ty 4191 wrote:sansterre wrote:Reasonable argument. I don't know enough about those seasons to comment about each individual coach. I worry that the above could be very easily cherry-picked (not saying that's what you're doing, but it would be easy to do, ie "Jordan won the title 100% of the time when he had a championship-level roster and wasn't coming off of a layaway", "Garnett made the Finals 100% of the time when he was still in his prime and healthy with a good roster", "Kobe won the Finals in 5 of the 8 times he had championship-level rosters around him" and so on. Not to say that the above are wrong per se, but it's a concern to see a player's career truncated to only the seasons that make them look good).
I will say, however, that if you're including Hannum it's weird that you're ignoring '64 and some of '65.
I'm honestly not tryin to cherry pick or make Wilt look better than he was. I think it would be extremely coincidental, however, if it just so happened that in the years he had great coaches, who understood him/took them under his wing, and used him properly...that his (overall) team winning percentage was north of .750. For about 5 years out of his career.
(And yes, you're absolutely right about 64' and half of 65'. That was my fault, but certainly not a conscious omission. Hence, that makes (roughly) 5.5 out of 14 seasons, based on content from these sources (see: below) that lend themselves to the idea that he was mismanaged (often, terribly), and, had tremendously subpar teammates (compared to Bill Russell).
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=wilt+larger+than+life&crid=3LFIA93X5ELET&sprefix=wilt+larger%2Caps%2C182&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-doa-p_1_11https://www.amazon.com/Rivalry-Russell-Chamberlain-Golden-Basketball-ebook/dp/B000FCKGSY/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=wilt+russell&qid=1633900039&sr=8-1sansterre wrote:Weird question: which was better, Steve Nash for the Mavericks or Steve Nash for the Suns? This isn't a trick question. Here's the thing: they're (in theory) the same player. In one situation Nash got an offensive mastermind to coach his team and a roster reasonably optimized for his style of play, and in the other he was merely a strong player on a strong team. Should we be acting like the Nash on the Suns was that good in Dallas too, because his situation was holding him back? Or should we be acting like Nash on the Mavericks is the true Nash, because situations as optimal as he had in Phoenix are not normal?
These are tough questions. And there aren't good answers.
Perhaps it was holding him back. Significantly so? I have no idea, since I'm as far from an expert on Steve Nash and the Mavs/Suns of that Era as you're going to meet.
That said, even as a hypothetical- with no extant knowledge prerequisite- it's an excellent, provocative question (that I wish I had an intelligent response to). What do you think?
I don't have a good answer. I'm very much on the side of rhetorical questions and I tend to find that any hard and fast answer is probably at least a little wrong. There aren't good answers here. On one hand, Nash got crazy lucky with his situation on the Suns. On the other hand, from '05 to '10 Steve Nash may have been the most impactful offensive player in the league. And that's in a league with prime Wade, prime Kobe, perpetual prime Dirk and early prime LeBron. If you are picking Top 10 all-time six-year stretches of offensive dominance, Steve Nash has to be in that conversation (if not necessarily in that group). So, on one hand, we know he was lucky. But on the other hand, we know that Nash was capable of rising to ATG-levels of offensive value in that lucky situation. And, frankly, the vast majority of players aren't capable of that no matter how optimal their situation is. Downside for Nash, he needed an optimal situation to do it in (while Kobe/LeBron/Dirk didn't), but most players can't get to that level no matter how optimal things are.
So that's a long way of saying "There is no way to get a simple answer about things like player situation. You just need to be aware of it and humble about the fact that it's almost impossible to compensate accurately for".
sansterre wrote:But in an argument over who *actually* delivered more career value I think the arguments for Russell are pretty persuasive.
This is the only place in this entire post where you lose me:
--If you look at their 143 head to head matchups, it's fairly laughable as to who was a better/more valuable center. If you look at peak or career PER or WS, same thing. Russell is on record, recently, as saying the following (just a few quotes I've heard very recently in new Wilt Chamberlain Archive Videos, and saw in the three books on Wilt and Russell I recently read):
"He believed- and rightfully so- that he was the greatest player in the history of this league. And, he was."
"He was the greatest athlete who ever lived. PERIOD. Total. Absolute. Monster."
"Let's see: he's 5 inches taller than me...he outweighs me by 50 pounds, he can run as fast as I can, jump as high as I can.....the only problem was, I had to show up."
