RealGM 2020 Top 100 Project: #22 (Kevin Durant)

[Odinn21]

ElGee's Valuation of Nash and Stockton

I completely disagree with his assessment of Nash vs Stockton. Elgee is a well known Stockton hater. He is a Malone fan so...

Okay I'm done. colts, I'm disappointed to hear you talk like this. Talking in terms of homers/haters is a the lowest of the low of the internet sports fan.

This was truly disappointing from him. I've been one of the most vocal critics of ElGee in the recent times but I explained why I don't agree with some of his process or perception.
Making such statement because he doesn't feel in the same way as you do is very much stan-like TBH.

[Doctor MJ]

Defense - by far most impressed by Schayes '54 where he was the main big on a -4.5 defense squad, levels above any defensive accomplishment from Pettit imo

So, something I'll note is that I've found descriptions of:

1. On the '54-55 team Earl Lloyd and Red Rocha were seen as the "enforcers", not Schayes.

2. Schayes talks about how he'd get beat up by the other team and Paul Seymour was his protector.

As I'm sure you noted, in '53-54, Rocha was not playing (retired for the year) and the team still ranks as the best defense anyway, so that's a point possibly in Schayes favor to be sure, but I don't see it as any given that simply because Schayes was the obvious "big man" that he was indeed the defensive anchor.

And this is a huge point I think you'd agree.

If Schayes was the lead defender on a team that won the title with the best defense, that's a big mark in his favor.

If Schayes was an offensive star being protected by tougher teammates who also roughed up the opposing offense, then his most noteworthy team success has him being carried by others in the actual primary strength of the team.

I'd appreciate if you have any quotes specifically talking about Schayes leading his defense as I haven't seen this but I believe both you and beast see Schayes as a particularly noteworthy defensive player.

Oh also, you made the point that Arizin had most of his years on a below average offense. That's really interesting and while I was aware of the up & down nature of his team, I hadn't thought about it in those terms. I'm reluctant to see that as truly damning of Arizin because we really did see him carry his team to the championship leading the best offense of the decade, but it really puts the longevity into a certain lens that makes it hard to justify him over someone like Schayes...though again, it really matters to me what Schayes' place was on defense because defense is how his team won.

One other note on Arizin that I think is important:

It's pointed out that young Wilt had Arizin on the roster and the offense still wasn't great, and thus Arizin must not have been that good. And it's certainly true that he wasn't adding to Wilt's team the way you'd hope, and the fact that Arizin was used to be an alpha with the ball in his hands was probably part of that. If he'd been more of an off-ball guy, he'd probably have ported to Wilt's team better.

However, I think it's really worth noting that Arizin's peak Warriors gave an ORtg that Wilt only surpassed once in his entire Warriors' run (in '62-63), and in that Wilt year, their ORtg was below average for the league. I think we need to ask ourselves quite earnestly whether an offense with prime Arizin & Wilt should have run through Arizin as the leading scorer.

And if that sounds crazy to folks I get it, but as has been noted before, Arizin was the closest thing to Jerry West before Jerry West, and when West & Wilt played, the smart thing to do was to run the offense through West.

[penbeast0]

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

Completely off topic but that's a lot of storied and lauded teams . . . and then there are Indiana and Washington. Makes me want to see John Wall back healthy.

[Doctor MJ]

ElGee's Valuation of Nash and Stockton

I completely disagree with his assessment of Nash vs Stockton. Elgee is a well known Stockton hater. He is a Malone fan so...

Okay I'm done. colts, I'm disappointed to hear you talk like this. Talking in terms of homers/haters is a the lowest of the low of the internet sports fan.

This was truly disappointing from him. I've been one of the most vocal critics of ElGee in the recent times but I explained why I don't agree with some of his process or perception.
Making such statement because he doesn't feel in the same way as you do is very much stan-like TBH.

I appreciate the acknowledgment that I'm not crazy in taking colts' words in this way Odinn, but let me also say this:

colts I'm sorry if this feels like we're beating up on you. Know that I have respected you for a long time and I'm not saying I no longer do. But I really would like to stamp out notions of homer/hater when we have discussions in such intellectual rare air.

