Kareem, impact & is there a ceiling on big man offense?
It looks like Kareem's going in, this thread, so this is my last chance to really address him in this project. But as I've read the posts here, a seed of thought I've been kind of chewing on for years is starting to grow. Like my other posts in this project so far, I'm free-writing this and coming up with a lot of it as I go. So, some of this might have the feel of a white board conversation where I put some things out there not to persuade, necessarily, but to see if anyone else might consider thinking about it from this angle. Other than that...we'll see what comes out.
My Tao of ranking Kareem
Kareem is another extremely interesting case. As I've mentioned a couple of times, now, when I started in on the Retro Player of the Year project about a decade back I was pretty set that Kareem was my GOAT. That was a bit of a controversial stance at the time...on this board he was universally considered part of what they called "The Immortal Six" (Jordan, Kareem, Russell, Wilt, Magic & Bird) but LeBron was still young, Shaq, Duncan, KG and Kobe were still not done with their careers, and Hakeem was still a bit of a dark horse candidate to break into the group. But even if there was a so-called Six, in these parts it was pretty clearly Jordan and everyone else. So for me to have Kareem at the top was kind of bold, in my mind.
Then, the project happened. And we'd gone through decades of history (which mean months of the project) before we got back to the 70s when Kareem was king. I remember thinking that once we got pre-80, so pre Magic and Bird, the project would be pretty dull with Kareem entrenched in the top spot for like a decade with no real competition. If anything, I was looking forward to learning about everyone else. So, imagine my shock when the 1978 and 1977 threads became a real battle between Kareem and Bill Walton. Bill Walton!?! I mean, I grew up watching ball, and in my earliest memories Walton (like later Sam Bowie and Ralph Sampson) was someone my dad talked about in "what if" terms, because they all could have been legendary but were so broken by injuries. I remember when Walton joined those mid-80s Celtics teams (who were, by the way, my LEAST favorite franchise of all-time. My dad was a huge Dr. J and Magic guy, which meant I was a big Dr. J and Magic guy...so the Celtics (and later the Bucks) were the enemies because they always challenged and often beat my guys. But I digress).
Anyway, my first impression of Walton had always been as the 6th man on those Celtics. I knew he'd been a legend back in college...frankly, the conversation among my dad and his friends was that Walton had been overrated, in college especially, because he could take the shine away from what Kareem had done at UCLA right before him. They never talked much about Walton's Trail Blazers teams, that won the title when I was a baby. By the time of the RPoY project I knew about those teams, but I was ready to scoff...SCOFF, I say, at the notion that Walton could have in any way been even on Kareem's level as a pro, let alone his equal. No WAY you could convince me he was superior.
When the 1978 thread began, I was pretty confident. Even knowing that Walton's Blazers won a championship the season before, I was cockily confident that this was just because the Blazers were stacked while Kareem was in a lone wolf situation...similar to the situations I'd argued vociferously about with Kevin Garnett in the years leading up to the project. In fact, I was sure that both Kareem in the 70s and Wilt in the 60s would prove to be akin to the KGs of their particular generation, overshadowed sometimes by overrated guys who happened to play on stacked championship teams that overinflated their value (the same argument I used to make against Duncan, or, in a cross-sport analogy, for Barry Sanders and against Emmitt Smith when the topic of which was the better running back came up).
And the available box score stats seemed to support my inclination. I mean yeah, in 1977 the Trail Blazers won the title, but Karem's stats against Walton were BONKERS. I think someone in one of the threads made the argument that Walton was an all-world defender and passer, but that he wasn't much of a scorer...but that Kareem was an all-world defender and passer and arguably the best scorer of all-time. So, the argument concluded, if Kareem could do everything that Walton could do but in ADDITION was also a GOAT scorer, then how could this even be a competition? Kareem was better, hands down!
But one thing would niggle at me. Someone...maybe ElGee? Maybe someone else? Can't remember...ok, going back through that thread now. Looks like TrueLAFan, in the 1978 thread, is who first brought up the games Kareem missed that year, and how the team was like a .400 team without him, then much better with him even as he played himself back into shape. And that concept of impact became a big discussion point here. We'd had huge arguments on +/- early on, when KG was showing up as the biggest impact player of his generation much to the consternation of many, but once we'd gotten past the early 2000s we hadn't had any more +/- data to work with. Wasn't expecting to get any quantification on impact for the 70s, but Kareem AND Walton having both missed so many games in those two years of shared peak gave us a unique opportunity to try to estimate the impact their presence had on their teams winning and losing.
