Post#72 » by Doctor MJ » Sat Nov 7, 2020 8:57 pm
Vote:
1. Jerry West
2. Oscar Robertson
3. Kobe Bryant
I think West is a monster. I think the more I learn about him, the more he seems like someone made up. The fact his arms were so long in an era decades before understood how significant and valuable that is, the fact that he thrived off-ball, the fact that it's utterly reasonable to see him as a top tier shooter at a variety of ranges, the fact that West's mind was so quick and intuitive on the court and yet has also had the best pulse on the game in the near half century since then.
For me the question with West is really more of whether I should have him higher than this.
I also think Oscar is something incredible, but it's more of a classifiable, quantifiable-as-bin kind of extraordinary-ness. , I think Oscar has an argument for being the point guard in history...I think West is a multi-dimensional outlier of a freak who we literally haven't seen anyone all that similar to him in the entire history of the NBA.
But being arguably the best point guard in history, is no small thing and there's also the matter that Oscar was literally the best offensive player in the NBA the moment he stepped on the floor as a rookie and was strong for a very solid longevity. It's not easy to move past him in my mind.
My third pick is Kobe. I'll say up front I won't answer questions about why I prefer other players to Kobe, but I will speak to why I chose him over other guys:
The main guy I was considering at this spot other than Kobe was Dirk. By +/-, Dirk is generally the more valuable guy and that's not just a regular season thing, it's a "always doing what's right for the team" thing that speaks to why Dirk remained valuable for Dallas after Kobe's time ceased to be.
These things are not nothing, but they aren't enough to move him past Kobe in my mind unless I really feel as confident about my ability to build a top contender around him as I do Kobe, and I'm not there. While I do think it took Dirk longer to become resilient against all defense than it did Kobe, the bigger concern for me is still defense.
I find the All-D accolades thrown at Kobe frankly pretty offensive, but while people overrated how effective Kobe was game-in-game-out, he wasn't a vulnerability offenses wanted to try to attack directly. Kobe was able to play great defense when locked in, and I value this more than I used to. It's a bigger deal in today's game, but it was always a thing, and I'd say I turned away from this rather obvious thing because of some emotional bias. It bothered me that people kept singling out Kobe for his defense when his actual play didn't warrant this. It still bothers me. All of those All-D awards are going to give people in the future the wrong ideas basically forever now.
But strip all the narrative out of it, if I'm building a contender, I'm happy to have Kobe on my defense for a lot of years.
I can't say the same for Dirk. That isn't everything, but it matters in a conversation where we're comparing him to someone with more traditional respect and more traditional success. I'm not a rings guy, but when comparing Guy A to a guy with X rings, I do find myself asking if I feel confident that I could build a team that would win X rings around Guy A. This is part of why it's really hard for me to put anyone ahead of Bill Russell.
I'm still more confident in Kobe.
But I'll say, while that debate took up the most space, that honestly doesn't mean that Dirk is my next guy after Kobe. Funny how that works, at least for me. I've mentioned Malone, Robinson, and Erving before, and it's not so much that Dirk earned his way "into the finals" against Kobe, but that Kobe's comparison with Dirk was the least clear.
Just to say a little on the other guys:
Malone - a mountain of a man and a mountain of minutes played. How you value longevity shapes how you rank him and I'm lower on longevity than some, but I'll admit to asking a question of "Now, do you really think X contributed more total value in his career than Malone?" that is really hard to answer and still makes me question whether I should really have Malone ahead of guys like Magic/Bird.
Robinson - I'm more infatuated with Robinson's game than Malone's. I think the way he was able to transition from volume scorer to #2 on offense, #1 on defense, while actively mentoring his successor is just beautiful. But the matchup with Malone himself looms in my mind and it's just hard for me to really push him above Malone.
Erving - the Aesthetic GOAT and one inspiration for my handle. Love him, but he has dropped in my eyes from a RealGM Top 100 perspective that, for me, is always informed by your actual impact. And to just speak plainly, I was shocked by Pollack's 76er +/- tracking and what it showed about him. The team really seemed to often do better with him on the bench.
I think you have to ask yourself what it means. Here's how I see it at this reflection:
I think that basically until the data ball era, teams and players were essentially wandering around in the dark in terms of actually knowing what was working. I think, for example, that Kobe Bryant represents essentially the last of the great pre-data ball era guys, and what we see with him is something similar to Erving in seeming to say that our traditional views overrate them.
But Erving's +/- numbers look dramatically more disappointing than Kobe's.
This does not mean that Erving wasn't an extraordinarily talented player.
This does not mean that Erving didn't scale well pretty dang well to playoff competition.
This does not mean that Erving wasn't a big piece on arguably the most dominant playoff team in the 20th century.
And most importantly it doesn't mean that his ABA years aren't amazingly good, which is the backbone of why I don't expect to drop Erving too much further.
Getting ready for the RealGM 100 on the PC Board
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I know Nash and Lebron got hit with a -2 port penalty in the bulk of their peak years; I presume the same is true of Oscar. His raw plus/minus evaluations without CORP are much more valuable to me, and I suspect that would cause a pretty substantial swing when removed of the often arbitrary and numerically suspect [-2 -1 0 +1 +2] port methodology.
