RealGM 2023 Top 100 Project - General Thread

[One_and_Done]

I just saw this, and will happily nominate to participate.

[ZeppelinPage]

H.) Efficiency needs to be contextualised to team role and scoring load. This tends to be a mistake with people who mostly are looking at raw boxscore averages, but I see it with people watching games too. Yes, there are players who “chuck”, and yes, that can be frustrating, and yes, it would be better if those players could score more with less, but it is not feasible to funnel shots to roleplayers. There is a burden to shotmaking.

One of my first conversations with [Lloyd/World B.] Free led to him asking, “Do you know how hard it is to get 20?”

“Twenty points?” I asked.

“No, 20 shots a game,” he said.

I laughed.

Free was serious. He explained how defenses were set up to stop players like him, scorers on bad teams. The goal was to keep the ball out of his hands. And when he did have the ball, he often faced two defenders. It took strength, energy and ingenuity to get off 20 decent shots a game.

“It can wear you down knowing you have to carry the offense for your team,” he said. “But I did it, year after year.”

Not everything is about “ceiling raising”.

This is a great point that I wanted to highlight. Your quote reminded me of something Jerry West said in his book West by West:

"Every player sets a standard for himself, seeks his own level of play. If Kobe Bryant hits nine of twenty-seven shots, he's criticized for having a terrible night, but the reality is that there may not be another player on the team who is good enough to take twenty-seven shots, or courageous enough to take them even though he is having a bad shooting night. The next night, Kobe might make eighteen out of twenty-seven, and all of a sudden he goes from a guy who took a lot of bad shots to a hero, and I'll guarantee you that many of those shots were the same shots he missed the night before."

Context is always important when evaluating. In this analytics era, with TS Add and other metrics being used to evaluate efficiency, it's crucial to remember the specific role and usage of each player on the team. West is correct; not every player can take that many shots, and it can definitely be a 'burden,' as you put it. But ultimately, someone has to shoot the ball. If a key player doesn't take the shot, it might just mean that a role player will end up taking a worse shot anyways, expending more energy.

[trelos6]

Keen to be a voter

[AEnigma]

H.) Efficiency needs to be contextualised to team role and scoring load. This tends to be a mistake with people who mostly are looking at raw boxscore averages, but I see it with people watching games too. Yes, there are players who “chuck”, and yes, that can be frustrating, and yes, it would be better if those players could score more with less, but it is not feasible to funnel shots to roleplayers. There is a burden to shotmaking.

One of my first conversations with [Lloyd/World B.] Free led to him asking, “Do you know how hard it is to get 20?”

“Twenty points?” I asked.

“No, 20 shots a game,” he said.

I laughed.

Free was serious. He explained how defenses were set up to stop players like him, scorers on bad teams. The goal was to keep the ball out of his hands. And when he did have the ball, he often faced two defenders. It took strength, energy and ingenuity to get off 20 decent shots a game.

“It can wear you down knowing you have to carry the offense for your team,” he said. “But I did it, year after year.”

Not everything is about “ceiling raising”.

This is a great point that I wanted to highlight. Your quote reminded me of something Jerry West said in his book West by West:

"Every player sets a standard for himself, seeks his own level of play. If Kobe Bryant hits nine of twenty-seven shots, he's criticized for having a terrible night, but the reality is that there may not be another player on the team who is good enough to take twenty-seven shots, or courageous enough to take them even though he is having a bad shooting night. The next night, Kobe might make eighteen out of twenty-seven, and all of a sudden he goes from a guy who took a lot of bad shots to a hero, and I'll guarantee you that many of those shots were the same shots he missed the night before."

Context is always important when evaluating. In this analytics era, with TS Add and other metrics being used to evaluate efficiency, it's crucial to remember the specific role and usage of each player on the team. West is correct; not every player can take that many shots, and it can definitely be a 'burden,' as you put it. But ultimately, someone has to shoot the ball. If a key player doesn't take the shot, it might just mean that a role player will end up taking a worse shot anyways, expending more energy.

Yeah. And I am not saying these guys are legitimately irreplaceable — Kobe’s team survived when he missed time in 2010, Jordan’s team survived his first retirement, Iverson’s team survived his absences in 2000 and 2001, etc. — but there is a space between “this guy was low efficiency and therefore not actually that valuable” and the more typical standard of “ppg is everything.”

[DQuinn1575]

I'm in.
Lots of discussion on voting, I'm fine however you want to do it.
Appreciate you and your predecessors doing it, it's a lot of work.

