RealGM Top 100 List #50

[PaulieWal]

Portland was not better than the 01 Bucks and Miami lost because of their best player playing bad. I'm tired of this after the fact crowning of the Mavs. They were a great team but they wouldn't kill the Sixers. It'll be a close series either way. Iverson was the type of player that would give the Mavs a fit (super fast slasher) and the Sixers defense was very strong.

Portland was an elite squad after they made the Gerald Wallace trade and were healthy. They played like a 5 SRS team in that span.

The Mavs were a big reason why LeBron played bad. It's not like LeBron was the only star who played bad vs the Mavs. Every single star player with the exception of Wade had struggles vs the Mavs (Aldridge, Kobe, Gasol, Durant, Westbrook, LeBron, Bosh).

I don't see how Iverson would be the type of player to give them fits when they were able to contain LeBron, Kobe, and Westbrook.

Durant didn't play bad and I guess Wade isn't a star. Coincidentally Wade happens to play the most like Iverson (Westbrook back then wasn't good enough for me to say he plays like Iverson).

Wade was not a star in 2011?

[tsherkin]

Wade was not a star in 2011?

If I read that correctly, he was being sarcastic and using that to highlight the exclusion of Wade as a mistake, not literally saying that Wade wasn't a star.

[PaulieWal]

Wade was not a star in 2011?

If I read that correctly, he was being sarcastic and using that to highlight the exclusion of Wade as a mistake, not literally saying that Wade wasn't a star.

Yeah, I wasn't sure because Colts18 said that every single star except for Wade struggled. He wasn't saying that Wade wasn't a star but you are probably right that he was being sarcastic.

[Texas Chuck]

What a senseless derail the 2011 Mavs are here.

The only thing that makes sense is that he thinks AI is superior to JJ Barea because that's the player on either the Mavs or their opponents who is the most logical comparison.

I'm willing to concede AI > JJB and I'm literally the only Barea stan on RealGM so I think we can move on.

If he's doing it just to troll the 2011 Mavs randomly, then we should just ignore it as it has absolutely no relevance to anything.

[JordansBulls]

VOTE: Dominique Wilkins.

Finished top 2 in MVP voting in a league with prime Hakeem, Bird, Magic, Kareem to name a few. Carried a franchise for a decade. Was an excellent scorer, defender, rebounder and was clutch.

[Owly]

The case that the teams are not that far apart and are thus "on the same level" might be made by looking at SRS (Dallas 4.41 versus Philly 3.63).

But that line of thinking wouldn't sit well alongside

I also disagree that he isn't capable of leading his team to a title, he was 3 games away from doing so and he happened to be up against a dynasty that had 2 top 10 players ever.

Because SRS doesn't indicate they suggest they are championship calibre.

http://www.basketball-reference.com/pla ... der_by=srs

Only 98th best team post 2000, out of 445 (outside the top fifth).

Of champions ...
There's the '06 Heat in that ballpark (3.59) ... but with Shaq playing 59 games, Zo playing 65, Jason Williams playing 59. That's three of their 4 most productive players missing large chunks.

'01 Lakers (3.74): again a bunch of niggling injuries, coasting, playoff dominance, and they were in any case the team that demolished Philly.

'95 Rockets (2.32): again lots of injuries.

'88 Lakers (4.81): (a) late season occasional slippage suggests defending champs confident of HCA, cruising, perhaps resting players, plus being dominant in a weak conference deflates their SRS in that they weren't pushed to maximise RS dominance.

Teams that are, at full strength, 3.63 SRS calibre are very unlikely to win a title (with certain era qualifiers, it's more plausible in the later half of the 70s or 54-56, though even those teams that won are, I would expect, more usually more standard deviations above average than Philly). Throw in that Philly's playoff competitors up to LA wasn't exactly murder's row. Particularly relative to the Dallas team in the comparison (and see the nature of Dallas' victories). I'm an SRS and RS "fan". But Dallas was only really given a series by Miami (the other series Dallas' points diff shows convincing victories). Meanwhile both 7 game series and narrow points diff advantages suggest Philly wasn't clearly outperforming their opponents in rounds 2 and 3.

