Most underrated superstar of all time. And I love how every time someone digs up a Jordan stat they also find something interesting on Olajuwon. Imagine being the only player in history drafted ahead of Jordan that no one can be mad about.
the media underrates him therefore dummies don't know his greatness somehow the 1995 playoffs where Jordan lost to Orlando and Hakeem destroyed everybody was forgotten amazing when millions of people saw this and suddenly 'forgot'
I think part of it is because Hakeem isn't in the spotlight. People see Shaq on TV so he stays relevant to them. Yet this stat shows that Olajuwon and Shaq were the top player in 19 playoff series apiece. Pretty impressive for Hakeem. It also shows that Lebron is better than I give him credit for. I just can't separate his greatness from his self-aggrandizement. I mean who tattoos "chosen one" on their back. Cmon son.
The Lebron thing is interesting, until you realize he played in the East for every series except the finals... and he teamed up with his only rivals.
Theres a lot of truth to this. East has been one of the most imbalanced conferences in pro sports for decades. Its kind of fascinating.
even knowing that game score is pretty heavily weighted toward volume scoring and very heavily weighted toward efficient scoring (only 3 of the top 100 playoff games involve sub-50% shooting), and knowing that his playoff vs regular season comparisons are favorable, i'm still surprised miller could lead 11 series. he wasn't even that high a volume regular season scorer so to do enough to lead an entire series 11 times is pretty impressive. KD being high isn't surprising. he's been a scoring/efficiency monster for over a decade of pretty deep playoff runs. that's why i never have any problem with people ranking hakeem very highly. the playoffs are so important in basketball compared to any other sport. most teams make the playoffs so what you do in the regular season isn't hugely important (like say it was in baseball before the wildcard and especially before 1961 with the division series). you get there a lot so the sample size is fairly meaningful (again, unlike baseball). even someone like hakeem who didn't have a ton of deep playoff runs still played 145 playoff games. the quality of your team doesn't typically affect your individual brilliance (unlike football where team factors can play a huge difference in what a qb/rb/wr do in a given game). and what one player does as the star can actually mean the difference in winning and losing. and hakeem was just an unbelievable playoff performer. very few poor series. a ton of great series. rarely, if ever, won thanks to someone else stepping up while he couldn't get it going. took advantage of a small number of legit title opportunities. and again, with so few poor series, it's hard to imagine he wouldn't have taken advantage of more title opportunities because it's not like the title years were outliers that don't look like his other playoff runs (he had a 37/17 four game series one time). if you took the name off the stats, i don't think people would believe how good some of lebron's playoff stats look. highest game 7 scoring average ever, highest elimination game scoring average ever, most buzzer beaters ever, most top-100 playoff game scores ever, most 30 PER playoff runs ever (matt bullard has the 4th most). there's some crazy stat about most times leading your own team in pts/reb/ast and it's like lebron is 1st and no one else is even in the same ballpark. he basically has one bad mark against his name, the 2011 finals. and you'd have to say he made up for at least half of it with the 2016 finals.
if i looked at it right, harden actually not bad with 6 out of 14 since coming to houston, and actually didn't lead 2 series where he had a 23+.
I posted that skip and Shannon spot where Shannon said Drexler never won a title And then Skip said the rockets won cause Jordan never played when they won everyone who saw the 94 and 95 title runs saw a majestic performance for the ages with unbelievable skill on offense and defense they want to erase history but rockets fans will never forget
In no way am I taking anything away from Hakeem, but I have to disagree with your second paragraph completely. In no sport is regular season performance more correlated to postseason performance than the NBA. In the entire history of the NBA, pre- and post-merger, only a smattering of teams seeded as low as 3rd have won it all, and only two teams have ever won seeded 4th or lower. Meanwhile in MLB, a wild card team has won the World Series three times in the past decade alone. And THAT is exactly what makes Hakeem's playoff performance so special. Sheer number of rings is actually least meaningful in the NBA of any of the sports. Good teams win; bad teams don't. That is what the data says. Except in 1995, the Houston Rockets did arguably the most unlikely thing in professional sports: winning an NBA championship from a 6th seed. We've never seen anything like that before or since in the NBA. And that team was led by Hakeem Olajuwon. By the hard numbers, that year is all the playoff legacy anyone needs to point out. Winning Finals MVP on top of MVP and DPOY the year before was another never-repeated feat. (And, yes, Jordan was there getting stomped by the team the Rockets went on to stomp.) Forget quantity. Rarity is what matters, and Hakeem was one of a kind on a one of a kind team.
