Nba g.o.a.t.

The Game Room
1

LONG POST ALERT!
Inspired by the discussion in the NBA playoff thread (in which I was talking up Larry Bird for some bizarre reason), I devised a simple point system to try to rank the great NBA players by career accomplishments.

Each year, a total of six points are awarded: one for winning the MVP, one for leading in scoring, and half a point each for leading in rebounds or assists. The team which wins the championship gets two points and the Finals loser gets one, which are divided equally among all its players who made an all-NBA team (first, second or third).

So, for example, this year, Stephen Curry earned two points (one for being one of two all-NBA players on the champion and one for winning the MVP). Klay Thompson earned a point for winning the championship, and LeBron and Kyrie Irving both earned half a point for winning the East. Russell Westbrook earned a point for leading the league in scoring, and Chris Paul and DeAndre Jordan earned half-points for winning the assist and rebounding titles respectively.

Boring minutiae: Points for reaching the Finals were divided between a team’s All-Stars if it had no all-NBA players; in the few cases where a team made it to the Finals without even one All-Star, I divided its points between its top three in P+A+R. Prior to 1957, the league didn’t elect a MVP, so I decided to assume that the scoring leader in those years would have been the MVP. Rebounds weren’t kept as a statistic during the league’s first two years; I decided to deal with it.

This system rewards all the things I think we look for in great players: statistical dominance, playing a crucial role on championship teams, and the subjective opinions of those who saw him play. Obviously it is a fairly blunt instrument and there may be good reasons for arguing that a player is somewhat better or worse than this would suggest.

The envelope, please…here are all the players with career scores of 5 or above, active players bolded:

  1. Michael Jordan 22
  2. Wilt Chamberlain 20
  3. Kareem 14 ½
  4. Magic 14 ½
  5. Bill Russell 14
    6**. Tim Duncan ** 10 ½
  6. George Mikan* 10 1/6
  7. **Kobe ** 10
  8. **LeBron ** 10
  9. Bob Cousy 9 2/3
  10. Larry Bird! 9 ½
  11. Bob Pettit 9
  12. Jerry West 8
  13. Moses Malone 8
  14. Shaq 8
  15. John Havlicek 7 1/3
  16. Neil Johnston* 7 1/6
  17. Oscar Robertson 6
  18. Hakeem 6
  19. Allen Iverson 5 ½
  20. **Kevin Durant ** 5 ½

Other notable active players: Kevin Garnett 4 1/3, Dwayne Wade and Dirk Nowitzki 4, Dwight Howard 3 ½

Notes: Well, I guess it bodes well for the system that it agrees with the general consensus about the best player ever. The thing I can’t believe I had somehow forgotten about MJ is that he led the league in scoring ten times, the most ever. Of course he also won five MVPs and six rings (he gets both points for 1991 and splits them with Pippen the other five).

Wilt counters with seven scoring titles, eleven rebounding titles, and one assist title, four MVPs. He earned one point each for three NBA Finals appearances (lost with the ’64 Warriors, won with the ’67 Sixers and ’72 Lakers); he also went to the Finals in his last year with the ’73 Lakers, but didn’t make the all-NBA team that year. Wilt’s problem, of course, was that his career largely overlapped with the Celtic dynasty – he lost seven conference finals in his career, six of them to the Bostons. If we awarded a half point for just reaching the conference finals, he would edge ahead of MJ 23 ½ - 23. If he had had the fortune to play with better teammates (or, as some might put it, if he had been more of a leader and less of a pain in the ass) he easily could have won a few more titles and pulled ahead of MJ – but then again, Jordan could also have earned even more points if he hadn’t taken two of his prime seasons off.

Again, this is a very simple system to gauge career accomplishment, and it may miss a lot, but I am now convinced that these two men are the only reasonable GOAT candidates, far ahead of the rest of the pack.

I think it is pretty cool that the two pillars of the Showtime Lakers end up exactly tied.

In the other thread I argued that nobody has ever done more with less than Tim Duncan, and although he’s nowhere near the top overall on this ranking I did have a point: Duncan has been the only all-NBA player on four championship teams. Magic did it three times, Havlicek and Bird twice each, nobody else more than once.

Mikan and Johnston get the * because they each earned three extra points for winning three scoring titles in the pre-MVP era, so if you don’t like the choice I made about that adjustment they would place lower.