Finally a terminology quibble

I also disagree that he isn't capable of leading his team to a title

I don't think anyone think's it's impossible to win with AI as your best player. Boston won in '76 with an SRS of 2.24 and nobody with a PER above 19. It just isn't thought of as very likely; in particular, relative to his superstar reputation and accolades (MVP).

[Clyde Frazier]

Some great research here by Moonbeam on Dantley and other star SFs of the 80s:

I love looking at these guys because most of my favorite players are small forwards, and it was such an exciting time to watch, as these guys were each capable of amazing offensive outbursts.

Spoiler:

One thing I've taken a hard look at is how to weigh up offensive statistics in the context of team offense. There has been a fair bit of discussion in the Top 100 poll about how to gauge individual performance based on team performance (e.g. Garnett's Minny teams did not generally excel on defense, how to compare Kidd's team offenses to Payton's given teammate quality), so I tried to come up with a rough model of expectations for team offense.

I used offensive win shares as the basis for this analysis. I know many aren't happy with OWS, but on a team-level, it is very strongly correlated with offensive rating, which is a good measure of overall team offensive performance. I looked at all regular season data from 1977-2014 to come up with a set of aging curves to encompass different types of peak shapes. I've used five different levels of peak sharpness and five different peak ages (21, 24, 27, 30, and 33), which makes it possible to model a player's career based on OWS/48, like this:



This is a very simple approach, but I wanted something specific enough to broadly capture the relationship between offensive production and aging, but not too specific as to produce perfect models - I'm interested in the deviations from expectations, after all, so I'm happy with a bit of noise.

Based on these curves of expected OWS/48, I then looked at team offense relative to expectations as judged by total OWS. I'm still looking to road-test this analysis, so if you know of any instances where you felt a team overachieved or underachieved its talent level, I'd be eager to check it against my model!

I parsed out performance relative to expectations for each of these players plus Larry Bird (in >28 MPG seasons) and their respective teammates as a whole. Why 28 MPG? I wanted to include enough seasons to get a big picture view, plus I wanted to avoid discontinuities where I could (e.g. Bernard King's 1988 season). Here are the resulting plots of player OWS, player expected OWS, teammate ("help") OWS and expected teammate OWS:

















Over this span, here are the MP-weighted averages for player OWS, % of team OWS, both rate and raw difference of help OWS to expectations:

Code: Select all

Player   WtOWS   %Off  Help Rate  Help Diff
Aguirre  5.112  0.166    1.018      +0.428
Bird     7.429  0.220    1.048      +1.056
Dantley  8.803  0.394    0.844      -2.155
English  6.536  0.246    1.016      +0.307
Johnson  5.954  0.253    1.040      +0.636
King     4.466  0.269    0.887      -1.413
Wilkins  6.084  0.255    1.015      +0.260
Worthy   5.065  0.155    1.116      +2.809


On the surface, it looks like Dantley (and to a lesser extent, King) may be getting their Win Shares somewhat at the expense of teammates, while Bird and Worthy are associated with boosts for their teammates. How much praise (or blame) should be apportioned for performance of teammates is up for debate, but I think it at least provides a framework for comparison.

Taking a look at the 5-year intervals in the OP:

Code: Select all

Player  Years   WtOWS   %Off  Help Rate  Help Diff
Aguirre 84-88   5.920  0.187    1.041      +1.005
Bird    84-88   9.933  0.302    0.989      -0.257
Dantley 80-84  11.213  0.553    1.083      +0.606
English 82-86   7.849  0.268    1.026      +0.548
Johnson 79-83   7.192  0.275    1.057      +0.984
King    81-85   6.675  0.323    0.919      -1.268
Wilkins 86-90   7.835  0.270    1.158      +2.891
Worthy  86-90   6.465  0.180    1.181      +4.496


Dantley is clearly the leader in both OWS and percentage of team offense (some of those supporting casts in Utah look dreadful), but perhaps he didn't provide the "lift" as others (or worse, perhaps his presence deflated his teammates offense). If we split his career into phases, it seems his early career is where his teammates fared the worst (0.731 rate, fit issues with Lakers?), while in Utah they performed nearly to (awful) expectations (0.968 rate), while in Detroit during 87-88, the rate fell to 0.801 (problems of fit with Isiah?), and across 89-90, it was 0.935.

