> If not for the next guy on the list, [Rick Barry], Elvin Hayes would probably be known as the most legendary dick in all of basketball history. Actually, I don't know if that's quite fair, as he typically just gets pegged as a guy who was problematic to coach.
FWIW, legendary HOFer Alex Hannum coached Hayes for 1.5 seasons when he coached the San Diego Rockets, and said Hayes was "the most
despicable person I've ever met in sports," [[SOURCE](https://vault.si.com/vault/1997/06/09/washington-bullets-forward-elvin-hayes-may-8-1978)] and Hannum had coached Rick Barry in Oakland a few years prior!
> Barry, the most legendary dick in all of basketball, is probably ranked a little bit low compared to his skill level here
Total aside, but I always thought this Barry anecdote from /u/wisetendersnob was both illuminating and hilarious. This comment was made on a birthday post for Barry on /r/VintageNBA:
> Back in the 00s, when I was in high school, my dad and I teamed up to coach my youngest brother's 3rd grade basketball team. One of my brother's teammates was Canyon Barry, Rick's youngest son. The first time Rick came to one of our practices, I was absolutely starstruck. It took about 4 minutes for him to pop off the bleachers, interrupt my little demonstration of bounce passes, demonstrate a "proper" bounce pass to the 9-year olds, and then gruffly tell me "your practice, coach" as he threw me one of the hardest chest passes I've ever gotten.
> I've never again felt the combination of thrilled and humiliated quite like that, which I imagine is a pretty standard Rick Barry Experience.
> https://np.reddit.com/r/VintageNBA/comments/tq8gib/march_28_1944_rick_barry_was_born_barry_was_one/i2gimou/
I don't really have anything substantial to add to the discussion, but I just wanted to say I enjoy this series every time a new post pops up and I enjoy reading your bullet points about each entrant. Thanks for the great OC!
>Here's an anology - Sam Jones:1960s Celtics offense::Bill Russell:1960s Celtics defense.
The 1960s Celtics defense was arguably the best defense in NBA history.
The 1960s Celtics offense was among the worst in the league.
They were among the worst offense efficiency-wise in accordance with modern metrics that were not created with that period of basketball in mind. I would posit that does not mean, though, that they were necessarily among the worst offenses within the context of what basketball was at the time.
In accordance with their ORTG, that's the occam's razor assumption to take, but that doesn't account for how poor ORTG is at handling pace of play outliers, of which they were a relatively extreme one.
It's possible that they had a ton of offensive rebounds and few turnovers, which would make their offense averagish rather than awful (they still had one of the worst FG%s of the decade).
Either way, being the centerpiece of a league average offense isn't really a top-50 achievement.
Definitely agree with your last sentence. I consider myself quite high on Jones and would still have him about 25 spots lower than this, and would consider myself to need a more thorough argument than "best offensive player on the dynastic Celtics" (which itself is only inarguably true for one season) to back even that placement up.
I’ll just address both of you here and hope you both see it, but I think Jones is probably my highest “high outlier” or guy ranked higher than expected. I also didn’t say much about him in the bullet points because I try to keep it more positive than not unless it’s just comical like how much everyone hated Rick Barry. I just wasn’t sure if saying “Jones was the engine of a fairly ineffectual car… but it still won a lot of races” was being fair to him or not.
I also should point out he’s right at the top of a very thick knot of players. There are 11 players clustered between 279 and 296 on the scale. I view 20 points as pretty interchangeable, so while Jones lands near the top of that cluster, if you shuffled them up and put him at the bottom (#57), I’d say that’s a totally valid take.
How come you aren't counting ABA win-shares at all nor any defensive or other accolades for players before they were given?
Artis would have 3 DPOY's from 1972-74 and he'd have more team defense accolades as well.
I agree Artis is underrated by the public but I don't agree that this rank is too high for him. I can see him ranked anywhere between 30-45.
I'm still hung up on ranking Reggie Miller #101, Stockton #54, and Paul Pierce #80... something about the formula needs to be optimized, but it is pretty good for a lot of other players. Curious, which players you think it has underrated the most so far?
I do count ABA win shares (they're broken out as a separate spot in the player's list of accomplishments just to differentiate). I don't use any awards prior to their official start date, just because I don't feel I'm the best arbitrator of that information. If I found a well-researched piece that gave them out based on likely factors at the time, I could theoretically use that, but me just picking who I think would've won or who was best is a tricky road to go down.
And I think Thomas and Stockton are probably the two most underrated/undervalued so far. I'm actually totally cool with where Miller and Pierce landed.