Other than the very early career guys, LBJ is the only active player who seems to have even an outside chance of breaking into the top two. Comparing LeBron and MJ, MJ at LeBron’s current age had “only” 14 points, with three championships, three scoring titles, and two MVPs still to come. LeBron’s basic problem according to this system (aside from losing the Finals a lot) is that he doesn’t usually lead the league in anything, having won only one scoring title. You could argue that this system unfairly treats players who do many things well without dominating a particular category; I think that’s a legitimate criticism, but LeBron is still several trophies away from being anywhere near the GOAT discussion.

The all-time leader in championship-related points is Magic Johnson, with 9 ½; the leader in regular season points is Wilt, with 17. Bill Russell got exactly 7 points from each category.

Anyway, that’s how I spent my afternoon. Hope you found it interesting.

2

Too late to edit: Forgot Scottie Pippen and John Stockton both have 5 points. Pippen is the only player on this list to have no points at all from regular season achievements; everyone on the list has at least some points from Finals appearances, with Stockton, Iverson and Kevin Durant tied for last place at 1/2 point.

3

It’s definitely an interesting metric. And definitely far from the least useful one. I think I would say that you have to pick either one or the other, though: either it’s very simple and misses a lot, or you can be convinced that it produces the only two reasonable candidates.

For instance, in Wilt’s NBA there were 8 teams in his conference at its largest. There were still only 9 teams in the entire league halfway through his career. Jordan or LeBron, to earn their two or one or one-half points for the Finals, had to battle through multiple extended playoff series, whereas for many seasons in the 50s and 60s for any given Hall of Famer it was a matter of winning one series. It isn’t fair to say that Wilt shouldn’t get credit for those things, because his accomplishments are still his accomplishments. But by aggregating those points and comparing them one-to-one, you fudge a lot of pretty significant differences.

4

It’s interesting trying to come up with a metric that both confirm and challenges our assumptions in a way that feels right. This looks like all the right names are there, even if I have a few minor quibbles (Jerry West seems too low and the gap between Magic and Bird seems too large).

A few of other metrics you might want to add:

– Finals MVP (extra consideration if they were recognized as the best player in the championship series)
– All-Star team selection (there were years when Jordan and LeBron and Shaq were clearly the best players in the league, but weren’t named MVP because people were tired of voting for them)
– Career all-time leader in points, assists or rebounds

5

Well, my meaning was that even though this system is quite simple, the gulf it shows between MJ/Wilt and everyone else is so large that I find it difficult to imagine any new information could convince me that anyone else was comparable.

I considered doing some adjustment for the changing size of the league and length of playoffs over time, but decided against it, partially to keep things simple and partially because I’m not convinced it really makes a big difference.

Sure, there used to be a lot fewer NBA players, but the guys we’re talking about here weren’t the ones who were out of the league. And although it’s true that modern teams have to survive two more rounds of playoffs than the old-timers did, it’s also true that teams regarded as serious championship contenders almost always do in fact survive those early rounds. I don’t think Wilt would likely have had many fewer conference finals appearances if he had had to first beat the eighth- and fourth- best teams in the conference in playoff series in order to get there.

I think it’s probably true that the quality of play in the league has gradually increased over time, so that this system slightly overrates older players, but I don’t believe there’s any simple way to fairly adjust for that.

6

I too was surprised by the size of the gap between Magic and Bird; I think we tend to view them as a matched pair, but then again Magic did play in six more Finals than Bird did. The guy I was surprised to see rank so highly was Moses Malone; I am just old enough to remember his career, and I don’t recall thinking of him as being a huge star like the other players on this list.

I don’t think the other metrics you suggest would be helpful. This system already awards half its points based on Finals play, which I think is if anything too generous. I think “greatness” definitely has a lot to do with winning championships, but I’d rather reward the player who was generally regarded as his team’s BEST player over the course of the season than the player who happened to play best in one playoff series.

Keeping track of everyone’s All-Star appearances would hugely increase the number of data points I would have to keep track of, and I doubt it would add much; all these guys, I’m sure, made the All-Star team almost every year of their careers. It would be useful to look at in trying to judge between two very closely ranked players. MJ, for example, played in 14 ASGs to Wilt’s 13, so that doesn’t say much. OTOH, Kareem leads Magic 19-12 in that category, so that might be an argument for ranking him a bit higher.

