Doctor MJ wrote:colts18 wrote:RAPM:
Stockton: 2.3 Off, 1.5 Def, 3.9 Tot
Nash: 2.2 Off, -0.4 Def, 1.9 Tot
When you look at both the box score advanced stats and the advanced impact data, Stockton beats out Nash on both counts. Stockton's offense comes out nearly equal to Nash's while Stockton's defense crushes Nash.
Okay so first colts18, I'll say that I appreciate all the work you put into that post. I don't know how much I'm going to end up responding on, but I felt I needed to address this.
In '96-97, all of the impact data favors Karl Malone over John Stockton. I'm not saying you're arguing Stockton > Malone, but there's a fundamental truth about how we're looking to compare Stockton to Nash when Stockton was secondary to Malone in his role. Plan A of the offense was to get the ball to Malone and have him do his thing. Stockton operated as the 2nd priority on the court and rarely made teams pay repeatedly over the course of the game for this (rarely drifts into volume scoring territory, which is quite unusual).
I'm not saying we should bash Stockton or claim that that meant Stockton couldn't play alpha, but we need to acknowledge that we haven't seen him in the role we saw Nash in in Phoenix.
We haven't seen him with all of the defenses attention focused on blunting his attack like we have with Nash.
We haven't seen him manufacture playing chances the same way we saw Nash do it.
We haven't seen him run offenses that stand out like the ones Nash did.
Your general thrust of argument is that because the box score and cumulative success of Stockton impresses you more than the box score of Nash while Nash leads better offenses than Stockton, then imagine how much more Stockton could have achieved if only he had Nash's situation, and I would reject that in principle.
You cannot infer from the box score that Stockton could do what Nash did. Period. I'm not saying I know Stockton couldn't do it and I'm not saying you can't think it likely, but I am saying that you cannot capture the entirety of what they were doing out there by use of this data on its own.
You really have to get into a player's moves, traits, tendencies. Honestly, video is really, really good for this, and frankly I'll readily admit that I am influenced here by ElGee's BackPicks 40 analysis. If you haven't done so, I'd say it's worth checking out the two analyses:
https://backpicks.com/2018/01/25/backpicks-goat-25-john-stockton/https://backpicks.com/2018/02/22/backpicks-goat-19-steve-nash/As you may recall, this fits with how I previously saw things so feel free to consider my perception biased - I'm not offended, do look at it with independent eyes maybe you'll make me think about something I didn't think about.
But just fundamentally, I don't think there's any good reason to think Stockton could do Nash. I think he could have been great in any era, but he's not the agent of chaos that Nash is so his effects would always be a bit different. And hey, you may rate those differences in favor of Stockton then just as you do now.
But Nash did take a team completely out from the blue and turn them into arguably the best and eventually most influential offensive dynasty in NBA history. I'm not just going to assume Stockton could have done the same thing when he's not shown all of the same abilities that Nash has.
Regarding Nash's '05-06 numbers. You're clearly using the non-prior numbers. The prior numbers look better, but of course, they were informed by '04-05 in which Nash was arguably the offensive GOAT peak, so the non-prior numbers make sense to use.
What do you do when you "use" them? Ask questions. Dig into data.
Remember that before the '05-06 season the Suns let go of two starters and lost another to injury. They went into the season with something that felt like a completely new team that had to figure each other out.
It took about 10 games.
The Suns started the year .500 ball to that point and it was a struggle.
After that they went 49-23, which was more impressive than it sounds because the team got hit with further injury. For about half a season they were playing 60-win level ball and this was in voters heads when they were voting.
So then let's note Nash's +/- in those two timespans:
Game 1 to 10: -51
Game 11 to 82: +523
And let's compare that to Boris Diaw, the guy NPI is giving so much of the credit to:
Game 1 to 10: +72
Game 11 to 82: +425
Boris Diaw got inserted into the starting lineup in Game 11. Basically he played his way from the bench playing small minutes against back-up competition to being a starter. He deserves a ton of praise for this...but once he was in the starting lineup with Nash, while he was very effective, he wasn't the most vital one out there.
