The problem with using "adjusted" numbers in comparing eras is that such numbers are typically "adjusted" for the purpose of "proving" what you believe. For example, Kelly used the fact that games typically had 120 possessions back then as an indicator of the fact that Wilt's numbers were inflated. However, you could just as easily argue that even with 120 possessions a game, Wilt was able to play 46-47 minutes a game his entire career. When you say you adjusted Wilt's numbers relative to his competition, what exactly did you do? Why did you normalize Wilt's numbers in such a way that his minutes played would match Shaq's? Do you know beyond all doubt that Wilt would NOT be able to play 45 minutes a game in today's league? Per minute stats are always very misleading. Instead of using per minutes stats to define the league average...you need to use ACTUAL league averages to do your computations. Otherwise, a few guys who scored 2 points in 1 minute of play will skew your calculations a crapload. (This is assuming the league average stats per minute you used carry the same weight per player. Otherwise, you can just ignore this paragraph). Likewise, instead of simply equalizing the number of minutes Shaq and Wilt played, normalize their minutes based on the percentage over the average number of minutes played by all players in their respective eras. Bottom line is...throughout all your number-crunching, all you did was come up with new reasons to downplay Wilt's numbers. Ultimately, claims about who's the greatest is a matter of opinion. No amount of pseudo-numerical proof is going to change anybody's mind.
What were Wilt's stats only against the Celtics (Bill Russell, the greatest defensive player of all time)? In case you don't want to look it up, it was 27.8 ppg and 27.8 rpg - that is over 10 years from '60 to '69. If he could average 27.8 in points and rebounds against Russell, I think he could do it against Olajuwon, Robinson, O'Neal, Ewing, Yao, Dampier, Ilgauskas, Duncan, and Garnett.
I don't think Bill Russell would be as great a defender today. He would be an undersized center today. Remember, he was playing the same scrubs that Chamberlain was playing against so his numbers, like Chamberlain's, will be inflated as well.
That's not bias. Kelly is using the very sensible idea that what a player does per possession is a much stronger indicator of "how good he is" than what he does per game. Wilt happened to play in an era where his team, and consequentially he, had significantly more opportunities over a period of time to score points and grab rebounds. If one is going to pay any attention at all to Wilt's statistical record (which, more than anything, is his name to fame), it is foolish not to consider the great difference in pace. It is inarguable that Wilt had more opportunities to score baskets and grab rebounds. That's fact. It has to be considered. On the other hand, your contention that it would be more difficult for Wilt to play 46-47 minutes effectively at that pace, and therefore he should get some extra credit for it isn't necessarily true (not that it doesn't make sense). To what extent one should account for it is difficult to say. I consider things like how pace and offensive schemes impact per-possession productivity more as second-order factors. Not sure what you mean by unbiased. I wasn't purposely trying to make one player look better than another. This is all I did. I adjusted Wilt's 1960 season to 1993, 1961 to 1994, and so on. I adjusted points, rebounds, and assists like this: Wilt's points per minute now = (Wilt's points per minute back then)* [ team's points per minute now ] / [team's points per minute back then] Same with rebounds and assists. Effectively, if Wilt's per-minute scoring was, twice as much as the average player in 1960, then I'll extrapolate that his per-minute scoring will be twice as much as the average player in 1992. In other words, I'm holding constant his statistical production relative to the league. It's a simple, inexact model, but it does add important context to Wilt's numbers. The result is that, per minute, Wilt and Shaq were comparable in per minute productivity, with Wilt having an edge in his initial seasons and Shaq was better in the second half of his career. I'm not going to project how many minutes Wilt would have played in the modern day. I doubt it would be 46 minutes a game, but maybe he would have stayed on the court around 42 minutes a game for his career. Don't really know. This is a good point, but my method shown above is effectively the same as taking a weighted average of player per minute numbers, weighted by total minutes played, to get a player league average. So this isn't an issue. Average number of minutes played is merely a function of the average number of players on each roster, since team minutes stays effectively constant per game. That wouldn't be helpful. It's very difficult to guess how many minutes Wilt might have played in modern times, so I didn't bother. I showed his numbers if he played the same number of minutes as he did back then, and I also showed his numbers if he played the same number of minutes per game as Shaq. It's probably somewhere in between. If one is basing their opinion on Wilt's per game numbers, then they need to consider pace. That's just plain common sense.
The reason this is such a fun (and sometimes heated) debate is because it's all subjective. No one should belittle anyone else's opinion. But I don't see how marketability leads to "greatest ever"...Carmelo Anthony right now is more marketable than Wilt was back then...is he better? No... And as far as innovativeness to the game: Wilt had rules changed or made to keep him from dominating. Say what you want, but that is quite "innovative" to the game, no? The debate can (and probably will) go on forever. Whoever's #1 in your mind, hey, I'm all for it. It's an interesting topic and fun to hear everyone's opinion. Actually, Bird was a pretty crafty defender. Not All-NBA first team defender by any stretch of the imagination, but definitely not a sieve...
