RealGM Top 100 List #21

[Doctor MJ]

Spoiler:

Elgin Baylor
I do feel Baylor should be getting some traction by this point: one of the greatest volume scorers of his era while simultaneously probably being THE greatest rebounder ever from the SF position.
The Lakers in '58 were a dismal 19-53 (.264).......Rookie Elgin Baylor arrives and finishes 4th in league in scoring, 3rd in rebounding, 8th in assists and the Lakers jump to 33-39 (.458) AND make a trip to the NBA finals (one of EIGHT finals appearances Baylor would make in his career).

tbh, only has about 5 seasons that I'd feel comfortable classifying as his prime ('59-'63):
rs: 32.0 ppg/16.7 rpg/4.4 apg; 26.1 PER, .195 WS/48 in a huge 42.1 mpg
ps: 33.6 ppg/14.6 rpg/3.9 apg; 25.1 PER, .183 WS/48 in a huge 44.0 mpg

After that his knee problems would become problematic, although he was STILL so damn good that he continued to garner All-NBA 1st Team nods (would 10 times receive that distinction).
He's 23rd all-time in MVP Award Shares, and a very symmetrical 23rd all-time in RealGM RPoY shares (while being up against Russell, Wilt, West, Robertson---who are ALL already voted in, and none worse than #15---for basically his whole career, as well as a few years up against Pettit).

Well, I'm sorry to be a hater here, but I'd be remiss if I didn't chime in.

I'll say up front I have no real qualms about giving Baylor credit for his early years, but as far as the honors he was "STILL so damn good" for later on, I think those honors are largely about a small league with not many players being afforded the primacy to put up big stats.

You've probably heard me talk about Baylor's efficiency issues before, but let me break it down more concretely.

The table has the following column all through Baylor's prime.
Year - NBA season in question
Lakers TS - True Shooting % of the Laker team
Baylor TS - True Shooting % of Baylor
FGA Primacy - Where Baylor ranked in terms of FGA per minute on his team
All-NBA - What All-NBA team Baylor made

Code: Select all

Year  Lakers TS   Baylor TS  FGA Primacy All-NBA   
'59   46.1        48.8       1st         1st
'60   44.4        48.9       1st         1st
'61   46.2        49.8       1st         1st
'62   48.7        49.2       1st         1st
'63   50.0        51.9       1st         1st
'64   50.3        48.7       1st         1st
'65   50.0        46.3       1st         1st
'66   50.5        45.6       2nd        none
'67   50.1        49.1       1st         1st
'68   52.8        50.5       1st         1st
'69   51.1        50.0       1st         1st
'70   51.2        53.7       2nd        none


Basic observations:
From '59 to '63, Baylor was more efficient than his team.
From '64 to '69, Baylor was less efficient than his team.
In '70 we finally see Baylor make a leap in efficiency after being basically static his whole career.

From '59 to '69, Baylor's shooting MO was pretty similar. He remained the first shooting option while he was on the floor except in '66 where he was really, really nowhere near 100% where Jerry West just barely beat him out.
In '70 he took another step back in primacy, and as mentioned, that was when his efficiency jumped.

He made All-NBA first team in all the years he had top primacy on the Lakers. He missed it in '66 and he missed it in '70, the two years he didn't shoot the most. In fairness though, Baylor missed time in '70, else I'm sure he would have made it.

What I see:
Basically from '64 on Baylor was playing in a way he should not have. The team would have been better if he'd played a different role letting the vastly more effective Jerry West score more, but he didn't. I think there were clearly two main results to this as far as what Baylor was:

1) Baylor was less valuable than he would have been if he played smarter.
2) Baylor was more highly rated than he should have been because he scored a lot.

Sadly, Baylor was probably more highly rated playing the dumb way than he would have been playing the smart way because people were so fixated on how much he scored.

I look at all of this and I don't see "And he was so good he was still Top 5 in the world". No, what I see is a guy in a small league where very few players are allowed to shoot as much as he did being credited for often hurting his team.

Let's take a look at '65. Granted this isn't a random year, but I want you to see how deep this went. In '65 Baylor made All-NBA 1st team. Here's the list of the top 5 FGA primacy scores in the league among those playing big minutes with their FGA/36 and their TS%:

Code: Select all

Player              FGA/36   TS%
1. Wilt Chamberlain 22.7     51.3
2. Sam Jones        22.7     50.3
3. Elgin Baylor     22.4     46.3
4. Jerry West       19.4     57.2
5. Bob Pettit       18.9     51.0


Basic observations:
-You've got 3 guys are around the same efficiency, one guy way behind and one guy way ahead.
-Wilt, it should be noted was injured. His efficiency was typically way higher.
-Pettit, it must be noted was on his last season, and was clearly below his previous standards.

What I see:
Baylor was painfully ineffectual by any NBA standards of the time, yet he still made All-NBA 1st team.
Baylor's inefficiency is particularly astonishing given that he had the league's best scorer right next to him. Baylor's inefficiency mixed with volume hurt the Lakers even more than it would have hurt other teams.

Finally, Baylor's being brought as Pettit is still being discussed. I'm sure many don't realize this, but when I talk about Pettit's scaling with the times in terms of efficiency, the criticism of Baylor being inefficient next to the Laker team note that this quite literally would NEVER have applied to Pettit.

Pettit was always more efficient than the Laker team of the same year, and even if you bump him forward in time a few years, the Lakers don't pass him up until his very last season.

So yeah, the scale of Baylor's issues here within his team context are mind-boggling. The only reason he got his later accolades (which amount to half of his total) is because people were quite literally clueless about efficiency back then. I try not to make assertions along the lines of "They were dumb back then, I know better now", but we see how numbers affect perception. Once people get used to efficiency, they do see the importance and they do care. They didn't have the same access back then, and the result was that Baylor got judged as if he were creating all those points out of nothing as opposed to taking opportunities away from his teammates.

When you then compare Baylor to the list of available candidates at this point, to me it's just no contest. Most of these guys are on here because they were doing great things for their team most of their career, and Baylor just wasn't. What he has to offer is maybe 5 years of true superstar impact before a massive drop. And yes injuries were part of the drop, but he was never very efficient before the injuries, and afterward he showed the mentally he wasn't able to to tell that he was chucking shots he shouldn't be, so to me he's basically exactly the kind of old generation guy you worry about being able to thrive in the modern game.

Alright, /rant

This guy was a SF not a coach. He took the shots they gave him and from 59-63 (his true prime) he was always 1st or 2nd in PER, and other than his rookie year (where he made the Finals) he always was more efficient in the playoffs (from 60-63 he averaged 33.8 ppg on 50.1 TS in the regular season and 35.8 ppg on 52.1 TS in the playoffs). In 64 he underperformed (1 series) but in 66 and 68 (he was hurt in 65 and 67) he was more efficient in the postseason just like his early career. How can we let this slide for someone like Duncan or Hakeem and not Baylor (not saying you Doc because you were hard on Hakeem and Duncan just stating it for people like me who had that logic when it came to them)?

[Texas Chuck]

Spoiler:

Stockton and Malone from 88-95. Great post by some user on this forum:

The general opinion of most people is that a team with one ATG (Top 25) will usually be pretty good unless the supporting cast is quite bad and management is incompetent to do anything about it. If you pair two players in this range with a good coach you should have a perpetual front-line contender that regularly turns in dominant RS performances. If the two players in question have games that are perfect fits for each other and never suffer injury than you should expect regular deep runs in the post-season.

The 88-95 Jazz had these ingredients but the results didn't come close to expectations.

First the facts:

I. Cumulative Regular-Season Performance

2nd Best RS WP%
4th Best RS SRS

II. Individual RS Performance

1 season that ranks in the top 25 for wins over these 8 years
1 season that ranks in the top 25 for SRS over these 8 years

III. Post-Season performance

Code: Select all

    W   L      MOV  SRS of opponent
    33  37   -.09   3.96

4 1st Round exits in 8 years.

The 88-95 Jazz were consistently good from 88-95 but almost never great. While they turned in one dominant RS in most years they were a secondary contender.

In the PS, their performance was quite average. In half the seasons they didn't even get out of the first round and never made it to the finals. Only twice did they reach the conference finals.

The accepted wisdom is that Stockton and Malone were both in their prime during these years and that the former was at his peak. They were never hurt during the RS or PS. Jerry Sloan is assumed to be a good coach. At various times they had impact players on the defensive and offensive end of the court.

No offense to the unnamed poster, but what's so great about it? Like Owly already alluded to in general and I pointed out specifically a couple of these years, this analysis is kinda superficial.