"I don't know which was more astounding; his strength and speed and size, or, his smarts. I devised 5 different defensive strategies w just to combat him, specifically, and all that I could do, honestly? Just 'put up speedbumps' against him."--And once again, Russell's teammates amassed literally TWICE the WS of Wilt's, 1960-1969. In not a single season did Russell NOT have better teammates than Wilt, overall (including, even, 1967 and 1968).
This cannot be understated, I don't think.
And.....IF we had the most advanced metrics (WOWY, RAPM, BMP, RAPTOR, Etc) I'm sure Wilt would likely blow Russell out of the water in career value, peak value, and- yes- even beat him in playoffs value, also.
Perhaps. Allow me a digression.
OBPM is generally pretty accurate as far as predicting player impact. But it's not perfect. OBPM really like's Nash's '05-10 stretch, but it only thinks he was a Top 5-10 player for those years, not the arguable #1. BPM likes Kobe's '05-10 pretty well, but RAPM makes clear that Kobe was more valuable than he looked. Often with players carrying their team's offense like '01 Iverson, we assume that their lackluster metrics conceal the fact that their team's were super-dependent on them. But RAPM reveals that often those carry-jobs aren't as critical as they looked; Iverson's '01 and T-Mac's 2003 were way less valuable than we might have thought. But Kobe's 2006 was actually more valuable to his team than OBPM guessed. All I'm trying to say is that OBPM is a reasonable ballpark, but there are a lot of subtle factors that add (or subtract) value that the box score simply can't see.
You can still be reasonably sure though. If a player is a +0.0 OBPM player, the odds that he was secretly a Top 5 offensive player in the league are about zero. If a player shows as a +4.0 OBPM player, could he secretly have been more like a +6.5 offensive player? That's possible, if a lot of things lined up for it. So OBPM is a really good indicator, lacking better information.
DBPM is not. Tim Duncan routinely posts RAPMs about +2.0 higher than BPM puts him at, and it's almost totally on defense. Draymond Green's DBPM looks pretty good (good defensive rebounding, solid blocks and steals) but his DRAPM or DPIPM are absolutely insane. Because much of what makes Green amazing (his rotations, his ability to switch onto wings) doesn't show up in the box score. DBPM is definitely better than nothing, but not a lot better.
Now we're back to Win Shares and PER.
Both of them have redeeming qualities. They scale in any era, so you can compare the Win Shares of Pettit with the Win Shares of Barkley and have it mean . . . something.
But beyond that they're fairly limited.
Think about it: blocks and steals are really weak approximations of defense . . . but we don't even have those. Turnovers are a quietly significant part of value: Jordan and Kobe were better on offense than you might have guessed because they turned the ball over so rarely. And players like Moses Malone and Dwight Howard are generally pegged as being less offensively valuable than you might have guessed because they turned the ball over more often than you might have thought. What were Wilt's turnovers like? No idea. Literally, almost no idea.
Have you ever seen Enter the Dragon? There's a scene where Bruce Lee is trying to communicate how subtle understanding a complicated thing can be, and he says "It's like a finger pointing at the moon. Do not concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory."
Stats (especially box score stats) are the pointing finger. And the actual reality of what happened is the moon. Stats are a very efficient way of directing your attention in the right direction. But the danger is that you become so focused on the value of the finger as a guide that you lose track of the fact that they are only an indicator, not the thing itself (and, full disclosure, I fall prey to this with some frequency).
So there's no shame in using metrics. But you have to know how reliable they are, and what their biases are.
If you describe a player as "He took an absolutely insane number of shots, way more than anybody else on his team (or in his league). He made them surprisingly efficiently, all told. And he was one of the best rebounders in the league, if not the best. And he blocked a ton of shots, possibly the most in the league. As for team defense, he had some seasons where he led his team to historically great defenses. But he also had seasons where his team was barely better than average on that front. He also never passed (we're talking an Assist to True Shooting Attempt ratio around almost 20) and (at the intersection of bad coaching and his own personality) had a tendency to alienate the crap out of his teammates."
I'd say "Well, he was obviously one of the most valuable players in the league. Maybe the most valuable. And I wouldn't be surprised if box score-driven stats absolutely love him (as rebounds and points are things that are very easy to appreciate). But his team's defenses suggest that he might have selectively slacked on that front to focus on what sounds like historically voluminous scoring. And the blend of really low passing and rampant rumors of his having alienate teammates suggests to me that he was almost certainly less valuable than his box score stats look." Wilt pushes all the buttons that box score metrics love, and has lots of failings in areas where box score metrics have blind spots - he's almost certainly overrated somewhat by them.
