Why Is Allen Iverson Considered To Be so Great? He was a chucker..

Did you even read the article?

 

How many of those players you named were in their primes or were still in their primes? Really, you're just grasping for straws now.

 

Can you look up when the last time Barkley averaged less than 20 points per game for me?

 

How does that prove other players didn't want to play with AI during his prime?

 

Ive ignored this thread all week but Ill reply because its so idiotic and disrespectful to arguably the most difficult player to guard in the NBA, ever.

Kobe? AI smashed.
Vince Carter? AI smashed.
Ray Allen/Sam Cassell/Glen "Big Dog" Robinson: AI Smashed.
Jason Kidd? AI smashed.
Starbury: Smashed
Made Michael Jordan look foolish, etc etc

Only player to really and hang with AI was Steve Francis, it was beautiful to watch them play each other when they did.

Also, if Im not mistaken, I believe AI and his 76ers were the only team in the playoffs that year to win a game away on the Lakers. Its remedial to penalize a player because of his conference. He went through Vince Carter, Sam I am, Ray and Gen Robinson that year. Having multiple 40 point and 50 point games, he was unbelievable.

AI, one of the greatest.

 

Why wouldn't I take DRob at his peak over Hakeem at his peak? For the same reason 99% of the public and professional media and contemporaries would. If you think because he scored more points or had a higher best one year PER than Hakeem then he WAS the better player at their peak... bully for you.

I disagree. Most do. I have no clue what Hakeem would have done on those Spurs teams, or Drob on the Rockets. Or a variety of other factors that makes it difficult, or even impossible, to just look at stats. But I can tell you that I'd take Hakeem and most others would, too.

Moreover, not sure why you are talking about regular seasons vs. playoffs now. As it relates to Iverson, and my comparison with Hakeem/DRob, we are talking about career accomplishments.

Not sure why you're completely overlooking the shortcomings of PER. Which underpenalizes high volume shooters/scorer. PER is not the be all end all stat that perfectly narrows down everything to a per minute basis. As I've mentioned a bazillion times as well, PER goes up with usage rate - or at least seems to for most of these players. That's not a surprise, you have to accumulate some type of stat to accumulate PER, and as noted, PER underpenalizes poor usage.

Sure there's the circular problem of AI's usage and whether he was uniquely amazing in being able to have such high usage, or he had such high usage because of his unique situation and skill set. I tend to believe the later... AI had 6 seasons of higher usage then Lebron's career high.... because it's just generally not that conducive to winning to have someone with such high usage, even if they are far and away the best player on the planet.

And I just can't give AI too much praise on the ultimate measure of success, as I've said already as well... winning. He took his team to the Finals once. It's been documented in this thread how horrible the EC was then. He never took his team to the ECF other than that one year. He had as many/more losing seasons than winning seasons with the Sixers, etc. I do recognize he wasn't surrounded by all-time great talent. I guess Deke was the second best player on the team? It was a team that came together at the exact right time, in the exact right way, and relied on its core strength of defense... and the team did have very solid defenders surround AI - Deke, Snow, McKie, Hill, Lynch.

I've given the man credit, but as I've noted, he's pretty far down the list of HOF players, even HOF backcourt players, I'd choose to start my team with.

This is what I'm talking about wrt the overrating and overvaluing of his play and style. The most difficult player to guard in the NBA, ever? WTF are you smoking. It's this type of analysis, which looks at his career - albeit great - and adds in the fact that he maybe juked MJ once or had a good game against Kobe a few times, and elevates his career and ignores his shortcomings.

For what its worth, btw, you can look up these head to head stats online. AI smashed Kobe? How? By losing to him more often than not, and having at best comparable stats?

 

But he was a chucker, a ballhog, and no one wanted to play with him. Top it off, no stars wanted to come to Philly either.

 

http://youtu.be/jGCSeA41exY

Franchise made AI pull his whole right side lol
AI still the man though.

 

Iverson was a warrior. Tough, hard nosed, quick, determined, skilled. He was hard to stop. Very entertaining. He was one of the first to go "thug culture" in the NBA with the tats and all; depends how you see that. I like the traditional look. The Rockets are pretty tattoo free. He was a great player despite his ball hogging ways.

 

Iverson was one of the best players of the iso era of Basketball. Plus he left it all on the court every game. He didn't care for practice though. lol

 

The question isn't which one you like more or prefer or who you would take at his peak in a hypothetical 1-on-1 matchup.

Rather the point you were trying to illustrate was that efficiency rating must somehow be useless because David Robinson clearly and totally outplayed Olajuwon during an 82 game stretch on offense, and because Olajuwon subsequently outperformed Robinson over a different, later 6 game stretch.

