What player have you changed your mind about over time?

[Ursusamericanus]

Patrick Ewing - as a kid I viewed him as a near-flawless, underrated center who simply got unlucky. A tragic hero.

In truth, yes he was great and yes he got unlucky at times, but he had several holes in his game which limited the Knicks. He could have used more help, but he also could have worked on being a better passer out of double teams or diversifying his offensive repertoire. The spamming of the mid-range jumper was a bit much. He also could have been a more inclusive, vocal leader of the team. Casting all the blame on Starks for the loss in '94 against the Rockets is a bit unfair, as Ewing went scoreless in the fourth quarter of game 6 when they could have closed the series out. And he shot 36% for the series! Hakeem badly exposed him, and I've grown to recognize and admit that over time.

Nuance, baby.

[Doctor MJ]

A couple of threads have come up this past little while and I've been thinking about players that I've changed my mind about over time. Maybe some new data has come out, maybe you've learned some new things about the game, whatever it is, what are some players who you've altered your evaluation of as time has passed?

A simple example.

For me, Allen Iverson is a big one. When I was a teenager, he was everything I hated about basketball. He dribbled too much, he shot poorly, he was breaking the rules every time he touched the ball. Amusingly, I would later come to enjoy this as it became evident that the league was going to let it keep happening and some of my other favorite players did it all the time, so... My bad, AI. You were just a trailblazer for entertainment before I knew what that was, heh. The 01 Sixers had this awesome defense and he was just gunning away like an inefficient chucker, la la la. The regular criticisms leveled in his direction at the time. As I got older, and actually as I got to RealGM in particular, I started reading some stuff from some of the wiser, more educated minds and seeing some projects about elevating bad offenses, the value of inefficient scoring in such contexts, etc. Started seeing some more box score plus-minus kind of stuff, etc. And for a while, I was skeptical, being younger and with a head full of steam and all that. But ultimately, it became fairly clear that by every measure, Iverson was at least bootstrapping those bad offenses as described. Later, as he got to the Nuggets and the league environment changed and so forth and he continued to have trouble mixing with other scorers, other criticisms became relevant, but it was still true that what he'd been doing was about as good as it was going to get in that absence of a top-tier star in that era, like that extremely exclusive club of a handful of players in any season at the apex of the offensive game. No shame not being that, right?

And as I keep participating in these threads and doing stat searches and so forth, he keeps popping up with these seasons in impressive company, particularly for having more than one of them. A lot of them are fairly arbitrary search criteria, of course. 25 ppg, 4 apg, 5 OBPM. Stuff like that. But you poke around enough and it's clear that he was exerting a positive impact on some low offensive talent rosters, just as all his fans had been saying all along.



Something like that. What players come to mind for you guys?

Interesting, I'm the other way.

Circa '00-01, AI was my favorite player and I defended him in LA against the attacks from Laker fans.
Then I started looking more at the data, and really backed off.

[Doctor MJ]

Guys who come to mind:

Steve Nash - '04-05 was a trigger for me to look more closely at basketball. I remember when Nash won the first Player of the Month that season over Amare and thinking "This is ridiculous!". More I looked at things, the more it turned everything I thought I knew on its head.

Kevin Garnett - Over time, the meaning of his Celtic run has re-shaped how I see him, his career, and frankly career achievement evaluation in general.

Bill Russell - Was completely cynical at the idea that a guy who wasn't really scoring could have actually been better at basketball than Wilt Chamberlain, but the more I looked into the details, I ended up on Team Russell.

[tsherkin]

Interesting, I'm the other way.

Circa '00-01, AI was my favorite player and I defended him in LA against the attacks from Laker fans.
Then I started looking more at the data, and really backed off.

I think I came from a place TOO negative. And wasn't really acknowledging the value, in lane, of a weaker volume scorer lifting the floor of a bad offensive team. There remain many players I'd prefer to build around than AI, no doubt, but I'm just a little higher on him than I used to be. And honestly, what I have seen statistically does seem to back the notion that he was lifting the offense to an extent. Now, if you want to discuss portability, then we have a very different, new discussion and it's a place where I feel AI loses out a lot.

[Narigo]

Kobe. before i discovered realgm, I thought he was the 2nd best player ever behind MJ

[falcolombardi]

Interesting, I'm the other way.

Circa '00-01, AI was my favorite player and I defended him in LA against the attacks from Laker fans.
Then I started looking more at the data, and really backed off.

I think I came from a place TOO negative. And wasn't really acknowledging the value, in lane, of a weaker volume scorer lifting the floor of a bad offensive team. There remain many players I'd prefer to build around than AI, no doubt, but I'm just a little higher on him than I used to be. And honestly, what I have seen statistically does seem to back the notion that he was lifting the offense to an extent. Now, if you want to discuss portability, then we have a very different, new discussion and it's a place where I feel AI loses out a lot.

i think offensive floor raising is really underated cause people only focus on offense and building the best possible offense

there is a lot of value to floor raising a team of great defenders and rebounders into a solid offense even as far as championships go, iverson didnt fail to win a ring cause he was a floor raiser, he did because he and the sixers were no good enough

[Doctor MJ]

Interesting, I'm the other way.