Seriously, look at the Warriors' defenses ('60-64): -4.3, -1.6, -1.2, +0.9, -6.0.
It was clear that when Wilt was motivated he was capable of leading monstrous defenses. But it's also clear that his presence on a team might not have that much defensive lift at all. And it's also worth noting that the seasons where his teams had only decent defenses coincide with the seasons when he took tons of shots and never passed. Consider
Kobe Bryant's 2006 (his ATG-level scoring season). He led his league in ORAPM by a fair margin, notable ahead of 2006 Wade and 2006 Dirk (both amazing offensive seasons). But his DRAPM was resoundingly negative, keeping him ranked as #6 for the season. It's *really* hard to be a value defensively and take 35%+ of your team's shots.
And don't forget, before 1980 *defense* was what mattered. Look at my 1970s tournament: a surprising number of those teams only had league average offenses, but their defenses were outstanding. Until the introduction of the three point line defense was what made champions, and the best defenses in the league were almost always better than the best offenses in the league. So Wilt being doubled-down on offense at the expense of defense can make sense in the modern era, but in the 1960s it wasn't such an obvious necessary evil. And we know that Wilt's teammates in the early 60s couldn't really shoot well, but how much of that was their team having weak ball movement because Wilt didn't move from his preferred spot on the block and his unwillingness to pass?
Take a look at 1966. You can't argue that the Sixers didn't have a good roster. They took the *exact* same roster in 1967 and vaporized the league (including the Celtics). I'm going to take an excerpt from my writeup about the '67 Sixers (certain parts highlighted for emphasis):
Eventually, in the middle of the 1965 season, Wilt was traded to the new Philadelphia 76ers. The Sixers were a slightly below average team but with a lot of upside, with veteran Hal Greer and a lot of promising young players in Wali Jones, Chet Walker, Luke Jackson and Billy Cunningham. In the last game of the ‘65 playoffs coach Dolph Schayes ran the Warriors’ last play to Hal Greer and not Wilt (fearing Wilt’s poor free throw shooting). But, echoing his team’s loss in the NCAA Finals, the inbounds pass was intercepted and the Warriors were eliminated. In an interview afterwards Wilt lambasted his coach, his players and pretty much everyone involved with the NBA. He had been mocked for years for his inability to win despite his sensational scoring numbers, and yet in the clutch it seemed as though his teammates and coaches kept failing him. His frustration was understandable but its expression not helpful.
In their first full season together the team won 55 games and posted a +4.16 RSRS, losing in the Conference Finals to the Celtics. But the 55 wins conceals the problems the team faced. Wilt’s addition had helped the team’s offense . . . not at all. As in 1960, his addition helped his team’s *defense* (from +0.6 to -3.4). Also, Wilt disliked coach Dolph Schayes, bothered by disrespectful remarks Schayes had made when they had played against each other in the past. Compounding matters, Wilt refused to actually live in Philadelphia. He preferred to live in New York and commute to Philly, which meant that he was only available for training in the afternoons (while the team preferred morning practices). In the Conference Finals Wilt blew off multiple team practices which antagonized his teammates even more. In spite of this, Wilt posted an outstanding series while his teammates struggled.
In other words, the ‘66 Sixers were part of the dysfunctional cycle that characterized many of Wilt’s interactions with his team. Wilt is brought to a team to be the transcendent superstar to lead the team to greatness. Wilt puts up transcendent superstar numbers but feels as though he isn’t appreciated or supported enough (after all, how could he possibly be losing when putting up these numbers *unless* his teammates/coaches are to blame?) and so feuds with his coach and alienates his teammates, which implodes team performance, leading to loss which leads him to become more resentful and the cycle continues.
Sounds like a nightmare. Surely nothing good can be on the horizon for the ‘67 Sixers, right? You’d be forgiven for thinking that. Instead the following all happened the next season:
- Wilt praised his teammates, calling Luke Jackson “the ultimate power forward”, Hal Greer a deadly jumpshooter and Wali Jones an excellent defender and outside scorer;
- Wilt began to take his teammates out to dinner and pick up the tab, since his salary was greater than that of the entire rest of the team;
- Hal Greer spoke of Chamberlain as a leader, saying “You knew in a minute the Big Fella was ready to go . . . and everybody would follow.”
