Should Adrian Dantley Be A Top 40 Player?

[chrismikayla]

It seems at least offensively he is easily a top 40 talent. I was curious why he was ranked outside the top 50 and wanted to hear from some of the posters here that are smarter than me.

[Quotatious]

Numbers-wise he has a case, he's arguably a top 3-5 volume scorer ever, but his impact doesn't impress me as much as his boxscore numbers (sort of an "early Wilt syndrome"). Certainly I may be wrong, but that's how I feel right now.

I'd probably rank Dantley as a fringe top 50 guy, but top 40 seems too high, because in addition to his somewhat doubtful offensive impact, he wasn't particularly good in other areas of the game.

I'm sure Moonbeam would gladly chime in here and prove that Dantley's impact was better than I give him credit for, though (Dantley is his favorite player).

[Extra Medium]

No. I remember watching Dantley in the '80's as a kid and being amazed that he could score as well as he did. He was slow, couldn't jump, had a weird physique (6'5" with a big rear end) but knew how to use it, was patient as hell, would pump fake for days and draw fouls like crazy. He got the most out of his talent. Having said that his offense didn't lead to team success and he was essentially a black hole. Moreover, he was a malcontent and wore out his welcome on every team he ever played on. It didn't end after his career ended which is probably why he never got a head coaching job either. I'd rank him as an all time great scorer and one of the four or five most unique players I've ever seen (Barkley, Mugsy etc) but not in my top 40. He's probably in the 80-100 range at best and 100-150 at worst.

[UN-Owen]

A quick look at the advanced stats and it looks like a case could be made for Dantley over Dominique

[Winsome Gerbil]

No. I remember watching Dantley in the '80's as a kid and being amazed that he could score as well as he did. He was slow, couldn't jump, had a weird physique (6'5" with a big rear end) but knew how to use it, was patient as hell, would pump fake for days and draw fouls like crazy. He got the most out of his talent. Having said that his offense didn't lead to team success and he was essentially a black hole. Moreover, he was a malcontent and wore out his welcome on every team he ever played on. It didn't end after his career ended which is probably why he never got a head coaching job either. I'd rank him as an all time great scorer and one of the four or five most unique players I've ever seen (Barkley, Mugsy etc) but not in my top 40. He's probably in the 80-100 range at best and 100-150 at worst.

Yeah, this is about right I think.

Dantley had a freakish knack for a scorer. He was 6'5". A stubby, unathletic SG. Hopeless case right? But no, he had such a knack in the post, and ability to draw fouls, that he scored his way into the HOF as a stubby SF. And statistically there is a real argument: by the numbers during his prime that's a Top 50 player.

But the thing is...he was a strange player. He was still 6'5" and unathletic and playing SF, and couldn't defend at all. Despite the massive numbers, his teams didn't win that much until he became part of the Detroit collective. Even in his own era he was only a part time All Star (although hit 6 of 7 right through his peak/prime, and probably would have been 7 of 7 if he didn't get hurt one year). The NBA put together its 50 greatest only a few years after he retired, and he didn't even make that list, let alone a Top 50 list with another 20 years of great players tacked on. He was kind of like the old guy at the park with the saavy old man big butted post game. Can't do anything else. Slow, unatheltic, but throw it to him and he'll back you done and score the heck of it.

I don't know. I think both Nique and English had more portable games. Could beat you in more ways. There are some shaky characters near the back of the Top 50, and case by case Dantley could rank above them for me. But overall, I think something was missing. He never had the respect or success his numbers would suggest even during the day.

[70sFan]

I don't like players like him. Volume ISO scorers who don't like and can't play defense. Beides scoring give your team nothing at all. BUT I LOVE DANTLEY GAME. He is for me amazing unique player. Unathletic and undersized for his position, but unguardable in one on one situations. Had every move down low, very strong, amazing pump fake, underrated shlasing ability which give him space to shoot from midrange.
I think he is underrated because there are not many videos about him in YouTube (I didn't see any Dantley highlight mix) nor many games from Jazz time. It would be nice if someone show his ability younger generation (I can't create basketball mixes )

[Dr Positivity]

