Moonbeam wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:To be clear, as I've said volume isn't the goal, it's just something we should expect in the natural variance of things, and Stockton stands out because his ability in practice to rise above his averages is literally below every one else I've ever thought to compare him against. Maybe it's just Sloan's fault, but it ain't no era thing.
This is an interesting point. The flip side of this variance issue suggests that Stockton's scoring production is likely to be more reliable, so while he may not be exploding for double his scoring average very much, he's also not likely to give less than half of his scoring average. Is it more valuable to have higher variance in scoring (and other production) and therefore be a threat to go nuclear, or is it more valuable to have a lower variance and be more dependable? That's not an easy question to answer, and I think it boils down to personal preference. In a "prototypical" point guard (e.g. John Stockton), I think I'd personally prefer dependability in scoring, but I can see the argument for the greater threat of scoring explosions being valuable, too.
A good thing to bring up. If two guys have the same average, and one has higher highs, then the other must have have lower lows, right?
In their literal sense, judging players purely by how much they scored, this is of course right. And of course, my narrative makes sense: It's entirely plausible that Nash scored less at times because that's all that was needed, and scored more because that's what was needed, while Stockton did the same thing regardless of what was needed. Other narratives would work too though, so how do we tell which was right?
Well, the pro-Stockton argument based on this data would be that he could give you that reliability even against the toughest of defense, whereas presumably Nash died off against the tough D's.
Check out what ElGee said about how these two did against tough D's though:
ElGee wrote:In Stockton, we're talking about a player who scored over 30 points 11 times in his prime (34-point best) out of 880 games. That's 1.2% of the time. This is someone in the 14-15 pts/36 range. He took over 20 true shot attempts in a game 21 times in that period (2.4% of games).
What's worse is what happens in the playoffs. He had six games with over 20 TSA (4.7% of PS games). Against sub-103 defenses in the playoffs, he averaged 12.7 pts/36, 8.5 sat/36 2.7 tov/36 on 52.8% TS. This is a drop from 14.4 pts/10.5 ast on 61.5% TS in the regular season. His sub-105 numbers show the same trend: in 87 games, 13.5 pts/36, 10.2 ast/36 on 57% TS, down 5% from the RS along with a 2 point drop in volume.
This was someone who not only failed to ramp up his game, but his absolute metrics make him look more pedestrian than all-nba (or all-timer). This is a major problem for me, not because it exists on paper, but precisely because it reinforces what I saw when I re-watched all those Jazz games a few years ago -- where the heck was John Stockton?? That Utah's offenses were so successful in the postseason says borderline wondrous things to Malone for me since he was the anchor, the rock, the constant, etc. I understand his variance (stemming from jump-shooting), but Michael and Kobe had variance. If I were less concerned with scaling (portability), I'd probably have Malone bordering on top-5.
Nash, on the other hand, only played 67 PS games from 05-10 in Phoenix. 43 of them were against sub-105s. (!) You know what happened in those game? His scoring spiked. 19.2 pts/36 on 60.2% TS. UP from the RS of 17.6/10.6 62.5% TS.
Hold on I nearly fainted. Didn't realize it was that impressive until I hit "calculate." Never seen that before.
So yeah, if ElGee's numbers are right, then it's Nash who is putting up the bigger numbers agains the toughest D's, while Stockton dies off. Which fits with my narrative I'd say.
Of course I didn't know this when I made my case, but there are plenty of other things that to me indicate stuff along these lines.
