eminence wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:.
I'm not sure why you're saying Mikan was inefficient by contemporary standards... Don't have NBL numbers on hand, but in BAA/NBA he was certainly efficient as a scorer by contemporary standards.
'49 - 3rd in the league in TS%, +10.8 rTS%
'50 - 4th, +7.7%
'51 - 5th, +8.1%
While leading the league in scoring all 3 years.
Not as good in later seasons (post leg injury), but still solid:
'52 - +2.1
'53 - +3.5%
'54 - +2.4%
2nd, 2nd, and then 4th in PPG.
I'm in a place where I actually can look at data and respond to posts so I will. I'm glad someone challenged me on my statement about Mikan's efficiency both because it's good for people to see more debates about old-timers and because it's literally been years since I'd thought about it.
Look at bkref on the data, here are observations that stand out to me, and which probably stood out to me before:
1) Mikan's Lakers won with defense. Relative ORtg & DRtg tell us this clearly. For the years we have these ratings and the Lakers won the title, they were below average on offense 2 out of those 3 years. I'd have to refresh my memory, but changes are pretty good that if we're looking at dynasties, the only ones to win more than 1 title with below average offense would be Mikan's Lakers and Russell's Celtics. So right there, given what we know of what came after, there's a pretty good chance that their use of a big man to volume score wasn't actually working like they thought it was.
2) Mikan retired after '53-54 and came back after a year as a shell of his former self. In that 3 years span, the only time the Lakers had an above average ORtg was in the year when Mikan was not playing. Yes Mikan wasn't at his best in this time, but still, MIkan was by far the team's lead scorer in '54 and when he retired, the evidence seem to suggest it improved the offense given that it's just his former sidekicks that were leading the offense.
3) Your use of rTS is a great starting point. Let me start off by looking at '53 because of the final 3 years that was apparently Mikan's highest by that stat, and the Lakers that was the year out of the 3 final titles where the Lakers had their highest rORtg, which means that if I'm cherry picking, I'm doing so Mikan's benefit.
In that year Mikan was 2nd in points per game. That combined with the rTS seems to indicate he was contributing major offensive value with his scoring.
Here are the top 5 scorers by volume with their PPG and TS
Johnston 22.3 .534
MIkan 20.6 .480
Macauley 20.3 .543
Cousy 19.8 .446
Schayes 17.8 .495
So first, the efficiencies you see of Johnston and Macauley are the type of thing I remember. Guys came into the league and quickly became vastly more efficient than Mikan, and these weren't guys that were necessarily worth caring about. Macauley is best known as the guy Boston traded Russell to get. You can justifiable say that Mikan wasn't inefficiency because of his rTS, but it's important to remember that back then efficiency was growing more by new arrivals than it was by old guys getting better.
Mikan with that .480 TS was about in the same ballpark he'd always been so I think it's inappropriate to talk as if he was falling off a cliff due to health. MIkan was what he was, and it's just that it seems pretty clear to me that by the mid-50s, it was clear that he probably just wasn't good enough of a scoring threat to shoot the ball more than the guys who could shoot 5% better.
I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about Cousy and Schayes.
Cousy? Well, when people start talking about Cousy, I'll probably talk more about how he basically had the same problems as Mikan except that he didn't retire prematurely and and so we got to see just how ill-equipped he was to compete with the next generation of players. He's called the original point guard and people talk as if he created the position, but what he really was, was the first zero guard. He dominated the ball so much that even though he shot the ball like crazy and when he passed players tended to just shoot it. I don't see him as a great passer, because great passers don't lead the league in shots taken on bad efficiency. Great passers know when to pass, and know without the need for a coach to tell them. Cousy wasn't that.
Also like Mikan, his way worked early in his career, but as the league got better, it stopped being a viable competitive advantage.
Schayes? He's another guy who will likely get on this list, and I won't claim he didn't have impact. His game aged into a mature NBA better than Mikan or Cousy, but he was again not a guy who saw his efficiency rise with league average.
4) What about those early years when Mikan was really efficient compared to the competition? Well, first I will acknowledge that his TS was a smidge higher in those early years...but not by a ton. In '50 his TS was .487, in '53 his TS was .480. That's cherry picking to a degree because if you averaged his first 3 TSes compared to his 2nd 3, the gap is more like 3%, but I want everyone to understand that the absolute falloff in MIkan's TS wasn't ultra dramatic. A guy could have a comparable falloff today and people could easily not even notice.
What was changing from a relative perspective was that the rest of the league learned how to make their shots better.
https://www.basketball-reference.com/leagues/NBA_stats.htmlIf you've never looked at the year-by-year league averages, the stats I list above are good to see. From time to time I talk about the natural S-shape of growth curves in burgeoning phenomena. In the first decade of the BAA/NBA, the league average FG% grew from around 28% to 38% and FT% also grew by around 10% until it reached around 75% at which its stayed at basically ever since.
From my perspective what that tells us is that in that first decade you basically had a bunch of amateurs turn into a pros, and so using relative ratings to call a guy efficient doesn't make much sense. Michael Beasley was super efficient in college, and his competition was probably tougher than Mikan's. Clearly it meant nothing in the modern NBA.
I'll add that Mikan being a guy who shot by the basket meant that it makes sense why his efficiency was ahead of others early on. Guys were just hurling bricks when they shot from range at first, and so it made sense to let Mikan dominate your offense. Once other guys gained skill, the wise move was to shift the offensive focus more to the perimeter in most cases, and Mikan was not a scoring talent that proved an exception to that rule from what I see.
None of this is to say I object to Mikan's place on this list. He was the best player in the world for most of his career because his defense was super dominant, and big men have dominated defense ever since. He was the first guy to do it, and the only thing was, folks at the time didn't have the stats to understand the team was winning due to Mikan's defense much more than his offense. Teams didn't really figure that out until Russell came in, played vastly smarter, and basically won every year.
I'll add that as others have said, Mikan's size wasn't that insane of an outlier. Clearly most bigs were stiffs back then, but Mikan wasn't. A guy of modern big size, with good coordination and solid agility could be an all-star in the right setting without question.