Circa '00-01, AI was my favorite player and I defended him in LA against the attacks from Laker fans.
Then I started looking more at the data, and really backed off.

I think I came from a place TOO negative. And wasn't really acknowledging the value, in lane, of a weaker volume scorer lifting the floor of a bad offensive team. There remain many players I'd prefer to build around than AI, no doubt, but I'm just a little higher on him than I used to be. And honestly, what I have seen statistically does seem to back the notion that he was lifting the offense to an extent. Now, if you want to discuss portability, then we have a very different, new discussion and it's a place where I feel AI loses out a lot.

Okay, and y'know I'll say that I've had some oscillation on my view of AI. While my new equilibrium is closer to valley than peak, he was the driving force on a team that consistently got to the playoffs, and had a tendency to perform better in the playoffs than in the regular season.

I might say something similar about Shaq & Kobe, and I'd say there are less dramatic swings back & forth for a number of players over my time 'round here.

[Doctor MJ]

Interesting, I'm the other way.

Circa '00-01, AI was my favorite player and I defended him in LA against the attacks from Laker fans.
Then I started looking more at the data, and really backed off.

I think I came from a place TOO negative. And wasn't really acknowledging the value, in lane, of a weaker volume scorer lifting the floor of a bad offensive team. There remain many players I'd prefer to build around than AI, no doubt, but I'm just a little higher on him than I used to be. And honestly, what I have seen statistically does seem to back the notion that he was lifting the offense to an extent. Now, if you want to discuss portability, then we have a very different, new discussion and it's a place where I feel AI loses out a lot.

i think offensive floor raising is really underated cause people only focus on offense and building the best possible offense

there is a lot of value to floor raising a team of great defenders and rebounders into a solid offense even as far as championships go, iverson didnt fail to win a ring cause he was a floor raiser, he did because he and the sixers were no good enough

I get where you're coming from definitely, but while we can have a philosophical difference as to much high we expect such approaches to climb, there is also the matter that Iverson's +/- just doesn't look dramatic like we've seen from other floor raisers.

As I'm sure everyone knows, I'm very critical of Westbrook, but he really did have tangible signs of "fall off a cliff without me" impact along the lines that everyone argued about Iverson back when he was winning that MVP, but really never turned up in the data.

As you probably know this is important to me as a data point in general, but I really want to emphasize that arguments defending AI's at the time (about things like lack of big-man stats, defensive impact, elite performance in early advanced stats, questionable decision making, shooting efficiency, as well as attitude) were couched in proto-plus-minus reasoning at a time where the basketball collective didn't think such data would ever actually be available, let alone for the year they were living through. But we have the data now and to me it effectively negates an essential part of the general thesis for why AI should be seen more impactful than the objective indicators indicate.

[falcolombardi]

I think I came from a place TOO negative. And wasn't really acknowledging the value, in lane, of a weaker volume scorer lifting the floor of a bad offensive team. There remain many players I'd prefer to build around than AI, no doubt, but I'm just a little higher on him than I used to be. And honestly, what I have seen statistically does seem to back the notion that he was lifting the offense to an extent. Now, if you want to discuss portability, then we have a very different, new discussion and it's a place where I feel AI loses out a lot.

i think offensive floor raising is really underated cause people only focus on offense and building the best possible offense

there is a lot of value to floor raising a team of great defenders and rebounders into a solid offense even as far as championships go, iverson didnt fail to win a ring cause he was a floor raiser, he did because he and the sixers were no good enough

I get where you're coming from definitely, but while we can have a philosophical difference as to much high we expect such approaches to climb, there is also the matter that Iverson's +/- just doesn't look dramatic like we've seen from other floor raisers.

As I'm sure everyone knows, I'm very critical of Westbrook, but he really did have tangible signs of "fall off a cliff without me" impact along the lines that everyone argued about Iverson back when he was winning that MVP, but really never turned up in the data.

As you probably know this is important to me as a data point in general, but I really want to emphasize that arguments defending AI's at the time (about things like lack of big-man stats, defensive impact, elite performance in early advanced stats, questionable decision making, shooting efficiency, as well as attitude) were couched in proto-plus-minus reasoning at a time where the basketball collective didn't think such data would ever actually be available, let alone for the year they were living through. But we have the data now and to me it effectively negates an essential part of the general thesis for why AI should be seen more impactful than the objective indicators indicate.

i dont disagree, my point is about floorraising in general and defending its value in championship construction

not about how good iverson is or is not

[tsherkin]

Okay, and y'know I'll say that I've had some oscillation on my view of AI. While my new equilibrium is closer to valley than peak, he was the driving force on a team that consistently got to the playoffs, and had a tendency to perform better in the playoffs than in the regular season.

Yeah, I mean, there are aspects to AI's game that don't correlate to strong team offense. He chews a lot of possessions and isn't stunningly efficient and he also wasn't a gifted playmaker, more of a brute-force playmaker who could make the basic passes when defenses collapsed in on his drives. There's utility to that, but he's not that guy who's gonna threaten those top 5 or better kind of offenses. Still, like Rose later proved again in 2011, you can be an unimpressive scorer who moves the ball and still drive team offense, and that sometimes gets lost a little, I've learned.