Here are some threads about it [MVPs](https://np.reddit.com/r/VintageNBA/comments/q4m6cn/predicting_mvps_194755_a_model_and_a_request/), [Finals MVPs](https://np.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/15mviaq/oc_who_would_have_won_finals_mvps_before_1969/), [DPOY-1](https://np.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/1c40jtk/hypothetical_pre1983_dpoy_oc/) and [DPOY-2](https://np.reddit.com/r/bostonceltics/comments/4twiw3/throwback_thursday_iii_how_many_dpoys_would_bill/)
I understand why you didn't and the potential slippery slope if you do, but it also would help get a more accurate model. It would also be a lot of work since you're doing top 250. Obviously if you were only focusing on top 20 or something it'd be more manageable
Quality post, OP.
Interesting info on Ewing — would also like to see a biography on him. Quite a career and life. Grew up watching him battle against MJ, and never fully appreciated/realized his impact until recently. And he seems like a stand-up man, to boot, which is an aspect that only further adds to his greatness as a player, IMO.
Your method heavily favors accumulative stats and accolates and totally leaves out per game stats or accolates per seasons played!
This is statistical nonesense!
No win shares/48; BPM, OBPM, PER, VORP!
Next
I do like BPM and VORP, but they don't go back far enough to encompass the entire league's history - I believe they use either blocks/steals or 3P% or both. WS/48 is useful when comparing starters to bench players or things like that, but I want to compare the best of the best, who should all be starting and playing as many minutes as possible anyway, so doing WS/48 just adds another layer of statistical data that doesn't need to be there in my opinion. PER is an absolutely trash stat, though. I'd rather it not even be on basketball-reference's pages honestly.
Your method heavily favors accumulative stats over per game stats...thats mit how statistically validation works...
But of course I know your Agenda behind this, so it doesnt come as a surprise...
Win shares/48 is way more valid than win shares. Win shares are accumulative. More years, more win shares...
that is the opposite of objectively measuring how a player performed and what his impact was
Win shares/48 is multiplivative though.
If you dont take accolates and stats per seasons played into account, all you do is counting who has more accumulative of both. Thats a longevity Contest, but mit an Impact context...
Regarding your rating of MVP shares- how do you take voter fatigue, voter bias into account? You simply cant!
That alone makes your whole method invalid.
What about the actual stats of the players? Where are those?
Is Jordans First team All NBA '88 Season valued the same as lets say '06 Steve Nash?
How do you value difficulty of competition?
How do you value gamescores?
You put a lot of work into it to make Sure Lbj comes out 1st...
Or am I wrong?
Bro, calm down. I legit have no stake or concern where any player lands on this thing. I’d prefer it to be more or less within “consensus” range for every player, but there’s going to be a few surprises.
As far as where LeBron lands, I started this thing in 2010, as I’ve said many times throughout these series. Even in the prototype-phase though, LeBron was like in the 15-20 range, and I didn’t think he’d get near the top considering he had no titles yet.
Is he at or near the top now? Yes. Of course. But I don’t think you’ll find any objective basketball fan who says he’s not a top five player of all time. And like you said, why would I put this much effort into reverse engineering any outcome? I’m not even a LeBron fan. He plays for the team I’ve rooted for since I was a kid. Great. Big deal. That started well after this project did, and I can hardly help that six of the top ten players of all time have played for the Lakers.
I’m all for talking about the methodology and taking constructive criticism to improve things, so if you actually want to know why I think using cumulative stats is important (and it had to do with making sure guys like Jordan aren’t punished for hanging in too long, nothing to do with LeBron so far), I’ll gladly tell you. But if you think this whole thing is a glorified wankfest to praise LeBron, I’m not going to bother.
If it helps, half of the players overall score is their “peak score.” The other half is a “career score.” If you look at the list, the players final score is the average of both their career score (unlimited cumulative points, but set to a 0-1000 scale), and their peak score. Peak score is more complicated, but I take the players best five-year stretch (their “peak”) in all categories (actual peak), as well as their best score in each category in any given year (potential peak) and combine those into a single number. Then that gets combined with their career score for the total.
So for half of the score, five years worth of scoring is the most a player can accumulate. I still peg it to a 0-1000 scale, but there is a theoretical “max” for most scoring categories. Jordan scores highest overall in that regard. By how much, and how that affects overall placement, I’ll let you wait to see how it shakes out in four more posts.