Career statistics can be misleading because the game changes over time; any career leader in any major stat in any sport will be a player who was both uncommonly talented and had the good fortune to play in an era which facilitated his talents. If you only looked at career passing yards, for instance, you would have to conclude that all the best QBs in NFL history have played in the quite recent past. The NBA hasn’t changed that much, but I know that scoring averages in the 90s were maybe 15 points per game higher than they are now; it’s not because the players then were better but because defenses have toughened. Besides, anyone who holds a career record almost certainly led the league in a bunch of seasons, so the system already rewards them amply.

7

My quibble is over the idea that it shows a gulf in the sense you mean it. I don’t have any objections to your measures of achievement, and your scores show pretty effectively that certain guys achieved a ton. But I don’t think they show who can reasonably be held up as candidates for greatest ever. I think it’s more that 1. any measurement you come up with is probably going to have Jordan at the top, because there aren’t a lot of things anybody could compete with him in; and 2. Wilt’s stats are famously bonkers, and you credited him for that directly.

For instance, it’s really simple, and not even totally batshit, to use a metric that adds, I dunno, scoring titles plus MVPs plus championships and nothing else, and you’d end up presumably with Jordan, then Wilt and Kareem and Russell in some order. And as long as what you call that metric is, like, “most notable achievements” or something, it’s doing its job really well, too. But if it’s supposed to be an overall metric for who we can reasonably say is the greatest player of all time, the warts start to show, because there’s no logical reason that Russell’s championship in 1960 should be equivalent on a 1-to-1 basis with Shaq’s scoring title in 2000 (in the same way that I would object to someone saying that Buster Posey’s batting title can be compared to Cap Anson’s 1881 NL pennant). And so on. I think the warts show with the scores you posted in the same way. If Wilt’s achievements on a per-point basis were only 75% as “Great” as Kareem’s achievements when you take into account their context and what they really were individually, which isn’t that much of an adjustment, then they’re effectively tied, which is a long way away from Wilt being the only reasonable candidate to hold up next to Jordan.

8

People argue eras and rule changes and team situations; oncourt play vs. stats vs. career accolades; how to compare bigs to smalls; which conference was weaker and who had it easier; injuries to the player and their opposition or team mates; weighing peak vs. longevity; and do you compare players all time like if you have time travel and they play each other or just what they did with respect to their own era, and so on and so forth until the cows come home.

How many full games of Kareem, Wilt, and Russell have you watched? Jerry West? Bill Walton? Prime Dr. J? For most people, they’re just numbers. Maybe you see some highlights on Youtube or a couple old games on NBA TV, which are often picked for being exciting or someone played really well.

A lot of accolades are situational and beyond a player’s control. KG was a beast stuck on a glorified D-league team most of his career. Literally the year he left he won a title. Timberwolves never made the playoffs before KG, haven’t made it since he left. Jordan was 1-9 in the playoffs until Pippen. Kareem was languishing in the '70s on anemic Laker teams until Magic came along. And then people downplay their accomplishments by saying one had the other (which is it?), or they played in a laughably bad Western conference while guys like Bird, Moses, and Isiah were going through a blood bath in the East. Same argument people make against LeBron. Five finals in a row, impressive – except you have a red carpet through the East.

Hardcore NBA fans have plenty of advanced stats systems to argue over, whether it’s based on box score stats (often looked down on as too simplistic) or various plus minus approaches. They’re interesting, but not the end all be all, especially if you can’t explain how they’re being generated (i.e. what’s actually happening on the court). And those are actually attempting to be rigorous.

I know this is supposed to be just for fun, but approaches like yours over rate team accomplishments and scoring, which are rather facile approaches to evaluating NBA talent IMO. Ben Wallace and Rodman were vital pieces of title teams and if they averaged over 10 ppg it was a miracle.

Individual awards often reflect politics and biases more than anything else. Kobe doesn’t deserve half his defensive team awards. Others aren’t so cut and dried. I think KG was the real FMVP over Pierce. Was Iggy really the FMVP over a guy running the entire offense and getting trapped practically at half court? Maybe, maybe not. What the heck is an MVP anymore? Sometimes it’s the best player in the league, other times it’s the best player on the best team. Voters get bored, they jump on bandwagons and narratives and what makes the best story.

I generally roll my eyes at NBA discussions focused on hardware. Rings this, rings that. LeBron could win 10 rings for all I care, he’s not as skilled as Jordan or Bird. He has glaring holes in his game. Nash has more MVPs than Shaq and you can defend that based on it being a regular season award. But I know who I’m picking first.