I never said it was. My claim is just that the same numbers can be used to support differing opinions. That's fine then. The only thing left to do now...is to normalize their stats based on the average number of minutes played by all players in their respective eras. In other words, if Wilt played 15% longer than the average player in 1960, then normalize his stats as if he spent 15% more time on the court than the average player in 1992. Nobody here is basing their opinion PURELY on Wilt's numbers. His numbers indicate a great basketball player no matter how much era adjustment you do. I'm sure you'd agree. If you couple what he accomplished on basketball court with other things recorded about his athletic prowess... - He long jumped over 22 feet, and triple jumped over 50 - He benched 550 lbs. - He high jumped 6'6", had a 48 inch vertical, and dunked on a 12 foot rim - He could run half a mile in under 2 minutes - He was invited to play pro football by the KC Chiefs ...then I think most people would agree that someone with his basketball and physical ability would be considered a candidate for GOAT regardless of when he played.
I agree. But numbers play a huge role in how Wilt is judged historically. You seem to be downplaying this. And to the extent one considers numbers, they just have to consider pace. Lots of people today who consider Wilt the greatest ever have 50/25 etched in their brains. It should be closer to 32/13, if their frame of reference is modern day player stats. Wilt was a great athlete in an era where the pool of athletic talent wasn't as strong. I don't know how true some of those Paul Bunyan feats are. What's your source?
Some of the specific numbers I got off of wikipedia just now, but I had read about many of them from various sources (magazines, autobiography excerpts, etc.) before the internet even existed....so either they're mostly true or they're just long-lived rumors/legends. I'm sure if you really wanted to, you could probably verify the track and field stuff with the University of Kansas.
A quantifiable, measurable value of a player (a "stat") is used, and people want it to go back to "OOh them stinkin stats dont tell me nothin. Just by watching, you'll just KNOW who....". Sure numbers can get tricky. Cuz they are hard to absorb at first doesn't mean they should be taken out of the discussion. Which doesn't seem to be the case currently which is good. On the you can't compare players of different eras thing, yeah you can. When trying to figure out the truth of the matter, all subjects are open to question and probe into. Why stay in the dark about things when an intelligent formula can bring two eras together, such as pace factor and size of players? No it still doesnt lead to a truly conclusive answer but it surely helps. Anyways on Wilt, there's no way to conclude how many minutes he'd play in today's game. Just as no one lately has averaged 50 in a game lately, no one has played almost every minute in every game for a while so its safe to say he'd get substituted more often and be in the top 5 of today's averages if not number one. That'd still lessen his numbers if he played today with today's pace factor. Using the difference in percentage of his numbers to the league average is great. No matter what the standard used to determine the average he'd be way over it. He's one player of that time that no doubt if he played today he wouldnt get the same numbers (as durvasa's formulas show) but he'd still be great. He was blessed with too many athletic traits not to be a good big game. It does have to be taken into account that Wilt was THE stat man of all time. He was all about what kind of numbers he could pile up. I know the old guys can exaggerate their tales but the 20,000 women thing said it all about him. Read long time ago in one of his books he beat Jim Brown in a race and ran a forty yard dash in the 4.3's-4'4 range! Hey maybe he did, but its what he was about..... Oh yeah Jordan, top 5 for SURE.
I sure don't. Russell was the beneficiary of a weaker era too, not to mention the pace issues that have been mentioned numerous times.
Yeah, this is like asking if Hakeem the Dteam is one of the top 5 centers of all time. It's almost a proved fact that MJ is the G.O.A.T. . Not for just what he did on the court, but off the court as well. If it wasn't for him, basketball wouldn't be as big as it is today. And not to mentions, players like T-mac,Kobe,D-wade, and Lebron all grew up watching Mike and in one form or another, tried to add some "Jordan" into their game. If it wasn't for Jordan, those guys might not be where they are now.
Well, not once did I cite Wilt's ridiculous number of points scored, rebounds grabbed, or assists dealt out as the measure of Wilt's greatness. So...I'm not suddenly "copping out" of a stat-based argument just because someone normalized statistics across eras. All I'm doing is trying to figure out some of the normalization processes people are using. More often than not, people use Wilt's relative size to his competitors as the defacto normalization factor, which frankly I think is a ridiculous one. If you ask me, Shaq's has had about the same relative size advantage in his prime. I liked durvasa's normalization process...minus the way he simply equated the number of minutes played. Kelly's statement about the number of possessions was a good argument as well.
