Thinking Basketball Greatest Peaks - Walton

[Doctor MJ]

Hey y'all,

I know we have a general thread for ElGee's new project, but I wanted to give something of a fresh start given that we're now to the actual meat of the project.

I think the most useful way to look at this new project is to look at it as video curation with commentary. Yes nominally he's aiming to do another ranking thing, but he's only doing that as a thematic hook.

The coolest thing here is that he's gone through tons and tons of video with the help of 70sFan and other, and he's isolated the key tendencies, strengths, and weakness of these player. I find this to be incredibly useful, and I would think the only people that wouldn't are people who have already done an exercise similar to what ElGee's done.

So when you watch this, try not to think about it in terms of how you think ElGee is going to rank stuff. Try to use it as a muse for you to think for yourself.

Beyond that, try to remember that ElGee's just a dude from RealGM working independently without the help of ESPN or the Ringer or the Athletic. He had to figure out all this technical stuff out himself, and he did so so that he could present it to folks like yourself.

Think you could do better? Go do it. ElGee isn't the first RealGMer to "make it big". Givony, Shams, Tjarks, Leroux, Snellings and now Taylor and I'm sure others I'm not thinking of, all have connections to RealGM as they got their starts. I hope they won't be the last.

Without further ado:

Watch on YouTube

I'd appreciate you pointing out whatever things about Walton stand out to you from the video, and you might consider pointing to a particular frame so that others can see what you mean. We ought to be able to learn more about Walton from this.

(Last note: Don't know if I'll do anything like this again, and it's fine to merge this in with that broader thread in a few days if it doesn't take hold, but I just didn't think that thread was going to bring the kind of discussion life to this video that I see as possible. Cheers, Doc)

[70sFan]

I copy and paste my post from the main thread:

Can't wait to see Kareem video, even though I expect that I won't agree with his conclusions.

Walton's video is much better than the first one - this is what I expected from Ben. You can get a very solid idea of how Walton played from that video and what his limitations were. He could go a bit deeper with his scoring game, but overall it's fantastic.

I like that he used a lot of material and that both videos approached almost 20 minutes. I expect a lot of good work from him during this project.

[colts18]

Here is a thread I made 8 years ago analyzing the Walton vs Kareem head to head battle during the 1977 playoffs. Kareem clearly outplayed Walton the same way Hakeem outplayed Robinson.

viewtopic.php?f=64&t=1201275

[70sFan]

Here is a thread I made 8 years ago analyzing the Walton vs Kareem head to head battle during the 1977 playoffs. Kareem clearly outplayed Walton the same way Hakeem outplayed Robinson.

viewtopic.php?f=64&t=1201275

Yeah, Kareem dominated Walton on offense, even though Portland defended him extremely well. The gap in supporting cast was about as large as in 2015 finals in this series.

It doesn't mean that Walton was much worse player, but he didn't outplay Jabbar in 1977 WCF.

[DQuinn1575]

He said he wasn't much of a jumper but we get this - he could get up

https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/bill-walton-of-ucla-goes-up-high-to-block-a-shot-during-an-news-photo/52975184

He made no mention of Walton's rebounding, especially on the defensive end, where he led league in defensive rebounding % multiple times.

He called his range 17 feet, but he very rarely shot outside of about 12; really preferred the bank shot, which was very typical of UCLA players of the 70s. (Wilkes, Dave Meyers, Rod Foster) BTW, the 44 point game he mentioned happened to be in the NCAA title game. Dunking wasn't allowed at the time, IIRC there were 2 or 3 other baskets that didn't count, as you couldn't put your palms down on a lob - your hands had to be perpendicular and not with your "palms down" - otherwise he would have had maybe 50.

He was pretty spot on about outlet passes - not home runs. Both he and Unseld were well known for getting quick outlet passes out after rebounds to start fast breaks.

The Blazers moved well without the ball and the players all passed fairly well - they operated without a point guard, running the offense around Walton. Pretty remarkable they had such a great team with Bob Gross and Dave Twardzik as starters. It was considered a victory of teamwork over the more talented Sixers of Doc, McGinnis, Doug Collins. Dawkins.

Because he was such a great passer, and not a me-first shooter, he didn't get double teamed very often. You figure he would make 8 baskets and get 5 assists, and 2 of those baskets would be on offensive rebounds.

It's an incredible shame he had less than two healthy seasons, we didn't get as much of a chance to see what he could do. He was only 25 in 1978.

[KTM_2813]

As someone who doesn't know much about the '70s NBA, I found this video to be really fascinating. The two highlights were Walton's passing, which I'd always heard about but didn't realize how good he was at finding cutters on a dime, and Walton's defense, which I didn't realize was so intimidating. Basketball was truly a different sport back then, with no three-point line to create spacing and big men absolutely destroying people with their rim protection.

Seems Kareem is next, can't wait!!