[Owly]

I appreciate the acknowledgment that I'm not crazy in taking colts' words in this way Odinn, but let me also say this:

colts I'm sorry if this feels like we're beating up on you. Know that I have respected you for a long time and I'm not saying I no longer do. But I really would like to stamp out notions of homer/hater when we have discussions in such intellectual rare air.

It may just be a vocab problem. "Hater" tends to come out more when discussing sports on the internet (and a natural opposite to "lover" used in regard to Malone). I think skeptic, or cynic are softer, less implying irrationality, terms.

[eminence]

Crud, lost a post

But anywho, the gist of it was - when I look at the Jazz from '88-'96 I'm generally disappointed by their playoff performance, and one of the issues to me is Stockton not doing as well vs his matchup as I feel he should've. Porter playing well in '91 and then outplaying him in '92, Kenny playing so well in '94/'95, and Payton absolutely dominating Stockton in '96. Obviously there are other problems (poor depth initially, Malone having his own poor outings, Sloan being too rigid).

*sidenote - damn did Don Nelson run circles around Sloan in '89

[Doctor MJ]

I appreciate the acknowledgment that I'm not crazy in taking colts' words in this way Odinn, but let me also say this:

colts I'm sorry if this feels like we're beating up on you. Know that I have respected you for a long time and I'm not saying I no longer do. But I really would like to stamp out notions of homer/hater when we have discussions in such intellectual rare air.

It may just be a vocab problem. "Hater" tends to come out more when discussing sports on the internet (and a natural opposite to "lover" used in regard to Malone). I think skeptic, or cynic are softer, less implying irrationality, terms.

Appreciate the post, and yes the implied emotional bias of the term is what I'm objecting to. It's one thing to say someone is wrong, or explicitly say they are getting a bit emotional, but the use of the term "hater" implies that the "hate" is the purpose, and that's an awful thing to say when you know it isn't.

Also incidentally, I'm 100% fine with the term "skeptic" being used in this context, but I don't like the term cynic because to me cynicism in the modern parlance has an emotional tinge to it. To me the distinction between these two stances is pretty important.

[WestGOAT]

How well does individual ORtg for certain players associate with their team's ORtg in the playoffs? Can this give us a fair impression of which player's offense was most relevant for their team's offensive performance?

This is especially relevant when it comes to the discussion of whether Stockton was merely "secondary to Malone in his role" as Doctor MJ put it or if he was more of a legit 1b, or even 1a, as colts18 keeps insisting. I think this matters when you compare Stockton with players like Isiah Thomas and Steve Nash, who were considered the undisputed "alpha" of their respective teams in their prime (1985-1990 Pistons and 2005-2010 Suns).

So I scraped the individual ORtgs of Isiah, Stockton, and Nash to see how well their ORtgs associates with their Team's ORtgs.
As you can see below for IT:

Every empty circle corresponds to a playoff game. As you can see for IT, the higher his ORtg the better the Pistons performed on offense, in general. For example, his two highest ORtgs (149 in both cases) corresponds to a team ORtg of 144.4 (https://www.basketball-reference.com/boxscores/198705240DET.html) and 111.6 (https://www.basketball-reference.com/boxscores/199005260CHI.html).

If you draw a line that best approximates/predicts ALL values you get a line with a slope of 0.23, meaning for every point increase of individual ORtg (x-axis), the team ORtg (y-axis) increases with 0.23 points on average. 1 would mean a perfect association, and 0 no relation at all.

By itself, this chart doesn't mean much without teammates. That's why I also plotted the association between individual ORtg and team ORtg for other "core" members of the Pistons during IT's prime:

Now this is interesting! This chart, imo, indicates that while IT was a big factor in the Piston's offensive performance, he did get substantial help from Dantley, and Dumars. What is especially interesting is that Dantley has a slope of 0.30, which is higher's than Isiah's. Does this mean he was more important to the offense than Isiah's? Well I don't think it's that clear, because Dantley played less than half of the total games as IT did during this time period:

Spoiler:

Code: Select all

joe_dumars
total games: 79
mark_aguirre
total games: 37
adrian_dantley
total games: 38
bill_laimbeer
total games: 88
isiah_thomas
total games: 88

What also is interesting is that Aguirre ORtg doesn't seem to be very meaningful to the team's overall ORtg, meaning he could have bad games and the Piston's wouldn't skip a beat on offense. Conversely, he could have a great individual ORtg, but that wouldn't necessarily translate to a higher team ORtg. To a lesser extreme that also applies to Laimbeer. Conclusion? I have to admit that while Isiah was the 'alpha' on this team, he did have some substantial help, at least from Dantley '87 and '88, and from Dumars.

