kayess wrote:Tesla wrote:Some quick thoughts on KG this high.
I dont want to offend anyones opinion here, but I just dont see it, its borderline absurd. This is not a peak ranking (which even then I disagree with, but sure I can see a legit argument for) As a ranking of greatest of all time, at this high where there is a handful of resumes, his argument revolves around his +/- and value over replacement on ridiculous bad teams... so the arguement I suppose is if he had a great team around him we can infer from those numbers that he would have Tim Duncan-like sucess? OK maybe, but Tim Duncan ACTUALLY happened. Its insane to me to give that much credit on a career level to someone over others that actually lived it, did it, proved it, got the results and did it inn extraordinary fashion.
I get it, its unfortunate that he played a majority of his prime with some garbage teams... but that is what we are calling one of the handful greatest of all time careers? I use Duncan just because its a contemporary that he is clearly inferior to in terms of a GOAT ranking, but even if we look at their careers at 31 years old and onward (when KG got a great team), Duncan still outshines and does so clearly. /end rant.
I get where you are coming from, and this was a big hurdle for me initially as well: it seems like we are crediting KG for what he COULD HAVE done, over what others ACTUALLY ACCOMPLISHED.
But then I realized two things:
- Team success is a function of not only the star player's impact/abilities, but also: his teammates', his coach's, the system/environment that they function in, the league-wide environment, etc.
- His impact on the court, how much better he made teams - these are things that actually happened. Things that he DID.
These have the following implications:
(1) This means that there are many, many potential reasons for a team not succeeding: bad teammates, bad coach, bad system... But even if you are already great, there might somebody still be greater. Most of these things are beyond the control of any single individual - therefore, why should we credit OR punish an individual for team success? Unless of course, we are able to look at team success, and somehow isolate how much impact an individual has on it...
(2) ...which of course, we are able to do (albeit, not perfectly). We know that the best predictor of success on the basketball court is margin of victory (MOV) - how much you outscore your opponents by. We also know that RAPM tries to isolate an individual's impact on his team's MOV, i.e., which player's presence on the court correlates most highly with his team's performance? By how much is he driving this?
(3) We can't stop there, though. Because it just means he is able to have an impact in that specific context. And we already know that this context (teammates, coach, environment, etc.) is difficult to control for an individual. So then we must ask ourselves: can he replicate this impact across different situations? This is where analyzing an individual's skill-set, and trying to make a best guess of (a) why he is successful, how he makes his teams successful, and (b) can he carry this across to different teams, comes in.
(4) Taking all previous 3 points together, it's easy to see that if an individual has great impact over his career, across different contexts... it's a real, tangible thing. The only thing he has control over, of the factors that affect a team's success.
So, to summarize: this isn't crediting KG for "could have been" results - it's realizing that for an individual, the results that are most indicative of ability aren't rings, it's on-court impact. And KG's influence, his impact on winning was as big as nearly anyone else's in history (Duncan is in the same boat), but Duncan won more simply because he was on better teams (their league context/environment is obviously identical).
It still is what could have been results. I have no problem with someone giving him credit for having some of the best impact numbers in history; however, he still did the majority of it on bad teams (not his fault). Likewise, it isnt any players faults that they played with greater teams, and we were able to see them make great impact over and over deep into the playoffs. I cant discredit that. To me it is more about not giving enough credit to what others have done. I simply cannot fathom giving so much credit to a career over only one aspect when others have him clearly edged in so many areas (that may not be part of a players control) yet they did happen. We are looking at greatest of all time, and I suppose it may vary on your criteria, but how can so many accomplisments be pushed aside for someone who has accomplished a fraction of those things yet his only advantage is on some impact stats largely done on very poor teams. You could argue he was as high of an impact player as anyone for maybe 6-7 years: 02 to 09? What about those that have done it for over 10 years? He is with Dirk, Malone, West, etc more than hes with any kind of mount rushmore and that is a compliment to him.
