Travel has completely disconnected me from these discussions, and makes it hard to jump in at this point in the thread and make any difference. My main methods of evaluation thus far have been impact-oriented, trying to identify which (among the sea of great NBA players) have done the most to help their teams succeed. Evaluating this is more difficult once we get before the databall era, but with the +/- data from the 76ers statistician that fpliii gathered and the WOWY work that ElGee has spearheaded we've got more tools on that front than we have for any previous project.
Of the players left on the board, it seems to me that West, Robinson and Dirk have the best impact cases left. Dr. J, Malone and Malone also have strong cases in general, but there are more questions there. I'll get into them more in future threads (any that don't go in here), and they have the chance to move up my list. But coming in late without much time, for this thread I'll focus most on West, Robinson and Dirk.
West's WOWY results support that his abilities as a scoring team offense initiator made him one of the biggest impact players of his era, or any other. His game also seems very translatable across era, as there's little doubt in my mind that he would have been able to use the 3-pointer as a weapon to make him even more effective in the modern game than he was in his own. Injuries are a big concern for West. I could consider them as another area, though, in which West would have benefited from the more modern era with better medical and training techniques. That's less tangible, though. What is tangible is that West, along with Oscar, was one of the greatest offensive players of his era with a separation from anyone else of that time. That West had a lot of injuries is a negative, but those injuries also gave us plenty of chances to evaluate what his teams looked like without him...and they struggled. With him, they were great. And he did have a history of putting up big boxscore numbers in the postseason that, without any method of estimating postseason impact, defaults to looking really elite considering his measured/estimated regular season impact.
Robinson was electric, to my eye test. His tournament run at Navy was some of the most exciting individual play I remember in the NCAA, and when he burst onto the scene in the pros after his tour of duty was up, he immediately looked like one of the best players in the NBA. Before the RPoY project I always felt like Robinson was overly downgraded for the Hakeem series in 95, but in that RPoY project several posters (especially Kaima) did a great job of pointing out how Robinson relatively struggled in 94, 96 and 98 against Karl Malone and the Jazz and used that as a basis for arguing that Robinson's playoff issues weren't just a Hakeem 95 thing, but a systemic issue. Subsequent research, posts and project discussions about Robinson's mechanisms of impact have been convincing that Robinson's game really does have tangible difficulty to be the focal iso-scoring lead in the playoffs...and that his overall offensive game wasn't diverse enough to maintain his offensive impact in the postseason. There is even some evidence that in the postseason in his peak, while trying to carry the load on both ends against some tough competition, Robinson's defensive impact slid a bit as well. These are all issues.
However, we have more information than that to work with to try to peg Robinson's level. It shouldn't have come as a shock to anyone, but Robinson's regular season on/off +/- data did peg him as the highest regular season impact player of the mid-90s (94 - 96). That's expected, but it is good to be able to quantify that. However, we also have quantitative impact estimates for another time period that is often minimized/ignored for Robinson...the 98 - 2000 period that has historically been considered the "Duncan era".
While it is unarguable that Duncan's presence as the focal point of the Spurs was huge in bringing the Spurs to championship level, and probably made the game much easier for Robinson...and while one could also strongly argue that Duncan may have been the actual leader of those teams and the player that opponents game-planned for...it's ALSO clear from the RAPM results that Robinson was having just about as much impact on the scoring margins of those 98 - 00 Spurs as Duncan was. Robinson was the defensive anchor on those teams, and with Timmy there as another offensive focus Robinson's offense was also able to flourish. And even in the postseason, the available on/off +/- numbers suggest that Robinson was able to maintain his huge regular season impact into the postseason in this era. Again, when we compare Robinson's postseason impact in the Duncan era to his impact at his peak, I think we have to credit Duncan's presence with making the game easier for him to maintain his best impact. However...that doesn't disqualify the impact itself. And I think that it also suggests that, while a team wouldn't want to move forward with Robinson as their focal offensive player, that a team that allows him to play to his strengths would be getting very possibly the highest impact player in the NBA in both the regular and post season.
Dirk played his whole career in the databall era, so we have the ability to measure/estimate his impact at a granularity that isn't available for previous generations. In both the regular and the postseason. He was a unique beast as a player, in that there isn't really a template for how a 7-footer with the offensive/scoring abilities of an elite wing can affect the game. What we saw, in practice, was that Dirk was able to make a very high impact on the game for much of the 2000s...he was regularly among the top 10, if not top-5, in the league as far as individual regular season impacts while carrying very successful teams.
But, while he actually improved on many of his boxscore stats in the postseason, he didn't have a very strong postseason impact run for most of the 2000s. I've argued, in the past, that those lower playoffs +/- numbers may have come from teams not distorting their defenses to defend him in the postseason the way that they did in the regular season. That teams may have been more willing to play Dirk straight up and let him get his as he could in the postseason, which allowed him to improve his scoring volume/efficiency, but may have weakened his spacing impact. That some of the teams would go so far as to defend Dirk with a wing instead of a big man, which further may have allowed him to get his but weakened his spacing impact on his team's results. And (as I've been arguing more and more in recent times), I think that a player's impact on team results can be much more important than his own scoring numbers, when it comes to estimating his overall impact.
Up through most of the 2000s, then, I'd argue that Dirk's seasons were similar impact-wise (in both the regular season and the playoffs) to what we saw from 90s Karl Malone. Malone's postseason scoring numbers dipped, unlike Dirk's, but again I don't know that Dirk's boxscore numbers were indicative of his actual impact. And in the larger regular season samples, both Karl (as measured by the available +/- numbers from 1994 on) and Dirk measured out in that top 5 - 10 players in the NBA range in the regular season and had trouble maintaining that in the postseason.
However, in the late 2000s up through 2011, Dirk upped his game. He added a more effective iso post game on offense, that took him out of the range of 7-foot scoring wing and gave him a legit big-boy component to his game. Thereafter, teams that tried to defend him with Stephen Jackson types would get punished. Also, I'd argue that by diversifying his scoring mechanisms an operating more from the post, it changed Dirk's center of offensive gravity and caused defenses to have to react to him in a more dynamic way. His shooting still provided interior spacing by bringing folks out, but his post-game could pull defenses more into the paint and make life a breeze for guys like Jason Terry. And his ability to partner the pick and roll/pop did the same, most famously around here for guys like J.J. Barea. And it's this late-prime modification to his game that separates Dirk from a player like Karl Malone, who also developed and diversified his offensive game in his late-prime to become a bigger offensive impact player...but never was able to do so to the full extent/effectiveness demonstrated by late-prime Dirk.
Overall: each of West, Robinson an Dirk had both a demonstrated/measurable all-time level impact that neither Erving, the Malones, or anyone else up in this category were able to match. However, each also had warts/limitations that kept them from going even higher on this list. To me, that means that right here is the exact right time to be discussing all three. And I'm not sure which is the correct order for the three. However, at the moment, Robinson's all-time defense in addition to his ability to operate at high level impacts as a secondary offensive threat (which is actually ideal for almost all big men) seems like the most effective of these three in the widest array of possibilities. West's injuries bother me, especially compared to a relative iron man like Dirk, but he also seemed to maintain his impact better throughout the course of his career...perhaps because his impact didn't rely so heavily on how teams chose to defend him, the way that Dirk's did until his post-game came into focus. Again, could be argued in any number of directions here (including with players that I didn't focus on), but having come in at this late stage of the thread, for now I have to just pick an order to vote, and then hope to have better discussions moving forward.
Vote: David Robinson
2nd: Jerry West