Take Nash who had STAT and Marion and/or Shaq and tons of good role players. Or even better he had Dirk and Fin and (Juwan or NVE or Jamison/Walker). He didn't experience much more playoff success, but you take no issue with him. Where is the consistency in approach?

[Doctor MJ]

[
What I see:
Basically from '64 on Baylor was playing in a way he should not have. The team would have been better if he'd played a different role letting the vastly more effective Jerry West score more, but he didn't. I think there were clearly two main results to this as far as what Baylor was:

1) Baylor was less valuable than he would have been if he played smarter.
2) Baylor was more highly rated than he should have been because he scored a lot.

Sadly, Baylor was probably more highly rated playing the dumb way than he would have been playing the smart way because people were so fixated on how much he scored.

Part of the reason that Elgin looks bad because of the team is that the team includes West.
Let's make it a 3 part equation


TS%

Elgin West Rest

61 0.498 0.468 0.444
62 0.492 0.524 0.470
63 0.519 0.523 0.485
64 0.487 0.562 0.488
65 0.463 0.572 0.487
66 0.456 0.573 0.491
67 0.491 0.559 0.488
68 0.505 0.590 0.524
69 0.500 0.557 0.503
70 0.537 0.572 0.486


Ave 0.495 0.551 0.487

Let's leave aside volume scoring (Carmelo/Iverson, etc.) for the moment.

So mostly you are saying that Elgin should have passed and set up West
more.

But Elgin was averaging 4.5 assists a game - and West 5.9 - and West's assists rose
each year

But West was the guard bringing the ball down court - not Baylor.

I don't know how much more a forward can do then average 4.5 assists a game


Here are the top assists per 36 for forwards 1961-69

http://bkref.com/tiny/CHVdW

The top 12 has 7 years of Elgin, 3 of Siegfried who was really a guard, plus 2 others - Schayes, and Ray Scott (a surprise to me).


So you have the top passing forward in the game virtually every year - and the main guy he is passing to is having an incredible TS%.

And overall he is volume scoring at a TS% rate higher than the rest of the team - he does have 3 bad years 65,66, and 68.


So it looks like Elgin was doing as much as any forward setting up a guard - maybe ever.

Well, first: Why would exclude West's efficiency when judging Baylor's? West's presence only made it more obvious that Baylor's inefficiency was pointless.

With that said, I think you have a good point. He wasn't a black hole. While he clearly was shooting too much, and doing so ineffectively, it's oversimplistic to say that he wasn't passing out. The real solution was to refrain from using him as so much of a hub in the first place, and that was a coaching decision.

I think though it's necessary to ponder the effect of Baylor's stature had on the coaches. If West had joined the Lakers first, so we really think that coaches would have designed an offense that let Baylor shoot more frequently than West for all those years? I can't imagine, maybe someone else would like to try to paint such a picture.

When a player who used to be the best is still given primacy after he's clearly been surpassed, it's probably because no one can figure out a way to get him to change how he's playing without doing something drastic, which is dangerous on many levels. A smart and wise player recognizes what's happened and adjusts smoothly without forcing anything drastic to occur, just as a smart and wise player finds ways to improve his efficiency over time regardless of whether he's been surpassed by a teammate.

And I should be clear with all of this, I'm not saying that Baylor was a moron in a sea of genius basketball players. Most players don't have the type of awareness I'm talking about, just the really smart ones. But while I am holding Baylor's brain against him to some degree here, really what I'm talking about primarily is just judging the man based on what he actually accomplished. Scoring at volume isn't much of an accomplishment if it's done while wasting possessions.

[E-Balla]

So 3 things:

1) If Baylor played stupid basketball and thus didn't help his team, even if it was only because coaches demanded it of him, isn't that what actually matters?

Well the guy you're saying should've gotten more shots was the point guard - aka the main guy distributing shots. Baylor had high assist numbers and we don't really know the way he was getting those shots or if it was detrimental to the team. Those Lakers teams won and had some great offenses. Hard to say the coaches, Baylor, or West weren't doing a good job distributing shots.

2) If you're one of the people who essentially tries to make a function rating a guy based on how valuable his scoring volume SHOULD have been, essentially blaming the fact that wasn't reality on the coach, what about the fact that he only scored that much because he took all those shots? Frankly how are you even imagining it went down differently. Are you pretending he took as many shots, but instead took shots he could make instead of ones he could miss? Are you pretending that every bad shot he took he just chose instead to not take?

I'm not saying its on the coach or even that it was an issue. For example 60 years from now someone could be saying LaMarcus Aldridge shouldn't have taken all those fga this past season because he was way less efficient than the team. In context we know they were only that efficient because they had him to take all the tough shots. If you can point me to old articles with people criticizing Baylor the way you are I'll rethink my stance but it's hard for me to believe all those people didn't understand what they were seeing and they randomly gave Baylor all those accolades.

3) What is it exactly you think coaches told Baylor to do? I think it's crucial to remember that this is a game where the game largely happens with the coach just standing their on the sidelines powerless. When we see other players from the same era move toward greater shooting efficiency, do you honestly think it's because a coach took them by the shoulders and fixed them and that coaches simply refused to do that with Baylor? In the end players know that no one wants them to take shots they aren't likely to hit, and that they are supposed to pass when someone else has a better opportunity. The only time it's remotely plausible that this isn't the case is when you have one volume scorer who you think is being told that he's the "loss leader" for his team sucking defenders away from teammates...but that absolutely wasn't the case with Baylor and the Lakers.

This is a good point. As everyone else got more efficient Baylor didn't. Is like to see the efficiency of players that played 56-59 compared to their efficiency in the 60s. Maybe he was behind the pack or maybe new and better players came in.

Re: let slide Hakeem & Duncan. I don't know what you're talking about. Those guys are defensive anchors who had nowhere near the efficiency issues Baylor did. They are basically superior to Baylor in every conceivable way despite their imperfections.

I'm saying when it came to scoring so these guys weren't really efficient in the regular season but they saw postseason efficiency and volume spikes. I have issues taking points off for efficiency when the player is efficient when it matters most.

[DQuinn1575]

That is 7 years in the playoffs where Malone and Stockton are pretty much in their prime, and are the 2 best players in the series. Get a pass for losing to MJ, Magic, or Hakeem.


Seven times they lost when they were the two best players in the series, who are in the Top xx of all time.
Anybody else in the top 20 have anything like that?

No offense but this is still superficial. Firstly the burden of proof would be on the people making a claim (though I'm not quite sure what the claim is). And then were going superficial again, just because a team has the players with the best careers it doesn't mean they are or should be expected to win (New Jersey this year, Portland '01 are extreme examples at a whole team level, and obviously this gets even more hazardous if you're only looking at the top couple of players). Otherwise its still the same "you can't have x top players in top y and not win a title" argument. Chuck has already covered this but you can't just look at all time rankings. Is it for instance your contention that beyond the top 2, Buck Williams was worse (or equal to) than Jeff Malone, that Duckworth and Clifford Robinson were worse than Mark Eaton and Mike Brown, ditto Jerome Kersey versus Blue Edwards, Danny Ainge, Mark Bryant and Walter Davis versus Thurl Bailey, Delaney Rudd and Tony Brown. Because if not (and I hope not) then what does saying they got eliminated by a team without top 20 (all-time) guys prove? It's not analysis. It's arbitrary. Feel free to show actual instances where you could say, "he didn't sufficiently outplay Terry Porter [to the degree you would expect of a player going here]" or "He was outplayed by Gary Payton" and those arguments will be evaluated on their merits and (if agreed with) weighted according to voters individual preferences. But to pretend their entire careers are dissapointing (and again at this point I'll re-emphasise, Malone is in, we're looking to evaluate Stockton now. I don't know the best place to argue wrongness with regard to Malone would be, probably a new thread; but not here) and alter Stockton's position based on surface level analysis of team performance, just seems odd to me.

But it's not winning a title I'm taking issue with - they lost to MJ, Magic, Hakeem - all better players than Karl
By my count there have been 6 pairings of the top 20 players when both were prime - I used making all-nba as my cut-off





oscar jabbar 71-72
west wilt 69-73
Kobe shaq 99-04
DRob Duncan 98-99,01
Jabbar magic 80-86
Erving Moses 83-84




Each pairing won at least 1 title



In 24 playoff years they:

won 10 titles
lost 11 times to a team with an T20 player
lost 3 times to a team without a T20 player. twice to titlist - West/Wilt to Lakers, Shaq/Kobe to Pistons


so 23 times out of 24, either champs, lost to top player, or lost to champs

42% titles 96% excusable loss

for Malone/Stockton


lost 5 times to team with a T20 player
lost 7 times to team without a T20 player

so 5 times out of 12, never champs, but lost to top player, or lost to champs

0% titles 42% excusable loss

It's an incredible failure rate compared to the others.

