Doctor MJ wrote:Also, as on offense, Wilt tended to focus on the tangible. He felt like if he blocked as many shots as Russell, he was doing as much as Russell on defense and he'd get miffed when a coach told him he was doing something "wrong", i.e. "Can you do more of X like Russell does?".
Getting back to the counterintuitive issue of a high efficiency player taking fewer shots and his team posting greater efficiency, I think what you said above is a major part of understanding Hannum's strategy.
The lost marginal efficiency of Wilt taking fewer shots was made up by the increased efficiency of his floormates, who are taking the majority of the shots even in a high usage Wilt scenario. That's the basic explantation of how this worked. In short, Wilt didn't gunk up the offense.
Maginal is the key word here. If we look at Wilt's FGM and FGA for 1966/67 and 1967/68, we see that he attempted 10.57 fewer shots per 48 and made 3.56 fewer shots per 48 (both rounded). His marginal FG% on those shots he surrendered was only .337. There were probably fewer turnovers involved as well due to fewer entry passes into Chamberlain. Even if turnovers were the same, the FG% for extra teammate attempts only needed to be .337 for this strategy to "break even", so it makes perfect sense.
Where it gets tricky is that the usage change was so great that we don't know if this was really the optimum solution. In other words, if Wilt gave up only 7 shots instead of 10.5, he might have shot .400 on those extra shots he retained. In the meantime those extra 3.5 shots distributed among teammates may have been the worst of the worst percentage shots...far below .400. We would need to know the usage curve of Wilt and his teammates to be certain. There was probably an "in between" usage decline that would have produced even better results.
So why didn't Hannum do this? Because like you said, Wilt was focused on the tangible. Hannum knew it would be an easier sell to get Wilt to surrender 10 or 11 shots in order to accrue a tremendous number of assists and rebounds. If he asked Wilt to surrender fewer shots, then that would come at the expense of his rebounding, FG%, and assists. If he was going to surrender the scoring duties, he needed the rebounding title (rpg and total reb). He needed to be number 1 at FG%. He needed to be far up the ranks in total assists and apb (3rd in both). If he was going to accept Hannum's suggestion, he was going to need to see tangible proof that he "out Russelled" Russell on the stat sheet: decisive apg and ast advantage, decisive rpg and tot reb advantage, etc.
In a nutshell, I don't think Wilt's touches per min needed to slip from 1st to 5th among starters to get the best results. He went from clear #1 to clear #5 in a year. It may have made more sense for his touches FGA+0.44xFTA) per 48 to decline by 5 or 6 per 48 rather than 10+. That would be put him on basically the same level as players 2-4, with only Cunningham being the clear leader. That was just a tougher sell and it would be better for the team to go big than to risk a smaller adjustment that Wilt may have abandoned midway through the year if his stat line couldn't show him he was the "best" at something.
