But those supposedly credible sources have vast disagreements on ranking the greatest players. Dr. J doesn't put Jordan or LeBron is his all time starting five. Oscar Robertson said that LeBron is clearly better than Jordan. Walt Frazier and Earl Monroe both say Wilt is easily the greatest player ever. Pat Riley says that Kareem is the greatest player of all time.

Bill Russell's list of the greatest players was Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Elgin Baylor, Oscar Robertson, and either Hakeem Olajuwon or Bob Pettit.

Wilt's list was Bird, West, Oscar, Baylor, Jordan, Magic, Barkley.

Neither guy was allowed to name themselves or each other. They both said that they would have picked each other. This was done before LeBron was around. It was 1997.

what's your point? multiple smart people can have different opinions about something, particularly something that can have different criteria for different people.


nobody said we should listen to one individual player or GM or anything. i really just don't know what you are even arguing about right now.

I'm arguing that the stats are much more accurate in assessing a player's value on the court than ANYBODY'S opinion. The fact that so called experts opinions on who are the best players vary so wildly just illustrates that. I'm arguing that there should not be "different criteria" for this. The purpose of any player is to contribute as much as possible to winning games. That's why they are called "win shares."

Any other criteria aside from career value and peak value is totally illogical.

Dude, multiple one number metrics disagree massively with each other. Win shares is just one, and not a great one. You think box plus minus or rpm arent trying to do the same thing and still getting different results?

You're just trying to use win shares to cover up your own lack of knowledge on the topic.

No, I'm using win shares because we can't use box plus minus or RPM or VORP for this project because they only go back far enough. They don't cover the full history of the league. We can't use PER because that's just a level of play stat that gives the same number whether you played 400 games or 1500 games. It's like OPS+.

They're getting a little bit different results, not massively different results like you claim. Nothing major. Jokic led this year in all of them. Nowhere near the different results you get when you just make up a list based on your opinion, like Thomas ahead of Stockton.

Show me ANY one number metric that has Thomas ranked higher than Stockton.

except he didn't. in rpm he was 4th behind Embiid (by a lot), Tatum, and LeBron.

LeBron was 65th in WinShares, 14th in BPM, 3rd in RPM
Sabonis was 2nd in WinShares, 15th in BPM, 79th in RPM
Tatum was 6th in WinShares, 17th in BPM, 2nd in RPM
Jarrett Allen was 8th in WinShares, 40th in BPM, 92nd in RPM
Kevon fucking Looney was 14th in WinShares, 46th in BPM, 64th in RPM


so its possible Kevon Looney was the 14th best player in the league, the 46th, the 64th, or- in reality- not in the top 100. its one of those 4 answers. but who knows? because these things are objective facts like you want them to be.

LeBron was simultaneously "not even close to as good as Sabonis" by one metric and "completely unquestionably better than Sabonis" by another metric.

at some point, you just have to accept you're wrong and shut the fuck up. goddamn.

BPM and RPM are rate stats. It's like looking at a guy with 200 AB with an OPS+ of 150 and saying that he's better than a guy with 600 AB and an OPS+ of 147. They don't mean much for one season because some guys play twice as many minutes as other guys.

But since you like these metrics:

BPM
Stockton - 6.84 (8th all time)
Thomas - 2.65 (86th all time)

RPM was not around early enough to have full numbers for Stockton and Thomas.

The problem with the PM metrics is that the quality of each team's bench has a huge effect on the numbers of the guy who just left the game. A star will do much better in PM metrics if his bench sucks

Embiid can be showing as better than Jokic because Jokic has a much better bench in general.

Philly's main bench players with their WS/48.
Tucker - .064
Milton - .087
Niang - .078

Denver's main bench players with their WS/48
Porter - .116
Braun - .079
Green - .074

Denver's bench player with the most minutes, Porter, was close to twice as effective as Philly's bench player with the most minutes, Tucker. That's gonna make Embiid's PM look better than Jokic's PM.

Well that's pretty much what everyone here is doing (yeah influence is taken into account but that really doesn't have much of an effect ultimately), they just disagree with your methods of measuring it.



The other players playing and the other players not playing is all adjusted for, though. These plus/minus stats aren't raw numbers. Otherwise, the results would look a lot weirder than
1. Embiid
2. Tatum
3. Lebron
4. Jokic

Btw, Box/Plus-Minus isn't even an on/off stat at all.

https://www.basketball-reference.com/about/bpm2.html

It's basically a somewhat less bad version of PER.

Btw, adjusted plus/minus stats are clearly the most accurate ones, as shown in this study.

https://fansided.com/2019/01/08/nylon-c ... nced-stat/

No it's not what everyone else is doing. No mathematical measurement of effectiveness would ever yield Isiah Thomas above John Stockton, or Bill Russell above Wilt Chamberlain, or Bird over Oscar, or Baylor over Malone, Nowitzki, Garnett and others. There area a bunch of preposterous rankings from Tim and Pave if they are basing it on metrics.

This one is also absurd.

32. Isiah Thomas
33. Chris Paul

What metric shows these two to even be in the same galaxy, let alone shows Thomas as better?

The study is very faulty. These metrics are not supposed to predict the future. They are supposed to measure the past. Besides, even in this study win shares was as good as most other metrics.

Taking into account a player's value =/= Using numbers to measure a player, though.

A statistic being consistent year by year is a good measure of it's success, though.

Where are the numbers?

These are not metrics, they are people's opinions bases on each submitting a ballot. And the Russell over Wilt one is preposterous.