So every other pairing of top 25 players were incredibly successful in the post season, but not this one.

[Texas Chuck]

What are you not getting that its about how those players were playing in each specific year that matters and not their overall career ranking?

In 91 and 92 for example Clyde Drexler was one of the best players in the league and his team beat the Jazz. Why is this such a failing for John Stockton?

And couldn't we easily argue that Nash/STAT have several years where they were better players than Stock/Malone typically were, but they didn't even make a Finals? The KG/Allen/Truth trio only got 1 title. Dirk/Nash have one conference Finals together, etc...

a HUGE part of why Malone is already on the list and why I think Stockton will be within the next 10 spots or so is becuase of longevity, not peaks. So in any given year they shouldn't be held to some unrealistic expectation.

[tsherkin]

Pettit allegedly negative RS-PS delta

There is nothing alleged about it; I demonstrated the differential in his scoring efficiency in my previous post. That term is not constructive. The drop-off is within the bounds of what we see normally from others, but Dirk breaks that mold, and the rarity of that truth combined with the specific level of offense he produced is significant.

Meantime, in the given range, Pettit averaged 51.3% TS against a league average of 46.7% during the same stretch, or ~ +4.6%. Very efficient relative to his peers.

02-12, Dirk averaged 58.3% TS against a period league average of 53.3, so we're talking about a +5.0% differential.

If you actually go and put in all of the single years, it's actually 4.5% and 5.1%.

Dirk's got four seasons in there where he was at +6% or better. Pettit maxed out at +5.0% in 64.

So yes, I do think it's relevant. Dirk maintained a level above Pettit's deviation from his peers even into the playoffs, while Pettit's efficacy dropped off from his RS level, rendering him less effective. Still good, but dropping off to 50.2% is still significant, as it cuts that differential down to 3.4. Still good, very good actually, but leaving Dirk having some seasons where he was doubling that efficiency differential.

Keeping in mind that Pettit was playing at 120+ possessions per game for chunks of his career, it should be pointed out that Dirk's a career 32.8 PTS100 player. If he had the opportunity to benefit from that kind of wildly increased pace, we wouldn't be having this discussion. He has a stretch from 05-12 where he averaged 35.6 PTS100. Greater efficiency, maintenance of that efficiency into the playoffs on volume that actually increased compared to the regular season at times, and then you're comparing two entirely separate calibre players in terms of shooting ability... Even without the 3, Dirk's draw rate and free throw shooting ability separate him from Pettit as a scorer.

All your pro-Dirk points sound like good arguments for Pettit over Ewing

The problem I have with this is that it assumes that Pettit's efficiency differential would translate to the modern league and be equivalent to what Ewing was doing, or that Pettit would wield comparable tactical subversion compared to having a 7-footer with that kind of inside/outside game and level of efficiency. I don't consider Pettit to be in Dirk's class of offensive player, regardless of scoring titles or his efficiency relative to the crap efficiency of the 50s and 60s. It's obvious that he wouldn't scale to Dirk's level of efficiency even if we leave all things equal otherwise, because Dirk's efficiency is essentially relative to Pettit's career-high level of efficiency and Pettit was considerably worse at the line than Dirk.

I think the gap we're experiencing here is that your contention is that Pettit's performance relative to his peers is the same as Dirk's. Dirk is a lot more reverse portable than Pettit is forward portable, even if you strip the 3 from his game and he takes the concordant efficiency hit as a result. Bob wasn't anything like Dirk in terms of actual offensive ability. Great for his era, sure, but the meaning of certain differentials isn't the same the further back you go.

For the arguments I have made for Dirk to apply to Pettit, he'd have to be that which he is not: a comparable offensive player.

[DQuinn1575]

Well, first: Why would exclude West's efficiency when judging Baylor's? West's presence only made it more obvious that Baylor's inefficiency was pointless

To point out that the option should be (1) West first, then it's okay for Elgin to shoot. When West was hurt or not on the court then it wasn't a bad thing for Elgin to shoot.

With that said, I think you have a good point. He wasn't a black hole. While he clearly was shooting too much, and doing so ineffectively, it's oversimplistic to say that he wasn't passing out. The real solution was to refrain from using him as so much of a hub in the first place, and that was a coaching decision.

I think though it's necessary to ponder the effect of Baylor's stature had on the coaches. If West had joined the Lakers first, so we really think that coaches would have designed an offense that let Baylor shoot more frequently than West for all those years? I can't imagine, maybe someone else would like to try to paint such a picture.

When a player who used to be the best is still given primacy after he's clearly been surpassed, it's probably because no one can figure out a way to get him to change how he's playing without doing something drastic, which is dangerous on many levels. A smart and wise player recognizes what's happened and adjusts smoothly without forcing anything drastic to occur, just as a smart and wise player finds ways to improve his efficiency over time regardless of whether he's been surpassed by a teammate.

And I should be clear with all of this, I'm not saying that Baylor was a moron in a sea of genius basketball players. Most players don't have the type of awareness I'm talking about, just the really smart ones. But while I am holding Baylor's brain against him to some degree here, really what I'm talking about primarily is just judging the man based on what he actually accomplished. Scoring at volume isn't much of an accomplishment if it's done while wasting possessions.

So what was Elgin supposed to do? - West passes him the ball - Elgin passes as much as any forward in the game back to West. He shoots and passes a lot because the offense goes through him.

Does he (1) tell the coach to change the offense?
(2) tell West to quit passing him the ball and shoot more?

Always, how much more could West shoot and keep up the TS%? I'm sure there is some, but how much?
And if Elgin fed West more and became less of a threat to the defense, would West's FG% decline - how much?

[The Infamous1]

What are you not getting that its about how those players were playing in each specific year that matters and not their overall career ranking?

In 91 and 92 for example Clyde Drexler was one of the best players in the league and his team beat the Jazz. Why is this such a failing for John Stockton?

And couldn't we easily argue that Nash/STAT have several years where they were better players than Stock/Malone typically were, but they didn't even make a Finals? The KG/Allen/Truth trio only got 1 title. Dirk/Nash have one conference Finals together, etc...

a HUGE part of why Malone is already on the list and why I think Stockton will be within the next 10 spots or so is becuase of longevity, not peaks. So in any given year they shouldn't be held to some unrealistic expectation.

The Boston big 3 didnt play 20 years and most importantly their entire peaks/primes together like Stockton/Malone. You could argue KG was just exiting his prime when they formed(07)
Dirk/Nash played about about 4 seasons together and nash wasn't even in his prime (you could argue Dirk wasnt either).
Nash/Amare didnt make a finals yes but Amare is no where close to an all time great.

Lol at you trying to act like those are comparable situations to stockton/Malone

[drza]

Pettit vs Baylor: what's Pettit's case?

Spoiler:

I've seen a lot of votes for Pettit in this thread, and I've seen others say that this spot is essentially between Pettit and Ewing. I've said all along that it's really hard to do cross-era comparisons, but Pettit has a contemporary still on the board that I'm struggling to see how he beats him. Keep in mind, a lot of this stems from my last few posts where I looked harder at the box score stats (late last night) after previously looking again at Pettit's postseasons vs his regular seasons. Taken together, Baylor just looks clearly better to me. But I'm definitely willing to be educated, for those that have Pettit as clearly the guy. But this is what I see:

Regular season, 10 year primes
Bob Pettit 1956 - 1965: 27 pts (51.3% TS), 16.5 reb, 3.0 ast (TO not kept)
Elgin Baylor 1959 - 1968: 28.1 pts (49.1% TS), 14.2 reb, 4.2 ast (TO not kept)

Playoffs, 10 year primes
Bob Pettit 1956 - 1965: 25.5 pts (50.1% TS), 14.8 reb, 2.7 ast (TO not kept)
Elgin Baylor 1959 - 1968: 30.7 pts (50.3% TS), 14.1 reb, 3.9 ast (TO not kept)

First, theer's not much need for pace adjustment here because those 10-year peaks almost completely overlapped outside of Pettit's 3-year head start. So if we just go macro and look at box scores, it certainly looks to me like Baylor is pretty clearly the more impressive of the 2. Pettit had small advantages in efficiency and rebounds in the regular season (vs. Baylor's small advantages in scoring volume and assists), but in the postseason Baylor improved his volume and efficiency while Pettit slid with the end result that Baylor seems to outperform him significantly in the postseason. Am I mis-reading this?