*Completely* unrelated to the above, the ‘67 Sixers went on to post the best regular season record and RSRS in the shot clock era to that point. So what in name of Jane Austen/NBA analogies happened? The same thing that happened to Mr. Darcy; he got told off by somebody he respected.
In 1967 they added a new coach, Alex Hannum. Hannum had coached Wilt in San Francisco. He was a crafty psychologist and understood Wilt well. He knew that Wilt, whose basic assumption was that he had more power than the coach and so was beyond reproach, would never respect a passive authority figure. So when Hannum took over he called a locker room meeting and laid it all out there, every issue with the team he saw over the last season. And many of these problems, understandably did not cast Wilt in the best light. So wounding were some of Hannum’s observations that teammates several times had to hold Wilt back to prevent a fistfight. Despite the fact that Wilt could certainly have pounded him into sticky goo Hannum never backed down, which earned Wilt’s respect. Later, when tempers had cooled, Hannum told Wilt that they both wanted to win a title, but that Wilt wasn’t acting in the ways best designed to do that. He needed Wilt to support his teammates, to shoot less and pass more. To take advantage of the attention the defense gave him by setting his teammates up more. And to ‘act like a man’ with more professional conduct. Wilt bought in.
Before we talk about the significance of that and how it affected the team, let’s clear up some misconceptions about Wilt. Given that he put up such insane scoring numbers it would be natural to think that he was taking a shot every time his team brought the ball up. But that wasn’t the case. Using a back-of-envelope formula to estimate the percentage of his team’s shooting possessions that Wilt used, he peaked at 36% in 1962 (the year of 50 points per game) and spent 3.5 seasons above 30%, though 1961 and 1966 both had him in the high 20s. That doesn’t sound crazy high. Compare this to Jordan, who took 40% of his team’s shooting possessions in ‘87, 35% in ‘88 and 34% in ‘91. In other words, Wilt at his most shot-takey shot about as often as Jordan, or a little less. How then did Wilt get 50 points a game? Easy, by playing in an era with many more possessions (so he could get more shots) and by playing the entire game every game. So Wilt, while taking a lot of shots, was hardly a historic ball-hog.
But there’s a little bit more to it than that. There are two ways in which a scorer can freeze out teammates. One is to take too many shots. The other is to be a ‘black hole’, scoring but not passing, taking but not giving. And this allegation against Wilt is entirely justified.
Some context:
Jordan averaged about 4.5 true shooting attempts per assist, though went as high as 5.3 in ‘93 and 7.2 in his insanely high-usage ‘87 season.
Kobe was as bad as 7 TSA per assist in ‘06, but spent ‘08-10 around 5.
Kevin Durant was as bad as 8.6 in his youth (2011) but by 2014 he was down to 4.6.
Noted “Black Hole” Kevin McHale averaged around 7 TSAs per assist during his peak.
Dwight Howard during his peak was around 10.
The worst big scorer I could find was Moses Malone, whose ‘79 through ‘83 put up eye-bleeding numbers between 11.4 and 16.4.
Playoff LeBron in Cleveland was in the mid-Twos
So that’s our frame of reference. Even “ball-hoggy” high usage players like Jordan and Kobe still dish an assist for every 7 shots *at their worst* and more often are around 5. Unskilled finishers can be as high as 10, or even in the low teens like Moses. That’s what we’re looking at.
From 1960 to 1962 Wilt’s rate was 18.6 TSA per assist. Holy balls. So he was taking shots like Jordan, but was passing even less per shot than Moses Malone (and that’s saying something). It is *this* that substantiates accusations against him of playing selfish offense. It’s not that he took too many shots. It’s that if you passed him the ball you’d never see it again. In ‘63 he dropped to 11.9, and in ‘64 (his first year with Alex Hannum in San Fran) he got as low as 6.8. In 1966 he had been as low as 5.8. So his offense had gradually moved from ‘the most epic of black holes’ to passing with about Kevin McHale levels of frequency, which isn’t good but isn’t awful either. In 1967, after his talk with Hannum, his TSA per assist dropped to 2.4, LeBron rates of passing (he used around half the possessions of LeBron, but in terms of what they were likely to do when they got the ball they were similar).
