Outside wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:To me there's a natural rhythm to an offense where only the most effective scorers are worth the drain predictably going to them often, and what that means is that big time scorers like that tend to fall from "very effective" to "hurting the team" without a lot of falloff in their volume production and thus they tend to get rewarded long after they deserve it in a way not coincidentally analogous to guys keep getting named to All-D long after they stopped deserving it.
Have you given consideration to the data presented that counters this argument?
-- West's season with the highest FGAs coincided with Baylor's season with the highest FGAs (1961-62).
-- As Baylor's FGAs dropped over the following seasons (-4.7, -10.3, -7.4 relative to his 61-62 peak), West's also fell, going down a max of -2.7 from his peak.
-- In 1965-66, the season following Baylor's knee surgery, Baylor's FGAs dropped to 15.9, which was -9.8 compared to the previous season and -17.4 compared to his 61-62 peak. Yet rather than going up to compensate, West's FGAs actually went down -0.5 compared to the previous season.
-- In the 1965 playoffs, when Baylor played only five minutes before hurting his knee, West took 31.9 FGAs in the postseason and scored 40.6 PPG, both easily career highs, but he shot only 44.2 FG% and 53.4 TS%, both easily career lows until his last three seasons.
My analysis of that information leads me to the following conclusions:
-- West was most comfortable taking 21-23 shots per game, that he wasn't comfortable taking more than that or perhaps knew that was his "sweet spot," where he was most efficient.
-- That when West and Baylor both played, the number of shots Baylor took had little or no bearing on the number of shots West took.
-- That Baylor taking fewer shots would not have resulted in West taking more shots.
I'd like to think that argument is persuasive. Is it?
The early 60s was the peak of pace. It reached around 125 possessions per game. So that takes away the superficial point, but you allude to other points that are still solid:
What is it, Doc that you really expect would have ideally happened? Are you saying you wanted West to shoot way more, because it's really not clear he'd want to do that.
I want Baylor to shoot less. I want to show sign that he understands what's around him, and adapt to make the team stronger.
And yes I also want him to allow West to take the control of the offense he would eventually take where he flirted with leading the entire league in assists. In doing so West wouldn't tend to score a lot more per se, because in general the answer is not that your lead scorer needs to score more but that only an utterly exceptional player should volume score.
I've done a disservice in linking my frustration with Baylor so much to West. I've latched on to points that I felt drove in the direction I thought was right even though I didn't feel strongly about them.
Let me try to strip it down and build it using one of ElGee's insights:
The early to mid 60s was a time where basketball played a lot more like baseball than it does today. Teams looked to come down and shoot with one of their lead scoring threats. If you were a star, and you had the ball in the half court, you typically shot the ball. Baylor was like that, and he shot similarly whether West was there or not. That's just how it was.I don't disagree with any of that, but the fact remains that however identical in approach Baylor was to most players of the time, he wasn't contributing the value with it that people back then assumed he was. The weak efficiency hints at it, the on/off data tells us more.
If we can accept this fact, to whatever extent you personally believe it, we have a discrepancy between the perceived impact and actual impact of Baylor, and the dilemma is how to rate Baylor for this.
When people say "You can't blame Baylor for being a product of his time.", what that translates to me as is "I'm going to choose to rate Baylor based how people at the time perceived him even thought I know that they were totally wrong."
I don't know why you would do that. They were wrong, and they were wrong in ways we all recognize because we all did it back when we were more naive basketball fans. They overrated scoring, they overrated volume numbers, they overrated players who were physically awe-inspiring to behold. They weren't idiots to think like this, they were simply new at this. They didn't have the history we have access to to build inspiration for this game really works best. We should expect to be able to understand things they did not.
Not that that means we should ignore contemporary opinion. We need to understand it, and respect the clarity that can only come from being there as it happens as much as we need to watch out for typical cognitive biases that come from merely being there.
For me, I try to begin seeking to understand a player's true shape. In doing so I've greatly valued being able to be steered by contemporary analysis. Once I understand that player's shape as well as I'm going to in that pass, I think try to understand a player's actual impact as to me the evaluative foundation needs to be built on value added.
And then from there, compare him to players individually. If the other player in question, the one from a future era, has a lot of the same mental characteristics as Baylor, then it makes sense to adjust perception of Baylor's accomplishment based on the advances the other player gained from. On the other hand, if the player is clearly more savvy relative to most contemporaries than Baylor demonstrated with his approach to the game, then I don't think it does make sense to simply adjust away era effects.
And for me personally, that makes it tough for Baylor because the people high up on a GOAT list, on average, were very savvy.