Accolades
I hear a lot about Pettit's 2 MVPs, his First Team All NBA finishes every season, and the championship that his team won over the Celtics. But again, even a cursory look indicates that these aren't really boons in comparison to Baylor. Baylor, too, was All NBA First Team every year during his 10-year prime. Which leaves the MVPs and the championship. So let's look closer at them:

Petit's first MVP in 1956
None of Russell, Wilt, Oscar, Baylor or West are in the league yet so (in a comparison with Baylor) it's fair to question whether Pettit's '56 would have been MVP-worthy just a few years later when Baylor was peaking. Also, look at Pettit's postseason that year:

Pettit in 1956
Reg: 25.7 ppg (50.2% TS), 16.2 reb, 27.3 PER (led NBA), .236 WS/48
Post: 19.1 ppg (48.2% TS), 10.5 reb, 21.5 PER, .108 WS/48

Pettit's production went through the floor that postseason. In his peak, Baylor never had a postseason this poor. So despite Pettit's regular season MVP (on a below .500 team) (at a time in between superstar talents), I don't see this season as anything that would give him an advantage over Baylor.

Hawks Championship year 1958
The fact that Pettit's Hawks beat Russell's Celtics is used as one of the big supports for Pettit's candidacy. However, upon closer examination: Russell was injured. That's not Pettit's fault, of course, but to me it takes the "he broke up Russell's dynasty!" card away from being played too hard. The Hawks that year were an 0.82 SRS team in the season (3rd out of 8 teams, well behind the Celtics' leading 5.02 SRS mark). So perhaps the narrative could be that Pettit dragged his average cast through the postseason to meet up with those Celtics, putting them in the right position to take advantage of Russell's injury?

But no, Pettit wasn't the one stepping up in the postseason to drag the average cast. It was Cliff Hagan who did that. 1958 playoffs;

1958 playoffs
Petit: 24.2 ppg (47.2% TS), 16.5 reb, 22.6 PER, .134 WS/48
Hagan: 27.7 ppg (57.6% TS), 10.5 reb, 27.5 PER, .312 WS/48

Hagan led the NBA in the 1958 playoffs in scoring, True Shooting Percentage, PER, FG% and WS/48. Essentially, he did in that championship run what I'd have expected Petit to do, and honestly I think superficial analysis leads many to believe that Petit in 1958 DID do what Hagan did. But he really didn't.

So again, let me be clear. The Hawks won the title, and Pettit will always have that Game 7. Those are great accomplishments, and not taking them away. But if I'm comparing Pettit with an era peer like Baylor, I don't see how that title should be used as a boost to Pettit's candidacy. In his peak, Baylor's postseasons were regularly stronger than the one that Pettit turned in and he didn't get the advantage of facing a Celtics squad with an injured Russell.

Pettit's 2nd MVP year: 1959
This is the last of the major accolade seasons that a cursory accolades count might use to rank Pettit ahead of Baylor. But again, in the words of the legendary Rafiki, "Look haaarder..."

Pettit won that MVP off his outstanding regular season performance, but rookie Elgin Baylor was right there with him finishing 3rd in the MVP vote. Baylor's Lakers, who just a season before were (by-FAR) the worst team in the NBA with 19 wins and a -5.79 SRS (next worst was 33 wins and -1.47 SRS) jumped up with rookie Baylor to a playoff-worthy 33 wins and -1.42 SRS (2nd in their division behind Pettit's Hawks with their 49 wins and +2.89 SRS). So it appears that the Hawks were clearly the better team, but in the regular season Rookie-of-the-year Baylor was very competitive with MVP Pettit. They were the two forwards on the All NBA 1st Team.

In the 1959 postseason as a whole Pettit's box score numbers were better than Baylor's:
Pettit: 27.8 ppg (50.4% TS), 12.5 reb, 22.9 PER, .188 WS/48
Baylor: 25.5 ppg (46.9% TS), 12.0 reb, 19.3 PER, .104 WS/48

However, Baylor led his 33-win Lakers to defeat Pettit's 49-win Hawks 4 - 2 in the Western Division Finals before eventually getting swept by the Celtics in the Finals (led by a fully healthy Bill Russell).

Again, my point here is not to say that Pettit didn't have a great season or that he didn't deserve his MVP. But if we're comparing with Baylor, and as a rookie that season Baylor was extremely competitive with Pettit in both the regular and postseason while leading his team to an upset victory over Pettit's Hawks...I just can't see how this season should be a feather in Pettit's hat.

Conclusion

Across their 10-year primes, it certainly looks to me like Baylor was competitive with Pettit in the regular season and clearly the better post-season performer. Pettit's accolades were deserved, but upon closer examination don't appear to give him any real advantage in this comp. So I ask again, for those voting Pettit here...what's his case over Baylor?

The difference is in league norms. Pettit's RS ts% (over their careers) edge isn't nothing (1.7 "percent", ts% not really a percentage). But in '55 (Pettit's rookie year) the league ts% was 0.455315731 and in '56 it's 0.457900659
. By '68 it's 0.497823894. Those are probably the extremes (the first year of your Pettit sample and the last of Baylor's). Ideally it would be more systematic but there's a fair chasm in terms of efficiency relative to the league in the non-mutual span and that shows up in the advanced metrics (Pettit prior to Baylor's arrival: 26.5 PER, .216 WS/48; Baylor after Pettit's retirement: 19.9 PER, .121 WS/48).

It's hard to get good info on either's D, but it seems like Baylor may not have been great, particularly in terms of possibly losing some mobility after his injuries.

Those are the reasons that came to mind for me in terms of what separates them.

The playoffs might be worth a closer look but with the smaller sample, the effects of competition (particularly Boston) and team performance, I'm less confident in it (and particularly metrics) as a fair barometer.

I don't think era difference/league norm difference is very explanatory here, for a few reasons. For one, again, we were talking about 7 years of overlap in their 10-year primes. That's a lot of overlap, the majority of their primes, in fact, and I think more than enough to show how they were performing in their primes on the same playing field. Plus, the lower Baylor performance at the back end of his prime that you site is less about league norms and more about Baylor's level dropping after his knee injuries.

If we look only at the common years of prime, there is very little difference between Pettit from 1959 - 65 as opposed to from 1956 - 65. I'm going to post the 59 - 65 numbers for each below, and when I do you can compare Pettit over the shorter time period to the longer time period in the spoiler above. Almost exactly the same. Baylor, on the other hand, looks significantly better if you only look at the 59 - 65 window. The late 60s, where the league norms effect that you point out should have been helping Baylor, in fact is the weakest period of what I included as his 10-year prime so they don't shift the needle in Baylor's favor at all. To whit:

Regular season
Bob Pettit 1959 - 1965: 27.8 pts (52% TS), 16.6 reb, 3.3 ast (TO not kept)
Elgin Baylor 1959 - 1965: 30.2 pts (49.2% TS), 15.4 reb, 4.3 ast (TO not kept)

Playoffs, 10 year primes
Bob Pettit 1959 - 1965 (59 games): 25.8 pts (50.8% TS), 14.8 reb, 3.0 ast (TO not kept)
Elgin Baylor 1959 - 1964 (65 games) : 32.9 pts (50.7% TS), 14.3 reb, 4.0 ast (TO not kept)

If we look only at the common years, the story is almost exactly the same as what I wrote in the spoiler section above, just with larger volumes for Baylor. Pettit still has the efficiency advantage in the regular season that goes away entirely in the postseason, when Baylor matches his efficiency but on much higher volume. Essentially, whether we look at the entire 10 years or just at the in-common 7 years, it still looks to me that they are pretty even in the regular season but that Baylor looks pretty solidly like the better postseason performer.

[Texas Chuck]

They are comparable because we can't look at Malone/Stockton as being this 20 years of the same team. You have to look at them in specific years or at least in smaller time periods (Eaton era/Horacek era, etc.) No other way of looking at makes any sense at all.

The pieces around them changed, but also again much of their value on an all-time ranking comes from longevity. If you actually took the time like I did to go back and look at who they were losing to in the playoffs and how each of them performed as individuals we wouldn't be having this needless discussion.

[Owly]

Pettit vs Baylor: what's Pettit's case?