Let’s look at all of his teammates and what this change meant. We are lucky because the Sixers had the exact same Top 6 from ‘66 to ‘68, so we have consistent data here. Here is every player, their ages in those years, their ‘Load’ (this is the Backpicks stat to be clear) and their true shooting relative to league average:
Wali Jones (23-25):
Load: 23.2 -> 28.4 -> 29.3
rTS%: -7.5% -> -0.7% -> -5.2%
So hitting ‘67, Jones suddenly jumps in usage and makes a massive 6.8 point leap in shooting efficiency. The change mostly disappears in ‘68.
Hal Greer (29-31):
Load: 30.8 -> 30.2 -> 31.6
rTS%: +1.7% -> +1.7% -> +3.1%
Greer’s numbers are unchanged.
Chet Walker (25-27):
Load: 25.3 -> 27.9 -> 27.4
rTS%: +2.7% -> +6.4% -> +2.3%
Chet Walker saw a massive 3.7% jump in his age 26 season, but came right back in ‘68.
Luke Jackson (24-26):
Load: 19.9 -> 21.5 -> 20.5
rTS%: -2.8% -> -0.6% -> -2.7%
Luke Jackson saw a 2.2% jump in ‘67, but regressed in ‘68.
Billy Cunningham (22-24):
Load: 31.2 -> 36.1 -> 35.3
rTS%: -1.3% -> +2.0% -> +0.1%
In ‘67 Cunningham’s usage and efficiency both jumped, but in ‘68 he regressed.
Wilt Chamberlain (29-31):
Load: 37 -> 30 -> 32.2
rTS%: +6.0% -> +14.4% -> +5.9%
And Wilt took fewer shots, but made them at an incredibly efficient rate.
The Sixers’ offense exploded in ‘67, jumping from +0.4 to +5.4 with the *exact* same personnel. And every single player (minus Hal Greer) jumped in efficiency (even while increasing their usage). And this is in the exact same season where Wilt increased from Kobe levels of passing to LeBron levels of passing. Do I think that Wilt drove this change?
Yeah. I do. Sure the players were all at the right age for a big step forward. But they all fell off a cliff again in ‘68, indicating that it wasn’t about them. This is the *one* season where the roster can’t shut up about what a great teammate Wilt is, and Wilt transforms from taking 26% of his team’s shots in ‘66 to 17% of his team’s shots in ‘67. Suddenly Wilt was focusing on defending and rebounding, passing when his teammates were open but destroying the opposition if he wasn’t doubled (+14.4% efficiency!?!). Wilt ultimately wanted to win, he’d always wanted to win. But like Mr. Darcy, he’d been led to follow that goal in pride and conceit. And it took Alex Hannum (Elizabeth Bennet in this analogy) to give him a reality check, to show him that the best version of him wasn’t about him at all. It was a lesson Wilt took to like a duck to water . . . for a time.
So, upside, it's clear that when Wilt was super-engaged he was capable of being one of the best players ever. Wilt's impact in '67 smokes anything that Russell had done.
But look at the steps to get there. The problem on the '66 Sixers wasn't that Schayes wanted Wilt to shoot too much (Wilt's shooting and passing were honestly not big problems). It's that Wilt acted like he was completely above the team. When Hannum called him out on it, Wilt tried to physically assault his coach. Obviously this is an extraordinary circumstance (and we cannot know what words Hannum used) but compare this to Bill Russell or Tim Duncan playing for a famously acerbic coach and having their professionalism and drive set an example for the rest of the team (though Auerbach did generally secure Russell's permission to yell at him ahead of time). And in '67 Wilt suddenly acts like he's part of a team and suddenly the team destroys everyone.
On one hand you could say "In 1967 Wilt lifted all of his teammates to greatness". But, let's face it, all Wilt was really doing was being a team player and not being a gigantic self-absorbed drama queen. The counter-argument could be that Wilt was actually *depressing* the performance of his teammates. Look at Chet Walker and Luke Johnson's TS%:
Jackson: 47.3% (partial Wilt), 45.9% (full diva Wilt), 48.7% (team player Wilt)
Walker: 52.6%, 49.7%, 47.1% (partial Wilt), 51.4% (full diva Wilt), 55.7% (team player Wilt)
I guess, all I'm saying is, some of '67 was Wilt lifting his teammates, but some of it was also him suddenly no longer depressing his teammates. Remember, we don't have context for Wilt's teammates too much; they were playing with a black-hole diva for much of their careers. Are we sure that some of their weakness wasn't Wilt's conduct and playstyle undermining the rest of the team?