So what about the Jazz and the Suns? Well have a look below:

Spoiler:

Code: Select all

jeff_hornachek
total games: 0
jeff_malone
total games: 30
thurl_bailey
total games: 28
karl_malone
total games: 49
john_stockton
total games: 49

Spoiler:

Code: Select all

jeff_hornachek
total games: 79
jeff_malone
total games: 0
thurl_bailey
total games: 0
karl_malone
total games: 79
john_stockton
total games: 79

In both time-periods, 1988-1993 and 1994-1998, I think it's very clear that Malone is carrying the team. That's not to say Stockton is not contributing, in fact his slope is larger than IT's (even though I'm not sure we can really compare the slopes from players from two different teams, I think it's fairer to compare players from the same team), he is a clear second to Malone. The association between Stockton's ORtg and his team was definitely stronger than Hornacheck's though.

Now for the Suns:

Spoiler:

Code: Select all

jason_richardson
total games: 16
boris_diaw
total games: 35
shawn_marion
total games: 46
amare_stoudimire
total games: 46
steve_nash
total games: 67

While I'm not sure if Nash is head-and-shoulders above the rest, his ORtg best correlates with the team's ORtg. The next two highest are Shawn Marion and Jason Richardson. Richardson only played 16 games though, so pretty small sample size.

In the end, this was a fun thought experiment to find out and see if it is possible to dissect an individual player's contribution to team's ORtg. I don't think you can make definite claims, as always with any stats context matters just as well, if not more, but it is nice to have stats/numbers visualized.

Note: I don't think individual ORtg is perfect, if I understand it correctly it seems like a box-metric stat (https://www.basketball-reference.com/about/ratings.html), and that has its inherent limitations. Still, it was available to scrape from basketball-reference and this provided me a nice exercise to make some tables and charts.

[Doctor MJ]

While I'm not sure if Nash is head-and-shoulders above the rest, his ORtg best correlates with the team's ORtg. The next two highest are Shawn Marion and Jason Richardson. Richardson only played 16 games though, so pretty small sample size.

In the end, this was a fun thought experiment to find out and see if it is possible to dissect an individual player's contribution to team's ORtg. I don't think you can make definite claims, but it's just nice to have the numbers visualized.

Note: I don't think individual ORtg is perfect, if I understand it correctly it seems like a box-metric stat (https://www.basketball-reference.com/about/ratings.html), and that has its inherent limitations. Still, it was available to scrape from basketball-reference and this provided me a nice exercise to make some tables and charts.

You're noting at the end but let me just say:

There's a historical confusion here between terms.

"ORtg" in the bkref player page refers to Dean Oliver's metric which, as you say, is a box score metric.

"Off Rtg" in the bkref team page refers to is an approximation of team points scored per 100 possessions.

And unfortunately, both stand for "Offensive Rating" and people in general don't really ever use any abbreviation other than "ORtg" for both in my experience.

I try to use the term "on-court ORtg" to refer to the team's ORtg while a player is on the court which I think communicates what I'm talking about a bit less ambiguously, but it's not a perfect term either.

I personally wish that bkref had started calling Oliver's stat as some form of "Oliver rating" once +/- surpassed Oliver's stats in usage (which really wasn't long after Oliver's book was published in 2004).

[WestGOAT]

on Isiah & Stockton

I'd be curious to see more data along these lines with other players. I'm interested in any players, but since you're focused on point guards right now that's what comes to mind. What about more modern guys like Billups & Lillard? What about contemporaries like KJ, Hardaway & Price?

I'll see if I can get to it, in theory since I have most of the data, and if not, the scripts to scrape it, it shouldn't take too long.
That said visualizing all of this data, even with scripts, can take longer than I expected .