[Doctor MJ]

As someone who doesn't know much about the '70s NBA, I found this video to be really fascinating. The two highlights were Walton's passing, which I'd always heard about but didn't realize how good he was at finding cutters on a dime, and Walton's defense, which I didn't realize was so intimidating. Basketball was truly a different sport back then, with no three-point line to create spacing and big men absolutely destroying people with their rim protection.

Seems Kareem is next, can't wait!!

You absolutely got to the essence of how I see Walton. I want to focus first on the part I bolded:

In order to find cutters, your teammates have to cut.

For anyone about to watch the video (or watch it again), watch Walton's teammates. They're always cutting.

This isn't something they were born doing with such aggression, this was the scheme that coach Dr. Jack Ramsay designed around Walton. And it worked. In '75-76, the Blazers used a more "traditional" coach in Lenny Wilkens and the team offense was 17th out of 18 in the league. Ramsay comes, implements a new system, and the Blazers jump to 2nd out of 22. An absolutely massive improvement that should be seen as the heart of why the Blazers became what they did.

I'll also note that Walton didn't actually play THAT much more from '75-76 to '76-77. Yes he played more, yes his body was in better shape, but the direct causal change was Ramsay's scheme.

Now as I say that, I'm sure my fellow Player Compare-ers are thinking "I see, well maybe Walton wasn't that impressive then?" But remember: Ramsay designed the scheme around Walton. If you look at the situation as Walton simply getting to play the way you should have always played around him, while Ramsay deserves credit for recognizing it, I think it's important not to assume that credit to the coach means pulling credit away from his star.

Regardless, I think it's important to fist ask yourself: Why would you see Walton and think "Oh my god, we could have cut-round-the-pivot playmaking system!"?

My answer: Because Walton had incredibly feel for the game in general, great vision, instant decision making, and a lovely passing touch. Much like Nikola Jokic does today. (For the record, I do consider Jokic the best passing big in history now, with Walton 2nd.)

2 more key points:

1. Ramsay didn't invent this sort of system. From what I can tell, the Original Celtics did in the '20s and they used it to be the become the best basketball team in the world. And they did it with this guy at the pivot:



That's Dutch Dehnert. He was 6'1". Can you imagine how much better that guy would have been if he had the passing angle of a man 10 inches taller than him? Jack Ramsay, I'm quite sure, could. (Sidenote: Dutch was incredibly thick wasn't he?)

I think it's really important to understand that the guy we'd think of as the more traditional coach (Wilkens) was a decade plus younger than Ramsay, and that Ramsay had been a coach a lot of other places before he came to Portland (when he retired in 1989, he had the record for most overall coaching wins between college and the pros). I would suggest that Ramsay didn't come up with his approach with Walton because he was the new avant garde, but because Ramsay was old enough to have played back when a time when center pivot systems based around cutting were still a dominant paradigm.

With the coming of Mikan the focus of the game thus went away from various guys cutting to the rim - with a distributed scoring across the team - to an actual human focal point: Put Mikan by the rim, get him the ball. And quite frankly, while much has changed about the game, this use of such a scoring focus has basically dominated the NBA for decades now. Most teams use volume scorers after all, whether they're big men, or perimeter threats.

But what if the NBA gets to the point that it learns to mitigate for the volume scoring big man? Might it then become more optimal to go back to a cut-round-the-pivot approach?

I'd say the answer was essentially "Yes". To be clear, I don't think that the Blazer offense around Walton was the best of all possible systems - but they were excellent.

2. After Walton went down with injury, while the Blazer defense fell apart, the offense actually held up pretty well. This is particularly fascinating when you look at the Blazer roster both in 1977 and a few years later. The immediate skeptical thought about Walton's offensive value is that he must have just had some great offensive teammates...but he really didn't have guys around him that were obviously amazing. I'd encourage folks to look into bkref for themselves on this, but as I tend to see it, what was happening is that once the team got used to playing in this way, they got good at playing this way. It's an offensive scheme that makes everyone proactive, which means they're always thinking and trying to make something work.

I would suggest that the hard part with a system like this is getting it started at the NBA level when you don't have an outlier passing big on your roster because up front there's naturally going to be a lot of kinks if you don't have a magician out there making everything just seem to work, but over time they don't necessarily need to rely on a genius to do the job pretty well.

It's interesting to note that Ramsay's downfall didn't come from Walton's fall but Clyde Drexler's rise. Ramsay wanted to keep playing his way, and Drexler was a superstar talent who didn't really fit. Bye coach!

I'll conclude this post there and for now just say to forget about who was better between Walton and Kareem or anyone else. There's something far more interesting going on here with how the Blazers played. It's really worth asking how different the NBA would be today if Walton had had a healthy career. The Blazers would likely have one several championships, and been a major contender against Magic & Bird (they were already more than major contenders against Dr. J of course). Entirely possible that the basketball world looks to copycat the Blazers success like crazy and you have many more guys of the Walton-Jokic type...but he didn't, and we haven't.