The Official Criteria Thread (2017-20)---PLEASE CONTRIBUTE if participating in top 100 project! (read OP)

[JordansBulls]

Wonder how much partipation will happen. Just in the first two threads alone 10 less people voted. Went from 37 people to 27 people. Probably best to have people commit to at least the top 10 voting. Top 100 is difficult as that is like a 9 month project.

[sansterre]

My methodology huh? This is a fun thought experiment - how do you decode an unconscious heuristic?

Macro: the best players yield the maximum amount of championship equity (relative to a modern league size) over the length of their career. High peaks are awesome because they yield a lot of equity but they aren't an end unto themselves. 11 of the best seasons ever is less valuable than 17 seasons at 85% of the value of the best seasons ever. So longevity matters, because more years contributing value is important. But peak matters some, because 20 years of playing as a +2 BPM player is awesome . . . but not going to get you in the top 25, because +2 BPM doesn't move the needle that much. So aggregate championship equity is what I'm aiming at.

What determines total championship equity? The sum of all the championship equity of all of the player's seasons.

What determines the championship equity of an individual season? Well hell, that's the hard part. I apologize, because this won't be terribly organized:

1. I don't give a Dwyane Wade three-pointer for style or "skill". Kobe and Hakeem made it their job to take really hard shots, and they were really, really good at it, maybe the best ever. They get credit for being relatively impervious to playoff defenses (within reason), but are punished because these shots are hard to make efficiently, even for players who are great at them. So they are rewarded and punished for the unique characteristics of the *value* of those shots, but no part of how skilled you have to be to make those shots should enter into it. If it helps you win, yay, if it doesn't, boo, things that don't enter into one of those two don't matter.

2. Players have to be judged in their era. Bill Russell wouldn't be an MVP in this era (I believe). That doesn't make him not (by far) the most valuable player in *his* league for a decade or so. Saying that Kevin Garnett would be *amazing* in the spacing era is totally true . . . but doesn't have much to do with his value for *his* era.

3. I don't care about awards. There a nice proxy for value if you have no other information, but if you have other information, awards shouldn't really enter into it.

4. I don't care about titles. I *do* care about playoff performance, and I do care about scaling with strong teams, and those things do dovetail with titles often. Maybe it would be most fair to say that I *try* not to care about titles.

5. "Clutch" (defined here by playing *better* in the playoffs) isn't meaningful in and of itself. A player who was dominant in the regular season and equally dominant in the playoffs doesn't lose anything for not getting better in the postseason.

6. Regular season performance is always the most important variable. It's the biggest sample size and allows pretty granular assessments of players, especially when it comes to team fit.

7. Playoff performance matters almost as much. How you handle playoff defenses plays a big part of your championship equity. But you shouldn't over-read into it and you really shouldn't tie team success into it too much (though the temptation to do both is high).

8. Team performance is important as an indicator of how well a player contributed to the success of his teammates. But this bleeds really, really easily into imputing teammate quality to player quality, so you have to be careful.

9. Everything starts with the stats for me. If somebody says "so and so was a great shooter" but I look and he shot at league average . . . the stats win unless there's some sort of semi-mitigating factor (like high usage, or defense-resistance or something). You always have to take into account context, but efforts at context often mistakes style for effectiveness.

10. Take as many sources as you can, but take everything with a grain of salt.

11. Portability is awesome because it's historically undervalued (at least among players that never had good teammates). But more portable players also tend to be more roster-construction dependent, which is a problem.

12. You can't assume facts not in evidence. We'd like to think that had Hakeem come up on the Spurs with Robinson and Pop that he'd have integrated into offenses better and passed better, but we're guessing. It's probable that Duncan, absent Pop and the Spurs organization, wouldn't have had anywhere near the same level of success. But we *do* know that his leadership/personality/intangibles integrated perfectly into an outstanding organization, which is something we know about very few players.

13. When it comes to evaluating players from before 1973 or so, I'm going to be pretty cautious. The ability for a reality-check is a lot lower, so I'm much more hesitant to rule on anything decisively.


Anyhow, that's a really quick hits version of everything I can think of.

Caveat: I have many things vying for time in my life. I have a two-year-old, I write an every-other-day pandemic stat-analysis email and I'm working on a Top 100 Teams set of articles for this site. This is a not-inconsiderable amount of time commitment. And those things are priorities; voting in this project and actively participating is only viable as long as time permits. So while I think it's super cool, I'm honored to even be considered for participation and I don't doubt I would enjoy it / benefit from it, I want to be clear that my limited time may compromise my involvement somewhat. And if you shot me down based on that I would have no hard feelings (and I'd probably post my non-voting takes here and there).

[Cavsfansince84]

My criteria for ordering a top 20 or top 100 is largely this:
1. How dominant they were in their prime years with longer primes carrying a larger merit in both the rs and ps. This would be largely viewed through the impact they had on winning during those years. Rings are nice but the contribution to those rings has more relevance to me. More so as the best player on a given team.
2. Accolades matter to some degree to me as well as portability. I have trouble voting for a guy if I don't think his level of play would hold up outside of his own era. Thus why I like Russell due to his mixture of athleticism, size and intangibles while I don't value Mikan quite the same way because I have major questions about how his athleticism and skill set would have translated just 10-15 years later.
3. Leadership and intangibles. I like guys who I think were good leaders/chemistry guys.
4. Analytics should imo back up point 1. No analytic by itself means that much to me. Its when guys score well across many if not all that it matters more and likewise when guys don't score well at all then I can't really get behind them.
5. Lastly I would say peak and overall longevity. One year peaks don't really matter much to me except maybe if its like dead even and one guy had a great year/post season that can be the tiebreaker. Overall longevity also matters but again its more like a tiebreaker thing and only matters to me so long as a guy is still roughly all star level or better.