[Dr Positivity]

1. Bob Pettit
2. Kevin Durant
3. Stephen Curry

Voted for Pettit for several threads now based on solid intangibles and longevity, high level peak

Durant and Curry is hard because I see Curry as clearly more valuable in the regular season, however Durant's scoring game appears to translate more to the playoffs. Durant has more longevity so he gets slight edge.

I would take Curry's leadership over Paul's easily, and Curry's offensive skillset is just higher level than Nash to me, I'm not going to overreact to team offensive results in Nash's sake, a lot went into SSOL Suns from D'Antoni to teammates. I'm not convinced Nash was a better player than Kidd or Billups level PGs.

[eminence]

Defense - by far most impressed by Schayes '54 where he was the main big on a -4.5 defense squad, levels above any defensive accomplishment from Pettit imo

So, something I'll note is that I've found descriptions of:

1. On the '54-55 team Earl Lloyd and Red Rocha were seen as the "enforcers", not Schayes.

2. Schayes talks about how he'd get beat up by the other team and Paul Seymour was his protector.

As I'm sure you noted, in '53-54, Rocha was not playing (retired for the year) and the team still ranks as the best defense anyway, so that's a point possibly in Schayes favor to be sure, but I don't see it as any given that simply because Schayes was the obvious "big man" that he was indeed the defensive anchor.

And this is a huge point I think you'd agree.

If Schayes was the lead defender on a team that won the title with the best defense, that's a big mark in his favor.

If Schayes was an offensive star being protected by tougher teammates who also roughed up the opposing offense, then his most noteworthy team success has him being carried by others in the actual primary strength of the team.

I'd appreciate if you have any quotes specifically talking about Schayes leading his defense as I haven't seen this but I believe both you and beast see Schayes as a particularly noteworthy defensive player.

Oh also, you made the point that Arizin had most of his years on a below average offense. That's really interesting and while I was aware of the up & down nature of his team, I hadn't thought about it in those terms. I'm reluctant to see that as truly damning of Arizin because we really did see him carry his team to the championship leading the best offense of the decade, but it really puts the longevity into a certain lens that makes it hard to justify him over someone like Schayes...though again, it really matters to me what Schayes' place was on defense because defense is how his team won.

One other note on Arizin that I think is important:

It's pointed out that young Wilt had Arizin on the roster and the offense still wasn't great, and thus Arizin must not have been that good. And it's certainly true that he wasn't adding to Wilt's team the way you'd hope, and the fact that Arizin was used to be an alpha with the ball in his hands was probably part of that. If he'd been more of an off-ball guy, he'd probably have ported to Wilt's team better.

However, I think it's really worth noting that Arizin's peak Warriors gave an ORtg that Wilt only surpassed once in his entire Warriors' run (in '62-63), and in that Wilt year, their ORtg was below average for the league. I think we need to ask ourselves quite earnestly whether an offense with prime Arizin & Wilt should have run through Arizin as the leading scorer.

And if that sounds crazy to folks I get it, but as has been noted before, Arizin was the closest thing to Jerry West before Jerry West, and when West & Wilt played, the smart thing to do was to run the offense through West.

I unfortunately don't know any quotes on Schayes defenes, I do have this from George King - "Our team was Dolph Schayes and a bunch of kumquats."

One could take that quote a lot of ways, but I generally agree with your assessment that Dolph wasn't the protector/enforcer of the squad. The team (or at least King and Seymour) saw themselves as the lower talent guys who had to impact the game in ways that didn't require a ton of skill.

I will say the 'protector' narrative to me seemed to apply more to Schayes early career, and that he needed to learn that toughness, but did learn it.

A difference here, you seem to view more natural overlap between the enforcer and high-impact defender roles than I do.

Here's my rough thought process:
-Nats were the best defense in both '54 and '55 (decent to good outside those years, tougher competition in Mikan/Russell)
-Super small in '54 with Lloyd/Osterkorn/Schayes as the bigs
-Pretty big in '55 with Redx2 joining the squad while Osterkorn falls from the rotation
-Four consistent pieces between seasons - Seymour, King, Lloyd, Schayes
-Schayes/Lloyd likely with pretty big role changes defensively between the seasons
-I struggle to see a team construction where they were the 4/5 and then the 3/4 on the best defense in the league both years and they aren't a strong/versatile defensive tandem
-I think it's actually impossible that either Lloyd or Schayes were notably weak defenders, and would require believing that Seymour/King were MJ and Pippen level on defense
-So together I think Lloyd/Schayes were bordering on elite, with each of them at least average
-Separating the two seems much much tougher, and I don't really have anything for ya there, I essentially wind up giving them both half credit and thinking of them as good, but not great defensive players (for Schayes as a PF that means in the range of Malone, while I'd put Pettit more in the average range)

If you have any ideas on how to separate Lloyd/Schayes I'd be happy to hear them!

