The best of the Backpicks Box

this is a fair observation , but matchups not effecting you CONSISTENTLY is something inelastic with your game , like over a large playoff sample you'll see that. What makes Steph or KD's or Kawhi's scoring better then someone like a Joel Embiid is the lack of those matchups who present series issues ( that we know of atleast or can assume ). There are no curry defenders ( no chaser in the history of this game can limit currys scoring in a island its like leaving Tyreeke Hill 1 on 1 in the slot ) , and no isolation defenders are making Kawhi nor KD seem like regular scorers , while they're are in fact defenders who do that for Giannis "

Some random thoughts here Ben.. As a fan of him I appreciate how your input/data seems to more accurately reflect the value of Reggie Miller in comparison to what the raw numbers tend to show, but part of me also wonders if it doesn't slightly over value him as well. Reggie is consistently underrated by the masses, but having him lumped with some of scorers in your charts doesn’t feel quite right either. For one he gets the same inflation adjustment for era or whatever, but he was already himself taking 6-7 threes a game. I know the premise is that scoring is "easier" but that's largely reflected upon playstyle which is a playstyle that was already applied to him. Some of which gimmicks he used to get to the FT have also been banned. The game in general was slower and teams built differently, but some of these teams weren't built to stop guys like Jordan or especially Reggie, it was an inside game. Adjusting for opponent strengths for a team like the Knicks when Starks/Davis weren't massive deterrents for guys like Reggie or MJ doesn't quite fit to me. A modern example, we wouldn't expect Curry to struggle mightily playing Utah because they have Rudy Gobert. A guy like Embiid on the other hand might.. I don't think "opponent strength" is a universal adjustment in that sense. To piggyback off of that to use the example of him playing the Knicks repeatedly as an indication of opponent strength, one could counter that if he repeatedly torched them more-so than even his other opponents then maybe they weren’t actually that tough for HIM. Could go both ways. I feel like his playoff 3-year stretches get a bit overplayed too. It seems more likely that he had a couple of really good years more so than 4-5 different runs of monster 3 year spans. Example being he only played 3 games in 92, 4 games in 93, 1 game in 96, and missed the playoffs entirely in 97. In as small of a sample size as playoff runs tend to be I do wonder how skewed those numbers can become. Take a 3 year run for him 92-94 and the actual minutes played in 92 and 93 make up 35% of the total minutes in that 3-year run.. Even though they are separate isolated runs of 3 games and 4 games vs 16 games in 94. Those numbers for him just per game basis are 27 on 72 TS%, 32 on 69 TS%, and then 23 on 58 TS% for the 16 games.. Massive differences. There is no evidence of Reggie being able to sustain uber level scoring + efficiency over an extended playoffs run. It feels more plausible that he can for bursts like those, (especially so when teams are sweeping them and have no reason to adjust otherwise against the volume from him) than it does to suggest that a 3 year span like that is more of a true representation. I would feel less confident in my assertion above had Reggie had even 1 elite level regular season to showcase he could carry that for stretches of time rather than just a hot week like a 3 game playoff run shows... But he hasn't. The closest to that we have would be the 17 game playoff run in 95, but even that feels more like "really good" than it does "top tier" like the adjusted 3-year data shows. I also get the efficiency, but his only outlier years were 92 and 93, again just 3 and 4 games. None of his deeper playoff runs are top 250 seasons by TS%.. I know it's all relative to league average but he was also one of the only high volume shooters in a league not built around that at the time. To give him all the adjustments in the other direction to compare vs today would be like me saying "player X would likely be +12 rTS% if we adjusted them backwards". Like I said I appreciate how your data more appropriately approximates how good he was, as most other takes understate him, but it does feel like all the adjustments to get him to that point are a bit of a 1-way street. Seeing him represented in a higher regard than “he’s just a 20 a night guy” is refreshing for a change, but then seeming him lumped in with guys like Kobe, Dirk, Steph as a scorer takes me back a step again.

Last few spots feel very malleable, but yeah, I'm not even comfortable with that either. That's it, I'm changing Curry to 9th! The really tricky part is having comparable data for players when they are clear No. 1 options, share the court with another big scorer and share the court with 2 other scorers. This deserves a follow-up post...

"9. Kawhi [9-14]" "10. Gervin [9-14]" "Those last two spots also could have gone to Wilt, Baylor, Kobe and Curry." It looks like the last two spots are malleable. In the Top Scorers Ever Revisited podcast Ben posited a similar idea as well

_kags

Kawhi a better scorer all-time than Steph & Kobe? Not sure why that’s what stuck with me through the whole read lol.