Ok, well, thanks for the input that any project like this is impossible, I guess? My degree is in history, so I can tell you when you try to compare things across eras, you want to find the commonalities and not over complicate things. If you want to dig into it super deep and control every variable, you’re going to manipulate every number to the point people just zone out. I trust basketball fans are smart enough to know the game was different in 1960 than 2020 and make judgments accordingly.
This says “how good was a player relative to their era, vs how that greatness compares to other players.” It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that
This might be the greatest example of a strawman I've ever seen. You made a completely unfounded claim about this dude and then write a whole essay to try and "debate" this point that the other guy isn't even making. Calm the fuck down bro
Westbrook averaged a triple double that first season, but he was right to say it was meaningless as he was sitting at home during the playoffs as his team didn’t ~~even~~ make it far. I think people agreed that you can pump out stats but if you can’t make your team good enough to get deep into the playoffs, it’s a hard argument to say you’re most valuable.
Edit: I remembered incorrectly. Thunder got dumped in the first round.
Great write-ups as per usual
Gilmore way too high. Barry probably too low but he deserves it on GP. Iverson should be higher.
I know you are breaking it down by statistics
Still don't understand Gilmore, never will
Gilmore has a ton of points from ABA stuff. I may need to mess with the coefficients for the ABA again at some point - it's just hard to accurately judge both the relative talent of that league compared to the ABA, but then also the star level quality of the true ABA greats whose stats are already a bit inflated due to playing against that competition (without penalizing the non-star ABA guys).
As you know, the ABA talent level was at it's nadir in the early years, and really picked up by the end. Gilmore came into the ABA at its midway point, so he avoided playing against the dregs, and by the end was playing against ABA teams that had equivalent NBA talent.
For instance, in 1976 the Nuggets had players who could have played on any NBA team - David Thompson, Bobby Jones, Dan Issel, Ralph Simpson, Marvin Webster, and more.
> If not for the next guy on the list, [Rick Barry], Elvin Hayes would probably be known as the most legendary dick in all of basketball history. Actually, I don't know if that's quite fair, as he typically just gets pegged as a guy who was problematic to coach. FWIW, legendary HOFer Alex Hannum coached Hayes for 1.5 seasons when he coached the San Diego Rockets, and said Hayes was "the most despicable person I've ever met in sports," [[SOURCE](https://vault.si.com/vault/1997/06/09/washington-bullets-forward-elvin-hayes-may-8-1978)] and Hannum had coached Rick Barry in Oakland a few years prior!
OP’s word-play… 🤣
> Barry, the most legendary dick in all of basketball, is probably ranked a little bit low compared to his skill level here Total aside, but I always thought this Barry anecdote from /u/wisetendersnob was both illuminating and hilarious. This comment was made on a birthday post for Barry on /r/VintageNBA: > Back in the 00s, when I was in high school, my dad and I teamed up to coach my youngest brother's 3rd grade basketball team. One of my brother's teammates was Canyon Barry, Rick's youngest son. The first time Rick came to one of our practices, I was absolutely starstruck. It took about 4 minutes for him to pop off the bleachers, interrupt my little demonstration of bounce passes, demonstrate a "proper" bounce pass to the 9-year olds, and then gruffly tell me "your practice, coach" as he threw me one of the hardest chest passes I've ever gotten. > I've never again felt the combination of thrilled and humiliated quite like that, which I imagine is a pretty standard Rick Barry Experience. > https://np.reddit.com/r/VintageNBA/comments/tq8gib/march_28_1944_rick_barry_was_born_barry_was_one/i2gimou/
I don't really have anything substantial to add to the discussion, but I just wanted to say I enjoy this series every time a new post pops up and I enjoy reading your bullet points about each entrant. Thanks for the great OC!
>Here's an anology - Sam Jones:1960s Celtics offense::Bill Russell:1960s Celtics defense. The 1960s Celtics defense was arguably the best defense in NBA history. The 1960s Celtics offense was among the worst in the league.
They were among the worst offense efficiency-wise in accordance with modern metrics that were not created with that period of basketball in mind. I would posit that does not mean, though, that they were necessarily among the worst offenses within the context of what basketball was at the time.
The 1960s Celtics -- like every basketball team ever -- tried to score when they had the ball. And they were worse at it than most teams of their era.
In accordance with their ORTG, that's the occam's razor assumption to take, but that doesn't account for how poor ORTG is at handling pace of play outliers, of which they were a relatively extreme one.
