Duncan is very fortunate to have found the perfect fit for him with coach, talent on the roster, and sanity of management from the get go. With Dream hypothetically replacing Duncan on that Spurs team, I believe they'd have at least 2 more titles. Dream was quite a step above any of the Cs from Ewing, Morning, to Robinson and Shaq. And TD is about Robinson's level, slightly below Shaq.
Parker and Manu were not all stars in 03. The advanced stats actually favor duncan through their first 16 years. <PRE> Rk Player From To G MP PER TS% eFG% ORB% DRB% TRB% AST% STL% BLK% TOV% USG% ORtg DRtg OWS DWS WS WS/48 1 Tim Duncan 1998 2013 1180 41447 24.7 .552 .508 9.9 26.5 18.5 16.5 1.1 4.6 12.2 27.7 110 95 90.7 93.5 184.2 .213 2 Hakeem Olajuwon* 1985 1999 1075 40250 24.2 .557 .515 10.5 24.0 17.4 12.4 2.4 5.5 13.0 27.7 109 98 66.6 87.5 154.1 .184 </PRE> I think Hakeem was better due to him being a better athlete, but duncan has put up some great stats. They weren't like ruth. Ruth was out homering entire teams.
If those are the stats you want to use then David Robinson was better than both of them but then we all know that's a joke.
Hakeem schooled Shaq in their NBA finals meeting, in a season Shaq was kind of dominating the league in the regular season. He just seemed to always step up to the challenges in the PO.
This is one of the most ignorant posts i ever seen. How can u say duncan owes his greatnes to the spurs? A small market franchise, never able to atract big time free agents? The spurs owe him this 16 years of good runs. He plays winning bb, and everything starts with him. Theres a reason he had never missed the playoffs ( of course having good teams helps), and won 4 championshps. An then you talk about wilt and russell. You cant compare players from different eras, you got to look at how they dominated their eras, against their lvl of competition. Fangio was regarded as the best driver on the history of F1 and he was a fat guy who started racing at the age of 33 or so. He would be destroyed today, same to babe ruth, but at their respective eras they where so dominant you cant take that away. I dont Agree that kobe is better than duncan. To me Duncan is the best player of his generation, Shaq included.
Duncan probably wouldn't have been as good as he was without Pop, and as a franchise, they basically screwed everyone by being about 4 years ahead of the curve on european back court talent. On best player of the generation? yeah Duncan.
Duncan is a damn good player......no doubt. That said, there is NO way in hell he's better than Hakeem.
1 on 1, Hakeem will dominate Duncan with his trademark Dream Shake. If we had better roster for Dream, he would be better, but Duncan's longevity compared to Dream is what makes Timmy better.
The stat that bothers me to no end is Defensive Win Shares. According to DWS Asik was only a marginally more effective defender than James Harden. Duncan's edge in Win Shares and PER is based off that difference. Unless there's something I'm missing.
As a basketball analytics enthusiast, this is always a contentious topic in my mind because of my fandom of the Rockets. Most metrics have Duncan edging out Hakeem both on total production (longevity) and to a lesser extent on peak performance. However, here are the qualitative factors that I consider to rank Hakeem a little higher in my mind. Hopefully one day, this can be quantified: 1) Hakeem played in the golden era big men and more often then not, came out on top. The 90's were absolutely stacked with great big men (old KAJ, young Shaq, Ewing, Robinson, defensive monsters like Mourning, Mutombo, Malone, etc.) On one-on-one matchups he more often then not, dominated these HOF'ers. 2) Duncan played with elite players with him his entire career, never saw double, triple teams like Hakeem Although it's in no way Duncan's fault, I would be curious to know what Duncan's numbers would have been if the entire game plan for the opponent was JUST to stop him for every single game like Hakeem. 3) Duncan played as a key cog of the most brilliant basketball system ever by the greatest coach ever his entire career. This is similar to 2) in that it's circumstantial, but that's all we can do, speculate. As much as we love Rudy, he is no Pop. I shudder to think what Popovich's system would look like with Hakeem in the middle. 4) Hakeem is the only player ever to lift a team that had only one other player above average player (according to PER), to a championship ('94). Can you guess the only one? Because of these factors, if someone had a gun to my head and I had to choose between Hakeem and Duncan to build a franchise, I would pick Hakeem.
I'm sure its been mentioned already, but in 2003, Duncan had a mediocre supporting cast. Robinson was a shell of his former self, and Ginobili/Parker were young players who had not developed into stars.
Player vs player Dream wins hands down BUT the one thing Duncan has over him is the rededication to his craft AFTER his skills started to wane. Dream packed it in once he knew his team and his skills were going south. He got lazy and fat compared to Duncan at the same point.
There are three types of lies... Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics. What is on paper rarely tells the entire story.
oh man.. que Robert Horry argument in 3,2,1.. :grin: they're both great players that played different positions. duncan may very well be the best pf to ever play the game. but dream was something special. there will never be another player with other-worldly combo of agility, quickness, finesse and touch like dream.