Spoiler:

I've seen a lot of votes for Pettit in this thread, and I've seen others say that this spot is essentially between Pettit and Ewing. I've said all along that it's really hard to do cross-era comparisons, but Pettit has a contemporary still on the board that I'm struggling to see how he beats him. Keep in mind, a lot of this stems from my last few posts where I looked harder at the box score stats (late last night) after previously looking again at Pettit's postseasons vs his regular seasons. Taken together, Baylor just looks clearly better to me. But I'm definitely willing to be educated, for those that have Pettit as clearly the guy. But this is what I see:

Regular season, 10 year primes
Bob Pettit 1956 - 1965: 27 pts (51.3% TS), 16.5 reb, 3.0 ast (TO not kept)
Elgin Baylor 1959 - 1968: 28.1 pts (49.1% TS), 14.2 reb, 4.2 ast (TO not kept)

Playoffs, 10 year primes
Bob Pettit 1956 - 1965: 25.5 pts (50.1% TS), 14.8 reb, 2.7 ast (TO not kept)
Elgin Baylor 1959 - 1968: 30.7 pts (50.3% TS), 14.1 reb, 3.9 ast (TO not kept)

First, theer's not much need for pace adjustment here because those 10-year peaks almost completely overlapped outside of Pettit's 3-year head start. So if we just go macro and look at box scores, it certainly looks to me like Baylor is pretty clearly the more impressive of the 2. Pettit had small advantages in efficiency and rebounds in the regular season (vs. Baylor's small advantages in scoring volume and assists), but in the postseason Baylor improved his volume and efficiency while Pettit slid with the end result that Baylor seems to outperform him significantly in the postseason. Am I mis-reading this?

Accolades
I hear a lot about Pettit's 2 MVPs, his First Team All NBA finishes every season, and the championship that his team won over the Celtics. But again, even a cursory look indicates that these aren't really boons in comparison to Baylor. Baylor, too, was All NBA First Team every year during his 10-year prime. Which leaves the MVPs and the championship. So let's look closer at them:

Petit's first MVP in 1956
None of Russell, Wilt, Oscar, Baylor or West are in the league yet so (in a comparison with Baylor) it's fair to question whether Pettit's '56 would have been MVP-worthy just a few years later when Baylor was peaking. Also, look at Pettit's postseason that year:

Pettit in 1956
Reg: 25.7 ppg (50.2% TS), 16.2 reb, 27.3 PER (led NBA), .236 WS/48
Post: 19.1 ppg (48.2% TS), 10.5 reb, 21.5 PER, .108 WS/48

Pettit's production went through the floor that postseason. In his peak, Baylor never had a postseason this poor. So despite Pettit's regular season MVP (on a below .500 team) (at a time in between superstar talents), I don't see this season as anything that would give him an advantage over Baylor.

Hawks Championship year 1958
The fact that Pettit's Hawks beat Russell's Celtics is used as one of the big supports for Pettit's candidacy. However, upon closer examination: Russell was injured. That's not Pettit's fault, of course, but to me it takes the "he broke up Russell's dynasty!" card away from being played too hard. The Hawks that year were an 0.82 SRS team in the season (3rd out of 8 teams, well behind the Celtics' leading 5.02 SRS mark). So perhaps the narrative could be that Pettit dragged his average cast through the postseason to meet up with those Celtics, putting them in the right position to take advantage of Russell's injury?

But no, Pettit wasn't the one stepping up in the postseason to drag the average cast. It was Cliff Hagan who did that. 1958 playoffs;

1958 playoffs
Petit: 24.2 ppg (47.2% TS), 16.5 reb, 22.6 PER, .134 WS/48
Hagan: 27.7 ppg (57.6% TS), 10.5 reb, 27.5 PER, .312 WS/48

Hagan led the NBA in the 1958 playoffs in scoring, True Shooting Percentage, PER, FG% and WS/48. Essentially, he did in that championship run what I'd have expected Petit to do, and honestly I think superficial analysis leads many to believe that Petit in 1958 DID do what Hagan did. But he really didn't.

So again, let me be clear. The Hawks won the title, and Pettit will always have that Game 7. Those are great accomplishments, and not taking them away. But if I'm comparing Pettit with an era peer like Baylor, I don't see how that title should be used as a boost to Pettit's candidacy. In his peak, Baylor's postseasons were regularly stronger than the one that Pettit turned in and he didn't get the advantage of facing a Celtics squad with an injured Russell.

Pettit's 2nd MVP year: 1959
This is the last of the major accolade seasons that a cursory accolades count might use to rank Pettit ahead of Baylor. But again, in the words of the legendary Rafiki, "Look haaarder..."

Pettit won that MVP off his outstanding regular season performance, but rookie Elgin Baylor was right there with him finishing 3rd in the MVP vote. Baylor's Lakers, who just a season before were (by-FAR) the worst team in the NBA with 19 wins and a -5.79 SRS (next worst was 33 wins and -1.47 SRS) jumped up with rookie Baylor to a playoff-worthy 33 wins and -1.42 SRS (2nd in their division behind Pettit's Hawks with their 49 wins and +2.89 SRS). So it appears that the Hawks were clearly the better team, but in the regular season Rookie-of-the-year Baylor was very competitive with MVP Pettit. They were the two forwards on the All NBA 1st Team.

In the 1959 postseason as a whole Pettit's box score numbers were better than Baylor's:
Pettit: 27.8 ppg (50.4% TS), 12.5 reb, 22.9 PER, .188 WS/48
Baylor: 25.5 ppg (46.9% TS), 12.0 reb, 19.3 PER, .104 WS/48

However, Baylor led his 33-win Lakers to defeat Pettit's 49-win Hawks 4 - 2 in the Western Division Finals before eventually getting swept by the Celtics in the Finals (led by a fully healthy Bill Russell).

Again, my point here is not to say that Pettit didn't have a great season or that he didn't deserve his MVP. But if we're comparing with Baylor, and as a rookie that season Baylor was extremely competitive with Pettit in both the regular and postseason while leading his team to an upset victory over Pettit's Hawks...I just can't see how this season should be a feather in Pettit's hat.

Conclusion

Across their 10-year primes, it certainly looks to me like Baylor was competitive with Pettit in the regular season and clearly the better post-season performer. Pettit's accolades were deserved, but upon closer examination don't appear to give him any real advantage in this comp. So I ask again, for those voting Pettit here...what's his case over Baylor?

The difference is in league norms. Pettit's RS ts% (over their careers) edge isn't nothing (1.7 "percent", ts% not really a percentage). But in '55 (Pettit's rookie year) the league ts% was 0.455315731 and in '56 it's 0.457900659
. By '68 it's 0.497823894. Those are probably the extremes (the first year of your Pettit sample and the last of Baylor's). Ideally it would be more systematic but there's a fair chasm in terms of efficiency relative to the league in the non-mutual span and that shows up in the advanced metrics (Pettit prior to Baylor's arrival: 26.5 PER, .216 WS/48; Baylor after Pettit's retirement: 19.9 PER, .121 WS/48).

It's hard to get good info on either's D, but it seems like Baylor may not have been great, particularly in terms of possibly losing some mobility after his injuries.

Those are the reasons that came to mind for me in terms of what separates them.

The playoffs might be worth a closer look but with the smaller sample, the effects of competition (particularly Boston) and team performance, I'm less confident in it (and particularly metrics) as a fair barometer.

I don't think era difference/league norm difference is very explanatory here, for a few reasons. For one, again, we were talking about 7 years of overlap in their 10-year primes. That's a lot of overlap, the majority of their primes, in fact, and I think more than enough to show how they were performing in their primes on the same playing field. Plus, the lower Baylor performance at the back end of his prime that you site is less about league norms and more about Baylor's level dropping after his knee injuries.

If we look only at the common years of prime, there is very little difference between Pettit from 1959 - 65 as opposed to from 1956 - 65. I'm going to post the 59 - 65 numbers for each below, and when I do you can compare Pettit over the shorter time period to the longer time period in the spoiler above. Almost exactly the same. Baylor, on the other hand, looks significantly better if you only look at the 59 - 65 window. The late 60s, where the league norms effect that you point out should have been helping Baylor, in fact is the weakest period of what I included as his 10-year prime so they don't shift the needle in Baylor's favor at all. To whit:

Regular season
Bob Pettit 1959 - 1965: 27.8 pts (52% TS), 16.6 reb, 3.3 ast (TO not kept)
Elgin Baylor 1959 - 1965: 30.2 pts (49.2% TS), 15.4 reb, 4.3 ast (TO not kept)

Playoffs, 10 year primes
Bob Pettit 1959 - 1965 (59 games): 25.8 pts (50.8% TS), 14.8 reb, 3.0 ast (TO not kept)
Elgin Baylor 1959 - 1964 (65 games) : 32.9 pts (50.7% TS), 14.3 reb, 4.0 ast (TO not kept)

If we look only at the common years, the story is almost exactly the same as what I wrote in the spoiler section above, just with larger volumes for Baylor. Pettit still has the efficiency advantage in the regular season that goes away entirely in the postseason, when Baylor matches his efficiency but on much higher volume. Essentially, whether we look at the entire 10 years or just at the in-common 7 years, it still looks to me that they are pretty even in the regular season but that Baylor looks pretty solidly like the better postseason performer.