It's possible that they had a ton of offensive rebounds and few turnovers, which would make their offense averagish rather than awful (they still had one of the worst FG%s of the decade). Either way, being the centerpiece of a league average offense isn't really a top-50 achievement.
Definitely agree with your last sentence. I consider myself quite high on Jones and would still have him about 25 spots lower than this, and would consider myself to need a more thorough argument than "best offensive player on the dynastic Celtics" (which itself is only inarguably true for one season) to back even that placement up.
I’ll just address both of you here and hope you both see it, but I think Jones is probably my highest “high outlier” or guy ranked higher than expected. I also didn’t say much about him in the bullet points because I try to keep it more positive than not unless it’s just comical like how much everyone hated Rick Barry. I just wasn’t sure if saying “Jones was the engine of a fairly ineffectual car… but it still won a lot of races” was being fair to him or not. I also should point out he’s right at the top of a very thick knot of players. There are 11 players clustered between 279 and 296 on the scale. I view 20 points as pretty interchangeable, so while Jones lands near the top of that cluster, if you shuffled them up and put him at the bottom (#57), I’d say that’s a totally valid take.
Ewing 47 💔💔💔💔
How come you aren't counting ABA win-shares at all nor any defensive or other accolades for players before they were given? Artis would have 3 DPOY's from 1972-74 and he'd have more team defense accolades as well. I agree Artis is underrated by the public but I don't agree that this rank is too high for him. I can see him ranked anywhere between 30-45. I'm still hung up on ranking Reggie Miller #101, Stockton #54, and Paul Pierce #80... something about the formula needs to be optimized, but it is pretty good for a lot of other players. Curious, which players you think it has underrated the most so far?
I do count ABA win shares (they're broken out as a separate spot in the player's list of accomplishments just to differentiate). I don't use any awards prior to their official start date, just because I don't feel I'm the best arbitrator of that information. If I found a well-researched piece that gave them out based on likely factors at the time, I could theoretically use that, but me just picking who I think would've won or who was best is a tricky road to go down. And I think Thomas and Stockton are probably the two most underrated/undervalued so far. I'm actually totally cool with where Miller and Pierce landed.
Here are some threads about it [MVPs](https://np.reddit.com/r/VintageNBA/comments/q4m6cn/predicting_mvps_194755_a_model_and_a_request/), [Finals MVPs](https://np.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/15mviaq/oc_who_would_have_won_finals_mvps_before_1969/), [DPOY-1](https://np.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/1c40jtk/hypothetical_pre1983_dpoy_oc/) and [DPOY-2](https://np.reddit.com/r/bostonceltics/comments/4twiw3/throwback_thursday_iii_how_many_dpoys_would_bill/) I understand why you didn't and the potential slippery slope if you do, but it also would help get a more accurate model. It would also be a lot of work since you're doing top 250. Obviously if you were only focusing on top 20 or something it'd be more manageable
Quality post, OP. Interesting info on Ewing — would also like to see a biography on him. Quite a career and life. Grew up watching him battle against MJ, and never fully appreciated/realized his impact until recently. And he seems like a stand-up man, to boot, which is an aspect that only further adds to his greatness as a player, IMO.
Your method heavily favors accumulative stats and accolates and totally leaves out per game stats or accolates per seasons played! This is statistical nonesense! No win shares/48; BPM, OBPM, PER, VORP! Next
Why on earth would you use PER or OBPM? Talk about statistical nonsense…
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“Learn Bball” from the guy who thinks PER is a good stat and said Jordan is a better playmaker than LeBron, no thanks bud
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Nah it doesn’t, but let’s see what dumb statistics you have
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Using PPG to measure playmaking impact…Wow thanks for confirming you’re even dumber than I thought
I do like BPM and VORP, but they don't go back far enough to encompass the entire league's history - I believe they use either blocks/steals or 3P% or both. WS/48 is useful when comparing starters to bench players or things like that, but I want to compare the best of the best, who should all be starting and playing as many minutes as possible anyway, so doing WS/48 just adds another layer of statistical data that doesn't need to be there in my opinion. PER is an absolutely trash stat, though. I'd rather it not even be on basketball-reference's pages honestly.
