reapaman wrote:You took Love's best season and used it in an argument to give a baseline of what Bird could do and said Bird could do better than that since he is arbitrarily seen as being better than Love. I did the same thing with Chambers then you switched your argument (btw your statement about total stats taking pace adjustment out the equation is inaccurate, but I will address that another time). You said nothing about total stats in your original argument.
If you disagree with me then fine, but we can't have a meaningful debate if people are going to switch their arguments whenever someone uses their statements against them. The only reason I'm calling this out is because this happens in nearly every thread like this and it end up turning in to a "your a kid and you don't know anything" argument instead of a meaningful analytical response.
I'm not trying to argue with you and I respect your knowledge and where you are coming from. I think we may be arguing along different tracks.
You're right about total stats, at least as regards something like PER. I know there is aPER, for example.
For me, bringing up Chambers is not meaningful. Chambers is not on the level of Love or Bird. I wanted to find the easiest way to demonstrate that, so I just grabbed BPM to do so. That seemed like a useful stat and one which has historical relevance (a stat which is useful to compare over eras). From Basketball Reference:
http://www.basketball-reference.com/about/bpm.htmlBPM was created to intentionally only use information that is available historically, going back to 1973-74. More recently there has been more information gathered, both in box scores and via play-by-play, but in order to create a stat with historical usefulness, those stats have been ignored for BPM. In other words – it is possible to create a better stat than BPM for measuring players, but difficult to make a better one that can also be used historically.
I wanted to get away from "peak," as you pointed out. That's not a great measurement, I agree. But I thought BPM, for a career, would be a good way for those who may not be as stats-savvy as yourself to kind of get a snapshot of where Bird, Love and Chambers are at in that regard.
I will say this, in all seriousness: I can't think of any basketball analyst who would rank Love above Bird. I know you said that it's "arbitrarily" the case that Bird is seen as being better than Love, but I don't know if there is anyone who would try to argue otherwise.
However, that said, Love's best WS/48 season is better than any of those put up by Bird. So I will give him that.
