Baller2014 wrote:Now see, this is disingenuous. If we're going to look at how many shots West took per 36, then I'm totally cool with that... except the effect of doing that massively reduces the stat lines that people are quoting. So the very criticism you're making misses the point. This isn't about whether West could get 18.7 shots a game today (of course he could), it's about whether he could get the 24+ shots per game he was getting in the 65-70 playoff run that his fans cited as demonstrating his dominance (he couldn't, unless it was a first round exit team where he had to gun like crazy). That's the pace advantage West enjoys, and Dr J and Malone don't. Nor would West be playing that many minutes in today's game.
Not really. I was using it to describe shooting rate. We're expecting him to generally play 36+ mpg over the prime of his career, which isn't atypical, and given 55% TS, we can expect some pretty significant results. The big trade-off is that people are expecting his stats to diminish based on pace, which I'm saying probably wouldn't affect a guy who was only shooting at that rate so much as expected. Pace typically affects volume of attempts, and it affects peripheral players before it affects stars (except at extreme ranges of volume and usage).
There's nothing about West's general production line that doesn't suggest straight portability compared to stars now.
Consider the .462 FTR, the 81.4% FT and then 18-20 FGA/g with his career FG% of 47.4%.
Minor rounding, of course, but also not inventing 3P% for him just yet.
18: 8.5/18 FG, 6.8/8.3 -> 23.8 ppg, 54.96% TS
19: 9/19, 7.2/8.8 -> 25.2 ppg, 55.1% TS
20: 9.5/20, 7.5/9.2 -> 26.5 ppg, 55.1% TS
Yeah, it's not 30 ppg, but it's still an elite volume scorer, and a top 3 player when you account for D and playmaking. There's no reason to sell him short because he'd probably hover in the 25-27 ppg... without accounting for 3pt shooting.
If you assume even 3 3PA/g and 33.3% shooting, that's another point per game on top of each of those averages, which means roughly 25-28 ppg. Again, yeah, he's probably not going to lead the league in scoring every year at 18-19 FGA/g, but at an early peak, he might challenge (given that Durant just won with 27.7 ppg).
Anyway, the point I was making was that you were disingenuously dismissing shooting volume as the product of bad rosters or gunner mentality, and you're flatly wrong based on recent NBA history and by the way things went in the 80s and 90s. 20 FGA/g in 40 mpg or thereabouts isn't super harmful if you're playing a good passing game and not killing ball movement with extensive isolation, which isn't an issue with West. 20 FGA/g in 40 mpg is the same as 18 FGA/g in 36 mpg, just stretched out over a longer period of time, so it's not at all unreasonable in the modern setting, but again, even at 18 FGA/g and assuming a slightly lower-than-usual 3P% for a modern volume shooter, West still looks like a 25 ppg player. At the 39 mpg he played in his actual career, he looks like a 26-28 ppg scorer.... which is a lot like the 27 ppg he averaged in his actual career, which is what I'm saying.
If we were looking at Baylor, I'd 100% agree that pace and era shifts would kill his rebounding and scoring averages, but West's minutes and attempts were all in line with contemporary scorers. Baylor had a 6-year stretch where he averaged 27.2 FGA/g. THAT'S the sort of thing which pace would kill, but we've seen WAY too many guys capable of posting the basic volume that West was managing back then even over the past 10 years, let alone if you stretch back to the 90s. It's doable, particularly for a guy with a strong jumper and the willingness to pop from 18-20, which West clearly had. You give him a PnR partner and he's gonna have clean looks from 17+ feet all day long and he's clearly going to bury them at a pretty wicked rate, since he didn't have 3pt shots changing things for him in his own era and still shot pretty damned well.
There's nothing about his play which suggests that West would have MORE trouble in a slower environment or that he'd have difficulty getting to the volume at which he played in his own time. You hand him 39 mpg (not wholly unusual for top-end players) and 19 FGA/g, boom, he's right at where he was in his own career. No problems. That's the thing about being able to shoot like that, if you put the ball in that guy's hands, he's going to make shots. And West was clearly cool with going to the rim and getting smacked around by the bigs, which is what bore out that FTR, and that helped him a lot. He'd still likely have some longevity issues today, but I'm betting 50 years of medical advances and differing equipment do him a few favors, yeah? He played through a lot of stuff, he'd generally be out there doing mean things to the opposition.
As an aside,
I cast my runoff vote for Jerry West; love the Doc, but I'm gonna have to wait before voting him in.