There are subjective biases too. Arguing Kareem over Jordan isn’t a stretch. I’d generally choose a big over a small. His go to move is unstoppable. He played forever. His peak numbers are gaudy. At age 39, in 18 playoff games he averaged 19/7, 53% shooting, 2 apg, 2 bpg, and was still called to make clutch shots when the offense ground to a halt, which is unheard of. He played against Wilt and Hakeem and Ewing, bridging different eras of NBA history.

Jordan was much more entertaining, though. You can watch a Jordan game and see something you’ve never seen before. His athletic artistry was unbelievable. If you’ve seen 10 Kareem games you’ve seem 'em all. This colors your perceptions. Even as a fan of post play Kareem is kinda boring. I’d rather watch Jordan or Hakeem post up. KAJ was mostly cool, aloof, quiet. Basically a basketball robot. Jordan took shit personally. There’s a reason there’s like a million Jordan highlight compilations and not nearly as much for Kareem (even allowing for the fact it’s harder to find all the old games). I’d rather watch a McHale highlight vid than a KAJ one. I don’t generally see a lot of passionate KAJ love or hate like I do for some other players.

Or how about this. How am I supposed to evaluate perimeter players in the 60s and 70s when the refs wouldn’t let them carry and travel like they do nowadays and the three point line was an ABA gimmick that no one would take seriously until the 90s?

Jerry West is a dubiously athletic white American. Not a good look nowadays. He had orangutang arms though, which is a nice asset. He put up huge numbers, mostly in losing efforts, and had a reputation as an elite defender. Am I supposed to realistically think he’s better than, I dunno, Dwayne Wade? Or Manu? Mind you, one of Wade’s toughest defenders during his prime was friggin’ Kirk Hinrich, also a dubiously athletic white American. So I could totally imagine Jerry West giving Wade hell. But I’ll never know. It’s hard for me to imagine them playing against each other. I think Wade’s rice krispie body would shatter into a million players playing in the 60s. Am I supposed to assume West would be an amazing three point shooter if he played now?

How about David Robinson? Never makes people’s top 10. Ridiculous basketball body. Ran down the court like a deer. Put up ludicrous numbers, monster defense, last guy to get a quadruple double (AD almost got one, speaking of potential GOATs playing right now…), scores 71, drags mediocre teams to the playoffs, gets clowned by Hakeem, gets hurt bad, then rides Duncan’s coat tails to some “me too” titles. Maybe he wasn’t the toughest mentally, maybe he fell in love with his face up jumper too much, but you’re telling me given different circumstances he couldn’t have filled a shelf? Like if he was playing in today’s space and pace era where teams will literally do pick and roll on every play if you let them? What if the Nash Suns had D-Rob instead of Amare? The mind boggles.

Duncan doing the most with the least raised an eyebrow. Drafted to a team with D-Rob. Parker and Manu are first ballot HOFers. Through luck or coaching/GM wizardry they’re always finding hidden gems and awesome role players. Kawhi Leonard won FMVP playing opposite LeBron. They left titles on the table due to ridiculous events, like Fisher’s 0.4 shot, Manu fouling Dirk in game 7, or Duncan missing an open layup or Ray Allen hitting a step back three off a rebound. They seem more like a modern version of the 60s Celtics to me than some beleaguered underdog.

Your effort reminded me of Bill Simmons’ 42 club.

Why 42? To make Bird look good.

9

Proofreading is sometimes a good idea.

Dwyane Wade.

A million pieces.

10

Any opinion based on LeBron being entirely dismissed as “unskilled” compared to anyone else - and I mean that, anyone else - is just stupid.

Find me another two year stretch where a guy shot 57% from the field, 39% from three, and averaged almost 7 assists a game.

Hell, find me one season. Don’t even worry about the guy needing to be the primary scorer on a championship team, we’ll just leave that out entirely. Just find me any dude who ever did that, except I’ll save you the trouble because there aren’t any.

Lower the bar far enough from what LeBron actually did - lower shooting percentage, not as many assists - and then the Stocktons and Nashes and Mo Cheeks and Bird show up. But maybe shooting and passing aren’t skills compared to having a mustache and flapping your hand around over the ball before making a pass, what do I know.

11

Wow, thanks for the thoughtful comments, guys!

