fpliii wrote:My vote in the runoff is for Ewing.So, I've been in favor of Ewing the past couple of rounds (though I don't believe I've casted actual votes). Pettit wasn't a defensive liability, but Pat is one of the all-time greats in that regard (lorak had a great breakdown here:
viewtopic.php?p=40970379#p40970379). Pettit was the superior rebounder, but I don't feel at this time that his range or post game were superior to Ewing's to offset the defensive advantage. Again, I don't want to make it a bigger issue than it is, but the racial composition of the league when Pettit played is still a major concern for me.
There's been some quality discussion of Baylor, and I really liked this post by Doc:
viewtopic.php?p=40981128#p40981128. He raises some interesting points:
Doctor MJ wrote: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.
Some thoughts of mine...
When looking at players who played before I started watching, it's really, really difficult to separate reputation from quality. Obviously you can watch as much tape as possible, but as the selection of tape to watch is likely going to be informed by popular perception, sample(/visibility, since the further back you go, the less tape is available) bias and winning bias are going to be very real concerns. Hell, I don't trust my own opinions from watching live in the pre-databall era (92-93 through 95-96 for me), so going back further, scouting from watching tape and looking at team ORtg/DRtg trends and available WOWY data (available to us thanks to ElGee's of course

), without having lived through those eras and experiencing the league at the time, is a very inexact science.
I do think some accounts are trustworthy. If we have a large enough volume of qualitative data to sort through, one would think there's a reasonable probability that we can parse out high quality information from first hand accounts. Things such as media accolades, comments effusing random praise, and the like aren't going to help us that much, but if we get specific, detailed descriptions of how these guys played, it can really help us paint a more complete picture. Unfortunately, sources are quite limited even for these accounts the further back one looks. There seems to be a reasonable wealth of information spanning the late 60s, 70s, and 80s (as well as tape becoming increasingly available as you move forward), but that doesn't really help us all that much when discussing Pettit and his contemporaries. Yes, if you do the legwork there is some good stuff out there (I admittedly haven't done as much research on Pettit in particular, so I may be understating the material, but I don't know that enough exists on his contemporaries (particularly earlier in his career) to draw conclusions about him in which I'd be reasonably confident (Samurai and johnlac1, as well as others, are tremendous assets since they seem to know a ton about pretty much every significant player thereafter).
Anyhow, what's my point? I do trust the team ORtg/DRtg trends and WOWY numbers a ton, but what I perceive them as telling us—namely how much players were impacting the game at the time, given the leaguewide trends/rules/competition etc. in place—isn't necessarily telling me everything I'm trying to learn, since a large part (perhaps the largest) portion of my evaluation is determining how a player would translate into today's game. The closer we get to the present era (need it be the last 5, 10, or 15 years), the closer the aforementioned data (+ RAPM) comes to answering these questions. Doc (and ElGee as well in the past, in addition to some other great posters on this board) in his post above, in the bolded portions, really forces me to question how I'm coming to the conclusions I'm reaching. While I stand by my criteria for evaluating players, I do admit that there is subjectivity/guesswork involved. If I can learn more about guys I can limit those elements (though naturally they can't be eliminated), but it's not as easy (or perhaps possible at all, if the resources don't exist).
With Wilt, while I'm not absolutely certain about he he'd play today, there are enough datapoints that I'm comfortable enough with the written accounts we have of him to project his game into today's league. As for Baylor (#17 on my pre-project list) and Pettit (outside the top 25 in my initial list, though he probably wouldn't be too far off)? Not so much. Again, a large portion of the burden is on me to investigate both guys to the best of my abilities, and I can't honestly say I've done all that can be done. A big part of this is asking the right questions, and asking others or finding reliable primary sources for myself to answer them.
I do think Doc has raised enough doubt about Baylor to force me to reevaluate slotting him so early on my initial list. If so much of his reputation is due to his ability to score (positionally, he was a very good passer, a plus rebounder, and not an abysmal defender from my understanding...but I think we'd need to see something more in the WOWY data if the non-scoring elements of his game were valuable enough to consider him here), even if he had more room today in which to operate with better spacing, I think it's a stretch to pick him here. Especially considering apparent issues with him adapting his game (I believe not figuring out a solution with West, not taking a lesser role when Wilt arrived, among other examples have been cited here). Since he played later than Pettit, the racial composition of the league isn't as huge an issue for me, but I do have to admit that it is perhaps something to consider. I'm not sure how to feel about his injuries, so I can't comment on whether they would've been more preventable/treatable in today's league (maybe someone more familiar with his injury history can comment on this).