Hakeem will always be in top 10 of All-Time conversation simply based on 1995 playoffs, but also his playoff performance in general. He actually took his game to the next level and not made it seem that way by just scoring more. I can understand people leaving Hakeem out of Top 10 or GOAT conversations due to his short peak, how hard he fell off in 97-98 and the lack of hype surrounding his titles, overshadowed by MJ’s three-peats. However, looking at 1986, the title runs and his playoff play and leadership he’s on GOAT level.
the problem is hakeem didn't have a short peak. people think he did because houston isn't a big market that gets talked about, and unlike duncan/spurs, we didn't win a ton so hakeem wasn't on tv until we won titles. and in people's minds, they probably just think hakeem was like 27 or 28 when we were winning because that's when a "prime" is. he was 32 in 1995. guy had a 27 ppg regular season at 33. he had a 27 ppg/59 FG% WCF the next season at 34. he got injured in '97-98 and then bounced back with a 19/9.6/2.5, 3rd-team all-nba season at age 36 in season 15. in a lockout-shortened season that should have been tough on older players. that's longevity. dominating showtime in year 2 and making 3rd team in year 15. even his '00-'01 season was one of the few 20 PER seasons for anyone 38 or older. in terms of all-time 20/10 seasons, shaq has 13 and hakeem and kareem have 12 and no one else has more than 11. and as we've both pointed out, during that whole time his playoffs were better than his regular season, even by advanced stats and not just counting stats, which basically doesn't happen.
you misunderstood my point. yes, our 6th seed win is incredible because basketball has 7 game series and isn't very random (like baseball) and so the better team wins almost all the time. so a 6th seed proving itself better 4 different times, for 5 to 7 games, without homecourt advantage, against the 4 best records in the league, is as rare as it's going to get. that's not a fluke title. that you are considered "great" after leading a team to something like that is axiomatic. the feat proves the claim. i was saying in a sport like baseball, where only 2 teams made the playoffs until 1961 (they only had the world series), and only 4 made it until the wildcard, you can argue that being really good in the regular season is really important because that's how you even get a chance to be in the playoffs and win a world series. you could maybe argue that someone like david robinson, who almost inarguably has better stats than hakeem in the regular season, was a better player because, in a hypothetical baseball format, he got his team to the playoffs 7 times and hakeem only got there 3 times, even if hakeem won 1 time and robinson didn't win any (these are just made up numbers). like our 1995 team wouldn't have even been in a baseball playoffs. but that's not how basketball works. basically everyone makes the playoffs. so being good in the regular season is great and all, but all it gets you is a nice seed for the tournament. what you do in the tournament to move on is what determines greatness. that's what i meant by the playoffs mean so much and the regular season means so little. david robinson doesn't have a claim to be better than hakeem because his team won 62 and hakeem's won 47 because that didn't matter. what mattered is what hakeem proved over 6 games. that might sound obvious but there are rankings that have tried to argue maybe robinson was better because he had such good regular season advanced stats or at least maybe they were really close in all-time rankings. but hakeem's career showed time and again that unless you had an overwhelming talent advantage, hakeem was hard to eliminate because hakeem was going to kick ass and take names almost every single time when it mattered most.
I’ve never liked Tommy Heinson. But that mizzrubble sob was always in awe of The Dream. And watching early-(H)Akeem made me remember he did have a mid-range game in those them years. And the acredible Rod Thorn, NBA lifer and MJ apologist (Dream Team/IT), went on record that if he had the 1st pick heda selected Olajuwon. He had the 3rd and he took MJ. What would history be if ‘the trade’ had gone down??? It might not have been pretty; it might have been awesome and a half (alas)...
Jordan and phil Jackson can only game plan for what's in front of them. The game planning time of phil Jackson was just as important or even more important than final product.
Same for Magic in the 80s west though that wasn't as bad as lebron era East. Bird led the Celtics to the ECF as a rookie in one of the greatest single season turn arounds for any franchise or maybe the greatest? That or Nash to Suns, but Bird was a rookie. Won the finals year 2. Bird would be #3 on this list easy if the stats went back to 79. Something tells me Kareem wouldn't be as high as people think.