I'm not voting Pettit here so not looking for an argument here. You said you don't see why people will have Pettit over Baylor, I'm telling you why I do. I agree for the shared years it's close. But I don't think you can ignore the difference in the other years Pettit puts you a fair way towards contention in those years (that they didn't do more I'd argue relates to a weak backcourt) and is an elite MVP contention player, wheras Baylor (in the years in question) is a player who by some metrics is barely above average and isn't a cornerstone piece you build around (and we think this gap gets bigger when you factor in D), and Baylor being injured is an explanation why he was less effective but it doesn't mean it didn't happen. It depends on the individual how far you want to go with hypotheticals, and I dare say a full healthy career Baylor would surpass Pettit based on longevity and era. But it didn't happen so it's influence is probably marginal to nil for most.

[Owly]

What are you not getting that its about how those players were playing in each specific year that matters and not their overall career ranking?

In 91 and 92 for example Clyde Drexler was one of the best players in the league and his team beat the Jazz. Why is this such a failing for John Stockton?

And couldn't we easily argue that Nash/STAT have several years where they were better players than Stock/Malone typically were, but they didn't even make a Finals? The KG/Allen/Truth trio only got 1 title. Dirk/Nash have one conference Finals together, etc...

a HUGE part of why Malone is already on the list and why I think Stockton will be within the next 10 spots or so is becuase of longevity, not peaks. So in any given year they shouldn't be held to some unrealistic expectation.

Besides which, and sorry in advance for engaging with this line of reasoning, many of these combos contain a top 5 all-time guy (Jabbar x2, Wilt); an epic peak guy at their peak (Shaq), or/or a top 10 guy with a top 15 guy. IIRC all but Erving/Moses have both guys in before Karl Malone, the higher ranked member of this duo.

Also this line of reasoning punishes Malone and Stockton for aging better than Dr J and Moses (includes a year where Stockton and Malone are a combined 71, but excludes one where Moses and Erving are a combined 63, and have rookie Barkley).

In any case this might not be a productive line of debate, though I now see a year-by-year has been posted which hopefully should end it.

(post edited to correct typo)

[Doctor MJ]

So 3 things:

1) If Baylor played stupid basketball and thus didn't help his team, even if it was only because coaches demanded it of him, isn't that what actually matters?

Well the guy you're saying should've gotten more shots was the point guard - aka the main guy distributing shots. Baylor had high assist numbers and we don't really know the way he was getting those shots or if it was detrimental to the team. Those Lakers teams won and had some great offenses. Hard to say the coaches, Baylor, or West weren't doing a good job distributing shots.

2) If you're one of the people who essentially tries to make a function rating a guy based on how valuable his scoring volume SHOULD have been, essentially blaming the fact that wasn't reality on the coach, what about the fact that he only scored that much because he took all those shots? Frankly how are you even imagining it went down differently. Are you pretending he took as many shots, but instead took shots he could make instead of ones he could miss? Are you pretending that every bad shot he took he just chose instead to not take?

I'm not saying its on the coach or even that it was an issue. For example 60 years from now someone could be saying LaMarcus Aldridge shouldn't have taken all those fga this past season because he was way less efficient than the team. In context we know they were only that efficient because they had him to take all the tough shots. If you can point me to old articles with people criticizing Baylor the way you are I'll rethink my stance but it's hard for me to believe all those people didn't understand what they were seeing and they randomly gave Baylor all those accolades.

3) What is it exactly you think coaches told Baylor to do? I think it's crucial to remember that this is a game where the game largely happens with the coach just standing their on the sidelines powerless. When we see other players from the same era move toward greater shooting efficiency, do you honestly think it's because a coach took them by the shoulders and fixed them and that coaches simply refused to do that with Baylor? In the end players know that no one wants them to take shots they aren't likely to hit, and that they are supposed to pass when someone else has a better opportunity. The only time it's remotely plausible that this isn't the case is when you have one volume scorer who you think is being told that he's the "loss leader" for his team sucking defenders away from teammates...but that absolutely wasn't the case with Baylor and the Lakers.

This is a good point. As everyone else got more efficient Baylor didn't. Is like to see the efficiency of players that played 56-59 compared to their efficiency in the 60s. Maybe he was behind the pack or maybe new and better players came in.

Re: let slide Hakeem & Duncan. I don't know what you're talking about. Those guys are defensive anchors who had nowhere near the efficiency issues Baylor did. They are basically superior to Baylor in every conceivable way despite their imperfections.

I'm saying when it came to scoring so these guys weren't really efficient in the regular season but they saw postseason efficiency and volume spikes. I have issues taking points off for efficiency when the player is efficient when it matters most.

As I read all of this to me the thing I keep thinking on is HOW you credit Baylor for what he was doing.

The thing I tend to see sometimes is that people have a tendency to start from the raw stats and interpolate from there. Say, they look and see he scored 30 PPG, and then they look at efficiency, and then they seem to try to find reasons to excuse the efficiency and thus leaving them with an assessment of the player that's essentially based on scoring volume. To me it's largely a way of rationalizing an opinion that's in agreement with what's held by those who don't even look at anything but the coarsest of stats when making judgments, and it's not the way to go.

What I'm advocating is that scoring volume shouldn't occupy that place as the starting point for what a guy did. Baylor missed a lot shots that the Lakers would have been better off if he hadn't. That's something real that shouldn't be seen as something to be brushed aside with "they must know what they are doing".

There's also the matter that it's not like this is the only piece of evidence we have here.

We've seen ElGee's WOWY stuff. West is literally the most impressive person in that entire analysis, Baylor is nothing like that, and that doesn't even include the matter of how the Lakers quite literally exploded once Baylor was gone.

Common sense would tell you that it was a problem letting Baylor shoot like he did, and then the only tests we actually have to see if that's the case confirm that the team was basically fine without him.

Re: Aldridge. So what you're basically saying here is, "Hey, sometimes inefficient guys do good things". Absolutely, but Aldridge's efficiency isn't helping Portland. Obviously they'd be better if he either shot more successfully or distributed a little more wisely. He helps them overall, but it's in spite of that efficiency issue.

If you want to point out that sometimes a hub ends up stuck with the hot potato that's cool, but recognize the difference here between Aldridge and Baylor. Aldridge has the reputation he does because of the combination of his okay scoring, good passing, and nice rebounding & defense, and he's experiencing a wave of appreciation because of how well his team did last year, which interestingly was NOT based on offensive attack despite the ORtg, but rather the low turnovers and rebounding that allowed them to not be wasteful.

Aldridge also probably won't even get mentioned in this project again after this unless it's too defend some other inefficient scorer.

Baylor is a legend largely because of how much he scored. Yes he got rebounds too, but Dennis Rodman isn't being talked about here despite being a better rebounder and a much better defender. Baylor's volume of scoring is his calling card, and a look at the details of that scoring raises tons of red flags. And as I've said, I think an approach that starts with the volume as what's "real" followed by a skeptical take at everything else is a pretty awful way to do analysis.

Re: Hakeem & Duncan efficiency. Yeah again, the reason it didn't matter as much for those guys is that it literally was far less severe relative to their argument. Let me focus on Duncan because obviously Hakeem's playoff narrative is unique. Duncan was a defensive anchor scoring 20 PPG on roughly okay efficiency in the regular season. What of that is problematic? You want to say he wasn't an offensive superstar? Well good, he wasn't really. Not top tier at least. He warrants being considered ranked where he was because he was still good enough when you factor everything else in.

The Baylor issue is that it hits right at the heart of why he was special at all, and hits it much harder. If it had been Duncan who was truly poor in his efficiency, that would merely be a knock on a secondary part of his game. For Baylor it's literally "Hey you know that thing he was truly great at, actually there was a real problem there."

It's similar to what I've talked about with Wilt except much more transparent in this case. If a player's reputation is built on a particular statistic that quite literally when you look at you see signs that his team would have been better off if he had NOT put up, the right thing to do is to completely reconsider how we think of the guy. And this is necessary specifically because it's the rare circumstance where we can realistically say most people from the time probably didn't fully understand what was going on when they built the narrative that was carried forward through history and thus represented our own individual starting points when first started looking into him.

I know some people are thinking "There Doc goes again", and are probably shaking their head at how I seem to have such love or hate responses to guys from early basketball eras, but the fact of the matter is that when people are operating largely based on their own intuition in the absence of good data, some guys go in the right direction, and some go in the wrong direction. Happens even now, but it was more dramatic back then.

Now that leaves open the argument of "Well I'm judging them based on how I think they'd do now?", and I get that, but that's why I ask: How are you estimating that? Because it's not at all realistic to start from a pseudo-accomplishment from the '60s and extrapolate from their like it's something real. If Baylor in those years in fact should have been scoring at 20 points per 100 possessions, then you should be extrapolating from there, not from some big inefficient volume.

