularly adept passer out of the double team. Yeah, his Houston teams weren't stunners in terms of floor-spacing talent, but it wasn't just shooters. You're talking about cutters, basic kick-outs, he really didn't weaponize the pass to any significant extent. This is a guy with
ZERO seasons of 2+ apg. He averaged 1.9 AST100 over his career, which is limp.
Yes, big men don't typically flash out crazy volume assist numbers, but because of the nature of his game, he really wasn't about creating opportunities for others and didn't do a particularly good job of leveraging the passing game as an offensive tool. This is part of why his impact was lesser than his individual scoring efficacy. If he's got a good shot, great, but you'd be wildly off the mark to suggest that every possession of every one of the considerable number of games he played, he had a really good shot and couldn't have done better by passing out. That's where it's coming from. Guys like Olajuwon, Duncan, Robinson and Shaq all helped their teams with passing skills and when those skills peaked, you typically saw significant team success above and beyond their usual levels. Moses never really showed any of that sort of passing acumen... even in Philly, when your comments about the quality of his teammates are entirely invalid. He was a 1.3 APG player with the Sixers, and before you start talking about his minutes per game, he averaged 1.3 apg in 37.5 mpg in the 83 title season as well.
Now that season obviously ended very well, so we're clearly not talking about something that's so brutally wrong about the player that it must be called a terrible weakness... but remember that this was true in context of a team that had made the Finals the previous season without him, and which actually DECLINED in offensive efficacy in the 83 season compared to the 82 season, despite Malone coming in with his 24.5 ppg on 57.8% TS and 116 ORTG. You'd imagine such a player would help them improve their offense, but the Sixers were actually 1.6 points per 100 possessions worse on offense. Adjustment periods, etc, etc, myriad explanations, but the point is that there really weren't any major returns on the offensive end and it was their defensive improvement which helped them win those 7 extra games. Moses played one of his only focused defensive effort-full seasons that year, something not a typical characteristic of his game, and it helped make a big difference.
This is the sort of stuff I'm talking about; you don't need to look at RAPM or WOWY or whatever other stat du jour against which you care to rail, you can look at the basic elements of how the team won or lost games and see that the primary focus of Malone's game wasn't helping the team nearly as much as an entirely separate side of the game to which he did not typically contribute that much. Things like that help steal some of the luster his numbers, accolades and achievements produce in our minds. He remains a great player and one who should be recognized among the very best, but when compared specifically to those guys, there are some things which come up that make it wholly reasonable that he's fallen to where he is despite traditional indicators like MVPs and such.
A guy like David Robinson is being elevated here primarily because of his defensive advantage over someone like Moses and because he actually did more with his non-stacked squads than Moses did, 81 luck run through the PS aside. Robinson doesn't have such a story because he didn't play on sub-.500 teams and he never had the luxury of playing an utterly crap squad in the WCFs... he was busy running into the Malone/Stockton Jazz, Olajuwon's Rockets, the 1990 Finalist Blazers, the Finalist Suns and so forth. Very good teams. Hell, even the Warriors were a whole sight better than the Royals teams, and there weren't any best-of-3 series of which to take advantage for Robinson either. So contextually, a guy who generally won more games and still made it plenty deep into the playoffs while facing superior competition is pretty competitive in an argument with someone like Moses... especially since he has some great RS numbers, an MVP, a DPOY, his own host of statistical records and achievements (the quadruple double, the 71-point game, etc) and a fairly palpable value as a defensive presence which helps counter his declining offensive utility in the playoffs. Then when he had help like Moses did, he also won a title (and then another when he was older and in his final season, of course), so it's not like you can even use the traditional "RINGZZZ" argument. You've got to go Finals MVP and forget that the same team sans Moses was in the Finals the year before anyway.
Food for thought: argue Moses, go nuts. He's a great player who deserves support and I was mumbling about him like 10 spots earlier in this project because he really does bear giving some traction in any of the past 8-10 spots, but do it the right way. Don't dismiss logic and data tracking because it doesn't agree with your subjective opinion or nostalgia-laden memories. Evaluate with honesty; if that evaluation leads you to still believe that Moses is the appropriate candidate, great. But try to remember that the point of this project is to be open to influence and reconsideration based on other information and viewpoints.