[DQuinn1575]

Just a thought.
If we only nominate 5 or 6, why not vote all 6?
If we require a run-off without a majority vote, then you will already have the votes, and
1.) won't have to wait a day or two for the runoff, and
2.) Your runoff vote will have more votes, as (hopefully) everyone who voted will give you all 6 spots.

With 100 spots this is a looong project for a board, making the runoff an auto feature could reduce it by a month or two.

Just throwing out an idea.

[SpreeS]

Realgm TOP100 is the most powerful list for elevation players in my opinion. I would like to vote too, but i am short of time. Two kids, wife and job eat my whole time

[Clyde Frazier]

I think I’d like to return to this.

I had a lot of fun participating in 2014 and learned a ton from the project.

I’ve been tinkering with a new model to give me a baseline ranking that I can use as the backbone of my list.

You're making me nostalgic about the 2014 project! As a longevity guy I think my goal for this one is to better figure out how to handle active players. It helps that guys like giannis, jokic, curry, etc have extended careers vs past projects. I really have trouble reconciling active guys who've played like 6-7 seasons.

[Moonbeam]

I think I’d like to return to this.

I had a lot of fun participating in 2014 and learned a ton from the project.

I’ve been tinkering with a new model to give me a baseline ranking that I can use as the backbone of my list.

You're making me nostalgic about the 2014 project! As a longevity guy I think my goal for this one is to better figure out how to handle active players. It helps that guys like giannis, jokic, curry, etc have extended careers vs past projects. I really have trouble reconciling active guys who've played like 6-7 seasons.

I agree that it's tricky to know how to include active careers with completed ones, but there are other factors in relation to longevity which I also struggle to grapple with. The modern game allows players to join the league much earlier than previously. I have no doubt that high-impact rookies like Kareem, Oscar, Unseld, Bellamy, etc. would have likely had strong impact had they been allowed to enter the league at 19 or 20. This may have come at the cost of some of their later years with added mileage, etc., but it's another dimension to consider in the longevity question.

The metrics I'm working on will allow me to view player careers through multiple prisms and come up with rankings based on any N I choose for a "Top N seasons" list. They are still a work in progress, but I think these metrics will have me better prepared than in 2014, where my metric at the time was a bit more ad hoc and used the Top 9 seasons only.

[mikejames23]

I want to participate. I will be on and off my computer a bit, but I think I can vote often.

Edit - You should run a Top 50 current day thread.

[Dooley]

I would like to participate if that's possible

[Doctor MJ]

Alright folks:

The Top 100 project will begin tomorrow with the opening of the #1 post. The plan will be to be doing 3-days per thread until further notice, however I will give more time for the first post if requested.

The first thread will only have Induction votes - no Nomination vote. After the first thread, we will adopt a two-step system of Nomination before Induction with 5 Nominees as the norm. The first set of Nominees will be the top 5 non-winning Induction vote getters from the first Induction vote, with the tiebreaker being placement on the 2020 Top 100.

Induction votes will be a 2-man ballot which I would encourage folks to think of as not as your top 2 guys so much as your top guy followed by your pick in the case of a run-off that your top guy doesn't qualify for. If you don't have a sense for who would be in that runoff, then feel free to just vote your second top guy or no one at all. The purpose of the 2-man ballot is to mitigate the feeling that you must choose between championing your top guy or having a say in who wins out, so if you're not actually feeling of such a choice driving you nuts, then don't worry about it.

I'll be using that second vote to do a simplistic instant runoff. If this still ends in a tie, we'll do a separate Runoff thread.

For Nomination votes, it will be just a 1-man ballot. In the event that the Induction vote has a winner but the Nomination has a tie, we will plan to treat all of the tied guys as Nomination winners and add them as Nominees for the next Induction vote, and we will not have any more Nomination votes until the number of existing Nominees drops back down to the 5-man standard.

If an Induction Runoff thread is required and the Nomination vote was also tied, then we'll do a Runoff for the Nomination as well.

Note that while none of these votes are "Mandatory" in the sense you'll get booted from the project for missing them, I'd like to encourage folks to specifically see the Nomination vote as optional with the Induction votes being the real meat of the project. If you're feeling overwhelmed thinking about every player not yet Inducted, just focus on the 5 (or so) guys we have already Nominated.

All of this is subject to change as the project goes along, but this is where we will begin.

Thank you for all your input on how we should do the voting. As those who have been following can see, I did make some changes based on the suggestions of others, but most of the suggestions were not incorporated. My apologies if you feel you're not being listened to, but aside from the fact that I can't incorporate all suggestions, I have a long history of running projects such as these and the simplifications I'm implementing this time are there for a reason. It's not a perfect system, but nothing is.