Arizin did have some pretty meh luck in terms of playing with guys who took way more shots than they should've with an aging Fulks and a young Wilt.

But the years that really drive me wild with Arizin are the gap between '56/'57 and the great offenses and Wilt's arrival in '60. For whatever reason his elite scoring just seemed to disconnect from great offense (sinking to league worst in '59). The cast was largely the same, so I just have no idea what happened there.

[colts18]

Stockton vs Malone

Most 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.

I'll say up front that there's a lot of thought in your post and I appreciate that. I'm not going to respond to it all.

I wanted to break in with the point above because it feels to me like you're thinking that the light-regard for Malone's peak isn't also a reflection on Stockton as well. It most definitely is. People don't go around thinking "Oh if only not for Malone, the Jazz would have beat the Bulls". They go around thinking, "Wow, Malone sure struggled against the Bulls, would've been nice if Stockton could have scored more than 15 ppg."

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%.

I'm not blaming Stockton for being a beta his whole career and I fully understand that Nash was a beta before he was an alpha, what I'm saying is that you cannot assume Stockton would be a better alpha than Nash just because you think he was a better beta.

I'm also not saying that you can't believe that he would be a better alpha than Nash, I'm just saying that we're talking about a role difference and your argument wasn't acknowledging that.

RE: usage gap. As I've said, you can't really quantify this difference easily.

I'll just point to what happened when Dallas tried to take away Nash's passing in the 2005 playoffs. Nash thrived as a volume scorer and from that point onward no one tried that again, which meant from there on out Nash was being approached by opposing defenses as someone who could rip you apart with either passing or scoring and you just had to find a balance that didn't hurt more than necessary. And that general balance from defenses led them to be less successful against Nash offenses than anyone else's offenses through 2011.

Stockton was just never treated like the same kind of attacking threat. He got to operate with only secondary attention on him his whole career, and while that doesn't mean he couldn't, it's a qualitative difference in what the two guys were facing that cannot be normalized away with usage stats.

Boris Diaw

Just 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.

So now you're trying to use Karl Malone as an anchor hurting Stockton while also using Boris Diaw as a massive plus helping Nash. I'm not trying to say Diaw was a bad player, but c'mon.

Re: If we give credit for the Suns turn around after 10 games... No. Stop. Listen.

This was not me making an argument justifying Nash's accolades that year, it was me getting into the details to explain what happened that year because you brought up a single RAPM number you chose because it made Nash look worse than other years around him and didn't bother to actually talk about the actual basketball being played.

You put the cart before the horse, I brought the horse. And now instead of talking about that horse, you've brought an entirely different horse into play. I'm not saying you can't talk about your horse, but you still haven't looked at the first horse through any lens other than winning a debate.

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.

Whoa. All of this is monday morning quarterbacking. I can pretty much guarantee that you had no idea that the Suns were going to go on an all-time offensive run circa 2004 because literally no one did.

It's fine for you to point out that Stockton didn't get a chance to be in Nash's position, as you have done multiple times, but when you talk as if "well of course", that's just clearly something that only someone years into the future with an toward disparagement would say.

But I'll add this: The key epiphany of that era was arguably the realization that you didn't need great shooters to shoot the 3. You could take a bad shooter like Bruce Bowen, and just tell him to practice standing at the line, catching a pass, and shooting, and it worked.

It's well and good as I've said to say that Stockton didn't have the chance to play after this epiphany, but trying to talk as if Nash had a massively talented offensive supporting cast in all years simply because 3-point shooting was a key part of what they did is pretty silly.

ElGee's Valuation of Nash and Stockton

I completely disagree with his assessment of Nash vs Stockton. Elgee is a well known Stockton hater. He is a Malone fan so...