One of the hardest players to rate. In team results his impact doesn't look good at all, and the Pistons winning 2 titles without him after an already sketchy LA/UTA career in impact, is especially worrisome. You can build the case that freezing the ball and playing poor defense cancelled out his value. But on the other hand it's hard to put up his stats and not have a major impact no matter what you do. It's conceivable Dantley just had the bad luck of his teams looking better without him. Say Kevin Love got traded halfway through next season, stat padded on a crap Lakers team for a few years, then has an early decline. Meanwhile Cleveland wins 2016 and 2017 titles. Look at how bad Love's career in impact would look. He never makes playoffs in Minny and peaks as a barely 40 W team, he goes to Cleveland and they make the Finals without him, then win 2 titles without him while he keeps losing elsewhere. Kevin Love becomes the new Dantley, amazing stats at his peak but nobody trusts him to win. Yet is this fair whatsoever? And unlike Dantley you can't come up with the he stopped the ball excuse, as if anything K Love spacing should be helping his teammates get better. This would just be pure bad luck by Love to end up on a horrible Minny organization followed by a Cleveland team stacked enough to look so good without him. The positive viewpoint on Dantley is this is just the luck he had. That Utah was just that bad and Detroit was just that good

Overall I'm conflicted so I would probably rate him around Vince Carter level career, who didn't win more than Dantley anyways.

[Joao Saraiva]

Fantastic scorer.
Great offensive rebounder for his position.
OK playmaker.
Bad defender.

As far as team results some people put too much weight on the Pistons championships. He actually played fine in both 87 and 88 runs.

He was also a good leader in Utah, taking us to our 1st playoff trips and putting us on the map as far as regualr season success.
84 - 45 wins and 2nd seed;
85 - 41 wins and 6th seed;
86 - 42 wins and 5th seed.
And those teams really didn't have a fantastic cast

He got us into the playoffs 3 times (84, 85 and 86), played only in two of them (84 and 85) and when he played we always got out of the 1st round. In 86 he didn't play and we lost in the 1st round, in 87 without him we also lost in the 1st round. Sounds like he was a plus on our team.


Doesn't sound like a top 40 player to me, but I would say he's definitely a possibility for the 40-60 range.

[mischievous]

I think his scoring numbers should be enough to place him in the lower end of the top 50 maybe, or at worst top 60. I don't know much about him other than what i've heard people say, blackhole, no defense etc. I find it a little hard to believe that you aren't at least a borderline top 50 guy when you can score in a way like that.

[tsherkin]

I think the big anti-Dantley fuss initially started because he wasn't a brilliant social individual in his own hey-day, and has revived some on these boards because his wicked scoring numbers don't really seem to correlate with a massive boost to team offense based on some reviews we've seen over the years. You'd think ultra-efficient 30 ppg would be killer for that, but he killed ball movement and ate clock like a beast without being much of a passer, which may have been the problem.

Or we might need to dig into things a little more, maybe. The RPOY project had some really nice posts on him.

[Warspite]

Chuck Daly said that he was a key component to the defense because of his ability to shoot a high FG% and draw fouls the Pistons could get into half court defense more often and allowed fewer transition baskets. He was fun to watch and he could make so many players look like fools.

[SinceGatlingWasARookie]

A little undersized as a small forward and not really quick enough to be a guard. He was intelligent defender.

Arguably stagnates offenses and burns shot clock.

Amazing mastery of his side of the key one on one offense whether facing up or backing in. Incredible footwork, fakes and patience. He routinely managed to confuse defenders and get himself open short shots that he rarely missed.

[Moonbeam]

Quotatious is right, I'm a huge fan. I'm a basketball fan mostly because of Dantley, so I'm sure I can't provide the most objective view.

That said, I don't have him in my top 40. I had him at 45 when I made a list last December. Is that overrating him? Probably. I'm sure I'm not immune from that.

If you want to see why I rate him that high, here is a link to a post I made when voting for him in the top 100 project, which contains links to other posts I made on various Dantley-related things.

A brief (if I can) summary:

Scoring: By all 3 Score+ metrics I developed, Dantley comes out at #1, pretty comfortably. In essence, nobody in history had a better combination of volume and efficiency in terms of direct scoreboard impact in the regular season. At his best, he was giving Utah an extra 6+ points per game above what could be expected with average efficiency and the same number of shots. When I get time, I'll revisit the clever way of allocating stats to postseasons prior to 1985 based on team totals, although this led me to a barrier in which the sums of individual stats from a team did not add up to the team totals on bbref - I should probably get around to writing them about it. In any case, he is in very rarefied air as a scorer.