To be clear, my personal definition of “greatness” is based on how thoroughly a player dominated the NBA in which he actually played; Jimmy seems to feel that adjustments should be made based on the era in which a player played, and I think marshmallow has very eloquently explained why that is a fool’s errand. So, I am fine with ranking George Mikan a notch above Shaq, even though I am pretty sure that Shaq would wipe the floor with Mikan if they had played one-on-one in their respective primes. Note, on this point, that this system doesn’t directly credit Wilt for having “bonkers statistics”, it credits him for having better statistics than anyone he played against, which avoids having to address the problem of comparing eras.

Having said that, I think it is ridiculous to suggest that the conversion factor from Wilt’s era to Kareem’s era should be anywhere near 0.75, given that their careers actually overlapped! My guess – and, pending the invention of time travel, this is impossible to prove – is that the overall quality of play in the NBA has slowly increased over time. But if it increased THAT fast, nobody would ever be able to play until age 30 before being pushed aside by the incoming crop of superrookies. In fact, I don’t recall ever hearing a single player say that he felt the average level of play in the league was noticeably higher at the end of his career compared to the beginning.

If I were to guess, I would say that an appropriate conversion factor might be to subtract 5% of points for each decade removed a player is from the current one. Without being super careful about the math, I think that would make the top ten MJ, Wilt, Magic/Duncan, LBJ, Kobe, Kareem, Shaq, Russell, and Bird, in that order. That’s probably better if you’re trying to make up a draft order for a time-travelling all-star team, but that’s not really what I’m trying to do. This creates a bit of separation between MJ (19.8) and Wilt (15), but the biggest gap between any two spots on this list is still between Wilt (15) and Magic/Timmay! (10).

I don’t think that, from the point of view of a great player, the expansion of the league over time has significantly increased the difficulty of winning championships or MVPs (obviously it has done so for any particular franchise). I’ve been following the NBA since the late seventies, and as far as I can remember there have always been maybe three or four teams that entered each season with realistic championship aspirations; at times there has been a general consensus on who the league’s best player is, but there are never more than two or three real candidates for the position. As far I can tell, has always been thus; the number of actual worthy opponents a great player has to overcome in order to win something has remained pretty stable over time, even as the number of teams and players in the league has increased.

Of course, you can quibble about how heavily team accomplishments should be weighted. My personal belief is that they should be weighted fairly heavily, because winning is, after all, the main object of sports. Obviously the quality of a player’s team isn’t within his control, and marshmallow offers examples of great players who played for bad teams for much of their career (of course, this isn’t unusual – the draft system pretty much ensures that great players will start their careers on bad teams)…but note that all those players did eventually find their way to championship teams, either by having a team built around them or forcing a trade. The impact of a great player in his prime is so great that almost any team he is on automatically becomes a championship contender; just ask the folks in Cleveland. And remember that KG’s otherwise woeful Minnesota team reached a conference final with him. So I think that, when dealing with elite players in this particular league, team championships is pretty highly correlated with individual skills.

I re-ran these numbers looking at just individual accomplishment, without regard for rings; this brings Wilt slightly ahead of MJ, but still leaves them on their own little planet, with Kareem and Russell at the top of the pack looking up at them. If we only look at team accomplishments, the top 11 are Magic, Duncan, Havlicek, Russell/MJ/Kobe, Bird, West, Kareem, Pippin/Shaq/LBJ. No disrespect to Havlicek, who I never saw play, but I don’t think anyone would argue that swapping him for Wilt improves the quality of the list. Still, the main point is that the same names keep popping up no matter how you look at it.

To marshmallow’s specific point, this system gives Ben Wallace four points and Rodman 3 ½, so they are certainly not neglected. I’m guessing this would leave them ranked somewhere in the thirties, which seems about right; certainly great players and no-brainers for the HOF, but I don’t think anyone would pick either of them over any of the guys in my top 20.

Comparing West to Wade and Ginobli, West is a guy who this system gives a lot of credit for team accomplishments; he has only 1 ½ points individually, compared to 1 for Wade and 0 for Ginobli. Still, West made the all-NBA team 16 times, including 10 first team selections. He led the league in scoring once and assists once. He is AFIAK the last player to win the Finals MVP while playing for the losing team. Seems like a pretty good career for a dubiously athletic guy. Dwayne Wade once led the league in scoring, and has been all-NBA eight times, only two of them first team. He also won one Finals MVP. Manu Ginobli never led the league in anything and made the third all-NBA team twice. I’m pretty comfortable saying that West was better than Wade relative to their respective competition, and completely comfortable with saying that Manu is nowhere near being comparable to either of them.
I too was surprised when I noticed what Duncan had accomplished, and I agree that “plucky underdog” isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of the recent Spurs teams. I will stipulate that David Robinson’s earning only 2 ½ career points seems to me to be one of this system’s most curious underratings. And of course nobody has ever won a championship without having multiple very good players, and Parker and Ginobli are certainly very good players. Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant were good in 1991, Magic was damn good in 1980, and Kareem was good in 1982. McHale and Parish were good in 1984 and 1986. None of those guys made an all-NBA team that year. All-NBA voting isn’t perfect, and a big flaw I see with this system is that it assumes that the difference between the best and the 15th-best player is less significant than the difference between the 15th and 16th best players, which is obviously absurd.