[drza]

Re: Stockton and Malone, and if they should have won more

I was skimming the exchange over Stockton and Malone and whether they should have won more if both are really top-25 players of all-time, then I did a double-take when I saw my name next to one of the posts in the exchange. Upon further review I realized that this was an old post of mine being quoted. I can't remember the exact context or time period of when I posted that. But since my name is next to it, I feel obligated to at least chime in on this discussion thread.

While I probably wouldn't have posted it now in this thread (as some point out, it makes Stockton the only one that could catch the brunt of the "blame" in this project since Malone's already in), I do stand by the sentiment in general. It DOES seem to me that if Stockton and Malone are both as good as many believe they are, then they should have won more over their 15 years together.

That said, I don't think that is a particularly deep bit of analysis. To really get into an assessment of their values, I think it more useful to try as best as possible to zero in on how much lift each was providing, how they provided that lift, how portable we think that lift might have been, and things of that nature. In short, I think that the approach I've been taking in this project is more beneficial than that particular quote of mine, whenever I made it.

As far as how that approach plays out, to me, I really don't think that Malone was as impactful on a year-to-year basis as most of the other players voted into the top-20. I do think it's fitting that Karl's normalized PI RAPM in '98, arguably his peak season, was on the order of +9 when the best seasons of the current generation were all well into the double-digits (LeBron, Shaq, KG, Dirk, Duncan and Wade all have at least one mark well into the 11s). Jordan in that '98 season that was significantly attenuated from him at his best had a score in the double-digits. Robinson had a couple of late-90s scores in the +8.3 - +8.9 range, and these are also periods of significant attenuation from him at his best.

Obviously that RAPM stuff isn't rigorous because we only have his late career, but those numbers make good illustration for what I already believed: that Karl Malone at his best was very, very good but not to the level of the best-of-the-best in any given year. His incredible longevity and iron-man history gives you a lot of those very, very good years to work with. But if you're looking to build around the best, then Karl doesn't really give you that ever. And a similar story with Stockton.

So if you put them together, in my opinion, you get 15 years of two very, very good players as the team centerpiece. But you never get any year with a truly elite player as the base. In most of those top-20 or top-25 pairings that Infamous put together, you would get at least a few years in that period where you were matching up some super-studs. With Stockton/Malone I don't think you ever get that highest level...you never get Bruce Leroy's glow from either of them...but their longevity does move them up in these lists.

Bottom line, I don't think Malone's actual rank or Stockton's likely upcoming rank are absurd. I wasn't quite ready to vote Karl in when he got in, but I wasn't that far away. And I expect that I'll be voting on Stockton right around when everyone else is,. Longevity and durability are very important. But when you have two players whose career values are so boosted by longevity instead of peak, I guess you can end up with what we saw with those Jazz. It was a unique circumstance, and one unlikely to be repeated often (if ever), but it's what it is. And in the end, I think evaluating them individually as much as possible is a better approach then trying to work backward from what they did (or didn't) accomplish as a duo.

[DQuinn1575]

6 Pettit – penbeast0, Jim Naismith, DQuinn1575, Warspite (62), trex_8063 (67), Ryoga Hibiki (84)
4 Ewing – ronnymac2, ShaqAttack3234, tsherkin (99), SactoKingsFan (100)
2 Frazier -- GC Pantalones, Moonbeam
1 Baylor -DannyNoonan1221 (113 - change from Pettit)
1 Wade – Basketballefan
1 MIkan -- Owly (57)

(#) - shows post # after initial posting.
15 votes cast - run-off ahead ??

[Doctor MJ]

Well, first: Why would exclude West's efficiency when judging Baylor's? West's presence only made it more obvious that Baylor's inefficiency was pointless

To point out that the option should be (1) West first, then it's okay for Elgin to shoot. When West was hurt or not on the court then it wasn't a bad thing for Elgin to shoot.

But that's not how basketball works. The 2nd option doesn't end up shooting more than the 1st option because it's "okay" for him to shoot everything that the 1st option doesn't take. The 2nd option is supposed to adopt a primacy relative to the skills of the players around him. If his efficiency capability is drastically below the 1st option and only comparable to other guys, he shouldn't be among the league leaders in FGA primacy.

Re: West missed time. I've yet to see any indication that Baylor behaved like a normal 2nd option when West was healthy.

With that said, I think you have a good point. He wasn't a black hole. While he clearly was shooting too much, and doing so ineffectively, it's oversimplistic to say that he wasn't passing out. The real solution was to refrain from using him as so much of a hub in the first place, and that was a coaching decision.

I think though it's necessary to ponder the effect of Baylor's stature had on the coaches. If West had joined the Lakers first, so we really think that coaches would have designed an offense that let Baylor shoot more frequently than West for all those years? I can't imagine, maybe someone else would like to try to paint such a picture.

When a player who used to be the best is still given primacy after he's clearly been surpassed, it's probably because no one can figure out a way to get him to change how he's playing without doing something drastic, which is dangerous on many levels. A smart and wise player recognizes what's happened and adjusts smoothly without forcing anything drastic to occur, just as a smart and wise player finds ways to improve his efficiency over time regardless of whether he's been surpassed by a teammate.

And I should be clear with all of this, I'm not saying that Baylor was a moron in a sea of genius basketball players. Most players don't have the type of awareness I'm talking about, just the really smart ones. But while I am holding Baylor's brain against him to some degree here, really what I'm talking about primarily is just judging the man based on what he actually accomplished. Scoring at volume isn't much of an accomplishment if it's done while wasting possessions.

So what was Elgin supposed to do? - West passes him the ball - Elgin passes as much as any forward in the game back to West. He shoots and passes a lot because the offense goes through him.

Does he (1) tell the coach to change the offense?
(2) tell West to quit passing him the ball and shoot more?

Always, how much more could West shoot and keep up the TS%? I'm sure there is some, but how much?
And if Elgin fed West more and became less of a threat to the defense, would West's FG% decline - how much?

If Baylor was really smart, he'd have simply made better decisions out there on the court. No one had to teach Magic Johnson (or Jerry West) that it was bad to take bad shots you can't hit. Top tier BBIQ guys are efficient just because it's obvious to them that that's how you play basketball.

If Baylor were the next tier down of smart, he'd tell the coach that it was clearly West's team and the coach needed to help him (Baylor) find a new role supporting the better star.

He would also tell West, "Hey this is your team now, don't worry about feeding me. Hit me when I'm open, but don't feel like you ever have to defer to me."

Re: If Baylor fed West more, would West's efficiency decline? Well first and foremost, this isn't a question to ask to justify an efficiency imbalance. You assume that putting more volume to a guy will diminish his efficiency, but when he's shooting 5-10% higher than the other guy, there's no worry that that's going to disappear simply because you try to capitalize on it.

Second, West is a perimeter player not a big. The issues of scaling to volume are much bigger to bigs than perimeter guys.

Third, West was known for going off in the playoffs without his efficiency suffering.

So yeah, they should have tried a different approach, and if Baylor were smarter either they would have or it wouldn't have been necessary in the first place.

[drza]

I guess I'd better get a vote in, since the thread is winding down. I did get to do my initial boxscore-based analysis of a bunch of the next players I'm considering, but I didn't get to go very far into anyone else except for Baylor vs Pettit. I didn't mean to spend so much time there because I'm not ready to vote for either, but I think it was important that I do so because I see a lot of individual arguments for either that (at least to me) don't stand up when they're put in the same place. With Pettit the narrative seems to be that he was dominant in his era with the proper accoutrements (e.g. the MVPs and the title over Russell's Celtics) such that we should not hold his scoring efficiency against him. OK, fair enough. But on the flip side, Baylor gets major flack for not adjusting his game to a more secondary role (in favor of West) in the exact same era. It just doesn't jive to me, and so far no one's really come up with an explanation that works for me. Until I get my head turned, I'm pretty confident that I'll be voting for Baylor before Pettit. But as I said before, I'm not sure I'm ready to vote for either yet.

I really wanted to spend some more time on the point guards, because that looks like a lot of fun and I'm really ready for round whatever in the Nash vs Kidd debate. But there's zero PG traction here, so no need to look at that more.

The wings are also of interest to me, but so far Wade is the only one getting mentioned. But again, he doesn't seem to have much traction so I don't know how fruitful it would be for me to try to start digging in on him with possibly just an hour or so left in the vote.