Now if you just use that data it is worth asking "Oh my gosh, maybe a team should just hand the entire offense to Diaw and see what he can do! Maybe Diaw is super-Nash!", but we're 15 years on and I think we all know this wasn't the case.
But this RAPM most definitely does not know this. It's literally treating all these data points like they're telling the same story about player value. And so that's why Nash's numbers for that year by that method are weaker than the years around it.
For the record, in terms of the MVP that year, I think there's a reasonable case to be made that those first 10 games really keep Nash from being worthy of the MVP that year. But in terms of what this says about Nash's impact capability in general, nah, when you really break things down you end up with data that just further hammers in the idea that Nash was kicking ass the vast majority of the time.
Stockton vs MaloneMost people will acknowledge that Malone was the alpha on that team. Despite being MVP, I don't believe there was a huge gap between them. Most of the posters here don't even regard Malone's peak that highly. He finished 32nd in the RealGM peaks project right ahead of Dwight Howard.
viewtopic.php?f=64&t=1900302
The 97 Jazz was an all-time great team. You don't 64 games with a 7.97 SRS with an 11-3 Western conference playoff record with only 1 great player. They were a lot more than Karl Malone. Stockton was just as much the engine for that team as Malone was. Did you know their starting lineup was the best lineup since 1997?
Top lineups in Total Net Plus/Minus since 1997 (including playoffs):
Lineup Tm Season PTS Per 100
J. Hornacek | K. Malone | G. Ostertag | B. Russell | J. Stockton UTA 1996-97 +552 +22.9
C. Billups | R. Hamilton | T. Prince | B. Wallace | R. Wallace DET 2005-06 +504 +13.8
J. Johnson | S. Marion | S. Nash | Q. Richardson | A. Stoudemire PHO 2004-05 +490 +15.9
M. Barnes | B. Griffin | D. Jordan | C. Paul | J. Redick LAC 2014-15 +478 +16.7
R. Allen | K. Garnett | K. Perkins | P. Pierce | R. Rondo BOS 2007-08 +473 +16.7
P. George | R. Hibbert | G. Hill | L. Stephenson | D. West IND 2012-13 +413 +13.6
C. Billups | R. Hamilton | T. Prince | B. Wallace | R. Wallace DET 2004-05 +370 +10.5
B. Beal | M. Gortat | M. Morris | O. Porter | J. Wall WAS 2016-17 +339 +10.5
R. Allen | K. Garnett | K. Perkins | P. Pierce | R. Rondo BOS 2009-10 +323 +10.7
S. Curry | K. Durant | D. Green | Z. Pachulia | K. Thompson GSW 2016-17 +319 +22.3
The supporting cast for that lineup is not anything special if you compare it to the other great lineups. Hornacek was a pretty good player but he was 33 at the time. Byron Russell was a role player who has a career 12.6 PER and 0.3 BPM. Ostertag was a straight up stiff. That isn't a lineup that's on par with the all-time lineups if you don't rank Stockton highly. They had a 120.4 O rating (+13.7 relative O rating). In Comparison, the Golden State lineup had a 123.9 (+15.1) offense in half of the minutes. The Jazz put up comparable offensive lineups to that legendary Warriors lineups despite taking 3x less 3 Pointers per 100 possessions (34 to 11).
Mind you, the Jazz was very close to beating the Bulls. The 1997 Bulls was an all-time great squad. They were 69-13 (3rd best record in history) with a 10.24 SRS. In the Eastern Conference playoffs they had a 11-2 record. The finals was a very close series. The Bulls only outscored the Jazz by 4 total points in 6 games. They lost because of Malone choking from the Free Throw line, shooting just 60% from the line during the series. The Bulls won games by 2, 2, and 4 points. Malone missed 3, 4, and 8 Free Throws in those 3 losses.
Nash vs Stockton being an Alpha You have to remember that Nash was also Plan B when he played with another alpha, Dirk. He had to hold back his game in Dallas. If Nash played with Malone, he would be the beta too. The gap in terms of volume offense was not that large. Their usage was 3% apart in those years and their career playoff gap is just 3.6%.