Still: Only 24 championships have been won by teams with only one player selected to an all-NBA team, and four of them were by Duncan. I think that’s pretty damn impressive. Put it another way, who can you point to who did more with less? The only other players to do this multiple times were Magic with the Showtime Lakers, Bird with the 80s Celtics, and Havlicek at the tail end of the Celtic dynasty (of the other 11 titles the Celtics won between 1957 and 1976, they had 3 all-NBAers for 7 of them and 2 for the other 4; not very much like the Spurs at all). I’m not familiar with the mid-seventies Celtics, but the 80s Lakers and Celtics would certainly run rings around the Spurs if both teams were minus their best player, and in any case Havlicek only did this twice, not four times.

The “42 Club” is interesting. The biggest flaw I see (aside from ignoring everyone before 1976!) is that it admits players into the “pantheon” based on one good postseason. Barkley, KG and Nowitzski are all sure-fire HOFers, but are they really among the top 15 of all time, or even since ‘76? I also note that only 16 of these 31 pantheonic seasons yielded a championship, and only four of them were cases where a champion had only one all-NBA player. There were also four seasons in which a team with only one all-NBA player lost the Finals. I suspect that this system gives too much credit to players who happened to be the only superstar on their team, enabling them to run up great stats but usually falling short of the ultimate goal.

OK, I’ll give you a few days to mull that over while I’m at the Dead shows. Maybe I’ll see Bill Walton (2 1/2 points) there!

12

One possible tweak to the system would be to give players .5 points for finishing second or third in the league in scoring - that would pull LeBron up even-ish with Kareem and Magic, which seems about right, and would also bring Karl Malone up roughly even with Stockton, which also seems about right.

13

Here’s an opportunity to share one of my favorite NBA videos:

The Battle of The Giants - Wilt vs. Kareem

6:47 in particular is wild. Most of the games I’ve seen of Kareem were '80s playoff games and I never remember his skyhook getting blocked straight up once, let alone twice in one play. Too bad big men battles like that are mostly a relic nowadays. Duncan and Shaq was the last great one I think. Bynum and Dwight? Dwight and AD? Eh.

Here’s RealGM’s top 100 players of all time, 2014 version. You can click each name to see the 20 page+ discussions on placement. There’s a lot of knowledgeable guys over there, a lot of old heads, good mix of old school and new school thinking.

Bill Walton didn’t make it despite having an amazing peak because his longevity was terrible. Sabonis didn’t either because he did most of his damage internationally. I’m not sure why Grant Hill made it but Penny didn’t.

I raised my eyebrow on these picks, though I understand the logic for most of them:
LeBron > Magic, Bird, and Hakeem
Nash > Stockton
Barry > Havlicek (mostly because Barry is one of the worst team mates of all time)
Reggie Miller at 40 seems high, especially compared to Ray Allen
Dwight Howard > McHale? Maybe in baby mommas
Nate Thurmond at 67 seems low

Depending on how he recovers from the injuries, I could see Durant sneaking into the top 20, maybe top 15 by the end of his career.

Most old NBA players trash talk the modern game, whenever it is. Wilt was telling Jordan they’d lay him out in the '60s and he was playing in a soft league. Jordan, Barkley, Shaq, Payton, and West have all bad mouthed the current game. Kobe and Pierce might have set a record for complaining about it while still playing. I do remember some old guy saying how much better a lot of guys are nowdays and how the defensive schemes are much more complex but I can’t remember who it was.

Was that a dig against CP3/Cliff Paul AKA Chris Fall?

I didn’t say LeBron wasn’t skilled. He’s good at pretty much everything. I was comparing him to other all time greats.

LeBron’s efficiency in Miami was otherworldly because he had Wade and Bosh to keep the defense honest, they ran the break a lot, and he got plenty of easy assisted shots inside the paint. It wasn’t a surprise when it plunged back to normal when he went back to Cleveland.