Okay I'm done. colts, I'm disappointed to hear you talk like this. Talking in terms of homers/haters is a the lowest of the low of the internet sports fan.

ElGee is not trying to make a platform to tear down Stockton and promote Malone. He's trying to make something that will be taken seriously as a neutral analyst. I'd hope everyone would know this, because why would anything else be an incentive for him?

It's fine if you think he underrates Stockton and overrates Malone. He can certainly be wrong, but it's not in his best interest to be so.[/quote]

It's fair to say that we don't know how Stockton would respond to being the alpha. He played his whole career with Malone. Stockton never had a chance to play an extended period of time with Malone injured as Malone missed a total of 10 games in his 18 year Jazz career. The only thing we can do is speculate on how he would play as the focal point of an offense.

I believe he would be great if he had a coach who let him shoot 3's, play uptempo, space the floor with 3 point shooters, and utilized pick n roll the way D' Antoni does. Can you imagine Stockton, the best PnR player in history, getting to play in a D' Antoni offense that uses PnR every play in an era where the defense can't play physical, an era where the refs never call illegal screens?

While we can only speculate on how well Stockton would be as an alpha, we did see Nash in the Stockton beta role in Dallas. He was clearly less effective in that role. The Mavs became better as a team when Nash left.

Hater is a strong word. But Elgee is well known for not being a Stockton fan. He has many posts on this forum upgrading Malone while downgrading Stockton. He has written articles on his website bashing Stockton. It's fair to characterize him as a Karl Malone fan. If you are a strong Karl Malone fan, you have to downgrade Stockton to reconcile the Jazz not winning a championship.

[colts18]

.

It's fair to say that we don't know how Stockton would respond to being the alpha. He played his whole career with Malone. Stockton never had a chance to play an extended period of time with Malone injured as Malone missed a total of 10 games in his 18 year Jazz career. The only thing we can do is speculate on how he would play as the focal point of an offense. Defenses did focus quite a bit on stopping Stockton. Teams spent a lot of time game planning ways to disrupt Stockton because Malone can't do his thing if he doesn't receive a pass. A good example is the Bulls putting Michael Jordan on Stockton and game planning to stop Stockton, not Malone. It was clear that they were scared of Stockton's passing more than Malone's shooting.

Watch on YouTube

;t=59s

I believe he would be great if he had a coach who let him shoot 3's, play uptempo, space the floor with 3 point shooters, and utilized pick n roll the way D' Antoni does. Can you imagine Stockton, the best PnR player in history, getting to play in a D' Antoni offense that uses PnR every play in an era where the defense can't play physical, an era where the refs never call illegal screens?

While we can only speculate on how well Stockton would be as an alpha, we did see Nash in the Stockton beta role in Dallas. He was clearly less effective in that role. The Mavs became better as a team when Nash left.

Hater is a strong word. But Elgee is well known for not being a Stockton fan. He has many posts on this forum upgrading Malone while downgrading Stockton. He has written articles on his website bashing Stockton. It's fair to characterize him as a Karl Malone fan. If you are a strong Karl Malone fan, you have to downgrade Stockton to reconcile the Jazz not winning a championship.

[penbeast0]

I will say that while Schayes has a good defensive rep from what I've heard (hard nosed is the usual quote; similarly Pettit is described as relentless which to me is a stronger word though this normally applies more to his rebounding), Schayes wasn't a rim protector or the team enforcer nor have I heard about his being a beast in the passing lanes and so his top end would probably be around a Robert Covington type of defense impact which is valuable but not the kind of a massive impact we later see with great defenders in the Russell mode.

[Doctor MJ]

I unfortunately don't know any quotes on Schayes defenes, I do have this from George King - "Our team was Dolph Schayes and a bunch of kumquats."

One could take that quote a lot of ways, but I generally agree with your assessment that Dolph wasn't the protector/enforcer of the squad. The team (or at least King and Seymour) saw themselves as the lower talent guys who had to impact the game in ways that didn't require a ton of skill.

I will say the 'protector' narrative to me seemed to apply more to Schayes early career, and that he needed to learn that toughness, but did learn it.

A difference here, you seem to view more natural overlap between the enforcer and high-impact defender roles than I do.