In terms of the voter list, here are the people I have so far:

AEnigma
Ambrose
ceilng raiser
Clyde Frazier
Colbinii
cupcakesnake
Doctor MJ
Dooley
DQuinn1575
Dr Positivity
Dutchball97
eminence
falcolombardi
Fundamentals21
homecourtloss
iggymcfrack
LA Bird
Lou Fan
Moonbeam
OhayoKD
One_and_Done
penbeast0
rk2023
ShaqAttac
Tim Lehrbach
trelos6
trex_8063
ZeppelinPage

I've included people whose posting implied they'd be participating. If I've included your name and you don't want to be on the list, tell me.

If you want to participate and are not on the list, please post in this thread now and going forward. I will not be adding more people to the project simply because they post in a voting thread.

Further: I'll still be adding people into the voting pool immediately during the first thread. After that, my intention is to have folks participate as non-voters first rather than letting them just jump in because they are passionate about the particular vote taking place.

[Baski]

Really looking forward to this year's project. It's been a wild 3 years. Would've loved to participate but I've been extremely flaky this year as far as the board goes.

Looking at the voter list though It's in very good hands.

Good luck to you guys and I'll be reading along.

Also thanks to DMJ for hosting it. Voting through 100 rounds is rough so I can't imagine what it must take to host the damn thing.

[lessthanjake]

I’d like to be added if that’s possible still.

[ceoofkobefans]

This seems like a lot of fun and will be the first time I participate in the top 100 voting (which I would like to do). Can’t wait to discuss where players should rank (especially when we get past the top 50). Really think participating in this list will help me flesh out my top 100-125 better

I would also like to add are we allowed to use our own criteria or do we have to strictly follow the criteria given? (For example I don’t value accolades or championships in my criteria and my list only spans from ≈ 1960 to 2023 since I’m not confident in evaluating guy like Pettit or Cousy with almost 0 extended film.)

Can’t wait for this to start

[penbeast0]

As far as I know, there is no set criteria except that we are looking at on the court greatness, not marketing or icon status. 100 greatest basketball players to ever play in the NBA; your criteria are your own.

[Doctor MJ]

This seems like a lot of fun and will be the first time I participate in the top 100 voting (which I would like to do). Can’t wait to discuss where players should rank (especially when we get past the top 50). Really think participating in this list will help me flesh out my top 100-125 better

I would also like to add are we allowed to use our own criteria or do we have to strictly follow the criteria given? (For example I don’t value accolades or championships in my criteria and my list only spans from ≈ 1960 to 2023 since I’m not confident in evaluating guy like Pettit or Cousy with almost 0 extended film.)

Can’t wait for this to start

So, to be clear, you’re not supposed to ignore the guys from the deep past just because you don’t know much about them. I’m not going to chase you down and ask “Why haven’t you voted for Bob Pettit yet?!”, but read what others say as they make their case and try to deepen your understanding. If you have questions please ask.

And also to be clear: All of us are missing knowledge about the past. We’re not diving into history because of what we already know, but because we like to learn.


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[Taj FTW]

This seems like a lot of fun and will be the first time I participate in the top 100 voting (which I would like to do). Can’t wait to discuss where players should rank (especially when we get past the top 50). Really think participating in this list will help me flesh out my top 100-125 better

I would also like to add are we allowed to use our own criteria or do we have to strictly follow the criteria given? (For example I don’t value accolades or championships in my criteria and my list only spans from ≈ 1960 to 2023 since I’m not confident in evaluating guy like Pettit or Cousy with almost 0 extended film.)

Can’t wait for this to start

So, to be clear, you’re not supposed to ignore the guys from the deep past just because you don’t know much about them. I’m not going to chase you down and ask “Why haven’t you voted for Bob Pettit yet?!”, but read what others say as they make their case and try to deepen your understanding. If you have questions please ask.

And also to be clear: All of us are missing knowledge about the past. We’re not diving into history because of what we already know, but because we like to learn.


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Can i get in on this too?

[trex_8063]

I’d like to participate, Doc. Thanks again

[Moonbeam]

Doc, the voting structure in the OP doesn't seem to match what's in post #1, in which you say:

"1. In this thread you are to vote for your GOAT, and you also get a second vote to give you a say if your GOAT isn't one of the top 2 candidates."

I don't see any mention of 6 candidates nor of nominating a player to join the pool for the #2 thread, etc.

So in thread #1, are we to vote for our #1 and #2 GOAT, or just the #1 GOAT for now, and should it be needed, a further vote among the top 2 candidates in a runoff?

Maybe I'm a little clueless today --- the Lillard trade request has my head spinning a bit.