Couple of comments (you knew I would, especially when you cite me by name).....
penbeast0 wrote:English v. Nique v. Tmac
IN terms of scoring, English is the most efficient, shooting at a .550 ts% for his career, Nique is behind him at .536, with Tmac trailing at .519 though in a tougher defensive era. Since the main value of each of the three is their volume scoring, this seems a strong argument for English. On the other hand, while all three were big volume scorers, Nique scored the most per 100 possessions at 34.5pts (though he was also the most frequently iso scorer rather than scoring in the flow of the offense), Tmac is a 31.6 and English at 30.4. Tmac has the single dominant season of the 3 when Grant Hill went down to injury and Orlando featured Tmac all the time every time; but he was also less consistent and more often injured than the other two. Note: Using the per 100 figure to avoid giving an advantage to English over Nique since English played in an extremely high pace system in DEN and Nique in a relatively low paced one in ATL. According to Trex's research, this should be depressing English's efficiency a bit so his advantage in efficiency might well be greater than shown by the raw numbers.
Hold on there. You're taking some liberties with my studies, and the bolded is not necessarily true. What my research indicated was that
in seasons where the league-average pace was >115 (**or thereabouts)---it was never remotely close to that in the 80s---
it appears detrimental to the offense to play at a pace that is above and beyond that.**I did another sample that included all years in which league average pace was >107, and found a faint/lesser [possibly not terribly statistically significant] negative correlation between rPace and rORTG......which may have been created entirely by those years within this sample where league avg was >115.
Either way, as you can see, this doesn't apply to English's prime in Denver, wherein the single-fastest league-avg pace was 103.1 (and the single-fastest pace they played at as a team was 112.1, fwiw).
penbeast0 wrote:In terms of playmaking, Tmac was the primary playmaker at 7.1 assists per 100 possessions, English a decent secondary playmaker at 5.1, and Wilkins not creating much for others at 3.5. Nique also turned the ball over 3.5 times/100 possessions as did Tmac with English only a hair better at 3.3. Rebounding gives the edge to Nique by a hair of Tmac at 9.3 v. 9.1 v. 7.7 to English.
wrt the bolded, semantically it kinda seems like you want to imply English had a better turnover economy than TMac (because 0.2 fewer TO/100).
However [just to make sure it's not lost on anyone], that was while producing
2.0 fewer assists/100 AND 1.2 fewer pts/100.
In terms of my modified TOV%, it goes like this:
TMac - 6.85%
English - 7.80%
Nique - 7.84%
TMac clearly the best in terms of turnover-economy [frequently forgotten, as people tend to tunnel-vision on his shooting effeciency, which was indeed poor, even after adjusting for era].
And there's actually negligible difference between Nique and English. Yes, English produced +1.6 ast/100 while committing -0.2 fewer tov/100.......but he also [as you've noted above] produced -4.1 fewer pts/100 and -1.6 fewer reb/100.
Nique needed to not turn the ball over in order to get the shots up that scored those additional +4.1 pts, and turnovers do sporadically occur immediately after a rebound too [though this is pretty negligible]. These are considerations included within my mTOV%.
A pinch more detail regarding the rebounding numbers [as it pertains to offense, as all of these guys are primarily known as offensive stars]: Nique is the best in terms of offensive rebounding. 3.8 oreb/100 [8.5% OREB%], vs 3.3 [7.4%] for English (TMac further behind both).
Also, specifically when comparing Nique to English, I'll note the best 5-year stretch of offenses for Denver was '81-'85: where they peaked as a +7.4 rORTG, though averaged out to +4.56......that with Dan Issel and Kiki Vandeweghe [two highly skilled offensive players who were about as offensive-minded as they come, too], a year or two of decling David Thompson, and just about the most offense-oriented coach ever until D'Antoni came about.
Nique's best 5-year stretch was a highly consistent '87-'91, in which they averaged a +3.98 rORTG [peaking at +4.9]. This occurred under a more defensive-minded coach, and also with a less noteworthy [offensively] cast for which the mostly highly featured offensive players were Kevin Willis, Doc Rivers, and........Cliff Levingston, I guess???? They did have one year of Mike McGee off the bench. They frequently had an empty [offensive] jersey at C, such as Tree Rollins, too.
It's sort of impressive, imo, given the supporting cast.
Criticisms on playoff consistency sustained.
"The fact that a proposition is absurd has never hindered those who wish to believe it." -Edward Rutherfurd
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