Defense: I've read a quote from Dantley that he was encouraged by coaches to put more effort in on offense, and that the other high-flying small forwards all had similar instructions... score, score, score! Dantley compares quite favorably to guys like English, Wilkins, Aguirre, King, Worthy, Marques Johnson, etc. in head-to-head matchups. Surprisingly, those guys (and others like Bird and Erving) saw a drop in their scoring averages of over 1 PPG against Dantley in seasons where both played at least 28 MPG. Surely, strong team defenses late in his stint in Utah and throughout his time in Detroit help that, but even before his teams were sporting good defenses in Utah, his opponents were kept right around their averages from 1980-82. Dantley also really ramped up the defense in Detroit in the playoffs, and was applauded by teammates, coaches, and even opponents for it.

Personality: Dantley got a bit of a reputation as a bad seed, and I think it's largely unwarranted. It seems mostly to come from 2 sources: the Frank Layden dispute (which Layden went on record taking the lion's shame of the blame for) and Isiah Thomas. Other teammates really liked him (notably Dumars and Salley). Dantley was not a gregarious guy - he came from a poor family and took a no-nonsense approach to the game. He was one of the few to lift weights in the 70s, and he kept his body in great shape. It was a big deal for him to spend a week after each season ended eating whatever he wanted (peach cobbler a particular favorite), but then he went straight back on his strict diet (which he taught to teammates like Salley). He started off a chubby kid in college but quickly became one of the most in-shape players you'd find. He was quiet, and probably not a very good leader as a result overall (though he inspired those young Pistons a lot in the playoffs, even becoming animated when needed). If you listen to his Hall of Fame induction speech, you'll see that he's not particularly eloquent. Check out this video from 1984 in which he discusses his MVP chances:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBBEHRjH8OY[/youtube]

He didn't seem like somebody who wanted much attention.

Impact: This is where he falls down in a lot of people's eyes. Utah's team offense was generally pretty bad while he was there at the peak of his powers. His offensive support was often bottom-of-the-barrel, however, and I took a look at decomposing offensive win shares to see if he "poached" from his teammates based on expectations through aging curves, and while in Utah, he didn't really seem to do that. By far the biggest thing dragging Utah's offense down was offensive rebounding, though:



They weren't good at offensive rebounding before he arrived, and they were bad after he left as well, so it's probably not a Dantley problem. Given that offensive rebounding is something that is a team effort and is subject to strategy, those offenses may very well have been closer to average than bad.

Related to this, there also appears to be a big gap between his box score production and his WOWY numbers, where he looks to be a modest positive at times and a modest negative at other times. I made some posts examining the 1983 and 1988 seasons (where he doesn't look so good) in detail, with some other factors that could explain them.

In general, I think we have to be a bit careful with WOWY data from pre-PBP seasons. In most cases, you are missing a majority of the minutes a player is off the court. Frank Layden even went so far as to say that the Jazz had a lot of first quarter leads with Dantley and Griffith that fell apart once he had to sub them out (I believe it was in 1982).

I've looked at the relationship between simple WOWY numbers (difference in HCA-adjusted SRS in games with and without a player) vs. +/- per 100 possessions from basketball-reference, and the correlation may not be as strong as you might think.

Here are some numbers for LaMarcus Aldridge in Portland:

Code: Select all

Season  Games Missed  SRS Diff  +/-
2007        19           1.30    4.9
2008         6         -16.19    2.9
2009         1          -1.96   10.2
2010         4           9.39    3.6
2011         1          24.99   15.0
2012        11           6.38   12.4
2013         8           6.05    9.4
2014        13           0.80    8.8
2015        11           7.94    5.2


Here's a graph, with bigger circles meaning there were more games missed (should be a better estimate):



The correlation between SRS difference and +/- per 100 possessions, weighted by number of games missed, was only 0.45.

Add to that the fact that the Jazz organization was a complete mess, and I'm not sure how much can be read into those numbers for Dantley. This is a team that was considered among the cheapest in the league - they'd take buses instead of flights sometimes, and the owners were strongly considering moving the team to Minnesota. They were struck by tragedies (Terry Furlow's car crash, Bill Robinzine's suicide). They had head cases - Bernard King spiraled out of control and Larry Drew had 2 drug incidents, the second of which got him baneed for life. And they were also incompetent, trading Dominique Wilkins for the aforementioned Drew without doing any background checks and giving roles to bit players that were much bigger than they ever saw elsewhere in their career, if they even lasted in the NBA.

I wouldn't be surprised if a group of dedicated fans like us went through game tape once it is made available through the promised digital archive to record lineup +/- for games, and if this is done, it wouldn't surprise me if Dantley looks better than he does looking at raw WOWY numbers.

Ultimately, he was a hyper-elite scorer who didn't consistently bring much else to the table. I don't think he's worth a place in the top 40, but I also think the reputation he developed as a malcontent and an empty stats guy goes too far.

