Owly wrote:Don't understand framing of" big 3".
It's a big 1, as Mikan made clear with impact on the Gears, then Lakers then even in his comeback. Then it's a gulf. Then you can argue. Which leads to ... I don't get your certainty re Pollard 2, Martin 3. This era is a very fuzzy picture.
3 guys on the Laker dynasty appear to be locks to be in our 10. All I'm saying is that if you're picking 3 guys from that dynasty because of that dynasty, Pollard should be in that group. He should frankly be the 2nd guy in that group ahead of Martin before you factor in what Martin did later on, but regardless, he's ahead of Mikkelson in terms of what all he did for that Laker team, and since Mikkelson appears to be about to make our list and Pollard isn't, that seems rather bizarre to me.
I often say that there's an inertia in evaluation wherein guys tend to have reputations from earlier in the career that color opinion of them later on. This tends to mean older guys are still seen as better than younger guys for longer than they should be.
We all know this to some degree whether we think about it or not, and I know that I was shaped by that to a degree when I presumed Mikkelson was a greater player than Pollard.
I think though at this point what we're seeing is a kind of backwards-inertia where we're focused on stats and the assumption of progress and not actually looking at who a team truly depended on to have the success they did. Go look at the '53-54 season and you see Pollard > Mikkelson based on basically every traditional way of judging who the most respected players are, and so it feels like a bizarre sort of revisionist history for Pollard to get the brush off in favor of Mikkelson.
Owly wrote:I'd argue bad efficiency in the pre-clock era worse rather than "[not] the problem a modern observer would think it was", given there's less pressure to drive usage on a good team (often leading). I don't see why anyone's "having to take the shot" most of the time (late game and down, yes).
but part of the problem with Fulks' aging is that he was a volume scorer.
... He's fourth in field goal attempts twice whilst on the same team as Mikan. He's not Fulks in the Philly system but hard to say that he's not a scorer because he misses enough that he's lower on the scoring totem (with the caveat that it was probably easier for bigs to score efficiently) ... I have trouble buying.
I think that's too logicky. Clearly the teams didn't actually make use of the no-shot-clock to say:
We're going to take our time to make sure Mikan gets the shot every time.
Mikan was Plan A, other people were going to take shots too.
Re: 4th in FGA, so not NOT shooting. That's true, but let's consider team context here and break it down by perimeter vs interior attack.
As we know as modern basketball observers, one of the problems with trying to build your offense around interior scoring is that you need to pass the ball to those guys, and if the defense knows that's what you want to do on every possession, then they can make that hard.
It's worth noting, for example, that in general, MIkan, Mikkelson, and Lovellette were all tending to see their FGA's go down in the playoffs, and I don't see any reason think that that was about Pollard and Martin getting greedy.
Let's also note that the M&M combo shot their most combined FGAs in '50-51 at 37.3, but the best ORtg the championship team had came in '52-53 when they only shot 30.3, with it again going down in the playoffs.
I would suggest that with the Mikan-led attack, there was only so much interior shooting you were going to be able to expect, and perimeter guys were going to have to do the rest. You can certainly argue that the Lakers should have distributed their perimeter shots in a more egalitarian matter, but who exactly did you want taking those shots?
The Laker back up plan was Pollard and it worked for them.
I'll also note that when he was 4th in FGA he was also 4th in FG's made and in general when you look at Pollard's leaderboard placement, he's not more represented on the FGA side than on the FG side. He was not ultra-efficient or ahead of his time, but neither was he glaringly behind his time.
I'd also note, not as an argument but just to say, Pollard was known to be a guy with ahead of his time athleticism. Clearly he was not encouraged to use it to attack as a volume scorer so it lied dormant there, but in terms of understanding why Jack Kundla was so insistent on playing Pollard so much, he was particularly high BBIQ guys with great tools for a perimeter guy. If you're looking to use your perimeter guys as supporting players who shoot when Plan A doesn't work, it makes sense that Pollard would be the kind of guy you'd likely want, and it probably made as much sense to have him shoot those shots as any other realistic option.
Owly wrote:Gallatin 7th in rotation is misleading in a tight 7 man rotation. Came out 2nd in total WS. And per Neft and Cohen had seemingly been a starter since year 2 (49-50) so framing him as emerging after the finals runs (though in the East so not always a great team) doesn't quite fit except to say the Knicks became less of an ensemble. His production is there in '53. their best year (though Ernie and Dick are certainly also highly productive - as ever harder for "smalls").
Not sure on the "upgrade" in Naulls at PF (Sears I like better though he didn't last too well and couldn't stop the Knicks freefall. From the little footage, the little reporting/potted bios and the ft% his shooting touch seems feathery).
Let me apply the WS's back to Mikkelson before I go to Gallatin.
Did you realize that Mikkelson's biggest rebounding year was in '57-58, but that his defensive Win Shares that year were only 1.1 compared to the 6.6 they were at his peak? Why, because the stat basically apportions credit to team success using the limited box score it has access to. Back when Mikkelson played with Mikan, that meant Defensive WS's thought Mikkelson was a DPOY type of guy, but later in his career as the same guy, they thought nothing of him because he was getting those numbers on terrible defenses.
What's the throughline? That Mikkelson could get rebounds without much correlation to defensive impact, and also that this means that his Win Shares during the MIkan years should probably be seen as a rather drastic inflation.
Back to Gallatin. He has the WS edge over his teammates because he was a rebounder and in '52-53, New York had a great defense, so Defensive WS are basically crediting Gallatin with that defense.
When I spoke about what I spoke about relating to Gallatin's stardom, I was pointing out that it wasn't until '53-54 that the team actually featured Gallatin. And yeah, I think going from 27 MPG to 37 MPG in the playoffs is a meaningful shift. If a guy is your best player and you're only playing him 27 that's weird and makes us ask questions. If the following year he plays 10 more MPG when it counts, I think that answers the questions.
Fine to say that Gallatin was still a key guy before that, but the year the Knicks decided to make Gallatin the MAN was '53-54.
And incidentally, the last year Gallatin was on a decently effective defense in his entire career was '52-53.