ElGee made a chart for it, in this post:
https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=24579173#p24579173Kareem had a really big impact...but not even close to as big as Walton's.
1977 & 1978 (early) WOWY for Kareem and Walton, normalized for 82-game paceWith Kareem: 52-30 record, 111.9 PPG, 107.8 Opponents PPG (+4.1 PPG)
W/O Kareem: 31-51 record, 105.6 PPG, 107.2 Opponents PPG (-1.6 PPG)
With Walton: 61-21 record, 112.0 PPG, 102.9 Opp PPG (+9.1 PPG)
W/O Walton: 31-51 record, 103.0 PPG, 106.7 Opp PPG (-3.7 PPG)
So, in those two seasons, Walton's team was worse than but similar to Kareem's when both stars were out, but add both stars back into the mix and Walton's team was SIGNIFICANTLY better than Kareem's.
It didn't add up to me. But I told myself it was some sort of fluke. Other players were hurt at different times on both teams, and impact stats are noisy. Ultimately, I had been SO SURE that Kareem was better that I still voted Kareem over Walton in both years. But a seed was planted, and later the much longer Wilt vs Russell debates helped that seed to grow.
By the end of the RPoY project I had worked my way to a new default setting...that Russell (and for the brief time he was healthy) Walton really were both all-history level impact players. And that Kareem and Wilt were both high impact guys as well, but not AS high as their rivals and that their impact was overstated because of their ability to put major points on the board.
Revolution.
Kareem, Wilt & a ceiling on teams w/ volume-scoring bigs?Doc MJ often talks about how it's optimal for a team's primary offensive threat to be a perimeter player (just as it's optimal for the defensive anchor to be a big man). However, usually Kareem, Shaq and maybe Hakeem are held up as the exception that proves the rule. Even Wilt, for all his awesome scoring, won his championships in years where he wasn't volume scoring.
In this thread (and on this board), I hear a lot of analysis that evaluates scoring based on volume and efficiency. Kareem (and Wilt) were both able to put up huge scoring volumes on excellent efficiency as well. We talk about skillsets, and how Kareem's complete toolbox of scoring prowess made him 1-of-1 in NBA history. He had the unblockable shot, but more than that he had outstanding touch, great moves, surprising quickness for his absurd length, was a great passer for a center...his offensive skillset was top notch. Before him, Wilt had his own superhuman skillset that led to his own scoring.
I just looked at something. Kareem entered the NBA in the 1969-70 season, the same year that Wilt got hurt and only played 12 games. Seems like a nice breakpoint. But if we consider Wilt from the 1960-1969 seasons and Kareem for the 1970-79 seasons, we're looking at a solid 20-YEAR-BLOCK of some of the most awesome center scoring in NBA history.
Wilt (60-69) and Kareem (70-79) scoring cartoon49,239 combined points
1,560 games
31.6 PPG
55.8 FG% (not TS%, 55.8 FIELD GOAL percentage)
But over those 20 seasons featuring the most dominant players in the NBA, they combined for a total of 2 championships. One each. For Wilt's chip, he averaged "only" 24.3 PPG, more than 10 PPG beneath his scoring average for that decade. Kareem's scoring in that season was still high (31.7 PPG, higher than his decade-average of 28.6 PPG), but I don't think it's a coincidence that this chip came in his one full season next to an all-time great guard before injuries and age robbed Oscar of a step.
Upthread, I saw someone argue that Bill Russell's Celtics weren't
really that dominant, that because they won several close series in their run it over-inflated how good they were. I feel like this trend is the exact other side of the coin...that the argument many make is that it was somehow a coincidence that Kareem and Wilt won chips so rarely during their dominant scoring years. But sometimes, it's tempting to go the Occam's Razor route.
Russell's teams won two championships at University of San Francisco, who had no history of success at that level.
He won Olympic Gold.
His Celtics won 11 championships in 13 seasons, and he was hobbled in one of the 2 losses.