I don't think Worthy's help numbers are attributable to him so much as they are to Magic, but he clearly fit into Showtime quite well. Wilkins looks like he could have provided decent lift across 86-90, and Aguirre's apparent issues with teammates did not seem to affect his teams' offenses.

I've got H2H stats I can post later, but I thought I'd put this out there as it's a fascinating comparison for me.

Entire discussion here:

viewtopic.php?p=41264223#p41264223

[tsherkin]

Dantley, Vince and English are the guys on my mind right now. McAdoo, a bit. Interesting set, those.

Reading Moonbeam's post was a good time.

[E-Balla]

What a senseless derail the 2011 Mavs are here.

The only thing that makes sense is that he thinks AI is superior to JJ Barea because that's the player on either the Mavs or their opponents who is the most logical comparison.

I'm willing to concede AI > JJB and I'm literally the only Barea stan on RealGM so I think we can move on.

If he's doing it just to troll the 2011 Mavs randomly, then we should just ignore it as it has absolutely no relevance to anything.

How am I trolling the Mavs by saying the 01 Sixers who made the Finals and beat the GOAT team are on their level? Get over yourself.

Now to get back to the original reason the Finals teams were brought up:

The case that the teams are not that far apart and are thus "on the same level" might be made by looking at SRS (Dallas 4.41 versus Philly 3.63).

But that line of thinking wouldn't sit well alongside

I also disagree that he isn't capable of leading his team to a title, he was 3 games away from doing so and he happened to be up against a dynasty that had 2 top 10 players ever.

Because SRS doesn't indicate they suggest they are championship calibre.

http://www.basketball-reference.com/pla ... der_by=srs

Only 98th best team post 2000, out of 445 (outside the top fifth).

Of champions ...
There's the '06 Heat in that ballpark (3.59) ... but with Shaq playing 59 games, Zo playing 65, Jason Williams playing 59. That's three of their 4 most productive players missing large chunks.

'01 Lakers (3.74): again a bunch of niggling injuries, coasting, playoff dominance, and they were in any case the team that demolished Philly.

'95 Rockets (2.32): again lots of injuries.

'88 Lakers (4.81): (a) late season occasional slippage suggests defending champs confident of HCA, cruising, perhaps resting players, plus being dominant in a weak conference deflates their SRS in that they weren't pushed to maximise RS dominance.

Teams that are, at full strength, 3.63 SRS calibre are very unlikely to win a title (with certain era qualifiers, it's more plausible in the later half of the 70s or 54-56, though even those teams that won are, I would expect, more usually more standard deviations above average than Philly). Throw in that Philly's playoff competitors up to LA wasn't exactly murder's row. Particularly relative to the Dallas team in the comparison (and see the nature of Dallas' victories). I'm an SRS and RS "fan". But Dallas was only really given a series by Miami (the other series Dallas' points diff shows convincing victories). Meanwhile both 7 game series and narrow points diff advantages suggest Philly wasn't clearly outperforming their opponents in rounds 2 and 3.

Finally a terminology quibble

I also disagree that he isn't capable of leading his team to a title

I don't think anyone think's it's impossible to win with AI as your best player. Boston won in '76 with an SRS of 2.24 and nobody with a PER above 19. It just isn't thought of as very likely; in particular, relative to his superstar reputation and accolades (MVP).

No one said they are completely up to a finals winning caliber but they could win. Sure they'd be one of the weakest teams to ever win but a win is a win. Either way he got awfully close with a team that wasn't that great outside of him.

[Texas Chuck]

How am I trolling the Mags by saying the 01 Sixers who made the Finals and beat the GOAT team are on their level? Get over yourself.

.