Here's my rough thought process:
-Nats were the best defense in both '54 and '55 (decent to good outside those years, tougher competition in Mikan/Russell)
-Super small in '54 with Lloyd/Osterkorn/Schayes as the bigs
-Pretty big in '55 with Redx2 joining the squad while Osterkorn falls from the rotation
-Four consistent pieces between seasons - Seymour, King, Lloyd, Schayes
-Schayes/Lloyd likely with pretty big role changes defensively between the seasons
-I struggle to see a team construction where they were the 4/5 and then the 3/4 on the best defense in the league both years and they aren't a strong/versatile defensive tandem
-I think it's actually impossible that either Lloyd or Schayes were notably weak defenders, and would require believing that Seymour/King were MJ and Pippen level on defense
-So together I think Lloyd/Schayes were bordering on elite, with each of them at least average
-Separating the two seems much much tougher, and I don't really have anything for ya there, I essentially wind up giving them both half credit and thinking of them as good, but not great defensive players (for Schayes as a PF that means in the range of Malone, while I'd put Pettit more in the average range)

If you have any ideas on how to separate Lloyd/Schayes I'd be happy to hear them!

Arizin did have some pretty meh luck in terms of playing with guys who took way more shots than they should've with an aging Fulks and a young Wilt.

Well, everyone talks about Lloyd's defense.

“He’s an unsung star. Anybody can score. Lloyd was an excellent defensive player. That was No. 1 on my roster,” said his Syracuse Coach Al Cervi.

Lloyd was the power forward, the bruiser, and the guy whoguarded the opposing team's best scorer.

Also, here's an image of the team, granted from 1956, a bit later:



That's Schayes in the center (#4) and Lloyd on the right (#11). My general thought is that Schayes does not look like he's towering over other guys here. I look at Lloyd and think, "Yeah, wouldn't surprise me if he was a tougher 'big' than Schayes."

[penbeast0]

What is Chris Mullin doing on that team and wearing #10?

[trex_8063]

How well does individual ORtg for certain players associate with their team's ORtg in the playoffs? Can this give us a fair impression of which player's offense was most relevant for their team's offensive performance?

This is especially relevant when it comes to the discussion of whether Stockton was merely "secondary to Malone in his role" as Doctor MJ put it or if he was more of a legit 1b, or even 1a, as colts18 keeps insisting. I think this matters when you compare Stockton with players like Isiah Thomas and Steve Nash, who were considered the undisputed "alpha" of their respective teams in their prime (1985-1990 Pistons and 2005-2010 Suns).

So I scraped the individual ORtgs of Isiah, Stockton, and Nash to see how well their ORtgs associates with their Team's ORtgs.
As you can see below for IT:

Every empty circle corresponds to a playoff game. As you can see for IT, the higher his ORtg the better the Pistons performed on offense, in general. For example, his two highest ORtgs (149 in both cases) corresponds to a team ORtg of 144.4 (https://www.basketball-reference.com/boxscores/198705240DET.html) and 111.6 (https://www.basketball-reference.com/boxscores/199005260CHI.html).

If you draw a line that best approximates/predicts ALL values you get a line with a slope of 0.23, meaning for every point increase of individual ORtg (x-axis), the team ORtg (y-axis) increases with 0.23 points on average. 1 would mean a perfect association, and 0 no relation at all.

By itself, this chart doesn't mean much without teammates. That's why I also plotted the association between individual ORtg and team ORtg for other "core" members of the Pistons during IT's prime:

Now this is interesting! This chart, imo, indicates that while IT was a big factor in the Piston's offensive performance, he did get substantial help from Dantley, and Dumars. What is especially interesting is that Dantley has a slope of 0.30, which is higher's than Isiah's. Does this mean he was more important to the offense than Isiah's? Well I don't think it's that clear, because Dantley played less than half of the total games as IT did during this time period:

Spoiler:

Code: Select all

joe_dumars
total games: 79
mark_aguirre
total games: 37
adrian_dantley
total games: 38
bill_laimbeer
total games: 88
isiah_thomas
total games: 88

What also is interesting is that Aguirre ORtg doesn't seem to be very meaningful to the team's overall ORtg, meaning he could have bad games and the Piston's wouldn't skip a beat on offense. Conversely, he could have a great individual ORtg, but that wouldn't necessarily translate to a higher team ORtg. To a lesser extreme that also applies to Laimbeer. Conclusion? I have to admit that while Isiah was the 'alpha' on this team, he did have some substantial help, at least from Dantley '87 and '88, and from Dumars.