[chrismikayla]

No. I remember watching Dantley in the '80's as a kid and being amazed that he could score as well as he did. He was slow, couldn't jump, had a weird physique (6'5" with a big rear end) but knew how to use it, was patient as hell, would pump fake for days and draw fouls like crazy. He got the most out of his talent. Having said that his offense didn't lead to team success and he was essentially a black hole. Moreover, he was a malcontent and wore out his welcome on every team he ever played on. It didn't end after his career ended which is probably why he never got a head coaching job either. I'd rank him as an all time great scorer and one of the four or five most unique players I've ever seen (Barkley, Mugsy etc) but not in my top 40. He's probably in the 80-100 range at best and 100-150 at worst.

Yeah, this is about right I think.

Dantley had a freakish knack for a scorer. He was 6'5". A stubby, unathletic SG. Hopeless case right? But no, he had such a knack in the post, and ability to draw fouls, that he scored his way into the HOF as a stubby SF. And statistically there is a real argument: by the numbers during his prime that's a Top 50 player.

But the thing is...he was a strange player. He was still 6'5" and unathletic and playing SF, and couldn't defend at all. Despite the massive numbers, his teams didn't win that much until he became part of the Detroit collective. Even in his own era he was only a part time All Star (although hit 6 of 7 right through his peak/prime, and probably would have been 7 of 7 if he didn't get hurt one year). The NBA put together its 50 greatest only a few years after he retired, and he didn't even make that list, let alone a Top 50 list with another 20 years of great players tacked on. He was kind of like the old guy at the park with the saavy old man big butted post game. Can't do anything else. Slow, unatheltic, but throw it to him and he'll back you done and score the heck of it.

I don't know. I think both Nique and English had more portable games. Could beat you in more ways. There are some shaky characters near the back of the Top 50, and case by case Dantley could rank above them for me. But overall, I think something was missing. He never had the respect or success his numbers would suggest even during the day.

Hey that's my game now.

[cpower]

I've never seen him play, is he a better player than Melo and do they score the similar way?

[tsherkin]

I've never seen him play, is he a better player than Melo and do they score the similar way?

Pound the rock in the post and use eleventy fakes to draw fouls and get buckets in close. No where near Melo as far as perimeter shooting or perimeter slashing. 3" shorter or so, nothing like Anthony's first step.

Deadly as an individual. Statistically superior scorer to Melo across most metrics and basic numbers.

[cpower]

I've never seen him play, is he a better player than Melo and do they score the similar way?

Pound the rock in the post and use eleventy fakes to draw fouls and get buckets in close. No where near Melo as far as perimeter shooting or perimeter slashing. 3" shorter or so, nothing like Anthony's first step.

Deadly as an individual. Statistically superior scorer to Melo across most metrics and basic numbers.

thanks, that does sound like a hell of unique player. I will definitely get a look at the old videos from him

[chrismikayla]

I've never seen him play, is he a better player than Melo and do they score the similar way?

Pound the rock in the post and use eleventy fakes to draw fouls and get buckets in close. No where near Melo as far as perimeter shooting or perimeter slashing. 3" shorter or so, nothing like Anthony's first step.

Deadly as an individual. Statistically superior scorer to Melo across most metrics and basic numbers.

Yeah I remember when I was a kid around eleven or twelve when he first got to the Pistons and watching them play the Lakers. I remember asking my dad who this guy was and why couldn't anyone stop him from scoring because he didn't "look" anything special on the court but man could he score from within ten feet or so.

[chrismikayla]

https://youtu.be/pHKL_n1xCuI

Also, this is a good short youtube clip showing much of his offensive repertoire.

[Extra Medium]

I've never seen him play, is he a better player than Melo and do they score the similar way?

Pound the rock in the post and use eleventy fakes to draw fouls and get buckets in close. No where near Melo as far as perimeter shooting or perimeter slashing. 3" shorter or so, nothing like Anthony's first step.

Deadly as an individual. Statistically superior scorer to Melo across most metrics and basic numbers.

Yeah I remember when I was a kid around eleven or twelve when he first got to the Pistons and watching them play the Lakers. I remember asking my dad who this guy was and why couldn't anyone stop him from scoring because he didn't "look" anything special on the court but man could he score from within ten feet or so.

He was the all time king of the slow pump fake. He wasn't in any hurry and he'd keep slowly pump faking until his defender bought it and then he either go around them or lean into them and draw a foul. I also remember him twirling and massaging the ball like crazy before he shot every free throw. He was definitely odd but damn good.