Have you actually established anything close to suggesting the 01 Sixers are a peer of the 2011 Mavs? Nope. So they are irrelevant to this thread and to AI. Not only were the Mavs the far superior playoff team, running rampage over much tougher competition in their own conference, when they faced the super team at the end, they triumphed.

And in the RS the Mavs were a top 2 or 3 team that year except for the 9 games Dirk missed with injury and the 2 games he rushed back to play when he was clearly still hurt. So their RS is underrated by measures like SRS because it doesn't account for that.

You are attempting to prop up Iverson by contriving some link to a team that played nothing like the Sixers and was vastly superior in the playoffs and the RS. Iverson is going to have to stand on his own measures. He doesn't get to piggy back on a team he has nothing to do with.

So you are both trolling the Mavs by comparing them to a vastly inferior team and you are attempting to prop up Iverson by making this dubious association.

[E-Balla]

How am I trolling the Mags by saying the 01 Sixers who made the Finals and beat the GOAT team are on their level? Get over yourself.

.

Have you actually established anything close to suggesting the 01 Sixers are a peer of the 2011 Mavs? Nope. So they are irrelevant to this thread and to AI. Not only were the Mavs the far superior playoff team, running rampage over much tougher competition in their own conference, when they faced the super team at the end, they triumphed.

And in the RS the Mavs were a top 2 or 3 team that year except for the 9 games Dirk missed with injury and the 2 games he rushed back to play when he was clearly still hurt. So their RS is underrated by measures like SRS because it doesn't account for that.

You are attempting to prop up Iverson by contriving some link to a team that played nothing like the Sixers and was vastly superior in the playoffs and the RS. Iverson is going to have to stand on his own measures. He doesn't get to piggy back on a team he has nothing to do with.

So you are both trolling the Mavs by comparing them to a vastly inferior team and you are attempting to prop up Iverson by making this dubious association.

If someone asks what team I think they could've beat and I say a team how is that irrelevant? The Mavs went 57-25 and the Sixers went 56-26. The Mavs were 8th in SRS and the Sixers were 7th. Dirk missed 9 games where they sucked but AI missed 11 games where the Sixers played bad. If you believe one more win is vastly superior that's on you.

And he's standing on his own measures. Its people like you trying to dismiss leading a 56 win team to a Finals win against the GOAT team. There's nothing for me to argue about the Sixers results speak for themselves.

[Sasaki]

Maybe I am wrong, but I do not think that there is a single star in the history of the NBA who is defined by ONE game as much as Allen Iverson. One game, which is always used to prop up how awesome Iverson is. Why does that one game count for so much blasted much? It's not like a championship team taking more games to defeat a team in the first round as opposed to the Finals means that the first round team is somehow better - otherwise we'd be thinking that the Hawks were better than the Lakers in 2008, the Rockets without Yao were better than the Magic in 2009, and the 2014 Mavericks really were the second best team in the league.

We aren't talking about the NFL, or the NCAA. One game means basically nothing.

Not to mention it's weird as hell that the answer to my question of "Which championship team is worse than the 01 Sixers" was "The 2011 Mavs". The Mavs aren't even close to the worst championship team of the 2000s.

[Basketballefan]

Maybe I am wrong, but I do not think that there is a single star in the history of the NBA who is defined by ONE game as much as Allen Iverson. One game, which is always used to prop up how awesome Iverson is. Why does that one game count for so much blasted much? It's not like a championship team taking more games to defeat a team in the first round as opposed to the Finals means that the first round team is somehow better - otherwise we'd be thinking that the Hawks were better than the Lakers in 2008, the Rockets without Yao were better than the Magic in 2009, and the 2014 Mavericks really were the second best team in the league.

We aren't talking about the NFL, or the NCAA. One game means basically nothing.

Not to mention it's weird as hell that the answer to my question of "Which championship team is worse than the 01 Sixers" was "The 2011 Mavs". The Mavs aren't even close to the worst championship team of the 2000s.

Where did anybody use one game to define iverson?

[Texas Chuck]

Its people like you trying to dismiss leading a 56 win team to a Finals win against the GOAT team.

2 things:

1. Please show me where I dismissed what AI did? I simply pointed out the 2011 Mavs were the better team with the superior playoff run.