It's not. That syllogism is ludicrous on its face, and Robinson significantly outperformed Olajuwon under every single traditional or advanced metric in the book on offense during the regular season that year. So if PER is invalid for the reasons you cite, might as well add in points, assists, and all of reality

Unless you can stipulate to that basic fact - there's no point in going further. "Look at what olajuwon during the 95 postseason therefore PER is invalid " is stupid on its face, especially considering that Hakeems PER was higher than Robinson's that series.


Instead however you're making an obvious appeal to emotion rather than reason particular to this board with this tangent, none of which changes the basic fact that Iverson's high offensive productivity per possession numbers make him the opposite ofan inefficient player ....this somehow makes you angry because "kids today" or some boring variant.

I l

 

He was fearless! One of the most exciting players to watch play ever.

 

Many Iverson apologists do make that argument. "He took a crappy team to the Finals" implying that he could have done better than going to the Finals (i.e. winning a championship) had he played on a better team. If you don't subscribe to that standard argument, then good for you.

You never address the standard reply to this claim: the Eastern Conference was garbage. That Philly team likely could not have got past the first round in the West.

I and many others have made many counter-arguments. The problem is how you define greatness. You basically argued that AI's greatness was in how he affected his fans. If you believe that's greatness, fine. I can understand because he was the hero of your team growing up.

Other people define greatness in winning rings, which I personally believe to be one of the most simplistically wrong measure. Most people in this thread try to argue from objective statistical measurement, which you didn't.

Like I said, it depends on how you define greatness. But let me just answer your question. I do believe he is a great player. But he is not more special than any of the 100+ great players in basketball history. A lot of people like you claim that he was one of the greatest of all time. That's what makes me think that he is overrated. He is not one of the handful greatest players. For example, I'd take Kobe over Iverson any day of the week, and I am a certified Kobe hater and do not believe Kobe is a top 10 all time.

Actually, I did talk about Iverson in other posts. You probably didn't read, which is fine. I was responding to your particular post because your argument did not really have anything to do with how good Iverson was, but rather how he affected his fans.

 

You might be misunderstanding it. PER doesn't reward high usage unless the player actually shoots well (above league average %).

 

No, you're wrong. I'm looking at a career. And even ignoring postseason play I'm saying take DRob at his best, take Hakeem at his best. Who would I prefer. I'd prefer Hakeem. Most people would. The stats would prove otherwise... So... Take stats with a grain of salt.

I'm also reiterating for the billionth time, which you refuse to acknowledge or address, AI is not the efficient offensive player you make him out to be. He had horrible shooting percentages, and not exactly a great ts%. His ft's do help him out, and I'd even say he's a better playmaker than many make him out to be, but his usage rate is ridiculously high, probably to the detriment of his team and career. Pointing to a stat that overinflates offensive efficiency for high volume inefficient shooters doesn't make a player offensively efficient. It just makes the stat bad at evaluating the players offensive efficiency.

 

No. Look at links I posted previously. PER severely under penalizes bad shooting - missed shots. PER works by subtracting points for misses... It doesn't subtract enough. If you got to the link I provided it notes you'd be better off shooting more if you were something like a 21% shooter.

This is my point wrt PER. Besides the obvious undervaluing of rebounds, blocks, defense, basketball IQ, it overvalues scoring especially to the exten done so wih horrible shooting. There's a disconnect there wrt shooting efficiency as it correlates to winning. PER doesn't accurately reflect that relationship.

Moreover, as I previously noted, for many (most) star players there is a positive correlation between usage and PER. This is not surprising. If a player is involved more offensively they'll have more stats to build their PER. The only way it would go down would be if they just reached a usage rate where they became horrible... Still involved so building that usage, but missi g shots, turning ball over, etc. unfortunately, especially given the under penalizing of poor shooting, this is almost impossible. As inefficient a shooter as even AI was, if he just shot the ball every possession, his PER would go up.

The argument there becomes about appropriate usage. Is AIs amazingly high usage (3rd all time) a function of how awesome he is? I don't think so. There's no reason from a pure career talent standpoint that AI should have higher usages than a magic, bird, MJ, etc. his high usage was because he had no other offensive talent around him and a ballhog style of play. As someone said, he was the best player of the ISO era of basketball... It's true.

 

The guy compared A.I. a future Hall of Fame guy to D.J. Augustin

C'mon you can't even take that argument serious

 

Already responded, but another article noting the under penalizing of poor shooting.

http://wagesofwins.com/2012/03/04/wayne-winston-simplifies-pers/

I can't reiterate this enough for AI and using PER. Extremely high usage, very bad fg shooting equates to an inflated PER