Boris DiawJust looking at Diaw's skillset, it was obvious he was going to have a massive impact on their offense. He was a Power Forward that averaged 6.2 Assists per game. Impact stats have always loved big men that can pass well. He was a perfect fit for the Suns. We saw Diaw kill it with the Spurs playing a similar style of basketball too. If we give credit for the Suns turning around after 10 games, we have to do the same for 97 Jazz who had a 31-4 Post all-star break record, best in NBA history. In 1998, They finished 31-5 post all-star break, 6th best. That's a 62-9 record over the 2 Finals seasons.
http://web.archive.org/web/20130425140547/http://www.basketball-reference.com/blog/?p=9119
Suns OffenseWe can't fully credit Nash for the Suns. Neither can we credit Diaw. You can't mention the Suns great offensive results without mentioning how extremely offensively tilted they were. They were a D'Antoni coached team that had 7 different players make 1 3 pointer per game: Bell (44%), Nash (44%), Tim Thomas (43%), Barbosa (44%), James Jones (39%), Eddie House (39%), Marion (33%). They were #1 in 3 Point Attempts, 3 Point makes, and 3P%. Bell, Thomas, Barbosa, Jones, and House are some of most well known 3 point specialists of this era. If you have all 5 of them on your team, your offense better be damn good.
In the playoffs, they were even more offensively slanted. D'Antoni only played Kurt Thomas a total of 6 minutes in the playoffs. The rotation was:
Nash
Bell
Marion
Diaw
Tim Thomas
Barbosa
James Jones
Eddie House
They had freakin Tim Thomas as their center in the playoffs. Why do they think they had absurdly good offensive numbers but their defense was trash in the playoffs? You can't credit Nash with a +9.5 offense in the playoffs without mentioning his team played a small ball lineup that had 4 3 point shooters on the court. You can't mention Nash's offenses without mentioning that from 2005-2010, his team finished top 5 3 point attempts every season with the exception of the year he missed the playoffs. You also have to mention how Offensive oriented Mike D'Antoni and Don Nelson. Nash played for the most known Offensive slanted coaches in history. If Nash played with little spacing, slower pace, and defensive coach, I doubt his offensive numbers would look that great.
ElGee's Valuation of Nash and StocktonI completely disagree with his assessment of Nash vs Stockton. Elgee is a well known Stockton hater. He is a Malone fan so he has to denigrate Stockton to lift up Malone. You can see it in the tone of his Stockton writeup. He leads off with all of the negative traits of Stockton. Very little of the writeup mentions Stockton's all world efficiency or his Screen setting.
I find his characterization of Stockton odd. First, He compares Stockton to more of a Rondo player. Then he says Stockton played smaller than his size. That is at odds with the way Stockton is described by his peers. In the video I linked earlier in this thread, Kenny Smith called Stockton a "Free Throw and In" type of player and Nash a "Free Throw and out" player. All of the data we have shows that Stockton attacked the basket more than Nash. From 97-on, Stockton shot 34% of his attempts at the rim compared to Nash's 19.5%. Stockton had a career .424 FT Rate while Nash was at .262. Nash's career high FT rate was .326, Stockton beat that EVERY single season of his 19 year career. As Kenny Smith said, "Nash is a shooter who you wanted to force to drive to the basket. You wanted to force Stockton to shoot jumpers."
I also disagree with his valuations of Nash and Stockton. Elgee has 8 different Nash seasons ahead of Stockton's peak. He has 3 more seasons (2001, 2004, and 2011) tied with Stockton's peak. The same 2001 season where Stockton crushed Nash in impact stats. The same 2004 season where Nash had a
NEGATIVE Plus/Minus. The same 2011 season where Nash was 36 years old on a 40-42 team that missed the playoffs. I can't trust his valuations if he really believes that 2011 Nash was on the same level as peak Stockton. He has 2002 and 2003 ahead of Peak Stockton even though old ass 39 and 40 year old Stockton was beating him in advanced stats and RAPM stats those same seasons. Elgee's valuation of Nash's 2006 has him at 18% championship odds while he has 1997 Stockton at 8%. Based on the numbers I showed earlier, there is no way you could have 2006 Nash with DOUBLE the odds of Stockton.