2. I don't get the relevance of how good the Lakers were. The Sixers didn't beat them. They lost 4-1. All that proves is that the Sixers weren't as good as the Lakers--it does nothing to suggest they approached the level of that Lakers team. Meanwhile Dallas swept the 2x defending champ Lakers, ran over the next year's WC champ OKC in 5 and beat the dynastic Heat.

[Texas Chuck]

Maybe I am wrong, but I do not think that there is a single star in the history of the NBA who is defined by ONE game as much as Allen Iverson. One game, which is always used to prop up how awesome Iverson is. Why does that one game count for so much blasted much? It's not like a championship team taking more games to defeat a team in the first round as opposed to the Finals means that the first round team is somehow better - otherwise we'd be thinking that the Hawks were better than the Lakers in 2008, the Rockets without Yao were better than the Magic in 2009, and the 2014 Mavericks really were the second best team in the league.

We aren't talking about the NFL, or the NCAA. One game means basically nothing.

Not to mention it's weird as hell that the answer to my question of "Which championship team is worse than the 01 Sixers" was "The 2011 Mavs". The Mavs aren't even close to the worst championship team of the 2000s.

Where did anybody use one game to define iverson?

uh E-balla has been using the fact that they went 1-4 against the Lakers in 2001 as evidence that they were as good as if not better than several actual championship teams including for some unknown reason the 2011 Mavs. No one else seems to agree or understand the relevance of the Mavs, but he has harped on that point for awhile now.

[trex_8063]

Maybe I am wrong, but I do not think that there is a single star in the history of the NBA who is defined by ONE game as much as Allen Iverson.

Walt Frazier says hi (imo).

[Owly]

What a senseless derail the 2011 Mavs are here.

The only thing that makes sense is that he thinks AI is superior to JJ Barea because that's the player on either the Mavs or their opponents who is the most logical comparison.

I'm willing to concede AI > JJB and I'm literally the only Barea stan on RealGM so I think we can move on.

If he's doing it just to troll the 2011 Mavs randomly, then we should just ignore it as it has absolutely no relevance to anything.

How am I trolling the Mavs by saying the 01 Sixers who made the Finals and beat the GOAT team are on their level? Get over yourself.

Now to get back to the original reason the Finals teams were brought up:

The case that the teams are not that far apart and are thus "on the same level" might be made by looking at SRS (Dallas 4.41 versus Philly 3.63).

But that line of thinking wouldn't sit well alongside

I also disagree that he isn't capable of leading his team to a title, he was 3 games away from doing so and he happened to be up against a dynasty that had 2 top 10 players ever.

Because SRS doesn't indicate they suggest they are championship calibre.

http://www.basketball-reference.com/pla ... der_by=srs

Only 98th best team post 2000, out of 445 (outside the top fifth).

Of champions ...
There's the '06 Heat in that ballpark (3.59) ... but with Shaq playing 59 games, Zo playing 65, Jason Williams playing 59. That's three of their 4 most productive players missing large chunks.

'01 Lakers (3.74): again a bunch of niggling injuries, coasting, playoff dominance, and they were in any case the team that demolished Philly.

'95 Rockets (2.32): again lots of injuries.

'88 Lakers (4.81): (a) late season occasional slippage suggests defending champs confident of HCA, cruising, perhaps resting players, plus being dominant in a weak conference deflates their SRS in that they weren't pushed to maximise RS dominance.

Teams that are, at full strength, 3.63 SRS calibre are very unlikely to win a title (with certain era qualifiers, it's more plausible in the later half of the 70s or 54-56, though even those teams that won are, I would expect, more usually more standard deviations above average than Philly). Throw in that Philly's playoff competitors up to LA wasn't exactly murder's row. Particularly relative to the Dallas team in the comparison (and see the nature of Dallas' victories). I'm an SRS and RS "fan". But Dallas was only really given a series by Miami (the other series Dallas' points diff shows convincing victories). Meanwhile both 7 game series and narrow points diff advantages suggest Philly wasn't clearly outperforming their opponents in rounds 2 and 3.