Which leaves me looking at Ewing, as the other player getting solid traction here. As I mentioned last thread, the initial Ewing discussion has been very interesting. It's gotten more-so this thread as it has gotten more fleshed out. Doc MJ has argued against using this term with Ewing, but it certainly does look like he is a legit 2-way center. Maybe his impact is skewed more towards defense, but as someone pointed out, Ewing's not Mutombo. He was capable of playing a major scoring role on a contender, even if offense isn't his forte. His exploits at his peak have been pointed out in this thread, and in that 90 time period he certainly looks like a monster.

As an aside, Ewing was one of the first major figures in my own basketball experience. I have some memories of players/teams before Ewing, but they are more general. But when it gets specific, Ewing at Georgetown was one of my early basketball landmarks. I remember him with those short-sleeved gray t-shirts on under his jersey, as the dominant force in college basketball. I remember how his matchups with Chris Mullins' St. Johns squads were magical, similar to the feeling I got when watching Bird's Celtics against Magic's Lakers. I remember being absolutely flabbergasted when Villanova beat Georgetown, as I thought that Ewing and his squad were juggernauts. So for me, it certainly feels right to be considering Ewing as an all-time great.

On the whole, I haven't gotten to do my own Ewing analysis the way that I'd have liked to. But I did spend some time on Pettit, and he still just hasn't impressed me on the historic level the way I thought/hoped he would. Of the two, Ewing's combination of dominant defense with still front-end scoring ability seems more valuable than Pettit's contributions. So:

Vote: Patrick Ewing

[90sAllDecade]

I'd like to vote for Patrick Ewing for the reasons I've listed throughout the thread.

His dominant defensive anchoring on the arguably the greatest modern era defense, his offensive abilities and his combined two way impact are the best at this spot imo.

I'll contribute more, shortly.

[Owly]

I think there's an issue with the bolded. Even if you think Starks was his second best player, he had an excellent defensive team around him in the mid-90s.

Oakley, Mason, Starks and Harper were all highly regarded defenders at their positions.

Absolutely. And when he had all of them, the Knicks were a 55 to 60-win team that went to the semis, ECFs, Finals and then the semis. That's a pretty strong team, despite generally not being that good on offense.

I think it's better than pretty strong as a supporting cast though.

I suspect some might have Ewing theory issues whether he was compatible with offensive talent (these are certainly not stars, and injuries came into it but Charles Smith and LJ saw usage rates fall with a consequent bump in efficiency, Allan Houston's efficiency actually collapsed as well as his usage and his 1 good year "with" Ewing was the year Ewing played just 26 games; Chris Childs saw a drop off in both areas too, McDaniel's usage stayed the same but his ts% fell a little). Obviously you'd want to look closer to be confident on this, but I think it's worth considering how well he blended with more offensive-minded talent, if we're to bemoan a lack of it.

I think that may be the sunny side of analysing the Knicks performance. The counter-argument might say just two serious contenders (5.87 SRS in '93, 6.48 in '94, no other teams above 4 and playoff performances from Ewing in the following two years that pretty much precluded them from being serious contenders even if you were optimistic about the performance of those teams).

Houston and LJ didn't even enter the picture until Ewing was in his mid/late 30s, so I consider them entirely irrelevant. Never mind the fact that JVG was never a stunner as an offensive coach at any stop during his career. Great defensive coach, but sub-optimal in his offensive tactics.

Ewing was 31 by the time the Knicks made the Finals the first time. Houston and LJ didn't join the roster until 1997, by which point Ewing was already 34 years old and obviously declining (plus not 100% healthy any longer, either). I don't consider evaluation of his mix during that period to be super keen as far as examining him because he was old and unhealthy and playing for a lesser coach.

Meantime, LJ, who was experiencing worsening health of his own, saw his arrival on the Knicks coincide with a roughly 4.5% INCREASE in his 2FG% compared to his final year in Charlotte. In his first three years with the Knicks, he posted 57.0%, 53.9% and 55.4% TS. He'd been a 55.9% TS player in Charlotte over his time there, so there isn't an appreciable difference in his scoring efficiency. Johnson's efficiency dropped as Ewing played LESS, but not in his 78-game season. That doesn't really conjure the correlation I believe you're trying to convey.

With Houston, his 3P% dipped off as the line was pulled back out in his second year with the team, dropping him under 40% from 3 for a couple of years, and again, Ewing was playing less and less. He's a little bit more interesting a case, but presumptively, if it were Ewing's presence causing him problems then we'd have seen a boost in his efficiency immediately after that first season with Ewing playing so much less. We did not. He roughly maintained in 98 and then worsened in 99 before breaking out in 2000. We also see Ewing playing considerably fewer minutes per game even when he was playing in the 98 and 99 seasons, then playing a similar number of minutes when he played (62 GP) in the 2000 season. More Ewing, more efficiency. Little Ewing, less efficiency (in fact, Houston's WORST efficiency of that stretch). It's by no means a perfect correlation, but it's enough to cast doubt on that theory.

He worked well enough with Starks in the Finals season of 94, it's just that Starks wasn't good enough, and sucked terribly in the elimination game 7.

I agree that using Ewing as a high-20s scorer wasn't a good option. Kind of like the discussions we've had about Wilt's highest-volume days, it seemed more that the team benefited from a reduction in his volume more than him carrying the load at quite that level. Riley had him down from his peak scoring volume as well, and that seemed to work out for the best.

Don't know how much to engage with this as for the most part it's you engaging with the issues I raised that relate to a part of his career you

consider ... entirely irrelevant

I'll do so briefly. I don't mind people saying van Gundy (or any coach) wasn't optimising the O so long as we give them credit for where they were strong (so not overcrediting Ewing for D).

Regarding trying to convey a correlation regarding Johnson, I think I made it clear that I haven't drawn firm conclusions and injuries in Johnson and Smith's case could be factors. However injuries accounting for further drops in '98 doesn't explain (or in any way refute or preclude) Johnson showing negligible increase in efficiency from a significant drop in usage, or that it could relate to compatability with Ewing. I don't see where just 2pt% comes in to it, nor why Johnson's baseline expectation would be based on what he including what he was doing in '91 rather than the year immediately before. Nonetheless I can go either way on Johnson, whilst I think pointing out Johnson's fall in efficiency in '98 as though this would be entirely unexpected is if not a straw man, then far from the full picture .The point wasn't that Johnson's efficiency got worse with Ewing, it was that a substantial drop in usage saw minimal affect on his efficiency, with Johnson resuming a larger role we'd expect the efficiency to drop somewhat, though if incompatability with Ewing was the only issue in this drop over this period we would expect him to be at roughly pre-NY level, that he isn't suggests playing Ewing isn't the only thing that hurt him, but it doesn't say that it hasn't done so.

I don't recognise your characterisation of Houston's NY years. After the initital significant fall (a rare double fall in usage and efficiency) upon arrival in NY, his TS% stays nearly identical to the previous year (.001 down) despite a massive boost in usage (22.2% to 26.7%) without Ewing (advanced metrics help corroborate increased producivity). Then Ewing returns and again both ts% and usage fall. Only '00 doesn't really fit in that Ewing is playing essentially playing the same amount (very slight reduction from 53.7190083% of available minutes to 0.513111447). This though hardly disproves that Ewing has impeded Houston's offensive performance.

TL;DR: Knicks' offensive rating relative to the league improved in '98 when he missed a huge chunk of the season and fell back when he returned, and it this corroborates suggestions that he might have been a difficult player to build around offensively. Higher usage individuals seem to have slipped (not effectively trading usage for efficiency) when joining him both during this spell (Childs, Johnson, Houston; understandable if you don't mind this too much in and of itself, given that it's late or post prime) and earlier (Charles Smith, Xavier McDaniel). One might look at his inability to mesh with Cartwright and Anthony Mason's flourishing as a playmaker outside New York (though Mase didn't increase scoring volume much and lost some shooting efficiency) as further concerns.

I'm not hugely against Ewing here just raising concerns because he hasn't been in the discussion for long. The other issue would be that some observers weren't as high on his D as the the sentiment here is. The Rick Barry Scouting Bible's gave him
'90 edition (after '89 season): AAA
'91: AAA
'92: A
'93: A
'94: B+
'95: A
'96: B+
'97: A
The most prominent (and recurring) criticisms are that he bought on too many of his mans fakes (a member of the parachute or paratrooper club) and that he fouled too much (though it is suggested he often got away with it due to star status)

Now given some of these are close to average (B - or which in their own words is "middle of the pack) these are surely going too far (and they are just opinions, though presumably informed ones), but it does give you some pause. The biting on fouls might help explain why he didn't (iirc) fare too well in head-to-heads with other elite centers.

As before I don't think Ewing's too far away for me but I think it's worth addressing criticisms and possible issues (I guess playoffs might be one too).

Wow, this post went on longer than intended.