You can't blame all of this on Wilt's early coaches. Yes, they modeled for him what his relationship with the team should have been, but at the point where you're being a fairly open toxic headcase, I don't know how much of an excuse that becomes.
This was a really long way of saying, however good Wilt's box score stats make him look, he was almost certainly worse. His career is the perfect example of the sorts of things that box score stats miss. How good was Wilt? Not sure. But I can tell you that he was almost certainly worse than his stats suggest.
Compare this to Russell: "Not much of an offensive player. At his best he could take an average number of shots and make them at slightly above average rates, but those seasons were the exception. Generally he was a below average scorer, but he tended to score a little better in the playoffs. He was an outstanding rebounder (one of the very best in the league). He was a strong passer (but low volume) for a big. He blocked a ton of shots (possibly the most in the league). But he was famous for, instead of spiking the ball out of bounds, deflecting the ball to himself or a teammate and starting a fast break (making his blocks more valuable). And he was famous for his perfect rotations, in practice grabbing teammates on the wing and practicing pick and roll defense over and over again until their motions were perfectly in sync. We're talking Draymond/Duncan/LeBron/KG levels of rotation and defensive awareness combined with Hakeem/Mutombo levels of rim protection. And he was in an era where defense reigned supreme and rim protection was the most valuable skill you could have. Also, he was an obsessive professional, never did anything to detract from winning and went to bat for his teammates every chance he had. And his teammates' level of reverence for him bordered on fawning. He also led the best defenses in NBA history *consistently*."
I'd say "That guy is so obviously going to be undervalued by box score stats it's a joke". Especially with no blocks or steals.
Think about it from PER/Win Shares point of view. The stats are smart enough to know four things: 1) the Celtics were great teams, 2) they had ATG-level defenses, 3) Russell was their center and 4) he played a lot of minutes.
Literally, that's *everything* they have to go on. +/-? Nope. Blocks/steals? Nope. Player tracking data? Just kidding. The stats have no GD clue. The best they can do is say "The Celtics had a great defense and Russell was probably a reasonably big part of that." So they give him some credit. Which is why Russell even shows up as a Top 5 player most years.
But every single thing that we know outside of the box score
screams that Russell was the reason for all of it. Think about how Duncan's defense was generally +2.0 better than DBPM thinks it was. And that's with them having Duncan's blocks and steals. Russell literally checks every single box that suggests that he'd be underrated by box score metrics.
And Win Shares are zero sum. If Win Shares underrates Russell by 5-15 wins (very possible) then it's dividing up that 5-15 wins between Russell's teammates. And if Win Shares overrates Wilt by 5-15 wins (very possible) then it's dividing up 5-15 wins between Wilt's teammates? Comparing their teammates is very depending on those players being correctly evaluated.
But I've talked about this before, and perhaps that doesn't persuade you. Wilt almost certainly dominates Russell in head to head scoring. But what about Russell's impact on his teammates compared to Wilt's? What about Russell's impact on Wilt's teammates compared to Wilt's impact on Russell's?
Imagine Jordan in '87. Now imagine that Jordan took even more shots, 50% of his team's shots while he was on the floor. And given that he's Jordan, he still manages to do it around league average efficiency or a little lower. He posts PPG numbers that dwarf any other in the modern era, and he puts up PPX numbers that dwarf any ever. But he also alienates his teammates by being a full-on diva, never passes and his defensive impact drops a lot because of the sheer effort he needs to put into his scoring to maintain this volume. How would this Jordan be evaluated?
He'd be fawned over historically. The entire league would, in hushed tones, whisper of the kind of personal greatness that they'd never seen before. Nobody would have ever had a scoring season like that, nobody could ever come close.
Also, Box Score metrics would absolutely love him.
Also, his team would almost certainly do much worse than you'd expect.
That "Hyper-Jordan" would post some of the best box score metrics ever. And players would generally consider "Hyper-Jordan" to be the greatest ever. But would "Hyper-Jordan's" value to his team have gone up? Let's be honest, his team would probably have been better with real 1987 Jordan than Hyper-Jordan. So when I'm talking about "Adding Value" and whatnot, that's the sort of thing I'm talking about. Wilt can have been "Greater" in 1962, and had way better box score metrics in 1962, and still have the less valuable player.
I'm not saying that you're wrong. I'm just saying that there are a ton of non-box score data points that suggest that Russell has a serious case here.
Remember the box score stats are only the finger pointing at the moon.