Finally a terminology quibble

I also disagree that he isn't capable of leading his team to a title

I don't think anyone think's it's impossible to win with AI as your best player. Boston won in '76 with an SRS of 2.24 and nobody with a PER above 19. It just isn't thought of as very likely; in particular, relative to his superstar reputation and accolades (MVP).

No one said they are completely up to a finals winning caliber but they could win. Sure they'd be one of the weakest teams to ever win but a win is a win. Either way he got awfully close with a team that wasn't that great outside of him.

Sure they could win (and one of my personal bugbears is the absolutes people sometimes speak in on this type of forum; "Who would win in series?" "Team A, no question." No nuance, no balance of probability, anyhow ... ). But you could say that of a lot players on the board, that you could build 3.5ish SRS team around them (especially with a late prime guy who has just got voted in). And I wouldn't say awfully close. As noted the finals appearance is somewhat misleading. Narrowly coming out of a weak East (covered above) then being defeated very convincingly does not suggest a team that you could typically expect to be a contender. They were much closer, for instance to being eliminated in the second round, thinking they got to the finals so they're close isn't far from merely emphasizing luck (and only emphazining the positive). They could have gotten lucky having got that far, it's a small sample, someone might get injured. Or his peak might not coincide with an awful conference which he happens to play in. Or his team might lose in one of the much closer series.

As I said it's not (I would suggest) an, "AI led teams can't win", it's a "He seems an awkward piece to build around, it might be difficult to build a really good team, a probable contender, around him."

[E-Balla]

Sure they could win (and one of my personal bugbears is the absolutes people sometimes speak in on this type of forum; "Who would win in series?" "Team A, no question." No nuance, no balance of probability, anyhow ... ). But you could say that of a lot players on the board, that you could build 3.5ish SRS team around them (especially with a late prime guy who has just got voted in). And I wouldn't say awfully close. As noted the finals appearance is somewhat misleading. Narrowly coming out of a weak East (covered above) then being defeated very convincingly does not suggest a team that you could typically expect to be a contender. They were much closer, for instance to being eliminated in the second round, thinking they got to the finals so they're close isn't far from merely emphasizing luck (and only emphazining the positive). They could have gotten lucky having got that far, it's a small sample, someone might get injured. Or his peak might not coincide with an awful conference which he happens to play in. Or his team might lose in one of the much closer series.

As I said it's not (I would suggest) an, "AI led teams can't win", it's a "He seems an awkward piece to build around, it might be difficult to build a really good team, a probable contender, around him."

A 3.5 SRS team isn't his cap though. That team was insanely inept on offense. You honestly think you couldn't build a better team around AI with as little money as he was getting paid?

[trex_8063]

Maybe I am wrong, but I do not think that there is a single star in the history of the NBA who is defined by ONE game as much as Allen Iverson.

Walt Frazier says hi (imo).

And fwiw, I personally don't put much stock or consideration into that one game in the finals (for Iverson, I mean; well, not for Frazier either, actually). tbh, I'm not sure if everyone who DOES bring up that game in the '01 finals is actually basing a ton of their opinion of Iverson on that one game. Sometimes I think it's just one of those things that comes up when giving the sort of "bullet point" recap of his career.

My opinion of him is based more on the broad evaluation of his production and efficiency (with consideration of context, which obv I went out of my way to explore), and his degree of impact (which again: I attempted to explore pretty thoroughly). And based on those things, I think he has a more than sufficient top 50 case.

[penbeast0]

VOTE: Dominique Wilkins.

Finished top 2 in MVP voting in a league with prime Hakeem, Bird, Magic, Kareem to name a few. Carried a franchise for a decade. Was an excellent scorer, defender, rebounder and was clutch.

Dominique Wilkins was voted by the other players in a TSN poll as the player who put the least effort in on defense in the league. He was not an excellent rebounder, he was a high volume scorer of average efficiency who was the focal point of an iso offense, more comparable to Iverson than to someone like Dantley or English, and his playoff struggles are legendary.

You are embarassing yourself with this one JB.