Meanwhile, WIlt and Kareem put up the most awesome, high-efficiency, high-volume scoring seasons from big men that the NBA had ever seen. For a solid TWO DECADES. And "only" managed 2 championships, one at much lower scoring volume and one while playing next to the greatest floor general of the era.
It just seems unlikely, when looked at from that altitude, that it's pure serendipity that Russell's teams just kept getting lucky while the mega-volume scoring bigs just struggled to get to the mountaintop.
And believe me, as someone that paid more attention to Kevin Garnett's career plight than most anyone else, I KNOW it's possible for the best player in the game to be stuck in a no-win situation year after year and not win championships.
But in Garnett's case, every analytic approach to supporting cast evaluation says that the Timberwolves were (way) the worst cast of any of the contenders in the 2000s. Similarly, every analytic that we have said that he was lifting his teams as far as humanly possible, with a higher measured impact than any other player of his generation.
The same can't be said for Wilt and Kareem. They both played on some teams that had reasonable, if not downright strong supporting casts compared to their contemporaries. And, the available analytics approaches for the time (WOWY, looking at team changes for trades, etc) don't support them as having nearly the lift of their contemporaries. Russell, West and Oscar all measured out significantly better in those approaches than Wilt. And as I pointed out above, Kareem's impact came up way short of Walton's at what should have been his peak.
So, it just doesn't seem to me that Wilt and Kareem actually WERE the dominant players of their time to the extent that the boxscores, particularly the scoring volume and efficiency numbers, would suggest. And it brings me back to, maybe they weren't among the exceptions to the rule against running an optimized offense through a volume-scoring big man. Maybe they're part of the rule itself.
A dominant scoring big man can put up some awesome numbers. But maybe it's not a coincidence that Kareem only won with Oscar or Magic playing at high levels. Maybe it's not a coincidence that Shaq didn't win until Kobe and later Wade came of age. Maybe it's not a coincidence that Wilt had to sublimate his scoring to win.
If this were a "rule", per se, perhaps the only true exception was Hakeem's Rockets in the mid-90s. They figured out a way to let him be maximized as a scorer while surrounding him with shooters that could be maximized playing off him. Maybe that really was a rare accomplishment.
Or, maybe it's not that you
can't win with a volume-scoring big, but instead that it puts a cap on just how good your team can get. If your center is volume scoring, then your perimeter players either have to be able to dominate without scoring (usually as an all-world floor general that can keep the rest of the unit maximized while maximizing the big guy as well), be dominant enough to play a 2-man scoring unit with the big guy that's strong enough to surround them with 3 role players that don't need the ball, or have a 3-point line that allows the big man to dominate with 4 other efficient (and clutch) shooters capable of maximizing the offense based off him.
And if it's difficult to build a championship-caliber offense around a scoring big, might it be that having a high-volume scoring big (even at high efficiency) might in some ways even be a
detriment to building a championship caliber team? Because it might lock the upside at a certain level that is really hard to break through for 99% of the supporting cast options that might be realistic at a given time.
Meanwhile, if your big man is the biggest impact player on the court because of his defense, maybe it's just
easier to build a champion around him because if you surround him with any good perimeter players they can maximize their own impact on offense without having to work around the needs of their big-scoring center. Maybe, as counterintuitive as it sounds, Russell's combination of Megatron defense while NOT being an alpha scorer is actually the much more ideal centerpiece for a championship squad than a dominant scoring big that is also good on defense. Food for thought.
Shrugs. I haven't quite completed the support for the thought I was working towards, but I've been writing this off-and-on during every break I've gotten all day. I started in the afternoon...it's now 2 in the morning. I shudder to even press preview and see how long this is. I'm going to stop rambling now. I'm sure I'll get some pushback if anyone even reads this monster, and I'm also sure this conversation will pick back up in future threads once we start talking about players like Wilt.
Vote:1) Bill Russell
2) Kevin Garnett (haven't spoken about him much yet, but others have started so I guess it's time to get him in my voting mix).
3) Tim Duncan
)Most surprising thing for me isn't the NBA part of the line but how the ABA line trends upwards sharply from 75 to 76. They did concentrate talent as teams failed and their players were redistributed but that meant poor unit cohesion plus VA was so incredibly all-time awful (who wants to coach the team this week?). I always think of 75 as the ABA's peak.