So what about the Jazz and the Suns? Well have a look below:

Spoiler:

Code: Select all

jeff_hornachek
total games: 0
jeff_malone
total games: 30
thurl_bailey
total games: 28
karl_malone
total games: 49
john_stockton
total games: 49

Spoiler:

Code: Select all

jeff_hornachek
total games: 79
jeff_malone
total games: 0
thurl_bailey
total games: 0
karl_malone
total games: 79
john_stockton
total games: 79

In both time-periods, 1988-1993 and 1994-1998, I think it's very clear that Malone is carrying the team. That's not to say Stockton is not contributing, in fact his slope is larger than IT's (even though I'm not sure we can really compare the slopes from players from two different teams, I think it's fairer to compare players from the same team), he is a clear second to Malone. The association between Stockton's ORtg and his team was definitely stronger than Hornacheck's though.

Now for the Suns:

Spoiler:

Code: Select all

jason_richardson
total games: 16
boris_diaw
total games: 35
shawn_marion
total games: 46
amare_stoudimire
total games: 46
steve_nash
total games: 67

While I'm not sure if Nash is head-and-shoulders above the rest, his ORtg best correlates with the team's ORtg. The next two highest are Shawn Marion and Jason Richardson. Richardson only played 16 games though, so pretty small sample size.

In the end, this was a fun thought experiment to find out and see if it is possible to dissect an individual player's contribution to team's ORtg. I don't think you can make definite claims, as always with any stats context matters just as well, if not more, but it is nice to have stats/numbers visualized.

Note: I don't think individual ORtg is perfect, if I understand it correctly it seems like a box-metric stat (https://www.basketball-reference.com/about/ratings.html), and that has its inherent limitations. Still, it was available to scrape from basketball-reference and this provided me a nice exercise to make some tables and charts.

Interesting stuff, thanks for sharing. Like Doc, I wouldn't mind seeing similar data on the Shaq Magic, the Jordan Bulls, Paul Clippers, etc.

As I've noted you tend to take a Stockton-critical/pro-Isiah slant with how you choose to word things or present the data, I'll try to provide a slight counterpoint "narrative" by way of a few bullet-points....

*You note how the Jazz offense seems to rise and fall on Malone more than Stockton.....is this a surprise to anyone? Or a major criticism to sustain? Karl Malone's an all-timer, was the clear focal point of their offense.
If we similarly found the Rockets offense lived or died more on James Harden than on Chris Paul.....is that really a surprise OR a point of shame for Paul?

**In a prior thread you'd stated that Stockton "took much more of a backseat" once Hornacek arrived (which seemed only minimally supported by the data, which I'd pointed out). I then pointed out that Isiah seemed to similarly [that is: to the same degree] "take a backseat" with the arrival of Joe Dumars.
This data that you show indicates the Piston offense was more reliant on Dumars than the Jazz one was on Hornacek, AND that there's basically negligible difference between Thomas and Dumars in terms of how much the offense relies [whereas there's a large difference between Stockton and Hornacek].

***While you're probably right that it may be of limited value to compare the slopes from players on different teams, I'll nonetheless point out that Stockton actually has the steepest slope of any of the three PG's being compared (IT's 0.21, Nash 0.27, Stockton 0.27 in the smaller sample and 0.28 in the bigger one).

****It seems you're subtly trying to downplay the validity of Dantley's correlation [which exceeds IT's] based on sample size; but it's a not insignificant 38-game sample. Further, if we have to question it based on an assumption that 38 games is not enough to be relevant, then tbh we have to throw or question MOST of the data presented (basically everything except Thomas, Dumars, and Laimbeer, the '94-'98 Jazz numbers, and maybe Nash alone).

[colts18]

What is Chris Mullin doing on that team and wearing #10?

He looks a twin of Detlef Schrempf to me

[penbeast0]

Another classic on the bad hair teams.