LeBron’s jumper has always been hot/cold. His numbers outside the paint this year’s playoffs were abysmal. In the finals he shot 39-137 (28%) from outside of five feet. The best strategy is to single cover him with a cushion. The Spurs got two titles that way. The Mavs did it too, although a lot of that was LeBron having a personal meltdown. The 08 Celtics did that and LeBron had one of the worst series by an all time great I’ve ever seen, though all most people remember is his duel with Pierce in game 7.

Alternatively, there’s a series like 09 against Orlando where he couldn’t ever miss, or that old game 5 against Detroit when he was hitting behind the back step backs, or game 7 against the Spurs.

I could say more, but I’d just end up sounding like a hater. LeBron is good enough to be top 10, especially if he stays healthy and keeps grinding out 25/5/5 type seasons. I wouldn’t be surprised if goes into a lot of people’s top 5 by the time he retires, especially if he wins a ring in Cleveland.

14

Interesting. I think of carnival freak Centers like I think of pitchers and goalies; they benefit so much from their freakish size and require a different skill set it be successful. So taking them out of the mix, we get:

  1. Michael Jordan 22
  2. Magic 14 ½
  3. Kobe 10
  4. LeBron 10
  5. Bob Cousy 9 2/3
  6. Larry Bird 9 ½
  7. Jerry West 8
  8. John Havlicek 7 1/3
  9. Oscar Robertson 6
  10. Allen Iverson 5 ½
  11. Kevin Durant 5 ½

I would take Bob Cousy off the list; the 1950s NBA was so much different from the game the other guys played its a joke. Since were figuring championships, we have to give LeBron credit over Magic since LeBron has been in the NBA finals 6 straight years and 2 of those finals, he lead them all by himself with a bunch of stiffs, while Magic had Kareem by his side. Kobe also had Shaq for most of his championships, as well.

Im a 76ers fan and Allen Iverson being included on this list with these greats disgusts me. AI drank his skills away and had no respect for the game. He’s not even in my top 25, including centers. Im still sickened to this day we drafted this punk and not Mamba.

Just out of PRINCIPLE, Dr. J needs to be shoehorned in here somewhere. The greatest star in NBA history.

15

I think I’m just not getting across what I’m trying to get across. Wilt is getting credit for his statistics, which were way better than everyone else, and really everyone ever. I think we’re saying the same thing about that. I’m just also saying that this metric is a very blunt instrument, as you acknowledged, which makes your ultimate conclusion that it’s decisive problematic.

I didn’t say that there was any specific conversion factor from era to era, or that specifically there’s a .75 conversion from Kareem’s to Wilt’s. I’m saying that you’re taking a disparate collection of all kinds of accomplishments and assigning them all the value “1.” And that this conversion process strips away all kinds of important contextual data, which is fine, but which makes it very very difficult to then assert that the resulting list demonstratively proves that the only reasonable candidates for greatest player are X and Y.

Because, you know, how close to equivalently “great” was it for Jordan to win MVP in 1990 over Magic and Barkley and Bird and Robinson and Hakeem and Dominique, as compared to Wilt winning a scoring title in 1960 over Jack Twyman, Elgin Baylor and Bob Pettit? It doesn’t seem to me that there’s any reason at all to hold those two things up as comparable items on the scale. But with totals as low as the single digits for lots of these guys, these kinds of comparisons are the bread and butter of the system; that’s one point for each. Whatever the “conversion factor” might be in any particular case, there very definitely is a need for one, unless it’s really the case that all scoring titles are created reasonably equally, and all championship All-NBA shares are both created reasonably equally and are created equal to scoring titles, and so on.

[QUOTE=russian heel]
AI drank his skills away and had no respect for the game.
[/QUOTE]

Allen Iverson was in a much better position than you are to decide what “respect for the game” looks like, I think. Don’t you mean something like respect for you?

16

Jimmy, I think I understand what you are saying, although I remain confused over why specifically you think Chamberlain’s achievements should be so discounted compared to Kareem’s.

I have made two assumptions in constructing this model: The first is that I wanted to rate players based only on their performance against their own peers, rather than trying to get involved in comparing players from different eras directly to each other.