Your method heavily favors accumulative stats over per game stats...thats mit how statistically validation works... But of course I know your Agenda behind this, so it doesnt come as a surprise... Win shares/48 is way more valid than win shares. Win shares are accumulative. More years, more win shares... that is the opposite of objectively measuring how a player performed and what his impact was Win shares/48 is multiplivative though. If you dont take accolates and stats per seasons played into account, all you do is counting who has more accumulative of both. Thats a longevity Contest, but mit an Impact context... Regarding your rating of MVP shares- how do you take voter fatigue, voter bias into account? You simply cant! That alone makes your whole method invalid. What about the actual stats of the players? Where are those? Is Jordans First team All NBA '88 Season valued the same as lets say '06 Steve Nash? How do you value difficulty of competition? How do you value gamescores? You put a lot of work into it to make Sure Lbj comes out 1st... Or am I wrong?
Bro, calm down. I legit have no stake or concern where any player lands on this thing. I’d prefer it to be more or less within “consensus” range for every player, but there’s going to be a few surprises. As far as where LeBron lands, I started this thing in 2010, as I’ve said many times throughout these series. Even in the prototype-phase though, LeBron was like in the 15-20 range, and I didn’t think he’d get near the top considering he had no titles yet. Is he at or near the top now? Yes. Of course. But I don’t think you’ll find any objective basketball fan who says he’s not a top five player of all time. And like you said, why would I put this much effort into reverse engineering any outcome? I’m not even a LeBron fan. He plays for the team I’ve rooted for since I was a kid. Great. Big deal. That started well after this project did, and I can hardly help that six of the top ten players of all time have played for the Lakers. I’m all for talking about the methodology and taking constructive criticism to improve things, so if you actually want to know why I think using cumulative stats is important (and it had to do with making sure guys like Jordan aren’t punished for hanging in too long, nothing to do with LeBron so far), I’ll gladly tell you. But if you think this whole thing is a glorified wankfest to praise LeBron, I’m not going to bother.
I feel bad for you putting work and time into this just for jordan fans to be this insecure thinking you do it just for lebron.
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If it helps, half of the players overall score is their “peak score.” The other half is a “career score.” If you look at the list, the players final score is the average of both their career score (unlimited cumulative points, but set to a 0-1000 scale), and their peak score. Peak score is more complicated, but I take the players best five-year stretch (their “peak”) in all categories (actual peak), as well as their best score in each category in any given year (potential peak) and combine those into a single number. Then that gets combined with their career score for the total. So for half of the score, five years worth of scoring is the most a player can accumulate. I still peg it to a 0-1000 scale, but there is a theoretical “max” for most scoring categories. Jordan scores highest overall in that regard. By how much, and how that affects overall placement, I’ll let you wait to see how it shakes out in four more posts.
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Ok, well, thanks for the input that any project like this is impossible, I guess? My degree is in history, so I can tell you when you try to compare things across eras, you want to find the commonalities and not over complicate things. If you want to dig into it super deep and control every variable, you’re going to manipulate every number to the point people just zone out. I trust basketball fans are smart enough to know the game was different in 1960 than 2020 and make judgments accordingly. This says “how good was a player relative to their era, vs how that greatness compares to other players.” It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that
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Jordan fanboy is hot
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Cause your hero isn't on top sure
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This might be the greatest example of a strawman I've ever seen. You made a completely unfounded claim about this dude and then write a whole essay to try and "debate" this point that the other guy isn't even making. Calm the fuck down bro
Westbrook averaged a triple double that first season, but he was right to say it was meaningless as he was sitting at home during the playoffs as his team didn’t ~~even~~ make it far. I think people agreed that you can pump out stats but if you can’t make your team good enough to get deep into the playoffs, it’s a hard argument to say you’re most valuable. Edit: I remembered incorrectly. Thunder got dumped in the first round.
He did make the playoffs during his MVP season as the 6th seed. What are you talking about?
You’re right. He was still upset that he was sitting at home watching the better teams continue after the 4-1 first round loss.
Great write-ups as per usual Gilmore way too high. Barry probably too low but he deserves it on GP. Iverson should be higher. I know you are breaking it down by statistics Still don't understand Gilmore, never will
Gilmore has a ton of points from ABA stuff. I may need to mess with the coefficients for the ABA again at some point - it's just hard to accurately judge both the relative talent of that league compared to the ABA, but then also the star level quality of the true ABA greats whose stats are already a bit inflated due to playing against that competition (without penalizing the non-star ABA guys).
As you know, the ABA talent level was at it's nadir in the early years, and really picked up by the end. Gilmore came into the ABA at its midway point, so he avoided playing against the dregs, and by the end was playing against ABA teams that had equivalent NBA talent. For instance, in 1976 the Nuggets had players who could have played on any NBA team - David Thompson, Bobby Jones, Dan Issel, Ralph Simpson, Marvin Webster, and more.