By equating the number of minutes played, I was only trying to get at how their per-minute production would compare. I'm not saying that MPG is not important. If Wilt was capable of playing more minutes than Shaq (and considering his ability to stay out of foul trouble and impressive stamina, this is likely), then he should get some credit for giving his team that extra value. I like to distinguish between how good a player is when he's on the court (for which per-minute or per-possession numbers are appropriate) and how much value a player brings to the team (in which case, minutes played should also be factored in). There are practical reasons for making this distinction, particularly for evaluating young or "unproven" talent; players like Tracy McGrady and Andrei Kirilenko looked like future stars from their rookie per-minute numbers, for instance. For comparing the greatness of Wilt and Shaq, I admit the per-minute numbers are less relevant.
a lot of those hall of famers were hall of famers because they played with russell. k.c. jones for example avged under 10 points a game, has the numbers of a back up point guard and is a hall of famer. it has already been proven already on this site, that russell did what he had to do to win, including games against wilt. if he needed to grab 25 rebounds he did, if he needed to score forty he did. but russell will forever be unfairly valued because he did what the celtics needed him to do. 11 rings speaks for itself. wilt had hall of fame teamates, he played with them in philly, and in a l.a., he played with one of the greatest shooting guards ever in jerry west.
But how can you just say that the league overall averaged X back then and averages Y today? I mean, the Rockets averaged 90.1 ppg last year...the Suns 108.4 - I imagine the discrepancy in possessions is similiar. So using the normalization stats argument presented here all the Suns players stats should be deflated while all the Rockets players stats should be inflated....and to be fair, I've heard some make similiar arguments. I haven't looked at the numebrs at all, but I'd imagine Wilt's teams got even more possesions than league average when he played. Should his "current" stats therefore be adjusted upward to reflect the fact that his team would generally score more than league average? But while some of it is certainly "era" based, some of it is great players DEFINING the style of the era. Steve Nash has won 2 MVP's in a row. Is he a product of a great system or the force behind the system to begin with? Point being: (1) there is likely a lot more math behind even attempting to find a good way to make-up stats for Wilt today. Simple has the benefit of being simple...but then, it's simple, and (2) even if you could get a complex formula to make sense, there are still so many other factors that go into it that are completely subjective (minutes played per game, competition, nutrition, would Wilt have been able to go straight from high school, rule changes, # of teams in the league, coaches, etc., etc., etc., etc.)... ...that any kind of math ends up being really just a stab in the dark.
WTF, this thread is still alive? I thought the poster would be laughed out of the forum and it would be dead by now?
I think Wilt’s stats were inflated relative to the current players, but not to the degree many say. I don’t think any other player has hit 40PPG, let alone 50PPG. The year Wilt got 50PPG there was a 12 point spread over Baylor (38PPG, I think the 2nd highest season ever), 19 point spread over Bellamy and Petit (31PPG) in the 3 and 4 spot. The year Jordan got 37PPG he only had an 8 point spread over Wilkens and Alex English (29PPG), Bird 1 behind, even Kiki Vandeweghe hit 27PPG. Further about that era guys like King, Dantley and Gervin were in the low 30s for seasons. So yes Wilts maybe were a tad inflated, but no-one in his era or any other has been even close to his #2 season (45PPG, 11 spread over Baylor again, 16 over the next hall of fame group of Oscar, Petit and Bellamy) let alone his best season. And over course those seasons he had about 25RPG (figure 15-18 in today’s game) and figure maybe 4 blocks. His seasons are so far out there of anyone his time, before his time, or after, I just think it is too strong to ignore. Another way to look at him is more subjective. Compare him to Shaq. Shaq was basically able to put together a 30PPG-14RPG-3BPG season (Even DR had a 30-11-3.3). Consider Wilt (7-1, 275 w/o weight lifting) was basically a better conditioned and more athletic/fluid version of Shaq, or a much naturally stronger and fluid DR with a low post game, and that the rules worked against Wilt and more for Shaq/DR (star rules of modern NBA), it is no big stretch to think Wilt would have put up 35-16-4, and probably 5+ APG too (seeing as Wilt lead the league 1 year). And yes Wilt’s track and field accomplishments are well documented, they are not blow your doors off in general, but I don’t think we have seen anything close in a guy his size. Shaq and DR are the 7 footers that come to mind with combinations of exceptional athleticism, strength and length, and they are not that close as natural athletes IMO to Wilt. Hey, I think Russell has an argument for being the best of all time. Wilt, MJ and Kareem also have an argument. My opinion is that trade Wilt for Russell and their championships are reversed, but it is speculation. Gosh I have never heard such a silly argument, and other have said it too. Is Kornacova (sp?) one of the greatest tennis players ever? Is Jackie Robinson one of the best baseball players of all time? Is Pat Tilman one of the greatest football players of all time? Fame, publicity, endorsements or notoriety off the court, for better or lesser reasons, means nothing in judging the greatest players in a sport. Besides, Jordan's off the court stuff (nearly being banned and having to leave to go suck in another sport for 2 years) if anything works against him.