The other was that “greatness” should be defined by a roughly equal mixture of statistical excellence, the subjective opinion of contemporaries, and contributions to championship teams. Obviously there are any number of reasonable ways you could do that and there is no intrinsic reason why an MVP and scoring title should be considered as equal to each other and as exactly twice as impressive as an assists total. You could, as suggested above, look at the top few players on each season’s leader board rather than just the very top. You could look at All-Star status instead of all-NBA, or you could adjust to make first team all-NBA count for more than second or third. There are any number of reasonable ways to do it, but I feel that, for the above three-part definition of greatness, any such system would produce the same two guys way at the top.

17

I don’t have a quibble specifically with the number of points Wilt and Kareem are receiving. They just happen to be the ones on either end of the gulf you’re convinced exists. My point is that this model doesn’t actually show a gulf unless all of these dudes’ achievements were very close to equivalent, one for one. And I can’t see how you could be convinced that’s true. It seems obvious beyond arguing to me that, taking your three part definition of greatness as the foundation, different parameters to evaluate those elements would produce wildly different lists.

Just off the top of my head, the leading minds in the field are working all the time on distilling “statistical excellence.” There’s no reason that using, say, PER for that component instead of number of times leading the league in a primary stat would be less reliable. But PER says it goes MJ, LeBron, Shaq, David Robinson, Wilt. I don’t know for sure what the results of plugging that in in place of your “statistical excellence” measure would be, but I’m sure willing to bet it wouldn’t be Wilt way above everyone else in second. And that’s just literally the first tweak that occurred to me.

18

Oh damn, now you’re making me learn stuff! I wasn’t familiar with PER, so I checked out the Wikipedia page. It appears that it is true that the stat is generally accepted by “the best minds in the game” as being more reliable than traditional counting stats; those of us who aren’t the best minds will have to take their word for it, as the formula to calculate PER is ridiculously complicated.
So, heroically sacrificing workplace productivity for the sake of the war on ignorance, I redid my calculations: instead of giving points for points, rebounds, and assists, I gave one point to each year’s PER leader and half a point to the second- and third- place players.
The new Top 10:

  1. Kareem 22 ½
  2. MJ 20
  3. LBJ 16
  4. Wilt 15 ½
  5. (tie) Magic 14
  6. Shaq 14
  7. Bird 13 ½
  8. (tie) Duncan 12 ½
  9. Pettit 12 ½
  10. (tie) Russell 12
  11. West 12
    And thus, I must conclude that my hypothesis has been rejected and there are in fact reasonable, probably even superior, formulations which don’t leave MJ and Wilt off in their own world.

Notes: This way of analyzing appears to give LeBron a much better chance of eventually rising to the top with a few more great years.

The player most helped by this shift is obviously Kareem (+8) followed by LBJ and Shaq (+6). The biggest loser AFAICT is Wilt (-4 ½); marshmallow will be saddened to hear that Dennis Rodman loses all 3 ½ of the points the prior system awarded him, but can take solace in David Robinson moving up to 5 ½. This puts him in the general neighborhood of Hakeem and Kevin Durant, which sounds much better to me than the previous ranking which had him equal to Dikembe Mutumbo. Russian heel will be happy that Iverson drops to 1 ½ points, making him more comparable to Rajan Rondo than to Jason Kidd. The flat-out wrongest thing I see about the PER adjustment is that it takes 4 ½ of 5 points away from John Stockton, leaving him among the teeming ½-point masses, looking up at the likes of Stephen Curry and Derrick Rose, which is just plain silly. In general, it appears that the PER system is tougher on point guards than the simple system, although this seems to have shifted a bit in very recent times.

19

This is really cool, tagging so I can read and comment later

20

I had assumed that players with “bonkers statistics” on the surface level would also be bonkers from the POV of more advanced analytics, since those are ultimately derived from basic stats. I am more familiar with advanced baseball stats, where the rule of thumb seems to be that such stats help identify players who do many things well, whereas subjective “eye test” fan opinions tend to overrate players who do one thing very well, even if they don’t do anything else well at all.

I was surprised that Wilt does so poorly (relatively speaking; he’s still second in most points earned from PER, behind KAJ and just ahead of MJ/Shaq) on this measure, since he clearly has the best raw stats of all time, and excelled in all facets of the game, being the only man to collect scoring, rebounding, and assist titles during his career. Shaq, OTOH, I remember as being an amazing force of nature on the court, but basically a one-dimensional rebounding and dunking machine, so I am a bit surprised that PER ranks him so highly.

Do you think you could try to offer a simple explanation of why this might be, or in general what characterizes players who look better on PER than on conventional stats?